“Do you feel responsible for his death?”
“Not as responsible as I feel for saving the life of the man he was trying to kill.”
As Gurney mulled over the story, he was struck by aspects of Hammond’s nature he hadn’t seen before—formidability, pragmatic cleverness, willingness to get his hands dirty in a dangerous situation. As he was considering ways to probe these qualities further, his phone rang.
He glanced at the screen. The text message, from a number he didn’t recognize, was terse, disquieting, and, for a moment, incomprehensible.
“RESTRICTED TECHNOLOGY. IMMEDIATE RETREAT ADVISED. W.”
Then he realized it was a response to the photos he’d sent Wigg of the inside of Madeleine’s phone. She was telling him, once again, that the nature of the device indicated the involvement of people he shouldn’t be messing with.
He wanted to talk to her, was tempted to call her, but was held back by the message’s cryptic tone. However, it occurred to him that he could use the arrival of the message as a natural cover for the bug-scanning procedure that was the real purpose of his visit to the chalet.
He stood up from the couch, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, but something’s been dropped in my lap that I need to deal with.” As he stepped away, he exchanged his phone for the look-alike scanner in his pocket. He walked slowly toward a far corner of the room, as if for privacy. He turned on the scanner, made his way through the setup steps, and began meandering around the room, his eyes on the screen, as if waiting for an elusive Internet connection.
Jane rose from her chair, meanwhile, to take care of something in the kitchen.
Gurney saw the room’s outline take shape on the screen, followed shortly by the appearance of three red dots—dots representing three distinct transmission sources, each operating at its own frequency.
At the same time, he couldn’t help overhearing Madeleine’s conversation with Hammond.
“So you’re saying that you saved the victim’s life by making up a story?”
“By giving him an alternative way of understanding his pain.”
“But it was a lie.”
“And that bothers you? Perhaps you’re too much of an idealist.”
“Because I value the truth?”
“Perhaps you value it too highly.”
“What’s the alternative? Believing lies?”
“If I told that obsessed man the truth—that voodoo has no inherent power, that it’s nothing but a trick of the mind that suckers the victim into a slow suicide—he wouldn’t have believed me. Given his background and culture, he couldn’t have believed me. He’d have dismissed my truth as heretical nonsense. And he’d have died as a result.”
“So the truth is irrelevant?”
“It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not the most important thing. At best, it helps us function. At worst, it devastates us.” Hammond, still in his armchair by the fire, leaned toward Madeleine. “Truth is overrated. What we really need is a way of seeing things that makes life livable.”
There was a prolonged silence. When Madeleine eventually spoke, her words remained challenging, but the combative edge was gone from her tone. “Is that what you do as a therapist? Come up with credible falsehoods your clients can live with?”
“Credible stories. Ways of understanding the events in their lives, particularly traumatic events. Isn’t a narrative that supports a happier life better than a truth you can’t live with?”
After another silence she replied softly, “You may be right.”
With part of his brain Gurney was struggling to digest what Hammond had said and Madeleine’s reaction to it, which he found bewilderingly upsetting. With the other part he was trying to focus on the data the scanner was displaying. That latter effort was interrupted by Hammond’s next comment.
“Perhaps there’s an event in your own life that you’ve never managed to integrate into a narrative you can live comfortably with. That’s not an uncommon source of pain. But it’s a pain that can be relieved.”
In the silence that followed, Gurney forced his attention back to the scanner. He made another loose circuit of the space to pinpoint the exact locations of the bugs. He found that they had all been placed more or less centrally—within range of the places where conversations were most likely to occur: the seating area around the hearth, the dining table, and a desk with a landline phone.
The scanner’s red dot pattern showed one bug in the base structure of a wooden planter full of philodendrons. It located another, with a similar frequency signature, less than ten feet from the first, in a rustic chandelier. But it was the third that got Gurney’s attention. With a transmission frequency in the same super-high range as the micro device in Madeleine’s phone, it seemed to be situated inside the delicate finial of an antique floor lamp.
He turned off the scanner and slipped it back in his pocket. He stepped closer to the lamp to examine the little finial, which appeared to have been carved from an opaque gemstone into the shape of a minuscule vase. It was deep green, flecked with irregular bits of bright crimson.
Jane returned from the kitchen. “Were you able to deal with whatever you had to deal with?”
Gurney moved away from the lamp. “That’s all taken care of. Sorry about the interruption. I do need to bring you up to date on a few things. And ask you a few questions.”
She glanced at her brother. “Did you hear that, Richard?”
He was leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin. He turned his attention, reluctantly it seemed, from Madeleine to Gurney. “I’m listening.”
With active audio surveillance now a certainty, Gurney was calculating how much he should say. One thing was clear—he didn’t want to compromise Angela Castro’s safety. The rest he’d have to play by ear. It occurred to him that it might be interesting to get Hammond’s perspective on the surveillance issue itself.
“Has it ever crossed your mind that your house or car might be bugged?”
Hammond shrugged. “I’d be shocked if they weren’t.”
“Have you taken any precautions?”
“No. I have nothing to hide.”
“Okay. New topic. How crazy is Peyton Gall?”
Hammond produced a fleeting smile. “You’ve made his acquaintance?”
“Earlier this evening. In his greenhouse. In the company of a naked woman.”
“Only one?”
“That sort of thing is common?”
“Oh, yes, quite routine.”
“So he wasn’t just putting on an act for my benefit?”
“You mean, was he pretending to be a fool so you’d take him off your list of suspects?”
“Something like that.”
“I’d say that what you saw is what he is.”
“He claimed that money bores him, that he has no interest in it. Truth or bullshit?”
“Truth, to the extent that managing money requires a level of attention and patience he simply doesn’t have. Bullshit, to the extent that he has an enormous interest in what it can buy.”
“So Peyton gets the coke and hookers, and Austen gets the investment reports?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, on to another subject. I was told by a reliable source that at least one of the victims received a strange phone call a couple of weeks before coming up to Wolf Lake Lodge. The caller may have been advising him to see you.”
“What was ‘strange’ about it?”
“He got the impression he was supposed to keep the call a secret—that he might even be killed if he talked about it.”