Red 1-2-3

23

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf lay crumpled in bed like a discarded piece of scratch paper. It was shortly after the sun had come up, and she stared across twisted sheets and pillows at her husband, who slept peacefully beside her. She listened to the steady, even sounds of his breathing and knew from long experience that his eyes would flutter open just as the clock on the bureau reached 7 a.m. He was utterly consistent in this and had been throughout the years of their marriage, regardless of how late he’d tucked himself into bed the night before. She knew that he would stretch by the side of the bed, run his fingers through his thinning hair, shake a little like a lazy dog roused from slumber, and then pad across the bedroom to the bathroom. He might complain about morning joint stiffness and arthritis. She could count the seconds before she would hear the water running in the shower and the toilet flushing.

This morning everything would be precisely the same.

Except it wasn’t.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf assessed every crease in her sleeping husband’s face, counted the dark brown age spots on his hands, and noted the gray hairs in his bushy eyebrows. Each item in her husband-inventory seemed as familiar as the weak morning sunlight.

She could feel an argument bubbling up within her: You know this man better than you know anyone other than yourself versus Who is he, really?

She had slept precious few hours and felt the nasty sort of exhaustion born of tossing and turning throughout the small hours. And when she had managed to sleep, her dreams had been remorseless and unsettled, like childhood nightmares. This was something she had not experienced since the days of her heart troubles, when fears would shake her night. A part of her wanted very badly to rest and forget, but it was overwhelmed by too many questions, none of which she could ask out loud.

The night before-after she had violated her husband’s work space-she had stared blankly at a succession of favorite television shows that failed to make even the slightest dent in her worries. She had shut off the television and turned off all the lights and sat in her usual seat in the pitch dark until she saw the headlights of her car reflecting off the white living room walls. Then she had purposely hurried to bed. Normally, no matter how tired she was, she would have stayed up to ask him about the forensics lecture. Not this night. She had feigned sleep when he’d quietly snuck into the bedroom and slid into bed beside her. She had felt cold, wondering whether this was a stranger who slipped in next to her. Once upon a time, he might have stroked her arm or her breast to awaken her with desire, but those days were well past.

What did you see in his office?

This question echoed within her. It had seemed loud through the dark of night, and only softened slightly as the dawn arose through the bedroom window.

I don’t know.

She wondered if this was a lie. Maybe I do know.

Simple, benign explanations warred with dark, dire interpretations. She felt as if she were standing in a square in some foreign country trying to get directions. Every sign was in letters that she couldn’t read, every passerby spoke some language she couldn’t comprehend.

“Hey, good morning!”

The Big Bad Wolf was stirring.

She thought her voice would quaver, but it did not. Ask the obvious, she told herself: Are you a killer?

But she did not.

She thought her voice was weak and reedy when she asked, “How was the lecture? I tried to stay up for you, but just crumped out before you got back…”

“Oh, fascinating. The state police guy was really pretty clever and funny, and damn smart. I learned a lot. Got in late.”

What did you learn? Did you learn how to-

She stopped. The questions frightened her.

She watched him roll from the bed and cross the room.

Call the police. Call the local district attorney. Call someone. Who?

“Hey, I noticed we’re almost out of toothpaste,” he said.

Normal, she thought. Nothing has changed.

This falsehood made her feel significantly better. She decided to consider what she would make for his breakfast, instead of wondering whether she had stumbled upon some sick secret. But she wasn’t very confident that a decision about eggs or pancakes would hold much sway over Is your husband a killer? for very long.

By the time she arrived at work, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf was unsure whether she completely wanted answers to the questions that her transgression had created. What she wanted was to rewind time as if it were a videotape-return to the moment when she had realized she held the key to her husband’s writing room and decided to sneak inside. A part of her was ashamed that she had lied to him. Another part was simply confused.

The first thing she did was go to the black steel cabinet that contained all the student records and pull out Jordan’s file.

On the inside jacket was the official school picture of Jordan taken at the beginning of the fall term. It reminded Mrs. Big Bad Wolf of pictures taken by the police: Front view. Turn. Right-side profile. Turn. Left-side profile. All that was missing was the placard with identifying numbers held beneath the chin.

She flipped past the photographs and pored over the details contained within the folder. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf had been a secretary in the private school for far too many years not to understand the patterns delineated by the documents on file. She believed they were boringly typical. She had a short conversation with herself: The kids always think all their problems are really special. They’re not. What’s next? Jordan experiments with sex. Jordan starts smoking weed or abusing a classmate’s prescription for Ritalin. Jordan breaks some school rule in a spectacularly obvious fashion and gets kicked out.

But what she couldn’t see was anything that connected her husband to Jordan.

And more: Why her? Why would she be a target, either for killing or for modeling a character in a book after?

Thoughts like this seemed to crash through Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s thinking, out of control, spastic.

She found herself staring into the many sheets of Jordan’s file with an unbridled anger. She could feel heat rushing through her.

What about you is so goddamn special that my husband has your fucking picture on his wall?

This question screamed inside her.

And, in the same moment, she realized she hated Jordan. It was a real, fierce, boiling-jealous hatred. She could no more have said why she felt this as she could have related what she was going to do about it. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf closed up the teenager’s file, slapping it shut on her desk.

This left her doctor and some other unknown woman to worry about. Why them?

She reached down into her pocketbook and pulled out the piece of paper on which she’d scribbled the names and dates of her husband’s books and the seemingly disconnected murder cases that he’d seen fit to clip from newsprint and store in his leather album.

She realized she had some research to do. She didn’t know how much time she had to do this, but she knew she had to hurry.

In his office that morning, the Wolf happily transcribed his notes from the lecture. He was also pleased with the calls he’d made.

He wrote: Sometimes the loudest noise you can make is no noise at all.

The cell phone he’d used to call each of the three Reds had been purchased with cash at a small electronics store-one that he’d made certain had no security cameras. After stopping alongside a highway and making the calls, he’d removed the memory chip and smashed the phone beneath his heel. Part had been discarded in a Dumpster outside a rest area. The remainder had been tossed into a small river not far from where the lecture was held. One of the things the Wolf enjoyed most about the science of murder was the preparation in anticipating every small detail of dying.

The key thing, he typed furiously, is to make sure that you’ve established the correct level of terror. Fear in your victims-whether it’s caused in a few seconds of realization panic or by a slow buildup of uncontrollable anxiety-is what causes them to make immense mistakes and what underscores your equally immense excitement. They stumble and trip and expose themselves while trying to flee or hide. Happens every time. Ever seen one of those teenage “slasher” movies? Every direction they turn either Jason or Freddy Krueger or the Texas guy with the face mask and the chain saw has anticipated their move and is waiting for them. What the victims don’t get is that the actions caused by their fear have made them infinitely more vulnerable. When they run amok, they open the door to someone more familiar with the terrain to exploit their fright. Arguing that Friday the 13th Part One Zillion has it just absolutely right seems a little crazy-but it isn’t really. Remember Little Red Riding Hood? The Wolf knows every inch of the territory with an intimacy she can’t imagine. Those movies are no different. It is into those gaps created by unplanned fear that the really sophisticated killer must adventure. Some of the richest moments in the killing experience come from those places, even if they are short in duration.

Every second becomes precious.

The best killer owns time.

The Big Bad Wolf hesitated, fingers above the keyboard. He could feel inexorable progress in the words that flowed onto the computer screen and the steady buildup of pages in a box at his elbow.

Weapons. Time to select each weapon.

Red One’s death would be different from Red Two’s. And neither of the first two would be the same as Red Three’s.

Three random and seemingly unconnected murders. Everything he’d learned from speaking with cops, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, last night’s lecture, and poring over popular literature, both fiction and nonfiction, had informed him that on the day the three Reds died, it had to seem like just so many unhappy coincidences. There would automatically be three separate investigative teams working three obviously unique homicides, in different parts of the county. If the authorities did take the time to speak to each other, they would see a wealth of contrasts, not three killings that were linked together. Each would have its own special whodunit nature. Each would be designed to stand alone-when the truth was something far different. That way, he truly believed, when his book arrived on the stands filled with details and truths that only a true master criminal could know, fascination in the public eye would redouble.

The publicity surrounding the embarrassment of the local police would catapult the book to the top of the best-seller lists. He was totally confident about this. The Three Reds would not only satisfy every sophisticated murderous urge he felt, they would bring him a lot of money.

Money he knew that some publisher would happily deposit into a blind anonymous offshore banking account.

Knives. Guns. Razors. Ropes. His own large hands.

There was a wealth of means at his disposal. It was simply a matter of matching the right style to the right Red. This, he thought, was nothing unusual for murder mystery novelists. It was what they routinely did with characters and plots.

He smiled and actually laughed out loud, before bending back to the design work that so enthralled him. He thought of himself as an architect. He believed that every line he drew was precise.