by John Philpin
“What are you gonna do?” she asked.
“Meet Jackson,” I said. “You check with the Smithsonian, the various universities. Put together a list of visiting anthropologists, consultants—that kind of thing. In the event that Wolf was flirting with the truth, include all Johns, regardless of their faculty status. And move fast.”
As I walked through the corridor, I realized that I probably had all the pieces of the puzzle, but I was not comfortable with how they were fitting together. I’m never comfortable with a dilemma like that, but this one was gnawing at me. I felt like the answer was dangling tantalizingly nearby, but I could not get a grasp on it.
Was Wolf about to go underground and disappear forever? Is that what the bastard was telling me?
Or now that he’d had his dress rehearsal, was he planning something far worse.
I FOLLOWED DARLA MICHAELS FROM HER OFFICE at the Washington Blade in D.C, to a country-western bar—Barb’s Barbecue—in Quantico.
I enjoyed following the unsuspecting reporter. She was the intermediary who would bring my design to its completion, and she knew nothing of what was going on around her. Quite delightful, really. She was about to file the biggest story of her career, but now she scampered from her car into a ramshackle, barn-board watering hole just off the state road.
Barb’s defined itself with antique neon beer signs, black cowboy hats, Confederate-flag-decorated denim jackets, and a jukebox that disgorged twangy, whiny, warbling blather about lost loves, last beers, dead dogs, and bright red pickup trucks with gun racks.
This was a strange land.
I sipped a beer and studied Darla Michaels. She was dressed casually in jeans and a shirt, and wore her light brown hair cut short. It was her profile that fascinated me. I stared at her face, searching for some hint, the slightest resemblance between her and her father, Anthony Michaels, a Boston reporter from the past. The senior Michaels had been one of Boston’s leading crime writers until his death from cancer six years ago. He had covered DeSalvo, the Cora Riordan murder and Jeremy Stoneham, Norman Elgar—all the big ones. He was a fan of Boston’s own wizard, Lucas Frank, giving the psychiatrist unlimited credence and all the public exposure that he wanted. Now, his daughter was the final prop for my last act.
It was fitting that we all come together like this, necessary that time collapse upon itself. The temptation to rip all of these people to shreds was strong. I had to fight it off, and I had to remain patient.
Rexford Landry ambled through Barb’s door. He seemed right at home in this non-English-speaking enclave. He waved to people, stopped and hugged a fat woman in a polka-dot dress, shook hands with a tall man wearing too-short jeans, white socks, and black shoes, and kissed a little girl whose face was covered with barbecue sauce.
Shit. He looked like Clinton campaigning.
He was still wiping sauce from his face when he sat with the reporter. “Hey, Darla,” he said, sliding into the booth across from mine. “You hit page one. Some spread.”
“This isn’t exactly anonymous, Landry,” she said. “I thought you were concerned about our being seen together.”
“These folks know me. They don’t know you.”
She shrugged. “Your funeral.”
“What I gave you was solid, huh?”
“No flat denials. Your superiors did some scurrying on Wolf-as-Chadwick teaching at the Academy.”
Landry laughed. “Jackson called me at home.”
“He has to suspect you of leaking the story” “I am so fed up with sitting in a fucking office I could puke. What are they gonna do, reassign me? Any-thing’s better than this shit. I want to go back on the street. I don’t know why they pulled me off the street. We were taking down dopers all over Miami. Anyway, what are you drinking?”
“Scotch.”
“Millie,” Landry yelled, “a shot of what she’s got and a draft.”
He turned his attention back to Michaels, who seemed barely able to tolerate the boorish cop. “I told you I could deliver the Wolf angle,” he said.
“I’m curious, Landry. Do you think he’s still alive?”
“There is no fuckin’ way that anything human walked out of that blast. Willoughby was obsessed, like he was tracking the Superman of serial killers. Establishing that Wolf was alive, then bringing him down— that was going to be the final feather in his distinguished cap. The Bureau’s official position remains the same: Wolf died in Vermont. Jackson’s getting mesmerized by Lucas Frank. He’s trying to reopen the case. They’re looking at possibilities.’ It’s all bullshit.”
“Then, who is doing the killing?”
“Millie, you’re a love,” Landry said as the waitress deposited his drinks on the table. “We call them Tans.’ They’re copycats. They devour everything they can find about a prick like Wolf. They read the tabloids, the paperbacks, watch Inside Edition, America’s Most Wanted. They’re fucking experts on these killers.”
He slammed down the shot, then sipped his beer. “Listen. Check for a land transfer, a house and ten acres in Saxtons River, Vermont. Corrigan to Willoughby.”
“He bought the fucking place?”
Landry laughed. “I told you he was obsessed. Talk about a fan. He put a big fence around the cellar hole, most of the land. Frank was in Vermont yesterday. He stopped in Swanton, then went to Saxtons River.”
“What was he after?”
Landry swallowed. “He’s staying at the Willard. Go ask him.”
“You don’t know?”
Landry shook his head. “But I can do better than that. You know the murder in Georgetown?”
“Samantha Becker. We attributed that to Wolf, just like you said.”
“I never said Wolf was the perp. You decided to use that angle. It was set up to look exactly like a murder that Wolf committed in New York about a year ago. Victim’s name was Sarah Sinclair. The lead investigator was Lane Frank. You fill out your story with that.”
“Details on Becker,” Michaels said, snapping open a steno pad.
“Throat cut with surgical precision. Dolled up in a fancy white dress which, we’ve been told, she didn’t own and never would have owned. The place looked like she had been entertaining. Wineglasses, all that shit. The dress had birds embroidered on the collar. Feather left at the scene.”
“I remember that,” Michaels said, looking up from her writing. “The feathers. They found cases all over the East Coast. VICAP never spit them out.”
“I’m not so sure they should’ve been spit out. These killers aren’t that smart, for chrissake. You people make them sound that way. Shawcross? Dumber than shit. Didn’t know enough to walk around puddles. Fuckin’ Bundy went pro se right into the electric chair. I think Ted Bundy wanted people to think that he’d killed more than he did. Like that guy in Texas, Henry Lee Lucas. Every time the Rangers brought him a strawberry milkshake, he confessed to a couple more. Three hundred plus before somebody finally said, Wait a fuckin’ minute, here/Asshole was in jail for a bunch of ’em, or in Florida when they were getting whacked in Oklahoma.”
“So, what we have here is a copycat?”
“Of course,” the agent said, slamming his hand on the table. “That’s what I’ve been saying. Maybe we cloned some fuckin* sheep, but ain’t nobody come back from the dead in a while.”
As Michaels prepared to leave, Landry’s tone changed. “Hey, shit. Listen to me. You’re the writer. You want to go with the magical maniac bit, sell a few papers, you do that. Millie?”
Darla Michaels left as Millie brought Landry his second round.
IT WAS NO SURPRISE TO ME THAT LUCAS FRANK had discovered the events in Swanton. Clever orchestration on my part.
For him to return to the old house to regain a mindset would have made sense only in some fiction writer’s melodrama. He always had the mindset. It didn’t matter whether he wanted it. It was as much a part of him as it was of me. The only difference between us was that he feared his love of murder, and I nurtured mine,
cultivated it to a fine art form.
No, like Willoughby, he had gone to Saxtons River in search of something elusive, but definitive—something that would tell him everything he needed to know to catch a killer.
Did you receive my gift, Dr. Frank?
That rusted metal box is all that remains of his life. Those scraps of paper change everything. A few photos, a couple of articles—they alter events that happened twenty years ago, ten years ago, yesterday. Trees only seemed to be falling in the forest when no one was there. There was someone there. I sent ripples of sound and emotion and chaos into his world.
I had been no more than a whisper to Lucas Frank—a whisper that he could not hear above the din of his own life. Now, as he fingers through his past, all of time and space and what he has known as reality is different. Two decades of his life have been disturbed.
Do I have your attention now, Dr. Frank?
AS I DROVE TOWARD D.C., I REMEMBERED YEARS ago, moving from a basement apartment on Boston’s Bay State Road to a brighter, first-floor unit on Fen-wood. During my second week in the new place, I arrived home from my job at the hospital and found two detectives waiting for me.
The lead cop was a short Irish bulldog from South Boston—Tommy Sullivan. His partner was a tall, heavy-set black man from Roxbury—Raymond Bolton. I wondered at the time if it had required a court order to bring these representatives of disparate sections of the city together.
They had some questions they wanted to ask me, Sullivan said.
I couldn’t imagine what they wanted. I invited them in, then sat on the sofa. They stood in their overcoats and hats in the center of the room, ignoring my suggestion that they make themselves comfortable.
Sullivan verified that I had lived on Bay State Road, the date I moved, when I turned in my keys and to whom.
“Mr. Rayle, did you make the acquaintance of the subsequent occupant of that apartment?” Sullivan asked, in the police version of our language.
“No.”
“You didn’t go back there? You know, for something you forgot?”
“I didn’t forget anything.”
“Did you know the place had been rented?”
“No. May I ask what this is about?”
Sullivan raised a single finger. “I’ll ask the questions. While you lived there, which entrance to the building did you use?”
I shrugged. “Both. Mostly the back one in the basement. The alley connected to Kenmore Square. Usually I use the bus or the subway. I don’t own a car. The back door was faster.”
“Your apartment key fit both doors?” Sullivan asked.
“It did,” I said, realizing what they were getting at, “but I didn’t need a key for the back door.”
“The lock was broken?”
“I don’t know. The door didn’t close all the way. It was like it was swollen, didn’t fit.”
Sullivan nodded his head. “Can you account for your time from midnight Saturday until noon Sunday?”
“Midnight Saturday? I was asleep. Sunday morning I got up around nine, went running on the River-way. When I got back, I had a late breakfast, read the paper. I got called in to work Sunday afternoon.”
Bolton spoke up. “You lived in the Bay State Road apartment for eight months.”
“Yes. It was a sublet.”
“Ever have any trouble with people coming in through that back door’?”
I thought about it. “Not enough that I ever complained. When I first moved in, it was still winter, and there was an old drunk who’d come in and sleep in the hallway. He seemed harmless enough, and it was cold. A couple of months ago, somebody jiggled my doorknob, but that’s happened other places I’ve lived. Once on Marlborough Street, I remember. I yelled and he went away. That’s about it.”
Bolton pushed magazines on the coffee table aside, sat there with his knees almost touching mine, and stared intently into my eyes. “We figure that somebody came through that alley door early Sunday morning, let himself in to your old apartment, and raped and murdered a young woman.”
“The new tenant?”
Bolton nodded.
“I don’t know anything about it. Like I said, I haven’t been back there. Sounds like Albert DeSalvo.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
Bolton looked away. Sullivan continued taking notes.
I found all of this to be an amazing coincidence. I had not been back to the apartment. I had not killed the woman. Some kindred soul was working my city, and had found his way to my apartment after I had moved. Suddenly, I wanted to meet this man, to talk with him. There are so few opportunities.
I also found the situation ironic There was Ray Bolton—Lucas Frank’s partner in crime, Lane Frank’s godfather—sitting with his pant legs brushing against my jeans. He was so close that I could smell his Old Spice.
The Boston detectives finally left, saying they would return if they had further questions. They never came back.
Six weeks later, on a snowy Christmas Eve, I walked up Fenwood Road, crossed Huntington, and killed Cora Riordan. Late into the night, I stood in a small crowd across the avenue and watched as Dr. Frank arrived.
The reporter, Anthony Michaels, briefly walked among us, asked questions, got reactions. Then he crossed Huntington and locked himself in conversation with Bolton first, then Lucas Frank. Later, I continued to watch as Bolton led Jeremy Stoneham away
Years after that, when I visited Norman Elgar at Walpole State Prison, he told me about the young woman whose name was hard and caustic like she was. Kira Kirkman. Elgar had followed her home, entered her building through a broken rear door, then strangled her.
He remembered all of his conquests. Ms. Kirkman had lived on Bay State Road.
Clearly, it was meant to be. I had worked long and hard to maintain us all as family.
WHILE WAITING FOR JACKSON, I READ ANOTHER entry in Wolf’s journal.
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTEAD, THE ARTIST WHO DEsigned New York’s Central Park, also developed plans for aesthetically pleasing cemeteries—garden cemeteries, with their rows of gravestones demarcated by bending and sloping paths, then adorned with thousands of tulips, daffodils, peonies. My favorites, standing out among the yellows and pinks and whites, are the bloodlike bursts of red.
Cemeteries are more sensuous than the places we inhabit in our time above the ground. In life, these magnificent gardens allow us to leave the wasteland we have created—a few short steps can be a transcendent experience, a chance to walk away from the wails of the living, and spend time among the quiet dead. We’re all going to join them anyway, so why not become comfortable in these grassy quarters.
• • •
SO MUCH OF WOLF’S YOUTH WAS ASSOCIATED with the underground. His fascination with cemeteries, his time in the cellar of the old house, the tunnel that he had obsessively dug out from the coal bin.
Obsesssion.
I was the audience that not only never applauded, I never even noticed that a show was going on.
Tunnels under the ground.
I remembered when I had begun examining homicide cases for Lane a year ago, right after Sarah Sinclair’s murder. One victim was a woman named Annie who had been found dead in a horse stall on a Connecticut farm. Wolf had written extensively about Annie in his computer journal.
She was a student in Cambridge when Wolf was there, and years later told her husband about a young man she had met at a warehouse fire. The night of the fire, she and her new friend walked the subway tracks from Central Square to Harvard Square.
He took her beneath the earth. He was comfortable there, she told her husband.
There was so much that I had not noticed, or had failed to appreciate. Wolf wanted me to feel haunted, and now I was feeling it—a twenty-year dose of it shoved down my throat for a single swallow.
I LOOKED DOWN AT THE PETITE WOMAN WHO HAD knocked on my door.
“My name is Darla Michaels,” she said. “I’m a reporter with the Washington Blade.”
>
“I know who you are. Despite your assurance at the desk downstairs, the gentlemen there knew that you were not expected. He also recognized you. I just got off the phone with him. Sounds like you must haunt this place. Come in.”
“You’ll talk to me?”
“Not standing in the hallway, and for only a minute. I’m in a bit of a rush. Come in.”
She sat on the edge of a chair, and produced a notebook and pen from her bag. “I was the lead writer for the Blade on the original Wolf case. I had been working on a series about the Bureau when that broke. It made a perfect opening for the other articles.”
I sat opposite the reporter. “I live in Michigan. I don’t get your newspaper. I did see your current story, though. You were quite thorough.”
“Thank you. Dr. Frank, you were in Vermont recently.”
“Lovely state. Its going to make a nice national park, unless they sell it to Disney.”
She laughed. “When I was little, my father and I used to ski at Mount Ascutney. It’s such a beautiful area. Dr. Frank, did you go to Swanton because of the double murder they had there in March?”
“Yes. Look, let’s speed things up. John Wolf is alive, and he killed those two people in Vermont. What has happened here in D.C is not the work of a copycat.”
She stared at me for a moment. “What about Willoughby?”
I nodded. “Wolf.”
“Samantha Becker’s murder was made to look like another homicide, Sarah Sinclair, the New York case that your daughter was lead investigator on. The killer arranged the scene.”
I waited.
“Even the dress that Becker was wearing was identical to the one that Sinclair was wearing when she was killed.”
