The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  Maybe it was all symbolic anyway. McDonald’s had run out of street corners and was turning up inside Wal-Marts. What would turn up inside McDonald’s?

  No, I guess I don’t have the warmest feelings for people. Most of the years of fifty-minute hours weren’t a problem. Therapy is a unique situation—an intense involvement between two people that defines its own structure. We share a direction, some goals, and we work together to get there.

  It’s the world without that structure—the way people pass time—that I don’t tolerate well. People in the wild, with their passionate championing of one cause or another, the way they fling insults or lawsuits about, or tell us all to have a nice day. I don’t get it, and it frightens me—keeps me awake nights.

  Toward the end, even the office became a problem. I was burning out—scheduling two people for the same time slot, leaving at three when I’d scheduled a four o’clock. The symptoms were clear. There were days when I’d open my day book, see a name, and have no idea who the person was. It didn’t have to be a new client; an old one would do.

  I’d go office to office on the chance that one of my partners would know who Barry W. was. That usually got shrugs all round. It was either early dementia, or time to get out of the business altogether. I opted for the latter diagnosis, and walked away.

  I was doing a lot of profiling work then. It was loner work—cerebral and visceral—and I had no idea the toll it was taking, the trap I was falling into (one which I had fashioned for myself). The techniques I had developed required that I extend myself into the worlds, the minds, of the most savage people we had created. I knew the intellectual fascination; I just didn’t recognize the dangers to the soul.

  Now there was a new danger—to Lane. Nothing else could have pried me from my own lair in Michigan, putting me on the road into the mountains of northern New England.

  I exited the Interstate above Brattleboro and continued north on Route 5. Bullet holes in the road signs and the profusion of decorative lawn derrieres reassured me—I was in Vermont. I hadn’t taken a wrong turn anywhere.

  Hunters clad in Day-Glo orange jumpsuits, and black-and-red wool plaid outfits, emptied out of pickup trucks and ambled into the woods with deer rifles and six-packs. Someone would either get a trophy or become one.

  The last time I was in Vermont was on our honeymoon. Before I met Savvy, I was the epitome of the confirmed bachelor, true to the stereotype in every way. Not only did I do my own cooking, cleaning, and laundry, I actually enjoyed it. When I proposed, Savvy said that I had her blessing if I wanted to keep on handling the domestic tasks. We compromised. We’d cook on alternate days, do our own laundry, and split the cleaning chores in half.

  On our honeymoon, we stayed at the Woodstock Inn, where we played at being lovers and tourists, sipped cognac in front of the fireplace, and, without knowing it, began to drift apart. In those early days, we were inseparable, but both of us were elsewhere, too.

  Savvy had her world of animals—caring and curing—and I had my world of murder.

  I got my first police case by accident. We had a neighbor, Ray Bolton, who was a detective with the Boston police department. When he and his wife were at our place for dinner one night, Ray mentioned a homicide case that he was working on. He was stymied.

  I plied him with questions, and all of us played a game of Clue involving an elderly woman who had met a gruesome stabbing death, apparently at the hands of a stranger in her fashionable Beacon Street home.

  Finally I’d had enough. “It’s elementary, my dear Bolton,” I said, getting laughs all around.

  “No, I mean it. It’s common sense.”

  Ray bristled. “I’ve been working this case for ten months.”

  “Ray, it isn’t a stranger. The woman opened her door to her killer—probably someone she knew well, maybe even a relative.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Ray pushed his coffee away and helped himself to a beer.

  “She had a heart condition,” I said. “A serious one.”

  “Right.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to climb stairs.”

  He nodded.

  “And she was a good patient—took all her medications, kept all her appointments. But you found her in an empty room upstairs. There was no bruising on her body. Her half slippers were still on her feet. So no one dragged her up those steps. She walked. Why?”

  “The perp showed her the knife,” Ray said.

  “And why didn’t he use it downstairs?”

  “He was looking for something. He needed her to go along.”

  “To a closed, unused, empty room?”

  “The grandson,” Ray said. “She’d go up there with the grandson. He’s a strange guy. In his twenties, no real job, no real place to call home.”

  “She had a soft spot for him, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “She’d take him in.”

  “And show him the room that was going to be his.”

  “Why’d he kill her?”

  “Hey, I gave you who. You take it from there.”

  Two weeks later Ray showed up at the door with a case of Heineken—my first fee as a law enforcement consultant. We sat at the kitchen table.

  “They’re probably gonna cop an insanity plea with the grandson,” he said. “The story he tells is they were in the room and she suddenly changes her mind, says he can’t stay there after all. He loses it, and stabs her eighteen times.”

  “It’s a sex crime,” I said.

  He opened a bottle of beer. “Educate me,” Ray said.

  “He’s probably psychotic. Either he touched her in some sexual way, or he opened his pants or something. She says that’s it, out, you’re not staying here, and he goes into overkill mode.”

  I expected Ray to resist that line of thinking, but he didn’t. “We’ve got this guy who does amazing things analyzing blood stains. He says her dress was raised up, then put back in place, after she was down.”

  “What do you know about the grandson?”

  “Saw a shrink for about three years. We can’t find out anything there. He was diddling around with a niece, a five-year-old. They handled it in the family. Set him up with an apartment and all he had to do was keep his appointments.”

  “The sexual curiosity of a child,” I said. “And maybe the mind of one, too.”

  Savvy said she could see it coming then. Sometimes Bolton or someone else in his department called or came by, or a detective from another department would call on Ray’s recommendation. I read the latest books on criminology and psychopathy, studied cases, and spent a lot of time thinking about them.

  Savvy had her work at a nearby clinic, and we were both usually home by 6:30. We had dinner together, then spent the evening worlds apart, until we fell into bed. I remember the night she came into the room I used for a study.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  I looked up from Jim Brussel’s Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.

  “I’m pregnant, and this marriage isn’t working.”

  We talked until 3:00 A.M. I resolved to mend my ways—to keep all business at the office, and to adhere to normal working hours. No cops or autopsy photos at the kitchen table. No midnight runs to the latest strangling.

  Savvy wanted to stop working when the baby came—just be a mother. I agreed. We didn’t need both salaries—my practice was growing—and it would be best for the child.

  Lane was five when Savvy went back to work at the same clinic, and seven when Savvy announced that she was going to Africa. She didn’t want a divorce, she said, but would understand if I did.

  I didn’t. And I didn’t want her to go. But I never did know how to hold her, either. So, for the next ten years, our marriage was a one-month-out-of-twelve affair.

  It seemed to work. Savvy loved her life in Zaire. I immersed myself in my fascination with the horror people do to one another. And Lanie became a prepubescent jet-setter. She’d seen Africa and Europe befor
e she was in her teens. When I took her to Disney World, she said, “Paris is better.”

  All of us loved the time we had together as a family—as limited as that was—and nothing ever interfered with it.

  When Lane went off to college, Savvy’s visits gradually became less frequent, and she didn’t stay as long. Neither one of us talked much about it. When I closed the practice and headed for the woods of Michigan, I harbored a fantasy of Savvy’s joining me there. I wrote to her and hinted at it. I received a ten-page letter in return. The first five pages described her fantasy of my dumping my forensic work twenty years before, and taking a job as a professor at some college in the Southwest. The last five pages explained how angry she was that it took me twenty years too long to get my head clear.

  The deterioration of our relationship—the wearing away of my life—was a progression, something so gradual I never noticed. Savvy used to complain about that—the way I never noticed what was going on around me. I didn’t pick things off the floor because I didn’t see them. I lived out of my laundry basket because I never noticed the bureau. Then, when she pointed it out to me, I lived off the top of the bureau.

  Only now do I remember and recognize the overwhelming need I had to go off alone, to withdraw, to live with my own thoughts. It was forever in competition with my need and love for Savvy. I won. And I lost.

  As I drove toward Westminster, Vermont, I watched for the turn that would lead me into Saxtons River. Lane had faxed me copies of Robert Sinclair’s notes, which included a crude map and directions to the house where Wolf had lived as a child.

  The sky was slate gray with a few traces of white cloud stretched out across the horizon. The pickups parked at odd angles in fields and just off the sides of the road were the only remaining evidence of the hunters. They were in the woods stalking their prey, or sitting in a tree stand waiting for a buck to walk by. That method might work with deer, but never with human prey.

  I found the road and continued north. After passing through the small village, I turned onto a dirt road that veered to the left. I drove slowly downhill, across a wooden bridge, then gradually upward again, until the old house came into view on the right.

  I parked in front, switched off the ignition, and, as I got out of the car, I stared at the small, wood-frame building—the manse that had spawned its own twisted life-form. There was a rotting front porch and some boarded-over windows, but the basic structure of the place, at least from the outside, appeared stable.

  This was the house that Sarah Humphrey had described to Lane. When I talked to Swartz and heard the details of Lane’s conversation with Wolf’s half-sister, I wasn’t surprised. I had already accurately pictured Wolf’s youth simply by studying the handiwork of his adult years.

  I walked around the house, through the backyard, and up the hill to where I knew the apple trees would be. A doe stood under one of the trees taking bites from apples that lay on the ground. As I approached, her head came up, her ears cocked, but she didn’t run—just watched as I approached, then moved off toward the bushes, stopping to look back occasionally at the rude intruder that I was. Even during hunting season, it wasn’t easy to spook the prey—probably because she didn’t know that’s what she was.

  There were bits of wood and old metal wire casing—the remnants of Wolf’s town—still embedded in the sandy soil.

  You constructed your world, lad, didn’t you? You were an architect of sorts, a young man with design in his mind. There is no fear in this place. You were safe here. You slipped each piece lovingly into position. Safe. Ordered. Secure.

  And you could move from here, up through that overgrown hillside, to go hunting with a knife, a club, a ball of twine. Your bare hands. God, what power.

  A blue jay swooped low in silence, through the clearing and into the brush on the uphill side. Only when it was invisible again did it pipe once.

  And you flew above it, didn’t you, lad? You learned how to split yourself away, to soar, to look back down at the earth and all you created. You discovered patterns you didn’t know were here—relationships in space, the positions of objects. Angels always have a better view. There were no feelings here at all, were there? There was no fear. It was the only place and the only time where you had absolute control.

  I sat on a rock near where the deer had been feeding. Only the roof of the house was visible from there.

  The chimney—that’s how you could tell when someone was home. Your mother or Corrigan would stoke the stove. Even if you had your back turned, you could smell the wood smoke, couldn’t you? It registered somewhere inside, but it didn’t require any attention. It was more information absorbed, tucked away somewhere in case it was needed.

  And just what was it you were running from mate? Where was the fear?

  I pushed myself up and walked slowly down the hill toward the house. The back porch hadn’t fared as poorly as the front. I stepped up on it and peered through a window into what had been a kitchen.

  The lock on the door was the type that required a skeleton key. Using the screwdriver blade on my pocket knife, I slid the bolt back, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

  James Brussel was the psychiatrist who, in the 1950s, told police what New York’s “mad bomber” would be wearing when they caught him. A double-breasted suit, buttoned. He told them more, too, and most of it was right on the money, but the core of the legend was George Metesky opening his door to the detectives, wearing that conservatively cut, double-breasted suit—with all the buttons buttoned.

  And it was Brussel who came to a Boston that was in disarray from “the stranglings” during the 1960s. The city had convened a distinguished panel of experts—medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists—to offer their advice to the investigators who were grappling with a case that had paralyzed the city. The good doctors were of the opinion that there were two stranglers—one for the early, elderly victims, another for the young women who were killed just before the murders stopped.

  Brussel’s was a solitary voice. There was one strangler, he said. And he described a bizarre course of sexual development he saw revealed in the killings. He also imagined a man who moved comfortably and anonymously through the city, his only remarkable characteristic a virtual mane that he loved to comb.

  In time, the world learned that Albert DeSalvo had a full head of black hair, which he wore slicked back in place, and he was the only one responsible for the string of stranglings.

  With characteristic humility, Brussel dismissed the mantle of seer. He stressed the need to be familiar with the facts of a case, but held out a special role for intuition.

  In my work, I studied hypnosis and dissociation—everything from the natural hypnoid states (those momentary disorientations that we all experience) to the extremes of multiple personality. I concluded that what Brussel called intuition was an altered state of consciousness, a passive receptiveness to all that could be perceived. It was at once effortless, and intense.

  Self-hypnosis became the key to my success as a criminal profiler, and I soon realized that a similar dissociation was the key to the success of many of the serial killers who claimed headlines.

  In the dim light of Wolf’s house I could see an old gas range pulled away from the wall, sitting near the center of the room. There was part of a kitchen chair, an empty picture frame, some old newspapers, rags and other debris from ages past, all in a heap on the floor. On the other side of the room there was an archway and, beyond that, what would have been the parlor.

  I turned around and walked down a hall to the first bedroom on the left. It was a small room with faded pink wallpaper still clinging to the walls. Sarah’s room.

  You were your mother’s son. You were her only one. Nothing else was necessary. There didn’t need to be any more people in your lives. When she was working at the diner, you did your schoolwork, took flight in your mind, and waited happily for her to come home. Until one time she came home with a man.

  That wa
s the first betrayal. Moving to this house was the second. Then Sarah. Three strikes and you’re out.

  You came to Sarah’s room from the time she was an infant and you were just a child, really. You watched her sleep. You watched her breathe. Were you disciplined for that? If they caught you in her room, were you punished, lad?

  And then later, of course, you wanted to touch her. But that wasn’t enough. You wanted to cause her pain—ultimately to kill her. She had an innocent charm, then a seductive smile, perhaps, then a physical shape that inflamed you.

  The second bedroom also was small—unpainted Sheet-rock with holes in it. Seven holes, each one the size of a boy’s fist. The holes were all about the same height from the floor, in a row. I wondered how many times Corrigan had replaced the Sheetrock—how many more holes there might have been.

  When you learned how to fly—while you were learning how to split yourself away and cut off the rage—you felt no pain in your hands when you shattered the wall with a single thrust of your fist.

  The largest bedroom—no doubt the parents’ room—was at the end of the hall. The door had a sliding bolt on the inside. They were afraid of what might come through the door in the night.

  When did they install the bolt? Not until later—not until after you had intruded, watched them, and been caught. You probably got the coal bin for that one, but then you grew. You were becoming more difficult for him to manage. So the bolt went on the door.

  Outside their room, on the right, was another door. When I opened it, the smell of damp soil wafted up. The cellar. I walked down the aging stairs to the dirt, where I surveyed the floor joists suffering from damp rot.

  It was a stone foundation, leaning dangerously into the cellar after years of freezing and thawing. The stones seemed laced together by cobwebs garnished with the sawdust residue from carpenter ants.

  There was a disconnected furnace on a concrete slab and, beside it, the rusting hulk of a water tank. Large, gray barn spiders had discovered a perfect residence. And—judging from the remains—rodents in a variety of sizes had moved freely through the space, probably even while the house was still inhabited. On the left there was an archway, with an ell beyond.