Red 1-2-3

39

Red One thought it was like inventing an edgy stage routine for a difficult, unruly audience.

Red Two thought it was like a grade school child’s papier-mâché project, pieced together with string and tape.

Red Three thought it was like studying for a hard examination in a course where she had skipped too many classes.

None of them actually called it what it was: preparing to kill someone.

Each of them created her own part of the whole. That had been Karen’s rough idea, and she had insisted upon it-although precisely why, she could not have fully explained to the other two Reds. It just seemed to her that shared effort made sense, in a vaguely democratic way. None of the three Reds knew that the Big Bad Wolf would have found this aspect of their hurried and haphazard plan totally delicious and decidedly smart; he would have admired the inevitable confusion three people operating independently to create one profound killing would have created for any follow-up investigator.

The Wolf had honed his own design down to what he considered a satisfying simplicity. It was similar to the famous family fun board game that rested on some dusty shelf in virtually every play room or summer vacation cottage: Clue. Except, for him, it wouldn’t be Colonel Mustard in the pantry with a candlestick. It would be the Wolf with a hunting knife when they least expect it. In actuality, the Wolf had entered into a Zen-like phase of murder: The actions were subordinate to the interpretation. He twitched with excitement in front of his computer screen: They are already dead. It’s the words that accompany the deed that are important. I have to bring people along with me on this journey. Arriving at the killings, it has to be utterly tempting for every reader; they can’t feel revulsion, they need to feel their own lust. It needs to be like driving past an accident on the highway: You can’t help but look even though you know indulging your morbid curiosity makes you somehow less of an honorable person.

The three Reds and the Big Bad Wolf had reached the same decision: Hurry up and kill.

Everyone’s future depended upon it.

Jordan left the library late in the afternoon, a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in her backpack. She was interested only in the opening chapters, which she had read through twice before skipping to deep in the middle to identify what had tripped up Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. She had also gone to the school’s modest selection of films and found the original version of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs-which she had never heard of-and the first installment of Wes Craven’s Scream on a shelf. These were supposed to be signed out on a nearby sheet. She started to put her name down, and then realized it might be better to ignore this requirement.

Back in her room, she put the first movie into her computer’s drive and took out a pad to jot down observations and notes. She had spent hours earlier in the day poring over Internet entries describing various crimes, but all with a pair of critical themes: random killing and home invasion. Jordan reminded herself that by the end of the day, she would have to destroy everything she had written down.

As the idyllic English countryside in the movie came up on the screen in front of her, she also knew that she would have to wreck her computer. She paused the film, and wrote a quick e-mail to her estranged mother and father:

Mom and Dad… My damn computer keeps freezing up and it totally like lost an important paper I’d been working on so I have to redo the whole thing and it might be late which would affect my grade. I’m sending you this e-mail from a friend’s laptop. I need to get a new computer asap because finals are coming up. I can get it at the mall today okay, but I’ll use your credit card.

She knew that neither of her parents would refuse this request. They would likely be pleased that she had communicated something with them, if only the need for some money. She thought adding the bit about the lost paper was clever, because they would never deny her something that might be the difference between flunking and passing a course. And her request might provide them with something to argue about, Jordan believed, which would be an added advantage.

The computer she was staring at had a footprint inside its memory that was every bit as incriminating as a fingerprint left at a crime scene. Jordan smiled, and turned back to the movie. She was pleased that she was becoming a criminal.

All that hard work and studying is paying off, she thought.

Three pairs of men’s running shoes. Three different sizes. Identical make and model. Three different sporting good stores to purchase each in cash. Her shopping list was extensive and the seemingly random manner in which she had to buy items added to the hassle. Ordinarily, Sarah would have complained about the added errands and the complicated, roundabout way she had invented to accomplish them, but now erratic, nonsensical behavior was a strength and not a deficit. She imagined some detective arriving at the mall and staring incomprehensibly at the competing shoe stores, unable to understand why some killer went and bought the same item in three places instead of just buying all three pairs at once. This had been a suggestion Jordan made: “Don’t do things that make obvious sense.”

The Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen shouting, “Off with their heads! And then we’ll have a trial.” Sarah looked around her at the most common staple in the American world-the shopping mall-and thought she was living an upside-down existence. I’m a dead woman purchasing items to kill with. It all seemed like some huge cosmic joke. She burst out in laughter-a few other shoppers turned and looked oddly at her-and then she went back to her duties.

Sarah worked her way through obtaining the items that she was assigned. She bought the first black hood at an outdoors chain that specialized in climbing gear and kayaks. At this place, she also acquired three matching sets of skin-tight black synthetic long underwear and three small, high-intensity flashlights. She went to the rival chain to buy two other hoods. She also bought a fish billy-an 18-inch-long polished wooden club with a leather strap that fit over the wrist that sportsmen used to subdue very large and feisty fish. She went to a store that featured leotards and dancing gear for three pairs of ballet slippers. In a hardware store she purchased a roll of gray duct tape, a set of screwdrivers, and a heavy rubber mallet.

Then, as if working without any rhyme or reason, she returned to the sporting goods store and added three black hooded sweatshirts to her list of purchases. At a nearby luggage specialty store, she bought the three cheapest small canvas duffel bags they had: one blue, one yellow, and one green.

When she walked out into the midst of the mall, surrounded by other shoppers carrying oversized paper sacks stuffed with cheap Chinese-made clothes and Korean electronic items, Sarah did a small dancer’s pirouette. If people stared at her for an instant, that was fine with her. She felt free. Unlike the other two Reds, she knew she could flee at any moment.

She wanted to laugh out loud. In return for a new identity and a new future, she had only a single obligation: murder.

Sarah liked the symmetry of it all. Death gives life. She conceded that it might not be the wisest approach to starting anew, but she was locked into a world that had little past-her life as Sarah seemed to be fading more every minute-and connected only to two red-haired onetime strangers whom she now felt she knew better than any friend she’d ever had before, and to some man who wanted to be a wolf and a character in a fairy tale.

She reached down into one of her shopping bags and wrapped her hand around the fish billy. It had heft and a smooth, polished surface. It felt lethal to her touch. She smiled. She felt lethal, too.

If he sees me, we’re screwed.

It was the only thought that penetrated Karen’s fear. Once again, she was in a rental car. She wore sunglasses, despite the gray overcast of the afternoon. Her distinctive red hair was hidden beneath a ski cap. In her right hand she had the video camera, as she cautiously steered with her left. The window was down on the passenger side of the car, and she lifted the camera up and took video as she slowly drove down the blocks adjacent to the house where the Big Bad Wolf might or might not live. She knew it would be jumpy, dizzying, unprofessional footage-but just letting the other Reds see the neighborhood was likely to help them.

She pulled to the side of the road a half-block away from the house. Looking up and down the street, she made certain that no one was around. Surveillance was important, but secrecy and surprise were more so. She took some shots of the house from afar.

Karen could feel her heart pounding, and she admonished herself, You can’t be like this later. Her hands shook, and she imagined that when she showed the other Reds the footage they would see how scared she had been, and that unsettled her, because she knew she had to be strong-willed.

It isn’t reasonable, she thought. I’m the one that’s supposed to be in control. She imagined that she was now only a doctor of doubt. Maybe a doctor of death.

Down the block, a teenage boy emerged from a nearby house and slid behind the wheel of a small dull-silver-colored pickup truck. The boy had absolutely nothing to do with anything, but she still ducked down, and as soon as he roared past her, she floored her own gas pedal and accelerated away from the neighborhood. It took miles for Karen to calm herself, and when her breathing returned to normal, she realized that she had driven into a totally unfamiliar part of the county.

It took her nearly an hour to find her way back to roads she recognized because she refused to stop and ask for directions, and another hour to return the rental, retrieve her own car, and make her way home in the dark.

She pulled up her driveway, descending into the woods that concealed her home from the road. More than ever before, she hated the isolation of her place. She stopped in front.

The automatic light system came on.

She was about to shut off the engine and head inside when she hesitated. She was nearly overcome by conflicted fears: The place that should have been her safe haven was also her biggest threat.

Karen suddenly slammed her car back into gear and did a tire-squealing U-turn. She drove as if she were being chased, even though she saw no one on any of the country roads that she took. It was suddenly as if the Big Bad Wolf had managed to kill everyone except her. She was alone in the world, last person standing, sole survivor, waiting for the inevitable. She screamed in her car as she accelerated down the highway, her voice rising through the small space, scaring her even more.

When she was able to get some slight control over her emotions, she drove up onto one of the main highways. Within a few seconds, she saw a sign: food-gas-lodging.

The motel at the bottom of the exit ramp was part of a national chain. The parking lot wasn’t crowded. There was only a single clerk at the desk. She seemed young, probably a recent college graduate in a management training program that required her to work late hours, and had an irrepressible, outgoing smile. The young woman checked Karen in, asking her whether she preferred a single king-sized bed or two double beds. Karen slid into nervous sarcasm. “I can only sleep in one bed at a time,” she replied.

The young lady smiled and laughed. “Well, that’s true. So a king-size?”

Karen handed over her credit card. This was dangerous. It made a record of her staying there. But there was little she could do about it.

“One night?” the young woman asked.

Karen shuddered. “No. Two. Business.”

In the small, oppressively neat motel room, the first thing Karen did was to indulge in a blisteringly hot shower. She felt filthy, sweaty. She wondered whether fear could make someone feel dirty. She thought it far more likely that it stemmed merely from being in close proximity to the person they all imagined might be the Wolf.

Hair damp, a pair of towels wrapped around her, she went to the small desk in the room and pulled out her comedy computer. No more jokes on this, she thought. She started in with various real estate sites, like Trulia.com and Zillow.com, followed by sites maintained by big banks in the mortgage business. It did not take her long to find the house where the secretary and her husband the writer lived. There were only exterior pictures. She cursed this bad luck, then looked a little harder and discovered that a house across the street-and seemingly identical-had been on the market three years earlier. One of the sites helpfully provided pictures of the interior and a virtual tour of this home. “Be the same,” she whispered to herself. “Please be the same.”

Like any prospective buyer, she followed the images on the screen. Front door. Turn right. Living room. Eat-in kitchen. Downstairs office space. Stairs up. Two small bedrooms “perfect for a growing family” and a master with its own bathroom. Finished basement.

She stared at the pictures. Suburban New England bliss. The great promise of the American middle class: home ownership.

Karen returned to the website showing the secretary and writer’s house. She learned how much they paid in property taxes. She learned how much in the current market conditions their house was worth. Useless information.

She had a brief memory right at that moment, staring at pictures of the house she intended to visit. The lyrics to an old rock song that played on the oldies stations she listened to frequently jumped into her head, and she mumbled in time to internal music: “Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day.”

Karen ignored this warning and sent a text message to the other two Reds: Tomorrow. 2 and 2.

She didn’t think she had to add p.m. and a.m. They would know what she meant.