The Prettiest Feathers (37 page)

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.

“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.

“L
ane, 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.

M
y 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 same 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.”

I felt that I was getting to know him better every day. His manipulation of Westphal was masterful. I read through
years of memos, watching how skillfully he persuaded the man to do his bidding. There was one memo of recent vintage telling Westphal he’d be away for a while, and asking him to mail a package to Robert Sinclair in his absence. The book of poetry. If Wolf hadn’t been in Vermont at that time, where was he? Playing the part of Robbins, and watching me?

The most chilling files were those that could be opened only with a directory password—“design”—a subdirectory password—“chaos”—and an additional password for each file. Sarah Sinclair’s was “Rimbaud.” The entry was brief:

I printed out this file and tried to fax it to Pop, but his machine wasn’t on. Several days passed before my attempts at transmission were successful. Then there was another long wait for him to respond. Nearly two weeks. It was in the middle of the night when I finally heard my fax machine switch on and begin its familiar, gentle purr.

I was in bed, but I wasn’t asleep. I was replaying the whole story of John Wolf in my mind. It wasn’t terror that haunted me; it was the questions. Pop had helped me see what drove Wolf, but what had driven me? I had asked myself that question a hundred times, and each time my hand had drifted up—to touch the rough, parallel scars on my throat. I was within a split second of killing the man, and I understood my rage. If he had to die so that we could live, so be it.