Tunnel of Night (21 page)

In his interview with Anthony Michaels, Frank described the reaction. Elgar didn’t move, but his eyes were different. “He stared at me in disbelief,” Frank told his favorite reporter.

Why wouldn’t he? The egocentric shrink had made a diagnosis, then acted as if there could be no doubt about its veracity. The aspect of all of this that irked me the most was that Dr. Frank had been right. He knew exactly what to say to Norman and how to say it. How could he know? How could he understand? I had gone in search of answers to those question.

“The fantasy never gave me life,” Norman told me. “I gave life to the fantasy. It was a matter of genuine superiority. I nurtured it.”

The mental health industry does not understand the etiology of this system of thought, although they try to sound as if they do. I don’t care what Lucas Frank says. You can look at a painting by Bosch or Magritte for as long as you want, but don’t expect to read the artist’s thoughts in his brush strokes.

Elgar told me that Frank had shrugged, looked down, leaned forward on the table, then snapped his eyes up to lock with Elgar’s. “Did the others swallow that bullshit?” he asked.

Elgar’s palms were flat on the table, his arms tense. He breathed heavily, but his eyes never wavered. “Police from eight states have been here,” Norman told the
psychiatrist. “FBI agents have been here four times. They know who I am.”

Lucas Frank shook his head. “They don’t know shit,” he said. “Never have. Never will. You’re obviously of average intelligence, and your wits served you well for a while. But you were coming unraveled, Normie.”

That was what Elgar’s mother had called him, and it had brought Elgar up out of his chair, backing away from the table, spittle on his chin, his eyes rolling around in their sockets like billiard balls after a split. He was yelling, and guards charged in from every direction.

The only thing that Frank had not done was to plunge a knife down through Elgar’s hand, pinning him to the table. The range of behavior available to the doctor did not include the technique that I had used when dealing with Oliver. Apparently, he recognized some constraints.

Frank had elicited exactly what he was after.

“That just wasn’t fair,” Elgar told me.

Lucas Frank had slipped into his jacket, straightened his tie. “Totally unraveled,” he said. “Psychotic.”

And Elgar, all five and a half feet and 135 pounds of him, threw the guards aside.

“I’ll get out of this fucking place,” he screamed. “I’ll do it all over again.”

They Maced him, and he waded through it. “Rip you to fuckin pieces,” he told Lucas Frank as one of the guards nailed him with a stun gun.

Now, as I guided my car south on the interstate, I thought about symmetry, and about all the years that I have been close to Lucas Frank.

I have followed his career. I have read everything he has written. I have pursued the same people he has talked with, conducted my own intimate interviews.
I have learned more from them than he or the feds ever will.

Balance. Order, Justice.

Symmetry
.

I know more about Lucas Frank than he will ever know about himself.

A PSYCHOTIC PATIENT OF MINE FROM YEARS AGO
would not use the phone. He both feared and detested the phone, and he adamantly refused to tell people his name.

“I don’t want anyone to know that I haven’t been murdered,” he said.

I doubt that I’m psychotic, but I do hate phones. I don’t like people much, either, especially when I have to observe complicated rules of etiquette like those that the phone requires.

“What if they remember that they didn’t kill me?” my patient asked.

His logic was internal, and unassailable.

He complained about the noises in his head. “Can’t hear myself think. Mostly because of the elevators whizzing up and down, and the doors that whoosh open and click shut.”

“What about voices?” I asked him.

“Just Winston Churchill. He resembles J. Edgar Hoover, and he recites T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the
Cathedral
Have you ever noticed how the past and present have a way of converging? I think it’s a warning.”

He had been a successful accountant in Boston. One day, he returned home from work and entered the lobby of his apartment building just as a man threw himself off the top of the stairs with a rope around his neck. The snap of the man’s neck as it broke—“like a bomb going off”—was a sound he could not forget.

His first symptoms were blinding migraines. His family doctor prescribed painkillers. All he had to do was step on a cockroach, and the migraines would start again. It was the cracking sound that did it. Every time he heard it, he saw the man hanging in the stairwell.

He responded to psychotropic medication— Thorazine, I think—and made sufficient progress to be released from the hospital. Within two weeks, he stopped taking his medication. A month later he was dead. A priest found him hanging in the vestry of a nearby cathedral, a copy of Eliot’s play in his pocket. He had been true to his voices.

While I did not share most of my patient’s aversions, I remained a staunch opponent of the telephone and all the demands it placed on me. But a call to Vermont was necessary.

Wolf had survived the explosion, and had moved on somewhere to recuperate. If I could track him—discover where he had been, what he had done, who he had talked to, what he had said—I should be able to determine what payoff he had in mind for himself, and that might help me to find him. I figured that the first step was to inquire about homicides, Wolf’s favorite activity. I had spoken to a Vermont police captain when I was checking to see if any cars had been stolen in Saxtons
River on the day of the explosion. I phoned the same man.

“You don’t have that many murders up there,” I began.

“More than we’d like,” he said. “Six, maybe seven a year.”

“What about the past year?”

“Well, there was the double murder up in Swanton.”

“I don’t know about it. What happened?”

“I can’t give you a whole lot of details. Just that a woman and her brother were shot to death in her trailer. Two bodies, killed with different guns, but only one of the weapons was found at the scene. We didn’t get great cooperation on that one because they’re Indians. The woman’s daughter can’t talk, and even if she could, she probably wouldn’t tell us anything. A neighbor said there’d been a guy staying with them, but he was long gone by the time we got there.”

“In his forties. Hair going gray. Maybe a mustache. Six feet tall. Medium build.”

“That describes a lot of people, but yeah. That’s basically what we got. He’d been injured somehow, and the woman was taking care of him. Look, Dr. Frank, if you can help us with this one …”

“John Wolf,” I said.

“The guy who died in the explosion?”

“He didn’t die.”

“I don’t know how anybody could have walked away from that. Of course, the feds locked us right out of there. We didn’t get a real close look.”

“Wolf was brought up by his stepfather. His biological father was a man named Pease, a logger who lived in Bellows Falls.”

“I think there’s still a few of that clan around. They’re Abenakis.”

“There was a tunnel,” I began, then lost the rest of whatever it was I had intended to say

The captain asked me questions, and I answered— but my mind was drifting far from the conversation. When I put down the phone, I stared straight ahead, thinking about Wolf.

The man’s tenacity and cunning fascinated me. So did his tunnel, and what it represented. It demonstrated his ability to see into the future, and to plan for any eventuality. For me to have any hope of catching up with him, I had to backtrack. I had to know as much about his life after death as I could.

Again, I grabbed the phone and dialed—this time a familiar number in Lake Albert.

“Thought you never used these things,” Buck Semple said.

I was amused, but wished that my eccentricities were not such common knowledge. “It’s giving me hives,” I told him, “but I think I’ll be okay”

The chief laughed. “Where the hell are you?”

“Still in D.C”

“Don’t know why you’d want to hang out in a place like that. What about the holes in your hide?”

“Good as new. I just wanted to touch base with you on that Charles Weathers ID. How far did you go checking that out?”

“Far as I could. The address in Lincoln was a fake. Driver’s license is still valid. He paid cash for the gun, even though he had a MasterCard and a checking account in Boston. I’ve got an eighteen-month history so far.”

“What about dates on the charge card, bank deposits, checks cashed? Is there any way to track him?”

“The card is what goes back the eighteen months,” Buck said. “He opened the bank account early last September, then closed it about two months ago.”

Wolf had closed his account on the day that Alan Chadwick was murdered. These was also a charge on his MasterCard that day—a one-way ticket to Fort Lauderdale.

“The police down there have been real helpful,” Buck said. “Weathers rented a car from Avis. It was a month’s lease, so they had a local address on him—a waterfront condo.”

The sonofabitch heals, gets his cash together, knocks off Chadwick, then goes on vacation. Jesus.

“They’re still checking for anyone who had dealings with him while he was in Fort Lauderdale,” Buck said. “I don’t have the paperwork yet, but he had a rental while he was here, too. Picked it up in Detroit and returned it at the airport there the day he took his shots at you.”

“I’m going to need passenger lists for flights from Detroit to D.C.”

“The feds could get those for you faster than I could.”

I thanked Buck, said that I would keep in touch, and warned him to stay away from my largemouth bass. For years, we had been chasing that same fish.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Buck said. “I’ll leave your fish alone. You leave Mr. Weathers alone. That’s the one I want to reel in.”

We made the pact, both of us lying.

• • •

AS I WORKED TO UNDERSTAND WOLF’S THINKING
, I knew that he would be doing the same—working to get inside my head. He was the only man on earth who could pull it off.

The knock on my door was Hiram Jackson. I had been expecting him to return, but not so soon. I was glad to see him.

“I should have them put a cot in here for you,” I told him.

Jackson smiled, settled into a chair, and leaned forward. “Maybe I’m too old and too tired for all this.”

I could see that he meant it. His tan suit was rumpled, his brown tie loosened at the neck. The dark bags under his eyes attested to a lack of sleep.

I sat opposite him.

“Tell me more about this guy,” Jackson said.

“Which one? Wolf, or his fan?”

“The lupine fellow.”

“He is the thoroughbred of human predators. Until last year, most of us had never encountered anything like him. What do you want to know that I can sum up in five minutes? What do you
need
to know?”

“We’ve learned that Willoughby was called out,” Jackson said, sighing. “We know why. We don’t know by whom. He took ten thousand dollars in cash with him when he left his office. He was going out to buy information. The money was still in its envelope in his pocket when we found him.”

Jackson was working the case, and he had been open-minded enough to brief me on his progress. Still, I had no idea how my next suggestion would go over.

“Take Walker off the investigation,” I said, up on my feet and pacing the room. “House her at Quantico until this is over.”

“She will be one annoyed agent.”

“Shell be alive.”

Jackson nodded.

“Wolf isn’t going to move on until he has cleared the way for himself,” I said. “It’s not that he couldn’t create another identity and disappear. It’s vengeance. Anyone who conspired to bring him down a year ago, and anyone who represents a current threat to him, will be eliminated. That doesn’t include recreational killing.”

I told the agent about the double murder in Swan-ton, Vermont, and about the possible connection between Wolf and the Abenaki community. “Those people helped him,” I said. “They brought the sonofabitch back to life, and he killed them.”

Jackson walked to the door. “I’ll catch up with Susan Walker,” he said.