Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)

by Frank Freudberg

  “These are circles, Rhoads. Boxes are square.”

  “Same difference,” Rhoads said. “Anyway, your caller’s probably thrilled about what he’s accomplished so far. But he’s put a hook in his own mouth. Best not overexcite him until it’s to our advantage. Let’s let him run it out a bit.”

  33

  Pensacola, Florida and Washington, D.C.

  At 4:03:16 p.m., Muntor picked up an outdoor pay phone and dialed the FBI Headquarters number he had now memorized.

  When the telephone company’s simulated female voice requested $1.85, Muntor began dropping quarters into the slot with his white-gloved hand. Nervous, he lost count of the coins deposited.

  “Thank you. You have forty cents credit toward your call,” the voice said.

  The call came into the switchboard and a telephone center supervisor switched it to Franklin in Lab C. The telephone began ringing.

  Franklin picked it up midway through the third ring.

  “Deputy Director Franklin.”

  “Hello!” The voice was gruff again, the tone familiar, but different this time.

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “Howdy, Deputy Director.” The distinct whine of a tractor trailer flying by. “Rhoads present and accounted for?”

  “Yes. Would you like to speak to him now? I know he wants to speak to you.”

  “Time’s a wasting. Eleven seconds down the drain.”

  Franklin nodded to Rhoads, who pressed the button putting him on the line. Franklin tapped the receiver button to make an audible click but stayed on the line to listen.

  “This is Tom Rhoads. They call me T.R. Hello.”

  “Mr. Rhoads. Thanks for coming.”

  “You’re welcome. Do I get a name to go with the voice?”

  “When I let you arrest me, I’ll show you my driver’s license, but until then, the name’s Virgil. Now, listen up. I can’t stay on this line gibber-jabbering with you all day.” The caller’s pace quickened. “We’re going to launch a little public awareness campaign, you and me. You watch—it’ll be quite educational. Now, what I want to do is this. I want to make a trade. I’ll cancel the next event I’ve planned if you can get your boss, W. Nicholas Pratt, to do me a little favor. I need him to make a personal appearance. Help kick off the campaign. Tomorrow night. He’ll have to spend some of the company dollars, though.”

  While the man who called himself Virgil continued his prepared speech, the communications tech spoke quietly to someone on the other end of his telephone.

  “The Denny’s at service plaza I 2-N, southbound on the interstate, north of Pensacola,” he said to a Florida Highway Patrol dispatcher.

  Rhoads listened to Virgil.

  “… and he’ll need to buy sixty-second spots on ABC, CNN, CBS, ESPN, MTV, and NBC.” The caller was speaking so fast he was slurring words together, not sloppy, like a drunk, but hurried. “At nine o’clock p.m. It doesn’t have to be precisely nine, but it should be within a few minutes. Don’t keep me waiting long. I’m one guy you don’t want to piss off. I’ll be a big star burning bright while I’m waiting, and I don’t wait patiently. I want to hear him, Pratt—no spokespeople, you understand?—read aloud an excerpt from page 345 of The Surgeon General’s Smoking and Health Report to the Congress, Third Revised Edition. He’s to read the third full ‘graph on that page. It enumerates how many lung cancer deaths there were in the U.S. last year and then goes on to state that ninety-two percent of all lung cancer cases result directly from smoking. This … this reading, constitutes Pratt’s confession on behalf of the entire industry. And it must be delivered that way. Solemnly, contritely.”

  Everyone in the room listened silently.

  “I’ve timed it—it can be read easily in under a minute. Now, let’s say Pratt balks. We got trouble, big trouble. I go to plan ‘B’—something I like to call ‘Back to School Night.’ Whoa! I’m looking at the second hand on my watch.” Virgil spoke even more rapidly now. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Rhoads, they say that in life, pain is mandatory, suffering is optional. I like that saying. Don’t you? Here’s how that concept applies to us. See, I have got a grand finale planned for all of this, something spectacular, a little ways down the road. It’ll make the Kuwaiti oil field infernos look like campfires. That’s pain, the mandatory part. That will happen. But this ‘Back to School Night’ thing? Hell, we don’t have to go through all that. That’s an optional one. And it’s Nick Pratt’s choice. We’ll see what he does. But I warn you, Mr. Rhoads, you won’t like ‘Back to School Night.’ That much I guarantee. That is all.”

  An FBI agent handed Rhoads a note.

  He paused half a beat to read it.

  “Mr. Virgil, what do you mean by ‘Back to… ’”

  “It’s not Mr. Virgil, jackass. Are you Mr. Tom? It’s just Virgil. Don’t make that stupid mistake again, because I can spell ‘RHOADS’ as well as I spelled ‘HOWDY,’ except that one extra poor son of a bitch will die. R-H-O-A-D-S.”

  The sound of the subject’s voice and the rush of background traffic ceased suddenly with a solid click. A dark quiet, as thick as night fog, eased out of the telephone and into all the listeners’ ears.

  Rhoads said, “He’s a writer, maybe an editor or reporter.”

  “What,” Franklin said. “How do you know?”

  “He said ‘graph’ instead of paragraph. It’s journalist jargon. I had a source in Philly, a reporter. He loved to say graph instead of paragraph to let me know he was a pro.”

  Franklin turned to Brandon. “Make sure that’s in the profile. Narrow the search. Find Virgil. Find Virgil.”

  34

  Dozens of state troopers’ cars, lights flashing, sirens screaming, roared toward the Denny’s. Emergency vehicles swerved past motorists, careened across tree- and shrubbery-lined medians, accelerated up both exit and entrance ramps.

  Troopers and rifle teams boiled from the vehicles, surrounding the plaza and closing in on a bank of telephone booths. A helicopter arrived, but the commander ordered it back. Its rotors chopped so loudly the men on the ground had difficulty hearing their radios.

  Police took up tactical positions, terrifying confused civilians.

  In one of the phone booths, the handset of a telephone dangled, swaying in the breeze.

  Florida Highway Patrol, Pensacola police, and FBI agents used dogs and helicopters to scour the service plaza and an adjacent gas station and surrounding woods. They immediately erected roadblocks on all highways within a fifteen-mile radius of the pay telephone.

  Zero.

  35

  FBI Headquarters

  Franklin slammed down the telephone. “We missed him.”

  “Oak,” Brandon said. “Something here you ought to hear. This is Dr. Ertmann. Doc?”

  A rail-thin, gray-haired man in a three-piece suit seated in a wheelchair rolled up and turned to face Franklin.

  “You the top man?” the doctor asked in a nasal squeak.

  “No, but in this investigation, I’m the next best thing,” Franklin said, barely looking at the man. “To me Director of the FBI is the top man.”

  “Right,” said Dr. Ertmann. “I don’t want to be telling this story to lots of different guys. I’ll say it once, do with the information as you see fit. I’ve been a respiratory specialist for forty years. Let me speculate and make a diagnosis based on what I’ve just heard. This Virgil fellow? He is, in all probability, in a very late stage of malignant carcinoma of the upper respiratory system. You send a copy of the tape of that phone call to my office, and I’ll have some fellows listen to it, see if they get the same thing I did.”

  “Take it from the top in English, Doctor. Are you telling me he’s dying?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “How soon?”

  “Can’t say. Could be very soon, could hang on for a couple of
years.”

  “Which team would you bet on?”

  The doctor thought for a minute. Franklin waited, desperate to hear good news.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you. Wild guess only. His shallowness, the faint wheeze, the suppuration, the way he stridulates. Let’s put it this way. I own stock in CIGNA, the insurance company. For this guy, I wouldn’t want them to write a life insurance policy.”

  Everyone within earshot in the ERC listened and absorbed the information. Tentative smiles became broader as the implication sank in.

  “Could it happen inside of a week?” an agent asked.

  “I said I can’t say. Possibly, but that’s a little too ambitious. But, in light of the strain he’s under, it could happen quickly. But I couldn’t say how long even if he were sitting here in my lap. If I’m right, and I usually am, it’ll take him very fast from here.”

  A couple of agents at the periphery of the crowd around the wheelchair-bound physician erupted spontaneously in shouts and cheers. Franklin glowered at his subordinates, and they immediately calmed down and assumed straight faces.

  He looked at Rhoads, and Rhoads nodded at him. He said, “We’re getting closer. He’s careful. He’s a planner. But since he’s obsessed with bragging about what he’s been doing, he can’t help but give us clues every time he calls.”

  “Rhoads is right,” Franklin said. “Whatever we have to do to get him to call, we’ll do it.”

  36

  Philadelphia

  Muntor arrived home after his flight from Florida nearly incapacitated by exhaustion.

  In his second-floor bathroom, his video camera sat perched on a tripod straddling the sink. A tiny red LED glowed next to the power button and the videocassette inside rolled silently, recording the scene.

  The lens pointed at an ornate, claw-foot bathtub in the middle of the tiled room, bolted decades ago into the floor. Next to the bathtub, Muntor had placed a three-legged wooden stool.

  The bathtub was surrounded by a ring of candles in red globes.

  The candlelight drenched the room in the color of blood.

  Minutes earlier, before beginning to film, he had cradled the camera in his arms like a newborn. Then he turned it on and held it up to his eye and slowly panned the room, preserving every detail. He had recorded the images of an orange crate just outside the ring of candles, piled high with newspapers, newspaper clippings, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and others. The one visible page showed a screaming headline about the cigarette murders. The camera’s microphone had picked up Muntor’s labored breathing and the musical tone of his wheeze. Between breaths, the mike recorded the steady dripping of a leaky faucet at the sink.

  Muntor stopped recording and screwed the camera into the mounting on the tripod. After adjusting the angle, he flipped the switch back to “On.” With the camera rolling, Muntor walked into the shot. It had been only five days, yet he appeared more emaciated than in the first scene he shot of himself preparing the seven hundred FedEx envelopes. His thin hair was even longer, and he was wearing nothing but baggy white jockey shorts. His features were twisted, his skin stained by the candlelight.

  Later, Muntor would hold pages of script in a shaky hand and record the text over this scene.

  “Act II. Scene Four. The Anointing… The One who has chosen himself has also chosen to wreak vengeance for the murdered millions. He must be initiated on his path. There can be no return. The commitment is final. The self-chosen one must be strong. Only sacrifice will convince the many to change their lives.”

  The next shot, Muntor would later see, came from another angle and showed him walking into the bathroom carrying a large plastic bucket of ice. He dumped it into the water-filled tub. He reached back and pressed a button on a boom box. He got in the bathtub, showing no sign of reacting to the cold, and sat down. Strains of music rose from the boom box and Muntor reached toward the wooden stool. Again using the remote, Muntor clicked off the camera.

  The next camera angle was not perfect. Some of Muntor’s figure was too far to the right and out of the frame. What could be seen most of the time was Muntor’s arm being tied off with rubber tubing. From a paper bag on the wooden stool, he took a syringe and held it up to the candlelight to see it better. The camera showed it filled with milky-white liquid. Muntor jabbed a bulging vein in the middle of his inner elbow. The plunger sank slowly.

  A tentative serenity grew across Muntor’s face as the drug rush caused synapses to fire riotously. At the same time, the music reached its crescendo. Muntor, filling with numbness and energy from the Biphetamine and Dilaudid combination, began to straighten up, giving the effect of levitation, as if drawn erect by the ecstatic surge of energy. He stretched his bony arms out. He raised them slowly and evenly until he held them straight up, fingertips stretching for the ceiling. Then he brought them back down, again, slowly, steadily. When they reached his sides, he repeated the motion. All the way up, all the way down. And again. And again. Each time, faster and faster and faster until it became clear what he was doing.

  He was flapping. His wings. The ice sloshed around in the bathtub and splashed over the side as Muntor maniacally flapped and flapped, trying to become airborne, paradoxically levitated by the effect of the drugs and weighted down by the cold of the ice and the water.

  “Into the eternal darkness.” Muntor cackled. “Into fire,” he screeched. “Into ice.”

  Muntor opened his mouth wide. Several seconds elapsed before a long, shrill shriek rose from his gut and rattled the bathroom. Loud enough for the neighbors to hear, the sound twisted and turned like a snake in a sewer and finally gave in to what it was, a hideous laugh.

  PART TWO

  37

  St. Ignatius Cemetery

  Boston

  A long line of black limousines, passenger cars, flower cars and a hearse wound through the narrow paved pathways of the rolling burial grounds under a blue sky. Television cameras and satellite trucks were set up on every patch of open grass or driveway. Throngs of spectators and uniformed police were visible outside an improvised rope fence around the gravesite.

  A female television reporter stage-whispered a live broadcast no more than thirty yards away from the freshly dug grave.

  “This morning the eyes of Boston and the world are mourning the terrible end of a human life,” she said in pretentious solemnity. “And one which marked the beginning of a tragedy that continues its death march as I speak. For grade-schoolers Dolly and Brian Jenkins, though, this is not a symbolic or national event. It is the funeral of their mother, diabolically murdered seventy-two hours ago by a madman who glibly calls himself Virgil. This funeral ceremony honors the first of the killer’s victims. But the sorrow of everyone here is compounded by the knowledge that there will be at least 361 other funerals in cemeteries throughout the United States. How many more there may be, no one wants to guess. The mandate is clear. Somewhere out there is an indifferent killer who must be found and stopped, and soon, for the sake of all the Dollys and Brians in America… This is Evelyn Townes, On-The-Spot World News, live from Boston.”

  The reporter stared into the camera with an expression of barely controlled rage for several seconds. Then she drew an index finger across her throat.

  “How was that?” she asked the cameraman as she pulled a cosmetic mirror from her pocket to see if her false eyelashes had stayed put this time.

  The cameraman responded by singing some Elvis. “I’m all shook up,” and bent to pick up a coil of audio cable.

  “Really, Bob, I’m asking you. Was it any good?’

  ‘Yep, it works. Let’s get something to eat, Evie.’

  ‘Not so fast, pudgy. I want to make sure to shoot all the bigs. The Director of the FBI is here officially, and over there,’ she pointed to several blue vans, ‘I’ll bet lunch, are the Feds doing surveillance in case Smokey’s a funeral pe
eper. Shoot them as tight as you can. And I want you to get the kids looking down into their mom’s grave. I want a sweep of all the tearful citizens, and get in tight when you see one with a hanky. And real important, the CEO of Old Carolina is here. I’ll give you a hand job if you can get a shot of him by the casket with an arm around the dead lady’s kids. His PR dork’s already turned me down for an interview, so you get video no matter what.’

  ‘Which one’s Pratt?’

  Evelyn Townes pointed across the lawn to the tall thin man in the black suit, flanked by a group of raincoat-wearing security men. A few yards away stood Rhoads and public relations consultant Arnold Northrup.

  “I’ve had about as much of this as I can take,” Pratt groused. “I’m going back to the airport.”

  “As your PR man, Nick,” Northrup said, “I have to tell you how important it is for you to stay. It’s not going to look good at all for you to exit before the finale.”

  “So I pat the kids on the head, pay my respects, and do thirty seconds with CNN to say that it’s a very private loss for the family and I don’t wish to intrude? Oh, come on, Northrup. The media have made it enough of a circus already.”

  “You don’t need the media antagonistic toward you, Nick.”

  Pratt exhaled deeply. “Yes, Northrup, you’re right.”

  A few minutes later, Pratt stood with Danny Danielson, the CNN reporter who covered breaking stories in New England. Northrup promised Danielson the exclusive graveside interview if Danielson would promise not to bring the tobacco-cancer issue into it. Danielson agreed with a quick handshake.

  “… are you accusing the media of exploiting this event? Is that what you mean, Mr. Pratt?” The interview had been under control until Pratt let his temper intrude. His upper-lip tic kicked in.

  Pratt came to himself. Smoothly and with an air of great dignity, he replied softly, “Daniel, you know better. This is hardly a time for us to argue about things we’ve always argued about. In my opinion, we should all be thinking only of the two bereaved children who have been orphaned by this Virgil maniac.”