Tunnel of Night (9 page)

Lane laughed as she slipped the small computer back into its case.

It was time to include my daughter in my thinking,
so I started with the day of the shooting. “I saw him. He was dressed in black, dark glasses, maybe six feet tall. From his posture, I’d say that he learned to shoot in the military. He shouldn’t have missed. Then he walked into the kitchen and tore the page from Peterson—an elaborate game. Put that together with all the other characteristics you were tapping into your twentieth-century toy.”

I paused to allow Lane time to absorb that information, then said, “We’re talking about John Wolf.”

“A copycat. Like I said before. Somebody who studied Wolf, who is imitating him.”

“Copycats are rare, Lanie. The concept appeals to the law enforcement community more than it equates with reality. Fear of the copycat becomes a convenient excuse to withhold more information in a case than is necessary. There have been a few. The Tylenol case comes to mind. When it does happen, it’s a different pathology from what I’ve encountered among serial killers. Typically, it’s someone at the fringes of sanity, about to tip over anyway. He hasn’t had any formulated plan. There hasn’t been anything to copy. The actions of the first killer serve as a catalyst, a trigger, and off he goes.”

I looked at Lane and said, “We’re going to see Dexter Willoughby.”

Willoughby was the FBI agent who showed up at the old house in Vermont right after the explosion that I assumed had taken Wolf’s life. Willoughby took over that scene, sealed it, then headed thirty-five miles north to secure Wolf’s entire business operation.

“Willoughby wouldn’t take my calls when I tried to reach him from Lake Albert. That’s why I was … out of sorts when I got back from town.”

“There’s no way Wolf could have walked out of that inferno.”

“I didn’t think so, either. I’m still not convinced. Everyone, including me, assumed that Wolf was dead simply because of the force of the explosion. As far as I know, his death was never confirmed.”

“How could he have survived that, Pop? No one could.”

I thought about the last time that I had seen John Wolf. The killer was in the cellar of his boyhood home, sprawled on top of a bomb that was buried in the coal bin. It was the same coal bin that he had been locked in as a child—his stepfather’s preferred method of discipline over the years.

“Lane, what might Wolf have done with all of those childhood hours alone in the terrifying darkness of that dungeon?”

Claw at the earth. Dig. Make your way toward freedom. Slow and steady, lad
.

There was a large slab of sandstone in one corner of the coal bin. I had noticed it when I reburied Wolf’s own explosives and changed his timing device. What would I have found if I had lifted it?

Wolf was fascinated with birds. The killdeer is a bird that builds its nest in a depression in the earth. If someone comes too near the nest, the bird emerges, feigns injury, hobbles with bent wing. I could see Wolf collapsing to the ground, wounded, like the killdeer only pretends to be. I could see him tunneling free from the cellar, dragging himself far away from the house.

Alive. Healed now. Taking flight. Seeking vengeance
.

“If Willoughby wouldn’t take your calls, he’s not gonna let us through the front door.”

“I’m confident that he already regrets not talking with me,”

“Huh? Pop, he shut me out of the Wolf case totally. He didn’t let the Vermont authorities in on any of it, either. After the first couple of days, he even began keeping his partner, Susan Walker, out of it. I hear he got all the credit for a major case cleared. He probably landed in a corner office, and sits behind a mahogany desk.”

“I called a friend,” I said. “Agent Willoughby will see us. If Wolf did get out of there alive, Willoughby is the one person who would know.”

SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE CORNER OFFICE
. Willoughby’s secretary ushered us in. But the desk that the FBI special agent was sitting behind was walnut, not mahogany. I nodded at the desk.

“Win some, lose some,” I mumbled to Lane.

The small, slender man had been with the FBI for twenty years. He had worked with John Douglas, the legendary profiler who later retired and went to work trying to catch up with Robert Ressler in the book and sound-bite business. Both men regurgitated the same cases over and over—the famous felons they had visited and felt threatened by—without contributing anything new to understanding why any of them had done what they had done.

Willoughby had the requisite credentials, and because he was in the right places when the pictures were snapped, he was thought to be heir-apparent to those Quantico gurus. Willoughby was a political animal. He didn’t want any part of the Behavioral Science Unit’s windowless offices sixty feet beneath the earth at the
FBI Academy in Virginia. Slithering around Washington was more his style.

He had the requisite flag, the photograph of the president, the customary “praise” and “thank you” plaques, what I assumed was a photo of his family— posed like a Rockwell painting around a fireplace that could exist only on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
—and a framed snapshot of himself as a child, shaking hands with J. Edgar Hoover.

Willoughby was a linear thinker—A leads to B leads to C. It’s the curse of the Western intellectual tradition, but our public schools keep shoving it down our throats anyway. I had told Lane that I imagined Dexter Willoughby doing the
New York Times
crossword in precise numerical order, never leaping ahead to the word at the heart of the puzzle—the one item that led to its solution. I also doubted that he had ever finished any of the puzzles.

“The senator called,” Willoughby said.

“Ah…yes. A friend of mine from college,” I told him.

The agent’s face was the color of sourdough. “He threatened me with Boise if I didn’t cooperate.”

For a fed, that’s worse than Havana. “They even take shots at the forest service people out there,” I said.

I wanted this bastard to squirm, and he was well on the way.

“What is it you want?”

“Wolf.”

The room was silent.

“Snows a lot in Boise,” I reminded him gently. I am perfectly capable of being diplomatic.

“We found five discrete sets of partial remains buried in the cellar. We were able to identify four. We still don’t
know who the fifth victim was. They were all female, of course.”

“What else did you find?”

“The place was incinerated. Completely demolished.”

Silence again. So I cracked my knuckles. One at a time. Diplomacy.

Finally Willoughby spoke. “There was a tunnel.”

I flashed on the slab of sandstone in the right rear corner of the coal bin.

“It ran parallel to the foundation for about twenty feet, then cut away,” Willoughby went on. “The first ten feet collapsed in the explosion. The rest was intact.”

Toward the crawl space beneath your parents’ bedroom. If you couldn’t get through the bolted door, you’d come up through the floor. Once you had tunneled that far, you didn’t stop. You kept digging, excavating an escape route that led far from the house
.

“We figure that he worked on it over a number of years. He probably used a knife and a spoon. We found a spoon down there. We do not, however, consider the tunnel a means of egress for a six-foot adult of medium build.”

The determination, the absolute will, the consideration of every contingency. Kill them all, lad, then crawl away to a world you created
.

“What else did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.

“Did it occur to you that Wolf might not be dead?”

Willoughby cleared his throat, but continued to look at me. “I never saw any basis for that assumption. Our official position is that he is dead. No one could have survived the devastation caused by that bomb.”

“What’s your unofficial position?”

“I wanted proof,” he said. “I didn’t get it. I had to be content with the circumstantial evidence which, as I’ve indicated, was quite compelling.”

“Another woman has been murdered,” Lane said.

Willoughby nodded. “Yes. I was sorry to hear about that.”

“She was a friend of Pop’s. He tried to kill Pop, and nearly succeeded.”

Willoughby’s eyes widened. He looked confused. “A month ago, Wolf’s sister, Sarah Humphrey, was killed in her home near Orlando. That’s who I thought you meant.”

I stared into the agent’s muddy brown eyes. “Let me guess. The local cops worked it as an isolated case. As what? Home intrusion? Sexual assault?”

“There was extensive postmortem cutting, and evidence of rape.”

Sarah Humphrey. Once a young, slender, attractive object of her brother’s fantasies, but approaching middle age now. Remember when you lusted for a taste of her, lad
?

“We never found anything that suggested that Wolf sexually assaulted any of his victims,” Lane said. “Why would he rape her, Pop?”

You have gone beyond power, control, humiliation— even beyond destruction. “Extensive postmortem cutting,” Willoughby said. You hacked her to pieces
.

“He was consummating a relationship that had existed only in his mind,” I told her.

“Wolf couldn’t be alive,” the agent was saying.

“Willoughby, you’re a sonofabitch,” Lane snapped. “You suspected that Wolf might not have died in the explosion. When you couldn’t match up any of the remains in that cellar with Wolf, why the hell didn’t you tell
someone? Why didn’t you warn Pop? And why didn’t you tell anyone when Sarah Humphrey turned up dead?”

Willoughby was shaking his head. “Wolf is dead,” he said.

You have always re-created yourself, lad. What are you now? And where
?

LANE AND I STOOD IN THE ELEVATOR
. “
LET’S
get a couple of rooms at the Willard,” I said. “I’d like a comfortable bed and some sleep.”

“You hurting?”

“No. I’m just tired.”

“Do you really think that Wolf is alive?”

“I’m never certain of anything, Lane. I don’t think anyone could do a perfect impression of a Paul Sierra painting, or one of Clapton’s riffs. As you know, I also don’t believe in coincidence. Sarah Humphrey? Why would Willoughby even have been informed about that case? It’s a local matter. Somebody must have thought he should know.”

I was already hating every minute of what I was doing. I wanted it over.

“Can’t you get Willoughby to help us?” Lane asked.

“I don’t want him to. I don’t want to muck around in some federal bureaucracy. I want to resolve this and get back to the lake.”

Janet Orr had been reduced to a case number, unsolved. A killer who wouldn’t stop killing until he was dead was free to methodically slake himself like a shark at a shipwreck.

“If Wolf survived,” Lane said, “you’ve got no business going after him. He’d be at the top of his form. You’re hurting. You need rest.”

Autumn bass fishing on Lake Albert is about as good as it gets, at least until winter crashes into the back end of October. I wanted to reclaim my home, build a fire in the woodstove, curl up with a good book and a cold bottle of ale. But there was a killer in my way.

“Whoever it is could still be at the lake,” Lane went on.

You’re here, aren’t you, lad? And you want me here
.

I had been played like a fine-tuned piano, manipulated, misled.

“No,” I told Lane. “I don’t think so.”

WHEN POP SAID WE WERE GOING TO STAY AT
the Willard, my heart did a little dance in my chest. For years, I had been wanting to stay there—ever since I learned who Emily Dickinson was. The Willard is where she slept when she visited Washington a century and a half ago. I just wished that the circumstances of our stay were different.

“Can we get a couple of the expensive rooms?” I asked.

“At the Willard, there isn’t any other kind. Let’s not go crazy. We don’t need any presidential suites. Just beds and indoor plumbing.”

Pop was in a foul mood. But it didn’t faze me at all— it’s actually rather endearing when he stomps around and acts all sullen. I suspected that he was wondering how to convince a bureaucracy that someone it has listed as dead, is not dead. Or, more likely, how to avoid dealing with that bureaucracy at all.

“If this is official business, is there anybody we can pass the bill along to?” I asked.

I was about two paychecks away from going on public assistance.

“This is
my
business. Nobody else’s. I’ll take care of the tab.”

It’s a little unsettling when Pop gets that tone in his voice. He seems to turn into one of those military tanks, the kind that can roll right over anything in its path. It isn’t that he’s necessarily loud or crashing around, although I’ve seen his mad elephant impression many times in my life.

This particular tone is almost too calm, too void of emotion.

A PROMENADE CALLED PEACOCK ALLEY. THE
Round Robin Bar. The Nest Lounge. Surrounded by so many feather connotations, it was hard to keep my mind off murder and John Wolf. Leaving a feather at the scene of a homicide had been one of Wolf’s favorite signatures. I was determined not to let him ruin my stay at the Willard—the home of the promenade, the bar, and the lounge.