Tunnel of Night (14 page)

When I returned to the trailer, Herb was sitting at the kitchen counter with his rifle. He was not cleaning it. The weapon simply rested there.

Something was wrong.

“Echo at the diner?” I asked,

“She called. Said she might be late.”

“Where’s Terry?”

“Don’t know,” Herb said, standing and cradling the .30-30 in his arms. “You know, Terry can’t talk, but she senses things in other ways. She says you’re a killer. You ever kill anyone?”

“Plenty I wanted to kill,” I said. “Guess I just never got around to it.”

While Herb nodded, pondering that, I removed the .44 from my pocket. I watched as his expression changed from thoughtful to quizzical to alarmed. It was strange. He seemed to have forgotten that he was holding a weapon.

I squeezed off a single round. Herb fell backward, then down.

It had been a long time since I had killed.

I sat at the counter until night came. Echo appeared in the open doorway, a silhouette against the moonlit sky.

“Where’s Herb?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.

“Who did you talk to?”

“I wanted to know. I went to the library, looked at old newspapers. Your name is John Wolf. Terry said …”

“You made a mistake.”

I fired Herb’s rifle twice, two slugs dead center into Echo’s chest. She fell back through the open door, out onto the snow, where her blood leached designs down along the walk.

I grabbed what I needed, stepped over Echo’s body, climbed into Herb’s truck, and drove south.

NOW, WITH LUCAS FRANK ENSCONSED IN THE
Willard and my plan falling into place, I drove into Virginia,
waiting until I had found the perfect location for what I had in mind. Then I placed my call.

“Special Agent Dexter Willoughby,” I said into the cellular phone.

“May I tell him who’s calling?”

“No.”

There was a pause. “I doubt that he’ll take the call, sir.”

“I have some information for him. If he wants to know why the Bureau took the heat for an ATF screw-up, he’ll take the call. If not, I’ll sell what I have to the media.”

“Hold for one moment, please.”

Within seconds the thin-voiced man said, “Special Agent Willoughby. How can I help you?”

“You and I both know that the Baker matter was the ATF’s problem. Your agency got slammed because there was no proof. ATF covered it up. Ten grand in cash buys you audio and videotapes that document the entire episode, and the only copy of the Baker file that never got shredded.”

“Who is this?”

I ignored his question, gave him directions to a car lot where we were to meet, told him he had a half hour to get there, then clicked off. He would have no time to think it over, no time to arrange backup. If the little dick’s ambition was the driving force I believed it to be, he would show up with ten thousand dollars in cash, salivating at the prospect of dumping all over a competing agency.

Willoughby had used my presumed death to advance his career. He was hardly someone to work up a sweat about, but I resented his bureaucratic ascent at
my expense. He offended me. His agency offended me, especially its elite spawn in Quantico. They weren’t “mind hunters.” In alleys and closets and other dark places, they engaged in games of mutual masturbation. They were fucking each other’s hands and getting paid to do it.

The name of the auto dealer—Featherstone Ford— was serendipitous, but couldn’t have been more fitting. Clearly, it was one of those things meant to be. I knew that it would not be wasted on Lucas Frank.

At the appointed time, Special Agent Dexter Willoughby stepped out of his car and walked toward me, unbuttoning his suit jacket. When he put his arms down to his sides again, I moved forward.

“We’ve never been formally introduced,” I said, extending my hand, smiling.

Willoughby kept his hands at his side. His expression was pained, as if he were straining to remember how and why we should know one another.

“Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Willoughby, that a life requires a certain order, a dependable if not predictable balance?”

“Who are you?”

“When the flow of a life being lived is disrupted, torn apart, and crumbles into dust, reparations are necessary, don’t you think? It’s only just. That’s your business, isn’t it? Justice.”

“I don’t know you.”

“My name is Wolf,” I said. “John Wolf.”

Willoughby’s right hand snapped up toward his shoulder holster. I grabbed his hand before he could draw his weapon, and spun him around. I grasped him under the chin and twisted until I heard a familiar crack. Then I propelled his limp body into the backseat
of my car. I had a few more details to attend to—a final touch that I knew would give me pleasure.

The commuter traffic was heavy. I don’t enjoy driving on crowded highways.

It is annoying.

Vexing.

AFTER LANE HAD GONE, I MANAGED TO OVER
-come my aversion to the phone and call Dexter Willoughby’s office.

His secretary remembered me. “He’s in the field, Dr. Frank,” she said. “He left shortly after you did yesterday. I’m not sure when hell be back.”

When I tried the agent’s home phone, I reached his voice mail. So far, so good.

I drove to Vienna, and parked in a branch library lot that abutted the rear of Willoughby’s property. I could barely make out the brick ranch house through the trees and dense undergrowth. I waited in my car until library traffic was nonexistent, then slipped over a low, split-rail fence and disappeared into the brush, where it was impossible to be quiet. I was sure I must sound like Virginia’s own “Bigfoot” tromping through the suburbs fallen leaves.

Twenty-five yards in, I arrived at the side of a small, cedar-shingled building. As I approached the door, I was prepared to find some creative way of opening it,
and considered some of the more imaginative forced entries I’ve performed over the years. Most of them were legal—in my capacity as a consultant to various law enforcement agencies. A few of them—like this one—could have bought me five to ten years in a steel and stone hotel.

This time, I had no need to be concerned. The door was open. If I got nailed as a trespasser, I could talk my way out of it.

I stepped into a small, neat room. Three tan filing cabinets, neatly and clearly labeled, lined the back wall. Stacking trays on top of the cabinets also wore block-lettered tags. A large window at the front of the building offered a view of the trees. Willoughby’s desk was there.

So was the agent.

He sat motionless, his semiclenched hands on his desk, his head tilted awkwardly to one side. He looked like he was staring thoughtfully into his stand of pines. I nearly said his name before I realized that he would never answer anyone again.

The agent’s head sat at too odd an angle to his body to allow for life. Someone had broken his neck, then propped him in place like a gray-suited doll. His legs had been taped to the desk. A thin wire wrapped around his chest and the chair held his upper body in place.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, staring at the man who had so infuriated me the previous day.

I looked away from the dead agent and surveyed the desktop in front of him. His hands had been placed on either side of a large notebook, as if he were about to open it, I lifted it and glanced quickly at police reports,
plastic sleeves of computer disks, hand-drawn diagrams of what looked like a bomb, audiotape transcripts. It was Willoughby’s case file on John Wolf.

As I closed the notebook, I noticed the printed message on the agent’s Windows Marquee screen saver: “Now is the time of the
assassins
.”

I could give the dead man no credit for having been that literate. The words that scrolled by were from a work by Arthur Rimbaud, one of John Wolf’s favorite poets.

I grabbed some paper towels and wiped down the few areas where I might have left fingerprints. Then, carrying the notebook that I was sure Wolf had left for me, I headed back through the woods to my car.

I drove to a convenience store and used an outside phone to call 911. I knew that the call would be taped, so I held the phone away from my mouth, spoke with as much of an accent as I could muster, and gave the dispatcher all the information he would need.

Then I retraced my path to the Willard, wondering who would visit me first: Willoughby’s colleagues, or his assassin.

LANE HAD DROPPED OFF A PRINT COPY OF THE NYPD
file on Wolf. It was similar to Willoughby’s notebook, but not nearly so complete. Lane had sent disk copies of her Wolf files to me at the lake last year, but I hadn’t bothered with the stuff. I knew that the feds had edited it for our consumption.

Besides, Wolf was dead and I was going fishing.

Now, I skimmed through the early pages of both logs—names, dates, police reports, interview summaries.
Lane’s partner at the NYPD, Robert Sinclair, had confirmed forty-two of Wolf’s victims. Willoughby had confirmed fifty-one.

I scanned Willoughby’s list, and one name immediately grabbed my attention: Cora Riordan.

“I don’t believe this,” I muttered, reaching for a nonexistent pack of cigarettes.

Even after six years of nonsmoking, the habit was there. People who smoke know their cues. Mine was anger.

Cora Riordan was a Boston case from the seventies. Christmas Eve. A brutal homicide that I knew well.

My wife, Savvy, and I were stringing the last of the popcorn for the tree, cutting shapes from cardboard, and coating them with glue and glittery sprinkles, or painting them with green and red acrylics. Lane was asleep. We were laughing and loving what we had made of our scrawny balsam and its single set of lights that I had bought at Woolworth’s. At eleven
P.M
., the phone rang.

“I have to go out,” I told Savvy

“The hospital?”

I shook my head.

“What is it?” she asked.

“That was Ray Bolton,” I said. “They have an unusual homicide. They don’t know what to make of it.”

“If killers aren’t going to take the holidays, the least they can do is commit the usual murders,” Savvy said, her voice sharp with sarcasm and disapproval.

I saw the squad cars and the small crowd that had gathered along Huntington Avenue. A light snow was falling—a Christmas card for the city, but filled with splashing lights and large men bulked out in blue wool suits, wearing guns. One of the uniformed officers
checked my ID and directed me to the second floor. I found Ray Bolton in the kitchen area of the small apartment.

“Sorry to drag you out,” Ray said. “You always say its better if you can see it.”

I nodded.

Ray pointed toward the living room, and I followed him. “Cora Riordan,” he said.

Now I skimmed the original report that Ray Bolton, one of my oldest friends, had filed. Cora was thirty, divorced, and had lived in her apartment for ten months. She worked in a coffee shop near Brigham Circle.

The woman lay on her back on the floor between her sofa and coffee table, her throat cut in three places, her chest and abdomen pierced a dozen times.

“The rear windows are secure,” Bolton told me. “Snow on the fire escape hasn’t been disturbed. No forced entry at the front door.”

“What else?”

“On the counter,” he went on. “One cup, one container of cocoa. Pan of warm milk on the stove.”

We walked back into the kitchen. Cora’s white work shoes were placed neatly on a mat to one side of the door. “So she walked in,” I said, “slipped out of her shoes, poured milk, switched on the stove.”

I scanned the apartment. It was clean. Neat. Things were put away. The sink was spotless, but there was a smear of blood on the stove switch for the right front burner.

“He switched off the stove,” I said as I wandered again toward the living room.

There was blood spatter on the sofa and coffee table. Blood had pooled on the carpet around Cora. I
looked up and saw spatter on the ceiling. He had flailed away at the woman’s body, but the killing cuts to the throat were surgically precise.

“What were you saying about the stove?” Bolton asked.

“Just wondering why he’d bother switching it off. He left the door open. Any similar cases?”

“None.”

“What about prowlers in the neighborhood? Peeping Toms?”

“We haven’t had any complaints like that. This isn’t a neighborhood, Lucas. There are four buildings like this one. Everything else is commercial or hospital.”

I looked in at Cora Riordan. She had planned a quiet Christmas Eve at home.

I remembered that Ray had an immediate suspect, Jeremy Stoneham, a young man who lived in the apartment below Cora’s. Stoneham worked as an orderly at one of the hospitals in the area.

Another tenant, Lucy Wilder, reported that she had seen Stoneham walking the stairs, muttering incoherently to himself—“crazy talk,” she called it. A week before the murder, Stoneham was standing inside the door when Wilder walked into the building. He had looked straight into her eyes and said, “The wolfman came. He spoke to me.”

Later that night, the young man said the same thing to Ray Bolton. Bolton tapped on the door to apartment one. No one answered. He reached for the knob, and it turned. The door glided open, revealing an apartment with a floor plan identical to Cora’s.