Red 1-2-3

34

The Big Bad Wolf held a nine-inch hunting knife in his hand, balancing it on his palm. It had a satisfying weight-not too heavy to be unwieldy, but not so light that it couldn’t be used to cut through skin, muscle, tendons, and even bone. He placed his thumb against the serrated blade but stopped himself from the temptation of drawing it across the razor-sharp edge. Instead, he moved his index finger to the flat side and gently stroked the length of the knife, reaching the tip and stopping. After a moment, he scraped at a little dried blood near the handle, before reaching below his desk, bringing out a spray bottle of disinfecting kitchen cleaner, liberally applying it to the entirety of the knife, and then carefully wiping every surface to destroy any lingering DNA.

“You don’t want to be mixing cats’ blood with Reds’ blood,” he said out loud. But this was spoken barely above a whisper, because he didn’t want Mrs. Big Bad Wolf overhearing anything. And, he reminded himself, she would definitely not have approved of killing cute little pussycats, even if he had told her it was essential to the overall plan. She might be unsure about murder, but not about cat killing.

They hadn’t even clawed him. He wondered for a moment what their names were. That was a detail that should have shown up in his research on Red One’s life. He hated slippage.

Be meticulous.

The details of death need to be measured out, anticipated, designed to the absolute second. The documentation needs to be equally precise. The descriptions you write need to be pitch-perfect.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “you are also a journalist.”

He was in his office, surrounded by his pictures, his words, his plans, and his books.

“We have arrived at the end game,” he said, this time pivoting to the wall of pictures and addressing each Red. He pointed the knife at the images. He wanted to do a Muhammad Ali I-Am-the-Greatest! victory dance, but fought off the urge, because nothing was truly finished yet.

The Wolf brandished the blade once more in the air, slicing fantasy throats before lowering it to his desktop. Then he gave his desk chair a little push so that he spun about and wheeled over to his bookcase. He pulled out several volumes: the late John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He placed these books beside the copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style that he kept handy at all times. He smiled and thought, Some crazy killers read the Bible or the Koran to find scriptural justification and guidance. They believe there are messages in every holy word, meant just for their own ears. But writers believe Strunk and White is the de facto bible of their craft. And I prefer John Gardner because his advice is so thoughtful, although he was a little crazy himself. Or maybe he was just eccentric-he rode a Harley-Davidson, lived in the wilds of upstate New York, and wore his silver hair down to his shoulders-that he seemed crazy at times.

Just like me.

He moved the knife over beside the books as if they were coupled.

Then he wrote:

A knife is both a wonderful and a poor choice for a murder weapon. On the one hand, it provides the intimacy that the killing experience requires. Psychologists and low-rent Freudians believe that it represents some sort of penis substitute, but obviously that oversimplifies matters significantly. What it does is bring the necessary proximity to murder, so that there are no barriers in that final moment between killer and victim, which is the nectar we all drink. It links us beyond partners, beyond twins, and beyond lovers.

On the other hand, it is damn messy.

Blood is both a killer’s desire and his enemy. It spurts uncontrollably. It flows quickly. It seeps into unwanted spots-like the soles of one’s shoes, or the cuff of one’s shirt-and leaves little microscopic reminders of the killing moment that some stodgy cop with a microscope can actually find in a later investigation. This makes it the most dangerous substance to come in contact with.

One of the best theories about the infamous 1892 Fall River murders done by Lizzie Borden-“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one…”-is that she stripped naked to murder her parents and after she had finished, she bathed and dressed herself, so when the authorities showed up there was nothing incriminating about her.

Except, naturally, the two dead bodies in the house.

You can’t be taking anything away from a murder site-like an article of clothes or a lock of hair-that you are not 100 percent certain about, and you have to know every second that this item might bring about your eventual downfall.

He stopped, his fingers above the keyboard, and thought: I’m not like so many cheap killers; I don’t need a gory souvenir. I have my memories and all those nicely detailed newspaper articles. They’re like reviews of my work. Good reviews. Positive reviews. Ecstatic, super, praise-worthy reviews. The kinds of reviews that get four stars.

He bent again to his writing:

Risk, of course, is always enticing and blood is always a risk. A proper killer needs to understand the narcotic, addictive quality it has on the soul. You can’t ignore it, but nor can you be enslaved by it.

But managed risk is the best.

Balance is important. Shooting someone with a gun, or even an antique bow and arrow, gives one the necessary distance to remove many of these subtle threats to detection at the same time that it increases other pitfalls that can lead to detection. Did you steal that gun? Are there fingerprints on the bullet casings? But my antipathy toward guns is different: I hate separation. Every step back from your Red diminishes the sensation. You categorically do not want to walk away from a carefully plotted murder with a sense of incompletion and frustration.

So, the careful killer anticipates problems and takes steps to avoid them. Sees that with every choice come issues. Surgical gloves, for example. You want to use a knife? Good choice, but not one without dangers. Those gloves are a must-have bit of paraphernalia.

He balanced thoughts. It will be the knife. Just as the Wolf relies on his teeth and claws, my knife will achieve the same. There won’t be anything anonymous when they see that blade.

For a few minutes, he worried over his words. He was concerned that his tone was a little too familiar and that he spoke a little too directly to his planned readership. He wondered for an instant whether he should redo the most recent passages. John Gardner in particular, and Stephen King as well, went on at length about careful planning and the value in rewriting. But he also didn’t want to overwork the spontaneity out of his manuscript. That’s what will bring the readers into the bookstores, he thought. They will know they are with me every step of the way.

The same as Red One and Red Three.

He quickly spun away from his desk, scooted across to his bookcase, and ran a finger up and down the spines of the books collected there. On the third shelf, he found what he was searching for: the late newspaper columnist Tom Wicker’s account of the uprising and takeover of Attica Correctional Facility, A Time to Die. He scoured the opening pages with his eyes until he found the passage he wanted. It was the author’s lament that despite acclaim as a reporter and writer, in his own eyes he had done little to “signify” his life.

He laughed out loud. That’s not going to be my problem. He turned back to his computer, hunching over, writing feverishly.

I have studied. I have inspected. I have watched. A killer is like a psychologist and like a lover. One must know one’s target intimately. Red One is most vulnerable in the space between her front door and her car. Night is better than morning because when she comes home she is scared of what awaits her inside. She doesn’t focus on the distance between her car-safety-and her front door-possible safety, potential threat. That was a side benefit of my little break-in. It forces her to concentrate on what might be within her walls waiting. As in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, she will expect me inside. The distance between the car and the front door is less than twenty feet. There is a bright light by the front door, which comes on before she arrives in the dark. She has the whole house on a timer. Remember that detail. If I break that outside light to give myself extra cover, she will be suspicious. Perhaps she won’t get out, she’ll turn her car around and flee. No, even though it lessens the numbers of shadows I can hide in, I have to leave it shining brightly.

He stopped writing and reminded himself: The Wolf will come at her from the woods. She will not see me coming.

The biggest problem, he thought, is really the length of time between murders.

He picked up where he had left off:

Red Three’s most vulnerable moment is in the evening as well, when she walks alone across campus. But her second most vulnerable time is on Tuesday mornings. She does not have a class until 9:45. The other members of her dormitory have first-period classes that begin an hour earlier. So Tuesdays, my little Red Three likes to sleep in a little later and does not realize she is alone in that old house, because Ms. Rodriguez, the dorm parent, has early morning faculty commitments those days.

Red Three gets up slowly and idly heads to the shower down the hallway with her toothbrush and some shampoo, not really awake, wiping the sleep from her eyes without any idea what might be waiting for her there.

He smiled and nodded. He said to himself, “So it will have to be a Tuesday: Red Three in the morning and Red One in the evening.”

The Big Bad Wolf liked that, even though it should have been morning, evening, and night. I would have gone for Red Two after midnight. But there was nothing he could do about that.

He saw the obvious problem: What if Red One learns of Red Three’s murder? Then she will know that this is her last day. She will know that she is only minutes away from her own death.

That space of time between murders-there’s the dilemma.

So, it must seem to the outside world that Red Three isn’t dead. Only strangely absent. From class. From basketball. From meals. Not absent from life, which is what will be accurate.

He picked up Strunk and White from his desktop. They always argue for brevity and directness. The same is true for killing.

The Big Bad Wolf turned back to his computer.

Red Three gets more beautiful every day. Her body becomes more lithe, more limber as she approaches womanhood. She is the one about to be cheated the very most.

Red One is the opposite. She ages just infinitesimally with each passing hour. She grays and knows her dying is right around the next minute and it wears on her figure, just as it gnaws on her heart.

The Wolf worked a little more before deciding to print out a few pages. He wished he were a poet, so he could more eloquently describe his two remaining victims. He was a little saddened when he thought of Red Two. This will be hard, he told himself, but you will have to write her epitaph in a chapter of its own. He nodded, quickly typed in some notes on a file he decided to call “Red Two’s Last Will and Testament,” and before shutting down the chapter he was working on wondered whether there was any need left to encrypt his files. He thought he no longer had anything to fear from Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. He imagined he’d never had anything to fear from her. She loved him. He loved her. The rest was all just part of life together.

While he was thinking these things, he idly flicked over to the Internet. He passed over the usual deluge of daily come-ons he received from Writer’s Digest and Script and other places urging him to sign up and spend some money, because through “webinars” or access to DVDs featuring all the tricks of the writing trade he could get published or optioned or taken step-by-step and dollar-by-dollar through all the elements necessary to create his own e-book. Instead the Big Bad Wolf went to the website of a local news station to try to get a seven-day weather forecast. He knew a steady and cold rain would be best for his Tuesday plan. But before he could check the weather, he saw a brief teaser headline on a news digest that caught his eye:

Memorial Service Planned for Teacher Saturday