Red 1-2-3 (28 page)

“He could go on doing what he’s doing forever,” Jordan said. “Maybe that’s what he likes.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah replied. “I mean, sure, he has to love what he’s doing. But I think he loves something bigger more.” They all knew what
bigger
meant.

All three women kept their eyes straight ahead, as if the titles and book jackets on the shelves in front of them might have an answer.

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Sarah continued, “The more I think about it, the more it’s like being in a classroom. We’re all learning about murder, aren’t we? You know, I spent a lot of time in classes teaching. And one thing I know: When something happens that interrupts the class, it ruins every lesson plan you’ve made. Every bit of design you had for that day’s teaching just disappears.

Her voice, as eager as it was, seemed to trail off into some memory.

Jordan imagined that Sarah had suddenly remembered what that “interruption” had been.

“A disruption that’s small—well, you deal with that quickly and effectively. Send an unruly student to the principal’s office; a little firmness restores order in the class. Get back to teaching.”

Jordan knew exactly what she was talking about. She had, after all, been that
unruly student
earlier in the day.

“But sometimes there are disruptions that you can’t handle easily.

Where everything just explodes all at once.”

“What happens then?” Karen asked.

“All your planning just goes straight to hell.”

“So,” Jordan said. “What are you saying?”

“We’re in his classroom. We have to disrupt that chain of plans he has for us. Break his system. Throw the goddamn proverbial monkey wrench into whatever the hell it is he’s designed to happen to each of us.”

Karen nodded, but whispered, “Sounds nice. But far easier said than done.”

“No,” Sarah said. She reached out and grabbed Karen’s wrist, pulling her a little closer. “I know how to screw it all up for him. Fuck up the Big Bad Wolf and what he has in mind for us totally and completely.” The obscenity felt honeylike rolling off her tongue.

“How?” Jordan blurted out. She was both confused and suddenly hope-ful. Just the thought of
doing
something rather than waiting for something to be done to her was encouraging.

Sarah’s eyes abruptly started to glisten with tears at the same time that her mouth widened into a grin. She reached up and stroked Jordan’s cheek, 201

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a surprising act of affection toward someone barely more than a stranger.

“One of us has to die,” she said.

The others looked shocked. Karen gasped and tried to take a step back, only to be stopped by Sarah’s grip, tightening around her arm and pulling her close. Sarah shook her head.

“No,” she replied to the unasked question. “It’s me.”

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26

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf discovered rapidly that there is only so much one can find out about specific crimes sitting at a desk and traveling through the Internet. She received even less electronic help unraveling the mystery of the man she loved.

Being an administrative secretary and devoted to routine and order, she made a spreadsheet to keep her inquiries organized. Four books. Four murders. Then marriage. She placed publication and homicide dates at the top of the page. She made subcategories of scenes and characters from the books and contrasted these with actual victims and homicide locations. She listed murder weapons used in real life versus what she had read on the pages of her husband’s novels. She collected every small detail she could glean from the diverse newspaper articles that came up on her computer screen and reexamined it like some sort of extremely anxious literary critic. The printer by her desk whirred as she searched doggedly for patterns, for similarities or any shared aspect between books and murders that would lead her down the route to understanding.

It was hard work.

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She chewed pencil eraser ends and sucked on hard-candy mints, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one could see what she was doing, even though she knew no one else was in the office. The dean had fortunately chosen that week to go to an academic conference in New York City. He had left behind precious few tasks for her to finish, so she was able to drive herself with a feverishness that paralleled her racing emotions.

Mid-morning a sophomore boy came by seeking information about a summer language program abroad. She quickly shooed him away with a fast lie, claiming she didn’t know anything about any such program, even though there was a large brochure describing everything about it in her top drawer.

A little later, right before she would ordinarily have taken her midday break, two senior girls showed up in her doorway needing the dean’s permission for an overnight college visit. This was a standard ruse designed not so much to assess a future school as to meet with a couple of boys who had graduated the year before. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf dismissed the pair with a harsh, sarcastic snort and two simple, embarrassing questions: “Do you think you’re the first students clever enough to think up this scheme?” and

“Do your parents know about this proposed adventure?”

She skipped lunch. Ordinarily she would have been famished, but this day anxiety filled her stomach.

As the workday dwindled into afternoon, she realized that whatever truth her efforts might uncover, it was mired in some sort of swamp. She could see some elements of books and crimes that seemed to match, and others that didn’t. A knife-wielding killer in one book seemed to eerily mimic behaviors described by news accounts. A young prostitute discovered in a fictional alley seemed similar to a prostitute who was abandoned street-side in one real city.

It occurred to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf that she was slipping across thin ice.

Anything she uncovered just might be the same, but at the same time, it might be different. She told herself to be precise. She told herself to be concrete. She told herself to be analytical.

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In two of the murders she’d inspected, men had actually been convicted of the crimes and were serving hard time. In the two others, police had filed the killings into “cold case” categories, which, as she knew from watching reality television shows, were only periodically looked at by a detective here or there. If some new piece of evidence magically arose, it might lead to an arrest amidst trumpets and fanfare, but she was smart enough to know that these infrequent made-for-Hollywood successes obscured the vast majority of real-life failures.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf was stymied.

When she had seen that two of the killings selected by her husband had resulted in convictions, she felt her heart soar and her pulse rate diminish and she whispered to herself, “See, I told you so. It’s no big deal. Nothing to worry about.” But the fact that two murders hadn’t been resolved troubled her. And she was further disturbed because one of the men convicted of a killing had given a lengthy jailhouse interview to a reporter persuasively insisting on his innocence and claiming the case against him was totally circumstantial; and the other, according to a much smaller story in a smaller newspaper, had agreed to be represented by the New York City–based Innocence Project, which specialized in overturning false convictions by presenting newly discovered DNA evidence.

She hated the word
circumstantial.
Perhaps it had been good enough in a courtroom. But for her it asked more questions than it answered. What frightened her was the idea that few people in the world were better at creating circumstances than her husband.
That’s what a writer does,
she thought.

She argued inwardly:
But he does this to make his books smart and seem
authentic. No more. No less. No ulterior motive.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf gripped her desk as if the earth were threatening to shake beneath her. She stared at the newspaper article that filled her computer screen. A particularly gory killing: knives, dismemberment, and blood.

She burst out, suddenly not caring if anyone overheard her, “Just where the hell else would he get the right details he needs for his books?” This 205

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seemed like a reasonable question to her, and she abruptly slumped back.

She idly reached out and typed a new entry in her spreadsheet.

It was the date she’d met her husband-to-be.

Rocking in her chair, she began to hum to herself snatches of dated Top 40 love songs from the ’80s. At the same time Mrs. Big Bad Wolf tried to picture the four real-life murders. The music she felt buzzing on her lips contradicted the images she created in her imagination of abandoned bodies strewn about isolated country locations and blood-spattered clothing.

She could see blond, matted hair and smell decomposing flesh. She closed her eyes and, instead of delving deeper into mental murder pictures, abruptly recalled walking up the steps of her local library to hear a lecture on a warm, late spring evening. She remembered it was the first time that season cricket sounds had filled the air. She did not know why she recalled that detail, but it blended with a memory of taking a seat near the front.

I was alone up until that night.

Following the speech at the library, she’d shouldered past several other women who were trying to talk to the Big Bad Wolf. She remembered how he’d smiled. She had been a little embarrassed; she was rarely that aggressive in social situations.

“So, do you like murder mysteries?” he had asked her as he sipped luke-warm coffee and munched on stale chocolate chip cookies.

“I love murder mysteries,” she had replied. “I live for murder mysteries.” These words had surprised her. “Especially yours.”

He had smiled, laughed out loud, and made a small Asian bow of thanks. Then he steered their conversation into a discussion about pulp writers like Jim Thompson and contrasted him against the newer crop of procedural-heavy authors like Patricia Cornwell or Linda Fairstein. They’d bonded over affection for the old noir books.
The Killer Inside Me,
they’d agreed, was a far superior read to anything on the current market.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf ’s eyes shot open and she bolted upright in her seat.

She tried hard to remember which of them had brought up that title first.

It seemed suddenly important, far more important than remembering the cricket sounds, but she couldn’t instantly recall who said what. This 206

RED 1–2–3

astonished her. She thought that entire first conversation was printed in her memory. She wondered if twenty-four hours earlier she could have recited everything they had said to each other that night, word for word, sentence for sentence, like an actor recalling some famous Shakespearean soliloquy.

She had a pencil in her hand, and she snapped it in two. For a second she stared down at the splintered twin shards of yellow wood and lead.

Then she went back to her task, even though it made her unspeakably sad.

The Big Bad Wolf thought,
Nothing focuses the mind like death.

This was as true for the ninety-five-year-old pensioner living out his days in a nursing home as it was for the nurses watching over tiny premature babies in a pediatric intensive care unit. A teenager who’d had too much to drink sobered suddenly in the split second he lost control of his father’s car on a wet roadway and caught a flash of the thick tree trunk he was about to hit. The same was true for the daydreaming soldier ducking against a dusty wall as automatic-weapons fire exploded in the air around him.

So he imagined that Red One, Red Two, and Red Three were entering into the same heightened state of awareness. He wrote:
There is a curious
symbiosis between killer and intended victim. We each take the same test, with
the same answers to the same questions.
The difference is that one of us emerges
stronger. The other doesn’t emerge at all.

In many primitive cultures, warriors believed that they absorbed the strength
and capabilities of the enemies they vanquished. This could be achieved by
devouring an enemy’s heart or merely, like David conquering the clumsy Goli-ath, cutting the poor dumb fool’s head off.

Our military today is too “sophisticated” to believe in such mythology. Too
bad. It was true in the past. It’s true today.

The modern killer is like a warrior of old. Every success makes him stronger.

He may not have to eat anyone’s brains or heart or make a sandwich out of a
vanquished victim’s genitals. But he achieves the same effect without dinner.

The Wolf stood up from his desk, pushed his chair back, and punched the air like a shadow boxer. He reached down and plucked the stack of 207

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printouts from the box where he kept them, and he fanned them in the air as if his thumb could accurately measure the number of pages. He was convinced that his latest chapters, describing the special way he’d terrorized each Red, would rivet readers. He knew instinctively that
his
fascination would be shared by anyone reading the pages. He understood that readers’ obsession with him would mirror his obsession with each Red.

They will want to know how the Reds die, just as much as I want to kill.

They will want to be standing right beside me, experiencing the moment precisely the same way I do.

Murder would make him rich.
In more ways than one,
he thought. He could feel energy coursing through his body. If it hadn’t been miserable and wet outside, he probably would have dug out some old running shoes and sweat clothes and gone jogging. It had been many years since he’d actually exercised, but he could feel the need surging through him. Then he laughed out loud.

“That’s not what you’re feeling,” he said out loud.

It’s closeness,
he told himself. He was very close to accomplishing so much. For an instant, he no longer felt old. He no longer felt ignored.

He felt unbridled strength.