Tunnel of Night (26 page)

“No kidding,” he said. “I’ve got this case in Oklahoma.”

“The burial grounds thing? I had a meeting at Interior last week. Someone mentioned that case. You’ve got your hands full.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, grateful for the sympathy and impressed with my connections in government.

We had dinner at the Stinking Rose. By the end of the evening, we had agreed that on my return to D.C. I would contact Special Agent Hiram Jackson in Quantico, and arrange to review photographs and soil samples from the Oklahoma sites. It was too easy.

“After that, I can give you a preliminary idea of what you’re dealing with,” I told him, “but it doesn’t sound good. You’re probably going to need some DNA work if you expect to make any identifications.”

I gave him a number in D.C. where I would be picking up messages. He gave me his office number in Oklahoma City.

“I don’t know where I’ll be staying,” he said, “but I’ll be checking with the office on a daily basis.”

I ordered another round of wine. “It must be difficult, always hopping around the country.”

“I enjoy it,” Cooper said, “I joined the Navy to see the world, and the Bureau to see this country. Never thought much about settling down. You married?”

I smiled for the asshole who still sported his Navy brush cut. “Two teenagers. We have a place on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge. Lynn, my wife, is in the education department at the university. I’ve always tried to confine my traveling to this time of year. The kids are at camp, and when Lynn isn’t busy with summer session, she often goes with me.”

“I’ve never even gotten close to that kind of life,” he said. “Work always gets in the way—mine or hers. I’ve been dating a woman in D.C Nothing serious, but this time it’s her work that’s getting in the way. Her name’s Samantha Becker. She’s divorced. Two kids who live with their father. She’s attractive, intelligent, knows what she wants out of life. It’s the first time I’ve actually thought about marriage. But right now, it just couldn’t happen. We both know that.”

All that I had wanted from my time with Agent Cooper was a connection to Quantico. Samantha was an unanticipated bonus.

• • •

I CALLED SAMANTHA BECKER’S OFFICE AT FORD’S
Theater, where she was extremely busy in her position as an assistant program director, she said. Still, she invited me to stop by her place in Georgetown.

Later that afternoon, I found her town house, rang the bell, and suffered through the chatter of greetings. She left me in the living room while she went off to the kitchen.

I looked at her walls. They were covered with posters advertising upcoming events at Ford’s. The posters dwarfed a family photograph of a blond mom and two blond kids.

Mom was Samantha, my victim.

More precisely, she was going to offer me the use of her town house as a stage. Samantha, of course, would be the central figure in my montage. She was a prop, an object to be placed and aligned in its proper position.

“What’s in the package?” she asked as she entered the room carrying a tray with two glasses and a bottle of Van der Heyden Chardonnay

She nodded her head toward the sleeve of brown paper that I had left on her glass coffee table.

Samantha’s blond hair spilled down over her shoulders—uncommonly long hair for a middle-aged woman of the nineties. She was dressed in tailored jeans, a white turtleneck, and a cotton print shirt in muted shades of blue.

“It’s the feather of a golden eagle.”

“An eagle feather? Really? Why on earth? Aren’t these illegal or something?”

She unwrapped the small parcel and glanced at the feather. “It’s pretty, I guess, but hardly seems worth spending time in jail. Where did you get it?”

I wanted to slit her throat. I detest shallow prattle.
She guessed this fragment of a bird that had soared above the Sierra Nevadas was “pretty.”

Lucas Frank had written a profile after one of my kills.

“He is reclusive, lives alone, does not socialize. He has never ‘fit’ in any social group. But as strange as others will consider his behavior, they would not think him impolite. He can smile, nod hello, but he does not waste time in frivolous chatter. He cannot tolerate others perceptions of the world if they contradict his own. He is intelligent, above average, but far from superior
.”

“It is not a superior specimen,” I said.

“It doesn’t have mites or anything, does it?”

“If he completed any degree it was a bachelors, no graduate degrees, with a major in biology or chemistry (a basic pre-med curriculum). He studies only what interests him, when he feels like it, and his resistance to authority rendered him a mediocre student
.”

She placed the feather on the table, brushed her hands on her jeans, and opened the wine.

“He could have accomplished more academically and professionally had he not been such a misfit. When he chooses to study, he does so exhaustively, perhaps in some esoteric fields, and works overtime at it
.”

Samantha leaned over the tray and poured two glasses of the Van der Heyden.

“What’s it like dating an FBI agent?” I asked. “Herb seems to have to move around a great deal.”

She brought my glass of Chardonnay. “Difficult,” she said.

“He is meticulous, considers himself perfect, and he is proud of the creation that he has left for your examination. He has moved around, left jobs at his convenience. Any military career will be undistinguished because of
his inability to deal with authority He did not live up to his own expectations for himself so he has redefined them and rewritten the past
.”

“Well,” Samantha said, “I’m glad you called, and I’m glad we could get together.”

“So am I.”

“Clinically, he is personality disordered—paranoid, narcissistic, obsessive compulsive. Also, he is dissociative. Despite the professional community’s reluctance to accept the diagnostic nomenclature, the most accurate label for him is ‘psychopath.’ He can play any role he needs to, and be convincing. He sees himself as the most powerful and brilliant person on earth—godlike. ‘Law and order’ are intellectual abstractions that he considers himself above. He believes that he is witnessing a breakdown of morality, justice, social and economic systems—otherwise he would have been recognized for his brilliance. He uses no drugs, doesn’t smoke. If he drinks, it is only the occasional glass of wine
.”

“What exactly is it that Herb wants you to do? Is it the Unabomber?”

I shook my head. “Samantha …”

“Then it must be the Oklahoma murders. You said on the phone that you were going to do some forensic work for him. What kind?”

“He is motivated by vengeance and the desire to have his superiority recognized, but he must maintain his anonymity. He is a game player, loves to taunt authority. All the clues he offers are spurious and will lead nowhere
.”

She had put down her glass and folded her arms across her chest. Her mouth was a thin line. Her eyes were narrow, questioning, skeptical. Samantha’s face seemed to twist and mold and shape itself into a mask. This woman wanted an answer to her question, and
she pushed like someone accustomed to getting her own way.

“The control he seeks is personal. The recognition he requires is public. This is frustrating to him because he cannot reveal his identity. He has dedicated his life to a single mission: murder. He sees himself as totally justified in everything he does
.”

As I explained the work that I would pretend to be doing for Agent Cooper, I reached behind my back and gripped the handle of my knife.

“Tell me what you do when the government doesn’t have its fangs in you,” she said.

“The feather has no mites.”

“What?”

Lucas Frank had written his “profile of an unknown subject” in 1976. He completed it based on a single Massachusetts case, and submitted the document to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Of course, nothing happened, and the case remained open.

In 1985, with Quantico operational, I returned to that same community and committed an identical murder. I lingered in the small town, staying at a local motel, reading the newspapers, watching the TV news, and observing state and federal officials come and go from the police station diagonally across the street.

After a week of this, just as I was growing bored with my game, Special Agent Dexter Willoughby participated in a televised press conference dealing with the case. A Boston reporter asked him about the possibility of a connection to the unsolved case from 1976.

“We see no reason to assume linkage between those cases,” Willoughby said. “To begin with, the 1976 homicide is remote in time, about nine years, and other than the type of weapon used, there really are no similarities.”

At first I thought it was a trick.

It was not. The gurus of crime were just as daft as any other teachers.

I was in Houston several months later, skimming through the day’s
Chronicle
, when I found an article describing the work of Quantico’s “psychological detectives.” A diplomatic Lucas Frank, M.D., was quoted in the article. He said that he envied the agency’s resources, and anticipated that these highly trained agents would be at the forefront in dealing with the growing epidemic of serial murder. A new addition to the BSU staff, Special Agent Herb Cooper, mentioned the unsolved case from 1985. “We’re constantly checking new cases,” Cooper told the reporter, “looking for similar MOs, anything that would allow us to go back and close out some of these older cases.”

Rubbish.

It was time to leave something for all the super sleuths—a replication of a brilliant work of art, signed by the artist.

Samantha Becker’s head snapped back as I slashed my blade against her throat.

LANE MET ME IN THE WILLARD’S LOBBY
.

“Jackson’s on his way to pick us up,” she said. “He’s taking us to a homicide scene in Georgetown. He didn’t say much. Somebody called it in to the District police. They called the feds. Jackson wants us to see it.”

She pointed to the door. “He just pulled up.”

As I got into Jackson’s car, he handed me a manila envelope. “I know Lane saw this in person,” he said. “You might want to review the photos.”

“What’s going on?”

Jackson didn’t answer. He pulled back into traffic and drove as I slipped a set of crime-scene photographs out of the envelope.

“That’s Sarah Sinclair,” Lane said, looking over my shoulder.

“Our victim’s name is Samantha Becker,” Jackson said. “She was an assistant program director at Ford’s Theater, organizing events, booking guests. The crime scene is her home in Georgetown. I walked in there, took one look around, and bells started going off.”

“Why are you giving me Sarah Sinclair?”

Jackson’s expression was hard to read, but I did notice a tightening of his facial muscles. “The crime scenes are almost identical,” he said.

We crossed the P Street bridge into Georgetown. Jackson made a couple of turns, then stopped in front of a private home, a narrow, Federal-style town house. The place was crawling with District cops and feds, including Rexford Landry.

As we got out of the car, Jackson said, “Looks like it happened sometime last night.”

We walked up the steps and crossed the foyer. I hesitated for a moment beneath the churchlike, vaulted ceilings, then dropped into a crouch beside the blond corpse. Her long hair was matted with blood.

“Oh, God,” Lane said, looking around the apartment. “This is exactly how Sarah Sinclair’s apartment looked when we found her.”

I shuffled through the photographs, stepped back, and looked at the room from a variety of angles. Everything matched the Sinclair scene. Candles burned down to puddles of wax. Wineglasses. A tray of crackers and cheese. Her dress was white, like a wedding gown, with birds embroidered on the neck, flying in the same direction as the slice through both carotid arteries.

“Samantha Becker wasn’t wearing that dress,” I said, stating the obvious. “He stripped her and put that on her after he killed her.”

All the display was after the fact of murder. He had killed her on the sofa—there was a large bloodstain there—rolled her onto the floor, stripped and redressed her, then dragged her into position near the coffee table.

“What about the clothes she was wearing?” I asked.

“He must have removed them from the scene,” Jackson said.

“She’s divorced,” Landry said from behind us. “Mother of two. Doesn’t look like the kids live here. Ex-husband’s a banker in Delaware. We’re trying to locate him. We’re also running a background on him. Couple of guys are up at Ford’s finding out what they can about her.”

“Waste of time,” I muttered.

“There’s the feather,” Jackson said, indicating the glass coffee table.

I stood up, walked around the white, oversized sofa, and looked down at a large, brown and yellow feather. “Have somebody at the Smithsonian take a look at it. I think you’ll find that it’s a neck feather from a golden eagle. He didn’t want us to miss it.”

At the Sinclair scene, just beyond Sarah’s outstretched fingers, Wolf had dropped a blue jay plume. With Samantha Becker, he had replicated the Sinclair homicide, and added another dimension to it.