Red 1-2-3 (8 page)

She wasn’t sure, but it did.

He’s not out there. Not yet. The Big Bad Wolf didn’t act swiftly. He stalked
Little Red Riding Hood.

There was a part of her that wanted to wall herself into her home, build barricades and protect herself, waiting for the Big Bad Wolf to show 50

RED 1–2–3

up and try to blow her house down.
Except,
Sarah shook her head as she reminded herself,
that’s the wrong damn fairy tale. I’m not one of the three little
pigs. My house may be made of straw, but that’s the wrong story completely.

Again she hesitated, reaching her hand around the door handle. It was not as if she was scared—a significant part of her welcomed death. It was more the uncertainty of everything. She felt caught up in a vortex, like there was a maelstrom spinning her around, threatening to pull her under dark waves. She could hear her breathing coming in raspy, fast gasps—but she could not
feel
the shortness of breath. It was almost as if the sounds were coming from someone else.

She shut her eyes.
Okay. If this is it, at least it will be fast. Just like Ted
and Brittany. They never saw the truck. Just one minute they were alive and
laughing and having a fine time, and then they were dead. Maybe it will be
like that for me, too. So okay, Big Bad Wolf. Just shoot me right now!

She pulled the door open savagely and stood framed in the space.
Take
your damn shot!

She closed her eyes. Waited.

Nothing.

She could feel the evening’s chill descending. It cooled her, and she realized that she was sweating, hot, as if she’d been exercising.

She blinked. Her street was as it always was. Quiet. Empty. She took a deep breath and stepped out.
Maybe there’s a bomb attached to my car and
when I start it up, it will explode just like in some Hollywood gangster movie.

She slid behind the wheel and, without hesitating, turned the key over.

The engine fired up and hummed like a cat being stroked.

Well, maybe the Big Bad Wolf will slam some truck into me, and I can die
like Ted and Brittany did.

She steered the car into the street and stopped. Again she closed her eyes.
Broadside. Forty, maybe fifty miles an hour. Just like the oil truck. Come
on. I’m waiting. I’m ready.

Sarah’s eyes again were squeezed tight.
Any second now,
she thought.

The car horn seemed to blast inches away from her left ear. The sound sliced the air like an explosion. She gasped and involuntarily held up her 51

JOHN KATZENBACH

arm, as if to shield herself from impact. Her eyes flew open and she cried out some half-scream, half-sob.

The horn beeped again. Only this time, it seemed childlike, like a toy noise.

She half-turned in her seat, and saw that she was obstructing a couple in a small Japanese compact car. The man behind the wheel, who looked to be in his early sixties, and his wife, who was still dark-haired and appeared a little younger, were waving at her, but not in an impatient, unfriendly fashion. It was more like they were concerned and confused. Sarah stared at the couple, and then haphazardly pieced things together in her head.

I’m blocking the road. They want to get past me.

The woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window. From perhaps ten feet away, she called out in a questioning tone, “Is everything okay?”

Yes. No. Yes. No.
Sarah didn’t respond other than to wave her hand as if to say
Sorry
without an explanation. She fumbled to get the car into forward gear. Then she quickly thrust her foot down on the accelerator and without looking back drove rapidly down the street. She did not know exactly where she was going, but wherever it was, she went in a hurry, breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, like a swimmer preparing for a dive into uncertain waters or waiting for the starter’s gun to sound the start of a race.

“Odd,” said Mrs. Big Bad Wolf.

“Maybe the young lady got a cell phone call, or remembered that she’d forgotten something. But you shouldn’t just stop in the middle of the road,” the Big Bad Wolf replied. “That’s really dangerous.”

“It’s a good thing you were paying attention,” his wife said. “People just certainly are strange.”

“Indeed they are,” he answered as he drove slowly forward. “Don’t want to be late.” He smiled. “Shall we listen to the radio?” he asked, pleasantly enough, fiddling with the dial until he found the classical music station.

He
hated
classical music, although he had always told his wife he loved it.

Little dishonesties, he thought, were good practice for the necessary larger ones.

52

RED 1–2–3

* * *

She was a woman accustomed to being if not exactly certain about matters, at least confident, and the letter from the Big Bad Wolf had scoured her emotions. After speaking with Detective Clark, she had set the letter aside and told herself,
Forget it.
Then she had picked it up again and told herself,
You need to act.
But precisely how eluded her. She had the sensation that she needed to be actively doing
something
but had very little idea what that
something
was. She had done everything Detective Clark had told her. She had called a security company—they were scheduled to install an alarm system in her house the next day. She had gone over patient files, looking for some error that might have led to a threat.

She had racked her memory for any slight, real or imagined, that might translate into “
You have been selected to die
.” She had even checked out the website of the local animal shelter to see if they had some big mean dog for adoption. She had looked up the numbers of some private detectives, checked with various consumer ratings programs to see who received the best reviews, and written down the telephone numbers of two different men. She had half-dialed one number only to stop and hang up her telephone.

Above all, Karen despised panic. Or even the appearance of panic.

In medical school, doing her internship rotations, she had seriously considered a career as an emergency room physician, because even with blood spurting, cries of agony, and the need to move quickly to save a life she had always found herself preternaturally calm. The more things were disintegrating around her, the more her own pulse would slow. She thought that her response to the threatening letter should have been precisely the same as when some accident victim arrived in front of her, rav-aged and in imminent danger of dying.

53

JOHN KATZENBACH

She liked to think of herself as a completely rational person, even with her comedy half occasionally surfacing. But since she’d opened the letter, she had been unable to even consider a comedy routine. Not a single joke, no sarcasm, no play on words or clever political observation—nothing that was the usual stuff of her routines had leapt into her thoughts. Her nighttime dreams had been tortured, which made her tired and angry.

She leaned back and rocked in her desk chair. She was shaking her head back and forth, as if disagreeing with something she’d told herself, when the door to her office opened.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t want to disturb you . . .”

“No, no, it’s okay. I was just a little lost in thought.”

Karen looked over at her nurse. Only two other people worked in her small practice: a young nurse two years out of a college program who had only recently, and hesitantly, asked Karen how to have the tattoo of a sun rising on the back of her neck removed, and her longtime receptionist, an older woman who knew many of the patients and their ailments far better than Karen did.

“Last patient of the day,” the nurse said. “She’s been waiting in exam room 2 for a couple of minutes and . . .”

She let her voice trail off before any sort of rebuke passed her lips.

Karen understood two things: The nurse wanted to get home to her EMT

boyfriend and Karen shouldn’t keep the last patient of the day waiting no matter how unsettled she felt. She took a deep breath and jumped out of her chair, launching herself into her
attentive doctor
mode.

“It’s just a routine follow-up exam,” the nurse said, “She’s already been checked by her cardiologist. His report is in her file. She’s doing fine. This is just a follow-up physical. Nothing too important.”

She handed Karen a clipboard with a file folder attached. Karen didn’t even look at it, feeling suddenly a bit guilty for making a patient wait unnecessarily. She adjusted her white lab coat and hurried down the hallway into the exam room.

The patient was seated on the exam table, wearing a johnny-gown and a smile. “Hello, Doctor,” she said.

54

RED 1–2–3

“Hello, Mrs . . .” Karen glanced quickly at the folder to grab the woman’s name. She hurriedly said it, trying to cover up her failure to greet her as she did all her patients: with a familiarity that implied that she had spent the entire day studying whatever medical issues the patient had.

Ordinarily she had no trouble remembering the names of her patients, and inwardly she berated herself for the lapse. She knew that stress sometimes caused blanks in the memory. That an anonymous threat could intrude on her day-to-day life seemed horribly wrong.

She had absolutely no idea that her greeting that day actually should have been: “
Hello, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf . . .
”

Nor had she any inkling that sitting patiently in her small waiting room, reading an out-of-date copy of the
New Yorker,
was the man who secretly longed to catch a glimpse of the doctor whom he’d dubbed Red One
.

55

6

Death is the big game and one that everyone plays and everyone loses at the
final whistle. But murder is slightly different, because it is far more like that
moment within each game when the outcome is decided. We sit in the stands,
never knowing when that precise second will arrive. Will it be this goal, or that
free throw, or the base hit with the man on second, or the defensive back failing
to make a tackle? Perhaps it’s the moment when the referee blows his whistle
and points to the penalty spot. Murder is more like sport than anyone knows.

Murder has its own clock and its own rules. Like sport, it’s about preparation
and determination. It’s about overcoming obstacles. Someone wants to live.

Someone wants to kill. That is the playing field.

He looked at the words on the computer screen.
Good,
he thought,

People reading this will start to understand.

Karen awakened exhausted from a night of restless dreams at 6 a.m., her customary time in the morning, a few moments before her alarm clock would have rung. She had always had an inner clock that would wake her up shortly before the hotel wake-up call or her alarm. Her habit was to 56

RED 1–2–3

roll over and punch the
off
button on the alarm, thrust herself up from beneath a handmade quilt she’d acquired at a local crafts show many years earlier, and make her way to a pink exercise pad set up in a corner of the bedroom, where she would indulge herself with exactly fifteen minutes of yoga stretches and exercises before heading to the shower. In the kitchen, the automatic coffeepot was already percolating. The clothes she had selected for that day’s work were set out the night before, after she checked the weather report. Routine, she insisted, set her free, although there were mornings when it was hard to persuade herself this statement was true.

She sometimes thought her entire world was constructed upside down, or perhaps back to front. She devoted all her organizational energies to her medical work, and thought of her comedy as liberating. Two Karens, she told herself, who might not even recognize each other if they met on the street. Comic
Karen was creative, spontaneous, and quick-witted. Internist Karen was dedicated to her work and patients, steady, organized, and always as precise as illness allowed. Her two sides seemed to share little, but had managed to accommodate each other over the years.

This morning, she wondered if perhaps she needed to create a third.

She glanced over toward the alarm system pad that had been installed on the bedroom wall two days after the letter from the Big Bad Wolf had arrived. It blinked red—letting her know that it was on and functioning. She felt an odd discomfort. She had to get up, turn it off so that the motion detectors mounted in corners throughout the house would not catch her instead of the fictional bad guys they were designed to raise alarm about. She needed to get the day started. But she lingered.

Predictability is my enemy,
she thought.

Someone unknown sends me a threatening letter, and I do exactly what
every book, manual, or website says to protect myself.
That was what made sense. A checklist. Call the police. Inform the neighbors to be on the lookout for any strange activity. Her isolation made that difficult, but she had still dutifully called the families that lived closest to her.

Simple, straightforward calls:
“Hi, this is Karen Jayson down the
block. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve received some anonymous threat.

57

JOHN KATZENBACH

No . . . No . . . the police don’t think it means anything much, but I just
wanted to ask some of the neighbors to keep an eye out for anything unusual.

Like strange cars parked on the road or something. Thanks . . .”

The responses had been solicitous, concerned.
Of course
everyone would keep eyes peeled for any suspicious behavior. The families with small children had reacted strongly—wondering whether they should keep the kids indoors until this formless threat had dissipated, as if it were some oil slick on the surface of the ocean. The weather being what it was, which was lousy, Karen thought it unlikely the kids would be outside anyway.