Tunnel of Night (16 page)

VENGEANCE IS AN ART
.

There is a stimulus. Someone offends you, causes you inconvenience, or harms you. What follows is what the shrinks like to call “brooding.”

I prefer to describe it as preparation.

When I was in my teens, the state put me in a place they referred to as a “therapeutic educational environment.” I was a model student—or inmate—and I had a mental list of the people I intended to kill.

I spent the first month in that institution mastering the game, learning what the teachers and counselors wanted to hear. Then, as I said all the correct phrases, and performed for them, I perfected my ability to slip in an out of the place as I pleased. I also mastered the art of car theft. Away from the campus, I could be in any one of five different states in three hours.

I killed in all of them.

They suspected me in one murder—questioned me, accused me, almost arrested me. It was a joke.

As a juvenile in the custody of the state, the laws
were on my side. Confidentiality protected me. All legal proceedings were held behind closed doors, and court records referred to me only by first name and the initial of my last name. The records of all proceedings were sealed. The social service agencies were my partners in crime.

One of my forays into the night was even more of a close call than my near arrest, although I was the only one who knew it. One night after bed check at eleven
P.M
., I slipped out of the dorm, jogged into the village, hot-wired an old Chevy, and drove to Sanford, Maine. My quarry was the former receptionist at the mental health clinic that I had been forced to attend.

Anita Baines would check my name on a list when I entered the waiting room, then stare at me until it was my time to go in with the social worker. “I ain’t gonna rip off the
Newsweek”
I told her.

“You think you got everybody fooled,” she said. “You’re nothing but a fuckin’ killer.”

Anita was perceptive but dumb, and had sealed her own fate. I smiled at her. “You might be next,” I said.

“You don’t scare me, punk.”

Anita married, left the clinic, and moved to Maine. I waited what I considered an appropriate time, then followed her. It wouldn’t have mattered where she went. Only the timing of her death might have changed. Had she moved to Denver or Dallas, Anita might have bought herself a couple of years. But she was going to die.

It was two
A.M
. when I drove into a quiet Sanford. I had no trouble finding her apartment building, then slipping the lock on the front door. They lived on the second floor, without a dead bolt. I slipped the lock and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. Then I
waited in the darkness until I heard the sound of breathing—two distinct sets of muscles drawing air in, pushing it out—then walked to the open bedroom door.

He was the bulk on the right side of the bed. I remember wondering why so many men insist on sleeping on the right side. Even in the movies.

When I was sure of the position of his head, I brought my recently sharpened ax down hard. There was a spasm of movement on his side of the bed; nothing on hers.

I went to Anita, slipped the wire loop around her neck, yanked on the two wooden handles, and waited for her to open her eyes. When she did—her arms struggling to come out of the blankets—I smiled and said, “Read about it in
Newsweek
.”

Then I pulled tighter and waited for her to die.

I knew that I didn’t have much time, but I lingered in the apartment long enough to take a brief inventory of the things these two people had acquired—the objects that were somehow necessary to their identity or their existence. A TV set. A stereo. Two matching, molded plastic candy dishes. A clock in the shape of a fish. A framed photograph of the pope.

I could only shake my head. None of it made any sense to me.

I left the place with some reluctance. I wanted to explore, to learn more about my victims. Who had they been, and why? There wasn’t time. I slipped out of the apartment, and started the long drive back to Vermont.

On Route 4, just before Concord, New Hampshire, an officer from the Epsom police department pulled me over.

“Oh, shit,” I said to the cop, “my aunt is gonna kill
me. I’m supposed to get this back before my uncle has to go to work. I swear I haven’t been drinking. I’ll take the breath test. Anything.”

He glanced at my fraudulent license, then studied the registration. “Where you been?” he asked.

“My girl,” I said. “She just moved over here.”

“Real lady killer, huh?”

I gave him my best goofy smile. “She’s okay with my aunt, but my uncle …”

“Slow it down,” he said, handing the papers back to me. “Gettin’ laid ain’t worth gettin’ killed over, or killin’ somebody else.”

“Yes, sir.”

It wasn’t an Academy Award performance, but it got me back on the road, and it was my first lesson in how crudely law enforcement agencies operate. Had he opened the trunk, the officer would have found a bloody ax, a wire strangulation loop, and Anita’s head.

It’s never enough to commit murder. The artistic touch is a necessity. I buried her head at the edge of the mental health clinic’s parking lot, beneath a forsythia bush. I assume it’s still there.

I WATCHED THE FEDERAL AGENTS LEAVE THE
Willard. Judging from the white cop’s expression, he had not enjoyed his meeting with Dr. Frank. He stood on the sidewalk, hands on his hips, glancing up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. The black man stood behind him, writing in a narrow notebook.

All cops are assholes.

Feds are worse than most local police departments, but they are all incompetent. Wife kills husband, or husband kills wife, the locals can handle that reasonably
well—provided that the assailant is sitting there, covered with blood, with the weapon in his or her hand, confessing.

But don’t count on it.

And don’t count on federal agents investigating anything. That’s a bad joke. The only technological claptrap they don’t have are cruise missiles, but they never caught the “Green River Killer.”

Despite a profile by John Douglas, and extensive interviews with that master sleuth and law enforcement consultant Theodore Robert Bundy—a Vermont native more famous than Calvin Coolidge—the feds have no idea who patrolled the Seattle-Tacoma strip wiping out its female population. They don’t know who killed the prostitutes in New Bedford, Massachusetts, or the ones in San Diego.

Of course, whores don’t matter. They’re typically of some hue, ethnicity, and religion other than WASP, and they carry disease. Clearly, they are part of what Charles Dickens called “the surplus population,” and in need of elimination. A predominantly white, Christian government agency really can’t be expected to give a shit.

The white fed—I heard his partner call him Landry—lit a cigarette. The other one pocketed his notebook and started walking toward the car.

“Hey,” Landry called. “That broad’s tough. She’s bi-racial, huh? What is she? You figure maybe a quadroon?”

“There’s something very black about her, Landry,” his partner said. “It’s the belt that I understand she has in karate. You want to be sucking on your own testicles, you go ahead and mess with her.”

Landry flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and walked to the Ford.

• • •

WHEN THE TWO FEDS HAD DRIVEN OFF, I WALKED
back into the Willard and strode directly to the elevator. There, I joined a mother and daughter going up. The woman gripped her child’s hand and stared rigidly at the elevator door. The little girl looked up at me. “What’s your name, mister?” she asked.

The mother yanked at her daughter’s arm and hissed, “Missy.”

I smiled. “John,” I said. “I guess you’re Missy.”

“Don’t bother the man,” Missy’s mother said.

A drama wrote itself in my mind. I would kill the mother. Missy might experience a moment or two of distress, but then she would be relieved. Then, therapists would fuck everything up. They would arrive by the busload to convince Missy that she had been traumatized, and had repressed her memories of horror. She would oblige these manipulative hordes and exhibit symptoms, attend groups, and live her life out as a victim, a survivor of Elevator Mother Murder. The truth of it all—that the kid had wished the old bitch dead a thousand times—would be lost.

I have standards.

When the elevator door opened at my floor, I said good-bye to Missy, then left the two of them to their parent-child wars.

I stepped into the carpeted hall and walked toward Lucas Frank’s room. I entertained myself with the thought that I was in the Coen brothers’ film,
Barton Fink,
and that I was about to ignite the world, beginning there in that long, silent corridor.

I slipped my hand around my .44 Magnum, not because I was concerned with Lucas Frank’s door springing open. I was considering a substantial variation in my script.

THERE WAS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR AND THE
phone rang.

“Everyone wants us at once,” I said to Lane, pointing at the phone and walking to the door.

I could hear Lane talking as a member of the hotel staff entered with a tray of coffee that I had ordered. He placed the tray on a table and handed me a small package. “This was on the floor, Dr. Frank, right outside your door.”

I thanked him, and closed the door.

“Who’s it from, Pop?” Lane asked as she replaced the receiver.

“Doesn’t say. Who was on the phone?”

“Not good. A reporter at the Washington
Blade.
Her name is Darla Michaels. She wants to talk to you about Willoughby’s death. I remember her name. She covered the Wolf case last year.”

“Did you tell her to call the feds?” I asked as I opened the box and unwrapped a small sheet of stiff paper—mockingbirds and thrashers, page 124 of Peterson’s
Field Guide
.

I froze.

“Yeah, but how does she even know you’re here?” Lane asked. “Pop? What is it?”

I held up a small brass figure, about the size of the stone gorilla that Lane had found for me in Lake Albert. A sticker on the base of the figure said only “Oliver.”

“It’s the phoenix,” I said. “Know your mythology?”

“The phoenix rises out of the ashes of its own funeral pyre, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Death and resurrection.”

Lane shot up out of her chair. “The sonofabitch
is
here. He knows where we’re staying.”

I rubbed my fingers across the rough surface of the mythical bird’s partially unfurled wings, then placed the brass figure on the coffee table, sat, and stared at it.

You watch from a silent distance as you pull the strings on your marionettes, don’t you, lad? You are a patient assassin
.

“He’s close,” I said, feeling suddenly weak, as if I couldn’t get enough air. “We have our personal notice of his ascension. If I had any question about what was motivating him, it’s gone now. I ‘killed’ him in Vermont. Now it’s my turn to die.”

“He was outside that fucking door, Pop,” Lane said, crossing the room and examining the page from Peterson. “What the hell does
this
mean?”

I shrugged. “Janet got kingbirds. We get mockingbirds.”

Law enforcement is not equipped to deal with the wolves of the world. Traditional investigation misses them more often than not. They’re invisible. Most are caught by accident—usually because of something minor
like the traffic violations of a Bundy, Joel Rifkin, or David Berkowitz.

Wolf was a cut above the pack. Back at the lake, I knew that I would be the one to bring him down. He would not allow himself to be taken alive, and ultimately there was only one confrontation that he wanted.

I could feel myself pulling away from Lane. It was a familiar sensation, one that I had experienced many times over the years, whenever a killer summoned me.

I walked to the window and pushed aside the curtain. “It’s raining,” I said, looking down at the street. “Did you notice how wet that cellar was in the old house in Vermont? Smelled like grave dirt. Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for Wolf as a kid, when his stepfather locked him in the coal bin down there. I’ve tried to imagine, to put myself there, to feel what he must have felt. I can’t.”

I glanced back at Lane. “I can’t because he didn’t feel anything. He thought a lot, reasoned, planned, but he didn’t feel a damn thing.”

Childhood trauma is only one possible ingredient in the recipe that produces a serial killer. Most children who survive abusive home lives do not go on to careers in homicide. How they perceive their experiences, and how they reason their world, have as much or more to do with shaping them as the experiences themselves. For years, our microscopes had been trained on the family, and we had ignored the subject of our study

Lane walked up behind me. “So, Wolf makes his announcement,” she said. “He’s back from the dead. What do the bird book pages mean?”

“Janet’s kingbird,
Tyrannus tyrannus,
the tyrant—is Wolf saying that he’s the tyrant, the evil lord of all?”

“And what? ‘Mocking’ you?”

“I don’t know what else it could mean.”