Tunnel of Night (19 page)

In a few days, it will be exactly a year since that brief moment when it seemed that my life might end. When I first emerged from my tunnel, I could smell the smoke from the explosion and fire. I watched the glowing embers blend with the light snow. As I moved away, that faded until there was just snow and the silence of the forest.

On the anniversary of my rebirth, it will not snow in Washington. But there will be a blast from beneath the earth—an explosion and fire—and then there will be the silence of the thousands numbed by my audacity.

“Perfection,” I said into the cool night air.

SUSAN WALKER HAD NOT RETURNED LANE’S CALLS
.

“I’m not even sure she’s getting the messages,” Lane said. “They keep transferring my calls to that prick, Landry.”

Early that morning, she had gone to find Walker. After that, she planned to do some follow-up work with the D.C. police. I intended to attack more of Willoughby’s files and Wolf’s journal, but Special Agent Hiram Jackson showed up at my door.

“I have to drive down to Quantico,” he said. “I thought if you weren’t busy, you might want to join me.”

I had no interest in a tour of their underground quarters, but I did want to continue my conversation with Jackson.

As we drove south on 1-95, he said, “I want to apologize for Agent Landry’s behavior yesterday.”

“Accepted.”

“I also feel like I have to defend him. He’s a South Florida veteran. I wonder sometimes if he has one of those post-traumatic stress problems. He spent five years in Miami, most of the time never knowing who was a
cop and who wasn’t. He cornered one guy in an alley— both of them had their weapons drawn—and the man turns out to be DEA. That kind of stuff can get to you. We all want the dope off the street, but the agencies don’t always work real well together.”

My own feeling was that the war on drugs was long lost. Tons of cocaine were removed from the trade. Millions of dollars never made their way back to Colombia. But there were always more than enough kilos to go around, and more than enough money to build palaces and establish personal armies in Cali or Medellín. If Miami got too hot, there was Galveston or L.A., and new shipping techniques to foil customs. I was familiar with the pressures that Landry must have experienced working in a situation like that, but the entire enterprise struck me as a waste of time and money.

“He’s even less happy with you now than he was before, however,” Jackson said.

“Oh?”

“You picked him out last night. You knew we had a tail on you.”

“Yes. I did.”

“He doesn’t believe he slipped on the bathroom floor in Jewell Howard’s.”

“I wouldn’t know. The floor was soaked when I went through. Looked like somebody missed the bowl.”

“He says the bouncer whacked him.”

“Oscar? Landry missing any money? His identification? His weapon?”

Jackson shook his head and sighed. “Let’s just say he slipped.”

“Agent Jackson, I don’t give a shit what happened to your protege while he was in the pisser. I also have nothing but antipathy for his abuses of my tax dollars in
Florida. He told me I was chasing a ghost. If he thought he was going to put a cork in the cocaine trade in Miami,
he
was delusional. If you alphabet agencies can’t work together, and really want to shoot one another, please have at it. Just try to be more efficient about it. Now, I’ll ask you the same question I asked Landry. If Wolf is dead, why follow me?”

Jackson was silent.

“Did you talk with Susan Walker?”

Jackson sighed. “Before Willoughby shut her out, she got a good look at what was left of that old house. She also saw some of the preliminary reports. She’s not concerned about John Wolf.”

“She’s comfortable with coincidence?”

“Apparently so.”

“Is that why she hasn’t returned Lane’s calls?”

Jackson looked at me. “She didn’t say anything about Lane calling.”

Another reason for me to stick pins in my Rexford Landry doll.

We drove along in silence for several minutes.

“You are not comfortable with coincidence,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t tap on my door and invite me out.”

He nodded. “I reviewed the material on Sarah Humphrey and Alan Chadwick. I remembered Wolf’s fascination with birds and feathers. His sister’s killer ate a meal in the trailer after cutting her. He placed an odd glass bird on the table, like it was supposed to be a centerpiece. None of her neighbors remember seeing the thing before. Her husband said he vaguely remembered it. Hadn’t seen it in years. Said he thought it was a gift from her brother. I also called Boston. Spoke to a guy who said he’s an old friend of yours. Ray Bolton.”

“Ray brought me my first case,” I said. “We go back a lot of years.”

“He was kind enough to do some checking on Chad-wick’s death, which was ruled a suicide, by the way There was a compact disk on a chair in the pathologist’s office. Stravinsky’s
Firebird.
Chadwick preferred classical music, but according to his colleagues, he purchased only vinyl recordings.”

I shook my head and silently saluted my opponent. Stravinsky’s ballet is the story of the phoenix. I slipped the brass figure from my pocket. “This was delivered to me at the hotel. It’s the phoenix, rising out of the ashes, returning to life. It was wrapped in a page from Peterson’s
Field Guide to the Birds
—mockingbirds. Janet Orr, my friend at the lake, received kingbirds. The page was torn from my copy of the book while I was unconscious on the patio.”

Jackson glanced at the brass rendition of the mythical bird, then at me. “I told you that I was willing to consider any overlap in our investigations. Chadwick also received a page from Peterson—coots, page sixty-one. Humphrey’s was page thirty-four, old squaws.”

I knew that Wolf’s signature in Willoughby’s office had not been a page from Peterson. The line from the poet Rimbaud scrolling across the agent’s computer screen had marked the murder as Wolf’s. I also knew that my not asking about that crime scene would appear strange.

“What about Willoughby?”

“Nothing from the bird books,” Jackson said, shaking his head, “but someone is involved in an elaborate charade. Maybe an ardent admirer, a fan of Wolf’s. We’ve seen a couple of cases like that before.”

That had been Lane’s initial reaction—that we were
dealing with a copycat. I respected Jackson’s intelligence enough to believe he knew that Willoughby’s body had been propped in place for a reason. Something should have been resting between the agent’s two cupped hands. I also believed that he was aware of the Rimbaud reference. He had to know.

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “The pathologist was connected to Wolf’s late teens and early twenties. The sister connects to his childhood. Both of them played significant roles in our ability to understand Wolf, and to find him. Neither was ever identified in the media. Willoughby became one of your investigative superstars at Wolf’s expense. John Wolf is motivated by vengeance.”

“Why didn’t Wolf kill you in Michigan?”

“I think because he wanted me here for the rest of his show.”

“Willoughby.”

“And Susan Walker, Lane—whatever else he has planned.”

“What else
does
he have in mind?” Jackson asked. “And when?”

I gazed out the window. Something was nudging at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t get a grasp on it. “I don’t know,” I said.

Jackson slid a photograph out of an envelope and handed it to me. I stared at the picture. An auto dealership. Willoughby’s Volvo with the driver’s door open. A group of cops standing around. Lab techs going through the agent’s car. High on a pole, at the end of the lot, was the owner’s sign:
FEATHERSTONE FORD
.

“I don’t think that’s a stretch,” Jackson said.

“Neither do I.”

“Officially, I can’t look for John Wolf. I don’t think
that matters. If it isn’t someone doing a damn decent imitation of Wolf, that leaves the original article, right?”

What Jackson was offering was much better than nothing. “Right,” I agreed.

THE BSU, IN ITS UNDERGROUND QUARTERS AT THE FBI
Academy in Quantico, was even more institutional and depressing than I had imagined. The place was sixty feet down, ill-lighted, tomblike.

Special Agent Landry sat in one of the cramped cubicles. As we passed, he looked up, displaying a bandage on his forehead, a blackened eye, and a vicious scowl.

“Landry’s reviewing all of Willoughby’s files,” Jackson said.

“So, I’ll have a different tail tonight?”

“Depends on where you go. Why not just file an itinerary with me? Be easier on all of us.”

“My sister once told me that life wasn’t fair. Think she was right?”

We both smiled, and walked in silence through the hall.

“This is Herb Cooper’s office,” Jackson said, pointing at one of the small rooms. “He’s working a case in Oklahoma, homicide victims buried in a Native American burial grounds. We have to identify the victims, two entire families, without disturbing the site,”

“Is this a recent case?”

“It’s from the sixties,” Jackson said. “The Winklers and the Parmenters. Both families had sixteen-year-old daughters. We think the kids were the targets, and we figure the same perps did both. It’s a little like the
Clutters in Kansas, the Truman Capote book, but money wasn’t an issue here. Also, whoever killed them didn’t leave the bodies to be found. We were lucky to stumble onto this thing—local guy found a jawbone and a femur—but it’s a tough one to work. We can’t disturb the burial grounds, and there could be all kinds of evidence in there.”

I met so many agents on my tour that the names flew by Lawrence, Draper, Bowers, Gannet, Means. Always, I was the intruder, the outsider. The women and men that I met were polite, but distant. I wasn’t a visiting official who needed to be impressed. I was a civilian critic and competitor.

When Jackson and I sat over sandwiches and beers in the cafeteria called the Boardroom, he said, “I thought you were retired.”

“I was. I liked it that way I’m slowly realizing that I can’t stay retired.”

“We’re not doing the job?” Jackson asked, with a twinkle in his eye.

I laughed. “You’re asking me? Jesus. Of course you’re not. Your press releases and your movies and the way you treat the local PDs—all of that says you know something nobody else does. You don’t. None of us can do the job alone, Jackson. I think you know that.”

He nodded. “The Bureau is changing,” he said. “For the better, I mean. It’s a slow process.”

“I have no patience with any bureaucracy,” I told him. “I’m not saying that I don’t have my own quirks and limitations. Wolf is certainly teaching me a lesson. When you turn your back on the predators, they snap at your heels. Given a choice like that, I’d much rather be the aggressor, and I don’t have time to wait for a committee decision to turn me loose.”

Jackson grinned. “Everybody said you were a pissant.”

“Damn right,” I said, taking a bite from my sandwich. “Lane says I should be in the
Guinness Book
under ‘strangest humanoid creatures.’ ”

“What about the pages from Peterson?”

“Good question. We could say that Alan Chadwick was a coot, Sarah Humphrey was an old squaw, and so forth. Those were just the first entries on the pages, though, right?”

Jackson nodded.

“That would be cute, but it wouldn’t be Wolf.”

“Or a fan,” the agent added.

“Or a fan,” I echoed, “since that’s your price of admission. The references are inconsistent. The kingbird and mockingbird would be references to him, not his victims, like the other two. He’s too rigid for that. They’d all have to be the same.”

“So?”

“You gonna make me do all the work?”

Jackson laughed. “Two of the pages have text carried over from previous pages,” he said, “There are other birds mentioned on all the pages. How can we be sure about what he wants us to see?”

I didn’t know the answer, but I liked the idea that I was not the only one thinking about the question.

JACKSON DROPPED ME AT THE WILLARD. LANE
still wasn’t back from the District PD.

I began reading selections from the journal that Wolf had kept on his office computer. Several times there was an entire page that contained only the words: “I speak to you.”

The audacious prick.

There were accounts of numerous murders, a long section about his sister, brief entries dealing with his mother and stepfather. One of the computer files was a lengthy, anecdotal report written by Dr. Elbert Bernard, a psychiatrist at the private school where Wolf had been confined in his late teens, just before he departed for Harvard. Authorities even then suspected him of terrible things.

Bernard was a nondirective therapist who allowed the relationships with his patients to evolve naturally. His taped sessions with the young Wolf began as a chess tutorial, with the teenager advising the older man on how to improve his game.

Wolf had rebuked his student: “Don’t think one or two moves ahead. Six, eight, ten—there is no limit to how far you can anticipate. The game is finite, after all. The moves must conform to certain rules. The area of the board is quite small. You tend to view it as a series of narrow corridors. These passages intersect, Dr. Bernard. Each one opens into others, creating new and different possibilities. Corridors confine. We must break out, then consider the whole. It’s a Zen sort of thing. I nurture my capacity to see not merely to the end, but beyond. Those who lecture us that perfection is not possible are wrong, of course. Perfection can be achieved, but to stay with any one thing that long would be rather boring.”