Tunnel of Night (27 page)

“He’s rubbing our faces in our inability to catch him,” I said.

Wolf was working the city like a skilled politician, operating a step ahead of everyone else, making his moves, and leaving us to suck up his wake.

“Sarah Sinclair’s murder was the reason that we caught on to Wolf,” I said. “VICAP was filled with his escapades, but no one had ever connected them.”

“I worked a serial case in Richmond years ago,” Jackson said. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with. Turned out that we had a burglar who graduated to sexual assault, then sexual homicide. The computers weren’t much help on that one either.”

“Someone should reprogram them. Danny Rolling
started out as a voyeuristic adolescent in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from looking in windows to going through them. Sometimes he took something. Sometimes he just moved things around. Eventually he raped and murdered college students in Gainesville. Its the need for a higher level of excitement, a bigger payoff. If you looked only at the official record of his arrests, you would dismiss him as an armed robber.”

“Anybody could’ve copied this,” Landry said. “You’d be amazed at the crime-scene details that leak out all over the Internet.”

“Lane, was anything about Sarah Sinclair’s dress ever released?”

“No. The media picked up that she had been entertaining Wolf, that they’d had drinks. I remember a few other details, but nothing about the dress.”

“He won’t be ignored,” I said to Landry. “He’s going to have his recognition, even if he has to bring you and your agency to its knees to get it.”

“You make this guy sound like some kind of fucking genius,” Landry said. “Even if the asshole was alive, which he is not, he’d be just like the rest of ’em. You two are like girls at a slumber party, freaking each other out with ghost stories.”

Landry turned away and stomped back through the foyer.

“Pop, why an eagle feather?”

“The first thing that comes to mind is power,” I told her. “The eagle is a predator. It’s also a significant motif in Native American lore. Wolf’s biological father was Abenaki.”

“Samantha Becker was dating one of our agents,” Jackson said. “Herb Cooper. He’s handling that Oklahoma case I told you about. He and Samantha went out
a few times earlier this summer. She was wrapped up in her work, so was he. Then Herb was assigned to Oklahoma City.”

“Maybe that’s the connection,” I said. “Cooper ever work with Willoughby?”

“One case. An unsolved in 1985. Massachusetts, I think. We’ve got someone pulling the records now. Will it connect to you?”

Wolf had spent time in Samantha Becker’s home. He knew he could not perfectly duplicate the Sinclair crime scene, but he had come close.

He would also know that he had made a believer of me back in Lake Albert. Why take such pains to simulate this murder from a year ago?

To the FBI, Wolf was still officially dead. The bureaucratic wheels that Jackson had set in motion hadn’t completed their rotation. Then there was Rexford Landry.

You want to be officially resurrected, don’t you, lad
?

“The Massachusetts case has to be connected to me,” I told Jackson, “but I think Ms. Becker might be for the Bureau’s benefit.”

“Do you know what happened to that old house in Vermont after our people were finished with it?” Jackson asked.

“No.”

“Willoughby bought it. He paid off the tax lien, then erected a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Apparently it looks like there should be a jail there, sitting out in the middle of the woods.”

“If Willoughby thought there was more to find, why not Wolf’s office—the loft over the barn up near Brownsville?”

“Our people took everything out of there. They removed wall paneling, floorboards, you name it. Willough-by’s
wife says the case was an obsession with him. He went over every object, skimmed through every book, read every piece of paper. At first she thought he was going to write his own book. All he’d say was that there was something missing and he had to find it. He had flown up there four times in the last six months.”

Willoughby had more than doubts. His purchase of the Vermont property was obviously the information that he didn’t want me to have. He was certain that Wolf had walked away from the explosion. The senior agent required something tangible, some physical thing that he could place on a table at a meeting.

“There’s a young girl who may know what happened in Swanton. I want to show her the composites that we have of Wolf. Then I’d like to go back to the old house. Is there a way onto the land?”

Jackson handed me a key. “Willoughby’s wife gave me that. It fits the gate. I didn’t give it to you. Please check in with me when you get back.”

WITH THE SLATE ALMOST WIPED CLEAN, I EX
perienced a wave of weariness. If it hadn’t been for the intricacy and bold scope of my script’s final scenes, the final thirty-six hours, I would have had difficulty dragging myself out of bed.

I knew it would pass. These periodic bouts of lethargy have always lifted.

In college, I had been intrigued by the idea of ennui, especially the existential variety. I didn’t think that I had ever suffered from it. Sartre was a bore. Camus was more to my taste—entertaining, as he did, both homicide and suicide as philosophical statements.

As I drove south on 1-95 through the rolling Virginia hills, I realized that as satisfying as my design was, I was entering its most challenging phase. I should have been feeling excitation, as I did in my youth.

Instead, as I left 1-95 at the exit for the Marine base at Quantico, I was thinking about theories of the absurd, and about how you tend to disregard the role of legend in your lives. Í am the stuff of legend. Samantha
Becker, in her role as the dead Sarah Sinclair, is the stuff of legend.

You have allowed statisticians to assign the label of legend to athletes, racehorses, politicians, serial killers. You are a nation that knows batting averages, elapsed times, trends, whether DeSalvo or the Manson family claimed more victims. The FBI allows the same number crunchers to determine the probabilities that are the life blood of a place like their cave at Quantico.

Even the cooperative international efforts of the English and the Russians rely on computer-generated models. Charts and bar graphs. They have discovered an approach that impresses the masses. The drunken Sunday football fan knows what to expect from Thurmon Thomas or Emmitt Smith in yards per carry, and believes that all numbers are scientific. Even those who flunked basic math have been drugged with this
Guinness Book
mentality.

This is part of the reason that I want to bring it all to their doorstep—to provide them with the ultimate experience in humiliation, laced with a dash of cataclysm.

Your numbers are meaningless. You cannot measure what you cannot comprehend.

The “mind hunters” ask their incarcerated serial killers whether they believe in God, and whether they believe they’ll have to answer to God for what they’ve done. Why? Is it a reminder? A projection? An exercise in a socialized variety of sadism?

“Maybe we couldn’t juice you, but God’s gonna burn your ass
.”

This exercise is similar to the way they shove crime-scene photos in front of visiting members of Congress or media people. The civilians recoil in disgust. The
federal cop nods his head sagely and says, “This is what people are capable of doing to one another. These are the cases we look at every day.”

Who would dare cut their funding after a display like that?

Your experts are floundering—laboring to cling to some system of beliefs, some structure of biblical justice. An eye for an eye—something to keep them going when they realize that we are multiplying exponentially, and are far more intelligent than they could ever dream of being.

When they ask about the quality of a life lived within walls of concrete and steel, are they establishing rapport? After removing the suit jacket and loosening the tie to appear casual, just one of the guys, do they believe that they are approximating compatibility with the man in chains and orange coveralls?

I’ve read many of the interviews. I’ve seen the photographs—Ressler and Douglas posed like midgets on either side of Edmund Kemper. They went to obtain their own trophies. Is the motivation to collect souvenirs any different for them than it was for Joel Rifkin, the Long Island killer?

I found the unmarked road that I was seeking, made my turn, and began the long drive to the gatehouse.

Profilers are amateurs, racing around the country speaking authoritatively because they have a collection of numbers—probabilities. They drop names. They have talked to Charles Manson, John Gacy, Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross. The caged killers kept them running in circles—telling them partial truths and total bullshit—but the agents didn’t care. Their audiences on the workshop circuit looked up at them in awe.

I stopped at the small enclosure, handing the rent-a-guard
my identification, my instructions from Agent Cooper, and the name of my contact—Special Agent Hiram Jackson.

“Straight ahead, then to the right, Dr. Krogh,” he said.

“Thank you.”

Of course, I had no trouble finding the large gray building with the sign in front—FBI Academy. The offices of the Behavioral Science Unit, Investigative Support Services, were underground.

The site of the carnage to come.

At the entrance to the building, I presented the same materials that I had at the gatehouse. A middle-aged woman with a soft southern accent informed me that Special Agent Jackson was “in the field.”

“I’m not certain when he’ll be back, Doctor,” she said.

“That’s a shame. I have only today and part of tomorrow to complete the preliminary work that Special Agent Cooper wanted. He seemed so sure that Agent Jackson would be available.”

“Let me see if there’s another agent who can help you,” she said, then, after a moment on the phone, asked, “How much time will you need?”

“I won’t know that until I’ve seen the site photographs and the soil samples. I just need a corner somewhere. Space isn’t a problem, but I don’t know about the time.”

She repeated that information into the phone, listened, then hung up. “It’ll just be a minute.”

I didn’t recognize the agent who opened the door, “Sam Draper,” he said, extending his hand. “Sorry about the inconvenience. You’re here on the Oklahoma case, right?”

“For Herb Cooper, yes.”

“Let me just ask you to walk through the metal detector. Any keys you have, pocket change.”

I smiled. “I know the routine. You’d better take this, too,” I said, handing him my briefcase.

“What’s in this thing?” he asked, hefting the case.

I walked through the metal detector, setting off no alarms. “Magnifying glasses, small hammers, picks, tweezers, a microscope. Open it. It’s not locked.”

He slipped the two latches and gazed at the trays of tools resting in velvet compartments. He snapped it shut and handed it back, returning a .44 Magnum, two knives, and my strips of plasticized cyclonite.

“Follow me, Dr. Krogh,” he said.

I stepped through the door behind the agent, glancing at the institutional decor, then began my descent into the catacombs that housed those who most wanted me.

LANE WAS AT THE DISTRICT PD. SHE AND DETEC
tive Williams were reviewing more of the lead sheets they had generated when they distributed the Wolf composites.

I scribbled a note explaining where I was going and why, then left for the airport.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that answers awaited me in the mountains. I just wished that I had a better grasp on what the questions were.

I HAD PHONED AHEAD AND ARRANGED TO MEET
Corporal Lucy Travis of the Vermont State Police at the airport in Burlington. Travis had eight years in with the VSP, had worked the double homicide in Swanton, and she could communicate in sign language.

“I appreciate your meeting me on such short notice,” I said.

She was tall, and seemed to be a slender woman, but she was bulked out by the uniform and equipment she carried. I was reminded what my daughter looked
like before she moved to Homicide and was permitted to wear her own clothes.