by John Philpin
It was a short bus ride to Franklin Park. My sister bought me a bag of peanuts at the gate and we walked along the path eating them.
“You want to go to the elephant house first?” she asked. “I just want to see the gorilla.” “Why do you like him so much?”
“I wish he wasn’t in a cage. I wish they took him back to Africa and let him go. He makes me feel happy, though.”
“I’m glad. You don’t seem happy very often.”
“I know,” I said, and held tightly to her hand.
The African lowlands gorilla has fingers as big as bananas, and eats seeds. The one at Franklin Park lived in a small, hexagonal stone building with four barred windows. The enclosure was surrounded by an iron fence.
His cage was empty. The bars on the window were broken, twisted out of shape. I found out later that kids were throwing beer bottles at him, and that the last two had been filled with gasoline and stuffed with rags. The boys lit the rags, then threw the bottles into the cage where they exploded.
The gorilla went wild, broke free of the enclosure, and had to be shot by the police. They left the cage like that—the twisted bars, the blackened walls.
So many times I had wanted the gorilla to crash out of there, but not that way. Later I would dream about what happened to him. I would hear the wailing, the roaring. I would understand his terror, feel his horror. His rage lived inside me.
Our beasts can never be set totally free. They may have brief periods of freedom, but then must be restrained or put to death. The rage of beasts should not be led by the hand into vacant lots of kite-flying children—places where chaos and collision are all too likely to occur.
I opened my eyes. Through the sliding glass door in the motel room I could see the determined march of cows toward a distant barn. They were Holsteins mostly—a few Brown Swiss. The black-and-white slab sides of the Holsteins swayed as they walked. The brown heifers seemed not much larger than the white-tailed deer being hunted all over the state. Cows, too, have deep, sad eyes.
Everything in my life had been like that dream of the train that just kept going faster. There was never any way to stop it once it got going. It had a life of its own.
The rock had hit the kid square in the face. There were screams and blood. I knew if I ever yielded to my own terror, I would go crazy with rage. Yet I knew I had to tease it—feel it from time to time, reassure myself that it was still there. I had to reach inside and stroke the soft fur of the African lowlands gorilla within me.
Shortly before he died, my father scraped together enough money to move the family from Roxbury to the suburbs because he didn’t want my sister dating black boys. Had he lived, he would have seen her marry a nice white boy. And he would have seen me select a wife from the race that frightened him so.
I worked my way through school as a cook in a Jewish delicatessen. I made the brisket and the pastrami, the salads and the deserts—and, occasionally, filled in for someone at the sandwich counter. I was making sandwiches that night when Savvy came in for a roast beef on rye.
I liked her sense of humor. She was bright, attractive, assertive, independent—but I think what I loved most about Savvy was her willing vulnerability, her belief in the goodness of others. I also envied that feeling she had of truly belonging in this world. But I, ever the outsider, remained the hardened cynic, trusting no one except her. She said she could change me, and, for a long while, I believed—perhaps even hoped—that she would.
I pushed myself up from my chair and retrieved the material that Street had faxed just before I left Michigan. It was a summary of a case presented as a problem in ethics. The issues raised by the case were later resolved in California’s Tarasoff decision—that a therapist had a duty to inform when a client made an explicit threat against someone. At the time of the Paul Wolf case, the waters were still muddy.
Wolf, a ward of the state after assaulting his stepfather and mother with a knife, was seen in therapy by a licensed clinical social worker. The youth told his therapist that if he were returned to his family, “I’ll probably kill them all.”
In the course of treatment he stated his intention to kill other people—a teacher, the wife of a police officer, a neighbor. He went into considerable detail about how he would commit these murders.
One of the three women was found murdered in the precise manner that Wolf had told the therapist he would kill her. A mail carrier on her way to work described a young man she had seen leaving the victim’s yard just before dawn. She picked Wolf out of a photo lineup, making him the prime suspect.
In the judgment of the therapist, the confidentiality required by her profession, as well as that imposed by the state on matters related to minors in their custody, were sacrosanct Besides, she argued, Wolf was in a residential school with twenty-four-hour supervision.
According to students at the school, however, the young man came and went pretty much as he pleased. Most of his forays away from the campus were at night, and he was never caught. Predictably, school officials insisted that any talk of his coming and going as he wished was fabrication. They didn’t say it was impossible; just highly unlikely.
The police investigation produced nothing. The homicide remained on the books as unsolved.
Police theorized that the victim, Estelle Cummings, fifty-three, had been asleep in her bed when an intruder entered her home. The time of death was estimated as between 2:00 and 5:00 A.M. The presence of defensive wounds on the corpse suggested a struggle. The killer awakened her before he started plunging his knife into her. He stabbed her thirty-one times.
Wolf’s second intended victim didn’t die as he had promised she would. She committed suicide—hanged herself—six months after Cummings’s murder. She left a note saying that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She expected “him” to come in the night.
The third was married to a police officer, and it seemed as though Wolf had more sense than to try anything there.
I phoned the officer’s department and learned that Captain Bruce Richards had been retired for a couple of years. He and his wife were living in Oakland Park, Florida. I got the number from information and called.
Bruce Richards was friendly enough, but understandably wary when I explained the reason for my call. I offered to provide him with law enforcement references before we talked, but the offer alone was enough to satisfy him.
“Paul didn’t leave us alone,” he said. “When I was out on calls, somebody was prowling around the house. A couple of times I found footprints. I also found jimmy marks on the back door. I went down to that school of his and had a private conversation with him. I told him if there was ever so much as another toe print outside my house that shouldn’t be there—I didn’t care if it was his or not—I was coming back to kill him. That was the end of the trouble. He knew I meant it.”
“Did you ever talk to him after that? Your impressions of him would help me a great deal.”
“I never talked to the bastard again. I saw him around town a few times. He was down in the city for a while, I guess, but he showed up back home now and then. Then the army took him. Why you digging all this up now?”
“I think Paul Wolf is still alive, and I believe he may be responsible for other murders.”
Richards laughed. “I know he’s alive. I saw him. That bullshit about his ashes—well, it wasn’t my problem anymore. We were up visiting family and friends last summer. I’ve got a Winnebago and we drove that up—stayed in a campground near Quechee. I saw this guy getting into a pickup truck that had the name of some construction company on the door. I felt like I knew him—even walked over closer for a better look. He drove off, but I got the plate number. I forgot all about it until one day it just hit me. You know the way that works. I thought, ‘That was Paul Wolf.’ He looked his age—in his forties, I guess—but he was still in good shape. It was the eyes that gave him away. When I was working, I always called that kind ‘nobody’s home eyes.’”
“Did you eve
r check the plate?”
“Sure. Daedalus Construction. I checked on ’em. Legitimate outfit. Successful. They had kind of an absentee owner. Sometimes he was there, most of the time he wasn’t. I figured maybe that was Paul—that he just wanted to start his life again, you know?—with a clean slate? Guess I was wrong.”
Daedalus—the architect who designed a maze for the king of Crete to imprison the Minotaur, a monster that was part bull and part man—was the father of Icarus. He designed the wings of wax for his son to use to escape from the maze and the beast, but Icarus flew too near the sun and his wings melted. He plunged into the sea.
I thanked Richards and got off the phone. Then I cracked open the yellow pages. Daedalus Construction.
Luck.
I hoisted my feet back onto the table and allowed my eyes to close.
For many years I supervised the training of young psychologists. Always, in the first session, I raised the question of power in the therapeutic relationship. I never had a trainee who was totally comfortable with that concept—that they have power and wield it, whether they realize it or not. Their clients give it to them, take it away, engage them in battles over it.
These young zealots always wanted to rush into the clinical world and start curing everyone in sight. They were well meaning, but blind. They were humanists. They were noble. They cared, and they knew how to communicate that. Graduate school had taught them all the necessary techniques.
The power to heal is the flip side of the power to destroy.
I always told them that. They grimaced. Some of them requested, and were granted, other supervisors. The ones who recognized the truth about power were the ones who went on to become superior therapists.
I started drifting again.
Luck.
The power to destroy.
The need to remember and to embrace our own horror.
I see myself hurling a rock into a child’s face because I am frightened. My sister has gone away. I’m alone. He’s careening toward me, totally out of control.
A man reminds me of what I have done, then dives to his death from the roof. Was I so evil?
I feel something stir inside me.
When abreaction occurs in the course of therapy, it is spontaneous. The client reexperiences a trauma, along with all the horrible feelings associated with it. It’s as if it’s happening right at that moment—there’s that kind of immediacy, that level of intensity. But, because the environment is supportive and caring, the client won’t be lost in the maelstrom. Healing can begin.
The power to heal is the flip side of the power to destroy.
There’s an old Lenny Bruce bit in which a doctor sends a bill for services provided to a child rescued from a well. The public is outraged. The doctor withdraws his demand for payment—but the child will have to be returned to the well.
It stirs again.
I move farther down, more deeply inside myself—through time, faces rushing by—to a place with eight sides and four windows. My gorilla turns his head, slowly, and stares at me with obvious expectation. I tell him that it isn’t quite time, but he continues to watch. We know each other well.
Sarah Sinclair, what can you tell me?
The child’s black-and-white notebook lies there on the bed. Though it is Sarah’s journal, it doesn’t pulsate or call to me. I feel no urge to snap it up and devour its contents. But through all the years of reconstructing the choreography of murder, of drawing a psychological portrait of the killer, victims have told me far more than any other expert on the subject. I picked up the notebook and started to read.
I tried to kill myself when I was 24. My husband had left me, my daughter was dead, and I couldn’t see beyond the moment. I thought I would always hurt, always weep inside. And I thought that death would bring a welcome change, an end to all the pain. But the overdose failed, the emergency room doctors succeeded, and I didn’t possess enough spirit to try it again. I was too beaten down. Too tired. I’d also stopped believing that death could bring relief.
Since meeting John Wolf, my blood has started circulating again. I feel newly born, alive.
But I’m also confused. Robert’s departure made me so sad, I wanted to die. Now, with John’s arrival, death is still attractive—but for an opposite reason. Dying should occur at the height of happiness. A perfect moment frozen for eternity. If John were to place his hand on my throat—if I could feel the warmth of it, the pressure—I would want to tell him what a compliment it was that he would pick me from all the others. But I fear that he would think me crazy.
Sarah Sinclair had attempted suicide, and damn near succeeded. She wanted out. She was sure of it.
She also had a sense of the connectedness of things—the past, the present—the way we flash in and out of our wars with today. But there was nothing warlike about her Wolf.
I stared at the photograph of Sarah lying in a heap on her living room floor. The white dress, stained red. The blue-and-white feather, barely visible—just beyond her outstretched arm.
A wedding? No. But her choice of that dress represented something, some kind of commitment. To what? Not to him. You were infatuated with the man, Sarah, but you barely knew him. You weren’t a fool.
Suicide—the most meaningful ceremony in anyone’s life. Some might expect you to wear black to travel the long tunnels of night, but perhaps you chose white because it is so much like the light that guides you home.
The white dress—commitment—to death? to life? Did he simply kill you, Sarah? Or did he first need to bring you to life?
Why was he so drawn to you? So undeterred by the risks?
He took your freedom, but he set you free. Gave you wings.
Another stirring.
It’s time.
Lane
It wasn’t long before I heard from Pop. He had settled in at a rustic motel somewhere in the mountains of Vermont.
“We need to get this wrapped up,” he said.
“We do,” I agreed.
There were long pauses in the conversation—silences that told me Pop was somewhere else—that place he visits whenever he’s clawing his way inside a killer’s mind.
Actually, clawing is the wrong word. The way he describes it to me, it isn’t something he does aggressively. If he were to try, he says, he’d fail. He has to just sit back and let it happen.
I guess it’s also wrong to say that he gets inside a killer’s mind. The reverse is closer to the truth: the mind of the killer enters Pop’s head, allowing him to see the world through the psychopath’s eyes. Judging from the change in Pop at such times, the view isn’t very pretty.
When I was a little girl, I took those changes in Pop personally. I thought that he had stopped loving me; I barely recognized him. A terrible distance would come between us, affecting every aspect of my life—schoolwork, appetite, sleep patterns. Pop finally sat me down one day and explained what was happening.
“It’s something I do to help the police,” he said. “Something that has nothing to do with how I feel about you.”
He went over to the window and opened it.
“A bird could fly in here,” he told me, “because the window is up and there is nothing to stop it. It might be a beautiful bird, brightly colored—like a parrot. Or one that sings a lovely song in the morning. Or even an ugly bat looking for someone to bite.”
I looked at the open window, waiting to see whether birds or bats would fly in.
“That’s what happens to me, Lanie,” he went on. “Sometimes an ugly bat flies in through the window of my mind. But it never stays. Soon, it flies away, and everything is fine again.”
I’m sure that my father thought he was reassuring me with this story, but I was a literal child. I envisioned a whole family of bats hanging upside down inside his skull, and the image frightened me. I had nightmares, but it was always my mother, not my father, who rushed to my room to comfort me in the middle of the night. When I told her that my dreams were of birds and
bats, she didn’t understand, didn’t see the reason for terror.
I knew the signs. John Wolf had already wandered into Pop’s mind. That window is always open. He doesn’t know how to close it.
“Look,” I said. “Just tell me how to find the motel and I’ll be on the road as soon as I can.”
“I really don’t want you here, Lane.”
“I’m not giving you a choice on that one, Pop.”
“I need a composite,” he said, finally.
“Fine. Swartz will do that for us.”
There’s nobody better than Swartz with a pen and pad. He doesn’t rely on just the overlays. Once he has the general features, he refines the drawing—makes it come alive.
“As soon as he’s done,” I said, “I’m on my way. I dragged you into this case, and I won’t leave you alone with it. Besides, I couldn’t let go of it now. I’m in too deep. I won’t let this guy kill again.”
“No,” he said. “No more victims. No more sparring with evil. It’s time for an ending.”
I didn’t like Pop’s tone. It had the same drifting quality, but there was an edge to it.
He had gone silent again. “Hey,” I said.
“Call me when you have the composite.”
I’d barely hung up when Swartz called.
“Any news from your father?” he wanted to know.
“Just talked to him. He needs a favor.”
“Name it.”
“Pop has to know what Wolf looks like. He wants you to do a composite,” I said. “Robert saw him when he was posing as Alan Carver. Let’s see what he comes up with before I add Robbins to the mix.”
On the ride out to Tranquil Acres, I told Swartz how much I appreciated his going out on a limb for me. He was risking his career just by talking to me and not turning me over to Hanson.
“Wolf is not one to toy with, Lane,” he said. “If you come in, you’ll be safe. I’ll talk to Hanson with you. Show him what we’ve got. Get the feds up there with your father.”
“There’s no time,” I told him. “I’m not sticking Pop with it while I go plead with Hanson. Wolf has to be stopped now.”
