Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  It was a collection of clippings, photos, and articles on we, kept by a man obsessed. There were copies of professional papers that I had written, both of my books, newspaper clippings—most of them under Anthony Michaels’s byline—covering many of the cases that I had worked. Wolf had critiqued all of them with slashing red strokes.

  I felt a rush of nausea and dizziness. Wolf had prowled through my trash, digging out personal letters, even greeting cards. The bastard had stalked me.

  It was monstrous. He had been at it for so long that at first he snapped his photographs with an old Polaroid—the kind that you had to peel the photo apart from its built-in negative. In a fading black-and-white, Ray Bolton and I stood in front of Cora Riordan’s Huntington Avenue apartment building.

  Eight-year-old Lanie and I walked out of our house on Beacon Hill. Ten-year-old Lanie and I sat in the sand at Winthrop Beach.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. As I lifted the various papers out of the box, the world was spinning, my hands shaking. I hadn’t eaten since US Air, but my stomach surged as if it wanted to empty itself.

  The quality of Wolf’s pictures improved. Color, some thirty-five-millimeter telephotos. Me with Lane in her cap and gown at her graduation from college. Me participating in a forum at Harvard’s Sanders Theater.

  “I don’t fucking believe this.”

  There were shots of the aging killer, Norman Elgar. All of these were photographs that Wolf had taken. He had visited Elgar, talked with him, just as I had.

  “His whole life has been about me,” I whispered.

  At any moment during the last two decades, Wolf could have stepped from the shadows and annihilated my entire family.

  The flawless predator. Once he has selected his prey, he is locked on. Nothing distracts him, moves him away, especially not time. There are no time limits in a reptilian mind. But why did he lock on?

  I remember walking along a dike in the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. I had looked down over the bank into the murky waters of the canal and saw the snout and hooded eyes of an alligator. The rest of the beast was under the water. I watched him for a while. He seemed to be just basking there. Then I noticed the broad, black wings of an anhinga, drying itself in a bush overhanging the canal, perhaps five feet away from the reptile. The bird, too, was motionless. I was wondering whether these were simply the parallel lives lived by two of the swamp’s inhabitants, when, after nearly half an hour, the anhinga moved its head, poking its beak at some irritation.

  The water exploded as ten feet of alligator, jaws agape, snapped the bird from its perch and disappeared beneath the surface of the canal.

  The eruption was sudden, startling, and final.

  I remember that I was impressed with the beast’s patience. I knew that it would not have mattered how long he had to wait for that momentary distraction, and the bit of motion that identified his target. Time was not a limiting factor.

  The flawless predator.

  What was I? A meal, or a threat?

  As I pawed through the contents of Wolf’s metal box, I understood everything that had happened a year ago. Wolf had wanted me involved in the investigation into Sarah Sinclair’s death. He knew that to get me involved, all he had to do was threaten Lane.

  He had been waiting.

  This time, he had sent his invitation with three shots from a Remington 30.06. Once again, I accepted. I had gone seeking Willoughby.

  Wolf was waiting.

  For two decades, I had been guilty of the worst possible sin that one can commit against the narcissistic psychopath. I had failed to notice him. Wolf had haunted my life, and I had not heard the floorboards creaking in the night.

  And always, Wolf waited.

  He wanted me to see him, to be aware of him, to know that he was there. He positioned himself at the edge of my vision, slightly away from the corner of my eye. He baited me, waiting for me to snap a glance in his direction. That never happened.

  “Why me?” I said into the evening air.

  He was an enduring shadow, but I didn’t know that he was there.

  He kept his obsession separate, split away None of it appeared in any of his files.

  It was no wonder that Wolf knew how I thought, how to anticipate what I might do. He had paid more attention to me and my work than I had.

  Why was I the one?

  His collection contained a brochure from a workshop I had attended—The Expert Witness: Presenting Forensic Evidence in the Courtroom. A Polaroid photograph was tucked inside the brochure. In the picture, I stood outside the conference room talking with Teddy Morgan.

  I remembered that moment. Teddy and two of her associates had organized the workshop, and I was complaining that their presenter, despite his sterling credentials, had an accent that was incomprehensible.

  “People are taking notes,” Teddy said defensively.

  “They’re writing letters home,” I told her. “ ‘Send money and explosives.’ ”

  I remember the camera flashes. Teddy and I had ignored them. We were both involved in high-publicity cases at the time, and reporters had been plaguing us.

  I stared at the photo. Wolf couldn’t have been more than ten feet away when he snapped it.

  Obsession.

  As I became more well known, Wolf had wallowed in enforced anonymity. When a detective, reporter, lawyer, or polygrapher wanted to talk murder, she or he called me. As one who killed, Wolf knew more about the subject than I, but was denied his place in the sun.

  I remember other cases that spanned years, and most of those involved emotional attachment. Predation occurred, but only following a period of subconscious incubation. An Oregon man’s twenty-five-year fixation with his ex-wife ended in her murder and his suicide in North Carolina. He hated her, blamed her for everything unpleasant that had befallen him, but his compost pile of passionate detritus had required a quarter century to percolate.

  The case of Donovan Kane had been more prominent. Kane was an attorney who had negotiated with a former Louisiana cop to have Kane’s wife murdered. The woman had the good fortune to develop appendicitis on the night that she was supposed to die. Having collected most of his fee, the cop could afford a spasm of conscience, and assisted the state with their case against Kane.

  A plea agreement would have required that Kane serve no jail time and pay a substantial fine. His license to practice law would be revoked. The judge in the case, Martin Lockworth, rejected the negotiated plea. Kane stood trial, was convicted, and served seven years before being released on parole.

  Each Christmas during his incarceration, and for a decade after that, Kane sent Christmas cards to Lock-worth. He also sent birthday notes, and congratulatory scribbles for each of Lockworth’s publicized professional accomplishments.

  As Lockworth’s reputation grew, Kane wallowed first in jail, then in obscurity.

  Nearly eighteen years after his appearance in Lock-worth’s courtroom, Donovan Kane, a passable realtor, emerged from the shadows of the parking lot at a fashionable local restaurant, fired nine rounds from a semiautomatic pistol into the judge’s body, and vanished.

  Obsession.

  When Kane, as “Donald Kahn,” was arrested in Toledo, Ohio, where he worked as a legal adviser to city government, he refused to speak to anyone. The shrinks called him paranoid, but competent.

  Donovan Kane was not paranoid, and he was more than competent. With the assistance of his attorneys and a psychiatrist from Columbus, Kane convinced the court that he suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder as a result of childhood abuse. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and confined in a state institution for the criminally insane. He promptly escaped.

  Kane then murdered his ex-wife. He also killed the cop who had betrayed him. This ghost of a man was implicated in a dozen other murders, apparently random killings that had no connection to his past. His fingerprints turned up at homicide scenes in Illino
is, Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, Texas.

  Once he had killed, it seemed as if Kane had developed a taste for it. He enjoyed the act of murder, tripped on the rush of power. Like D. B. Cooper, who leaped with his bag of money from a jet somewhere over the rugged mountains of the American Northwest, Donovan Kane had his own cult following. There were clubs, discussion groups on the Internet exchanging bits of information, possible sightings. Instead of seeing Elvis at Burger King, it was “DK at the BK.”

  For all I knew, Donovan Kane, now in his middle fifties, could still be plying the trade that had begun as a single directed obsession—the judge who had rejected the plea agreement in Kane’s case.

  I had been John Wolf’s Judge Lockworth.

  The past is a scrap heap of myths and realities, confused dreams and nightmares, hits of illusion and shards of evanescent truth. That was never enough for you, was it, lad? I came along and read your mind without committing murder, without ever knowing you. You immediately saw the similarities. Later, you recognized the threat.

  There was an audiotape at the bottom of Wolf’s metal box. It reminded me of the many messages that Wolf had left with his victims—the music that played over and over in Sarah Sinclair’s house when her ex-husband found her body

  This tape had its own message, a single sheet of paper. “Where will you celebrate the anniversary of my death?” Wolf had written. “It is only fitting that I return to the underground to observe the holiday. Perhaps you will join me for the fireworks.”

  On our way to Swanton, Lucy Travis said that it had snowed in Vermont at this time last year. I knew that because I was here, tracking Wolf. I’m not good with dates, but the “anniversary” had to be within days, perhaps even hours. There was nothing left of Wolf’s tunnel. What the hell was he talking about?

  I walked down the slope, closed and locked Willoughby’s gate behind me. I sat in the car and slipped the tape into the cassette player. It was Jacques Brel’s “Le Mori-bond,” “The Dying Man,” a song about the death of a long-time friend. There was nothing homicidal in the song, but it didn’t require a great deal of imagination for me to get the message.

  I was a threat, an irritation that you were compelled to tease like an aching tooth. You had to be there— watching, waiting. I just might have snapped my head around. But since I did not react, you allowed us to live parallel lives until you decided otherwise. Now, of course, it was my turn to fade into dust.

  I was John Wolf’s “dying man,” and had been for twenty years.

  THE CEMETERY IS AN ART FORM.

  Angles, lines, shadows, and at night, the purest darkness—all are part of the geometry and stage setting of death.

  We are linear in life, then we lay each other down in straight lines on strict planes when life has ended— all according to a grid that resembles a map of city streets. Of course, the place of the dead is more symmetrical, and extends deep into the earth. It stays that way until someone detonates a charge that dislocates both the living and the dead.

  Special Agent Herb Cooper’s burial ground was a slice of prairie wasteland. Sand and bones—no flowers— a cactus here and there. I sat in his cramped, subterranean office, skimming through the photos. Vials of dirt and decomposed human tissue were arrayed on the desk. I opened my wooden case, removed a few tools, and created the appearance of a forensic consultant at work.

  When Hiram Jackson stopped by to introduce himself, I recognized him. He was the fed who was driving into Susan Walker’s apartment complex as I was leaving.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be here yesterday,” he said. “Looks like they’ve got you pretty well set up. Is there anything else you’re going to need?”

  “I have what I need for a preliminary read on this material,” I told him. “There’s more sophisticated testing required, of course, but your lab will have to do that. I do have to stop back briefly. I hadn’t expected to, but it’s unavoidable. The dead seem to require so much more than the living.”

  Jackson’s forehead wrinkled. “Oh?”

  “People are seldom gratefully dead. Sorry. Anthropological humor.”

  Jackson smiled. “Hang on to your security tag, Dr. Krogh. I’ll let them know upstairs. How long have you and Cooper worked together?”

  “This is the first time, actually,” I said. “We shared an elevator in San Francisco last month. I was familiar with the Oklahoma case from my work at Interior. They think you might as well give it up, by the way, that there’s no way you can get what you need out of those burial grounds. I didn’t know that Herb was the case agent. I was out there to deliver a lecture. One participant wanted to know what made my work most difficult, and what helped me the most. Cyclonite and Elmer’s glue, I told her.”

  Jackson laughed. “Well, in the event that you do need anything, Dr. Krogh, just let me know. I’ll check with you again tomorrow.”

  I thanked him and he left.

  IN SO MANY WAYS, MY WORK HAS BEEN TOO EASY.

  I heard some of the agents talking in the hall, making sure the conference room was available for their Friday morning “status meeting.” I was disappointed that no one mentioned me by name, but I was pleased with their choice of date and time. Of course, Samantha Becker and I had assisted them with that decision.

  Something will end when Lucas Frank walks through the doors sixty feet above my head, then passes through these long corridors. Perhaps then I will finally claim a permanent place aboveground.

  There have been many times that I’ve tried to see beyond murder, to understand what is required by intimacy. As a young man, I watched the faces of couples engrossed in conversation over coffee at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria. I saw them talk and touch and smile and agonize, communicating privately with only their eyes. I studied them.

  Theirs was a drama that they played out for themselves while fucking their way through school. The play was a titillating mystery—the excitement of curling into a dormitory bed intended for one. The late night phone calls made to microscopically examine the details of a life together were an essential aspect of the mystery.

  I decided that all relationships were self-referential. They turned back upon themselves and stayed that way until one or both participants grew bored. For me, murder remained the simpler and more satisfying endeavor.

  One night during those years, a group of students gathered at a warehouse fire in East Cambridge. They gazed at the fire from a distance, fearful, while I inched closer to the flames, wondering what fear was, wanting to know if what I had tasted in my stepfather’s cellar was fear. The building crashed in upon itself, smashed down and blew up a shower of flaming chunks of debris.

  I heard shrieks from the group behind me.

  “Aren’t you frightened?” a young woman asked. I shook my head.

  “You should move back,” she said, standing at my shoulder.

  We walked together, back to Central Square, but the subway had shut down for the night.

  “Ever walk the tracks?” I asked Annie.

  “Through the tunnels? What about rats?”

  “There’s a world underground.”

  I remember the red and yellow caution lights blending into their own colors of fire, and casting oversized shadows on the walls. We became giants in the underground maze.

  We ended up at her place, talked, and drank.

  “I think we’re too drunk to fuck,” Annie said. “But I’d really like to.”

  She fell asleep on the floor, her hair spread in a fan around her head, her hands clenched into small fists like a child. I got down on my knees and touched her face, ran my fingers across her lips, and, finally, touched her lips with mine. She never moved.

  The next day she slipped into a seat beside me in the lecture hall and handed me a note. “Did you do anything to me last night?” the note said. “If you didn’t, I’m gonna be pissed.”

  She had scribbled her phone number across the bottom. We both stared forward as a graduate teaching assistant tore into The Winter’s Ta
le. “Shakespeare’s message is simple,” he said. “Sin must be paid for before it can be forgiven.”

  When he finished, she leaned over.

  “I think I had a good time last night,” she said. “But I think all the heat was at the fire.”

  The second night, she opened two beers, handed me one, and said, “I want to know you. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “If you drink faster, I won’t have to answer that question.”

  “Then I’ll pass out and you’ll take advantage of me again. Or would it be the first time? I don’t remember.”

  “You have no idea of the risks that you’re taking.”

  “That’s what makes it so exciting. You could be a murderer. You could be the one who killed that girl last spring, strangled her with her own sock.”

  She pushed a bowl of nuts across the table. “Have some,” she said. “I bet you snuck up there while she was sleeping, broke into her apartment…”

  “How did I break into her apartment?”

  “With a crow bar? No. A screwdriver. You pried the door so the lock slid open. Then you went in, found her in the bedroom. You probably didn’t mean to kill her, but she said she was going to tell the cops that you raped her. So then you had to kill her.”

  “Annie, I’m in pre-med. I study martial arts. I know the pressure points on the neck. Why would I bother with the sock?”

  “Aha,” she said. “Just like the Boston Strangles You killed her with your bare hands, then tied the sock around her neck in a bow like he used to do.”

  “Let me tell you exactly how I did it.”

  “Great. Let me get more beers first.”

  She returned with a six-pack. “I want all the details, and don’t let me pass out.”

  “I climbed up the fire escape,” I began.

  “So that’s why nobody saw anything.”

  “Are you going to keep interrupting?”

  “No. I can’t help it, though. This is exciting.”

  She was playing a game, and having a wonderful time. She had no idea that what I was telling her was precisely what I had done.

  “The bathroom window was open about two inches. I pushed it up and stepped inside.”