Tunnel of Night (8 page)

“Could we have a copycat on our hands, Pop?”

“No,” I said, slamming the door as I headed for my Jeep.

IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAD BEEN
unable to follow Pop’s train of thought. He had come out of the hospital and latched on to Peter Kurten. Then it was Charles Starkweather. Now it was John Wolf.

I couldn’t keep up with him.

I remember one time when I was in my teens, and I wandered into Pop’s study He was so busy poring over some photographs at his desk, he didn’t notice me. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then he got up and walked through the door that led to the garage. I followed him, passing close to his desk, glancing down at pictures of a dead young woman, her back laced with thin, bloody, parallel lines.

I kept moving, until I could see Pop on his hands and knees on the concrete garage floor. He raked his right hand across the rough surface of the cement, then stared at the bloody lines on his palm. “That’s how she got those striated marks,” he said. “He couldn’t pick her up. He lifted her legs, dragged her across the concrete floor, then maneuvered her into the trunk.”

Pop walked within feet of me, ignoring the blood
that stained his hand, and sat again at his desk. After a few minutes, he picked up the telephone receiver, and as he dialed, seemed to realize for the first time that his hand was bleeding. He balled up some tissues and gripped them, stanched the wounds, and made his call.

A few weeks later, I saw an article in the newspaper. The police had charged their prime suspect, Frank Lockerby, a mechanic, with the murder of a young woman. Pop was mentioned in the article, and so was his old police friend and my godfather, Ray Bolton.

Years later, I asked Pop about the case. “The lines on the victim’s back were crucial to making the case,” he explained. “We could explain every other mark on her body, but didn’t know what had caused those marks, and didn’t know where the crime had been committed. Once we knew how the marks were made, we had a crime scene—the gas station where Lockerby worked— and that gave Ray the additional physical evidence he needed to make the case. Lockerby was a shade over five feet tall, and had a slight build. He couldn’t have lifted his victim. He had to drag her across the concrete floor.”

That was only one of many times that I had learned not to question my father’s erratic behavior in matters related to murder.

Now, I watched his Jeep disappear through the gate, and returned to my work at the computer.

Ginger had spent months putting together the relational database for Pop, but I wasn’t having any luck making it work. I had entered all the criteria that Pop and I had been able to come up with, but every time I tried to run the program, I got the same on-screen message:
GOTO: DEA
.

I knew that Pop had done a lot of work for government
agencies, but I had never heard him mention anything about Drug Enforcement. When I tried to call up the DEA file, the screen seemed to freeze, as if the computer were waiting for the rest of the command. After a series of tries, and just as many failures and reboots, I shut down the system and put away the disks. I was starting to agree with my father, at least as far as technology was concerned.

POP WAS GONE NEARLY TWO HOURS. I WAS READY
to call Buck when I heard the Jeep pull into the yard.

“Fuckin’ phones,” he said as he came through the door.

“If you put one here in the house …”

“I’d have to talk to people.”

“What about a fax with a handset? Stick an answering machine on it and turn off the ringer.”

Pop ignored me as he stomped around the house. Max dove off his chair and headed for cover under the sofa.

Pop mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“I hate it when you do that.”

“I said you get more like your mother every day She had to have a phone in every room. Even the fucking bathroom.”

Pop was seething. He didn’t say why he was angry, and I had long ago learned not to ask. When he’s ready to talk, he talks. Not before.

“I booked a flight to Washington, D.C.,” he said. “You can come if you want.”

“What?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Lincoln Memorial.”

I knew that there was only one Lincoln on his mind. Lincoln, Nebraska. Charlie Starkweather—and whatever connection he had to our shooter. But the trail was here, not in Washington.

“Pop, what are you talking about? You’ve got a case to work.
We
do. You are somebody’s target, and that somebody made Lake Albert his personal shooting gallery.”

“Fine. You stay. I’ll go.”

He stalked into his bedroom. I could hear him yank open drawers and pull back the zippers on his duffel bag. I walked to the doorway.

“You know I’m not gonna let you go off alone,” I said.

“Then go pack.”

THE
737
LIFTED OFF THE RUNWAY
.

I looked down, watching the earth recede and race away. Lake Albert was far behind me. I was roaring toward something that I wanted nothing to do with, but I knew that I had no choice.

I was chasing a killer who consumed victims as if they were handfuls of cheese-flavored popcorn. He was a man who had operated according to his own agenda, who had lived as a god deciding who died and when, until I had tracked him down. For most of his adult life, John Wolf had sought his own justice for the physical and emotional pain inflicted on him by a sadistic stepfather. Now, a different vengeance drove him: I’d had the gall to interrupt his mayhem.

I had more questions than answers. Number one on my list was how anyone could walk away from an explosion that blew flames and debris a hundred feet into the air. I had locked him in the coal bin of his family’s Vermont home and flipped a switch that triggered the load of the plastic explosives buried in the bin. Explosives
he
had planted to kill me and my daughter. Number
two nudged for the top spot: Why hadn’t he killed me when he had the chance?

When I first opened my practice in Boston, most of my referrals originated with the courts. Spousal homicide, familicide, patricide. I needed to know how the events of violence had evolved. The killer’s dynamics could be understood only in the context of his or her relationships. Lengthy interviews with survivors— relatives, neighbors, the accused—provided a complete biography that moved inexorably toward a single convulsive moment.

Albert DeSalvo—“The Boston Strangler”—had changed everything. There were many other serial killers before him. Who knew what the werewolf legends of Europe really were? DeSalvo had brought his carnage into my neighborhood, and forced himself into my consciousness.

I was living on Beacon Hill when DeSalvo, in his cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, identified himself— first to fellow inmate George Nassar, then to the fiery young attorney, R Lee Bailey—as Boston’s most feared killer. It was close. One of the strangler’s victims lived on Charles Street, within walking distance of my apartment. For me, in my practice, DeSalvo had changed the face of murder. He had known none of his thirteen homicide victims, nor had he known any of his countless “Measuring Man” or “Green Man” rape victims.

The sixties—a benchmark decade in music, political assassination, social revolution—also saw a sharp increase in the number of strangers killing strangers. How was it possible to trace the evolution of an act of violence that had no apparent context, where there was no discernible relationship? I was determined to find out, and developed my own approach to the art of identifying
the characteristics of a killer from the evidence left at the crime scene, and from what I could learn about the victim’s personality. It was a process of working backward.

I decided that examining the grab site and its circumstances were as important as microscopy of everything found at the kill site, the location that my colleagues in law enforcement insisted on calling the “crime scene.” The crime, I decided, moved through several locations— whether within the same room, apartment, or house, or spread all over the city and throughout Suffolk County. The homicides that I studied had
scenes,
multiple locations that were equally important.

I remember one homicide detective telling me, “The perp grabbed her at a supermarket on the Cambridge side of the river, but he did her here.”

“Here” was an alley in Boston’s North End.

“Did he grab her inside the market, in the parking lot, what?” I asked.

“Inside. He didn’t exactly
grab
her, Doc. They walked out together. What fuckin’ difference does that make?”

“He established face validity,” I said. “He was believable, seemed trustworthy, a nice guy.”

“Nice guys don’t do this shit, Doc”

The knee-jerk reaction had been to call these murders random, senseless, motiveless. They weren’t. In our revulsion, our need to assign a label, and an equally strong need to distance ourselves from these killers, we hastened to dismiss them as sick, demented, insane. They weren’t. Many of them were “nice guys.”

What I eventually concluded offended everyone’s sensibilities. It arrived one day in a blinding flash from Walt Kelly’s
Pogo:
“they” were “us.”

When I was young, in addition to a taste for the comics, I learned many things from my father. It is difficult to gain enlightenment from someone who is inebriated most of the time, but when he spoke in that thick brogue of his, I listened. He was uneducated, at least formally, but intelligent—a working-class drunk who imbibed philosophy when he wasn’t sucking down Seagram’s Seven in his tea.

He was … an unusual man. I wanted to know him, and I wanted him to know me. I remember wandering into his room one morning. He was reading, so I sat at the foot of his bed.

“Did you know that William Blake saw God?” he asked.

His voice had a raspy quality. It always did. Like someone shaking off the morning’s alcoholic rust and trying to jump-start the day.

I shook my head.

“When he was a wee lad, about your age, he saw God looking at him. Blake wasn’t crazy. He knew that the things we touch and smell and hear can matter only when they lead us back into our minds to what we can imagine. He knew that we must have evil. How else would we measure good? If we have heaven, we must have hell. He trusted his own mind, lad. He didn’t wait for the priests and teachers to catch up. It’s a heavy burden to bear, this trusting of your own mind.”

“If I saw God,” I said, “I might believe in Him.”

“Aye, but ye’d probably be wrong. Maybe Blake did see the old guy. Maybe he didn’t. But he definitely
felt
God inside his mind.”

He coughed, lighted a Pall Mall, then added, “That never happened to me, but I remain open to the possibility.”

Now, my father’s words echoed in my head:
He trusted his own mind, lad.
That’s what I had always tried to do, and it’s what I had to do now. My mind would lead me to a killer, if I allowed it to.

After the pilot’s announcement about our arrival time and the weather in D.C, Lane flipped open her laptop computer.

“You kids can’t go anywhere without those things,” I said, trying to focus my attention on a volume of poetry by Christina Rossetti.

“Do you think you’re ever going to join the twentieth century, Pop?”

“Doubtful. I’m in the nineteenth right now.”

I watched as she popped disks in and out, tapped commands, read whatever it was that the screen had to tell her.

“When did you ever work for the DEA?” she asked.

“Never did.”

“When I get all of these characteristics in here and run the search, it says
GOTO:DEA
. But when I type
DEA,
nothing happens.”

“Give Ginger a call when we get to D.C.,” I suggested. “I don’t know anything about it. We don’t have those things here in the nineteenth century.”

“Used properly, it saves time. Think of it as a tool.”

“Technology is a drug. If we allow ourselves to become dependent on it, we’re going to forget how to use our own powers of reasoning. People don’t read enough anymore. They have ‘multimedia experiences.’ Sounds vaguely obscene, if you ask me. I’ll take
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
any day.”