Red 1-2-3 (6 page)

Holding the olive-drab ammo box under her right arm, she lifted her left hand to the side of her face, blocking the sight of her dead daughter’s room. She did not think she could handle another conversation with a ghost that day, and she hurried down the hallway back to her kitchen.

She was still naked. But there was something about getting the weapon and the reverberating noise from the threatening letter that made her suddenly feel modest. She plucked her clothes from where she’d discarded them, and tugged them back on.

Then she took the letter and put it next to the ammo box on a coffee table in her living room. She dialed the combination and reached inside.

35

JOHN KATZENBACH

A cold black Colt Python .357 Magnum rested on the bottom, next to a box of hollow-point bullets. She removed the weapon, fiddled with it for an instant, and finally cracked open the chamber. Seeing it was unloaded, she carefully steered six live rounds into the cylinder.

The gun seemed incredibly heavy in her hand, and she wondered how anyone had the strength to lift it, aim, and fire. She used both hands, and adopted a shooter’s stance as she had seen in television melodramas. Using two hands helped, but it was still difficult.
A guy’s gun,
she thought.
Teddy
would always want a real guy’s gun. Not some flimsy little girly shooter.

This thought made her smile.

She looked down at the words on the letter.

“
You have been selected to die
.”

Sarah put the gun down on top of the typed page

That might be true,
she silently told whoever it was that was out there planning to kill her,
but I’m more than half-dead already, and this is one
Little Red Riding Hood that isn’t going down without a fight. So come on.

Give it your best shot, and let’s see what happens.

Sarah was astonished at her response. It was the exact opposite of what she’d expected herself to think. Logic suggested that because she wanted to die, she should do nothing and just open her door to the Big Bad Wolf and let him kill her and put her out of her misery.

But instead, she spun the cylinder of the gun, which made a clicking sound before coming to a halt.
Okay, let’s see what you’ve got. I may be alone,
but I’m not, really.
She had absolutely no desire to call her aging parents, who lived in the eastern portion of the state, or any of the people she once thought of as friends but whom she now ignored. She did not want to call the police or an attorney or a neighbor or anyone else. Whoever it was that had
selected
her, well, she was going to face him all by herself.
This
just might be crazy,
she told herself,
but it’s my choice. Whatever happens, it’s
okay with me.

And oddly, she felt a sense of warmth, because for a fleeting instant, she thought her dead husband and her dead daughter just might possibly be proud of her.

36

RED 1–2–3

* * *

Jordan seemed frozen on her bed, hunched into a fetal position. She wondered whether she should ever move again. Then, as seconds blended into minutes, and she heard some of the other girls in the dormitory returning—voices raised, doors slamming, a sudden burst of laughter, and a fake wail mocking whatever phony trouble someone had—Jordan began to stir. After a few more moments, she sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Then she picked up the letter and reread it.

For an instant, she wanted to laugh.

You think you’re the only Big Bad Wolf in my life?

It was almost like
get in line
. Everyone else—from her estranged and constantly arguing parents, to the faculty at her school, to her ex-friends who’d abandoned her—was in the process of killing her off. Now, added to that was some anonymous joker.

She suddenly felt rebellious, confrontational. She still figured that whoever wrote the letter was just taunting her. Prep school students could be incredibly inventive and incredibly cruel. Someone wanted her to react in some manner that would amuse him. Or her. She reminded herself to not rule out girls just because the letter writer promised violence. Some of her female classmates were capable of administering astonishing physical beatings.

Screw you,
she thought.
Whoever you are.

Jordan picked up the letter and began to go over it carefully, the way she once would do when she was absorbing a detailed question on a difficult test.

The words on the page seemed to leap at her. The letter didn’t seem juvenile. It had a more sophisticated tone than that of her classmates. But Jordan knew she needed to be careful before she reached any conclusion.

Just because it didn’t
read
like it came from another teenager didn’t mean that one hadn’t written it. Like Jordan, many of her classmates had actually absorbed the language lessons taught by Hemingway and Faulkner, Proust and Tolstoy. Some were capable of very sophisticated prose.

37

JOHN KATZENBACH

She stepped across the room to her small work space. Desk. Laptop. A jar of pens and pencils and a stack of unused notebooks. In a top drawer, she found a tan folder that she usually used for collecting stray class notes in one location. She put the letter into the folder.

Okay, what’s the next step?

Jordan felt cold inside. She realized there was little right then that she could do, or should do, but one thing did jump out at her.
“It would be
wise for you to keep that in mind . . .”

She nodded.
All right. You want me to learn about the real story of Little
Red Riding Hood. Well, that I can damn well do.

It was time for basketball practice. After working up a sweat on the court and showering, she would have plenty of time to go to the school library and find the Brothers Grimm. She was pretty much flunking everything, so spending her time analyzing a centuries-old fairy tale because she was either being stalked by a crazy killer or was the butt of some elaborate joke by a mean classmate made perfect sense to her.

38

4

The Big Bad Wolf regretted not being able to see the reactions of each of his Reds when they read his message on the page in front of them. He was forced to indulge in fantasy—racing through delicious mental images of each, and anticipating the emotional contortions each was stumbling wildly into.

Red One will be angry.

Red Two will be confused.

Red Three will be scared.

He took a moment to look at slightly blurry pictures of each woman, taken with a long-lens camera. On the wall above his computer he had tacked more than a dozen pictures of each Red, along with note cards filled with information about each woman. Months of observation—

from a distance yet intensely personal—were delineated on the wall. Little bits of their history, small aspects of their lives—all gleaned from cautious study—became words on a note card or glossy full-color pictures.

Red One was caught smoking.
A dangerously bad habit,
he thought. Red Three was sitting alone beneath a campus tree.
Always lonely,
he reminded 39

JOHN KATZENBACH

himself. Red Two was pictured emerging from a liquor store, arms filled with packages.
You are so weak,
he whispered. He had placed that photograph above a newspaper clipping that was frayed around the edges. The headline was
Fireman and Daughter, 3, Killed in Crash.

It was not unlike the sort of display that police detective bureaus collected so that the cops could have a visual representation of the way a case was progressing. It was a staple cinematographer’s shot in a hundred movies—with justification, because it was so commonplace. There was one large difference, however: The police tacked up crime scene photos of murdered bodies because they needed answers to questions. His array was of the living, destined to die, most questions already answered.

He knew each Red would respond differently to the letter. He had spent considerable time examining literary and scientific works that assessed human behavior in the turmoil that direct threats create. While there were common reactions associated with fear—see a shark’s fin and the heart skips a beat—the Big Bad Wolf instinctively believed fear was processed individually. When an airplane hits unexpected turbulence and seems to stagger in the sky, the passenger in seat 10A screams and grips the armrests white-knuckled, while in seat 10B the traveler shrugs and goes back to reading. This fascinated him. He liked to think that in both his careers, novelist and killer, he had explored these things deeply.

And he was not one to underestimate the correlation between fear and creativity.

He expected several concrete things to happen after they’d read his letter. He also tried to anticipate some of the emotions that were within them.
They will stumble and fall,
he thought.
They will twitch and shake.

He had recently watched a television show on the History Channel that interviewed famous military snipers. Using high-tech camerawork, it had reconstructed some of the remarkable assassinations they had performed, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in the Iraq war. But what struck him was not merely the extraordinary competence of these snipers who stole lives, but the emotional detachment they displayed, what the French call
sangfroid.

The military killers called their victims
targets,
as if they had no more 40

RED 1–2–3

personality than a black-and-white bull’s-eye, and boasted that they had not the slightest hint of a subsequent nightmare. He did not know that he believed this. In his murderous experience, the stealing of a life was only as significant as the mental reverberations afterward. Indeed, reliving moments was where the real satisfaction rested. He embraced nightmares.

He guessed that the snipers did as well. They just weren’t about to say that in public with a documentary camera rolling.

That, too, made him special. He was documenting
everything.
That was what he found delicious: actions and thoughts, the stew of death. He typed furiously, words racing at him.

One of them—at least one, but not all—will call the police. That’s to be
expected. But the police will be as confused as they are. Preventing something
from happening is precisely not what the police are skilled at. Maybe the police
are capable of finding out who performed a murder, after it happens—but
they are relatively incompetent at preventing one from taking place. The Secret
Service protects the president, and they devote thousands of man-hours, computer time, psychological analysis, and academic study to keeping one man
safe. And yet—they fail. Regularly.

No one is protecting the Reds.

One—maybe all three of them at some point—will try to hide from me.

Think of the children’s game of hide-and-seek. The advantages are always with
the person doing the seeking: He knows his quarry. He knows what drives them
into concealment. He probably knows the places they will try to hide, and he
knows the uncertainty that fuels their fear.

One—I’m sure at least one—will refuse to believe the truth: that they are
going to die at my hands. Fear corners some people underground. But sometimes fear insists that people ignore danger. It is much easier to believe nothing
will happen to you than it is to think each breath you take may be one of the
last you’ll ever enjoy.

One—maybe all three—will think they need to seek out assistance, only
to have no idea what sort of assistance they need. So they will be stifled by
uncertainty. And even were they to seek out another person’s counsel—well,
41

JOHN KATZENBACH

that person is likely to downplay the threat, not underscore it. This is because
we do not want to ever believe in the capriciousness of life. We do not want to
believe in thunderbolts and accidents. We do not want to believe that we are
being hunted, when in truth, we are every day of our lives. And so, whoever
they consult will want to reassure my Red that everything is going to be all
right, when the exact opposite is the case.

What is the challenge facing me?

My Reds will try to protect themselves in any number of ways. My task,
obviously, is to make certain that they cannot. To achieve that, I have to get
close to each of them, so that I can anticipate each pathetic step they will try.

But at the same time, I have to maintain my anonymity. Close, yet hidden—

that’s the approach.

He paused. It was nearing the dinner hour. His fingers flew across the keyboard. He wanted to finish up with some of his initial thoughts before breaking for the evening meal.

No one has ever done what I intend to do.

Three wildly different victims.

Three distinct locations.

Three different deaths.

All on the same day. Within hours of each other. Maybe within minutes.

Deaths that tumble together like dominoes. Each one falling against the next.

Click. Click. Click.

He stopped. He
liked
that image.

Maybe one of those military snipers had achieved multiple kills all on the same day, or in the same hour, or even in the same minute, he thought. But they had a single enemy to focus on that walked stupidly and thoughtlessly directly into their line of fire. And there were killers he had studied who had achieved multiple murders in short order. But again, these were genuinely random acts—shoot this person, walk across town, shoot another person. The D.C. Sniper. Son of Sam. The Zodiac.

42

RED 1–2–3

There were others. But none had done anything as special as what he planned. What he was attempting was truly something that no one had ever tried.
Guinness World Records
-worthy. He could barely contain his excitement.
Proximity
, he told himself.
Get closer.
That was what the Big Bad Wolf did in the children’s story. That was what he was busy planning.