Red 1-2-3 (32 page)

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf nodded.

“Fictionally, of course,” the Wolf added with a happy laugh.

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The sergeant who took her statement thought Red Three was on the verge of hysteria, but he was a twenty-year veteran of the force, with two fourteen-year-old twin daughters at home, and so he was accustomed to sorting through the high-pitched noise that stressed teenagers used for language, although secretly he wished they all had a volume switch that he could just dial down a little.

He wrote down in his notebook phrases like
I saw her jump
and
She
disappeared over the edge
and
One second she was standing there and the next
she was just gone
that Jordan had ripped from between sobs. He tried to get her to give him an accurate description of the woman she saw throw herself from the bridge, but Jordan was limited to a wild-eyed, arms-waving
Dark clothes, hat, medium height, mid-thirties.

The cop interviewed the coach, the assistant coach, and all the other players and dutifully listed everyone’s cell phone number. None had seen what Jordan saw. They all had reasonable explanations for why their attention was elsewhere.

He offered to call for an ambulance, as he feared that Jordan, who continued to alternate between tears and a kind of icy, withdrawn, flat 231

JOHN KATZENBACH

look, was going into shock. Indeed, the cop believed that the reaction the teenager had was the most compelling evidence of a bridge suicide.
She
saw some damn thing,
he thought.

None of the other officers in the half-dozen patrol cars spread out across the bridge had come up with much of anything other than an abandoned jacket. The flashing red and blue lights of the patrol vehicles reflected off the damp roadway, and made it difficult for the officers searching up and down the narrow walkway to find any evidence. High-powered flashlights carved out small slices of black surface when shone down on the rushing waters. Eyeball examinations of the area found few signs of suicide; there was a telltale muddy footprint of a woman’s-sized running shoe at the beginning of the bridge’s footpath, and there was a scuff mark in the cement where Jordan said the mystery woman launched over the edge.

But the overall lack of overt indications of death didn’t surprise the policeman. This wasn’t the first time he had been called to the bridge for a reported suicide. It was a preferred spot. There was plenty of leftover despair in the small, fading mill town, where manufacturing jobs had been replaced by illicit drugs. He—like many of his neighbors in the town—knew that the strong currents would sweep a body downstream, maybe toward the treatment plant, possibly over the falls. The force of the unforgiving waters might carry it miles down the river. It was also possible that the body was hung up on the debris that littered the river bottom. It had sometimes taken weeks for authorities to recover bodies that went in at that spot, and there were some that were never found.

He was already writing his report in his head to leave for the morning detective crew. It would be their problem to follow up. Find a name.

Notify next of kin. The fact that there seemed no ready proof available to the cop didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened. He just wanted to finish his part of the case. Police divers and a boat crew would wait until daylight before they started with their hunt for the body.
They won’t be happy when
they get this order,
he thought. It was dark and dangerous work in ink-colored waters, and likely to be completely futile.

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Better chance that body will show up by accident. Maybe a fisherman will
snag it one day this summer. That would be some surprise to reel in.

He placed a hand on Jordan’s shoulder. “Would you like me to call an ambulance, have the EMTs check you out?” he asked her gently, switching from cop tone of voice to father.

Jordan shook her head. “I’m okay,” she replied.

Her coach interjected, “We have support staff at the school who can help her if she needs it. Trauma specialists.”

The cop slowly nodded. This sounded like snobbery to him. “You sure?”

he asked again, directing his question to Jordan. He didn’t like the coach, who seemed a little put out by the whole event.
Like it’s some big inconvenience some woman killed herself as you happened by,
the cop said to himself.

“Easy for me to call,” he added to Jordan, who was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and whose rapid-fire breathing seemed to be slowing to normal. He didn’t mind making the coach wait longer on the bridge in the cold drizzle, and in his experience the EMTs were far better at dealing with sudden shock than just about anyone else.

“Thanks,” Jordan said. Her voice seemed a little stronger. “But I’m okay. I just want to go back to my dorm.”

The cop shrugged. It was always tempting to see anyone ordinary and young caught up in any sort of police event through the eyes of his own kids, but his years of police work had given him a thick skin and a crusty exterior. He had his statements. He had contact numbers for everyone in the van. He had ordered other patrolmen to continue to fruitlessly investigate the area.

He’d done all he could that evening.

The cop saw the coach dialing a number on his cell phone. “Who you calling?” he demanded.

“School heads,” the coach replied. “They will want to know why we’re late. Need to keep the dining hall open. And they’ll arrange for someone to speak with Jordan tonight, if necessary.”

The cop thought this was actually the coach making sure he wouldn’t be blamed for getting back to campus late.

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“Well,” he said, “all of you are free to go. If there’s any need for a follow-up, someone will be in touch.”

“You will have to contact the dean’s office if you want to talk to any of the kids,” the coach said.

“Really?” the policeman said. He didn’t add, “
The hell we will,
” which was what he thought. He just let the skeptical tone he used with the single word convey that impression.

He watched the team climb back into the van. Some of the girls still seemed upset, and were holding hands or hugging each other. He noticed that no one threw an arm around Jordan.

The cop took note that Jordan made her way to the back of the van and that she sat alone.

He gave her a little friendly wave, which wasn’t very professional, but which came naturally to him. He was pleased when he saw a flitting smile on Jordan’s face, and a shy return wave.

Damn, kids can be cruel,
he thought. He knew he wouldn’t get home before his own daughters had gone to bed, but he decided then that he would look in on them and maybe just spend a few minutes watching their sleeping faces. He knew his wife would understand why he needed to do this without asking any questions.

It was not until early the following morning that the detectives assigned to complete the suicide investigation received a call from two clerks who worked in a local motor vehicle registry office. They had been waiting at the bus stop and spotted the letter Red Two had nailed to the tree, and had obeyed the message and called the police. They were smart enough not to touch anything, and they were dedicated enough to wait for a detective to arrive and take possession of the letter and the photograph, even though this made the clerks late for work.

At more or less the same time, Red One was seated across from a woman just a little younger than her, but twice her size. The woman wore close-cropped hair and had massive arms and girth to match. One ear was rid-dled with at least a half-dozen earrings, and the edge of a tattoo peeked 234

RED 1–2–3

out from beneath her blouse. She was the sort of woman who gave off the impression that she rode a Harley-Davidson chopper to work and that for fun she challenged lumberjacks to arm-wrestling contests, which she rarely lost. Karen was astonished, however, by the soft tone of voice the woman used.

“Here’s what we can do,” the woman said. “We can protect your friend.

We can protect her children. We can provide a safe place for them to transition to a new life. We can assist them with social work advice and legal help as they adjust. We can set them all up with therapists as well, because a number of really prominent local psychiatrists volunteer their time here.

We can really help them get started anew.”

“Yes?” Karen said, because she heard
but
attached to the end.

“Nothing is foolproof,” the woman said.

A distant sound of children laughing penetrated the walls. Karen guessed it came from an upstairs day-care center.

“What do you mean?” Karen asked.

The woman leaned back in her desk chair, rocking backward as if relaxing, but keeping her gaze fixed directly on Karen’s face, measuring it for reactions.

“I’m required by law to say that.”

“But there’s more, right?” Karen asked.

The huge woman sighed.

“Here at Safe Space we are three city blocks from the police station. It is manned around-the-clock, all year. Response time from there to our front door, following a 911 call, is less than ninety seconds. We have an arrangement with the police—there’s a code word that the entire staff and all our clients learn—that means that some man has shown up and means to do something violent, so the police respond in force, weapons drawn.

We put this in place after an incident last year. Perhaps you remember it?”

Karen did. Headlines and breathless news reports spread over several days. A man, his estranged wife, two children aged six and eight, and three policemen. When the shooting stopped, the wife and one of the officers were dead and one of the children was seriously wounded. The 235

JOHN KATZENBACH

estranged husband tried to kill himself, but had expended all the bullets in his revolver, so he knelt on the sidewalk, gun in mouth, pulling the trigger and clicking uselessly on empty chambers until he was handcuffed and taken away. The case was still in the court system. The man was now claiming temporary insanity
.

“My friend is worried about her husband’s tendency to violence,” Karen said. Then she shook her head. “That makes it sound like a common cold.

The man is a flat-out savage. He’s beaten her badly, time and again. Broken bones and black eyes. He’s threatened to kill her. She has nowhere else to turn.”

“That’s why we’re here,” the huge woman said. Karen could sense anger within her words, directed toward some anonymous man. In this case a fictional man. The story Karen had made up involved a friend, two little children, an abusive husband, and the wife’s plan to run away before he killed her. Karen had taken common truths and rolled them together. She knew the director of Safe Space wouldn’t ask too many questions.

“So, it would be three—your friend and the children . . .”

“I think the children can be sent to family where they will be safe. But the husband will pursue my friend right to the edge of the world and off it, if he has to. He’s obsessed and crazy.”

“I don’t know if separating—”

“He doesn’t care about the kids. They’re not his anyway, so they are just in the way of whatever he’s going to do. It’s my friend who is in danger.”

“I see. And is he armed?”

“I don’t know. I would assume so.”

Karen wondered just what sorts of weapons the Big Bad Wolf had handy. Handguns. Rifles. Swords. Knives. Bombs. Bows and arrows. Poisons. Rocks and sharpened sticks. His hands. Razor blades. All were potentially lethal. Any might be what he was intending to use on the three Reds.

“How about your friend? Is she armed?”

Karen pictured Red Two’s gun. She wondered if she could figure out how to load it, aim it, and fire it. She did not even dare contemplate the
killing
part of the equation.

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“No,” she lied.

The director paused. “I’m not supposed to say this,” she said. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper, leaning forward. “But I won’t allow another incident like the one last year.”

She raised her hand and placed a large semiautomatic pistol on the desk. It was black and heartless. Karen stared at it for a moment and then nodded. “That makes me feel substantially better,” she said with a small laugh.

The woman removed the pistol to her desk drawer. “I take combat classes at the gun range.”

“A wise hobby.”

“I’ve become an expert shot.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“When will you be bringing your friend in?”

“Soon,” Karen said. “Very soon.”

“Intake is round-the-clock. Any time is the right time. Two in the afternoon. Two in the morning. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I will tell the staff to expect a new guest at potentially any time.”

“That would be most helpful.”

Karen gathered her things. She sensed the interview was at an end, but the director had one final question.

The director looked at her closely. “It is a
friend
we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Red One had one more stop to make before going to her office for the remainder of the day. It was a place she’d been many times before but that, even with her medical training and experience, she found too sad for words.

One of the things she’d always noticed about the hospice center at the retirement home was that the lights in the entranceway were bright, harsh, fluorescent, and unforgiving, but as one worked his or her way deeper into the building, they softened, the shadows grew larger, and the white walls 237

JOHN KATZENBACH

turned to shades of yellowish gray. The building itself seemed to reflect dying.

Bagpipes,
she remembered from her last visit.

The hospice nurses were a little surprised to see Karen. They hadn’t called her. “Just checking on some old paperwork,” Karen said breezily as she swept past the desks where the nurses hung out when they took momentary breaks from the relentless dying that filled the rooms. She knew that explanation was more than enough to give her privacy.