Wolf Lake

by John Verdon

“You mean Dalton Gall being killed by wolves after dreaming about them?”

  “Right. So Dalton’s son inherits the place. Elliman Gall. Big-game hunter. Mountain climber. All that shit. Wolves killed his father, so Elliman sees this as an opportunity to prove something. He kills a shit-load of wolves.”

  There was a glint in Steckle’s eyes that suggested he wouldn’t mind killing a shitload of wolves himself. “He has a few of them stuffed. Puts the fucking wolves in the Hearth Room, for everyone to admire. Elliman Gall. Man in control.”

  “I get the feeling this story has an unhappy ending.”

  Again Steckle let out that eruptive hacksaw sound that passed for a laugh. “He gets the idea to plant the Gall family crest on the peak of Devil’s Fang. Big mountain climber, Elliman tries this in the middle of winter, horrible day like today, slips on the ice, falls eight hundred feet down the rock face, bounces off an outcropping on the way. They never found his head. Actually got ripped off on the way down.” Steckle grinned radiantly. “Shit happens, right?”

  “Sounds like the man craved admiration.”

  “He was dying for it.” Once more, the awful laugh.

  “How did the wolves end up here in the attic?”

  “That was my first suggestion to Ethan, when I started working here—to get the goddamn creepy things out of the Hearth Room. There’s enough wild shit outdoors; we don’t need to have it in our faces indoors.”

  “You don’t sound like much of a nature guy.”

  “I’m a numbers guy. Nice, predictable numbers. Nature, in my humble opinion, is a fucking horror story.”

  “An Adirondack lodge seems like an odd place for you to be working.”

  “You focus on the work, not where you do it.”

  Gurney realized that Steckle’s philosophy wasn’t that far from his own way of seeing things. His years in NYPD homicide had repeatedly put him in horrendous places. The thought made him want to change the subject.

  “That family crest you mentioned—what was on it?”

  “See for yourself.” Steckle turned the cold white beam of his flashlight to the far end of the long room. High on the rough pine wall, hanging in the triangular area outlined by the dark rafters, there was a shield-shaped plaque. It bore a relief carving of a man’s fist, raised in what could have been a symbol of power or defiance or both. Under the carving were three Latin words:

  Virtus. Perseverantia. Dominatus.

  Calling on his memory of his high school Latin, Gurney pondered the qualities chosen to represent the family’s guiding lights:

  Manliness. Determination. Mastery.

  He looked at Steckle. “Interesting motto.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Those ideals don’t impress you?”

  “They’re just words.”

  “And words don’t mean much?”

  “Words don’t mean a goddamn thing.”

  The deeply hostile tone of this seemed rooted in a dangerous part of Steckle’s psyche—not an area to be probed when one was alone with the man in a dark attic.

  “No matter what anyone tells you, all you got is yourself.” His gaze went back to the Gall family crest, high on the far wall. “Everything else is bullshit.”

  “Like Elliman Gall seeking admiration?” suggested Gurney.

  Steckle nodded. “Seeking admiration is the stupidest fucking thing a man could do.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Steckle led Gurney two flights down the dark stairwell to a door that opened into a wide corridor. “This leads out to the reception floor. You’ll have to use the main stairs to get back up to your suite.”

  Gurney replied matter-of-factly, “I may check out the attic one more time tonight before I turn in. Set my mind at rest about those footsteps.”

  “Didn’t you just do that?”

  “Is there a problem with my taking another look?”

  Steckle hesitated. “It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s a matter of legal liability.”

  “Liability for what?”

  “Building code problems. It’s not a public area. Could be weak floorboards. Exposed wires. Bad lighting. You shouldn’t be up there.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve told me twice now that it’s not a public area. If I sprain my ankle, it’ll be my problem for breaking the rules, not yours.”

  Steckle’s expression soured but he said nothing more. When they reached the reception area, he went into his office and closed the door.

  Gurney headed for his car.

  A bitter wind was blowing snow sideways under the portico. He sprinted from the lodge to the Outback, got his big Maglite out of the glove box and a second smaller flashlight from the emergency kit, and sprinted back inside.

  Upstairs in the suite, he was surprised to find Madeleine sitting on the couch in front of the hearth with a small fire burning. Classical guitar music was playing on her tablet. She was wearing one of the lodge’s oversized white bathrobes and heavy wool socks. Her hair had been neatened a bit. On the low table between the couch and the hearth were two dinner plates covered by aluminum foil.

  She gave him an anxious look. “Where were you?”

  He didn’t want to unsettle her. “Just having a look around. I’m surprised to see you up. How are you feeling?”

  “We forgot about the Hammonds. We were supposed to go there for dinner tonight. Jane came over to see if we were all right. She brought us two plates. She made the fire.”

  “Caretaker Jane to the rescue.” As soon as the words were out, he regretted them.

  “She went out of her way to be helpful.” Her gaze moved to the two flashlights in his hands. “What are those for?”

  “There’s a small crack in the plaster in the bathroom. I want to make sure it’s not being used for another bug.”

  Her expression shifted from skeptical to concerned. “Where in the bathroom?”

  “The ceiling. A crack by the light fixture.”

  Her eyes widened. “Check the whole room. There has to be an explanation.”

  He realized she was talking about Colin’s body in the tub. But he knew that no reasonable explanation involving her imagination would be acceptable in her current state of mind.

  “Maddie, why don’t we get out of here?”

  She said nothing, just stared at him.

  He persisted. “If I’d seen a ghost . . . this is the last place I’d want to stay. It can’t be good for you. Why don’t we just go home?”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What’s not true?”

  “That you’d walk away from something like this, if it happened to you.”

  He tried again. “You know, it’s possible to be too close to something to see it for what it is—”

  She cut him off. “I saw his body here, not at home. The explanation is here.”

  He sat down on the couch next to her. He found himself staring at the two foil-covered plates on the coffee table. The guitar music from her tablet was building to another crescendo. His gaze shifted to the dying fire.

  “Would you like me to add a couple more logs?”

  “No. I’m going back to bed. Do we need to keep the music on?”

  “I’ll turn it off. Then I’ll do a quick little check of the attic over the bathroom.”

  She pulled the bathrobe more snugly around her and closed her eyes.

  ON HIS SECOND VISIT THE ATTIC FELT LESS THREATENING. EVEN now, in the same room with those crouching wolves, his sense of purpose seemed to be warding off any eerie imaginings.

  Before coming up to the attic he’d set the more powerful of his two flashlights upright on the flat rim of the tub in the bathroom, it’s beam aimed at the fissure in the ceiling.

  Now he switched off the smaller flashlight he’d used to find his way. For several seconds the darkness was absolute. He became aware of the wind gusting against the angled roof above him, straining against the century-old timbers.

  Then, as his eyes adjusted, he caug
ht a glimpse of what he’d hoped to see—a thin line of light between two floorboards perhaps twenty feet from where he was standing. He switched his flashlight back on and made his way around the wolves to where he’d spotted that thin line.

  The floor was made of wide pine boards, some of which were loose under his feet, especially at the source of the light. Sticking the back of the flashlight in his mouth, he knelt down and pressed his fingernails into the crack between the boards and slowly tilted one of them up from the joists it rested on. When it was tilted enough to grip it, he lifted it out and put it aside. The next one came up with equal ease.

  He’d laid bare a portion of the rough-sawn joist structure that separated the floorboards of the attic from the plaster ceiling of the area below it. Most significantly, he’d laid bare the wiring and support hardware of a light fixture in the ceiling of the room below. He could see that the round medallion designed to cover the opening in the plaster for the fixture wiring didn’t quite cover all of it. There was a narrow gap, just a few millimeters wide. A thin line of light from the bathroom below was shining up through it.

  He examined the area around the top of the fixture as well as the joist to which it was fastened. He concluded there were no surveillance devices present. There were, however, clear signs that two devices of some sort had been installed and later removed, probably in a hurry.

  It appeared that one may have been a fiber-optic video camera with its associated transmitter. There were several short pieces of fresh, sticky duct tape hanging from the side of the joist closest to the opening in the ceiling. There was a small spring clamp taped just above the opening. Gurney guessed it would have held the lens end of the optic cable in place. He figured the pieces of tape would have secured the rest of the cable to the joist to keep it from moving or creating any torquing pressure at the clamp. Cable-like imprints on the tape supported this idea. Two larger pieces of tape at what would have been the far end of the cable had probably supported the camera and transmitter components.

  That raised a question. Why hadn’t the transmitter come to light when he conducted the surveillance scan of the suite the previous day? Had it been removed by then? Or not yet installed at the time of the scan? If the latter, why was it removed so quickly?

  The evidence for the recent presence of a second device was convincing but unenlightening. A small pair of clamps were affixed to the joist above the opening in the plaster, but there was no way of knowing what sort of device they’d held in place.

  He checked the widths at which the clamps were set to guesstimate the size of the device they’d held. He concluded it was something roughly the diameter of a lipstick, of unknown length.

  Satisfied that he’d discovered as much as there was to be discovered, he eased the floorboards back into place. He stood up and took another look around the cavernous room. In the sweeping beam of his flashlight, the shadows of the wolves lunged wildly across the wall.

  He turned his flashlight up toward the Gall crest on the wall.

  Virtus. Perseverantia. Dominatus.

  He was struck by the coincidence of those stern sentiments being set above the ferocious beasts on the floor. His attention was drawn especially to the culminating term in the series: Dominatus.

  He recalled that it could be translated in many ways. But common to all those translations was one central concept: Control.

  As he thought about it in the context of the case, he began to see it as a recurring theme—from Elliman Gall’s obsession with wolf killing, to Ethan Gall’s focus on reforming the world by rehabilitating criminal personalities, to Peyton Gall’s unbridled self-will.

  And it went beyond the Gall family. According to Gilbert Fenton, the essence of the case involved Richard Hammond’s total control over his four victims.

  Fenton’s own media strategy, of course, was all about controlling the public perception of the case, controlling its future prosecutorial direction, controlling the fate of Richard Hammond.

  The shadowy forces above Fenton were controlling investigatory decisions in four separate jurisdictions.

  Going back thirteen years to that infamous summer at Camp Brightwater, Gurney wondered about the anonymous four—Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel. Moe Blumberg said their fellow campers were afraid of them. What kind of control had they exercised over those kids? What kind of control had they exercised over Scott Fallon?

  That train of thought brought Gurney around to the four recent murders. He was convinced that ‘murder’ was the only realistic term for what had happened to the four men who bled to death from their severed wrist arteries. Whatever obscure steps had been taken to bring about their deaths, the process must have been orchestrated with their deaths as the goal. In his book, that was the definition of murder.

  And murder was the ultimate act of control.

  CHAPTER 42

  “So what the hell are you saying?” asked Hardwick. “That it was a power struggle? And the dead guys lost? Who the fuck won?”

  Gurney was sitting in the Hearth Room. Rather than going directly back to the suite from the attic, he’d stopped there to call Hardwick and bring him up to date on his discoveries and his suspicion that the element of control might be central to the case.

  It was that last notion that Hardwick had challenged. He loved the concrete, hated the conceptual, and reacted predictably. “Whatever it’s about, Sherlock, I have total faith that you’ll figure it out and reveal it to us lesser mortals in your own time. Meanwhile, you want to hear my own Camp Brightwater brainstorm?”

  “Nothing I’d like better.”

  “Okay, then. Leo the Lion.”

  Gurney thought about it for a moment. “You’re saying that Leo Balzac was one of the anonymous four? Because Leo means Lion?”

  “It’s a direct connection, right? And I’m thinking that Wolf was probably Ethan Gall.”

  “Because of the family estate at Wolf Lake?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Except we have no evidence Ethan was at Brightwater. You have any other linkups?”

  “How about Wenzel the Weasel?”

  “That’s conceivable. There’s one more victim and one more nickname. Pardosa and Spider. You see some way they connect?”

  “Not yet. But three out of four has to mean something.”

  “It might mean we’re getting desperate for connections. But let’s say for argument’s sake that our four victims were the four bad seeds at Brightwater. And that they were responsible for Scott Fallon’s death. Is that where you’re going with this?”

  “Why not? It makes sense.” Hardwick sounded excited.

  “All right,” said Gurney calmly. “But even if that’s true, it happened thirteen years ago. What’s the connection to the present events?”

  “Maybe someone else knew what happened. Or found out about it later. Suppose Richard Hammond found out what happened at Brightwater that summer. Suppose he found out that a gay teenage boy had been beaten to death by Gall, Balzac, Wenzel, and Pardosa.” He paused. “Suppose he decided to do something about it.”

  “Other than pass along what he knew to law enforcement?”

  “Seeing how useless law enforcement was the first time around, suppose he decided to avenge Fallon’s death himself. Hammond devoted his early career to gay men and boys. How might he react if he discovered the identities of four people who killed a boy just because he was gay? Maybe Hammond took the position at Wolf Lake for easy access to Ethan. Maybe he was the one who made those phone calls that enticed the other three into coming to the lodge. Maybe he even concocted some kind of financial carrot to draw them into the trap.”

  That struck a chord. It fit with the stories of Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa seeming to have improved financial prospects around the time of their meetings with Hammond. But Gurney wasn’t convinced.

  Hardwick seemed to sense his skepticism. “Look, I’m not trying to sell you this scenario. Truth be told, I hope I’m wrong.”


  “Why is that?”

  “Because if I’m right, Fenton is right. And that’s a revolting thought.”

  “But you aren’t pushing the scenario as far as Fenton is. I mean, you aren’t buying into the notion of people being hypnotized into committing suicide, right?”

  Hardwick didn’t answer.

  Like a sound effect in a ghost movie, a moan came from the empty hearth at the far end of the room. Gurney told himself it was just the wind passing over the chimney.

  CHAPTER 43

  He found Madeleine in bed, with one of the bedside lamps still on. He looked to see if the tic in her cheek had subsided, but that side of her face was against the pillow.

  To ward off his feeling of helplessness, he tried to focus on Hardwick’s theory that Hammond had persuaded Wenzel, Balzac, and Pardosa to come to the lodge. There was some evidence that their financial situations had improved around the time of their visits, but it seemed a leap too far to assume that Hammond was responsible for that.

  Thinking about the financial angle brought to mind Angela Castro’s comment at the Dollhouse that Tabitha’s solicitousness might have arisen from her assumption that they were going to buy another doll. It had never made much sense to Gurney, but he’d never pursued it.

  He took his phone into the bathroom, where he found the flashlight still upright on the rim of the tub, still illuminating the ceiling. He switched it off and closed the door quietly.

  He called Angela’s number.

  When she picked up, the first thing he heard was a TV—that same rhythm of voices, laughter, and applause he’d heard in the background of their last phone conversation. He wondered if she ever turned it off.

  “Detective Gurney?” Her small voice sounded sleepy.

  “Hello, Angela. Sorry if I woke you.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing new. Are you still in the same place?”

  “What? Oh, yes, the same place.”

  “When we first met, you mentioned that Tabitha might have been thinking we were going to buy a Barbie. Remember that?”