Tunnel of Night (23 page)

Eventually, Lane dropped the reports on my table, saying that she was going to grab a quick shower and head back to the DCPD. She stopped at the door. “I almost forgot. Wolf told Oliver Wendblat that there would be no more acts of kindness.”

“What?”

“He said Oliver should be sure to tell that to the police.”

With that, Lane left.

No more acts of kindness.
Wolf had not killed Susan Parker, Oliver, the complainant in the apartment building, the responding officer. He wanted them to tell their stories, for connections to be made. Wolf
had
killed
Nicholas Wesley, but then made certain that he was seen driving away, just as he had done at his sister’s in Florida.

Why wouldn’t he just steal a van?
I wondered, then instantly answered my own question.

“Because he felt like killing,” I said.

I sat, allowing my thoughts to go where they would. I knew how the formula worked, that it had to do with my own idiosyncratic notion of retribution—what the German killer, Peter Kurten, had called “compensatory justice.”

Less than a year ago, I had explained to Lane how fine a line there was between “us” and “them.” She couldn’t stand to think of me as a murderer. As much as I might have wanted to tell her something different, I could not.

Justice is simply too abstract and personal a notion to ever exist as an absolute. The wild man who attacked Oliver the street vendor had mumbled something about justice.

I glanced at the address scrawled across the top of the police report on Nicholas Wesley’s murder. I was about to leave when the phone rang.

“Walker’s disappeared,” Jackson said. “I couldn’t find her through her office, so I went out to her place. Her door had been smashed open. Looks like there was a struggle. We figure he rolled her up in the carpet and carried her out. The carpet’s gone, the mat is there. There was a guy seen in the building …”

Valley Carpet
.

“I don’t have time to explain,” I interrupted, then gave him the address of the man who wandered halls with a gun, wearing nothing but his underwear.

“Meet me there. Now.”

I HAD PLACED SUSAN WALKER IN A CHAIR FACING
the door. She was unable to see through the strips of tape that covered her eyes. I stood behind her, listening as she moaned through the gag and duct tape securing her mouth. She was trying to move her head, but the bindings and the chair’s high back restricted her.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to break your fucking neck like I did Willoughby’s.”

She stopped moving. The steady plink-plinking of a leaky faucet was the only sound in the room.

“You insulted me. I read the papers. ‘FBI profiler says Wolf was a madman.’ That’s asinine. If I were a madman, I would have carved you into pieces by now. Fed you to the Maryland crabs. You said that I thought very little of myself, that I suffered from a poor self-image, that I was fixated. You people scoff at psychiatric terminology, but you flee into it whenever you can’t explain something in simple English, or you want to make it sound repulsive.”

Her head started to move again.

“You said that I was very much like other serial
killers. Am I? You’d better think about that one. You said that when I was a teenager, I enjoyed an incestuous relationship with my sister. That’s not true. I didn’t fuck her until she was dead. I
am
an insatiable beast, but I’m not the one that you described. You also said that my behavior was predictable.”

I watched as she struggled to free herself.

“Predict, Ms. Walker. What am I going to do next?”

I placed my hands across the back of her neck, feeling the bristles of her short hair where it had been razor-cut. A woman’s neck is so fragile. She cringed, as if I had hit her.

I leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Will I slit your throat?”

She pulled back as far as she could.

I turned my attention to the project I had begun earlier—tinkering with the necessary wires, switches, and batteries. This was a simple assembly, a small device— just enough to level the building.

“Many years ago,” I said to the back of her head, “I picked up a young woman who was hitchhiking. She was about your age, similar in appearance. The same build, eyes, hair color. Her voice wasn’t as shrill as yours, and she wasn’t quite so full of herself. She was a graduate student. Her worst flaw was that she talked incessantly. Where did I work? Did I like Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground’? Had I ever been to Europe? Endless chatter. Tell me what you think, Special Agent Walker. Predict. Use your Quantico training. Did I fuck her and kill her?”

The agent remained still. Listening. The faucet continued its erratic drip.

“I picked her up in Santa Cruz, California, at the
same time that Edmund Kemper was beheading coeds. One would think that she would have had more sense than to be out there asking for it. What is your prediction, Ms. Walker?”

Silence.

“I dropped her at a theater entrance,” I said. “An old Frank Sinatra film was showing. I continued on my way I create my own opportunities. I don’t wait for luck to hand them to me.”

My mechanical work was complete. It was time for a change of clothes, and of appearance.

I turned the tap on the kitchen sink, splashed water into my face, then applied shaving cream.

“Your former partner used my death to advance his career. He offended me. Just as the profile that you wrote offended me.”

Walker sat as still as a corpse, listening.

“The name of the car dealer—Featherstone Ford— was serendipitous. It was one of those things meant to be. Was that a detail that escaped you? I’m sure it wasn’t wasted on Lucas Frank. He is superior to you people, you know. That’s hardly a recommendation, but you really should heed whatever advice he has to offer. Otherwise, you may as well forfeit the game. As it is, there’s very little time remaining.”

The mustache was gone. I rinsed my face, then twisted the taps closed.

“I didn’t spend much time with Willoughby. It was simply one of those menial chores we all have to do.”

Hair color was next, but I hesitated, my attention drawn to the immobilized special agent. Behind her mask of tape, she had to be thinking. This woman would have doubted my ability to rise from the dead.

“When Alan Chadwick plummeted to the pavement, did you or your people at Quantico even think about me?”

I looked at the tendons on her neck, like cords strung vertically, taut against her throat.

“When they found what was left of my sister on the floor of the trailer, did you wonder?”

Scrubbed, distinct blue veins decorated the spaces between her neck tendons.

“What the fuck does it take for Quantico to start seeing a pattern? Should I have called it in?”

Stupidity angers me. I could feel my rage building, and knew that I had to guard against it. Rage is always counterproductive, a threat to the successful completion of any design. I had to stay focused, on track. I took a deep breath. The sink began to drip again.

“Have you ever been to San Francisco? I was there recently. I wonder why they call California ‘the golden state.’ The hills are brown.”

I remember crossing the Bay Bridge and driving north on I-80. I was headed for Fourth Street in Berkeley where Spenger’s Fish Grotto is tucked down beside a highway overpass. The restaurant started as a seafood market in the 1800s, and has been there ever since. It was at Spenger’s that I tasted the finest French-style bouillabaisse in the world.

“Have you ever read the transcripts of Theodore Bundy sparring with his interrogators during the early eighties?” I asked Walker. “I remember when they were discussing memory. Bundy feigned an attempt to recall individual victims and the details of their deaths. He used an analogy to bouillabaisse, saying that some people remember the taste of clams, others the taste of mullet. Bundy was a vulgar person. The whole is always
greater than the sum of its parts. You understand that when you have bouillabaisse at Spenger’s in Berkeley. The experience stays with you, whole, to be savored forever. There is no breaking it into pieces. And Spenger’s puts neither clams nor mullet in their bouillabaisse.”

That early evening in Berkeley, I had lingered over my meal—sipping a glass of red wine and absorbing the atmosphere. As I left, I bought a carnation from a street vendor, stuck it in my lapel, then drove up Telegraph Avenue to Rasputin’s, where I surveyed the two floors of music.

Experiences have always returned to me in their entirety. Sometimes there’s a sense of distance, a fugue-like haze around them. I feel as if the memory belongs to someone else. My recollection of the trip to Berkeley is mixed. The early hours are clear, an experience that I can summon forth at will. Those later hours have lost shape and drifted just beyond my grasp. I’m not sure how long I stayed, or how the evening ended. I don’t know whether anyone died.

I do know that the next morning I drove south to San Jose. My contact was a short, heavy, dark-haired woman who walked her dog in a park. She placed a shopping bag on a concrete bench, then reached down to release her dog from its leash and allow it to run. I did as she had always instructed: I stood ten feet away and waited. And as always, I imagined myself a child waiting for teacher’s permission to go take a leak.

“I have to admit that I am more curious about you,” the woman said, “than about any of my other clients.”

“Curiosity is not a healthy trait,” I said.

She shrugged. “I always read the newspapers. I try to guess which of the world’s explosions originate here. I’m never sure.”

She looked at me for the first time. “With you. I haven’t a clue.”

I said nothing.

“This one must be big,” she continued. “So many sheets of plasticized cyclonite.”

She turned away and whistled for the dog. “Leave the money on the bench,” she said. “Take the bag and go.”

Now, I tightened the kitchen taps, and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Reddish brown hair and eyebrows. Tinted contact lenses. Horn-rimmed glasses. A gray suit.

“This has been a perfect dress rehearsal,” I said.

She did not seem to be breathing.

“I’m happy that you could attend.”

I moved through the room, arranging wires, a timer, a toggle switch. I had completed my work.

“Listen,” I said.

There was a click—louder than the dripping faucet—when I threw the switch.

“Did you hear that? You know how fond I am of explosive devices. You do have a chance, however—which is more than Lucas Frank gave me. I’ve drawn attention to myself in the time that I’ve been here. A police officer visited a while ago. It’s possible that hell return. Ill leave the door unlocked. Make all the noise you wish. No one will pay attention. People are woefully indifferent. Nobody seems to care about the welfare of others anymore.”

I gathered up my briefcase and keys. “You’re probably wondering why I’m allowing you to live at all, even for a few brief tickings of the clock. Should you survive, Ms. Walker—should a miracle occur, and you walk out of here—please sit down and have a long heart-to-heart with Dr. Frank. Someone needs to tell him that he’s
dealing with the perfect assassin. I can’t be stopped. Everyone falls this time.”

I slipped into the hall, my hand on the doorknob behind me. I stood there for a moment, wondering why I didn’t just kill the woman. Then I heard the door click shut in the front hallway downstairs. I had no wish to compromise my new appearance.

Anyway, it really didn’t matter. I knew that if she survived, I would be seeing Susan Walker again.

THE APARTMENT BUILDING, A BLACKENED STONE
structure, was a relic, something from more prosperous ages past. It squatted three blocks from where police had gunned down a man named Billy, and Senator Harry Storrs had picked me up in his Lincoln.

I stepped inside, onto a foot-worn landing. The heavy wooden door clicked shut behind me. As the street noises died, the building fell strangely silent.

Then I heard the clanking of an elevator somewhere in the rear of the building. It was on its way down.