Red 1-2-3 (29 page)

The Big Bad Wolf looked at his watch. His wife would be home soon.

Dinner routine followed by television routine and then bed routine. He did a quick calculation in his head.
Just enough time for a quick drive-by,
he thought.
But whom shall I go see?
Red Three was not a good choice; he didn’t want to accidentally pass his wife coming home from their school.

She’d want to know why he was going the wrong direction at the end of the day. Red One was probably still in her office seeing patients. She typically worked late several weekdays, and this was one of them.
She’s too
damn dedicated, even when she’s about to die.
He didn’t want to have to hang outside the medical building waiting to catch a glimpse of her as she went to her car.

The Wolf smiled.
So it’ll be Red Two
. He knew she was the one with the least ability to move about. She was tethered to her house by uncontrolled 208

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emotions.
Poor gal,
he thought.
She’s probably going to welcome death, even
more than the others.

He closed up his computer.
In fact, she’ll probably thank me when we
have our special get-together,
he told himself.

She knew it was time for her to leave the office as the workday hastened to a close, but Mrs. Big Bad Wolf lingered. She had learned much and little. She had accumulated facts that merely created more fictions. She was filled with doubt and uncertainty, and her stomach clenched with confusion.

She thought,
If only I could get one piece of clarity, I could build off that.

What she wanted was just a simple and neat understanding:
He’s a killer.

Or perhaps,
He’s not a killer. He’s just a writer who steals details from real life.

Like every other writer.

She looked up at the clock on the wall as if the time might provide some sort of concrete foundation. Then she reached out her hand and picked up the telephone. She had written down a name collected from a news story and coupled it with a number easily obtained over the Internet.

Her fingers shook only slightly as she dialed.

“Detective bureau,” a crisp voice answered.

“Yes. Good evening. I’m trying to reach a Detective Martin Young,”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf replied swiftly.

“Is this an emergency?”

“No. It concerns an old case of his.”

“You have some information for him?”

“That’s correct.”

This affirmation was a lie. She
needed
information.

“Detective Young should be in within a half hour. He’s on the early night shift this week. You want me to have him call you?”

“Does he have a direct line?”

“I’ll give you that number. I’d wait at least forty-five minutes.”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf wrote down the number and began to wait.

She continued to watch the clock. She had always thought that when someone stared at a second hand sweeping around a clock face, it made 209

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things seem longer and slower. To her surprise the opposite was true. Her imagination filled with twisted thoughts and unsettling scenes. Minutes jumped by, until she felt she could try Detective Young again. She dialed his extension.

A different gruff voice answered, “This is Detective Martin Young.”

“Good evening,” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf said. “My name is Jones,” she lied.

“I’m a teacher in a private New England school.” This was less of a lie.

“How can I help you?”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf took a breath and continued with the tale she had decided to tell. It was a reasonable falsehood, she believed, and one that the cop would readily swallow. “We have a student in a senior-year current events class who has written a paper about a crime that took place in her hometown some years back. Your name is mentioned. I just want to be sure that the student has things accurately before giving her a grade.”

“What sort of paper?” the detective asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf continued, “the assignment was to write about a crime.”

“Sounds like a pretty odd assignment.”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf faked a laugh.

“Well, you know, with kids these days, we work really hard to come up with tests and papers that they can’t plagiarize from the Internet or buy from some term-paper service. Do you have children, Detective?”

“Yeah, but they’re off in college now. And you’re right. They’re probably buying tomorrow’s assignment with one of my credit cards.”

“Well, then you know what I mean.”

The detective half-snorted and half-laughed in agreement. “So, what’s the case?” he asked.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf shuddered as she read a name off her spreadsheet.

The detective let out a long sigh. “Ah, man, one of my most frustrating failures,” he said. “You never forget those. And you say your student wrote about that one? She can’t have been more than a baby when it happened.”

“Apparently it happened not far from where she lived and her family talked about it growing up. Made a distinct impression on her.”

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“Well, that’s not surprising. Eighth-grade kid disappears on the way home from school. It happens, but usually someplace else, if you know what I mean. We’re not the big city here. Anyway, hell, all the people in that neighborhood were terrified. Neighborhood watches got formed.

Parents started escorting kids to and from all the local schools. There were meetings in every community center—you know, the “What can we do?”

type of gabfest. Problem was, me and all the other detectives were pretty stymied, what with no witnesses and no body. Of course, when some hunter found the bones in the woods three years later it terrified every-body all over again.”

“And suspects?” she asked, trying to control her voice.

“A name here. A name there. We took a good look at the people familiar with the girl’s route home and every registered sex offender within miles. But we never had a case.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s history.”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf shuddered as she hung up the phone.
A missing eighth-grade girl. Dead in the woods.
She paused.
Missing in a small city that she knew
her husband had once lived in nearby.
She tried to take down some notes, but it was hard, because her hand shook uncontrollably.
Nearby is not the same as
murder,
she told herself. She wasn’t sure whether this was true.

The Big Bad Wolf drove by the house slowly, stealing glances at the windows, hoping to catch a quick glimpse of Red Two. No luck. He accelerated and went around the block.

Just one time more,
he told himself.
Maybe you’ll get lucky.
He knew he had to be disciplined. A car rolling past a house more than twice would surely be noticed. Two times was the maximum. That way he looked like someone who had accidentally missed an address and was retracing his path. He grimaced as he steered the car down Red Two’s street for the second pass. He could feel his heart rate increase and a drop of sweat gather beneath his arms. He wanted to laugh out loud.
Like a forlorn teenager in
love,
he told himself, moving slowly, deliberately, staring at dark windows.

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* * *

Sarah carefully chose each word on the page.
When you’re writing for
the very last time, make it all count.
The page filled up slowly. Sad words about her husband. Tormented words about their child. Tortured words about her loss.

But she held back all the angry words about the man who wanted to kill her, but whom she intended to cheat.

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27

Red One held a very short list in her hand.
Do this. Then do that.

Karen had absolutely no confidence that even a small part of their plan would work and total confidence that it would all work. She ricocheted between contradictory doubts and beliefs like a stray gunshot deflecting off a shiny steel surface.

She was seated behind the wheel of a rental car, a nondescript gray Chevrolet four-door that she had sent her nurse out earlier that day to bring back for her. She had traded keys with the same nurse, before asking the young woman to head out on some made-up errand driving Karen’s car.

The nurse had been mildly surprised, especially when Karen had dressed her in her own overcoat and had pulled a knit woolen cap down over her blond hair. Nurses were accustomed to grudgingly following directions from doctors, regardless of how crazy, dumb, or mysterious these directions might appear to be, and the nurse had seemed satisfied with the cryptic explanation: “I think this guy I had a bad breakup with has been watching me, and I’d like to avoid some ugly confrontation.” Her nurse 213

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had much experience with her own never-ending series of bad boyfriends, so this all seemed to make some sort of bizarre sense to her.

She had readily taken off in Karen’s car in the opposite direction—

letting Karen sneak from her office undetected, or so she hoped. She had assigned superhuman capabilities to the Big Bad Wolf. He didn’t need sleep, food, or drink. He could render himself invisible or soar in the air above like a hawk hunting for prey. He could follow her scent like the Wolf he was, picking up Karen’s odors on the barest of breezes.

But this evening she hoped he would be following the wrong person.

She looked out through steamed-up windows at the world around her and reassured herself:
You are alone.
The rental car was parked on a gloomy, deserted street, not far from some decrepit warehouses that had once housed mills and manufacturing businesses but now sported boarded-up windows, chain-link fences, and rusty barbed wire stretched over doorways. Swathes of graffiti marred the walls. It had been nearly half an hour since any other vehicle drove past, and no one had wandered down the cracked and crum-bling sidewalk. It was a sad, lonely, and abandoned part of the small city, unsettling in the growing shadows. It looked like a Hollywood set for a murder; the faded redbrick of the adjacent buildings was stained with grime and cold rain spat heartlessly at the black macadam. A yellow streetlight did little to dispel the growing dark. Karen was parked in a spot that cried out
abandoned and forgotten,
as if some disease had carved all the life away. It was the type of place where nothing good seemed possible.

But it was the best spot for what she had to do.

She looked at her watch. For an instant, she was nearly overcome with a shapeless sadness. She did not form the words
It’s happening now
in her head, but she could feel her pulse quicken.

Sarah pulled her car into a bus stop no-parking zone and cavalierly made sure that she was illegally blocking the space.

For a moment she closed her eyes, afraid to look out the window. It was the first time she had been to the juncture of roads that had crushed her life so abruptly.

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But, just as surely, she knew it was the only place to leave what she intended to leave behind. The location would speak as loudly as any final message she could write. Quickly, keeping her head bowed and her back to the intersection, she slid from behind the wheel and moved just beyond the clear Plexiglas hut where folks waited in bad weather for the bus to arrive. It was empty, as she hoped it would be.

On the opposite side of the sidewalk behind the bus stop there was a large oak tree, which provided a bit more shelter and shade in the summer. Sarah looked at the barren branches and thought,
They would have
bloomed fully by that day. Lots of green leaves. They would have rustled in the
breeze. It’s a nice sound that quietly reminds people of the fine days to come.

Sarah was carrying a large satchel. She tugged out a small hammer and some nails as she walked up to the tree trunk. She took a determined, workman’s stance and removed an 8-by-10 glossy picture of her husband, herself, and their daughter, taken about a year before the fatal accident.

She had carefully covered it with plastic see-through wrap to protect it from the drizzle that fell around her.

She nailed the picture to the tree trunk. Eye height.

Working rapidly, she took a large pink envelope from her purse. This was encased in a waterproof clear plastic bag. She nailed this directly beneath the picture, using two nails to make sure it wouldn’t fall to the ground. The hammering noise was like pistol shots fading into the evening gloom.

The outside of the envelope had a simple message written in large letters and strident red ink: GIVE THIS TO THE POLICE
.

Not very polite,
she thought.
Not even a please or a thank you.
She turned and stole a look toward the intersection. She stopped suddenly, as if hypnotized, breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
They were coming that way.

The fuel truck was speeding through the stop. They were probably laughing
when it happened. Maybe he was singing. He always liked to sing in the car
to our daughter. It was silly and he would make up the words to songs, but she
would giggle helplessly because no one in the entire world could possibly be as
funny as her daddy.
Sarah choked.
She could hear the screech of tires and 215

JOHN KATZENBACH

the terrible sound of impact and metal twisting. It was an explosion of memory and her hands shook and she could not help herself; it was as if all the muscles in her body had been suddenly sliced through. She fell to her knees like a supplicant in a church, staring at the place where all her hopes had died.

Her hands involuntarily lifted up and covered her face. For a moment she held them there, as if playing the child’s game of peekaboo. She had the terrible thought she would never be able to move, ever again.