Configuring a miniature drone to look and move like a bird would be an enormous technical challenge. For clandestine operations, however, a drone that passed for a bird would offer huge advantages—advantages that might be worth the development cost, especially if no one else believed such a device was feasible.
Madeleine frowned. “There was a hawk circling over us at Grayson Lake.”
“I know. And over that little lane down to the lake. And here, every day, over this lake.”
“Watching us?”
“Possibly.”
“So we’re being observed from the air, listened to in our room, and tracked in our car.”
“Apparently.”
“By the same person who . . . who projected that image of Colin?”
“Probably.”
“Good God, David, who’s doing this to us?”
“Someone who’s extremely worried about us being here. Someone with tremendous resources. Someone Gilbert Fenton is willing to take orders from.”
“Someone who wants Richard to be tried and convicted for those four deaths?”
He almost agreed. But then he remembered the strange thing that Hammond told them during their dinner at the chalet. He told them that what Fenton wanted more than anything was for him to confess—and Fenton had promised that once he confessed, everything would be all right.
It had struck Gurney at the time as the sort of deceptive inducement to confession that anyone with half a brain could see through, and he was surprised that Fenton would try to pull a ruse like that on a man as sophisticated as Hammond; but the really strange part was that Hammond was positive that Fenton was being honest and that he actually believed a confession would be the end of Hammond’s problems.
What would it mean if confession was the real goal, not conviction?
“David?”
“Sorry?”
“I was asking who you thought was behind all this spooky surveillance stuff.”
“I may get to the answer when I figure out why a confession is so important to them.”
She looked confused.
He reminded her what Hammond had told them at dinner. He added something else he remembered as he was speaking—Fenton’s angry complaint that Gurney’s efforts were giving Hammond false hope, essentially prolonging the agony, and that the man’s only way out was a complete confession.
“So that’s why they want us out of here? Because you’re standing in the way of a confession?”
“I think so. But to get to the bottom of the whole case, I need to figure out the significance of that confession.”
“In the meantime,” she said, “we really need to warn the Hammonds.”
“I wish we could. But the only way would be to make the trek there. And I can’t leave you alone here. Not after what happened to Steckle.”
“Then I’ll come with you.”
“In that blizzard?”
“We did bring our ski clothes. And ski masks. And snowshoes.”
“It’s dark.”
“We have flashlights.”
He recognized in her tone a depth of determination that would make further argument a waste of time. Ten minutes later, against his better judgment, they were down in the reception area, strapping their snowshoes onto their insulated boots. With their ski pants over their jeans and their hooded down jackets over their sweaters and their ski masks over their faces, they headed out onto the lake road.
In the pools of light formed by their flashlights Gurney could see the windblown outlines of footprints. As they progressed along the snow-covered road and passed the far end of the lodge itself, the faint suggestion of footprints veered off toward the side of the building in the direction of the generators. It reminded him that Landon had said something about checking them as he headed out in his pursuit of Tarr.
On the off chance that the man might be there now, perhaps attempting some repair, Gurney persuaded Madeleine to take the short detour with him.
They made their way around the building through the drifts. At the edge of a clearing that separated the lodge from the surrounding forest, the beam of his flashlight revealed two large rectangular objects. Approaching closer, he could see the ventilation slots, heavy-duty cables, and propane tanks that identified the rectangular objects as generators. He could also see that a carport-like structure—a slanted metal roof on high posts—intended to keep the generators from being buried in snow, had been partially crushed, apparently from the tree that had fallen on it during the earlier blackout.
Madeleine uttered a gasp at the sharp crack of a branch giving way under the pressure of snow and wind somewhere in the nearby forest.
Seeing no sign of Landon and realizing that closer examination of the generators was unlikely to give him any useful information, Gurney made one last sweep of the area with his flashlight.
“What’s that?” asked Madeleine.
He looked where she was pointing.
At first he saw nothing.
Then he saw something dark on the ground, sticking out from behind the nearer of the two generators.
It looked like a gloved hand.
“Stay here.” He made a cautiously wide approach for a better perspective on the generator’s hidden side.
As his angle of view changed, the situation became clearer.
There was indeed a gloved hand in the snow. The hand was attached to an arm attached to a body that was lying facedown. Snow had blown against one side of the body, half covering it. But the parts that were exposed were familiar. In particular, the knee-high Wellington boots. The chic Barbour storm coat. The tartan scarf.
As he got closer, he moved the beam of his flashlight along the body, up past the scarf.
Then he flinched.
The head had been chopped into at least half a dozen bloody pieces.
“What is it?” called Madeleine, starting toward him.
“Stay back.” It was his reflexive cop’s voice, a voice of command. Then he added in a more human tone, “You don’t want to see this.”
“What is it?”
“A repeat of what we saw in the suite.”
“Oh God. Who . . .?”
“It looks like Tarr found Landon before Landon found Tarr.”
He forced himself to make a closer inspection of the butchered head. It appeared to have been hacked apart in the same manner as Steckle’s, likely with the same weapon. A ring of blood had spread out into the snow around the gruesome mess, forming an outlandish halo of red ice.
As he swept his flashlight back and forth over the body, he saw on the side covered with snow part of a rifle barrel. He bent over and brushed the snow away. It was a custom Weatherby with a hand-tooled claro-walnut stock. He tried to pick it up to see if it had been fired, but it was frozen to the ground.
It occurred to him that the body itself, including the dismembered head, would almost certainly be frozen to the ground as well.
Whatever sharp-toothed scavengers might be abroad in the forest that night, and however helpful it might be to the medical examiner to keep the remains intact, moving that body indoors by himself was not an option he was willing to consider.
He went back to Madeleine. “We need to get inside.”
“We still have to warn Richard and Jane.”
He shook his head. “Not after what I just saw. I’m not going to risk something happening to you, just to lower the risk of something happening to them. Before we can help anyone else, we need to establish a secure position for ourselves.”
“A secure position . . .” She repeated the words as though she were trying to absorb a measure of confidence from them. She nodded, gazing over at Landon’s rifle—frozen to the ground and now barely visible through the swirling snow. “Do you think he might have some other guns in his room?”