Gurney left the door ajar until he’d heard Landon descend the staircase to the reception area and go out into the storm.
“Quite a character,” said Madeleine.
Gurney went to the room’s row of windows that looked out over a balcony similar to the suite’s. Through the swirling snow he soon caught sight of Landon’s flashlight beam emerging from under the portico, then dimly moving away from the lodge, presumably as the man followed whatever footprints the wind had not yet erased.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s get back to the job at hand.”
Flashlight in hand, he led the way out of the room and through the dark corridor to the suite door. He unlocked it and went in, followed by Madeleine. The air inside was cold.
He swept the beam of light around. Everything seemed in order. Although a large floor lamp was partially blocking his view of Steckle, he could see enough of the man’s arms tied behind the back of the narrow wooden chair he’d left him in to be reassured that no progress had been made toward escaping.
“It’s freezing in here,” said Madeleine.
The room, Gurney realized, was colder than it should have been, even considering the lack of central heating for the past half hour.
He pointed the flashlight at each of the windows. They were all closed, as was the door to the balcony. But then he noticed with instant concern the source of the frigid air. In the balcony door’s large glass panel there was a jagged hole next to the locking mechanism.
Someone had broken in, or tried to break in. He swept the light around the room again.
With a sick feeling he stepped around the obstructing floor lamp and started moving toward the figure bound in the chair, not sure if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
“Steckle!” he cried.
There was no answer.
As what he was looking at became clearer, a sick feeling nearly overwhelmed him. He tried to turn Madeleine away as she came up beside him. But it was too late.
She saw exactly what he saw. Half gagging, half groaning, she grabbed his arm.
The bulky physique and the recognizable clothes made it fairly certain that the body in the chair was Austen Steckle’s.
The lack of absolute certainty arose from the fact that the head had been severed from the torso and lay on the floor, chopped into pieces.
CHAPTER 57
Gurney tried to persuade Madeleine to return to the room next door, but she refused.
Trembling and tight-lipped, she insisted on staying right there with him—watching as he checked the sitting area, bedroom alcove, bathroom, and balcony to ensure that the killer was no longer present. She continued to watch—although with evident difficulty and revulsion—as he proceeded with a general inspection of the disfigured corpse.
The sight was as awful as any he’d encountered in all his years as a homicide detective.
He took out his smartphone and made a photographic record of the body, particularly the grotesque damage done to it, from multiple angles. Although there was no cell service and no access to the Internet, the phone’s batteries could still power its other functions.
He also photographed the area around the body, the broken glass panel in the balcony door, and as much of the balcony itself as he could without stepping outside and compromising any footprints or other trace evidence.
There was no point in trying to check the body for lividity, temperature decrease, or the signs of rigor mortis that could establish an approximate time of death. The murder had obviously occurred during Gurney’s relatively brief absence from the suite.
With the help of his flashlight, he took a closer look at the remnants of the head. The final opinion would, of course, be the medical examiner’s, but he had no doubt that he was looking at the result of multiple blows from something with a sharp, heavy, axe-like blade.
Something like Barlow Tarr’s hatchet.
The hatchet that Austen Steckle had brought to the suite with him.
The hatchet that was now gone.
In the interest of crime-scene preservation, they left the body in place exactly as they’d found it—and left everything else as undisturbed as possible. They weren’t about to occupy the room any longer than necessary, so they did have to remove their things.
Gurney took a fresh blanket from one of the bureaus and laid it on the bed. He put their bags, loose clothing, bathroom articles, laptop, and tablet on the sheet. He gathered up the corners, creating a kind of catch-all sack with which they could take what they needed in a single trip; and they moved it all to the room where they’d been planning to take Steckle. The solution wasn’t in perfect compliance with crime-scene protocol, but he felt it was the best they could do under the circumstances.
AS THE SHOCK AND HORROR OF THEIR DISCOVERY BEGAN TO ABATE, and they guardedly occupied their new quarters, Gurney felt increasingly pressured—and stymied. It seemed that none of the things that cried out for immediate action could be acted on.
A madman with a hatchet had to be corralled. Law enforcement had to be alerted to the radically changed situation. The Hammonds had to be warned. Yet none of these things seemed possible with phone service dead, night falling, roads obstructed by snowdrifts, vehicles crippled.
He felt obligated to get word to Richard and Jane, but how? He wasn’t going to leave Madeleine alone in the lodge with an axe murderer loose. And he wasn’t about to ask her to come with him on a mile-long trek through a sub-zero blizzard.
As frustrating as it was, he knew he had to resign himself to the limitations of the situation—and focus on what he could do.
At least the fire he’d started was gaining strength and beginning to warm the room. He checked the supply of kerosene for the lamps and judged that it would be adequate for a few days. He went into the bathroom, turned on the tub taps, and managed to capture a few gallons of water before the residual tank pressure was exhausted.
He pulled the heavy drapes across the row of icy windows to conserve heat, locked the doors to the balcony and to the outer corridor, and tipped chairbacks under the knobs as makeshift braces.
As he was adjusting the draft in the fireplace flue to maximize the burn time of the logs, Madeleine was standing by the bed, looking down at the blanket full of things he’d brought in from the suite. She picked up what he’d retrieved earlier from the lake—what he’d assumed at the time was one of the hawk’s tail feathers.
“Is this what flew off that thing when you shot at it?”
He glanced over from the fireplace. “Yes. Tail feather, I think.”
“It may have come from the tail, but it doesn’t feel like a feather.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Feel it.”
The texture was hard and rather plastic-like. But he knew nothing about feathers. Madeleine, on the other hand, knew a great deal. Every time she found a new one on their property in Walnut Crossing, she brought it back to the house and researched it on the Internet. She’d accumulated a collection of turkey, grouse, crow, blue jay, and cardinal feathers; even a few hawk and owl feathers.
“How’s it supposed to feel?”
“Not like that. And there’s another thing. What happened to me out there on the lake? I really don’t think that’s something a hawk would do, unless its nest was being threatened.”
He recalled something Barlow Tarr had said. Something about “the hawk man” setting the hawk loose. Setting it loose “into the sun, into the moon.” It sounded like gibberish at the time. Since hawks didn’t fly at night, setting one loose “into the moon” made no sense.
Unless, as Madeleine was now suggesting, it wasn’t a hawk at all.