Tunnel of Night (5 page)

I stood in the darkness at the foot of his bed and wondered what my father’s dreams were like. I decided that he was so physically exhausted that he probably was not dreaming at all.

In the morning, I got up with the birds, put the coffee on, and decided to take a crack at Pop’s computer database that I had installed on my laptop. Leonard Cohen was grumbling about the Chelsea Hotel when Pop wandered into the study.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Better. I didn’t expect to sleep all night. Guess I just needed my own bed. Do I smell coffee?”

“I made a pot. Sit down and I’ll get you some.”

When I returned with the coffee, I watched as Pop prowled through his books. He yanked out a battered hardcover that looked like an antique. “What’s that?”

“The Monster of Dusseldorf,
by Margaret Seaton Wagner. It was published in 1932. I don’t know what’s
drawing me to this particular volume, but I’ve learned not to second-guess my instincts. No word from Janet?”

I glanced at the empty fax machine, shook my head, and returned to my work at the computer.

“Hmphh. She didn’t say anything about going out of town.”

Pop curled up with his book, and I continued to bang away at the keyboard. I had installed his disks and had the software operating. Now I wanted to pump my father for characteristics related to the shooter so that I could feed them into a set of search criteria. He was more interested in Margaret Wagner’s description of the exploits of Peter Kurten, a German serial killer from the 1920s and ’30s.

“I’m not fond of computers anyway,” he said. “I agree with the Unabomber’s professed philosophy about technology. Fortunately, I have a different way of expressing it.”

“It’s giving me twelve spaces,” I interrupted, futilely hoping to turn his attention back to the program. “What about ‘crack shot’?”

“Marksman. One of the FBI’s mind hunters’ claims credit for the term ‘serial killer.’ Margaret Wagner came close. She called Peter Kurten a ‘series killer.’ In the 1980s, the feds went to categories and definitions— cooling-off periods, a minimum of three dead, that sort of nonsense. Great fun if you have the mind of an accountant, but not if you want to catch a killer. Where would we be as a civilization without labelers?”

I had a certain fondness for my father’s favorite polemic but enough was enough, “You fully awake now?” I asked.

He nodded happily. “Coffee’s good. Double Italian roast.”

“Whatever that black stuff was in the freezer. Now, are you ready to help me with this?” I nudged, indicating the computer program.

“I’ll learn more from Peter Kurten. You know, I was a labeler all those years that I went to my office. This one’s schizophrenic. That one’s borderline. The one who’s examining the walls for thought-stealing devices is a tad paranoid. Insurance companies and health management outfits require labels so they can determine if a patient needs three sessions or five—as if anything could be cured in that time. Clerks who don’t know a schizoid from a solenoid make those decisions.”

“C’mon, Pop. I need some help.”

“Okay,” he said, sighing. “We don’t know a hell of a lot. So I don’t know why you’re bothering me. He’s bright, and he’s deliberate. He had to do some homework to know that I had a security system in place. Maybe he was here before, saw the perimeter guard, and realized that it can’t be disarmed outside. If you tamper with it, it goes off. So, he could have waited for me to shut down the system, or he knew that I would have it down. I don’t know what that program wants, but I want to get back to my book. Peter Kurten said that the biggest disappointment in his life was that he wouldn’t get to hear his own blood drip into the bucket when they decapitated him. Charming fellow.”

“All right, all right, tell me about him,” I said, leaning back in my chair, giving in to the inevitable. Besides, he obviously had something on his mind and it was bound to be more interesting than the database.

“Kurten fascinates me. He killed his victims in virtually every imaginable manner. He set fire to women. Stabbed them with screwdrivers. Bludgeoned children. Drowned them. He operated on the basis of what he
called Compensatory justice.’ Simply stated, his sole motivation was vengeance. He believed that every slight, or perceived affront, gave him license to enter any home, to assault, maim, murder anyone he selected, so that Society received its payback. For years he terrorized an entire city. He said at his trial that he was sending them a message. I think I’m beginning to understand why I woke up drawn to this particular book. Vengeance is a good choice of motivation for our shooter. But for what? What did I do to him? What’s
his
message?”

In his own way, Pop already was working on the case. His head never stopped working.

While he was mulling through the mind of our anonymous shooter, I pushed myself away from the desk. “I found something for you in the hospital gift shop,” I said, handing him the small package.

I watched as he pulled the tissue from a stone carving of an African lowlands gorilla. He studied its hunched posture, huge hands, and black eyes, and seemed mesmerized by the precision of the artist’s work.

“Why do you love them so much?” I asked.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the animal,” he said. “When I was a kid, I identified with one particularly imposing gorilla who was locked in a stone cage at a zoo near the tenement where we lived. He was trapped, and that was how I felt then. Trapped. If he had been left alone and unprovoked in the wilds, he would have lived a relatively peaceful existence. Locked up, taunted, and tortured—as my gorilla was—he could only erupt in a destructive rage.”

“The one in the zoo did?”

“Some kids threw lighted bottles of gasoline into his enclosure. He broke free. The police had to shoot him.”

“God, that’s horrible.”

Pop looked down at the stone carving in his hand. “I imagined that my anger was like a gorilla who lived inside of me. As I grew older, I thought I could even feel him there. My sister always said that I was a fearful child—‘Sad and frightened by the world,’ she said. She was right. I learned fast that it was easy to transform intolerable feelings of sadness, fear, and helplessness into fury.”

“Savvy told me that when you were a kid, you saw
Mighty Joe Young
about a dozen times.”

“More,” he said. “Do you know the story?”

I shook my head.

“Mighty Joe was a gentle, giant ape, taken from his home in the jungle by a Hollywood nightclub owner. After three drunks slipped backstage and primed Joe with whiskey, the gorilla went on a rampage—tearing the nightclub apart, terrorizing the patrons into a stampede that spilled out onto the city streets. Even his having saved children from a burning house couldn’t redeem him. Joe had to die. My sister took me. I remember our trips up Dale Street to the Warren Theater in Roxbury She didn’t seem to mind.”

“Is she the one who used to take you to the zoo?”

Pop looked at me with a strange intensity. “Lane, what is it that you want to know?”

“How you think. Why you think the way you do. How you came to be the person you are.”

“Because I killed a man?”

“That’s part of the reason,” I agreed.

Pop placed the stone gorilla on the table beside him. “Well, it looks like we’re finally going to have that talk. Lane, for thirty years, I immersed myself in murder and murderers. The reason I experienced the success
that I did was that I never tried to deny my own violent impulses. Whenever I felt it necessary to rip into and expose a killer’s secrets, to bring him to tears or rage, I did it. I had the knack of ‘out-psychopathing’ the psychopath. John Wolf was going to kill you. I wouldn’t let that happen. Period. The criminal justice system would have diddled around with him—or he with it—for years. That was unacceptable. Does that answer your question?”

“I had more than one, Pop,” I said, smiling.

“You know, it isn’t a requirement of the father-daughter relationship that we agree on any of this.”

“I know that.”

“Good. Now, I’m going for a boat ride. I’m headed for Janet’s. Want to come?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m gonna bang around in this database some more. You sure you should be bouncing around on the lake so soon?”

“There’s just a light chop on the water this morning. I’ll be fine. Back in an hour.”

When he got up, Pop touched the side of my face. “I love you, Lanie,” he said.

“Love you, too, Pop.”

I watched him when he headed out through the sliding-glass doors. He stopped on the patio, gazed to his right, up into the field where the shooter had stood.

Only then did I notice that my father was carrying a gun.

I GUIDED MY EIGHTEEN-FOOT BOSTON WHALER
across Lake Albert’s choppy surface. In the distance, I could see Janet’s boat secured to her dock.

I remembered my first week at Lake Albert. Janet paddled across the lake in a kayak to bring me a house-warming gift. Someone had briefed her. The gift, neatly wrapped in the previous Sunday’s comics section, was a book on how to make the most of an early retirement.

Janet was tall, forty-two, and wore her black hair fashionably short. She had a college student’s preference for black clothes—sweaters, shirts, jeans, an occasional skirt, onyx rings, and necklaces.

“You’re the prematurely tired shrink,” she said, welcoming me to the lake.

“Word gets around fast.”

“All the waterfronts come equipped with cans and string.”

“Are you the welcome wagon?” I asked. “Janet Orr. I’ve got the small clapboard place over there,” she said, pointing to the northwest.

There were only four houses at our end of the lake, so I had no trouble placing it.

“Lucas Frank,” I said, smiling, and we shook hands.

We talked about everything—music, the weather, cooking, her work as a potter, politics, her estranged husband in Wisconsin, my estranged wife in what was then called Zaire, and cats. I had one. She had three.

That was six years ago. We had dinner together— her place or mine—once or twice a month. Occasionally we would take off, like we had for Vancouver. We became the best of friends.

As I stepped onto the dock, I wondered again why I had not heard from Janet. News travels fast at Lake Albert, especially bad news. I walked up the steps to her deck, and when she did not respond to my knocking, I shoved at the sliding-glass door. It was locked.

I wandered around the north side of the building. She had parked her Honda in the driveway and left the garage door open, something she often did when she was working in the yard, but she wasn’t in the yard.

The front door was also locked. Janet’s garden gloves and a trowel rested on the brick steps. I tried the door knocker and chimes, but again there was no answer, and no sound of anyone stirring inside.

It was possible that she had locked the house and driven off with a friend, but she would not have left the garage door up.

I walked down West Shore Drive to Ann Chelsea’s house. Janet’s only neighbor met me on the dirt road.

“Is she back?” Ann asked. “I’ve been calling and getting the machine.”

I shook my head. “When did you last see her?”

The gray-haired octogenarian thought for a moment. “It was right before I heard you were in the hospital.
Eva Logan called me. There was a man here from a foundation, and he was looking for Janet. He showed me his business card and all. I’m worried, Lucas. I almost called Buck Semple.”

For Ann Chelsea to consider calling Buck meant that she was damn near in a panic state. “Call Buck now,” I told her. “Ask him to meet me at Janet’s.”

“Oh, God. I hope she didn’t have a fall,” Ann said as she turned back toward her house.

My bandaged side stinging, I jogged back up the road, went directly into Janet’s garage, and tried the door to the house. Like the others, it was locked. I grabbed a screwdriver from the tool rack and pried between the doorjamb and the lock housing. On my third try, the door popped open.

The rancid stench of death knocked me back a step.

“Oh, Jesus,” I muttered, grabbing the nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol from my hip.

I stepped into the mud room and moved toward the kitchen door that I knew had no lock. The house was silent. I covered my left hand with a plastic bag from Janet’s recycling bin, then grasped the knob and pulled gently. The smell came on stronger.

I saw an arm on the floor, extending out from behind the sink. The hand was palm up. The fingers were curled.

Janet’s left hand. The wedding ring she still wore
.

As I moved farther into the room, I could see Janet’s body, facedown, her head surrounded by a pool of hardened black blood.

Janet is dead
.

I didn’t know what had hit me harder—the two slugs that had slammed me to the ground, or staring down at my friend’s corpse.

Janet Orr was dead. I knew the words. I had the information. I saw her legs stretched out behind her in black jeans, work boots on her feet. I pulled my gaze away and scanned the kitchen. My eyes were watering, blurring my vision.