Tunnel of Night (36 page)

Anthony Michaels had died around the time I had left my practice and retreated to Michigan. Cancer, I thought.

“My name is Dana Michaels. I’m a reporter with the Washington
Blade.”

I remembered that Anthony had shown me a photograph of his daughter. She was Lane’s age. The name Michaels was a common one, but as much as I wanted to dismiss it as coincidence, I couldn’t.

“My father and I used to ski at Mount Ascutney
.”

Anthony Michaels had been an avid skier.

Lane and I were supposed to arrive for the status meeting in the morning. Wolf, as Krogh, would be waiting, prepared to kill us all in the bowels of the BSU. If Darla was Anthony’s daughter, what did she have to do with it? It was clear that she had gotten her story from Landry

“I was the lead writer for the
Blade
on the original Wolf case
.”

She had given Wolf a splash in the press, one that he desperately craved, but her father—if Anthony was her father—had given me all the newspaper attention I had ever wanted or needed.

A composite drawing and a day or two on page one could not feed Wolf’s insatiable need for recognition. He had never experienced the luxury of being able to exert control over what cops and shrinks said about him, and what reporters wrote about him. His image was not his own. During his years in Boston, without knowing Wolf’s identity, Ray Bolton and I had shaped what the public learned about the killer.

That pissed you off, lad, didn’t it
?

I pulled off the highway into a gas station, found a phone, and dialed information for Boston. The listing hadn’t been changed since Anthony’s death. I listened as the phone rang three, four, five times. Finally, a woman answered.

“Mrs. Michaels?” I asked, managing to keep any evidence of urgency from my voice.

“Yes.”

“My name is Lucas Frank.”

“Dr. Frank? Of course. My Anthony used to speak of you.”

“I’m in Washington, D.C, Mrs. Michaels, and…”

“Our Darla is there. She’s a reporter now, you know. Just like her father. Crime.”

Mrs. Michaels sounded as if she could talk all night. I didn’t have time. “I’m having trouble with this phone,” I said. “Sorry I disturbed you. I’ll call back another time.”

When I called the Washington
Blade
and asked for Darla Michaels, I reached her voice mail.

I ran back to the car and continued driving south.

The past had already collided with the present. Wolf would go after Darla Michaels, but for what? Was she to be another victim? Was she supposed to pay for the sins of omission and distortion that Wolf would think her father had committed?

It made sense—Wolf’s kind of sense.

I had to get to him before he had the chance to get to the young reporter.

A year ago, probably the only thing that John Wolf had not anticipated was my willingness to kill him. Now, of course, he knew that I, like him, would not hesitate to kill.

The only advantage I had was that Wolf did not expect to see me until morning.

DARLA MICHAELS LOOKED AS IF I HAD HIT HER
. Her eyes widened. Her pouty mouth fell open.

“He told you this?” she said.

I nodded.

She grabbed her phone and punched numbers. “Landry, where the hell are you? Call me. Fast.”

She clicked off.

“Answering machine,” she muttered.

She looked up, stared pleadingly into my eyes. “Why is Wolf after me?”

“He said that your article was inaccurate, and that he found it terribly offensive.”

“I don’t believe this. Jesus.”

“When I spoke to the agent, he was in his office in Quantico. Can we go there?” She chewed her nails.

“Well, perhaps for your own safety you’d rather just go to the local police,” I suggested.

She slammed her palm on her desk. “They aren’t worth a damn. You’ll go with me to see Landry?”

“Of course. I feel an obligation.”

“Are you armed?”

I gave her my best blank expression. “Good heavens, no.”

She punched more numbers into her phone, waited, then said, “Landry, this is Darla Michaels. Meet me at your office as soon as possible. I’m on my way there with Roger Curlew. Remember him?”

My cast of characters continued to grow. I had anticipated that Landry would be among those that I incinerated. I had not expected the bonus of some private time with him.

Michaels grabbed a .32 from her desk, dropped it into her purse, then picked up her jacket.

“Let’s go.”

WE TOOK MY CAR. THE REPORTER WAS TOO SHAKEN
to drive.

I had redefined her reality. How could she not trust a composed, nonthreatening, churchless pastor? She sat, leaned against the passenger door, and continued to chew her nails.

Only now could I feel the excitement that accompanies the anticipation of carnage. Odd. With other kills—even other multiple kills, other versions of the Apocalypse—the notion, the formation of a rudimentary plan, the initial preparations, catching sight of a victim, were enough to stimulate me. This time was different. Could I have doubted myself, questioned my ability to bring this off?

I had to smile at my self-analysis. It was so wrong.

“You strike me as someone who is always very tense,” I said to Michaels. “I know this must be a terrible ordeal for you, but I don’t mean just this situation
right now. That was my first impression when I walked into your office and saw you on the phone. You seem like a nervous person.”

“I say it’s the job. I don’t know. I guess I’ve always been a little wired. Maybe that’s why I found my way into this kind of work. That and my father. He was a reporter. I’ve never had my life threatened before, though.”

“Can you remember a time when you were truly relaxed?”

I glanced over at her. She stared straight ahead for the moment, then dropped her eyes down and to the right—to the back of her hand.

“Yeah,” she said, sighing.

When I learned that the key to Lucas Frank’s technique was hypnosis—that he was capable of self-inducing a dissociative state—I had researched and mastered that skill, as well as the talent to effect a hypnoid state in anyone I chose. For my entire life, I had been exiting my body involuntarily. It required little effort or training to harness that ability.

“Sometimes it can be relaxing to think about other times that you felt that way,” I said.

“Just a few days ago, I had this strange but pleasant experience. It wasn’t a feeling, really. It was like being able to see things around me that I always thought were unimportant. I could really see them.”

“What were you seeing?”

“Oh, that was the strange part. One thing was a small brass frog.”

“Its brass tongue sticks out, and there’s a brass fly wrapped up in the tongue,” I said.

She turned toward me, a hint of anxiety in her voice. “I thought it was an unusual piece. How did you know that?”

When I was in Michaels’s apartment, I had placed the frog next to a carved wooden starfish on the top shelf of her bookcase. I fingered through her copies of
Primary Colors,
and
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.
She was not terribly eclectic. Hers were books that a Washington reporter would read.

“Just a guess. Seems like the sort of thing an artist would do. I may even have seen an object like that once, or maybe a picture of one.”

I had also prowled through her more personal belongings and inhaled her scent, the same fragrance that I could smell now in the car. I am always prepared for any encounter.

“I had admired that frog when I found it,” she said. “It just appeared there, on a shelf in my apartment a few days ago. I had a couple of dates with this guy, and I figured he put it there. He denied it, but I’m sure he put it there. I named it Oliver because of the artist’s sticker on the bottom of it. I liked it, but I hadn’t really seen it, absorbed all the details of it. Then, it was as if I were seeing it for the very first time, just for a moment.”

“Then, for another small increment of time, there was a sense of loss,” I said.

She hesitated, and agreed. “I couldn’t see it again. Not the same way”

“As if in a dream.”

“It was like that.”

“It just happened. There was no effort involved.”

She sighed. “You must be good at what you do. I don’t feel nearly as freaked as I did.”

“There is a sense of lightness that accompanies experiences like those. You feel as if you can rise up from your chair, or that you can soar out of your own body. Or that you’re going to, regardless of whether you want to.”

Darla nodded. “I thought it was just me.”

“We don’t pay enough attention to the subtle moments of our lives. We’re trained not to. Public schools do that to us. I refused to give in. Fought ’em every inch of the way.”

She laughed softly. “Tough talk for a minister.”

“I remember a teacher,” I said. “Miss Gossett. I wrote a poem about a flying squirrel. I had that little rodent soaring all over the place. Miss Gossett was very science-minded. She explained that squirrels don’t fly. The ones that are called flying squirrels glide. I knew that, but I wanted my squirrel to travel all over the universe if he wanted. I believed that I was free—in poetry, at least—to do as I wished. She gave me a C. What was worse, when I argued about the grade, Miss Gossett told my mother that I was arrogant. I heard about it for weeks.”

Marjorie Gossett never should have called me arrogant. It was ironic, really, because I always worked hard at not attracting attention to myself. There was no poem about a squirrel. Miss Gossett had walked in on me when I was using the faculty reading room adjacent to the library.

“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.

I started to explain that I had permission to be there. I got half a sentence out of my mouth when she told me that I was arrogant, then went off and reported me to the principal. He sent me home for the day, and that night my stepfather used me for a punching bag.

Later that year, Miss Gossett had a nervous breakdown. Someone had been calling her late at night. They were hang-up calls, heavy breathing, laughter.

Then, one by one, her several cats turned up on her doorstep with their throats cut. When all of her cats
were gone, more dead cats arrived. Despite a police patrol in her neighborhood, the dead cats kept coming.

The last one graced her bed pillow.

Someone said that Miss Gossett began to scream then, and didn’t stop screaming until doctors had pumped her full of Thorazine.

Years later I sent my former teacher a postcard, unsigned. It was a picture of a mother cat nursing its kittens.

“Do you like cats?” I asked Darla.

“I like them, but I’m allergic to them.”

“So was Miss Gossett.”

“Who?”

“That teacher I was telling you about.”

“Oh.”

“Eventually, her allergy killed her.”

I CONTINUED TO DRIVE SOUTH ON
1-95,
LEAV
ing behind the city and suburban lights, and entering the darkness.

I remembered another entry from Wolf’s journal.

PEOPLE COLLIDE ALL THE TIME. WE NEVER CON
verge
for more than an instant, but we do collide. If we were up high, we would come together, I’m quite certain. But I worry that there may be too many of us. When we soar so near the limits of the universe, we go at our own risk
.

Tomorrow always goes on as scheduled, but some of us don’t make it. And no one ever remembers for longer than it takes to pronounce a name
.

THE BSU’S MAIN ENTRANCE WOULD BE LOCKED
at night, so I walked into the adjacent building. I went up a flight of stairs, turned to my right, then walked through the glass-walled corridor that connected to the BSU offices.

I stepped into the stairwell, slipped out my gun, and listened. It was silent.

Staying close to the wall, I began a slow descent.

Cellars
.

Tunnels. Caverns
.

Places underground
.

As it had on my first visit with Jackson, it seemed strange to enter a building and travel downward. I remember doing some research at Harvard, descending in a claustrophobia-inducing elevator into the underground stacks at Widener Library.