by John Philpin
“He’s even less happy with you now than he was before, however,” Jackson said.
“Oh?”
“You picked him out last night. You knew we had a tail on you.”
“Yes. I did.”
“He doesn’t believe he slipped on the bathroom floor in Jewell Howard’s.”
“I wouldn’t know. The floor was soaked when I went through. Looked like somebody missed the bowl.”
“He says the bouncer whacked him.”
“Oscar? Landry missing any money? His identification? His weapon?”
Jackson shook his head and sighed. “Let’s just say he slipped.”
“Agent Jackson, I don’t give a shit what happened to your protege while he was in the pisser. I also have nothing but antipathy for his abuses of my tax dollars in Florida. He told me I was chasing a ghost. If he thought he was going to put a cork in the cocaine trade in Miami, he was delusional. If you alphabet agencies can’t work together, and really want to shoot one another, please have at it. Just try to be more efficient about it. Now, I’ll ask you the same question I asked Landry. If Wolf is dead, why follow me?”
Jackson was silent.
“Did you talk with Susan Walker?”
Jackson sighed. “Before Willoughby shut her out, she got a good look at what was left of that old house. She also saw some of the preliminary reports. She’s not concerned about John Wolf.”
“She’s comfortable with coincidence?”
“Apparently so.”
“Is that why she hasn’t returned Lane’s calls?”
Jackson looked at me. “She didn’t say anything about Lane calling.”
Another reason for me to stick pins in my Rexford Landry doll.
We drove along in silence for several minutes.
“You are not comfortable with coincidence,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t tap on my door and invite me out.”
He nodded. “I reviewed the material on Sarah Humphrey and Alan Chadwick. I remembered Wolf’s fascination with birds and feathers. His sister’s killer ate a meal in the trailer after cutting her. He placed an odd glass bird on the table, like it was supposed to be a centerpiece. None of her neighbors remember seeing the thing before. Her husband said he vaguely remembered it. Hadn’t seen it in years. Said he thought it was a gift from her brother. I also called Boston. Spoke to a guy who said he’s an old friend of yours. Ray Bolton.”
“Ray brought me my first case,” I said. “We go back a lot of years.”
“He was kind enough to do some checking on Chad-wick’s death, which was ruled a suicide, by the way There was a compact disk on a chair in the pathologist’s office. Stravinsky’s Firebird. Chadwick preferred classical music, but according to his colleagues, he purchased only vinyl recordings.”
I shook my head and silently saluted my opponent. Stravinsky’s ballet is the story of the phoenix. I slipped the brass figure from my pocket. “This was delivered to me at the hotel. It’s the phoenix, rising out of the ashes, returning to life. It was wrapped in a page from Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds—mockingbirds. Janet Orr, my friend at the lake, received kingbirds. The page was torn from my copy of the book while I was unconscious on the patio.”
Jackson glanced at the brass rendition of the mythical bird, then at me. “I told you that I was willing to consider any overlap in our investigations. Chadwick also received a page from Peterson—coots, page sixty-one. Humphrey’s was page thirty-four, old squaws.”
I knew that Wolf’s signature in Willoughby’s office had not been a page from Peterson. The line from the poet Rimbaud scrolling across the agent’s computer screen had marked the murder as Wolf’s. I also knew that my not asking about that crime scene would appear strange.
“What about Willoughby?”
“Nothing from the bird books,” Jackson said, shaking his head, “but someone is involved in an elaborate charade. Maybe an ardent admirer, a fan of Wolf’s. We’ve seen a couple of cases like that before.”
That had been Lane’s initial reaction—that we were dealing with a copycat. I respected Jackson’s intelligence enough to believe he knew that Willoughby’s body had been propped in place for a reason. Something should have been resting between the agent’s two cupped hands. I also believed that he was aware of the Rimbaud reference. He had to know.
“I don’t buy it,” I said. “The pathologist was connected to Wolf’s late teens and early twenties. The sister connects to his childhood. Both of them played significant roles in our ability to understand Wolf, and to find him. Neither was ever identified in the media. Willoughby became one of your investigative superstars at Wolf’s expense. John Wolf is motivated by vengeance.”
“Why didn’t Wolf kill you in Michigan?”
“I think because he wanted me here for the rest of his show.”
“Willoughby.”
“And Susan Walker, Lane—whatever else he has planned.”
“What else does he have in mind?” Jackson asked. “And when?”
I gazed out the window. Something was nudging at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t get a grasp on it. “I don’t know,” I said.
Jackson slid a photograph out of an envelope and handed it to me. I stared at the picture. An auto dealership. Willoughby’s Volvo with the driver’s door open. A group of cops standing around. Lab techs going through the agent’s car. High on a pole, at the end of the lot, was the owner’s sign: FEATHERSTONE FORD.
“I don’t think that’s a stretch,” Jackson said.
“Neither do I.”
“Officially, I can’t look for John Wolf. I don’t think that matters. If it isn’t someone doing a damn decent imitation of Wolf, that leaves the original article, right?”
What Jackson was offering was much better than nothing. “Right,” I agreed.
THE BSU, IN ITS UNDERGROUND QUARTERS AT THE FBI Academy in Quantico, was even more institutional and depressing than I had imagined. The place was sixty feet down, ill-lighted, tomblike.
Special Agent Landry sat in one of the cramped cubicles. As we passed, he looked up, displaying a bandage on his forehead, a blackened eye, and a vicious scowl.
“Landry’s reviewing all of Willoughby’s files,” Jackson said.
“So, I’ll have a different tail tonight?”
“Depends on where you go. Why not just file an itinerary with me? Be easier on all of us.”
“My sister once told me that life wasn’t fair. Think she was right?”
We both smiled, and walked in silence through the hall.
“This is Herb Cooper’s office,” Jackson said, pointing at one of the small rooms. “He’s working a case in Oklahoma, homicide victims buried in a Native American burial grounds. We have to identify the victims, two entire families, without disturbing the site,”
“Is this a recent case?”
“It’s from the sixties,” Jackson said. “The Winklers and the Parmenters. Both families had sixteen-year-old daughters. We think the kids were the targets, and we figure the same perps did both. It’s a little like the Clutters in Kansas, the Truman Capote book, but money wasn’t an issue here. Also, whoever killed them didn’t leave the bodies to be found. We were lucky to stumble onto this thing—local guy found a jawbone and a femur—but it’s a tough one to work. We can’t disturb the burial grounds, and there could be all kinds of evidence in there.”
I met so many agents on my tour that the names flew by Lawrence, Draper, Bowers, Gannet, Means. Always, I was the intruder, the outsider. The women and men that I met were polite, but distant. I wasn’t a visiting official who needed to be impressed. I was a civilian critic and competitor.
When Jackson and I sat over sandwiches and beers in the cafeteria called the Boardroom, he said, “I thought you were retired.”
“I was. I liked it that way I’m slowly realizing that I can’t stay retired.”
“We’re not doing the job?” Jackson asked, with a twinkle in his eye.
I laughed. �
��You’re asking me? Jesus. Of course you’re not. Your press releases and your movies and the way you treat the local PDs—all of that says you know something nobody else does. You don’t. None of us can do the job alone, Jackson. I think you know that.”
He nodded. “The Bureau is changing,” he said. “For the better, I mean. It’s a slow process.”
“I have no patience with any bureaucracy,” I told him. “I’m not saying that I don’t have my own quirks and limitations. Wolf is certainly teaching me a lesson. When you turn your back on the predators, they snap at your heels. Given a choice like that, I’d much rather be the aggressor, and I don’t have time to wait for a committee decision to turn me loose.”
Jackson grinned. “Everybody said you were a pissant.”
“Damn right,” I said, taking a bite from my sandwich. “Lane says I should be in the Guinness Book under ‘strangest humanoid creatures.’ ”
“What about the pages from Peterson?”
“Good question. We could say that Alan Chadwick was a coot, Sarah Humphrey was an old squaw, and so forth. Those were just the first entries on the pages, though, right?”
Jackson nodded.
“That would be cute, but it wouldn’t be Wolf.”
“Or a fan,” the agent added.
“Or a fan,” I echoed, “since that’s your price of admission. The references are inconsistent. The kingbird and mockingbird would be references to him, not his victims, like the other two. He’s too rigid for that. They’d all have to be the same.”
“So?”
“You gonna make me do all the work?”
Jackson laughed. “Two of the pages have text carried over from previous pages,” he said, “There are other birds mentioned on all the pages. How can we be sure about what he wants us to see?”
I didn’t know the answer, but I liked the idea that I was not the only one thinking about the question.
JACKSON DROPPED ME AT THE WILLARD. LANE still wasn’t back from the District PD.
I began reading selections from the journal that Wolf had kept on his office computer. Several times there was an entire page that contained only the words: “I speak to you.”
The audacious prick.
There were accounts of numerous murders, a long section about his sister, brief entries dealing with his mother and stepfather. One of the computer files was a lengthy, anecdotal report written by Dr. Elbert Bernard, a psychiatrist at the private school where Wolf had been confined in his late teens, just before he departed for Harvard. Authorities even then suspected him of terrible things.
Bernard was a nondirective therapist who allowed the relationships with his patients to evolve naturally. His taped sessions with the young Wolf began as a chess tutorial, with the teenager advising the older man on how to improve his game.
Wolf had rebuked his student: “Don’t think one or two moves ahead. Six, eight, ten—there is no limit to how far you can anticipate. The game is finite, after all. The moves must conform to certain rules. The area of the board is quite small. You tend to view it as a series of narrow corridors. These passages intersect, Dr. Bernard. Each one opens into others, creating new and different possibilities. Corridors confine. We must break out, then consider the whole. It’s a Zen sort of thing. I nurture my capacity to see not merely to the end, but beyond. Those who lecture us that perfection is not possible are wrong, of course. Perfection can be achieved, but to stay with any one thing that long would be rather boring.”
Dr. Bernard asked Wolf to illustrate his point. The young man scribbled on a sheet of paper, then turned the paper facedown and slid it across to the psychiatrist.
“My move has created a number of possible moves for you,” Wolf said. “If I entertain, say, the two or three most likely moves, then I can anticipate their impact, my subsequent move, your options, mine, and so forth. Try it.”
“Amazing,” Bernard said. “You’re very clever.”
“And you, unless you change your self-limiting style of thinking, are six moves from check, seven from checkmate.”
“Are you willing to entertain a hypothetical?”
“Of course.”
“If you had done what others have alleged— if you were killing people—would you approach such acts in the same manner that you approach this game?”
“Generally speaking. But chess is a game for simpletons, Dr. Bernard. So is life. They are most comfortable in their sameness, somewhat challenging because of what passes for complexity. I could be as adept at taking chess pieces, or lives, as I am alleged to be, only if I were to play these games according to the prevailing customs. Does that address your hypothetical?”
“It does.”
Wolf cleared his throat. “The two officers who were here came equipped with their own biases of thought and behavior. One operated by the basic rules of interrogation. He asked questions, waited for answers, took notes. The other was something of a Neanderthal. Very physical. Crowding my personal space, even bumping against me. As if he could force responses. It’s amusing and disconcerting at the same time. These are the people to whom we have delegated the task of protecting us. I don’t feel terribly well protected. Do you recall the Heirens case from the 1940s?”
“I do.”
“The authorities assumed that Heirens’s writing on the mirror—some business about ‘catch me before I kill more’—was a plea from a sick man. Now, if he’s sick, Dr. Bernard, well, that’s an aberration from the mean. The thin end of the bell curve. That explains everything. He’s not like the rest of us. He’s mentally ill. Interesting. I read Heirens’s message as a challenge. There’s another aspect of his case that intrigues me. He was caught for a number of burglaries and placed in a strict Catholic boarding school with lots of nasty nuns. Did they turn a burglar into a killer? I assaulted my parents, Dr. Bernard. What will I become here? Do you suppose that the state might have made a terrible mistake with me?”
It was a rhetorical and argumentative question. Bernard knew enough to not answer.
After a long pause, Wolf said, “Make your move.”
I WOKE UP SOMETIME IN THE AFTERNOON.
The sun pissed its way in through the only window in the apartment. I was drained, running on empty
I didn’t move, just stared at the ceiling. A lightbulb hung from a single strand of wire that disappeared through a crack in the plaster. The crack, shaped like the contour of a woman’s breast, was filled with cobwebs. Stains from the last century’s rains formed other patterns on the ceiling and walls.
The ratcheting of rodent teeth emanated from somewhere behind the lath.
Shit.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and lurched to a sitting position. I swallowed the last of the pills I had taken from my sister.
Last night I drank wine at the Willard. A cheap taxi ride transported me here, light-years away from the splendor of the hotel and into a zone of marginal people. Sometimes it’s necessary to live like this, beyond the edge of what passes for civilized society. It is a matter of survival.
Somewhere in the apartment building a TV blasted, advertising everything from Jesus to Jeeps.
I groped along the top of the bureau until my hand wrapped around the .44 Magnum. I watched the clock as the second hand drifted past the three. If it reached the three again—and the TV was still screaming about breakfast cereals, cars, athletic shoes, tampons, detergents, deodorants—I was going to walk out into the hall, find the offending apartment, kick in the door, and shoot everyone in sight.
You are such well-trained consumers, such obedient buyers. You listen, read, see images, digest the spin, allow reality to be created for you, then go out and buy—even when it is a product that will kill you. I have had only one victim who was as compliant as you, and even she did not pay me to end her life.
The second hand swept by the six.
Yeast infections. Beer. Basketball shoes. More cars.
The blasts of TV noise were probably some kids’ mot
her plopped like Jabba the Hutt in front of Ricki Lake while they were out in the alley shooting dope.
Nine.
America’s number-one-selling minivan. Twelve.
I pushed myself off the bed and walked through the combination living-dining-kitchen area, a rectangular space demarcated by a sofa, a red Formica-topped, aluminum table, and the roach-ridden sink.
Barefoot, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and stained boxers, I stepped into the hall and listened.
There was laughter from the TV. “So you didn’t know he was in the next room sleeping with your sister.”
“No. And I didn’t know he was seeing my mother, either.”
More laughter.
I walked down the stairs and turned to my right. A black man carrying a lunch pail came out of a silent apartment and froze when he looked at me. His eyes drifted down to the Magnum. “Go to work,” I said.
He slipped past me and ran down the stairs. I walked farther down the hall and stopped at apartment four. Listening.
“What was the final toll?”
“He slept with my mother first, then with me, both of my sisters.”
I pulled back the hammer on the gun.
“Two weeks ago he called me in my dorm at college and had the nerve to say he wanted to see me again.”
“But you did see him, didn’t you?”
There were groans from the audience as I raised the .44, preparing to kick in the door.
The TV in the apartment went silent just as my sister’s final gift, the pills, kicked in. My head cleared.
I lowered the hammer and dropped my arm to my side. Whoever lived behind the door had just won the lottery and didn’t know it.
I walked back to my apartment.
Everything is part of the design.
