Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  “You don’t want to be mixing cats’ blood with Reds’ blood,” he said out loud. But this was spoken barely above a whisper, because he didn’t want Mrs. Big Bad Wolf overhearing anything. And, he reminded himself, she would definitely not have approved of killing cute little pussycats, even if he had told her it was essential to the overall plan. She might be unsure about murder, but not about cat killing.

  They hadn’t even clawed him. He wondered for a moment what their names were. That was a detail that should have shown up in his research on Red One’s life. He hated slippage.

  Be meticulous.

  The details of death need to be measured out, anticipated, designed to the absolute second. The documentation needs to be equally precise. The descriptions you write need to be pitch-perfect.

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “you are also a journalist.”

  He was in his office, surrounded by his pictures, his words, his plans, and his books.

  “We have arrived at the end game,” he said, this time pivoting to the wall of pictures and addressing each Red. He pointed the knife at the images. He wanted to do a Muhammad Ali I-Am-the-Greatest! victory dance, but fought off the urge, because nothing was truly finished yet.

  The Wolf brandished the blade once more in the air, slicing fantasy throats before lowering it to his desktop. Then he gave his desk chair a little push so that he spun about and wheeled over to his bookcase. He pulled out several volumes: the late John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He placed these books beside the copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style that he kept handy at all times. He smiled and thought, Some crazy killers read the Bible or the Koran to find scriptural justification and guidance. They believe there are messages in every holy word, meant just for their own ears. But writers believe Strunk and White is the de facto bible of their craft. And I prefer John Gardner because his advice is so thoughtful, although he was a little crazy himself. Or maybe he was just eccentric—he rode a Harley-Davidson, lived in the wilds of upstate New York, and wore his silver hair down to his shoulders—that he seemed crazy at times.

  Just like me.

  He moved the knife over beside the books as if they were coupled.

  Then he wrote:

  A knife is both a wonderful and a poor choice for a murder weapon. On the one hand, it provides the intimacy that the killing experience requires. Psychologists and low-rent Freudians believe that it represents some sort of penis substitute, but obviously that oversimplifies matters significantly. What it does is bring the necessary proximity to murder, so that there are no barriers in that final moment between killer and victim, which is the nectar we all drink. It links us beyond partners, beyond twins, and beyond lovers.

  On the other hand, it is damn messy.

  Blood is both a killer’s desire and his enemy. It spurts uncontrollably. It flows quickly. It seeps into unwanted spots—like the soles of one’s shoes, or the cuff of one’s shirt—and leaves little microscopic reminders of the killing moment that some stodgy cop with a microscope can actually find in a later investigation. This makes it the most dangerous substance to come in contact with.

  One of the best theories about the infamous 1892 Fall River murders done by Lizzie Borden—“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one . . .”—is that she stripped naked to murder her parents and after she had finished, she bathed and dressed herself, so when the authorities showed up there was nothing incriminating about her.

  Except, naturally, the two dead bodies in the house.

  You can’t be taking anything away from a murder site—like an article of clothes or a lock of hair—that you are not 100 percent certain about, and you have to know every second that this item might bring about your eventual downfall.

  He stopped, his fingers above the keyboard, and thought: I’m not like so many cheap killers; I don’t need a gory souvenir. I have my memories and all those nicely detailed newspaper articles. They’re like reviews of my work. Good reviews. Positive reviews. Ecstatic, super, praise-worthy reviews. The kinds of reviews that get four stars.

  He bent again to his writing:

  Risk, of course, is always enticing and blood is always a risk. A proper killer needs to understand the narcotic, addictive quality it has on the soul. You can’t ignore it, but nor can you be enslaved by it.

  But managed risk is the best.

  Balance is important. Shooting someone with a gun, or even an antique bow and arrow, gives one the necessary distance to remove many of these subtle threats to detection at the same time that it increases other pitfalls that can lead to detection. Did you steal that gun? Are there fingerprints on the bullet casings? But my antipathy toward guns is different: I hate separation. Every step back from your Red diminishes the sensation. You categorically do not want to walk away from a carefully plotted murder with a sense of incompletion and frustration.

  So, the careful killer anticipates problems and takes steps to avoid them. Sees that with every choice come issues. Surgical gloves, for example. You want to use a knife? Good choice, but not one without dangers. Those gloves are a must-have bit of paraphernalia.

  He balanced thoughts. It will be the knife. Just as the Wolf relies on his teeth and claws, my knife will achieve the same. There won’t be anything anonymous when they see that blade.

  For a few minutes, he worried over his words. He was concerned that his tone was a little too familiar and that he spoke a little too directly to his planned readership. He wondered for an instant whether he should redo the most recent passages. John Gardner in particular, and Stephen King as well, went on at length about careful planning and the value in rewriting. But he also didn’t want to overwork the spontaneity out of his manuscript. That’s what will bring the readers into the bookstores, he thought. They will know they are with me every step of the way.

  The same as Red One and Red Three.

  He quickly spun away from his desk, scooted across to his bookcase, and ran a finger up and down the spines of the books collected there. On the third shelf, he found what he was searching for: the late newspaper columnist Tom Wicker’s account of the uprising and takeover of Attica Correctional Facility, A Time to Die. He scoured the opening pages with his eyes until he found the passage he wanted. It was the author’s lament that despite acclaim as a reporter and writer, in his own eyes he had done little to “signify” his life.

  He laughed out loud. That’s not going to be my problem. He turned back to his computer, hunching over, writing feverishly.

  I have studied. I have inspected. I have watched. A killer is like a psychologist and like a lover. One must know one’s target intimately. Red One is most vulnerable in the space between her front door and her car. Night is better than morning because when she comes home she is scared of what awaits her inside. She doesn’t focus on the distance between her car—safety—and her front door—possible safety, potential threat. That was a side benefit of my little break-in. It forces her to concentrate on what might be within her walls waiting. As in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, she will expect me inside. The distance between the car and the front door is less than twenty feet. There is a bright light by the front door, which comes on before she arrives in the dark. She has the whole house on a timer. Remember that detail. If I break that outside light to give myself extra cover, she will be suspicious. Perhaps she won’t get out, she’ll turn her car around and flee. No, even though it lessens the numbers of shadows I can hide in, I have to leave it shining brightly.

  He stopped writing and reminded himself: The Wolf will come at her from the woods. She will not see me coming.

  The biggest problem, he thought, is really the length of time between murders.

  He picked up wh
ere he had left off:

  Red Three’s most vulnerable moment is in the evening as well, when she walks alone across campus. But her second most vulnerable time is on Tuesday mornings. She does not have a class until 9:45. The other members of her dormitory have first-period classes that begin an hour earlier. So Tuesdays, my little Red Three likes to sleep in a little later and does not realize she is alone in that old house, because Ms. Rodriguez, the dorm parent, has early morning faculty commitments those days.

  Red Three gets up slowly and idly heads to the shower down the hallway with her toothbrush and some shampoo, not really awake, wiping the sleep from her eyes without any idea what might be waiting for her there.

  He smiled and nodded. He said to himself, “So it will have to be a Tuesday: Red Three in the morning and Red One in the evening.”

  The Big Bad Wolf liked that, even though it should have been morning, evening, and night. I would have gone for Red Two after midnight. But there was nothing he could do about that.

  He saw the obvious problem: What if Red One learns of Red Three’s murder? Then she will know that this is her last day. She will know that she is only minutes away from her own death.

  That space of time between murders—there’s the dilemma.

  So, it must seem to the outside world that Red Three isn’t dead. Only strangely absent. From class. From basketball. From meals. Not absent from life, which is what will be accurate.

  He picked up Strunk and White from his desktop. They always argue for brevity and directness. The same is true for killing.

  The Big Bad Wolf turned back to his computer.

  Red Three gets more beautiful every day. Her body becomes more lithe, more limber as she approaches womanhood. She is the one about to be cheated the very most.

  Red One is the opposite. She ages just infinitesimally with each passing hour. She grays and knows her dying is right around the next minute and it wears on her figure, just as it gnaws on her heart.

  The Wolf worked a little more before deciding to print out a few pages. He wished he were a poet, so he could more eloquently describe his two remaining victims. He was a little saddened when he thought of Red Two. This will be hard, he told himself, but you will have to write her epitaph in a chapter of its own. He nodded, quickly typed in some notes on a file he decided to call “Red Two’s Last Will and Testament,” and before shutting down the chapter he was working on wondered whether there was any need left to encrypt his files. He thought he no longer had anything to fear from Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. He imagined he’d never had anything to fear from her. She loved him. He loved her. The rest was all just part of life together.

  While he was thinking these things, he idly flicked over to the Internet. He passed over the usual deluge of daily come-ons he received from Writer’s Digest and Script and other places urging him to sign up and spend some money, because through “webinars” or access to DVDs featuring all the tricks of the writing trade he could get published or optioned or taken step-by-step and dollar-by-dollar through all the elements necessary to create his own e-book. Instead the Big Bad Wolf went to the website of a local news station to try to get a seven-day weather forecast. He knew a steady and cold rain would be best for his Tuesday plan. But before he could check the weather, he saw a brief teaser headline on a news digest that caught his eye:

  Memorial Service Planned for Teacher Saturday

  35

  Red Two asked herself, What should you say about your own death? Or, maybe, what would you like someone else to say? Was I a good person? Maybe not.

  Sarah struggled with the ideas that flooded her head. She felt trapped between life and death. The muffled sounds of gunfire were like distant thunderclaps, penetrating the thick ear protectors she wore. In the booth next to her, the Safe Space director was banging out quick shots from a Glock 9 mm, filling the air with angry explosions. Sarah lifted her dead husband’s weapon, held it out steadily with both hands the way she had been shown, and aimed down the sight at the black cartoon of a fierce man grasping a large knife, wearing a snarl and a scar, and painted with a target in his chest. She pulled the trigger three times. She doubted if the target looked much like the Big Bad Wolf.

  The recoil sent shock waves through her arms, but she was privately pleased that it didn’t make her stagger back or fall to the ground as she’d expected.

  She looked up, squinting down the firing range. She could see that two shots had landed just outside the target, but a third had torn the paper dead center. She didn’t know whether this was the first shot or the last, but she was pleased that at least one would have proved fatal.

  “Attagirl,” the director said, leaning around a small partition that separated the shooting galleries. “Try to get a handle on how the weapon will pull one way or the other when you’re rapid-firing. And, you know, empty the chamber. Fire all six rounds. You better your chances that way. We’ve got plenty of ammo and plenty of time.”

  Plenty of ammo is right, Sarah thought. Plenty of time isn’t. She cracked open the cylinder to reload from a box on the shooting platform at her waist.

  Sarah Locksley, born thirty-three years ago. Happy once. Not so much anymore. Dead in a river, killed by a psychopath who drove her to further despair by threatening to murder her, except she had nothing left to live for anyway because some goddamn out-of-control fuel truck driver ran through a stop sign.

  She lifted the gun and aimed again.

  That won’t work. This is a memorial service. A little sadness and mainly nice, safe things said about someone whose life was cut short by tragedy.

  That’s me. I’m the someone. Or maybe, it’s the ex-me.

  The target loomed in front of her. She narrowed her eyes and hummed to herself to block out the noise of other weapons being fired.

  Not a word about the truth of Sarah Locksley.

  She smiled. A part of her wished she could go to the service. It would certainly help for her say goodbye to herself. So long, Sarah. Hello, Cynthia Harrison. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. And I’m delighted to take over your life.

  She could hear the gunshots echoing around her, and the gun jumped in her hand. Cynthia Harrison, she thought, I wonder if you would be embarrassed or disappointed or angry to know that the very first thing I do with your name is kill a man. A very special man. A wolf who most assuredly deserves to die. After all, he’s killed me once already.

  This time four of the six shots landed dead center, and the fifth tore a hole in the target’s forehead.

  Twenty minutes before the service was to begin, Red Three took the video camera she’d obtained at the mall and placed it in a spot where it was trained on the people who would come through the doors, stop and sign a “remembrance” book, then take their seats in the small room. It was set to record two hours’ worth of video, which Karen had insisted to the funeral director be the length of the service.

  She glanced toward the front of the room. Karen had put together a montage of photographs of Sarah and her dead family. There were bouquets of white lilies on either side of the pictures, which were mounted on a sheet of white poster board and placed on a tripod in front of the few chairs the funeral home had put out. There was a small podium with a microphone.

  A part of Red Three wanted to stay. She imagined she could hide behind a curtain, remaining still, holding her breath. But she knew there was danger in staying behind, even if hidden. So instead she ducked out minutes before the first people pulled into the funeral home parking lot. She wore a dark hooded sweatshirt beneath her old parka, and she pulled this up over her head and walked away as quickly as she could from the funeral home toward a nearby bus stop.

  For the first time in days, she knew she wasn’t being followed. This didn’t make sense to her, but Jordan wasn’t about to reject the sensation, because it made her feel like she was doing something that migh
t just help save her life.

  When the bus wheezed up beside her and its doors opened with a familiar hydraulic whoosh, she climbed in. Jordan was aware that she was breaking any number of school rules by being off campus on a Saturday without permission. She did not care. She imagined that breaking a few onerous regulations was the very least of the trouble she was racing toward. Breaking rules is bad, she thought. Killing is worse.

  This notion made her smile, and she had to fight to keep herself from bursting out in laughter.

  Karen was in a side room, dressed in a trim black dress, looking as proper as a Puritan, poring over two sheets of paper on which she’d written a small speech, using details that Sarah had given her about her life.

  The words on the page streamed together. She felt like a dyslexic, every letter jumbling and tumbling across the paper willy-nilly, threatening to short-circuit everything she planned to say. Just as she did before going on stage with a new comedy routine, she did some breathing exercises. Slow in. Slow out. Settle the racing heartbeat.

  “I know you’re here,” she whispered. One of the funeral directors, across the room from her, looked up with a practiced, hypocritically wistful look, and Karen realized that he thought she was speaking to her dead friend, not a killer.

  “People are starting to arrive,” the funeral director said. He was significantly younger than the man she’d spoken to earlier in the week, but he already had down pat the solemn, sonorous tones of loss. She guessed he was a son or a nephew being shepherded into the family business, and this particular memorial service was definitely not a funeral home challenge. No need for the boss to be there. No casket. No body. Few flowers. Just some random sentiments.