Tunnel of Night (34 page)

“The new tenant?”

Bolton nodded.

“I don’t know anything about it. Like I said, I haven’t been back there. Sounds like Albert DeSalvo.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Bolton looked away. Sullivan continued taking notes.

I found all of this to be an amazing coincidence. I had not been back to the apartment. I had not killed the woman. Some kindred soul was working my city, and had found his way to my apartment after I had moved. Suddenly, I wanted to meet this man, to talk with him. There are so few opportunities.

I also found the situation ironic There was Ray Bolton—Lucas Frank’s partner in crime, Lane Frank’s godfather—sitting with his pant legs brushing against my jeans. He was so close that I could smell his Old Spice.

The Boston detectives finally left, saying they would return if they had further questions. They never came back.

Six weeks later, on a snowy Christmas Eve, I walked up Fenwood Road, crossed Huntington, and killed Cora Riordan. Late into the night, I stood in a small crowd across the avenue and watched as Dr. Frank arrived.

The reporter, Anthony Michaels, briefly walked among us, asked questions, got reactions. Then he crossed Huntington and locked himself in conversation with Bolton first, then Lucas Frank. Later, I continued to watch as Bolton led Jeremy Stoneham away

Years after that, when I visited Norman Elgar at Walpole State Prison, he told me about the young woman whose name was hard and caustic like she was. Kira Kirkman. Elgar had followed her home, entered her building through a broken rear door, then strangled her.

He remembered all of his conquests. Ms. Kirkman had lived on Bay State Road.

Clearly, it was meant to be. I had worked long and hard to maintain us all as family.

WHILE WAITING FOR JACKSON, I READ ANOTHER
entry in Wolf’s journal.

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTEAD, THE ARTIST WHO DE
signed New York’s Central Park, also developed plans for aesthetically pleasing cemeteries—garden cemeteries, with their rows of gravestones demarcated by bending and sloping paths, then adorned with thousands of tulips, daffodils, peonies. My favorites, standing out among the yellows and pinks and whites, are the bloodlike bursts of red
.

Cemeteries are more sensuous than the places we inhabit in our time above the ground. In life, these magnificent gardens allow us to leave the wasteland we have created—a few short steps can be a transcendent experience, a chance to walk away from the wails of the living, and spend time among the quiet dead. We’re all going to join them anyway, so why not become comfortable in these grassy quarters
.

• • •

SO MUCH OF WOLF’S YOUTH WAS ASSOCIATED
with the underground. His fascination with cemeteries, his time in the cellar of the old house, the tunnel that he had obsessively dug out from the coal bin.

Obsesssion
.

I was the audience that not only never applauded, I never even noticed that a show was going on.

Tunnels under the ground
.

I remembered when I had begun examining homicide cases for Lane a year ago, right after Sarah Sinclair’s murder. One victim was a woman named Annie who had been found dead in a horse stall on a Connecticut farm. Wolf had written extensively about Annie in his computer journal.

She was a student in Cambridge when Wolf was there, and years later told her husband about a young man she had met at a warehouse fire. The night of the fire, she and her new friend walked the subway tracks from Central Square to Harvard Square.

He took her beneath the earth. He was comfortable there, she told her husband
.

There was so much that I had not noticed, or had failed to appreciate. Wolf wanted me to feel haunted, and now I was feeling it—a twenty-year dose of it shoved down my throat for a single swallow.

I LOOKED DOWN AT THE PETITE WOMAN WHO HAD
knocked on my door.

“My name is Darla Michaels,” she said. “I’m a reporter with the Washington
Blade
.”

“I know who you are. Despite your assurance at the desk downstairs, the gentlemen there knew that you
were not expected. He also recognized you. I just got off the phone with him. Sounds like you must haunt this place. Come in.”

“You’ll talk to me?”

“Not standing in the hallway, and for only a minute. I’m in a bit of a rush. Come in.”

She sat on the edge of a chair, and produced a notebook and pen from her bag. “I was the lead writer for the
Blade
on the original Wolf case. I had been working on a series about the Bureau when that broke. It made a perfect opening for the other articles.”

I sat opposite the reporter. “I live in Michigan. I don’t get your newspaper. I did see your current story, though. You were quite thorough.”

“Thank you. Dr. Frank, you were in Vermont recently.”

“Lovely state. Its going to make a nice national park, unless they sell it to Disney.”

She laughed. “When I was little, my father and I used to ski at Mount Ascutney. It’s such a beautiful area. Dr. Frank, did you go to Swanton because of the double murder they had there in March?”

“Yes. Look, let’s speed things up. John Wolf is alive, and he killed those two people in Vermont. What has happened here in D.C is not the work of a copycat.”

She stared at me for a moment. “What about Willoughby?”

I nodded. “Wolf.”

“Samantha Becker’s murder was made to look like another homicide, Sarah Sinclair, the New York case that your daughter was lead investigator on. The killer arranged the scene.”

I waited.

“Even the dress that Becker was wearing was identical
to the one that Sinclair was wearing when she was killed.”

Rexford Landry was responsible for feeding her information. Jackson had assigned the bitter, irascible agent to review Willoughby’s records. Landry had been at both D.C crime scenes and knew all the details.

“I’m running late,” I said.

“Are you saying that Wolf is responsible for the Becker homicide, too?”

I led her to the door. “Absolutely. There’s your confirmation, Ms. Michaels.”

“I had hoped to get more detail, Dr. Frank,” Michaels said as I gently pushed her into the hall. “I especially wanted to ask you your feelings about being hauled out of retirement twice by the same killer.”

“Pissed off,” I told her, and closed the door.

I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE EATING. JACKSON ORDERED SOUP
.

“The basement is clear,” he said. “Nothing. They even ran dogs through there.”

If I was right, we were down to a matter of hours. Wolf would want things set, in place. If his target was not the Willard, what the hell was it?

“We’re leaving a couple of agents down there in case he shows up.”

“Did you discover anything more about Wolf’s teaching at your place?”

Jackson shook his head. “Somebody pulled Chad-wick’s file. We figure Willoughby did that. He probably thought he was saving the Bureau embarrassment, and we know he was covering his own tracks. Wolf was his ticket to that corner office down the street.”

“Also his ticket to the grave. What about Landry?”

Jackson put his hand up, palm out, as if he were directing traffic. “Internal matter,” he said.

“An affliction of the bowels,” I muttered. “I just had a visit from Darla Michaels.”

Jackson hesitated, then said, “She’d never reveal a source.”

I shrugged. “Not intentionally, perhaps.”

Jackson shook his head. “?’ll handle this my way. I told you that Samantha Becker was dating Herb Cooper for a while. I talked with Cooper this morning.”

“Could Wolf have met Agent Cooper at the homicide school?”

“Cooper was working out of the Denver office then. That wouldn’t make much sense anyway. It was four years ago.”

“Decades don’t mean anything to Wolf. What about the case that Cooper worked with Willoughby— the one from 1985?”

“I don’t think it helps us much. It’s an unsolved. A young woman was strangled, left in the foundation of a burned-out ranger’s cabin in one of the parks on Cape Cod.”

I remembered the case. It was identical to one that I had worked on in 1976. I had completed a profile in the earlier case.

A
murderer with a mission—one who intends to make a career of killing
.

“She was found fully dressed, but the clothing wasn’t hers,” I said. “The victim’s fingernails had been done, her hair had been washed and combed out.”

Jackson raised an eyebrow. “You worked that case?”

“There were two identical cases. The one I worked was in 1976. Clearly, Wolf killed both young women. I remember Willoughby saying that they weren’t connected.
At first, I thought it was an investigative ploy. Later, I realized that he meant it. Wolf was telling us that he was out there. None of us heard him.”

Jackson handed me a sheet of paper. “This is an outline of the material he covered when he was here as Alan Chadwick.”

Wolf had lectured on weapon selection in serial murder cases. He mentioned the cases from 1976 and 1985. Both were ligature strangulations with wire loops. In the later case, he had left his weapon with the body. He wanted the connection to be made.

“VICAP kicked out another wire loop case,” Jackson said, leaning across the table and pointing to where I was reading. “It’s an older one. Sanford, Maine. Female done with the wire. Male, beside her in bed, done with an ax. Looks like two assailants. They took her head. No changing her clothes in that one. Wolf would’ve been just a teenager then.”

“He was in that private school the state put him in,” I said. “When other kids that age were playing Legion baseball, Wolf was honing his skills as a killer.”

I continued reading. Wolf had also discussed the Cora Riordan case, and another—Kira Kirkman—on Bay State Road in Boston. Ray Bolton and I had always believed that Norman Elgar had done that one.

Something about Wolf’s case selection was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They were New England cases, but that wasn’t all of it.

“That stuff telling you anything?”

I shrugged. “Did Cooper ever talk to anyone about his relationship with Samantha Becker?”

“He says no. Was Walker any help?”

“She confirmed most of what we already know, added a few new items. Wolf likes bouillabaisse.”

“What’s that?”

“A French fisherman’s stew. A few restaurants in Marseilles serve the finest bouillabaisse in the world. All of the fishy ingredients are supposed to come from the Mediterranean Sea. The closest we get to the genuine item would be Spenger’s in Berkeley. Wolf mentioned Spenger’s to Walker.”

“Cooper was in San Francisco,” Jackson said, putting down his spoon. “He spent a few days with the Unabomber task force.”

“In the last month?”

“Three or four weeks ago. That’s where he ran into the consultant he’s using on the Oklahoma case.”

Jean Posner’s words from deep in her trance echoed in my mind.

Bones. John digs up dead people. John is an anthropologist at Harvard
.

“What kind of consultant?”

“He’s a forensic anthropologist,” Jackson said. “From Harvard, I think. Dr. John Krogh.”

I leaned back in my chair and relaxed for the first time since Wolf had cut me down at Lake Albert.

“Difficult work,” I said.

“Krogh’s at it night and day. I don’t know when he sleeps. He’s there until midnight, and he’s back at dawn.”

Wolf’s underground was not the Willard Hotel. It was the BSU at Quantico. My God, what a mind.

He would spend time there before his anniversary, conditioning the personnel to become accustomed to his presence.

“Will he handle the DNA testing, too?”

Jackson shook his head. “We’ll have our lab take care of that.”

“You trust them?”

“Jesus. You don’t let up, do you?”

“Well, they did fall from grace, didn’t they? Maybe you should send your samples to L.A. I hear they handle evidence well. So, Cooper might have run into Wolf on the West Coast.”

“I’ll call him back, have him reconstruct every minute of his time out there.”

There was no need.

The corridors of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, sixty feet beneath the earth
.

To control and humiliate, walk into their lair. Kill right under their noses. Bring the whole shithouse down
.

It was vintage Wolf.

The killer and I were more alike than I would ever want to admit. We are creatures of thought and impulse—like everyone else, I suppose—but there is a certain lethality that we collect around ourselves. A cop friend once sensed the surges that bounce inside my skull, and told me he was glad that I was on his side of the badge.

“Most of the time I am,” I had told him.

This was one time that I knew he would disapprove. I had a clear choice. I could level with Jackson, turn the matter over to him and his army of agents, and allow them to invade their offices in search of their own consultant.

Yeah, right. I had no intention of delegating this task. Landry was unreliable. Jackson and the rest of his people would make every effort to take Wolf alive. I wanted him dead.