Her hand quivered as she read the name. Are you the Wolf? For a moment, her head spun dizzily. Jordan breathed in deeply, settling her racing pulse and clenched stomach. Then she copied everything from the directory entry onto the back of her hand in black ink. She didn’t trust herself not to lose a scrap of paper. She wanted this information tattooed to her skin.
She could feel a rush of fears and confidences all clashing together within her. She fought off every sensation, telling herself to remain calm, remain focused, to return the directory to the exact same position it had occupied when she found it. She reminded herself to make sure that she had disturbed nothing and left no trace of herself in the faculty member’s apartment, not even the scent of her fear. The air in the apartment seemed harsh, like bitter smoke. She urged herself to use stealth, make sure that she exited the room with as much quiet and secrecy as she had used when she arrived.
Don’t let anyone see you, Jordan, she admonished herself. Be invisible.
For an instant, she thought it was funny. She had broken in and acted like a burglar, violating a school rule that would get her dismissed instantly, but she had not stolen anything except a small piece of information that might be larger than anything she had ever before held in her hands. It was like stealing something that could be either priceless or worthless.
She moved across the room quietly and put her ear to the door. She could hear no one outside. She inhaled rapidly, like a diver readying herself to plunge beneath black waters, and slowly turned the handle to let herself out. She wished in that second that she’d brought her filleting knife with her. She decided that from that point on, she would keep it close at hand.
Now the band was covering the Rolling Stones’ “She’s So Cold,” doing a passable imitation of Mick, Keith, and the lads, right down to the lead vocalist’s plaintive pleas encapsulated in the lyrics. The local group was wedged into a corner of the art gallery’s main room. Usually, the gallery sported student, faculty, and alumni works, but the open space was easily converted into a dance floor. Someone had replaced some of the overhead lights with a huge silver ball that reflected flashes of light onto the packed dancers.
The music reverberated off the walls; the students gyrated or collected in knots, closely pressed together, shouting above the band’s sounds. It was hot and loud. There was a refreshment table to the side, where a pair of the younger faculty dispensed plastic cups filled with watered-down red punch. A couple of other teachers hung by the sides, eyeing the students, trying to make sure than none of them snuck off hand in hand for some illicit contact. This was an impossible task. Jordan knew that the heat in the room would translate into connecting. Someone will lose his or her virginity tonight, she told herself.
Three times, she had elbowed her way through the dense, twisting pack of dancing students, moving diagonally across the floor each time, pausing once or twice to twist her body in circles, so that she might be mistaken for one of the party-goers. Her eyes, however, were fixed on the exits and on the faculty trying to prevent the inevitable sneaking off to quiet, dark places.
Jordan had been to enough of these dances to know what would happen. The teachers would spot a couple trying to exit together. Or, they’d be smart enough to realize that the sophomore leaving from the right intended to meet the senior exiting on the left, and both would be halted.
She waited, biding her time. When she saw a couple trying to leave, she slid behind them. She knew what would happen.
“Where do you think you two are going?” came the demand from the teacher. He confronted the couple, who at least had the sense to stop holding hands, and who were replying sheepishly and nervously that they meant no harm and didn’t mean anything and weren’t doing anything and had no possible idea what the faculty member thought they might conceivably be up to.
And, in that moment of confrontation, Jordan slipped through the door.
She made her way rapidly down a corridor. With each step, the music faded a bit more. At the end of the hall, she stopped. To her right were stairs, to her left another hall that led to the bathrooms. There would be faculty watching each bathroom. It was too obvious a place for a quick grope between couples or a fast swallow of an ecstasy pill or snort of cocaine. The kids who wanted to use the dance to cover a marijuana smoke invariably were wise enough to head outside, so that the telltale scent of the drug couldn’t be detected by the houndlike capabilities of the faculty noses.
The stairs to the right went down to a second flight, where there were drawing and sculpture studios. The studios would all be watched by a teacher making rounds every fifteen minutes or so, because they were a favorite making-out location. She intended to bypass these obvious spots, head out a ground-floor door, and, sticking to the shadows, make her way into the science and physics building next door. It was a little like being an escaping prisoner of war, dodging light towers and guards.
There was an advantage to being a four-year senior. By the time graduation would arrive, one knew all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of the school—such as which doors weren’t locked.
Ignoring the classrooms just inside the entrance, Jordan headed down another flight of stairs. The labs were below and their windows didn’t look out on the main walkways and quadrangles of the school, but faced toward the playing fields. It was dark—the only light was reflected from the art building where the dance was being held, which was well illuminated. It was quiet; Jordan’s sneakers slapping against the floor and her breathing were the only noises close by—everything else was rhythm and blues and rock and roll coming from the band a building away.
At the third lab door, Jordan stopped and turned the handle. The room was black and gray. She could make out the shadows of lab equipment spread out across wide tables, where students did experiments.
She whispered, “Karen? Sarah?”
From a corner shadow, they responded, “We’re here.”
38
The room itself seemed conspiratorial. Dark shadows seeping into corners, the wan light from the nearby art building, the odd shapes of scientific equipment spread throughout the long, wide space—everything made it seem like the sort of spot where bad ideas and wild schemes were hatched. It had been years since Karen had been in a school laboratory. Sarah’s scientific sensibilities were defined by elementary classroom studies of ducks and frogs and barnyard animals. Jordan, however, loved the room, not because of the science that was contained there, but because it seemed to her to be the place where odd chemicals and strange substances could be combined into smelly failures or explosive successes, and that paralleled the position she imagined the three of them were in. She was encouraged as well by the idea that it was a place of well-defined formulas and eminent reason, so that the order and understanding that science tried to impose on the world might help them as they designed what their next steps were to be.
The three Reds sat cross-legged on the floor behind a long table. They had Karen’s laptop between them, and they hunched forward as Jordan typed in various bits of information.
“Here,” Jordan said. She pointed at the screen. “Gotta love Google Images.”
The unprepossessing image of a man in his sixties stared back at them. He had a paunch around his middle and skin that sagged beneath his chin. He had shaggy gray-tinged hair around his ears, but a thinning top, and he wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. The picture was taken a few years earlier at a local bookstore reading series. He was clearly a little shy of six feet tall, and not heavy-set, but not athletic-looking either. His ordinariness was his most dramatic feature.
“You think that’s a killer?” Jordan asked.
“He doesn’t look like what I imagined the Wolf would look like,” Karen said.
“What do killers look like?” Jordan asked. “And what would a wolf look like?”
“Tall. Strong
. Predatory. I don’t see that,” Karen said quietly. “You think that guy could chase you down?”
“He’s a writer. Mysteries and thrillers,” Sarah said.
“Does that mean anything?” Karen responded.
“Well, I guess it means he knows something about crimes,” Sarah replied. “Wouldn’t any crime writer who was good enough to get a book published know something about how to commit a felony?”
“Yeah, probably,” Karen answered sharply. “But they’d also know how people get caught.” She turned to Jordan. “Tell us about the wife,” she asked.
“Bitch,” Jordan snapped.
“That doesn’t say much,” Karen said.
“Yes it does,” Sarah interjected.
“The woman sits up in the dean’s office and never smiles,” Jordan said. “Never says hello. Acts put out when you show up to get reamed by the dean for whatever you’ve done wrong, like you’ve somehow made her day worse.”
“So, just because she’s a little rude, you think . . .” Karen stopped. Teenage think is simple think, she reminded herself. Except when it isn’t, when they surprise you with some truly prescient idea or observation. She looked through the dark at Jordan, trying to discern which of these moments this was. Jordan was the angriest of the three of them. Even in the room’s shadows, she could see her face lit with barely contained fury. Karen imagined that it was the teenager’s anger that made her risky. It also made her attractive. She wasn’t beset by doubts—or, at the least, no doubts that Karen could see. She wondered whether she had once been like Jordan and suspected the answer to that question was yes, because the line between anger and determination was often thin. At least, she hoped she’d once been like Jordan. She suddenly felt old, then thought, No, that’s not what I’m feeling. What I’m feeling is defeated already by what we might have to do.
“I still think she’s a bitch,” Jordan replied. The teenager hesitated, then gasped sharply, the sound echoing about the science lab.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
Jordan’s voice trembled. It was in sharp contrast to the blustery, fierce Jordan that the other Reds had grown accustomed to. “I just realized: The bitch comes to every basketball game.”
“Well, what does—” Sarah started, only to have Jordan leap excitedly into a rush of words.
“Every game. I mean, she’s always up there in the middle of the stands—I’ve seen her a million times, watching us play. Except I only thought it was us. Maybe it was me. And if she’s there, I bet her husband is there, too, right next to her.”
“Well, have you ever seen him?”
“Yeah. Sure. Probably. How would I know who he was?”
This made sense.
“And that’s not all,” Jordan said, her voice picking up momentum. “In the dean’s office, she would have access to my school record. She would know just about every scheduled place I had to be. She’d know when I was likely to be in class, or eating lunch or going to basketball or heading to the library. She would know just about everything. Or, at least, could figure it out.”
Sarah leaned back. Her mind churned. You take one thing and add it to another thing, you combine one observation with something else you’ve noticed, and it all seems to mean something when maybe it doesn’t.
To Jordan, it suddenly seemed obvious: mean secretary. Husband. Games. Her every trip to the gym. All the failed appointments with psychologists to get her back on track. She thought, It has to connect the dots. But not yet to the other two Reds. Jordan abruptly punched computer keys, and pictures of the husband’s four book jackets arrived on the screen.
The pictures were lurid, suggestive, and over-the-top images. A man wielding a bloody knife figured prominently in one. A large handgun resting on a table was in the center of another. A third sported a shadowy figure lurking in an alleyway. This jacket caused Karen to shudder.
“He hasn’t published in years. Maybe he’s retired,” Karen said. Not one word that fell from her lips had any conviction behind it.
“Yeah. Or maybe something else,” Jordan sneered. “Maybe he got tired of writing about killers and decided to try a real suit on for size.”
The three Reds remained silent. They could hear distant music from the dance. The pulse of rock and roll contradicted the dark feelings they all felt.
“What do we do now?” Sarah whispered. “Maybe it’s him. Maybe it isn’t. I mean, what the hell can we do? What are our alternatives?”
Again silence enclosed the three women. It took Karen, the organized one of the three, a few minutes to reply. “One, we do nothing—”
“Great plan,” Jordan interrupted. “And wait for him to kill us?”
“He hasn’t yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe this is all just, I don’t know . . .”—she waved her hand at the science lab equipment—“some weird experiment, the kind of bizarre thing a writer thinks up and—” She stopped. “We have no real evidence, other that the Wolf’s word, that he intends to kill us.”
“Bullshit! He’s been stalking us and—” Sarah countered.
“What about your dead cats?” Jordan cut in.
“I don’t know for sure they’re dead. I only know—” Karen realized she was contradicting everything she truly believed.
“Bullshit!” Jordan interrupted, echoing Sarah. “You fucking well know.”
Karen did, but she continued on, false reason and awkward compromise littering her voice. “Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe he just wants to go on taunting us and teasing us and threatening us for years.”
Jordan shook her head back and forth. “Any one of the shrinks my fucking parents have forced me to go to over the years would grin and say that’s total denial, as if they were making some sort of really wonderful point that should straighten me out like instantly and turn me into a well-adjusted, happy, perfectly normal teenager, like there is such a thing anywhere in the world.”
Both Karen and Sarah were glad of the dark, because they both smiled right past their fears. Karen thought this was exactly what she really liked about Jordan. If she can live through all this, Karen thought, she will grow into someone special.
The word if was nearly painful inside her, like a sudden clenched stomachache or a slap across the cheek.
“Okay, so nothing and wait to see if he does kill us is one choice,” Sarah said. “And?”
“We can try confrontation,” Karen said. “See if that scares him off.”
“You mean,” Jordan interjected, “like knock on his door and say, ‘Hi. We’re the three Reds. One of us has already faked her death, but we’d really like it if you’d stop saying you’re going to kill us, pretty please.’ Now, that’s a plan that we can all really get behind.”
Sarah nodded. “Of course, we do that or something like that—let him know we know who he is—and it’s just as possible that it would force him to make a move. He might accelerate all his plans. Think of all the movies you’ve seen, where the kidnappers tell the victim’s family, ‘Don’t call the police,’ and either they do or they don’t, but neither answer is ever right because it sets everything in motion. It’s like we’ve been kidnapped.”
“One other thing,” Jordan added. “If we just confront him, we lose all our advantages. He just denies he’s the Wolf, slams the door in our faces, and we’re back at square one. Maybe we’re dead tomorrow or next week or next year. Maybe all he’ll do is decide to invent a new plan and put that into action.”
Karen put her head into her hands for an instant. She was trying to see clearly through a fog of possibilities. It was like sorting through symptoms belonging to a very sick patient. A misstep, a wrong diagnosis, and the patient might die.
“We don’t know for sure that he is the Wolf,” she said. “How can we act without being one hundred percent sure?” She was a little surprised at th
e hesitancy creeping into her words; she always tried to be aggressive, decisive. This was hard for her. She felt like she had just delivered a joke that fell flat, and she was being laughed at, not with.
Jordan shrugged. “So what? We’re not a court of law. We’re not going to the cops with some crazy-ass story about notes and a Wolf and sneaking around for all this time, just so a cop can think we’re complete nuts.” Jordan was speaking fast. Probably too fast, the other two Reds thought. “It’s all about maintaining the edge. Keeping control. There’s only one thing we can do.”
Karen knew what Jordan was going to say, but she let the teenager say it anyway.
“We outwolf him.”
“How do we do that?” Sarah asked. She already knew the answer to her question. It just scared her.
Karen, too, knew the answer. She leaned back and felt a ripple of muscle tension race through her entire body, as if she was quivering from head to toe. Her last remaining bit of reason forced some words out of her mouth. “We can’t just go kill him, just like that. Wait outside his front door and when he comes out to get the newspaper, shoot him and then try to disappear? Do our own little urban drive-by? That’s not who we are. And we’d all end up in prison, because that’s not self-defense, it’s murder, and the last time I checked, none of us are master criminals.”
“How do we make it into self-defense?” Sarah asked. “Like a trap? Do we wait for him to try to kill us first? Except, maybe he’s been doing that already.”
“I don’t know,” Karen replied. “None of us has ever done anything like this before.”
“Are you sure?” Sarah allowed frustration to creep into her voice. “We invented my death. We’ve all been manipulative, scheming, I don’t know what, at some point in our lives. Everyone has. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. You grow up and you learn how. We just have to create something that the Wolf would never expect. Why can’t we do that?”
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