The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  Time for an ending.

  I was hitting 60 when I crossed the Williams River near Bellows Falls. An eighteen-wheeler came up fast behind me, then thundered by in the snow-covered passing lane, sending up billows of white powder that blocked my view of the road. Minutes later, when I slowed for the Westminster exit, I peered through the falling snow and saw another of those big rigs on its side in the median. The state police had set out flares.

  When I came down the highway off-ramp and drove west, I knew that I was looking for a left turn onto a dirt road. Bridge Road was somewhere in or very near the village. Then I saw it—just beyond the general store. I made the turn, and five minutes later I saw Pop’s rental car parked beside a pickup truck. Daedalus Construction, the truck’s emblem read.

  The house was smaller but every bit as decrepit as what I had imagined. Two sets of footprints led away from the vehicles toward the rear of the property. I followed them, stepped up onto the back porch, and pushed open the door.

  Pop

  You’re perfection, aren’t you, lad? Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not you.

  I called to him, told him where the water was—through the archway. Then I walked slowly down the rotting cellar stairs.

  Wolf moved at an angle across the dirt floor and stopped under the arch. My hands were in my jacket pockets-one of them wrapped around the .32.

  With his back turned to me, he extended his arms up and fastened his hands onto the cross beam.

  You’re staring at the new hinges and hasp assembly on the coal bin door, aren’t you?

  Without turning his body, he looked back over his shoulder. His eyes were gray, lifeless. Like mine.

  We’re the same now. What you see, lad, is what you are.

  “Does your castle have a dungeon?” he asked.

  Once the animal inside stirs, there is no quieting him. When fire laps at his fur, he grabs the bars between us, wrenching them away. He holds the throne once held by reason. All is dictated by a focused, intense rage, laserlike and precise. Calm, deliberate.

  “It would appear I’ve underestimated you. Let me guess,” he said. “A weapon in the pocket?”

  I pulled back the hammer on the .32. He heard the click.

  “You’re playing a very dangerous game.”

  “Sarah Sinclair,” I said, almost not recognizing my own voice.

  “By any chance, did a blue jay fly in through her window?”

  You’ve made your choice, lad. You’re going all the way. You have a design in mind.

  “Step into the coal bin,” I said.

  What do your dreams tell you? You’ve lived this scene, this nightmare, so many times before. How do you disarm your own dreams? How do you defeat them? Do you kill them?

  When he hesitated, I squeezed the trigger on the .32. The bullet tore through my jacket, slamming into the support beam six inches to Wolf’s right. He flinched.

  “Sarah,” I said. “Your sister. Your imperfect lover. Sarah Corrigan. And Sarah Sinclair. Your perfect victim.”

  “Look, old man—”

  I squeezed off a second shot, grazing his right hand. Again, his body jerked, but he kept his grasp on the cross beam.

  Lad, the boundaries of your cage have been drawn for you. For an effervescent twenty years, you included the world in your dream. Now this cellar is your world. The coal bin is your cage. The dream is mine.

  I heard the back door click shut upstairs. He heard it, too. I listened to the soft padding of footsteps across the floor. They stopped at the top of the steps.

  Have you fled your body, lad? Are you flying somewhere up above us now, gazing lazily down, watching that blood as it trickles from your hand, down your arm, into your sleeve?

  “One of us won’t leave here alive,” he said.

  It was an acknowledgment of sorts, a realization. It wasn’t a threat.

  I heard a tentative creaking at the top of the stairs.

  “Maybe two of us,” Wolf said. “I can smell that one. A woman. Hotel soap. No cloying perfume. I like them that way.”

  My third shot hit him in the upper right shoulder, knocking his right hand loose from the beam. He continued to suspend himself, apelike, by his left hand.

  “Lane, don’t come down here,” I said.

  “Pop? Is that you?”

  Wolf looked back over his shoulder again.

  “Pop,” he said. “The little girl, protected by her father, watches the boy receive his punishment in the cellar. Can you do it, Pop?”

  When I look into the face of my own beast, lad, I know him. I love him. It’s so seldom he gets to be free. He lusts for his freedom. Has a taste for blood. Loves to kill. I’d never try to send him away, lad. To do that would be to deny who I am.

  “Tell me about Sarah Sinclair,” I said.

  I was aware of Lane coming down the stairs, but I didn’t turn. I looked at Wolf’s eyes.

  “Lane,” he said, “did you like your feather tree?”

  When Lane didn’t answer, Wolf said, “Sarah Sinclair was just one more.”

  “You had to have her,” I said.

  “I had to have them all.”

  “You took risks with her.”

  “She was a victim before I ever got to her,” he said. “She wanted to die. She was waiting for me or someone else. When I had the knife in my hand, and she knew—”

  “She reached out for you,” I said.

  “She practically asked me to cut her throat.”

  It was as if his voice were coming toward me from a distant land—a topography I knew well.

  “That never happened before, did it? None of your other victims were so ready, so willing,” I said.

  “Never. It was in her eyes the first day I saw her. I killed two men who had seen me in her shop. I destroyed Chadwick—my cover for six years.”

  “So you could accommodate her.”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  I heard Lane call out to me. She was at the bottom of the stairs now, maybe ten feet to my right. I ignored her.

  “You kept a record,” I told Wolf. “Where is it?”

  “Find it,” he said.

  I had noticed the PC in his loft. “It’s in the computer. Someone can figure out the password, and I’m sure the connections are there.”

  He laughed. “For more than twenty years, no one even saw the connections.”

  “What about your trophies?”

  “Most of them were less than memorable,” he said.

  “Maxine Harris and Sarah Sinclair—the connection was the bookstore. The trophy was that volume of Rimbaud’s poems you sent to Robert Sinclair. Educate me.”

  “You seem to know everything already.”

  “The woman found dead in the horse barn.”

  He sighed. “Someone from the past. A loose end.”

  “Why the burial ground on your land?”

  “They were the throwaways—the garbage. There was nothing noteworthy in the artistry.”

  I expected Wolf to make a move—something. This man was not about to go quietly. But I didn’t expect him to move as fast as he did.

  Lane

  Wolf swung away from the arch. He seemed to bounce off the support beam and careen in Pop’s direction, a long knife in his hand. It was fast—a blur. I had no time to get the .22 out of my jacket pocket.

  Pop fired a round and hit Wolf, but the killer didn’t slow down. He slammed my father against the stone foundation, and thrust the blade up toward his throat.

  My first kick caught him in the side. As he fell to one knee, I aimed my second kick at his head. Wolf had the reflexes and conditioning of an athlete. He rolled under my leg, knocking me off balance. Before I could react, he was on his feet behind me, grabbing me under the chin with his forearm and pressing the knife against my throat. The tip broke my skin, drawing blood. I could feel it trickle down my neck.

  Pop glanced up at the arch, at the narrow ledge that ran the length of the carrying beam.

&
nbsp; “It’s too late,” Wolf said.

  Then he laughed. “Once you’ve resigned yourself to your own death, everything becomes possible. We’re all going to die, old man. Some of us very soon. Put the gun down.”

  Pop raised his arm and aimed the revolver in our direction.

  “You won’t kill your daughter. Or has prowling around in the world of murder made you a bit like us? If I were in your shoes, I’d just start firing away.”

  Pop pulled back the hammer.

  “Pop,” I said.

  Wolf laughed again, then tightened his grip, drawing blood a second time. “Maybe you do have it in you.”

  Pop’s eyes were locked on Wolf’s. “Since we’re all going to die, what difference does it make?”

  “I’d really enjoy discussing the philosophy of all this, but time is slipping away. You’ve had your moment of bravado. Put down the gun.”

  Pop brought his left hand up, parallel to his gun hand, then moved it slowly in an arc away from his body. Wolf’s eyes must have shifted to the right, following Pop’s hand.

  “Now,” Pop said.

  My elbow hammered Wolf’s sternum, then shot up into his face. Blood sprayed from his mouth and nose as he fell back against the stone foundation and went down. The knife clattered off the old furnace.

  I whipped the .22 out of my pocket and flipped off the safety. Nothing was going to stop me from emptying the nine-shot clip into his face.

  Pop

  “Lane, get up the stairs and out of the house. Go now. Get as far away from here as you can.”

  She had her gun aimed at Wolf’s head. It was as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Lane, get out of here,” I said.

  “What-?”

  “Get out” I shouted.

  She moved—slowly at first—backing away toward the stairwell and then disappeared up the stairs. I heard the back door slam as she ran outside.

  I dropped into a catcher’s crouch beside Wolf. “You wired the house, just like you did in Hasty Hills. You used a timer switch that you installed up on the cross beam.”

  “You don’t have much time,” he said.

  In the years of my childhood, only my sister knew that it wasn’t possible to fool me. No one played sly tricks on me and walked away laughing.

  “I want you in the coal bin,” I said. “If I have to shoot you again to get you there, I will.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? This place is going up any second. You’re going to die.”

  “Then grant me a final wish, Wolf. Get into the coal bin.”

  I grabbed him by the shirt, the gun pressed against his neck, and half dragged, half threw him into the enclosure.

  “How can I be afraid of this place when I know I’m about to die?”

  Fear loves this place …

  I looked into Wolf’s eyes. “You’re sprawled on top of your own bomb. I moved it all here. I also changed the timer.”

  The power to heal is the flip side of the power to destroy.

  I stood up, moved back from the stall, and slammed the door. I wedged a large wooden peg down through the hasp.

  “Any final words, lad?” I asked.

  After a moment, he spoke—but the voice was that of a young boy. “I’m sorry,” the boy said.

  “Damn right you are,” I said.

  I walked across the cellar, up the stairs, and out into the backyard. I saw Lane standing up on the side of the hill and walked in her direction.

  “Have you been up by the apple trees?” I asked, taking her arm and leading her toward the weathered remains of Wolf’s miniature town—the world he had built as a child.

  “I feel like you almost killed me.”

  “Up the hill,” I said, adding pressure to my grip on her arm.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  “No. He needs some time to think.”

  She looked at me in disbelief.

  “Why did you chase me out of there?”

  Then the earth shook as the house blew apart and pieces of a murderer’s life flew a hundred feet into the air. Lane crouched low to the ground, covering her ears. I could feel the blast of hot air wrap itself around me, then blow right on by.

  “Pop, what the hell did you do?”

  “Clean this,” I said, handing her the gun. “Replace the cartridges, then return it to the PD—put it back where you got it. Have the state police seal Wolf’s loft until you can get the feds back up here. Everything they’ll want is in there.”

  “They’re going to know that you shot him, Pop.”

  “There’ll be less of him left than there was of that maintenance man in the Hasty Hills explosion,” I said. “I’ll fax them a statement.”

  I turned and started back down the hill. Flames danced in the debris and plumes of smoke blew up into the air. Snowflakes and ashes met and merged.

  “You killed a man, Pop. It doesn’t work like that.”

  I stopped walking and stared at Wolf’s pyre.

  “So how does it work, Lanie?” I asked. “For a time in there, you were going to kill him.”

  I looked back at my daughter, but she didn’t respond.

  “Is there another way you would have preferred that this be handled?”

  She looked at the fire, then at me.

  “How did he get so twisted?” she asked.

  “Same way we all do, I guess,” I said, and walked away.

  Lane

  My father didn’t want any part of the aftermath. By the time Willoughby finished debriefing me, Pop had already slipped out of Vermont. He knew what lay ahead. The circus. The hype.

  Susan Walker worked behind the scenes to ensure that I would be invited to the press conference. Louis Freeh, Director of the FBI, took center stage, with Walker, Willoughby, and a few of the Bureau’s clones off to the side. Hanson placed me behind the group, but, because I’m so tall, I stood out. In any case, reporters from the tabloids gathered around, taping my remarks for broadcast that night. By the time the story made it onto the TV screen, there was no mention of Pop. It was as if he had never been in Vermont, and I knew that he’d want it that way.

  But suddenly I was the one who had tracked down and destroyed Wolf. That’s what the media wanted. A woman who had gone face-to-face with a serial killer, and not only lived through it, but brought him down.

  On my neck there were two cuts made by a madman, but I didn’t cover them with gauze and tape. I wanted to see them, to be constantly reminded that life is full of risks, some of them mandatory.

  Robert returned to work—sober and eager to help mop up in the aftermath of the Wolf case. I thought it would be good therapy for him, a way of putting Sarah’s death behind him. I gave him the job of sorting out the victims, determining which were Wolf’s. He did some follow-up interviews with Purrington, and determined that the man truly did kill the prostitutes in Albany and Troy. But he had nothing to do with the Maxine Harris case. He was just feeling so guilty about what he had done, he was willing to confess to everything, including what he hadn’t done. “He would have taken responsibility for the crucifixion, if I had let him,” Robert said.

  Before it was over, Robert had established a potential link between Wolf and forty-two homicides. His trail covered a lot of states, a lot of years, with deaths wherever he went. We were sure that many went down as naturals when they were anything but. Wolf was that good.

  Robert made it his mission to identify the connection between Wolf and his victims. All we knew for sure was that every victim was in some way connected to the one who preceded her (as Sarah was to Maxine), and to the one who succeeded her (as Sheila was to Sarah, and I would have been to Sheila). There was a logic behind his every move.

  Robert also dealt with the aliases. He found twenty-three possible IDs used by Wolf over the years, with the most enduring and elaborate being Chadwick and Wrenville. For the most part, Wolf’s aliases were selected with the same warped logic that his victims were. The name he used in Colorado was the s
ame as the name of a guy he worked with in California. Chadwick, as we knew, was the boyfriend of the young woman Wolf had thrown off a roof in Cambridge. And so it went, name after name, year after year, victim after victim. It was another example of the rigidity that Pop had talked about.

  Wolf established the Wrenville ID, along with Daedalus Construction, after “dying” in Vietnam and returning home. Robert worked with military intelligence to identify the soldier with whom Wolf had switched dog tags. When it came time to notify the dead soldier’s next of kin, Robert handed that whole aspect of the case over to the army and moved on.

  It was exactly sixteen days after his discharge from Tranquil Acres when Robert pulled the tab on his first of many cans of Old Milwaukee. It was a slip, he said, part of the disease. He stuck a note in my box at the office. “Three days of familiar solace,” he wrote. “I loved it going down, and I remembered the bliss of being blitzed. I can’t say it won’t happen again. One day at a time, and all that. I know it drives you farther away, but that’s for the best right now.”

  I knew then that I was putting a lot more than the Wolf case behind me. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. Robert was a great cop, and an even greater friend, but he had become like a brother to me, not a lover.

  Once the feds had taken control of the offices of Daedalus Construction, searching for evidence, I couldn’t get my foot in the door. I’m sure it was Susan Walker who copied all the files from the construction company’s computer and sent me the disks. The package arrived in the mail, with no return address.

  Most of the files were of little interest to me. Ordinary business correspondence. But, in a six-year-old memo to Mort Westphal (Wolf’s right hand man at Daedalus Construction; the person he trusted to run the place whenever he was away), Wolf gave instructions for filling out the necessary forms for the firm to obtain bonded status. He told Mort to take care of everything—and not to “muddy the waters” by explaining that he wasn’t Wrenville when he took the paperwork to Montpelier. “Just go ahead and let them print you,” Wolf said. “Otherwise it will take months for me to get there, and customers are insisting that we be bonded.”