“No problem. Just curiosity.”
Fenton cocked his head speculatively, as though turning a difficult concept around in his mind. “Curiosity can be a problem when the stuff you don’t know is stuff you shouldn’t know.” He hesitated, his jaw muscles tensing. “If you knew even half the story, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be stepping into something over your head. You wouldn’t be sitting across a dinner table from Richard Hammond. You wouldn’t be anywhere near Wolf Lake.”
“But now that I’m here, you want to fill me in on the facts.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” But the distaste with which he said it hinted at some conflict in his mission. Perhaps a career-long antipathy for sharing information outside the boundaries of his law enforcement unit was colliding with an order to do exactly that.
“I’m listening.” Gurney sank down into one of the leather chairs by the hearth, gesturing toward another near it. “You want to have a seat?”
Fenton glanced around, selected instead the simplest wooden chair in the room, and brought it to a spot facing Gurney, but not too close. He perched on the edge of the seat as if it were a stool, his hands on his knees. His jaw muscles started moving again. He was staring down at the rug. Whatever was going on in his head narrowed the eyes that were already too small for his slab of a face.
He looked up, met Gurney’s inquisitive gaze, and cleared his throat. “Motive, means, opportunity. That what you want to hear about?”
“Good place to start.”
“Okay. Motive. Would twenty-nine million dollars qualify?”
Gurney frowned, said nothing.
Fenton flashed an ugly smile. “They didn’t tell you about that, huh? Little Dick and Jane. They neglected to mention Ethan Gall’s will?”
“Tell me about it.”
The ugly smile widened. “Ethan had a very simple will—especially for a guy with eighty-seven million dollars, give or take a few million for variations in investment values.” He paused, studying Gurney’s expression. “One third for the Gall New Life Foundation; one third for little brother Peyton; and one third—that’s twenty-nine million bucks—for Doctor Dick.”
So that’s what Steckle had been talking about. Richard was the legatee whose name he wouldn’t disclose.
“Why would Gall leave Hammond that much? Were they that close?”
Fenton made a face between a leer and a sneer. “Maybe closer than anyone knew. But the main reason was to piss off Peyton. Peyton hated the fact that Doctor Dick was Ethan’s pet. The whole point was to threaten Peyton. Scare him into being a good boy.”
“How recent was this version of Ethan’s will?”
“Very recent. And the thing that puts the nail in Doctor Dick’s coffin is that he knew Ethan was about to change it again—give it all back to his little brother. Your dinner companion had a twenty-nine-million-dollar window of opportunity that was about to close. You think that might be a powerful motive for timely action?”
Gurney shrugged. “Maybe a little too powerful and a little too timely.”
Fenton stared at him. “Meaning what?”
“Seems too obvious and too neat. But the bigger question is, what action are you claiming it motivated?” When Fenton didn’t answer right away, Gurney went on. “If you’re claiming that Hammond killed Gall in order to grab that twenty-nine million before it disappeared, the real question is how did he kill him?”
Fenton looked like he had a mouthful of stomach acid. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics. I’ll just say that Hammond developed some motivational techniques that go beyond anything normal, therapeutic, or ethical.”
“You’re saying that he persuaded Ethan Gall to commit suicide?”
“You find that hard to believe?”
“Very hard.”
“His goddamn ‘gay emergence therapy’ seemed like quite a stretch, too! Think about it.” Fenton’s eyes flashed with anger. “This is the same son of a bitch who invented a so-called ‘therapy’ to make normal men believe they were gay!”
“So you figure if Hammond could convince a man he was gay, he could convince him to kill himself?” The logic of that struck Gurney as absurd.
“The technical term for what we’re talking about is ‘trance-induced suicide.’”
“Whose term is that?”
Fenton blinked, rubbed his hand across his mouth. He seemed to be considering how much more he ought to say. “The people we’ve consulted. Experts. Best in the world.”
If Fenton wanted to identify his experts, he’d volunteer their names. If he didn’t want to, there was no point in asking. Gurney sat back in his armchair and steepled his fingers thoughtfully under his chin. “Trance-induced suicide. Interesting. And this can be achieved through a single hypnotherapy session?”
“An intensive three-hour session with a follow-up session on the final day.”
“The final day?”
“The suicide day.”
“Where did that follow-up meeting occur?”
“With Mr. Gall, right here at Wolf Lake. With the other three, it was done by phone.”
“And of course you have a record of Hammond calling each of those three victims on—”
Fenton cut in. “On the day each one cut his wrists.” He paused, studying Gurney’s face. “You didn’t know any of this shit, right? You have no goddamn idea what you’re stumbling around in. Blind man in a minefield.” He shook his head. “Do you happen to know what subject the famous Doctor Hammond wrote his PhD thesis on?”
“Tell me.”
“Long title, but maybe you ought to memorize it. ‘Hypnotic Elements in the Mechanism of Fatality in Voodoo: How Witch Doctors Make Their Victims Die.’ That’s a pretty interesting area of expertise, wouldn’t you say?”
Fenton radiated the triumph of a poker player showing a full house, aces high. “Think about it, Gurney. This guy hypnotized four people. They all ended up with the same nightmare. They all talked to him on the last day of their lives. And they all cut their wrists in exactly the same way.”
He paused before adding, “Is this really a guy you want to be having dinner with?”
CHAPTER 24
Having written a doctoral thesis examining the psychological levers underlying the practice of voodoo was, at least, suggestive of a past academic interest. It was certainly a provocative coincidence and the sort of thing that would capture the imagination of a jury, but it was hardly, as the lawyers say, dispositive.
The will, however, was another matter. The will nailed down the first third of the motive-means-opportunity triad. The will was a big deal. So big a deal that Gurney felt he had to get to the bottom of it—the precise nature of the provision favoring Hammond to the tune of twenty-nine million dollars, as well as the reason that neither Jane nor Richard had seen fit to mention it—before he could put his mind to any other task.
He took out his phone, called Jack Hardwick, and left a message. “Tell me you didn’t know about the twenty-nine-million-dollar motive lurking in the middle of this case. Because if you knew about that little item and chose not to tell me, you and I have a serious problem. Call me ASAP.”
He considered calling Jane Hammond next, then decided a personal visit to the chalet, unannounced, to confront Jane and Richard together would be more revealing. He went to his duffle bag, found his notebook, tore out a blank page, and wrote a quick message to Madeleine:
“It’s almost 11:00 AM. I got back from Plattsburgh a while ago. Had a visit from Gilbert Fenton. Going over to the Hammonds’ place now to sort out a problem. I’ll have my phone with me—please call as soon as you get in.”