Tunnel of Night (12 page)

Suddenly I was disoriented, adrift in time, as I watched a young woman leaning against the bridge’s concrete parapet. I stopped and stared at her profile. For only seconds—although it seemed like much longer— the years dropped away, a dead woman returned to life, and I stared at my past. This girl was a youthful version of a woman I had met at a fire in Cambridge when we were both students there. I smiled, walked onto the
bridge, and almost called her “Annie” before I snapped away from the hypnotic beckoning of a false reality.

“I will give you a wooden figure,” I said. “I want something back.”

She shook her head and turned away

I felt a sharp pain behind my eyes, a familiar stab of rage. This woman had disoriented me, then turned her back. I grabbed her by her black hair, swung her around, and placed a knife against her throat. “I want an object,” I said.

“What?” she gasped as she struggled ineffectively. “I want to make a trade. Give me something of yours, and I, in return, will give something to you.”

“The bird.”

“What bird?”

“In my pocket. Please don’t hurt me.”

I searched through her pockets and found a brass bird—one that married past with present, and foretold the future. It was the phoenix, rising from its flames— its wings partially unfurled, its eyes filled with fire glaring at an open sky.

“Where did you get this?”

“In the parking lot. I got it from Oliver at the red VW bus. His wife was making music with her fingers.”

I flipped her over the wall into the brook below. By the time she found a way up, I would be long gone.

I could have killed her—slit her throat and then dumped her over the wall. Stoned hordes would have stumbled across the bridge after the concert and never looked down. But it didn’t seem  
just
She and I had made a fair trade. I had committed an act of
justice
—she was alive, after all. It was my gift to her.

I laughed to myself as I strode into the parking lot.
The cops on horses had gone, although there were cruisers parked in the distance near the exit. The VW was there, its canopy still up, Oliver sat on a blanket next to his van, smoking a bong. I didn’t want his woman. I wanted him.

I sat cross-legged, opposite the burly man.

“What do you want?” Oliver asked.

“Balance. Order. A kind of justice, perhaps.”

“You a cop?”

I shook my head. “I guess you could say that I’m the opposite of a doctor.”

Oliver’s face clouded with confusion. He stopped sucking on his pipe, placed his hands flat on the blanket, and leaned toward me. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I liked his attitude. That was exactly what I required.

“When you aren’t feeling well,” I said as I gripped the bone handle of my knife, “you go to see the doctor and he makes you feel better. I look for people who are feeling good, even ethereal, and I bring them down.”

I plunged the knife through the back of Oliver’s right hand, through the blanket and down into the dirt. His hand was pinned to the earth. I was sure that his roar of pain could be heard by the cops out near the road, and equally certain that they would pay no attention. Tears creased the big man’s twisted face as he leaned agonizingly to one side. His howl faded to a whimper.

“Balance,” I repeated, breathing against his tear-stained face. “Order. A kind of justice. I’ve just given you a gift, Oliver. Your life. This is my final charitable act. Make sure you tell the police that. Tell them that Wolf said there will be no more kindness.”

I grabbed a handful of his trinkets, pushed myself up, and walked away.

I stroked the brass bird, knowing that the piece of metal was why I had been drawn to the Fall Fest, and aware of the place that it would have in my future.

I had a gift for Lucas Frank, but I would not be as generous with him as I had been with Oliver.

I WATCHED THE DOCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER
enter and leave the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the theoretical repository of justice and the home of the FBI. Then I followed them to the Willard. Both of them entered; a short time later, he left. I suspected that he was not satisfied with whatever scraps Dexter Willoughby had thrown to him.

I did not follow the retired psychiatrist. When I wanted to find him, I knew where to look.

If I had wanted Dr. Frank dead in Michigan, he would be dead. I control his world. He continues to exist only because my design dictates that he stumble around the capital for a few days.

I have an absolute wealth of patience. My mother would be proud.

I wonder if the Franks have made my hypothetical cybertrip—if they know the precise moments that they will die.

I do.

JUST AFTER DAWN, I SIPPED COFFEE AND SCANNED
the two files that Willoughby had dropped beside me on the sidewalk the previous afternoon. Lane tapped on my door carrying her own coffee.

“You’re up early,” I said.

She nodded. “What’s that?”

“Copies of the case files on Sarah Humphrey and Alan Chadwick.”

“Chadwick?”

“He’s dead. Two months ago. Willoughby said it was a fall from a roof.”

Lane sat across from me on the sofa and made room for her cup on the table where I had the reports spread out. “Where did you get that stuff?”

“I was out for a while yesterday afternoon.”

“You didn’t take a nap.”

“I visited Willoughby at his home.”

Lane’s eyes widened. “Let me get this straight. Wolf killed Chadwick
and
his sister.”

Three dead and one almost dead in two months, and all connected because of a single man who had
been presumed dead. For me, that was coincidence overload.

“I think he killed both of them,” I said. “I think Willoughby is still holding back. I have no idea what he isn’t telling me, but I don’t think we’re through counting the dead.”

“Do the files tell you anything?”

For all the years that I had made a living developing personality profiles, tracking killers, interviewing them, each new case had brought a rush. This one gave me a headache.

“Alan Chadwick was in his office doing what we’re doing now,” I said. “Drinking coffee. He fell, jumped, or was thrown from the roof of the hospital. When the police got there, the coffee cup was still warm. I figure that if you enjoy strolling the roof among piles of pigeon shit, you take your coffee with you. If you’re planning a swan dive, you’re too distracted to care about coffee in the first place. The autopsy report indicates some bruising on Chadwick’s body that wasn’t consistent with the fall. The way I see it, Wolf struggled briefly with him and threw him off.”

As I recited the details to Lane, a feeling of helplessness washed over me. Sweat beaded on the back of my neck. It was just as I had felt in Janet Orr’s kitchen when I looked down at her corpse.

“Chadwick helped us track Wolf a year ago,” Lane said.

“They had their past history, too. Wolf killed Chadwick’s girlfriend in Cambridge when they were all students there. Threw her off the roof of her dorm. Since Vermont, Wolf has had plenty of time to brood. I think that while he was on the mend, he developed his current script. These files are incomplete. Pages are missing.
Willoughby probably pulled them out. I can’t make much sense of it.”

Incomplete? Shit. Trying to make sense of the files was like working on an unnumbered acrostic.

“What about the material on Sarah Humphrey?” Lane asked.

“That file isn’t quite as fragmented. Wolf drove a rental car into her trailer park in the middle of the day. He went in, raped her, killed her, then kept cutting. He also helped himself to a postmortem sandwich; there was blood on the crusts of bread. He took a shower and walked out to his car in front of a half-dozen witnesses. Their description is close enough. He even stopped and chatted with one woman about what a pleasant day it was.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Sarah had just filled a prescription for diet pills. The medication was gone. Is Wolf concerned about his weight? That’s laughable. Is he physiologically priming himself? That’s a good bet. Swallowing uppers reinforces his belief that he is invincible.”

Lane finished the last of her coffee and shook her head. “I thought that control was critical to him, Pop.”

When Wolf killed his sister, he was closing the book on something that had been rattling around in his head since they were kids. All the power that he had attributed to her, he took away. He strode out her door, waved to his audience, and drove off.

“I’m not sure that Wolf has ever been able to distinguish between control and the illusion of control,” I said.

When I worked the Wolf case a year earlier, I suspected that Wolf’s emotional development had taken a sharp turn with Sarah’s birth. She effectively displaced
him in the family. Sarah became the focus of her parents’ attention. All she had to do was exist. Then she grew into an attractive teenager. Young men paid attention to her, falling all over themselves.

Her brother was bright, but socially awkward, a loner. No one had any interest in him. While she was out playing around with the boys in their cars, Wolf was cooling his heels in the coal bin. He got repeated lessons about just how powerless he was. So he dug his tunnel.

“Wolf couldn’t tolerate his own helplessness,” I told Lane. “As he grew older, he wouldn’t even entertain the notion that he was not the center of the universe. He had a sexual interest in Sarah, and a resentment that smoldered into a hatred. He loved and loathed his sister, and detested himself for feeling dependent on her. He didn’t want to feel the way he did, but there was nothing he could do about it—except in his mind.”

“I remember when I went to Florida and interviewed Sarah Humphrey last year,” Lane said. “It was strange. She had loved her brother. She also hated him. Mostly, I think she pitied him because of the way her father treated him.”

“Feeling sorry for him was probably her biggest mistake. Wolf can ignore or dismiss adoration and loathing. Pity suggests condescension, that she was above him. In his mind, no one holds that position.”

“So,” Lane said, “when the time came to act on what had been festering in his mind, killing her wasn’t enough.”

I shook my head. “He cut her up the same way he did animals when he was a boy. Committing murder at midafternoon in the close quarters of a trailer park hardly seems like the mark of a meticulous predator. When he’s
up, he acts on his fantasies, the rehearsals that he plays over and over in his head. I think that Florida brought him down. The satisfaction he anticipated never happened. He required the illusion of mastery offered by the amphetamines.”

I stood and began pacing the room.

“What is it, Pop?”

Yeah. What was it? Wolf had collected his justification to do whatever he pleased a long time ago. He had been cashing in on it for years. Then we had humiliated him in Vermont. That degradation would be far worse than any physical pain he had ever suffered. Now, anything was enough reason for a killing season.

Shit. Wolf didn’t need a reason.

“He won’t stop,” I said. “He can’t. Killing is how he has defined his life. I think that for him to move on to whatever life he has in mind for himself, he has to first eliminate everyone who had anything to do with Vermont.”

But there’s more to it, isn’t there, lad? It wouldn’t be enough for you to simply wipe us out. You need a grand finale, a great explosion of fireworks in the sky, color and thunder that shake the earth
.

“You, me, Willoughby,” Lane began.

“What was his partner’s name?”

“Susan Walker. Did you warn Willoughby?”

“How do I warn a man who insists that Wolf is dead, that the dead man might be coming after him?”

Now Lane was on her feet and wandering around the room. Pretty soon we would need someone to direct traffic.

“Pop, why didn’t Wolf just take you out at the lake?”

It was a damn good question. He had me in his
sights, and knocked me down—even stepped over me to get the page from my Peterson. He had demonstrated that he
could
kill me. Anyplace. Anytime.

“I think there’s some fucking twisted game that he’s playing,” I said. “We have to play. We don’t get a choice in that, nor do we get to know the rules. We don’t even know who all the players are. Wolf knew that as soon as I made the connection to him, I would head for Willoughby, for D.C. He would also assume that I’d find out about his sister and Chadwick.”

“How do we stop him?”

There had to be a million ways that Wolf could get us, and we didn’t even know where to find him. “He’s somewhere in the city. He’ll make an effort at anonymity, but he can’t be anywhere without leaving some sort of trail. We have to lock on to that trail.”

It was also possible that I was talking through my hat—trying to impose reason on an unreasonable situation. I dropped onto the sofa and planted my legs across the coffee table, scattering papers onto the floor.

“I’d like you to make contact with the local police,” I said. “Start with that detective I mentioned.”

“Williams?”

“Right. Give him everything we’ve got, including Willoughby’s connection to the case. Call your Lieutenant Swartz and ask him to send copies of the composites of Wolf that he did for us last year. Do we have a list of Wolf’s aliases?”