by John Philpin
“It’s the feather of a golden eagle.”
“An eagle feather? Really? Why on earth? Aren’t these illegal or something?”
She unwrapped the small parcel and glanced at the feather. “It’s pretty, I guess, but hardly seems worth spending time in jail. Where did you get it?”
I wanted to slit her throat. I detest shallow prattle. She guessed this fragment of a bird that had soared above the Sierra Nevadas was “pretty.”
Lucas Frank had written a profile after one of my kills.
“He is reclusive, lives alone, does not socialize. He has never ‘fit’ in any social group. But as strange as others will consider his behavior, they would not think him impolite. He can smile, nod hello, but he does not waste time in frivolous chatter. He cannot tolerate others perceptions of the world if they contradict his own. He is intelligent, above average, but far from superior.”
“It is not a superior specimen,” I said.
“It doesn’t have mites or anything, does it?”
“If he completed any degree it was a bachelors, no graduate degrees, with a major in biology or chemistry (a basic pre-med curriculum). He studies only what interests him, when he feels like it, and his resistance to authority rendered him a mediocre student.”
She placed the feather on the table, brushed her hands on her jeans, and opened the wine.
“He could have accomplished more academically and professionally had he not been such a misfit. When he chooses to study, he does so exhaustively, perhaps in some esoteric fields, and works overtime at it.”
Samantha leaned over the tray and poured two glasses of the Van der Heyden.
“What’s it like dating an FBI agent?” I asked. “Herb seems to have to move around a great deal.”
She brought my glass of Chardonnay. “Difficult,” she said.
“He is meticulous, considers himself perfect, and he is proud of the creation that he has left for your examination. He has moved around, left jobs at his convenience. Any military career will be undistinguished because of his inability to deal with authority He did not live up to his own expectations for himself so he has redefined them and rewritten the past.”
“Well,” Samantha said, “I’m glad you called, and I’m glad we could get together.”
“So am I.”
“Clinically, he is personality disordered—paranoid, narcissistic, obsessive compulsive. Also, he is dissociative. Despite the professional community’s reluctance to accept the diagnostic nomenclature, the most accurate label for him is ‘psychopath.’ He can play any role he needs to, and be convincing. He sees himself as the most powerful and brilliant person on earth—godlike. ‘Law and order’ are intellectual abstractions that he considers himself above. He believes that he is witnessing a breakdown of morality, justice, social and economic systems—otherwise he would have been recognized for his brilliance. He uses no drugs, doesn’t smoke. If he drinks, it is only the occasional glass of wine.”
“What exactly is it that Herb wants you to do? Is it the Unabomber?”
I shook my head. “Samantha …”
“Then it must be the Oklahoma murders. You said on the phone that you were going to do some forensic work for him. What kind?”
“He is motivated by vengeance and the desire to have his superiority recognized, but he must maintain his anonymity. He is a game player, loves to taunt authority. All the clues he offers are spurious and will lead nowhere.”
She had put down her glass and folded her arms across her chest. Her mouth was a thin line. Her eyes were narrow, questioning, skeptical. Samantha’s face seemed to twist and mold and shape itself into a mask. This woman wanted an answer to her question, and she pushed like someone accustomed to getting her own way.
“The control he seeks is personal. The recognition he requires is public. This is frustrating to him because he cannot reveal his identity. He has dedicated his life to a single mission: murder. He sees himself as totally justified in everything he does.”
As I explained the work that I would pretend to be doing for Agent Cooper, I reached behind my back and gripped the handle of my knife.
“Tell me what you do when the government doesn’t have its fangs in you,” she said.
“The feather has no mites.”
“What?”
Lucas Frank had written his “profile of an unknown subject” in 1976. He completed it based on a single Massachusetts case, and submitted the document to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Of course, nothing happened, and the case remained open.
In 1985, with Quantico operational, I returned to that same community and committed an identical murder. I lingered in the small town, staying at a local motel, reading the newspapers, watching the TV news, and observing state and federal officials come and go from the police station diagonally across the street.
After a week of this, just as I was growing bored with my game, Special Agent Dexter Willoughby participated in a televised press conference dealing with the case. A Boston reporter asked him about the possibility of a connection to the unsolved case from 1976.
“We see no reason to assume linkage between those cases,” Willoughby said. “To begin with, the 1976 homicide is remote in time, about nine years, and other than the type of weapon used, there really are no similarities.”
At first I thought it was a trick.
It was not. The gurus of crime were just as daft as any other teachers.
I was in Houston several months later, skimming through the day’s Chronicle, when I found an article describing the work of Quantico’s “psychological detectives.” A diplomatic Lucas Frank, M.D., was quoted in the article. He said that he envied the agency’s resources, and anticipated that these highly trained agents would be at the forefront in dealing with the growing epidemic of serial murder. A new addition to the BSU staff, Special Agent Herb Cooper, mentioned the unsolved case from 1985. “We’re constantly checking new cases,” Cooper told the reporter, “looking for similar MOs, anything that would allow us to go back and close out some of these older cases.”
Rubbish.
It was time to leave something for all the super sleuths—a replication of a brilliant work of art, signed by the artist.
Samantha Becker’s head snapped back as I slashed my blade against her throat.
LANE MET ME IN THE WILLARD’S LOBBY.
“Jackson’s on his way to pick us up,” she said. “He’s taking us to a homicide scene in Georgetown. He didn’t say much. Somebody called it in to the District police. They called the feds. Jackson wants us to see it.”
She pointed to the door. “He just pulled up.”
As I got into Jackson’s car, he handed me a manila envelope. “I know Lane saw this in person,” he said. “You might want to review the photos.”
“What’s going on?”
Jackson didn’t answer. He pulled back into traffic and drove as I slipped a set of crime-scene photographs out of the envelope.
“That’s Sarah Sinclair,” Lane said, looking over my shoulder.
“Our victim’s name is Samantha Becker,” Jackson said. “She was an assistant program director at Ford’s Theater, organizing events, booking guests. The crime scene is her home in Georgetown. I walked in there, took one look around, and bells started going off.”
“Why are you giving me Sarah Sinclair?”
Jackson’s expression was hard to read, but I did notice a tightening of his facial muscles. “The crime scenes are almost identical,” he said.
We crossed the P Street bridge into Georgetown. Jackson made a couple of turns, then stopped in front of a private home, a narrow, Federal-style town house. The place was crawling with District cops and feds, including Rexford Landry.
As we got out of the car, Jackson said, “Looks like it happened sometime last night.”
We walked up the steps and crossed the foyer. I hesitated for a moment beneath the churchlike, vaulted ceilings, then dropped into a crouch beside the blond c
orpse. Her long hair was matted with blood.
“Oh, God,” Lane said, looking around the apartment. “This is exactly how Sarah Sinclair’s apartment looked when we found her.”
I shuffled through the photographs, stepped back, and looked at the room from a variety of angles. Everything matched the Sinclair scene. Candles burned down to puddles of wax. Wineglasses. A tray of crackers and cheese. Her dress was white, like a wedding gown, with birds embroidered on the neck, flying in the same direction as the slice through both carotid arteries.
“Samantha Becker wasn’t wearing that dress,” I said, stating the obvious. “He stripped her and put that on her after he killed her.”
All the display was after the fact of murder. He had killed her on the sofa—there was a large bloodstain there—rolled her onto the floor, stripped and redressed her, then dragged her into position near the coffee table.
“What about the clothes she was wearing?” I asked.
“He must have removed them from the scene,” Jackson said.
“She’s divorced,” Landry said from behind us. “Mother of two. Doesn’t look like the kids live here. Ex-husband’s a banker in Delaware. We’re trying to locate him. We’re also running a background on him. Couple of guys are up at Ford’s finding out what they can about her.”
“Waste of time,” I muttered.
“There’s the feather,” Jackson said, indicating the glass coffee table.
I stood up, walked around the white, oversized sofa, and looked down at a large, brown and yellow feather. “Have somebody at the Smithsonian take a look at it. I think you’ll find that it’s a neck feather from a golden eagle. He didn’t want us to miss it.”
At the Sinclair scene, just beyond Sarah’s outstretched fingers, Wolf had dropped a blue jay plume. With Samantha Becker, he had replicated the Sinclair homicide, and added another dimension to it.
“He’s rubbing our faces in our inability to catch him,” I said.
Wolf was working the city like a skilled politician, operating a step ahead of everyone else, making his moves, and leaving us to suck up his wake.
“Sarah Sinclair’s murder was the reason that we caught on to Wolf,” I said. “VICAP was filled with his escapades, but no one had ever connected them.”
“I worked a serial case in Richmond years ago,” Jackson said. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with. Turned out that we had a burglar who graduated to sexual assault, then sexual homicide. The computers weren’t much help on that one either.”
“Someone should reprogram them. Danny Rolling started out as a voyeuristic adolescent in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from looking in windows to going through them. Sometimes he took something. Sometimes he just moved things around. Eventually he raped and murdered college students in Gainesville. Its the need for a higher level of excitement, a bigger payoff. If you looked only at the official record of his arrests, you would dismiss him as an armed robber.”
“Anybody could’ve copied this,” Landry said. “You’d be amazed at the crime-scene details that leak out all over the Internet.”
“Lane, was anything about Sarah Sinclair’s dress ever released?”
“No. The media picked up that she had been entertaining Wolf, that they’d had drinks. I remember a few other details, but nothing about the dress.”
“He won’t be ignored,” I said to Landry. “He’s going to have his recognition, even if he has to bring you and your agency to its knees to get it.”
“You make this guy sound like some kind of fucking genius,” Landry said. “Even if the asshole was alive, which he is not, he’d be just like the rest of ’em. You two are like girls at a slumber party, freaking each other out with ghost stories.”
Landry turned away and stomped back through the foyer.
“Pop, why an eagle feather?”
“The first thing that comes to mind is power,” I told her. “The eagle is a predator. It’s also a significant motif in Native American lore. Wolf’s biological father was Abenaki.”
“Samantha Becker was dating one of our agents,” Jackson said. “Herb Cooper. He’s handling that Oklahoma case I told you about. He and Samantha went out a few times earlier this summer. She was wrapped up in her work, so was he. Then Herb was assigned to Oklahoma City.”
“Maybe that’s the connection,” I said. “Cooper ever work with Willoughby?”
“One case. An unsolved in 1985. Massachusetts, I think. We’ve got someone pulling the records now. Will it connect to you?”
Wolf had spent time in Samantha Becker’s home. He knew he could not perfectly duplicate the Sinclair crime scene, but he had come close.
He would also know that he had made a believer of me back in Lake Albert. Why take such pains to simulate this murder from a year ago?
To the FBI, Wolf was still officially dead. The bureaucratic wheels that Jackson had set in motion hadn’t completed their rotation. Then there was Rexford Landry.
You want to be officially resurrected, don’t you, lad?
“The Massachusetts case has to be connected to me,” I told Jackson, “but I think Ms. Becker might be for the Bureau’s benefit.”
“Do you know what happened to that old house in Vermont after our people were finished with it?” Jackson asked.
“No.”
“Willoughby bought it. He paid off the tax lien, then erected a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Apparently it looks like there should be a jail there, sitting out in the middle of the woods.”
“If Willoughby thought there was more to find, why not Wolf’s office—the loft over the barn up near Brownsville?”
“Our people took everything out of there. They removed wall paneling, floorboards, you name it. Willough-by’s wife says the case was an obsession with him. He went over every object, skimmed through every book, read every piece of paper. At first she thought he was going to write his own book. All he’d say was that there was something missing and he had to find it. He had flown up there four times in the last six months.”
Willoughby had more than doubts. His purchase of the Vermont property was obviously the information that he didn’t want me to have. He was certain that Wolf had walked away from the explosion. The senior agent required something tangible, some physical thing that he could place on a table at a meeting.
“There’s a young girl who may know what happened in Swanton. I want to show her the composites that we have of Wolf. Then I’d like to go back to the old house. Is there a way onto the land?”
Jackson handed me a key. “Willoughby’s wife gave me that. It fits the gate. I didn’t give it to you. Please check in with me when you get back.”
WITH THE SLATE ALMOST WIPED CLEAN, I EXperienced a wave of weariness. If it hadn’t been for the intricacy and bold scope of my script’s final scenes, the final thirty-six hours, I would have had difficulty dragging myself out of bed.
I knew it would pass. These periodic bouts of lethargy have always lifted.
In college, I had been intrigued by the idea of ennui, especially the existential variety. I didn’t think that I had ever suffered from it. Sartre was a bore. Camus was more to my taste—entertaining, as he did, both homicide and suicide as philosophical statements.
As I drove south on 1-95 through the rolling Virginia hills, I realized that as satisfying as my design was, I was entering its most challenging phase. I should have been feeling excitation, as I did in my youth.
Instead, as I left 1-95 at the exit for the Marine base at Quantico, I was thinking about theories of the absurd, and about how you tend to disregard the role of legend in your lives. Í am the stuff of legend. Samantha Becker, in her role as the dead Sarah Sinclair, is the stuff of legend.
You have allowed statisticians to assign the label of legend to athletes, racehorses, politicians, serial killers. You are a nation that knows batting averages, elapsed times, trends, whether DeSalvo or the Manson family claimed more victims. The FBI allows the same number cr
unchers to determine the probabilities that are the life blood of a place like their cave at Quantico.
Even the cooperative international efforts of the English and the Russians rely on computer-generated models. Charts and bar graphs. They have discovered an approach that impresses the masses. The drunken Sunday football fan knows what to expect from Thurmon Thomas or Emmitt Smith in yards per carry, and believes that all numbers are scientific. Even those who flunked basic math have been drugged with this Guinness Book mentality.
This is part of the reason that I want to bring it all to their doorstep—to provide them with the ultimate experience in humiliation, laced with a dash of cataclysm.
Your numbers are meaningless. You cannot measure what you cannot comprehend.
The “mind hunters” ask their incarcerated serial killers whether they believe in God, and whether they believe they’ll have to answer to God for what they’ve done. Why? Is it a reminder? A projection? An exercise in a socialized variety of sadism?
“Maybe we couldn’t juice you, but God’s gonna burn your ass.”
This exercise is similar to the way they shove crime-scene photos in front of visiting members of Congress or media people. The civilians recoil in disgust. The federal cop nods his head sagely and says, “This is what people are capable of doing to one another. These are the cases we look at every day.”
Who would dare cut their funding after a display like that?
Your experts are floundering—laboring to cling to some system of beliefs, some structure of biblical justice. An eye for an eye—something to keep them going when they realize that we are multiplying exponentially, and are far more intelligent than they could ever dream of being.
When they ask about the quality of a life lived within walls of concrete and steel, are they establishing rapport? After removing the suit jacket and loosening the tie to appear casual, just one of the guys, do they believe that they are approximating compatibility with the man in chains and orange coveralls?
