Manx stared at him. “Because hacking off a blackmailer’s head with an axe seems a little over the edge?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Ever occur to you that Slade might be crazy? That maybe this is what he does to people who threaten him? He wouldn’t be the first nutcase to have a few heads in his freezer.”
17
GURNEY CONSIDERED THE MURDER SCENE EVIDENCE. THE bits and pieces were strung together by a plausible but not necessarily accurate narrative. To imagine an alternative narrative, he needed firsthand knowledge of the site. Crime scenarios had often shifted in his mind as he stood in the spot where killer and victim collided.
From his Outback, he called Emma Martin.
“What can I do for you, David?”
“I’m trying to clarify a few issues, and it would help if I could visit Slade’s lodge.”
“It’s currently being watched over by a young man in our addiction recovery group. When do you want to go there?”
“I’m near Albany right now. I could take a detour up into the Adirondacks.”
“If Ian isn’t there now, he will be later today. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
“Ian?”
“Ian Valdez. One our success stories and a great fan of Ziko.”
Gurney entered the lodge address into his GPS and pulled out of the NorthGuard parking lot. As he left the Albany metro area, the urban traffic thinned out, and by the time he was heading due north into the Adirondack foothills on a winding two-lane road, there were no other vehicles in sight.
The vistas around Walnut Crossing were essentially bucolic. Hillside meadows and thickets of deciduous maple, beech, and cherry trees alternated with old farms, barns, and silos. In contrast to the Catskills, the Adirondack vistas appeared less cultivated. This was a land of log cabins rather than farmhouses. Instead of meandering through broad valleys, the streams tumbled through boulder-strewn gullies. The forests seemed vaster, the silence deeper, the air colder. This was not a place of planting and harvesting but of hunting and trapping.
The farther north he drove, the stronger these impressions grew—along with a feeling of apprehension. A thin fog reduced visibility of the road ahead. The giant pines and hemlocks encroaching on the pavement darkened in the haze.
An edgy sense of again being followed crept up on Gurney, justified only by a momentary glimpse of a vehicle far behind him. Twice he slowed and once pulled over to test his suspicion, but no vehicle appeared. Still, the uneasy feeling persisted.
By the time his GPS told him he’d arrived at his destination, the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the fog was depositing films of ice on the trees. The announced “destination” was actually the point at which Slade’s private road—essentially, a very long driveway—met the public road. Gurney turned onto Slade’s property and followed the narrow lane through the forest to a clearing dominated by an imposing two-story log structure. There were no lights on, nor any other vehicle in sight.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing, got out, zipped his light windbreaker up to his neck, and stuffed his hands in the pockets. The fog, the dead stillness, and the motionless evergreens with their drooping branches gave the place an eerie look. All that was needed now, thought Gurney, was the screech of an owl to send shivers down his spine.
Based on what Emma had said, Ian, the house minder, would be arriving at any moment, but Gurney saw no reason to wait for him before proceeding. Soon, the November dusk would fade into darkness.
He approached the front porch of the lodge and stopped a few feet from the broad wooden steps—the spot where the prosecution claimed Lerman had been knocked unconscious. Gurney didn’t expect to find any remaining traces of the event. It was the place itself that interested him.
He began by making his way around the building. It was constructed of giant logs on a laid-stone foundation, in the style of the opulent Adirondack “camps” of the early 1900s. As he walked, he calculated the depth of the main structure to be about fifty feet. A square addition appended to the rear corner added another twenty or so feet. The windows in that section were larger. Gurney identified that part of the building as the kitchen.
He conceded that someone preparing a meal in there would probably not have been able to hear something occurring out by the front porch. That by itself didn’t argue for Slade’s innocence, but at least it explained how he could have been ignorant of someone else’s attack on Lerman.
Continuing around the back of the building, he saw a padlocked shed at the edge of the woods, perhaps the shed where the investigation team found the axe bearing the traces of blood with Lerman’s DNA. A generator hummed from behind the shed. A couple of the upstairs windows did not appear to be tightly shut, perhaps due to some warping or swelling of the sashes—another fact that proved nothing but was consistent with Slade’s explanation of how someone could have gotten into the lodge to take one of his camo suits as part of a framing scheme.
Gurney completed a full circuit of the lodge, then headed out of the clearing and into the woods in the direction the unconscious Lerman was said to have been dragged. Counting his paces to approximate the distance mentioned in the trial, he arrived at a spot bearing no noticeable characteristics identifying it as the location of Lenny Lerman’s shallow grave.
Because the deepening gloom under the trees was making it difficult to see clearly, he activated his phone flashlight app, sweeping the beam from side to side. Then he returned to his starting point in front of the lodge, changed the angle of his exploration, and repeated the process half a dozen times without success.
He was about to give up the effort when his phone light illuminated an area next to a huge pine where the ground was slightly hollowed out. The layer of pine needles over the sunken area was thinner here than on the surrounding ground and the earth was a little softer. His recollection of the crime scene photos confirmed that this was the spot where Lerman had been beheaded the previous November.
A slight tremor ran through him as he pictured the unconscious man being dragged facedown and dumped in the shallow waiting grave . . . the axe swinging down through the back of his neck . . . the blood spurting from the severed carotid arteries and seeping slowly into the dark earth . . . the fingers being clipped off one by one . . . loose soil being shoveled over the body . . . and finally the—
Gurney’s mental reconstruction of the murder was cut short by a scream.
18
THE SCREAM WAS A SOUND OF PURE TERROR—MADE EVEN more hair-raising because its distance and direction was obscured by a creeping fog. The uncertainty stymied Gurney’s police instinct to run toward a sound of distress.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “Where are you?”
He waited a few seconds, listening, then shouted both questions again.
The silence was absolute.
He retreated from the grave site, using his phone to illuminate the way back through the woods and to his car. He unlocked the glove box and took out his 9mm Beretta.
He was imagining possible scenarios for the scream and deciding on his next move when a glint of light caught the corner of his eye.
And then it was gone.
He peered into the woods, searching for it, but saw nothing in the murky dusk but the black ghosts of trees.
The light appeared again.
It seemed to be moving.
And there was a second light moving with it.
Then there was the sound of a vehicle coming from the same direction.
Intermittently, through the trees, a pair of headlights turned onto Slade’s long driveway. A minute later, a white pickup truck entered the clearing and came to a stop behind the Outback.