Tunnel of Night (38 page)

Darla, please don’t push him
.

“In a few hours, Lucas Frank and his daughter, Agent Jackson, your friend Landry if he doesn’t respond to your message, Agent Walker, some of the other BSU experts—all of them plan to gather in the conference room and debate my existence. I am flattered to be the focus of so much attention and speculation, but these cretins will not complete their meeting. Within minutes of our departure, Ms. Michaels, this place will cease to exist.”

“Why a bomb? Jesus. I can’t think. Which of those people is the target?”

“The target is everyone,” Wolf said. “Lucas Frank thought he had killed me. He made a mistake. My message to the FBI is simple. They can’t create their categories of homicidal behavior fast enough to keep up with the killers. You should write that. After the Versace murder in Florida last summer, agents bickered about whether their suspect was a serial killer, a spree killer, or a hybrid. They had no idea where he was, but they knew who he was, and they were going to pigeonhole him. What fucking difference did it make? The caretaker for a houseboat stumbled onto him.”

“What about Lucas Frank?” Michaels asked. “What’s your message to him? Just that he made a mistake?”

“He’s received a lifetime of messages from me,” Wolf snapped. “He paid no attention. You are getting ahead of the orderly development of things, and you’re wasting time.
I
am the news. I
make
the news. I
decide
what’s news. What you do is write it down. Report the news. That’s all. I will not caution you again.”

I was close enough so that I could see Wolf’s shadow fall across a table. Darla Michaels sat at the table. I needed Wolf to move from where he was pontificating, or I had to get close enough to the doorway so that I had a decent angle for a shot.

“I can’t interview you? I can’t ask any questions?” Michaels asked.

Wolf sighed.

Jesus, Darla, hack off
.

“One question. Ask. Don’t waste time.”

“Most of your victims were women. Was there ever a woman you cared about?”

There was a long silence.

“Her name was Annie. I met her in Cambridge at a warehouse fire.”

“Did you kill her?”

“Many years later.”

“Why did you kill her?”

Again, Wolf sighed, but he was granting Darla Michaels considerable latitude. She was his Boswell— his biographer. “She talked about her father often, but seldom with affection. He was a hard man, a wealthy breeder of world-class horses, and a drunk.”

I knew what was coming. The story of Annie’s father was an entry in Wolf’s computer journal.

“One night when Annie was home for a weekend,”
Wolf continued, “something was bothering the horses. Her father went out to the stable. The horses were frightened, nervous, jittery. He didn’t know why. Then he saw what he thought was a large dog—really just the shadow of the animal—moving away from the barn. It disappeared into the darkness, and eventually the horses settled down.”

His account was verbatim. John Wolf could not exist without rehearsal. He was fact and he was fiction. I wondered if he knew which was which. The problem had always been that he was so fucking believable, so seductively real.

“When the same thing happened the next night,” Wolf continued, “her father took their German shepherd with him. The dog was afraid, too. This was a trained attack dog, but he put his tail down and backed away toward the house. Annie’s father got a better look at the animal, though. It was like a dog, but bigger than any dog he had ever seen. It wasn’t afraid. It was almost casual as it drifted into the shadows. It had no fear, which intimidated her father. On the third night, he took his deer rifle with him. When he saw the profile of the animal moving away from the barn, he fired. Annie said that the animal went down. The game warden came and looked at it. He said it was a wolf, the first one on the south side of the mountains in fifty years.”

The room was silent.

“Because she told you that story, you killed her?”

There was a sharp edge to Wolf’s voice.

“I told her that it had to be a mixed breed. She was adamant. Her father couldn’t be wrong about something like that. ‘Pure wolf,’ she said. No pure wolf would be that stupid. I told her that. Whatever it was, that animal just walked out there for her father to shoot
him. One shot. It would never happen. A scavenger like a coyote, maybe, but not the purest predator of them all. Not a wolf. Not one shot.”

“You identify with the animal?”

“He lives inside me. Always.”

The elevator doors whooshed and clicked behind me in the corridor, followed by the sound of footsteps approaching fast.

I saw Wolf’s arm reach across the table and grab Darla Michaels by the shirt. He skirted the table, a long knife in his hand, and started to move into position behind the young woman.

I raised my nine-millimeter and aimed at the space where I expected to see the side of his head.

As he brought the knife up against her throat, he came into view for the first time. He turned his head to look toward the doorway, his eyes glazed gray and empty. He was inches from Darla Michaels’s face.

I had one chance, one shot to stop him.

“Freeze,” Rexford Landry called from behind me.

The FBI agent could see me, but he could not see Wolf and Michaels.

Wolf held his grip on the reporter’s shirt. I moved my head only slightly, but in that split second Wolf disappeared into the maze of cubicles.

“Place your weapon on the floor,” Landry said. “Do it now.”

Darla Michaels continued to sit at the table, staring straight ahead, slowly shaking her head.

“Landry, John Wolf is in this room,” I shouted.

I heard the snap as Landry engaged the action on his gun. “Put it down, Dr. Frank.”

Michaels slipped from her chair onto the floor and began to crawl toward me. The chair, taped to her ankles,
slid along behind her, then wedged against the aluminum table, threatening to tip it.

“Okay, Landry,” I said. “You want him? You go after him.”

Landry approached slowly, directly behind me, still unable to see beyond the doorway, and unconcerned as he moved into the light that spilled from the room.

That was when I first saw the bomb. With each of Darla Michaels’s attempts to move forward, the chair banged the folding table, and the explosive device slipped toward the edge. I had no idea how stable cyclonite was—whether the impact of a two-and-a-half-foot fall would set it off.

“Darla, don’t crawl,” I said.

Wolf was quick. The BSU’s tunnels echoed with the large caliber handgun’s explosion as the slug ripped into Landry’s shoulder and spun him around. The agent bounced off the wall and went down, his weapon skidding back along the floor.

“Oh, God,” Michaels said, again sliding forward, and again nudging the bomb toward the edge of the table.

I dove forward into the room, landing beside her.

“Stay put,” I said to Michaels. “Stay flat on the floor and don’t move.”

“He set the timer,” she said, her voice shaking. “He did it real fast. He snapped a red wire into place, then clicked something.”

“Darla, I need you to stay as motionless as possible.”

She nodded. “Just hurry up.”

I crawled forward into the first cubicle, where I pulled myself to a crouching position and looked back at the table. The bomb had slid to the far side and rested at an angle, extending two inches out over the floor. I couldn’t see the timer.

From my glimpse of Wolf, and the smoke from his gun when he shot Landry, I knew that he was near the back of the room on the right side. I figured there were thirty feet between Wolf and me, and I was between him and the exit.

I glanced around, searching for inspiration.

If I moved down one line of cubicles, Wolf could move up on the opposite side. If I dove up over the partition that separated the two rows, I would make an excellent target. If Wolf missed, me, all he had to do was disappear through the row that I had vacated.

Then, just as my calf muscles started to cramp, I saw it—a can of solvent and thinner for rubber cement. The cubicle’s occupant was the person responsible for mounting crime-scene photographs. The agent’s desk was also decorated with a dried wildflower arrangement in a narrow-necked glass bottle. A smock hanging from a hook was my final ingredient.

I yanked the weeds from the neck of the bottle, and emptied the solvent into it.

“I plan to have a glass of red wine when I leave here,” Wolf’s disembodied voice said. “What about you? Oh. I forgot. It’s late. You’re an old man. Probably right to bed, huh? You hadn’t thought about it, had you? You were trying to figure out how to finish me off, so you gave no consideration to what you might do after that. There isn’t much time, you know.”

Wolf was moving. He had a forty-foot area that was his. As long as he remained there, I couldn’t see him.

“Doesn’t this piss you off?” he asked. “You already killed me once. Now you have to do it again. Well, it was your own stupidity. You thought to the end as you defined the end. That’s never good enough. A killer
must look beyond the end. Shit. I gave you every possible advantage. This episode proves what I’ve known from the beginning. No mere theorist will ever be as good as a man who plies the trade.”

Using my pocketknife, I cut the smock into several foot-long strips, wound them tight, and pushed them through the neck of the bottle until only four inches remained exposed.

Wolf snorted in derision. “You are a theorist. Instead of a place like this filled with federal drones, or a college crawling with sociology types, you sit in your log house on the lake and create your own mythology of behavior. How does it feel to know that I watched you fabricate in Boston, feign expertise in New York, Miami, Dallas? I was there.”

I reached for my cigarettes to get the book of matches I kept tucked inside the cellophane. They were gone. I had quit smoking again, and I had given Lane the package the night we had walked on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“You think you have me at a disadvantage,” Wolf said. “In a few minutes, this place is going up.”

I had no wish to indulge Wolf, nor did I want him to know exactly where I was. But he was winding down, and I needed time. I had to say something.

“We’ve been through this before,” I said. “In Vermont.”

There was a short laugh from the back of the room. “There’s no coal bin here, no place for you to bury a bomb. Jesus. You’re just as homicidal as I am. An empty, hollow player of games. We see the world the same way. Your invitation from the Bureau was for morning. Do you think that I wasn’t expecting you?”

I dug into my pockets, finally finding a book of matches that I had picked up at Delta’s Blues Bar, where Wolf had killed Nicholas Wesley.

I did not believe that Wolf had been expecting me. He was playing a game, a transparent attempt at conning another who had made a business of mastering manipulation.

A full minute passed. I heard no movement at the back of the room. Then, he spoke. “I think I’ve already explained this to you. Before I could begin to set something like this in motion, I had to resign myself to my own death. Having done that, I have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. You just don’t learn. I learned a great deal from you. Through the years, you helped me to become a better artist. You were the inspiration. With your guidance, I matured into a creative killer. No one else can claim to have achieved what I have.”

I climbed onto the desk, keeping my head below the top of the partition.

He believed that he was the embodiment of perfection, that there was no challenge he could not meet. “You have a world-class ego, Mr. Wolf,” I said. “Tonight, you were more concerned with your press coverage than with properly assembling your device.”

When he spoke, he sounded too relaxed, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Think what you want.”

John Wolf was the perfect psychopath. I wanted to grab the advantage.

“I think that one of us will die,” I said, then lit a match and touched it to the rags that extended from my Molotov cocktail. The odor and the smoke would give me away, so I had to act fast.

The ceiling was low. I reached up and rifled a line
drive toward the back wall. The bottle shattered with a roar, a wall of flames, and billowing smoke.

I threw myself up onto the top of the cubicle’s partition, precariously balancing on the junction supports, and aiming my nine-millimeter at the spot where I expected Wolf to appear.

Seconds passed. A minute.

What the hell was he doing? Black billows of smoke rolled from the rear corner toward the center of the room.

I lowered myself to the floor on the other side of the partition, remained in a crouch, and moved slowly toward the smoke. As I neared the end of the corridor, the sprinkler system spluttered on. Reflexively, I looked up and saw that two ceiling panels had been dislodged. Had he climbed up through them?

Or was it further manipulation?

I spun to my left as the killer of dozens emerged from behind the wall of smoke, his gun in his right hand, his left arm across his eyes.

With a suddenness that stunned me, Wolf snapped his weapon into firing position. Both hands gripped the .44 Magnum. Wolf scanned the corridor as if he had been impervious to the dense black smoke. Then his eyes fixed on mine.

I squeezed off a single shot that slammed into Wolf’s face, sending up a mist of blood and brain. The killer went down. His gun clattered harmlessly on the floor.

Wolf lay in a sodden heap. I watched as his blood spread in a pool around his head, diluted by the spray from overhead.

I was confident that I had removed him from this life.

I walked through the mechanical rain to his side.
Most of the back of his head was gone, but still I touched my fingers to his throat and glanced at my watch. “Time of death,” I muttered to myself. “Twelve-forty
A.M. NO
resurrection this time, lad.”

I turned and walked back toward the hallway.

“It’s almost over,” I said to Darla Michaels. “Few more seconds.”

I gently nudged Wolf’s bomb back onto the table and gazed down at a battery housing, three wires, the stacked sheets of cyclonite, and the timing mechanism. In ninety seconds, we and the BSU would be history.