by John Philpin
“It just is.”
Now, as I drove south on the interstate, I realized that the biggest part of my life—all of what was represented in Wolf’s metal box—was violence and death.
Many of Wolf’s killings had been designed to impress or confuse or taunt or frighten me. It hadn’t worked because I never knew that his one-man show was going on. I even left the theater and retired. That’s when Wolf made a few adjustments. He was no longer entertaining me; he was going to kill me.
That hasn’t changed. He wants me dead.
Wolf’s style of thinking hasn’t changed any, either. The young man who carved marks in the wooden sides of the coal bin became an adult who did the same thing. Each slash in the wood represented an injustice, an atrocity done to him, for which he had licensed himself to get revenge.
On my first morning home from the hospital in Lake Albert, I had grabbed Margaret Wagner’s book about Peter Kurten. Somewhere below the level of my consciousness I sensed a killer’s message.
Compensatory justice.
Wolf had been fixated on me for years. He had directed all of his homicidal energy at me.
After the Cora Riordan murder, I had told Ray Bolton that her killer was another Albert DeSalvo.
The Bay State Road case, six weeks before Cora Riordan, was the product of another’s lust for creating mayhem. It had not been Jeremy Stoneham, nor had it been his “wolfman.” Norman Elgar had bloodied that basement apartment. I said as much to a reporter.
Then Wolf had visited Elgar.
Of the 1976 profile I had done in the Cape Cod case, I told the same reporter, “He’ll kill again.”
But I did not know who “he” was.
I had watched the 1985 case in the same Cape community with interest, then disbelief. The FBI hadn’t connected the murder to the earlier, identical homicide. The press called again.
“Hey, Lucas. This is Anthony Michaels.”
“Anthony. Good to hear your voice. Why do I have the feeling that we’re going to be talking about murder?”
Anthony Michaels had died around the time I had left my practice and retreated to Michigan. Cancer, I thought.
“My name is Dana Michaels. I’m a reporter with the Washington Blade.”
I remembered that Anthony had shown me a photograph of his daughter. She was Lane’s age. The name Michaels was a common one, but as much as I wanted to dismiss it as coincidence, I couldn’t.
“My father and I used to ski at Mount Ascutney.”
Anthony Michaels had been an avid skier.
Lane and I were supposed to arrive for the status meeting in the morning. Wolf, as Krogh, would be waiting, prepared to kill us all in the bowels of the BSU. If Darla was Anthony’s daughter, what did she have to do with it? It was clear that she had gotten her story from Landry
“I was the lead writer for the Blade on the original Wolf case.”
She had given Wolf a splash in the press, one that he desperately craved, but her father—if Anthony was her father—had given me all the newspaper attention I had ever wanted or needed.
A composite drawing and a day or two on page one could not feed Wolf’s insatiable need for recognition. He had never experienced the luxury of being able to exert control over what cops and shrinks said about him, and what reporters wrote about him. His image was not his own. During his years in Boston, without knowing Wolf’s identity, Ray Bolton and I had shaped what the public learned about the killer.
That pissed you off, lad, didn’t it?
I pulled off the highway into a gas station, found a phone, and dialed information for Boston. The listing hadn’t been changed since Anthony’s death. I listened as the phone rang three, four, five times. Finally, a woman answered.
“Mrs. Michaels?” I asked, managing to keep any evidence of urgency from my voice.
“Yes.”
“My name is Lucas Frank.”
“Dr. Frank? Of course. My Anthony used to speak of you.”
“I’m in Washington, D.C, Mrs. Michaels, and…”
“Our Darla is there. She’s a reporter now, you know. Just like her father. Crime.”
Mrs. Michaels sounded as if she could talk all night. I didn’t have time. “I’m having trouble with this phone,” I said. “Sorry I disturbed you. I’ll call back another time.”
When I called the Washington Blade and asked for Darla Michaels, I reached her voice mail.
I ran back to the car and continued driving south.
The past had already collided with the present. Wolf would go after Darla Michaels, but for what? Was she to be another victim? Was she supposed to pay for the sins of omission and distortion that Wolf would think her father had committed?
It made sense—Wolf’s kind of sense.
I had to get to him before he had the chance to get to the young reporter.
A year ago, probably the only thing that John Wolf had not anticipated was my willingness to kill him. Now, of course, he knew that I, like him, would not hesitate to kill.
The only advantage I had was that Wolf did not expect to see me until morning.
DARLA MICHAELS LOOKED AS IF I HAD HIT HER. Her eyes widened. Her pouty mouth fell open.
“He told you this?” she said.
I nodded.
She grabbed her phone and punched numbers. “Landry, where the hell are you? Call me. Fast.”
She clicked off.
“Answering machine,” she muttered.
She looked up, stared pleadingly into my eyes. “Why is Wolf after me?”
“He said that your article was inaccurate, and that he found it terribly offensive.”
“I don’t believe this. Jesus.”
“When I spoke to the agent, he was in his office in Quantico. Can we go there?” She chewed her nails.
“Well, perhaps for your own safety you’d rather just go to the local police,” I suggested.
She slammed her palm on her desk. “They aren’t worth a damn. You’ll go with me to see Landry?”
“Of course. I feel an obligation.”
“Are you armed?”
I gave her my best blank expression. “Good heavens, no.”
She punched more numbers into her phone, waited, then said, “Landry, this is Darla Michaels. Meet me at your office as soon as possible. I’m on my way there with Roger Curlew. Remember him?”
My cast of characters continued to grow. I had anticipated that Landry would be among those that I incinerated. I had not expected the bonus of some private time with him.
Michaels grabbed a .32 from her desk, dropped it into her purse, then picked up her jacket.
“Let’s go.”
WE TOOK MY CAR. THE REPORTER WAS TOO SHAKEN to drive.
I had redefined her reality. How could she not trust a composed, nonthreatening, churchless pastor? She sat, leaned against the passenger door, and continued to chew her nails.
Only now could I feel the excitement that accompanies the anticipation of carnage. Odd. With other kills—even other multiple kills, other versions of the Apocalypse—the notion, the formation of a rudimentary plan, the initial preparations, catching sight of a victim, were enough to stimulate me. This time was different. Could I have doubted myself, questioned my ability to bring this off?
I had to smile at my self-analysis. It was so wrong.
“You strike me as someone who is always very tense,” I said to Michaels. “I know this must be a terrible ordeal for you, but I don’t mean just this situation right now. That was my first impression when I walked into your office and saw you on the phone. You seem like a nervous person.”
“I say it’s the job. I don’t know. I guess I’ve always been a little wired. Maybe that’s why I found my way into this kind of work. That and my father. He was a reporter. I’ve never had my life threatened before, though.”
“Can you remember a time when you were truly relaxed?”
I glanced over at her. She stared straight ahead for the moment, then dropped he
r eyes down and to the right—to the back of her hand.
“Yeah,” she said, sighing.
When I learned that the key to Lucas Frank’s technique was hypnosis—that he was capable of self-inducing a dissociative state—I had researched and mastered that skill, as well as the talent to effect a hypnoid state in anyone I chose. For my entire life, I had been exiting my body involuntarily. It required little effort or training to harness that ability.
“Sometimes it can be relaxing to think about other times that you felt that way,” I said.
“Just a few days ago, I had this strange but pleasant experience. It wasn’t a feeling, really. It was like being able to see things around me that I always thought were unimportant. I could really see them.”
“What were you seeing?”
“Oh, that was the strange part. One thing was a small brass frog.”
“Its brass tongue sticks out, and there’s a brass fly wrapped up in the tongue,” I said.
She turned toward me, a hint of anxiety in her voice. “I thought it was an unusual piece. How did you know that?”
When I was in Michaels’s apartment, I had placed the frog next to a carved wooden starfish on the top shelf of her bookcase. I fingered through her copies of Primary Colors, and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. She was not terribly eclectic. Hers were books that a Washington reporter would read.
“Just a guess. Seems like the sort of thing an artist would do. I may even have seen an object like that once, or maybe a picture of one.”
I had also prowled through her more personal belongings and inhaled her scent, the same fragrance that I could smell now in the car. I am always prepared for any encounter.
“I had admired that frog when I found it,” she said. “It just appeared there, on a shelf in my apartment a few days ago. I had a couple of dates with this guy, and I figured he put it there. He denied it, but I’m sure he put it there. I named it Oliver because of the artist’s sticker on the bottom of it. I liked it, but I hadn’t really seen it, absorbed all the details of it. Then, it was as if I were seeing it for the very first time, just for a moment.”
“Then, for another small increment of time, there was a sense of loss,” I said.
She hesitated, and agreed. “I couldn’t see it again. Not the same way”
“As if in a dream.”
“It was like that.”
“It just happened. There was no effort involved.”
She sighed. “You must be good at what you do. I don’t feel nearly as freaked as I did.”
“There is a sense of lightness that accompanies experiences like those. You feel as if you can rise up from your chair, or that you can soar out of your own body. Or that you’re going to, regardless of whether you want to.”
Darla nodded. “I thought it was just me.”
“We don’t pay enough attention to the subtle moments of our lives. We’re trained not to. Public schools do that to us. I refused to give in. Fought ’em every inch of the way.”
She laughed softly. “Tough talk for a minister.”
“I remember a teacher,” I said. “Miss Gossett. I wrote a poem about a flying squirrel. I had that little rodent soaring all over the place. Miss Gossett was very science-minded. She explained that squirrels don’t fly. The ones that are called flying squirrels glide. I knew that, but I wanted my squirrel to travel all over the universe if he wanted. I believed that I was free—in poetry, at least—to do as I wished. She gave me a C. What was worse, when I argued about the grade, Miss Gossett told my mother that I was arrogant. I heard about it for weeks.”
Marjorie Gossett never should have called me arrogant. It was ironic, really, because I always worked hard at not attracting attention to myself. There was no poem about a squirrel. Miss Gossett had walked in on me when I was using the faculty reading room adjacent to the library.
“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.
I started to explain that I had permission to be there. I got half a sentence out of my mouth when she told me that I was arrogant, then went off and reported me to the principal. He sent me home for the day, and that night my stepfather used me for a punching bag.
Later that year, Miss Gossett had a nervous breakdown. Someone had been calling her late at night. They were hang-up calls, heavy breathing, laughter.
Then, one by one, her several cats turned up on her doorstep with their throats cut. When all of her cats were gone, more dead cats arrived. Despite a police patrol in her neighborhood, the dead cats kept coming.
The last one graced her bed pillow.
Someone said that Miss Gossett began to scream then, and didn’t stop screaming until doctors had pumped her full of Thorazine.
Years later I sent my former teacher a postcard, unsigned. It was a picture of a mother cat nursing its kittens.
“Do you like cats?” I asked Darla.
“I like them, but I’m allergic to them.”
“So was Miss Gossett.”
“Who?”
“That teacher I was telling you about.”
“Oh.”
“Eventually, her allergy killed her.”
I CONTINUED TO DRIVE SOUTH ON 1-95, LEAVing behind the city and suburban lights, and entering the darkness.
I remembered another entry from Wolf’s journal.
PEOPLE COLLIDE ALL THE TIME. WE NEVER CONverge for more than an instant, but we do collide. If we were up high, we would come together, I’m quite certain. But I worry that there may be too many of us. When we soar so near the limits of the universe, we go at our own risk.
Tomorrow always goes on as scheduled, but some of us don’t make it. And no one ever remembers for longer than it takes to pronounce a name.
THE BSU’S MAIN ENTRANCE WOULD BE LOCKED at night, so I walked into the adjacent building. I went up a flight of stairs, turned to my right, then walked through the glass-walled corridor that connected to the BSU offices.
I stepped into the stairwell, slipped out my gun, and listened. It was silent.
Staying close to the wall, I began a slow descent.
Cellars.
Tunnels. Caverns.
Places underground.
As it had on my first visit with Jackson, it seemed strange to enter a building and travel downward. I remember doing some research at Harvard, descending in a claustrophobia-inducing elevator into the underground stacks at Widener Library.
It was at Harvard in the sixties that Alan Chadwick had followed Wolf into the cavernous Peabody Museum. Chadwick watched as Wolf, in a hypnoid state, stared at the mounted birds and mumbled what might have been some parody of a prayer.
One flight down.
Wolf had told his sister how angry he was about the birds that are carried down into the coal mines as living gauges on deadly gases. That story had reminded me of a test for guilt or innocence in 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. Suspected witches were weighted with large rocks and thrown into a pond. If the women floated, they were declared possessed by supernatural forces, and the penalty was death. If the rocks carried the women down, they were not prosecuted, but there was an often lethal side effect: drowning.
John Wolf had studied and met the same people I had. While I was trying to achieve some understanding about what made them tick, he was making sure that he was nothing like them. He was also learning to think exactly like I did.
As I descended the stairs, I thought of the hanging man, and of murder in holy places.
The animals that reside in the lightless recesses of our minds achieve their full potential only when we nurture them, stroke them, allow them out from time to time and use them.
I had spent a lifetime struggling to maintain a balance with mine.
Wolf had set his free.
Two flights.
We project ourselves into everything we create. That fact is one of the foundation principles of effectively understanding the mind behind a crime scene, working backward from the carnage to its creator. Each of us leaves traces
of our emotional self in everything we do. Even with our mouths shut, we are walking communicators.
Most of what I had read in Wolf’s journals was thematically familiar. He wished to terrify, humiliate, and ultimately destroy anyone who demeaned him by failing to acknowledge his existence. Every ounce of Wolf’s energy and intellect were devoted to the perfection of murder.
Sometime in his youth, Wolf had assembled a plan for his whole life. That’s where his rigidity originated. He didn’t know who he would kill, or when, or where. He trusted that one experience would lead him to another. His was a self-designed, closed system. He extolled the excitement that he associated with the anticipation of the kill. Waiting, titillating himself with his fantasies, knowing what he was going to do—these were his most exciting acts in his time on the stage. By remaining silent, scouting the environment in the safety of anonymity, isolating his prey, seizing a victim here, a victim there, the terror he set in motion soon developed a life of its own.
Three flights.
It was time to bring that life to an end.
I had reached the deepest level of the building, sixty feet down, and slipped into the corridor. With my back pressed to the wall, I moved through the dimly lighted hall toward the one bright room somewhere in the distance.
The offices were small, cramped burrows. I stepped into the room that Jackson had told me was Herb Cooper’s office. From the glow of the lights in the hall, I could see that the desk was covered with small vials, plastic bags containing fragments of bone, and a wooden case with a brass strip that said, “Dr. John Krogh.” I used my pocketknife to pry open the velvet-covered tray in the bottom of the case, then looked down at a folded Buck knife. There were also spaces for another knife—a straight blade—and a large caliber handgun. But the spaces were empty.
I picked up one of three identical paper wrappers that had been discarded in the bottom of the case. A single word had been block-printed on the paper: CYCLONITE.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I had seen the plastic explosive only once in my life. I had seen the craters that well-placed cyclonite had created three times that I could remember. Wolf intended to blow the place off the face of the earth.
