Tunnel of Night (24 page)

A freight lift
.

A man delivering a carpet—especially one with a woman rolled up in it—would not have carried his load up these stairs. I wondered if he would descend the same way, with or without the load.

I removed the nine-millimeter from my pocket, walked to the stairwell, and listened. The elevator rumbled past the first floor on its way to the basement.

I walked down the single flight into a dark, dank corridor and followed the noise to my left. When I engaged the action on my gun, the snapping noise echoed,
pinging off the walls ahead where a single light illuminated the junction of two passages.

The elevator whooshed to a halt around the corner on the right, but the gate failed to crank open.

What the hell
?

Adrenaline pumping, I flattened myself against the cracked plaster wall and moved slowly toward the hallways’ intersection. I could feel my heart thudding as I stole a quick glance around the corner.

The freight lift was empty.

I heard footsteps overhead—someone moving fast toward the rear. I ran the length of the corridor, expecting to find a rear door. Instead, I came to a dead end. There was only a casement window that allowed a dim view of the building’s back parking lot.

I caught a glimpse of a man walking rapidly away from the light, past a van that bore the logo: Valley Carpet. He disappeared into the alley’s darkness.

Once again, there was silence.

As I began to climb up the steel-framed, concrete stairs, my gun still in hand, the place seemed vacant. Now, the only evidence of human occupancy was the melange of smells—onions frying, urine, the musky aroma of sweat. This housing for semitransients was a structure removed from the air and light of day.

As I entered the top-floor corridor, I had no idea what I was going to find. I approached the door to the apartment and listened. There was a muffled noise and a scraping sound from behind the door.

I tried the knob, and the door slipped open a crack. I leveled the gun toward the room as I poked the bottom of the door with my foot. It creaked open, revealing a young woman taped and bound to a chair in the middle of the room.

“Is anyone else in there?” I asked. The woman shook her head.

I checked out the bedroom and the bathroom, then used my pocketknife to cut away the bindings on the woman’s wrists and arms. She immediately yanked the tape and a gag from her mouth.

“There’s a bomb,” Special Agent Susan Walker said. “I’ve got to call nine-one-one. We have to clear the building and get a bomb squad over here.”

She struggled with the tape covering her eyes as I cut through the rope that held her to the chair. Together, we disentangled duct tape from her hair and eased it away from her skin.

Walker was stiff but quick as she moved through the door into the hall.

There’s a bomb
.

Reflexively, I looked up at the framing above the door. In the cellar of the house in Vermont, Wolf had placed the switch for his bomb on top of an arch. Now, I found a toggle switch where I expected to, then followed the wires down the side of the door, and across the floor under the sink where they ended, attached to nothing.

It was a dummy.

I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled as I walked back into the apartment to a table behind the chair where Walker had been restrained. There were bits of green and red wire on the floor and table, needle-nose pliers, wire cutters. The sadistic prick had terrorized the young agent.

I heard sirens in the distance. Walker was back in the doorway. “Clear the building, Dr. Frank,” she said, then disappeared again before I could say anything.

When I walked into the hall, I could hear voices below as the building’s few tenants were evacuated.

Why would Wolf arrange a fake bomb? He wanted Walker dead. She was another player in his Vermont demise. He had killed a man for a van and a pair of coveralls, then kidnapped a federal agent and staged a hoax. What the hell was he doing?

I began a slow descent of the stairs. It was a setup. The whole thing was a ruse. An elaborate stage setting. Why hadn’t he killed Walker?

I turned on the landing to the last flight of stairs, picturing—

the black and red wires extending down from the toggle switch, the green and red fragments of wire on the table—

The wires didn’t match. There was a bomb.

Wolf had concealed a real bomb somewhere else in the apartment, or even in another part of the building.

I ran the last flight, plunging into the street that had filled with emergency vehicles. Hiram Jackson was moving away from Susan Walker toward me, as space-suited members of the D.C. bomb squad began their approach to the building.

The pavement seemed to buckle even before I heard the blast, felt the thrust of hot air and debris blowing into my back. The explosion forced me against Jackson and slammed the two of us down.

I SAT IN THE DINER, DIAGONALLY ACROSS THE
avenue from my former apartment building, sipping the warm brown water that the management sold as coffee. I glanced at my watch, then at the street— where police cars, firetrucks, TV vans, and numerous unidentifiable vehicles congregated.

Obviously, someone had found Agent Walker. They would not find the bomb.

I was amused by the frantic activity, the collection of high-tech toys, the ludicrous outfits with shoulder-patch flags and designations of rank. They were Boy Scouts who had brought their badges with them into adulthood, never thinking for a second how childlike and irrelevant they continue to be.

I wondered if Special Agent Hiram Jackson was out there. He was my contact at Quantico—the man who would allow me to enter the inner sanctum of violent human behavior.

Jackson wasn’t at Quantico when I visited as Alan Chadwick four years ago. I lectured there—weapon selection and its relationship to personality in cases of
multiple homicide. My tenure as consultant was something Agent Willoughby may have discovered, but could not possibly have revealed. That would have been too embarrassing for the Bureau.

I also wondered whether any of them would make the connection—realize that they were the glue that held my design together. All of my players swung like planets in nonintersecting orbits around a small star. They were visitors to the homicidal mind, rescued from the task of cleaning up after a kill because they described and predicted with authority, if not accuracy.

He will kill again. He drives an old car. He is disorganized. He masturbates with his left hand, while turning the pages of
Hustler
with his right. He resides with an elderly female relative. He works as a menial laborer
.

On a couple of occasions, the FBI had surged past me in their mad charge to nowhere. Lucas Frank was always right there. Even in the early days, he sensed a presence, but he could not give it a name or a face. I was the only one who moved freely from one orbit to another.

Now I wanted all of these parallel worlds to smash together and fall, so I had shaped events to set them on a collision course. None of my players would make any connections as they careened through space toward their last convergence.

Seventy-two hours remained.

ALAN CHADWICK HAD BEEN STEP ONE. THERE WAS
another with whom I’d had an even longer history.

When I was in Florida, I spent a month listening to parrots cavort in the Fort Lauderdale morning. I walked on Dania Beach, where I couldn’t distinguish the plastic-foam
from the coral. For weeks, I didn’t know whether I was hearing mockingbirds or car alarms.

Then, as Charles S. Weathers, I returned my Avis rental at the airport. Professor John Krogh, frugal as always, picked up an Alamo compact and drove to Orlando.

I doubted that any of these machinations were necessary, but I knew that someone would piss away a couple of weeks tracking the cars and identities—if they were able to.

I followed State Road 436 north, all the way to Winter Park Drive. Finding the turn for the trailer park was no trouble, although I was surprised to see that it had been paved since my last visit.

There was another new addition. On the patch of crabgrass that passed for a lawn, a sign declared: HUMPHREY. It was one of those rectangular, wooden signs with jagged edges—the kind of thing a junior high student had to cut out with a jigsaw to pass woodworking for the term. Maybe her kids
were
that old. The sign was slopped with white enamel and had raised red letters.

One summer night in the old house in Saxtons River, I left my bedroom and walked to Sarah’s. I was determined to do it that night
.

She was asleep. I could hear the soft intake and outflow of her breath. I watched the thin blanket rise and fall. This was to be the end of all the longing, all the nights spent staining my own sheets
.

I drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around, then parked facing the exit. The kids would be at school. Her husband would be at whatever passed for work.

I grabbed my duffel bag, then walked the half-dozen steps to the door. It was unlocked.

I moved to the foot of her bed and slipped out of my pajama bottoms
.

I stepped into the kitchen, listening to the silence. The trailer was stifling—no air-conditioning—and smelled of eggs fried in butter. Next to a half cup of coffee, the Orlando
Sentinel
was open on the table—a story about a man on Florida’s death row. I dropped my bag, then sat down, facing the kitchen door.

Her eyes were open, staring, but she said nothing
.

Her glasses covered the story. I pushed them aside and read. The key witness at the trial of “Crazy Joe” Spaziano had recanted, but Spaziano was still scheduled to die in Florida’s electric chair. He had been convicted of killing a young woman, then disposing of her body at a dump where it would decompose along with all the other trash. There was another body in the dump—an unidentified young woman—and Spaziano had not been charged with her murder. The proximity of these two meant nothing to the authorities. The stupidity of the law and its practitioners were evident in the story.

Laws are collections of prohibitions and procedures that you feel passionate about today. They change when the fad passes.

The legal minds who represent you allow great variance when it comes to the taking of a human life. Whether you are black, white, rich, poor, hunting for deer when you shoot the woman at her clothesline, or hunting for humans when you shoot the buck out of season—you are entitled to a trial by a jury of your peers.

If the state followed procedure in the Spaziano case, despite doubt about the man’s guilt, Spaziano would die. I wondered how Sarah felt about this.

“I want to fuck you,” I told her
.

“
Go away,” she said. “Go back to your room.” “I promise not to kill you
.”

She sat up. I could see the outline of her breasts through the thin fabric of her nightgown. I felt myself growing harder, erect
.

“
Ma wouldn’t let me do it to her,” I said
.

“
Oh, Jesus. Go back to your room
.”

“
She was the one who wanted the bolt on their bedroom door
.”

Sarah treated me like a child. “Just jerk off on the blanket,” she said. “Then go back to bed
.”

The key witness in the Spaziano case had found the Lord. He had gone to the authorities because he wanted to make things right. He had been hypnotized, he said. A different reality had been created for him.

I walked to the kitchen counter, tossed the duffel up there, and opened it. I slipped the Buck knife into my hip pocket, the .44 Magnum into my belt. I stood in the corner and waited.

“Touch it,” I said
.

“
No
.”

“
I won’t leave until you do
.”

I couldn’t wait. It came in long, throbbing, pulsing waves—warm and wet—all over my hand and down onto her blanket
.

She sagged back on the bed, pulling the cover up to her chin
.