Tunnel of Night (35 page)

Lane’s trip to Lake Albert had been prompted in part by the variance between her sense of justice and mine. However critical of the Bureau she might be, she had been trained in the enforcement of the law. Where
this one man was involved—this killing machine who had made a special project of me and my life—I did not care about the law.

John Wolf had been my shadow for twenty years. I had been negligent a year ago; Wolf survived and others had died. Killing him was not a task that I would entrust to anyone.

Krogh is at it night and day
Jackson had said.

I preferred the night. Wolf would be making his preparations for morning, when Lane and I were to walk through the corridors to the status meeting. By going in at night, I would have the element of surprise, and there would be only the two of us.

WHEN I RETURNED TO MY ROOM, I FOUND THE
flight lists that Lane had given me. I did not feel that checking them was necessary, but could offer a final validation. I opened a bottle of ale, sat on the sofa, and leafed through the sheets.

Two days before Lane and I flew from Detroit to Washington, John Krogh had made the same trip.

DARLA MICHAELS SAT AT A METAL DESK IN THE
Blade’s
newsroom.

She wore the same black jeans and blue work shirt she had worn to Barb’s in Quantico. Her eyes were an elegant green.

She was talking on the phone. I pulled over a chair and sat a discreet distance from her, but close enough to hear her conversation.

“This is going to take longer than I thought,” she said into the phone. “I found two more. A pathologist in Boston and a woman in an Orlando suburb. I’m starting to believe. The woman was his sister.”

She glanced at me during the pause at her end, held up one finger, then snapped her attention back to the phone. “I don’t expect to have all the details for tomorrow’s story, but I want to at least have confirmation that Willoughby had tied them to Wolf. You’ll have it.”

Michaels slammed down the phone.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “Editors. Sometimes they just make it harder to pull a story together. Look,
I’m real busy here. I’ve got a deadline. Is this something that can wait?”

She turned away, not waiting for my answer.

“I was at Harvard in the sixties,” I said. “For a year, the man you call John Wolf was my roommate.”

She swung back in my direction, and I had her complete attention.

“Do you know anything about what’s been happening here?” she asked.

“I read your article. A year ago, the FBI and the New York police interviewed me extensively. They seemed to think that was the end of it. You know, that he was dead. I knew he wasn’t.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“I’ll tell you that, and I’ll show you some identification, but I’d like to be a confidential source. Please don’t refer to me as his college roommate.”

“Agreed.”

“My name is Roger Curlew,” I said, flipping open my wallet and showing her a Maryland driver’s license.

“I’ll have to check with security,” she said, dialing an extension, then spelling my name and reading my driver’s license number.

After a moment, she said, “Clergy? Okay. Thanks.”

“Without church,” I said as she replaced her phone. “I’m a pastoral counselor.”

“Is it Reverend Curlew?”

“Roger.”

She nodded. “Roger, why are you so certain that he survived the explosion in Vermont? Do you mind if I tape this?”

I shrugged. She pulled a microcassette recorder from her lap drawer and clicked it on.

“Why do you think he’s alive?”

My experience with reporters had taught me that they hear only key words, never complete sentences. Which is why they never spell a name correctly, and why they always know which of the victim’s body parts police find.

“Ms. Michaels, I said 1
know
that he’s alive. He called me in January of this year, then again in June, and then two days ago. He and I had lunch today at the Willard. Yes, I know that’s where this psychiatrist, Lucas Frank, is staying. Paul—I’ve always known him as Paul—thought that visiting the hotel where this man is staying was a delicious bit of irony. He’s always been like that.”

“You two stayed in touch after college.”

“Not really He left school before I did. I know nothing of his time in Vietnam. He got my name and address from an alumni directory, and started writing to me during the eighties. He called occasionally, too. I told the police all of this.”

“Did you tell them you know he’s alive? Did you tell them he called you after he was supposed to be dead?”

I nodded. “I tried to. They treated me as if I were crazy. Paul—excuse
me, John
—is a dangerous man. He would never hurt me. He’s told me so. But he has hurt so many others. He understood that I would have to talk with someone. He’s not crazy He’s not unreasonable. He just can’t, or won’t, stop killing.”

“God,” Michaels said, shaking her head. “What did you two talk about at lunch?”

I could have said anything at that point, and Darla Michaels would have believed. I decided to stick to my script. Only hours remained until its final scene.

“It was small talk at first, just catching-up kinds of things. He asked for my wife, my kids. He looks very
different now, nothing like the drawing you had in your paper. He’s blond. His hair has thinned. He told me about being a medical examiner in Connecticut. He laughed about that—how he’d become a doctor despite never having completed his undergraduate degree. Oh, dear. What else did we talk about? Oh, yes. He had spoken with an FBI agent. In order to prove who he was, he gave the agent details of that poor woman’s death—the one in Georgetown.”

“Samantha Becker.”

“Yes. Details that only the killer, only
he
could have known. The agent hung up on him.”

Michaels furrowed her brow. “Who was the agent? Did he say?”

I thought. “Landers, maybe?”

“Landry?”

“Yes. That’s it. He had an unusual first name.”

“That sonofabitch.”

“John told me who he was going to kill next. The police won’t even take my calls. They hung up on him, and they don’t let me through. That’s why I decided that I had to come to you.”

“Mr. Curlew…”

“It’s Roger.”

“Right. Roger. He actually told you who his next victim will be?”

“Oh, dear. I thought you understood. That’s why I came to you.”

“What…”

“You are the next victim, Ms. Michaels.”

I EXAMINED MY NINE-MILLIMETER, THEN SLIPPED
the gun into a belt-clip holster at the small of my back. I was pulling on my blue sports jacket when Lane arrived.

“Evening out?” she asked.

I handed her a slip of paper. “Pack. Go to National. There’s a Lear waiting for us. Instructions are in the note.”

“Wait a minute, Pop. Where are you going? What’s this about?”

“I don’t have time, Lane. Trust me. Do as I say. I’ve already sent my bag ahead. I’ll join you in about three hours. Make sure there’s some cold ale on the damn plane.”

She dropped into a chair. “What about Wolf? Has he been caught, or are we conceding? I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”

I took one look at her face and knew that she was not about to budge. I also knew that I was not going to allow myself to be distracted by my concern for anyone else’s safety.

“There’s a metal lockbox with my stuff on the plane.
It’s in my duffel bag. Everything you need to know is in that box. You’ll have to work it open with your pocket-knife.”

“Where are you going?”

“Quantico.”

“The BSU?”

“Yes.”

She cocked her head to one side. “We’re supposed to have that status meeting there in the morning. Is that off? Why are you going down there tonight?”

“I need some time there alone.”

“Is this legal?”

I shrugged. “I have my security pass from the other day”

“What about Wolf?”

“That’s what I don’t have time to go into with you. It’s all in the box on the plane. After you go through that stuff, if there’s anything that you don’t understand, I’ll explain as soon as I arrive.”

“Are you in danger?”

The treasures in Wolf’s metal box had erased all boundaries between the two of us. There were no souvenirs or trophies of his kills. Instead, there were fragments of a past that Wolf had rewritten. My past. His past. Knotted together.

He cared more about savoring his success at tricking me than he did about lingering over any of his more than fifty murders.

“I’ve always been in danger. Lane, the answers are where I said you’ll find them. I have to do this my way There isn’t much time. Please get going.”

Lane stared at me. Finally, she nodded, got up, and walked to the door. She glanced at her watch. “If you’re not at the plane by two
A.M
., I’m coming after you.”

“Deal,” I said. “There are some other instructions in that note, two calls that I need you to make after you’re on the plane. What I want you to say is sketched out there.”

She glanced at the sheet of paper, then back at me. “Two
A.M.,”
she said again, and walked out.

I SLIPPED INTO THE CAR AND SWITCHED ON THE
ignition.

Just the two of us, lad. But then, it has always been this way, hasn’t it
?

When I was a kid and lived in Roxbury, my sister often wandered into my room to read my scribblings.

“Do you mind if I read this aloud?” she asked one time.

I shook my head.

Her voice slipped softly through the words.

“Living here is like that for you, isn’t it?” my sister asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you thinking about the boy who was struck by the el?”

I shook my head. “The boy they shot on Mission Hill.”

“Does everything have to be about violence and death?”

“It just is.”

Now, as I drove south on the interstate, I realized that the biggest part of my life—all of what was represented in Wolf’s metal box—was violence and death.

Many of Wolf’s killings had been designed to impress or confuse or taunt or frighten me. It hadn’t worked because I never knew that his one-man show was going on. I even left the theater and retired. That’s when Wolf made a few adjustments. He was no longer entertaining me; he was going to kill me.

That hasn’t changed. He wants me dead.

Wolf’s style of thinking hasn’t changed any, either. The young man who carved marks in the wooden sides of the coal bin became an adult who did the same thing. Each slash in the wood represented an injustice, an atrocity done to him, for which he had licensed himself to get revenge.

On my first morning home from the hospital in Lake Albert, I had grabbed Margaret Wagner’s book about Peter Kurten. Somewhere below the level of my consciousness I sensed a killer’s message.

Compensatory justice.

Wolf had been fixated on me for years. He had directed all of his homicidal energy at me.

After the Cora Riordan murder, I had told Ray Bolton that her killer was another Albert DeSalvo.

The Bay State Road case, six weeks before Cora Riordan,
was the product of another’s lust for creating mayhem. It had not been Jeremy Stoneham, nor had it been his “wolfman.” Norman Elgar had bloodied that basement apartment. I said as much to a reporter.

Then Wolf had visited Elgar.

Of the 1976 profile I had done in the Cape Cod case, I told the same reporter, “He’ll kill again.”

But I did not know who “he” was.

I had watched the 1985 case in the same Cape community with interest, then disbelief. The FBI hadn’t connected the murder to the earlier, identical homicide. The press called again.

“
Hey, Lucas. This is Anthony Michaels
.”

“
Anthony. Good to hear your voice. Why do I have the feeling that we’re going to be talking about murder
?”