Red 1-2-3 (33 page)

She went into a small side room with a copying machine, a coffeemaker on a table, and three large black steel filing cabinets. It did not take her long to find the manila file that she needed.

She took this back to her desk and opened up the computer, adjusting it in front of her. For an instant, she was tempted by the stale package of cigarettes in the top drawer, waiting for her. She realized that she hadn’t had a smoke in days.
Good for you, Mr. Big Bad Wolf,
she thought.
Maybe
you’ve helped me finally kick the habit. So when you kill me you’ll be saving
me from a really nasty end. Can’t thank you enough.

Cancer was what she was looking for in the file. Not exactly the disease.

But it was what killed the person whose file she spread out on her desk.

Cynthia Harrison.
A common enough name,
Karen thought.
That’s good.

Thirty-eight years old.
Young for breast cancer. That was sad. But just three
years older than Red Two.

A husband. No children.
Probably that’s how she found out the bad news:
when she couldn’t conceive. They started to run some routine fertility tests and
troubling indications showed up in the results. Then it would have been a
rapid treadmill of doctors, treatments, and never-ending pain.

Cynthia was in hospice for just three weeks, following unsuccessful radiation that was followed by equally unsuccessful surgery.
They sent her
here because it’s the least expensive place to die. If she’d stayed in the hospital it
would have cost thousands. And they knew she had just long enough for folks
to make the right arrangements.

She checked the funeral home information and saw which of her col-leagues had signed the death certificate. It was the surgeon.
He probably
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RED 1–2–3

wanted to sign and forget about his failure.
She wrote all the necessary information down on a pad of paper, all Cynthia Harrison’s vital statistics: Date of birth. Place of birth. Last address. Profession. Next of kin. Social security number. Relevant medical history. Height. Weight. Eye color. Hair color. Karen parsed every detail she could from the extensive hospice file.

After she closed the paper file, she found all of Cynthia Harrison’s computer entries in the hospice archive. These she moved to the
trash
bin.

Then she electronically emptied the
trash.
She knew that someone skilled would be able to find it all, if driven to do so. But she doubted anyone would be.

Then she walked down the hallway to one of the nursing stations. It was a simple matter of finding a red-colored
Danger! Infectious Medical Waste
plastic bag and a large sealed container where needles, used sample cups, and anything that might have picked up some powerful virus or deadly bacteria were tossed.

“Sorry, Cynthia,” she whispered. “I wish I’d known you.”
Except now
I do,
Karen finished the thought. She rolled up the entire file tightly and snugged it into the plastic bag, sealing the top carefully before dropping it into the closed bin designed for the sole purpose of keeping everyone safe.

Red Two danced.

She waltzed with an invisible partner. She tangoed to sexy electric beats.

She bowed across the room to empty space, as if following the stately steps of an elaborate Elizabethan galliard. When the music changed, she started to twitch and shake as if on a modern dance floor.
Dancing with the Stars,
she thought.
No, Dancing with the Wolf.
She mimicked ridiculous ’60s dances like the Frug and the Watusi that she remembered her parents demonstrating at silly moments. At one point, she even launched into the Macarena, gyrating her hips suggestively. Eventually, as exhaustion crept into her steps, she became balletic, moving her arms above her head slowly and spinning about.
Swan Lake,
she hoped. She had seen a performance as a teenager. Stirring. Beautiful. It was the sort of magical memory that an impressionable fifteen-year-old girl never forgets. Once she’d expected to 239

JOHN KATZENBACH

take her daughter to see a similar show. No longer. In the small world of the basement, she lifted her arms above her head and tried to raise herself up on her toes, like the dancer playing a white swan would, but it was impossible.

Her music was contradictory. None of the songs that filled her head matched her movements. Rock and roll wasn’t like square dancing, even if that was what she did.

Red Three had left her an iPod with several playlists designated
Waiting Music.
She did not recognize all the performers—she had never heard of David Wax Museum or The Iguanas and had no idea who someone named Silina Musango was or who made up a group called The Gourds.

But the music Red Three had selected for her was irrepressible, enthusiastic, uplifting, and she appreciated the joyous rhythms and the wild energy incorporated in every song.

Red Three was trying to help,
Sarah realized.
Damn thoughtful of her. She
knew that after I killed myself, I’d be isolated and a little crazy.

Smart girl.

Red Three had created another playlist, but Sarah didn’t listen to this one, because she didn’t think the time was yet right. She knew it would have far different sounds and selections. This playlist was titled
Killing
Music.

When fatigue finally overcame her, Sarah pulled out her earphones and slumped to the cement floor of Red One’s basement. It was cool beneath her cheek. She knew she was making herself filthy. Dust and grime were everywhere, and she could feel sweat streaking her forehead and dripping from her chin, but she did not care. The air was hot and thick as a result of the furnace in the corner having kicked on to heat the house. There wasn’t a window, so she could not look outside. She knew only that she was hidden and that even if the Big Bad Wolf were parked outside watching the front door, he wouldn’t be able to see her. A part of her thought that if she shut off the single overhead bulb that filled the room with weak light, it might be the same black turbulence as the river waters that she’d faked diving into.

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The night before, when she’d run through the growing nighttime to where she knew Red One was waiting for her, she’d imagined Red Three’s piercing scream.
I bet it convinced everyone.

She curled up into a ball.

Sarah died last night,
she thought.
Suicide note and “Goodbye, I’m gone
forever.” They will bury me beside my husband and my daughter. Except it
won’t be me. It will be an empty coffin.

She knew she was destined to become someone new. She wasn’t at all certain she liked this. But until she was reborn, she would only be Red Two.

A deadly Red Two,
she told herself.
A homicidal Red Two.
A cold chill of ferocity slid through her, surging up against uncontrollable rage.

But then she abruptly gave in to all the emotions reverberating within her and sobbed uncontrollably on the floor as she cradled not a picture of her dead family, but the .357 Colt Magnum.

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30

The Big Bad Wolf gasped once, then shouted out an incomprehensible torrent of curses. He spun about and had to restrain himself from punching the kitchen wall. Instead, he crushed the local news section of the daily newspaper in his fists and closed his eyes as if someone were drawing fingernails across a blackboard making a scratching sound that assaulted every nerve end in his body. Beneath his fingers was a headline on a short article:
Former Schoolteacher a Suspected Suicide
.

“No, goddamnit! No!” he bellowed in sudden, uncontrollable rage.

Bright light reflected off the river surface. The rain had finally stopped and the weather had warmed slightly. The wind had dropped and the morning sun had risen into a wide, cloudless blue sky. A small crowd was gathered on the bridge, leaning up against the low concrete barrier and watching the activity below. A news crew seemed bored, their shoulder-held camera lying uselessly against the wheel of their panel truck. Cars on the bridge slowed down as they gawked at the activity before speeding away. Three Hispanic women, each pushing a baby-filled stroller, had paused and were 242

RED 1–2–3

talking rapidly and gesticulating toward the flat black water surface. One woman crossed herself three times rapidly. The Big Bad Wolf slid in beside a pair of men not much older than him. He knew they would both be observant and filled with opinions readily shared. They were smoking, letting wisps of cigarette smoke pungently fill the still air.

“I tell yah, they ain’t gonna find nothin’,” one man said confidently, although he hadn’t been asked a question. He wore a tattered gray overcoat and a crumpled brown felt fedora that was snugged down tight on a weather-beaten forehead. He shaded his eyes against the morning glare.

“Man, I wouldn’t go in there,” said his companion. “Not even with a safety line.”

“You know, they ought to post no-swimming signs all over the place.”

“Yeah, except they ain’t looking for no swimmer.”

The two men grunted in agreement.

Poised thirty yards from the bridge buttresses were two small aluminum outboards. A pair of policemen in black wet suits and wearing twin aluminum air tanks were taking turns slipping into the river, while others held ropes and maneuvered the boats against the strong currents.

The Wolf watched carefully. There was something hypnotizing in the way a diver would disappear, leaving a trail of air bubbles and a slight disturbance on the water surface, only to emerge within a few moments, struggling against the powerful flow of the river. He could see frustration and exhaustion as the divers were pulled from the water and the boats moved to a different position.
A grid search,
the Big Bad Wolf thought.

Standard police technique: Divide the area into manageable segments and
inspect each before moving to the next.

“Have they come up with anything at all?” he asked the two old men, who clearly had been watching all morning. He used a carefully chosen tone of idle curiosity.

“Some crap. Like a kid-sized jacket or something. That got ’em all excited for a while and both guys went under for maybe fifteen minutes.

But nothing else. So now they’re moving back and forth. Maybe trying to get lucky.”

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“I sometimes fish that stretch,” his companion said. “But no one is dumb enough to go near the river until after it comes down in the summer. At least no one who wants to live.” This old man was wearing a navy baseball cap adorned with the name of the USS
Oriskany,
a retired Vietnam-era carrier that had been sunk to make an artificial reef. The cap had a frayed peak. The Wolf noticed that his hands were scarred and gnarled, like the roots of an ancient oak.

“I tell yah, they ain’t gonna find nothin’,” the other man said again.

“They’re just wasting our tax dollars out there. They buy up all that fancy diving equipment and never get much chance to use it.”

“They’ll give up soon enough,” Baseball Hat said to Fedora.

The Big Bad Wolf decided to keep watching. But he thought the old man was probably right.

They ain’t gonna find nothin’.

Maybe,
he thought,
because there’s nothing to find.

He just wasn’t sure, which irritated him no end. He knew certainty was the lifeblood of murder. Small details and accurate assessments. He sometimes considered himself to be an accountant of killing. This was one of those moments where attention to minutiae was critical.
It’s like doing
a tax return of death.

Maybe I have killed her,
he thought. Certainly the intense pressure he’d brought to bear was enough to drive someone to take her own life.
If you
know you’re about to be murdered, wouldn’t you elect to kill yourself ?
That made a certain amount of sense. He thought of prisoners awaiting execution who hang themselves in their cells, or people who receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness. He had a vision of doomed financial brokers and office workers throwing themselves from the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The uncertainty of awaiting death can be far worse than the pain of suicide.

And he knew that Red Two was the weakest of the three Reds. If she had tossed herself into the river, well, that was
almost
as good as choking her to death himself. For a moment he could feel pressure in his hands, as if they were wrapped around Red Two’s neck and he was actually throttling her 244

RED 1–2–3

beneath him.
Certainly worth putting a notch on the gun,
he told himself, thinking like some old Western gunslinger.

Death is like the truth. It answers questions.

He made a mental note to put that in his next chapter. Perhaps he could legitimately claim her murder alongside the two others. He considered this possibility and realized that his earlier anger just might have been misplaced.
Readers will be intrigued by the thought that I could drive her to
take her own life. It will be shocking. Like all those people slowing down on the
bridge to see if they can spot something, readers will need to see what happens
next. It will make them more anxious for Red One and Red Three. And that
will make the last days for the remaining Reds a little easier to manage, with
one less stop along the road to death.

Like a journalist collecting elements for a story on deadline, the Big Bad Wolf looked around. He took in the policemen working in the river, he counted the people watching from the bridge, he noted the news crew packing up their cameras and sound equipment and readying to leave for some bigger and better photo op. This made him smile.
They don’t know it,
he thought,
but this is the best damn story around. By far.

But this story is all mine.