Wolf Lake Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by John Verdon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Verdon, John, author.

  Title: Wolf Lake: a novel / John Verdon.

  Description: Berkeley: Counterpoint, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008988

  Subjects: LCSH: Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Serial murder investigation—Fiction. | Psychologists—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.E736 W65 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008988

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-807-4

  For Naomi

  Contents

  PART ONE: DEADLY DREAMS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  PART TWO: THE BODY

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  PART THREE: THE WOLF AND THE HAWK

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  PART ONE

  DEADLY DREAMS

  PROLOGUE

  She stood shivering in the moonlight between the two giant hemlocks at the end of the frozen lake. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, so frightened. The sight of the full moon above the jagged treetops was giving her gooseflesh. The drooping branches were becoming in her mind deformed arms that might reach down and—

  No! Stop! She shook her head—her real problem was terrifying enough without letting her imagination run wild.

  In the distance she heard the motorcycle approaching—first on the old dirt road, then on the winding trail from the road down to the lake. The closer it came, the tighter the feeling in her chest.

  Finally, with a surge of anxiety, she caught sight of the headlight flickering through the woods, then coming across the clearing that separated the pines from the towering black hemlocks.

  He stopped in front of her and switched off the engine, planting his feet wide on the ground to balance the heavy bike—his big brother’s, which he rode illegally.

  She could just make out a few snowflakes in his wind-tousled hair. She wasn’t sure whether he looked worried or whether she was imagining it because that was the way she’d expected him to look. Her phone call hadn’t been explicit, but she knew her voice had been full of fear and urgency. She was sure, even with his back to the moon, that he was looking at her intently, waiting for her to explain why they were meeting here.

  She could hear him breathing, could even hear his heart beating. But that was impossible. Maybe it was her own heart, her own desperate pulse beating in her ears.

  She’d prepared what she intended to say, rehearsed it a hundred times that very evening; but now, in this forbidding place, her voice failed her.

  “What?” he asked. “What is it?” His voice was sharp, not like she’d ever heard it before.

  She bit her lower lip, took a trembling breath, and forced out the words in a barely audible whisper.

  She heard him take a deep breath, but he said nothing.

  She wondered if he’d heard her—half hoping that he hadn’t.

  A slow-moving cloud began to creep across the moon.

  Sometime after that—she’d lost her sense of time—he restarted the motorcycle, gave the throttle a sudden twist, and accelerated out onto the ice-covered lake, the shriek of the engine slicing through the frigid air, the chrome tailpipe reflecting what was left of the moonlight.

  Then, out on the distant center of the lake, the diminishing howl of the engine was broken by a horrifying crack—then another, and another, like a rapid series of muffled gunshots as the ice gave way under the motorcycle’s weight. There was a sickening splashing impact . . . the hiss of the hot machine sinking . . . and silence.

  The cloud now had obliterated every trace of the moon.

  All was darkness. No sound. No light. No thought. No hope. No feeling.

  And then, the scream. The scream rising with a feral life of its own, going on and on.

  The scream that she came to realize only later had been hers.

  CHAPTER 1

  The porcupine’s behavior was making no sense.

  There was something deeply disturbing about its lack of logical purpose—disturbing at least to Dave Gurney.

  On that raw morning in early December, he was sitting by the den window, gazing out toward a row of bare trees on the north side of the old pasture. He was fixated on one tree in particular, on one low-lying branch of that tree, as an unusually fat porcupine ambled back and forth along that branch—slowly, repetitively, seemingly pointlessly.

  “Which snowshoes are you bringing?” Madeleine was standing in the den doorway, holding a traditional rawhide-on-wood pair in one hand and a contemporary metal-and-plastic pair in the other. Her short dark hair had the especially disarranged look it had when she’d been rooting around in the low-ceilinged attic or the back of a closet.

  “I’ll decide later.”

  They were planning to spend a few days at an inn in the Green Mountains of Vermont for some snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Snow had not yet arrived that year in their own Catskill Mountains, and snow was the part of winter that Madeleine loved.

  She nodded toward the den window. “Still obsessed with our little visitor?”

  He considered several ways of responding to that, rejecting immediately any mention of the porcupine’s resemblance to a shambling, half-senile gangster he’d known in the city. Three years into his retirement from the NYPD he and Madeleine had fi
nally reached a tacit understanding of sorts. Although he was officially no longer the homicide detective he’d been for over twenty years, it had become clear that he wasn’t about to morph into the biking, kayaking, all-out nature lover Madeleine had been hoping for. But some accommodation was called for. On his part, he agreed to stop relating how his current experiences in the rural mountains of upstate New York managed to bring to mind past criminal cases. On her part, she agreed to stop trying to convert him into something he wasn’t. All this, of course, could lead to some fraught silences.

  He looked back out the window. “I’m trying to figure out what he’s up to.”

  She leaned the snowshoes against the wall, came next to him, peered out for several seconds at the bristly animal meandering along the branch. “He’s probably just doing some normal porcupine thing. Same thing he was doing yesterday. What’s the problem?”

  “What he’s doing doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe it makes sense to him.”

  “Not unless he’s crazy. Or pretending to be crazy, which is unlikely. Look. Very slowly he makes his way out to the end of that branch. Then, very hesitantly, he turns around. Then he makes his way back the way he came. He’s expending energy . . . for what?”

  “Does everything have to be explainable?”

  “Everything ultimately is explainable. And in this case I’d like to know that the explanation is something other than rabies.”

  “Rabies? Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Rabies causes deranged behavior.”

  “Do you know for a fact that porcupines get rabies?”

  “Yes. I checked. I’m going to put a couple of trail cams out there, find out where he goes, what he does, when he’s not bumbling around on that branch.”

  She made a face, maybe confused, maybe incredulous—he wasn’t sure which.

  “Trail cams. Outdoor security cameras,” he explained. “Motion-activated.”

  “Security cameras? Good Lord, David, the odds are he’s just going about his little porcupine life, and you’re treating him like . . . like he’s committing a crime.” She paused. “Where would you get these cameras anyway?”

  “Jack Hardwick. He has a bunch of them.”

  He didn’t remind her that they were left over from an aborted plan he and Hardwick had cooked up during the recent Peter Pan murder case, but, judging from her darkening expression, a reminder was unnecessary. He added, in an effort to pull the discussion back from an abyss of bad memories, “Once I can see how that animal behaves on the ground, I’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.”

  “You don’t think you’re overreacting, just a little?”

  “Not if the damn thing has rabies.”

  She gave him one of those long looks that he could never quite decipher. “We’re leaving for Vermont the day after tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “So when are you planning on doing whatever you’re going to do with those camera things?”

  “As soon as possible. As soon as I can get them from Hardwick. In fact, I should call him right now.”

  The indecipherable look changed to obvious concern. “When are you going to pack?”

  “Christ, we’re only going away for three days.”

  “Four.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  As Gurney left the den in search of his cell phone, Madeleine’s voice followed him. “Did it occur to you that the porcupine might be totally harmless and that the reason he’s walking back and forth on the branch might be none of your business?”

  CHAPTER 2

  A half hour later the morning sun was well above the eastern ridge. Its rays slanting through the ice crystals in the dry, frigid air were creating random microscopic sparkles.

  Largely oblivious to this phenomenon, Gurney was standing by the French doors in the breakfast nook of their farmhouse kitchen. He was gazing down over the low pasture toward the red barn, the point at which the narrow town road dead-ended into their fifty-acre property—once upon a time a functioning hill farm, a use long since abandoned in the collapse of the upstate dairy industry.

  After retiring early from their careers in the city, he and Madeleine had moved to that pastoral part of the western Catskill Mountains because the countryside was breathtakingly beautiful despite its economic depression. Her enthusiasm for the place was obvious from the beginning. Her energetic, unpretentious character; her positive fascination with the natural world; and her visceral delight in simply being outdoors in any season—canoeing, berry-picking, or just wandering along old forest trails—suited her for country life. Adapting to their new environment had been for her an easy, happy process.

  He, nearly three years later, was still working on it.

  But that sometimes divisive issue was not what was preoccupying him at the moment. He was pondering the disconcerting phone conversation he’d just had with Jack Hardwick.

  Hardwick had answered the phone quite pleasantly with none of his customary jibes. He’d sounded so friendly that Gurney had suspected it was a parody of cordiality to be replaced at any moment by some cynical remark. But that didn’t happen. Hardwick had responded to Gurney’s request for the loan of a couple of trail cams with eagerness—not only to provide them but to deliver them. And not only to deliver them, but to do so immediately.

  As Gurney stood by the glass doors mulling over this uncharacteristic rush to be helpful, Madeleine came down from an upstairs room carrying two nylon duffel bags—one blue, one green. She set them down on the floor by his feet.

  “Do you have a preference?”

  He glanced at the bags and shook his head. “Whichever.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He told her about the phone call.

  Her eyes narrowed. “He’s coming . . . here? Now?”

  “Apparently.”

  “What’s his big hurry?”

  “Good question. I assume we’ll find out when he arrives.”

  On cue, from somewhere down the road below the barn, came the throaty rumble of a big V-8 engine. Half a minute later Hardwick’s classic muscle car, a red 1970 Pontiac GTO, was making its way up the snow-covered lane through the overgrown pasture.

  “He’s got someone with him,” said Madeleine.

  Gurney wasn’t fond of surprises. He went out past the mud room to the side door, opened it and watched while Hardwick parked the loud, angular GTO next to his own dusty, anonymous Outback.

  Hardwick got out first, his thin-lipped grin exhibiting, as usual, more determination than warmth—the same message conveyed by his ice-blue eyes and aggressively colorless clothes: black jeans, black sweater, black windbreaker.

  Gurney’s attention, however, was on the person emerging from the passenger side. His first impression was of a different kind of colorlessness—a drab anonymity. A large, plain woman, she was wearing a quilted winter coat and shapeless wool ski hat, perhaps in her early forties.

  When she arrived at the door, Gurney offered her a pleasant smile and turned an inquisitive glance toward Hardwick—which seemed to make the man’s grin grow brighter.

  “You’re asking yourself, ‘Where’s that camera equipment he was supposed to be bringing me?’ Am I right?”

  Gurney waited, smiled patiently, said nothing.

  “As your trusty guardian angel . . .” Hardwick inserted a dramatic pause before proceeding with relish, “I decided to bring you something of far greater value than a fucking trail cam. May we come in?”

  Gurney led them into the kitchen end of the long open room that also included a dining area and, at the far end, a sitting area arranged around a fieldstone fireplace.

  Madeleine’s fraught smile seemed to reflect Gurney’s history with his sometime colleague—a difficult man with whom he’d shared a series of near-fatal law enforcement experiences.

  Hardwick’s grin widened. “Madeleine. You look fantastic.”

  “Can I take your jackets?”


  “Absolutely.” He helped the bulky woman beside him remove hers. He did this with a flourish, as if he were unveiling something grand. “Dave, Madeleine, may I introduce . . . Jane Hammond.”

  Madeleine smiled and said hello. Gurney extended his hand, but the woman shook her head. “Very happy to meet you, but I won’t shake your hand, I’m full of germs.” She pulled off her knitted cap, revealing a shapeless, low-maintenance hairstyle.

  Evidently sensing the absence of any recognition, Hardwick added, “Jane is the sister of Richard Hammond.”

  Gurney’s expression suggested nothing but ongoing curiosity.

  “Richard Hammond,” repeated Hardwick. “The Richard Hammond—the one in every major newscast for the past month.”

  Madeleine showed a twinge of concern. “The hypnotist?”

  Jane Hammond’s reaction was emphatic. “Not hypnotist—hypnotherapist. Any charlatan can call himself a hypnotist, dangle a pendulum, and pretend he’s doing something profound. My brother is a Harvard-trained psychologist who utilizes very sophisticated techniques.”

  Madeleine nodded sympathetically, as though she were dealing with a touchy client at the mental health clinic where she worked. “But isn’t ‘hypnotist’ what they’re calling him in the news reports?”

  “That’s not all they’re calling him. The so-called news programs today are nothing but trash! They don’t care how unfair they are, how full of lies—” She broke off in a brief fit of coughing. “Allergies,” she explained. “I seem to have a different one for every season.”

  Hardwick spoke up. “Actually, could we sit down?”

  Before Gurney could object, Madeleine offered them seats at the round pine table in the breakfast nook—where Hardwick, with a nod of encouragement from Jane Hammond, launched into the story of Richard Hammond’s bizarre situation.

  CHAPTER 3

  “You know about the Adirondack Great Camps, right? Thousand-acre compounds, giant lodges, plenty of room for guests and servants, built about a hundred years ago by the richer-than-God robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, et cetera. One of the lower-profile fat cats who built a place up there was a guy named Dalton Gall, a nasty bastard who’d made a fortune in tin mining. There’s a peculiar legend involving his untimely death, which I’ll come back to.”