Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  Rexford Landry was responsible for feeding her information. Jackson had assigned the bitter, irascible agent to review Willoughby’s records. Landry had been at both D.C crime scenes and knew all the details.

  “I’m running late,” I said.

  “Are you saying that Wolf is responsible for the Becker homicide, too?”

  I led her to the door. “Absolutely. There’s your confirmation, Ms. Michaels.”

  “I had hoped to get more detail, Dr. Frank,” Michaels said as I gently pushed her into the hall. “I especially wanted to ask you your feelings about being hauled out of retirement twice by the same killer.”

  “Pissed off,” I told her, and closed the door.

  I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE EATING. JACKSON ORDERED SOUP.

  “The basement is clear,” he said. “Nothing. They even ran dogs through there.”

  If I was right, we were down to a matter of hours. Wolf would want things set, in place. If his target was not the Willard, what the hell was it?

  “We’re leaving a couple of agents down there in case he shows up.”

  “Did you discover anything more about Wolf’s teaching at your place?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Somebody pulled Chad-wick’s file. We figure Willoughby did that. He probably thought he was saving the Bureau embarrassment, and we know he was covering his own tracks. Wolf was his ticket to that corner office down the street.”

  “Also his ticket to the grave. What about Landry?”

  Jackson put his hand up, palm out, as if he were directing traffic. “Internal matter,” he said.

  “An affliction of the bowels,” I muttered. “I just had a visit from Darla Michaels.”

  Jackson hesitated, then said, “She’d never reveal a source.”

  I shrugged. “Not intentionally, perhaps.”

  Jackson shook his head. “?’ll handle this my way. I told you that Samantha Becker was dating Herb Cooper for a while. I talked with Cooper this morning.”

  “Could Wolf have met Agent Cooper at the homicide school?”

  “Cooper was working out of the Denver office then. That wouldn’t make much sense anyway. It was four years ago.”

  “Decades don’t mean anything to Wolf. What about the case that Cooper worked with Willoughby— the one from 1985?”

  “I don’t think it helps us much. It’s an unsolved. A young woman was strangled, left in the foundation of a burned-out ranger’s cabin in one of the parks on Cape Cod.”

  I remembered the case. It was identical to one that I had worked on in 1976. I had completed a profile in the earlier case.

  A murderer with a mission—one who intends to make a career of killing.

  “She was found fully dressed, but the clothing wasn’t hers,” I said. “The victim’s fingernails had been done, her hair had been washed and combed out.”

  Jackson raised an eyebrow. “You worked that case?”

  “There were two identical cases. The one I worked was in 1976. Clearly, Wolf killed both young women. I remember Willoughby saying that they weren’t connected. At first, I thought it was an investigative ploy. Later, I realized that he meant it. Wolf was telling us that he was out there. None of us heard him.”

  Jackson handed me a sheet of paper. “This is an outline of the material he covered when he was here as Alan Chadwick.”

  Wolf had lectured on weapon selection in serial murder cases. He mentioned the cases from 1976 and 1985. Both were ligature strangulations with wire loops. In the later case, he had left his weapon with the body. He wanted the connection to be made.

  “VICAP kicked out another wire loop case,” Jackson said, leaning across the table and pointing to where I was reading. “It’s an older one. Sanford, Maine. Female done with the wire. Male, beside her in bed, done with an ax. Looks like two assailants. They took her head. No changing her clothes in that one. Wolf would’ve been just a teenager then.”

  “He was in that private school the state put him in,” I said. “When other kids that age were playing Legion baseball, Wolf was honing his skills as a killer.”

  I continued reading. Wolf had also discussed the Cora Riordan case, and another—Kira Kirkman—on Bay State Road in Boston. Ray Bolton and I had always believed that Norman Elgar had done that one.

  Something about Wolf’s case selection was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They were New England cases, but that wasn’t all of it.

  “That stuff telling you anything?”

  I shrugged. “Did Cooper ever talk to anyone about his relationship with Samantha Becker?”

  “He says no. Was Walker any help?”

  “She confirmed most of what we already know, added a few new items. Wolf likes bouillabaisse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A French fisherman’s stew. A few restaurants in Marseilles serve the finest bouillabaisse in the world. All of the fishy ingredients are supposed to come from the Mediterranean Sea. The closest we get to the genuine item would be Spenger’s in Berkeley. Wolf mentioned Spenger’s to Walker.”

  “Cooper was in San Francisco,” Jackson said, putting down his spoon. “He spent a few days with the Unabomber task force.”

  “In the last month?”

  “Three or four weeks ago. That’s where he ran into the consultant he’s using on the Oklahoma case.”

  Jean Posner’s words from deep in her trance echoed in my mind.

  Bones. John digs up dead people. John is an anthropologist at Harvard.

  “What kind of consultant?”

  “He’s a forensic anthropologist,” Jackson said. “From Harvard, I think. Dr. John Krogh.”

  I leaned back in my chair and relaxed for the first time since Wolf had cut me down at Lake Albert.

  “Difficult work,” I said.

  “Krogh’s at it night and day. I don’t know when he sleeps. He’s there until midnight, and he’s back at dawn.”

  Wolf’s underground was not the Willard Hotel. It was the BSU at Quantico. My God, what a mind.

  He would spend time there before his anniversary, conditioning the personnel to become accustomed to his presence.

  “Will he handle the DNA testing, too?”

  Jackson shook his head. “We’ll have our lab take care of that.”

  “You trust them?”

  “Jesus. You don’t let up, do you?”

  “Well, they did fall from grace, didn’t they? Maybe you should send your samples to L.A. I hear they handle evidence well. So, Cooper might have run into Wolf on the West Coast.”

  “I’ll call him back, have him reconstruct every minute of his time out there.”

  There was no need.

  The corridors of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, sixty feet beneath the earth.

  To control and humiliate, walk into their lair. Kill right under their noses. Bring the whole shithouse down.

  It was vintage Wolf.

  The killer and I were more alike than I would ever want to admit. We are creatures of thought and impulse—like everyone else, I suppose—but there is a certain lethality that we collect around ourselves. A cop friend once sensed the surges that bounce inside my skull, and told me he was glad that I was on his side of the badge.

  “Most of the time I am,” I had told him.

  This was one time that I knew he would disapprove. I had a clear choice. I could level with Jackson, turn the matter over to him and his army of agents, and allow them to invade their offices in search of their own consultant.

  Yeah, right. I had no intention of delegating this task. Landry was unreliable. Jackson and the rest of his people would make every effort to take Wolf alive. I wanted him dead.

  Lane’s trip to Lake Albert had been prompted in part by the variance between her sense of justice and mine. However critical of the Bureau she might be, she had been trained in the enforcement of the law. Where this one man was involved—this killing machine who had made a special project of me and my life—I did not care about the la
w.

  John Wolf had been my shadow for twenty years. I had been negligent a year ago; Wolf survived and others had died. Killing him was not a task that I would entrust to anyone.

  Krogh is at it night and day Jackson had said.

  I preferred the night. Wolf would be making his preparations for morning, when Lane and I were to walk through the corridors to the status meeting. By going in at night, I would have the element of surprise, and there would be only the two of us.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO MY ROOM, I FOUND THE flight lists that Lane had given me. I did not feel that checking them was necessary, but could offer a final validation. I opened a bottle of ale, sat on the sofa, and leafed through the sheets.

  Two days before Lane and I flew from Detroit to Washington, John Krogh had made the same trip.

  DARLA MICHAELS SAT AT A METAL DESK IN THE Blade’s newsroom.

  She wore the same black jeans and blue work shirt she had worn to Barb’s in Quantico. Her eyes were an elegant green.

  She was talking on the phone. I pulled over a chair and sat a discreet distance from her, but close enough to hear her conversation.

  “This is going to take longer than I thought,” she said into the phone. “I found two more. A pathologist in Boston and a woman in an Orlando suburb. I’m starting to believe. The woman was his sister.”

  She glanced at me during the pause at her end, held up one finger, then snapped her attention back to the phone. “I don’t expect to have all the details for tomorrow’s story, but I want to at least have confirmation that Willoughby had tied them to Wolf. You’ll have it.”

  Michaels slammed down the phone.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “Editors. Sometimes they just make it harder to pull a story together. Look, I’m real busy here. I’ve got a deadline. Is this something that can wait?”

  She turned away, not waiting for my answer.

  “I was at Harvard in the sixties,” I said. “For a year, the man you call John Wolf was my roommate.”

  She swung back in my direction, and I had her complete attention.

  “Do you know anything about what’s been happening here?” she asked.

  “I read your article. A year ago, the FBI and the New York police interviewed me extensively. They seemed to think that was the end of it. You know, that he was dead. I knew he wasn’t.”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you that, and I’ll show you some identification, but I’d like to be a confidential source. Please don’t refer to me as his college roommate.”

  “Agreed.”

  “My name is Roger Curlew,” I said, flipping open my wallet and showing her a Maryland driver’s license.

  “I’ll have to check with security,” she said, dialing an extension, then spelling my name and reading my driver’s license number.

  After a moment, she said, “Clergy? Okay. Thanks.”

  “Without church,” I said as she replaced her phone. “I’m a pastoral counselor.”

  “Is it Reverend Curlew?”

  “Roger.”

  She nodded. “Roger, why are you so certain that he survived the explosion in Vermont? Do you mind if I tape this?”

  I shrugged. She pulled a microcassette recorder from her lap drawer and clicked it on.

  “Why do you think he’s alive?”

  My experience with reporters had taught me that they hear only key words, never complete sentences. Which is why they never spell a name correctly, and why they always know which of the victim’s body parts police find.

  “Ms. Michaels, I said 1 know that he’s alive. He called me in January of this year, then again in June, and then two days ago. He and I had lunch today at the Willard. Yes, I know that’s where this psychiatrist, Lucas Frank, is staying. Paul—I’ve always known him as Paul—thought that visiting the hotel where this man is staying was a delicious bit of irony. He’s always been like that.”

  “You two stayed in touch after college.”

  “Not really He left school before I did. I know nothing of his time in Vietnam. He got my name and address from an alumni directory, and started writing to me during the eighties. He called occasionally, too. I told the police all of this.”

  “Did you tell them you know he’s alive? Did you tell them he called you after he was supposed to be dead?”

  I nodded. “I tried to. They treated me as if I were crazy. Paul—excuse me, John—is a dangerous man. He would never hurt me. He’s told me so. But he has hurt so many others. He understood that I would have to talk with someone. He’s not crazy He’s not unreasonable. He just can’t, or won’t, stop killing.”

  “God,” Michaels said, shaking her head. “What did you two talk about at lunch?”

  I could have said anything at that point, and Darla Michaels would have believed. I decided to stick to my script. Only hours remained until its final scene.

  “It was small talk at first, just catching-up kinds of things. He asked for my wife, my kids. He looks very different now, nothing like the drawing you had in your paper. He’s blond. His hair has thinned. He told me about being a medical examiner in Connecticut. He laughed about that—how he’d become a doctor despite never having completed his undergraduate degree. Oh, dear. What else did we talk about? Oh, yes. He had spoken with an FBI agent. In order to prove who he was, he gave the agent details of that poor woman’s death—the one in Georgetown.”

  “Samantha Becker.”

  “Yes. Details that only the killer, only he could have known. The agent hung up on him.”

  Michaels furrowed her brow. “Who was the agent? Did he say?”

  I thought. “Landers, maybe?”

  “Landry?”

  “Yes. That’s it. He had an unusual first name.”

  “That sonofabitch.”

  “John told me who he was going to kill next. The police won’t even take my calls. They hung up on him, and they don’t let me through. That’s why I decided that I had to come to you.”

  “Mr. Curlew…”

  “It’s Roger.”

  “Right. Roger. He actually told you who his next victim will be?”

  “Oh, dear. I thought you understood. That’s why I came to you.”

  “What…”

  “You are the next victim, Ms. Michaels.”

  I EXAMINED MY NINE-MILLIMETER, THEN SLIPPED the gun into a belt-clip holster at the small of my back. I was pulling on my blue sports jacket when Lane arrived.

  “Evening out?” she asked.

  I handed her a slip of paper. “Pack. Go to National. There’s a Lear waiting for us. Instructions are in the note.”

  “Wait a minute, Pop. Where are you going? What’s this about?”

  “I don’t have time, Lane. Trust me. Do as I say. I’ve already sent my bag ahead. I’ll join you in about three hours. Make sure there’s some cold ale on the damn plane.”

  She dropped into a chair. “What about Wolf? Has he been caught, or are we conceding? I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”

  I took one look at her face and knew that she was not about to budge. I also knew that I was not going to allow myself to be distracted by my concern for anyone else’s safety.

  “There’s a metal lockbox with my stuff on the plane. It’s in my duffel bag. Everything you need to know is in that box. You’ll have to work it open with your pocket-knife.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Quantico.”

  “The BSU?”

  “Yes.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “We’re supposed to have that status meeting there in the morning. Is that off? Why are you going down there tonight?”

  “I need some time there alone.”

  “Is this legal?”

  I shrugged. “I have my security pass from the other day”

  “What about Wolf?”

  “That’s what I don’t have time to go into with you. It’s all in the box on the plane. After you go through that stu
ff, if there’s anything that you don’t understand, I’ll explain as soon as I arrive.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  The treasures in Wolf’s metal box had erased all boundaries between the two of us. There were no souvenirs or trophies of his kills. Instead, there were fragments of a past that Wolf had rewritten. My past. His past. Knotted together.

  He cared more about savoring his success at tricking me than he did about lingering over any of his more than fifty murders.

  “I’ve always been in danger. Lane, the answers are where I said you’ll find them. I have to do this my way There isn’t much time. Please get going.”

  Lane stared at me. Finally, she nodded, got up, and walked to the door. She glanced at her watch. “If you’re not at the plane by two A.M., I’m coming after you.”

  “Deal,” I said. “There are some other instructions in that note, two calls that I need you to make after you’re on the plane. What I want you to say is sketched out there.”

  She glanced at the sheet of paper, then back at me. “Two A.M.,” she said again, and walked out.

  I SLIPPED INTO THE CAR AND SWITCHED ON THE ignition.

  Just the two of us, lad. But then, it has always been this way, hasn’t it?

  When I was a kid and lived in Roxbury, my sister often wandered into my room to read my scribblings.

  “Do you mind if I read this aloud?” she asked one time.

  I shook my head.

  Her voice slipped softly through the words.

  Home

  what it’s like to live here,

  the black old woman says,

  is different now

  because we shoot each other

  sweet jungle of cities,

  fire in the southern skies—

  no one taught us how to live

  and no one seems to know

  that you can’t put the blood back in

  once it spills out on the snow

  “Living here is like that for you, isn’t it?” my sister asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you thinking about the boy who was struck by the el?”

  I shook my head. “The boy they shot on Mission Hill.”

  “Does everything have to be about violence and death?”