Wolf Lake

by John Verdon

  It was an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgment.

  THE RELEVANCE OF THE TRUNK EPISODE SEEMED TO CREATE A SHIFT in Hammond’s perspective. It also brought the edgy momentum of the gathering to a kind of resting place.

  At Jane’s suggestion, they moved from the table to a half circle of armchairs facing the hearth. The glowing coals created a soothing focal point that made the lull in the conversation feel comfortable. Jane served coffee and brought them each a slice of blueberry tart from the sideboard.

  The relaxed mood, however, was fragile.

  Gurney sensed it ebbing away as they were finishing their coffee and Hammond asked him if he’d read the statement he’d issued to the press.

  “I did.”

  “Then you know that I was absolutely clear on certain points?”

  “Yes.”

  “I said that I would hire no defenders or representatives of any kind.”

  “True.”

  “I didn’t mean that I myself would hire no defenders, but I’d have my sister do it for me. I wasn’t being devious. I meant what I said.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “But now you want me to reverse that position and bless your employment by my sister.”

  “Your agreeing to my involvement won’t reverse anything. I have no intention of being your defender or representative.”

  Hammond appeared bewildered, Jane alarmed.

  Gurney continued. “The only purpose of my involvement—if I choose to get involved at all—would be to discover how and why those four people died.”

  “So you’re not interested in proving my innocence?”

  “Only to the extent that the truth itself proves your innocence. My job is uncovering the facts. I’m a detective, not a lawyer. If I were to get involved in this case, I wouldn’t be representing you or your sister. I’d be representing Ethan Gall, Christopher Wenzel, Leo Balzac, and Steven Pardosa. Discovering the truth behind their deaths is something I’d be doing for them. If the truth should end up benefiting you, that would be fine with me. But I’d be representing their interests, not yours.”

  Throughout this speech Jane looked like she was in a panic to jump in.

  Richard’s only hint of emotion was a flicker of sadness at the mention of Ethan Gall.

  He regarded Gurney for a long moment before asking, “What do you want from me?”

  “Any thoughts or suspicions you may have about the four deaths. Anything that could help me make sense of a case that right now makes no sense at all.”

  “It makes sense to Gilbert Fenton.”

  “And to Reverend Bowman Cox,” Gurney added, wondering what impact the name might have on Hammond.

  Judging from his blank look, it had none.

  Gurney explained, “Bowman Cox is the Florida minister Wenzel confided his nightmare to. I was curious about the nightmare, so I got in touch with him. He can recite it by heart.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He says the nightmare is the key to understanding Wenzel’s death, and your role in it.”

  “My role being . . .?”

  “He told me your therapeutic specialty is the manufacture of homosexuals.”

  “Not that old nonsense all over again! Did he mention how I do it?”

  “You put people in a deep trance. You go through some lurid mumbo jumbo to convince them that they’re really homosexual. And when they emerge from the trance, they either dive headfirst into their new lifestyle or become suicidal at the very thought of it.”

  “That must be a hell of a trance I’m putting them in.”

  “Yes. Literally. A hell of a trance. Cox claims that your power to destroy people’s lives comes from a secret partnership with Satan.”

  Hammond sighed. “Isn’t it remarkable that here in America we treat the mentally ill like dirt—except when they make a religion out of their craziness and hatred, and claim it’s Christianity? Then we flock to their churches.”

  A valid enough observation, thought Gurney, but he didn’t want to get off on a tangent. “Let me ask you a clinical question. Could a hypnotherapist implant the details of a dream in a patient’s mind and actually cause him to have that dream?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s a neurological impossibility.”

  “Okay. Could a hypnotherapist talk a client into committing suicide?”

  “Not unless the client was already suffering from a depression severe enough to incline him that way to begin with.”

  “Did you note that kind of depression in any of the four men who ended up dead?”

  “No. They all had positive feelings about the future. That’s not a suicidal state of mind.”

  “Does that lead you to any conclusion?”

  “My conclusion is that they were victims of murders staged to resemble suicides.”

  “Yet Fenton is ignoring that possibility. He’s claiming that the unlikelihood of their committing suicide indicates that you caused it. Do you have any idea why he’d take such a strange position?”

  Jane broke in, “Because he’s a dishonest, lying bastard!” Her fragile china plate with its half-eaten slice of blueberry tart slipped from her lap and shattered on the floor. She stared down at it, muttered a frustrated “Shit!” and began cleaning it up. Madeleine got a sponge and some paper towels from the sink to help.

  Hammond answered Gurney’s question. “There are two puzzling things about Fenton’s position. First, it’s based on a clinical impossibility. Secondly, he believes what he’s saying.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That’s what I’m good at. Nine times out of ten, I can hear in a person’s voice the sound of the truth, the sound of a lie. The way I practice therapy is based a little on technique and a lot on insight into what people really believe and want, regardless of what they tell me.”

  “And you’re convinced that Fenton believes the wild scenario he’s hyping to the press?”

  “He has no doubt about it. It’s in his voice, his eyes, his body language.”

  “Just when I thought I couldn’t be more confused, you’ve added another twist. A homicide investigator might briefly consider the possibility that a hypnotist was behind a string of suicides. But to embrace it as the only possible answer seems crazy.” He glanced over at Madeleine to see if she had any reaction; but her eyes were on the dying red coals, her mind plainly somewhere else.

  Another question occurred to him. “You said you were good at sensing what a person really wants. What do you think Fenton wants?”

  “He wants me to confess my involvement in the four deaths. He told me that it’s the only way out, and if I don’t confess, my life will be over.”

  “And if you do confess to some yet unnamed felony, what then?”

  “He said if I confessed to my part in causing all four suicides, then everything would be all right.”

  That was the way some investigators talked mentally challenged suspects into confessing, often to crimes they hadn’t committed. If you keep denying it, we’ll get mad, and then you’ll really be in trouble. Just admit you did it, then everything will be cleared up, and everyone can go home.

  That’s the way crimes were hung on people with IQs of eighty.

  Why on earth was Fenton taking that approach with a brilliant psychologist?

  What goddamn twilight zone was this happening in?

  CHAPTER 17

  As they sat around the hearth nursing their coffees, Gurney took the opportunity to ask a very basic question. “Richard, I may be assuming I understand hypnosis better than I actually do. Can you give me a simple definition of it?”

  Hammond lowered his coffee to the arm of his chair. “A quick story might make it clearer than a definition. When I was in high school in Mill Valley, I played some baseball. I wasn’t very good, barely good enough to stay on the team. Then one day I came up to bat five times, and I hit five home runs. I’d never hit a home run before that day. The most remarkable thing was how it
felt. The effortlessness of it. I wasn’t even swinging that hard. I wasn’t trying to concentrate. I wasn’t trying to hit a home run. I wasn’t trying to do anything. I was completely relaxed. It seemed that the bat just kept finding the ball and striking it at the perfect angle. Five times in a row.”

  “And the connection between that and hypnosis is . . .?”

  “Achieving a goal depends less on overcoming external obstacles than on removing internal ones—dysfunctional beliefs, emotional static. Hypnotherapy, as I practice it, is devoted to clearing that internal path.”

  “How?” That single, sharp word came from Madeleine—who, up to that point, had said almost nothing.

  “By uncovering what’s in the way. Freeing you from it. Letting you move toward what you really want without being stuck in the underbrush of guilt, confusion, and self-sabotage.”

  “Isn’t that overly dramatic?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. We really do get tangled up in some nasty internal thornbushes.”

  “I thought hypnosis was about concentration.”

  “Concentrated focus is the aim, but trying to concentrate is the worst way to get there. That’s like trying to levitate by pulling up on your ankles. Or like chasing happiness. You can’t catch it by chasing it.”

  She looked unconvinced.

  Gurney pursued the issue. “What sort of internal obstacles do you need to clear away with people who want to stop smoking?”

  Hammond continued to observe Madeleine for a moment before turning to Gurney. “Two big ones—memories of anxiety being relieved by smoking, and a faulty risk calculation.”

  “I understand the first. What’s the second?”

  “The rational individual tends to avoid activities whose costs outweigh their pleasures. The addict tends to avoid activities whose costs precede their pleasures. In a clearly operating mind, the ultimate balance decides the matter. Immediate and future effects are both seen as real. In a mind warped by addiction, sequence is the crucial factor. Immediate effects are seen as real; future effects are seen as hypothetical.”

  “So you bring some clarity to that?” asked Gurney.

  “I don’t bring anything. I simply help the person see what they know in their heart to be true. I help them focus on what they really want.”

  “You believe you have a reliable instinct for sensing what people want?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did all four of the victims want to stop smoking?”

  Hammond blinked noticeably for the first time. “The desire was strong in Ethan, moderate in Wenzel. In Balzac and Pardosa it was between weak and nonexistent.”

  “Why would you bother treating someone like that?”

  “The truth about the nature and depth of a person’s desire becomes clear to me only during the course of the session. They all claimed to have a strong desire at the start.”

  Gurney looked perplexed.

  Hammond went on. “People frequently come at the urging of someone else. Their real desire is to get someone off their back by being compliant. And some people come in the belief that hypnosis will create a desire to stop, even though they have no such desire themselves. Pardosa was the worst—anxious, unfocused, completely scattered—the one who most obviously was doing it at someone else’s request. But he wouldn’t admit it.”

  “What about their other desires?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Did your instinct for sensing people’s motives lead you to any other conclusions?”

  “Some general ones.”

  “About Ethan?”

  Hammond hesitated, as though considering confidentiality issues. “Ethan wanted everyone in the world to behave better. He wanted to find a proper role for each person and put them in it. A place for everyone, and everyone in their place. He was certain that he knew best. He didn’t want recognition. Just obedience.”

  “I assume he didn’t always get the kind of obedience he wanted?”

  “He had his successes and his failures.”

  “How about your sense of Christopher Wenzel? What did he want out of life?”

  “Christopher wanted to win. In the worst way, literally. He saw life as a zero-sum game. Not only did he want to win, he wanted someone else to lose.”

  “What about Leo Balzac?”

  “Angry God of the Old Testament. He wanted all the bad guys to be punished. He would have enjoyed standing at a porthole in Noah’s ark, watching the sinners drowning.”

  “And Steven Pardosa?”

  “He was the one who lived in his parents’ basement. He was desperate for respect. More than anything else, he wanted to be seen as an adult—which is, of course, the universal desire of people who never grow up.”

  “How about Peyton Gall?”

  “Ah, Peyton. Peyton wants to feel good all the time, regardless of the cost to himself or others. Like most drug addicts, he has infantile ideas of happiness. He wants to do whatever he feels like doing, whenever he feels like doing it. He’s the prisoner of his own concept of freedom. The enormous inheritance he receives from Ethan’s estate will probably kill him.”

  “How?”

  “Unlimited financial resources will remove whatever slight restraint may have been modifying his behavior till now. His disregard of future consequences will take over completely. In Freudian terms, Peyton is pure, 100 percent rampaging id.”

  All Gurney could think of was the car flying past him on the narrow dirt road and the wild shrieks of laughter. “How did he get along with his brother?”

  “There was no ‘getting along’ at all. They lived in separate wings of the house and had as little to do with each other as possible, apart from Ethan’s sporadic efforts to apply whatever pressure he could. If Austen was Ethan’s greatest success, Peyton was his greatest failure.”

  “Do you think Peyton would have been capable of killing Ethan?”

  “Morally, yes. Emotionally, yes. Practically, no. I can’t see Peyton handling anything that would demand complex thinking, precise logistics, or steadiness under pressure.”

  “Those are the qualities you believe were required to . . . to engineer the four deaths?”

  “They may not have been the only ones, but they’re definitely the ones Peyton lacks.”

  Another question came to mind—a bit of a wild tangent. “Getting back to your ability to sense what people want . . . what about me? What do you think I really want?”

  Hammond flashed a chilly smile. “Are you testing me?”

  “I’m curious to see how far your instincts take you.”

  “Fair enough. What does Dave Gurney really want? It’s an interesting question.” He glanced at Madeleine, who was watching him intently, before turning back to Gurney.

  “This is only the barest of first impressions, but I’d guess that you have one great imperative in your life. You want to understand. You want to connect the dots. Your personality is built around that central desire, a desire you perceive as a need. You claimed earlier that you want to represent the victims, to stand up for Ethan Gall, to achieve justice for him and the others. That may or may not be true, but I can see that you believe it. I can see that you’re being as open and honest with me as you can be. But you also appear to have a great deal on your mind, issues you’re not talking about.”

  His gaze moved to Madeleine. “You have a great deal on your mind, too.”

  “Oh?” She reflexively crossed her arms.

  “You have something on your mind that’s making you uncomfortable. Most of that discomfort comes from keeping it a secret. Your husband knows something is troubling you. He senses that you’re afraid to tell him about it. That adds to his own burden. And you can see how your secret is affecting him, but you don’t see any simple way out of it, and it’s making your situation very painful.”

  “You can tell all that . . . how? By the way I eat my blueberry tart?”

  Hammond smiled softly. “Actually, by the way you don’t eat it. When Jane firs
t mentioned blueberries, there was a positive flash of anticipation in your eyes, which was quickly overtaken by other thoughts. Your anxiety stole your appetite. You never touched your dessert.”

  “Amazing. Who knew that failing to eat a tart could be so revealing?”

  Her anger had no visible effect on Hammond, whose gentle smile persisted. “A lot is revealed by the way a husband and wife look at each other, particularly the way one looks at the other when the other isn’t looking back. So much is written on their faces.”

  Madeleine returned his smile, but hers was cold. “Do you look in the mirror much?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, if I understand what you’re getting at.”

  “A man with your insight into facial expressions must gather all sorts of information from his own reflection.”

  “I wish that were true. In my case, it’s not.”

  “So your psychological dissection skills can only be applied to other people?”

  He nodded ruefully. “Sometimes I think of it as my deal with the devil.”

  Madeleine fell silent, perhaps surprised by the odd reply.

  “What do you mean?” asked Gurney.

  “I mean I’ve been given something of value, but there’s a related price.”

  “The thing of value being your insight?”

  “My insight into others. The price seems to be a lack of insight into myself. Clarity looking outward, blindness looking inward. I can see your motives plainly. Mine are a mystery to me. The better I get at understanding the actions of others, the less I seem able to understand my own. So there are questions whose answers I can only guess at. You wonder why I don’t hire a lawyer, why I don’t sue the police for defamation, why I don’t sue the tabloids and bloggers for libel, why I don’t hire a team of investigators to discredit Gilbert Fenton, why I don’t conduct an aggressive public relations campaign in my own defense. You wonder why the hell don’t I stand up and fight, launch an all-out war, and bury these bastards in their own lies?”

  “It’s an excellent question. Is there an answer?”