Red 1-2-3

18

In what the Wolf thought was a wonderfully serendipitous bit of good fortune, the following day he received a chain e-mail from the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, announcing a special seminar with the Massachusetts State Police’s top forensic analyst. Although he had joined the organization shortly after his first book was published, he had never attended any of its lectures, which were designed to help members with tricky issues that cropped up in their struggling narratives. He had felt above these “how-to” sessions and preferred researching on his own. The local police were always helpful, as were many criminal defense lawyers. He sometimes wondered whether they would be equally eager to speak to a real killer.

But this e-mail seemed to play into his current needs, and he reserved a space for the seminar, paying the $50 fee with a credit card and getting directions to a hotel convention room for the talk. It was going to be a two-hour drive to just outside Boston, but he felt it would be worth the trip. The Wolf liked to think that he was constantly on the lookout for small pieces of information. Little details of crime made his writing come alive, he believed. In that regard, he imagined himself like all the other writers of crime fiction.

This notion of joining a pack amused him. Because I’m not like any of those others struggling to find a good agent and get a book contract and maybe a movie deal for their detective series.

It was to be an evening session-which he didn’t like. He no longer enjoyed driving at night. His eyesight was still good enough, but the creeping early winter darkness seemed to slow his reactions down, which made him tentative behind the wheel. This sensation of vulnerability or mortality-he hated it-reminded him he was steadily aging. This caused him, in turn, to feel more energized when he thought about the three Reds.

Killing, he wrote, brings out the youth inside.

Do you remember what it was like when you had your first kiss? The first time you touched a girl’s breast? The first time you caressed a knife blade with your thumb and drew a little line of blood? Do you remember that taste? Or the first time you hefted a loaded pistol, and placed your index finger upon the trigger, knowing that all the power in the world would be released with just the gentlest tug?

Perfection.

Those are the passions that constantly need to be restored and renewed.

The Wolf reluctantly set aside his musings on murder and devoted some time to drearily writing down questions for the seminar speaker and trying to anticipate the scientist’s answers. He thought of himself as a dedicated graduate student preparing for an oral exam. This would be the final step before being awarded a doctorate. This idea made him grin. A higher degree in killing. Still, he considered it necessary to be prepared for the seminar. He wanted to be able to display enough understanding that expert knowledge would flow back toward him. It was like knocking on the door to a sophisticated, exclusive club, demanding entrance.

He did make one more note in the chapter he was working on: To be a truly successful killer, you must always be eager to learn. Too many death-row inmates stare out between iron bars waiting for that final bad word from the warden and wondering where exactly everything went so wrong. “I’m sorry. All your court appeals have failed. Would you like a priest? And chicken or steak for that last meal?” If you don’t educate yourself about death, death will decide to educate you. And you don’t want that lesson.

This, he thought, was probably obvious to every reader but deserved being stated in clear, concise prose anyway. Sometimes, he told himself, you have to be totally explicit. Pornographically clear. In words and in killing.

Jordan counted quietly to herself. One step. Two. Twenty, twenty-five, and thirty. She angled across the open quadrangle, measuring carefully, ignoring the other students walking to late classes.

In her hand, she clutched a small video camera. She had borrowed it from one of her dorm mates, a slightly younger girl who seemed less intent than the others on either taunting her remorselessly or taking pains to avoid her. Jordan imagined that it was used mostly for out-of-bounds fun-maybe taking incriminating pictures of other girls making out with football team boys or breaking the school rules by drinking wildly at parties.

Moving across the campus, Jordan periodically lifted the camera and looked back through the lens. When the distance seemed right, she stopped and checked the viewfinder. Then she smiled and took a quick glance around.

“That’s where you were standing,” she whispered to herself. She half-lifted her hand to point, as if there were someone standing next to her.

Jordan had duplicated the first shot the Wolf had taken of her in her Red Three YouTube video. The distance was approximately the same. The angle was nearly identical. She had done her best to gauge the light to replicate the time of day.

She was stopped a few feet outside a small space between a science lab and a boys’ dormitory. It was a dead-end alleyway-no longer than eight or ten feet deep-that was blocked by a gray concrete wall at the back that connected the two buildings for no apparent purpose. There were several trash bins located at that end and the wall was scrawled with obscenities and vaguely pornographic drawings, phone numbers, and protests of undying love or promises of oral sex. It was not unlike a typical bathroom stall wall in a bus station.

Both buildings were the ubiquitous redbrick so familiar to schools and colleges, covered with tangled ivy, although the cold weather had stripped all the branches of leaves. The space seemed almost cavelike. It was, Jordan thought, a bad place for trash containers, but a fine place to hide for a few moments while sneaking a video.

Had to be last spring term. Plenty of greenery, she thought. And the evening shadows would have made this spot dark, while the last bit of sunlight hitting the quadrangle would have made it possible to see me clearly.

She bit down on her lip. It was a smart place to choose for a secret videotaping. Jordan stepped back slightly, looking first right, then left. No one could see what you were doing unless they accidentally walked right past and happened to look directly at you.

In her imagination, it was like she was conversing with the Wolf-as if she wanted him to hear how much she had already figured out about him. She stared at the spot she believed he’d occupied. She wanted to whisper something defiant, but no words came to her. She pictured him-a lurking man’s dark form that seemed part animal, almost cartoonlike-lowering the camera, wide wolf’s grin on his face, teeth bared. Again, she let her eyes travel the adjacent areas. Plenty of parking on the side street just twenty yards away. A few quick steps and you would be gone. No one would know what you’d been up to. So, you must have felt pretty damn safe.

Jordan worked hard to reconstruct every element of the filming moment in her head.

You couldn’t just wait here for hours, hoping eventually I would happen by and you could take your pictures. That would be far too suspicious. Someone might spot you and maybe call security. No one’s allowed to just hang out around the school. So that’s a chance you wouldn’t take. Any smart wolf would know to be far more cautious, right?

Her throat felt sore, her mouth dry.

You had to know when I was going to pass by. Maybe not exactly, but damn close. You had to have a sense of timing. My timing. You know my school. The smart wolf knows exactly when he can spy on his prey in complete safety.

That observation told her something.

You must know the same things for Red One and Red Two.

She lifted the video camera up to her eye, but did not push the record button. She had already seen all she wanted.

Jordan could feel a rush of warmth, even though the air was chilly. Here is the first fight, she told herself. Don’t panic. He was standing right here, right where you are right now. What else does it tell you?

One answer she already knew, and she reminded herself of it, speaking out loud to no one: “He’s been watching all of us for months.” The video was the culmination of many hours. It wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment picture.

This seemed completely unfair to her. It was like a surprise test in a classroom on material that she’d neglected to study. Only failure here meant much more than a lousy mark.

She reached out and idly ran her fingers over the pitted brick of the science building, as if the old stone could tell her something else.

Jordan had the sensation there was some reply to her touch to be found, but it seemed to elude her in the late afternoon gloom. Torn-a part of her wanted to flee, a part of her told her to keep looking because there might be other answers just lying about near the trash-she pivoted. For a moment, she stared at the gray concrete wall behind the trash containers, her eyes flowing over all the faded and misspelled messages. She took a couple of steps closer, reading.

Kathy gives good head. Call her 555-1729.

Fcuk the class of 2009. There assholes.

I Luv S. Forever.

She was about to turn when her eyes spotted a small hand-drawn heart shape scratched into the wall. Inside it were the letters RT and BW. Jordan stared at the heart, as if her eyes could burn some truth out of it.

RT, she thought. That can’t be Red Three.

BW can’t be Bad Wolf.

She shook her head. No, it would have to be BBW because that’s how he signed his letters. She scoured her memory. Isn’t there a Robbie Townsend in that boys’ dorm? Didn’t he have a crush on Betty Williams last semester?

That has to be it.

But trying to insist that nothing was wrong seemed like a complete lie. She felt chilled, and she turned around and began to march toward her dormitory. She had the eerie sensation that the Wolf was suddenly right behind her, hidden in that location and once again filming her, materializing out of shadow as soon as she’d turned her back. The nape of her neck burned. A surge of frantic fear came over her and she nearly broke into a sprint. But instead, Jordan forced herself to slow down and walk steadily. One foot in front of the other, she told herself. She wanted to sing out in some loud and raucously obscene cadence, like a soldier, but she couldn’t find the strength to raise her voice, so she began to whisper in a singsong, “I don’t know but I’ve been told, Eskimo cocks are mighty cold. Left. Right. Left. Right…” Her pace, she hoped, was every bit as defiant as the words she couldn’t find for herself earlier. But she doubted it was.

Act normal.

Sarah Locksley had joked to herself that this should mean popping some pills and washing them down with warm vodka. My new normal. Not my old normal.

Instead, she had spent most of the day relentlessly straightening up her house. She collected debris and placed empty liquor bottles in recycling bins. She vacuumed carpets and washed floors. The laundry ran nearly nonstop for hours, each load carefully folded and placed in her drawers as it was finished. She cleaned every countertop and surface in the kitchen, and switched on the oven’s self-cleaning mechanism. The refrigerator was a challenge, but she scrubbed out every bit of spilled milk. Spoiled food was thrown into a trash bag and carted outside. She assaulted the bathrooms with brush, cleanser, and military precision, bending over until her back shouted with pain, but afterward the porcelain and stainless steel glistened. And, in what she truly believed was complete idiocy, she took two plastic garbage bags and went from window to window, door to door, disassembling her Home Alone security system. The broken glass spread beneath each entranceway clinked as she swept it up with dustpan and broom.

She couldn’t quite bring herself to open windows and air the house out-although she knew she needed to do that. An open window seemed like an invitation to cold air, trouble, and maybe worse.

Nor could Sarah take a feather duster into her husband’s study or her daughter’s bedroom. Those remained shut. Normal could only go so far.

When she’d restored her home to something approximating reasonable, Sarah stepped into her shower and let steaming-hot water run over her, the heat seeping into sore muscles. She stood beneath the stream almost like a statue, unable to move, but not frozen by fatigue as much as turmoil. When she soaped up her hair and body, she felt like her hands were running over the skin of a stranger. It seemed to her that nothing was familiar-not the shape of her breasts, the length of her legs, the tangles in her hair. When she emerged from the shower, she stood naked in front of a mirror, imagining that she was looking at some odd identical twin she had never known, from whom she’d been separated at birth, but who had just moments before suddenly reappeared in her life.

She dressed carefully, choosing a modest pants-and-sweater outfit from the rows of clothes that she’d once worn to work at the elementary school. They were loose-fitting when she had a job, a husband, and a family. Now, with none of those things, her body baggier from the weight loss of depression, they hung on her, and she wondered whether they would ever fit again.

She found her overcoat, brushed a few spots of dust from it, and searched around for her satchel. She double-checked to make sure that her husband’s revolver was snugly contained inside. Out loud, she said, “Normal doesn’t include being stupid.”

She wasn’t sure that this statement was accurate.

Sarah stepped outside into weak afternoon sunlight. She could feel her hands twitch, and knew that she was on an edge of fear. She desperately wanted to stop, search up and down the roadway with her eyes, inspect her small world for some telltale sign of the Wolf’s presence.

Normal, she thought, doesn’t need to look around nervously and worry about every step outside.

She felt a shaft of cold within her as she thought that if her husband had only looked in the right direction, perhaps…

She shut off that small bit of despair. Instead, she hastily moved to her car and slid behind the wheel, behaving like any person who had someplace to go.

She did. But this was not the sort of trip that would fit into anyone’s definition of routine. This trip was to combine the insistently ordinary with the deepest sadness.

Her first stop was the mundane: the local grocery store. She seized a cart from the rack and filled it up with salads, fruit, lean meats, and fish. She purchased bottled water and freshly squeezed juices. Sarah felt a little like a stranger walking through the aisles of healthy foodstuffs. It had been a long time since she’d bought anything to eat that had any nutritional value.

At the floral displays she grabbed two cheap bunches of colorful flowers.

The checkout girl took Sarah’s credit card and ran it through the register, which gave Sarah a twinge of embarrassment, because she was sure it would be declined. When it was approved, Sarah was mildly astonished.

She steered her cart and groceries over to her car, keeping her eyes focused on loading, steeling herself against the desire to look about furtively. For the first time in her life she felt a little like a wild animal. The demands of caution and remaining alert to all threats nearly overcame her.

The Wolf won’t follow you on this next errand, she thought. And even if he did, what would he learn?

Nothing he doesn’t already know.

Telling herself to ignore every creeping fear, Sarah stuffed the groceries into her trunk. Then she slid behind the wheel, took a deep breath, and pulled out of the parking lot into traffic.

End-of-the-day drivers ducked in and out of lanes and tailgated her. There is a frustrated energy to commuting time; there’s so many people in a hurry to get home that they wind up slowing everyone down. She reminded herself that once she was the same way, at the end of the school day. She would pack up all her classroom items and get behind the wheel and drive rapidly home because that was where her real life was, or at least the part of it that she liked to think of as real. Picking up her daughter at day care, fixing dinner, waiting for her husband to come home from fire department headquarters.

Behind her a car honked. She punched down on her gas pedal, knowing that even moving faster wasn’t likely to make whoever it was who had decided to be rude any less so.

It took her nearly half an hour to drive to the cemetery. It was located near a large public park so that any city residue dropped away rapidly, giving the last few blocks an almost country feel.

The grave sites were set back on a small sloping plot of land. Streets meandered haphazardly amidst gray headstones. There were pathways that led up to ornate crypts and lurking statues of angels. There was little daylight remaining, and shadows seemed to drop from the oak trees that were scattered about the landscape. Nearly lost in one corner was a small building that Sarah knew housed a backhoe and shovels.

She was alone.

Some of the graves sported dying flowers. Several were adorned with well-worn, tattered American flags. A few had freshly turned dirt. Others were faded by years of weather, the grass around them browned by time. Names, dates, quick sentiments-beloved, devoted-adorned some of the headstones. Decades of losses were arrayed quietly before her.

Sarah stopped her car and grasped the two bouquets of flowers.

It has been a long time since you came here, she told herself. Be brave.

When she formed this last word in her head, she was uncertain whether she was referring to the Wolf or to the two people who had been stolen from her life. She wished that her husband or daughter would whisper something to her, but there was nothing but cemetery silence in the air.

A little unsteadily, she walked down a pathway running through rows of simple gray monuments guarded by two cherub statues wielding trumpets that played no sound. She could hear her shoes clacking against the black macadam of the path. A part of her wished she were drunk, an equal part of her believed there was no amount of liquor in the world that could overcome her sobriety at that moment.

In her mind, she was working on what she was going to say to her slaughtered family. Words like I’m sorry or I need you both to help me get through this filled her mouth, as if ready to burst forth. She clutched the bouquets, almost as she had the gun earlier.

Sarah knew how many steps she would walk. She kept her eyes down, head lowered, as if she was afraid to read the names on the gray marble headstone that awaited her. When she knew she was in front of it, she stopped, breathed in sharply, and raised her eyes.

As she did this, she started to speak, almost nonsensically. “I miss you both so much and now someone wants to kill me…”

Then, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across her tongue, the weak and flimsy message she had for her dead husband and daughter died in her mouth.

She stared through the encroaching darkness at the headstone. At first, she could only formulate, There’s something wrong.

She peered at the granite-colored stone. Graffiti, she thought at first. A surge of outrage immediately filled her. This is terrible, she thought. What sort of creepy, thoughtless, goddamn stupid teenager would take a can of spray paint and deface a grave? Don’t they know they’re breaking someone’s heart?

She took a step forward and looked closer. That’s not right. She realized that she was breathing shallow, quick bursts of air stripped from the rapidly falling darkness.

What should have been the angular “tags” of teenage gangs or the round, bulbous drawings of nicknames were nothing of the sort. Nor were these scratchy, misspelled obscenities hurriedly sprayed across the surface. Sarah stepped forward, as if drawn to the shapes she saw.

They were painted white. They angled across the stone, bisecting each name and the death date. There were four of them.

Sarah had never seen a wolf’s paw print before, but she suddenly knew that was precisely what she was staring at.

She dropped the flowers to the sidewalk and ran hard.