Tunnel of Night (37 page)

It was at Harvard in the sixties that Alan Chadwick had followed Wolf into the cavernous Peabody Museum. Chadwick watched as Wolf, in a hypnoid state, stared at the mounted birds and mumbled what might have been some parody of a prayer.

One flight down.

Wolf had told his sister how angry he was about the birds that are carried down into the coal mines as living gauges on deadly gases. That story had reminded me of a test for guilt or innocence in 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. Suspected witches were weighted with large rocks and thrown into a pond. If the women floated, they were declared possessed by supernatural forces, and the penalty was death. If the rocks carried the women down, they were not prosecuted, but there was an often lethal side effect: drowning.

John Wolf had studied and met the same people I had. While I was trying to achieve some understanding about what made them tick, he was making sure that he was nothing like them. He was also learning to think exactly like I did.

As I descended the stairs, I thought of the hanging man, and of murder in holy places.

The animals that reside in the lightless recesses of our minds achieve their full potential only when we nurture them, stroke them, allow them out from time to time and use them
.

I had spent a lifetime struggling to maintain a balance with mine
.

Wolf had set his free
.

Two flights.

We project ourselves into everything we create. That fact is one of the foundation principles of effectively understanding the mind behind a crime scene, working backward from the carnage to its creator. Each of us leaves traces of our emotional self in everything we do. Even with our mouths shut, we are walking communicators.

Most of what I had read in Wolf’s journals was thematically familiar. He wished to terrify, humiliate, and ultimately destroy anyone who demeaned him by failing to acknowledge his existence. Every ounce of Wolf’s energy and intellect were devoted to the perfection of murder.

Sometime in his youth, Wolf had assembled a plan for his whole life. That’s where his rigidity originated. He didn’t know who he would kill, or when, or where. He trusted that one experience would lead him to another. His was a self-designed, closed system. He extolled the excitement that he associated with the anticipation of the kill. Waiting, titillating himself with his fantasies, knowing what he was going to do—these were his most exciting acts in his time on the stage. By remaining silent, scouting the environment in the safety of anonymity, isolating his prey, seizing a victim here, a victim there, the terror he set in motion soon developed a life of its own.

Three flights.

It was time to bring that life to an end.

I had reached the deepest level of the building, sixty feet down, and slipped into the corridor. With my back pressed to the wall, I moved through the dimly lighted hall toward the one bright room somewhere in the distance.

The offices were small, cramped burrows. I stepped into the room that Jackson had told me was Herb Cooper’s office. From the glow of the lights in the hall, I could see that the desk was covered with small vials, plastic bags containing fragments of bone, and a wooden case with a brass strip that said, “Dr. John Krogh.” I used my pocketknife to pry open the velvet-covered tray in the bottom of the case, then looked down at a folded Buck knife. There were also spaces for another knife—a straight blade—and a large caliber handgun. But the spaces were empty.

I picked up one of three identical paper wrappers that had been discarded in the bottom of the case. A single word had been block-printed on the paper:
CYCLONITE
.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

I had seen the plastic explosive only once in my life. I had seen the craters that well-placed cyclonite had created three times that I could remember. Wolf intended to blow the place off the face of the earth.

What the hell was I doing? I had the chance to hand this to Jackson. He had an army of specialists to deal with this shit. There was a phone on Cooper’s desk. I could call Jackson, then sit tight with my gun aimed at the door until the troops arrived.

As fast as it hit me, all doubt vanished. Wolf had to be terminated. Now.

Rage had always served me as the perfect replacement for fear. I breathed deeply, then stepped back through Cooper’s door, and slipped farther into the depths of the BSU.

I heard voices originating somewhere near the end of the hall.

Wolf had someone with him.

It was a woman’s voice.

Darla Michaels.

I had violated every law and ethical constraint I could think of so that, at the end, there would be no one between Wolf and me. Once again, I felt as if the bastard had read my mind.

“DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO WRITE WITH
?” I asked Darla Michaels.

“What? Oh, sure.”

She dropped her purse on the table and walked along the row of cubicles, glancing in at each one. I removed her .32 from the leather bag and placed it in my pocket. I had done my work well; she trusted me.

When she reached the last workstation, Michaels turned and started back. “Why do I need something to write with?”

“I’m going to give you the rest of your story.”

She sat at the table and folded her hands. “Roger, why don’t we just wait for Landry. He shouldn’t be long.”

“My name isn’t Roger.”

Darla looked up at me. As she stared at my eyes, her face clouded with confusion. Then her expression cleared and she dove for her purse.

“I have your weapon,” I said.

She continued to dig through the leather bag, emitting a low-pitched whine. Her performance was
undignified and annoying. Finally, she collapsed across the bag, her head resting against her arms.

After several moments she looked up at me and said, “John Wolf.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

Her voice shook. Her green eyes were wide, and darted in wild sweeps of the room.

“No. You have to carry my words to the world. Your readers depend on you for their vicarious thrills. I need you, and you need me. I want the story done right. You want your Pulitzer. We have only a few hours, so let’s get started. Sit in that chair.”

Her face was a mess. “Landry’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked, falling back into the chair I had indicated.

“We’re all going to die.”

Silence. Too shocked to think.

“How will you die?” she asked, rallying, a hint of challenge in her voice.

“I was in Greenwich Village one time,” I said as I peeled a length of duct tape from a roll and cut it with my knife. “I was still a student then. You probably should write this down.”

She was slow to move, but did manage to find a pen and steno pad. “You’re playing a game. Then you’re going to kill me.”

“I give you my word.”

“What good is that?”

“It’s all you have to believe in right now. There’s no one else here. If I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

“What’s the tape for?”

“To fix your ankles to the chair legs. As long as you behave, that will be the only restraint I use.”

“What did you do to Landry? He should’ve been hereby now.”

“Nothing. Darla, do you
want
to die?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then listen, and write,” I said, pointing at her pad. “How many reporters get an opportunity like this? Your father would have jumped at the chance to sit and talk with me.”

“You knew my father?”

I taped her legs to the chair.

“He knew my work.”

“Oh, Jesus. You’ve been killing that long?”

“Longer.”

“I can’t…”

“Greenwich Village,” I said again as I removed my jacket, reached inside its lining, and retrieved the soft cloth that contained my tools, wires, timer, batteries, and wafer-thin, cream-colored sheets of plastic explosive.

“What’s that?”

“I visited the White Horse Tavern,” I said as I folded open the cloth. “That’s the place where Dylan Thomas did most of his drinking when he was in New York. Then, I walked toward Washington Square. I saw a sign for a palm reader.”

Darla’s hands were trembling. “I can’t concentrate. What is all that?”

“Remember your brass frog? The one that sits next to the wooden starfish on top of your bookcase.”

Her head snapped up. “I said it was on a shelf. I didn’t say anything about the starfish. You’ve been in my fucking apartment.”

“Oliver—the artist—was an acquaintance of mine.”

Again, she seemed confused. “You put it there? When? How… ?”

She was like a child searching the heavens for Orion, finding a star here, a star there, but never the constellation in its entirety.

“The palm reader,” I interrupted, pointing again at her hands. “You don’t need to concentrate, Darla. Just write.”

Once more, she looked down at the pad. “I still want to know what you’re doing.”

“For two dollars the future could be mine,” I continued. “It was already mine, but I walked up the narrow flight of stairs anyway, sat at a small, round table, and waited.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t like it when people interrupt me.”

“I’m a reporter.”

“An old woman came in,” I said as I began stripping half-inch bare ends on my wires. “She asked for the money, and told me to hold out my right hand. She gazed down at it, then folded up my fingers and pushed my hand away. She shook her head and said, You know too much.’ The she returned my two dollars, got up, and walked back through the curtains the way she had come.”

“If you know so much, you can answer the question.”

“What question?”

“How will you die?”

“By violence.”

There was a curious expression on her face. “What about me? How will I die?”

This young woman would travel to my Web site on the Internet. I was mildly impressed. I had made a good choice for the person I wanted to see me, to know and
to record my accomplishments for others to finally appreciate.

“Let’s finish with me first,” I said. “Then maybe I’ll tell you the story of the rest of your life.”

I fixed the sealed battery case in its seat on the timer’s back, then threaded wires through the clips that would brace them, and attached the bare copper ends to the appropriate poles.

Michaels watched. “What’s the tan stuff?”

“Cyclonite.”

She looked up from my hands. Her eyes widened. “You’re going to blow up this place.”

I smiled. “They’ve never been very nice to me.”

I COULD HEAR WOLF’S VOICE—THE DEEP, THROATY
bass, and the tone, the inflections of a man who is absolutely sure of himself—the same voice I had heard a year ago in Vermont, and countless times in my mind.

I moved into the corridor on my right, my back against the wall, inching toward the lighted room thirty feet away, and remaining in the shadows.

My old friends daughter said, “You can’t do that. You’ll never get away with it. If you thought you had cops after you before …”

“You just don’t get it,” Wolf said. “I’m the killer. You’re the reporter. You write down all of this, and then you make a story out of it. I build the bombs and blow up whatever I want. Police are inept. They’ll hint at nonexistent progress while waiting for the public outcry to subside. Case closed.”

“What if your hand slips?”

“It won’t.”

It was no longer the simple matter of surprising Wolf and executing him. I was within twenty feet of the lighted doorway, listening as Darla Michaels confronted
John Wolf—pushed the killer, challenged him— and Wolf grew increasingly restive as he assembled his bomb.

Michaels was not applying school-of-journalism technique. What I heard was the person she was. Her demeanor could be enough to get her killed.

“You can’t let me go. You have to kill me.”

“You and I will leave here together. Ill drop you at your office.”

“Why would you risk coming here? Why blow up this place?”