Red 1-2-3

40

2 p.m.

He took her out to lunch-an unexpected pleasure.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf left behind on her desk faculty assessments and student disciplinary reports that all needed to be properly assigned to permanent files. She put aside a long-winded analysis from a trustee committee investigating new revenue streams and a lengthy written request from the head of the English Department to expand course offerings away from traditional literature like Dickens and Faulkner and into classes on modern communications media, like Twitter and Facebook. She happily joined the Big Bad Wolf at a downtown Chinese restaurant, where they ate far-too-spicy foods and sipped weak green tea. She guessed that he had some motive for taking her out-as in any long-term marriage, spontaneous acts of affection were rare-but she didn’t care. She reveled in steamed dumplings and miso sauce.

The waitress came and asked if they wanted dessert.

“I think a bowl of ice cream,” the Big Bad Wolf said. He looked at his wife.

“No, no sweets. Got to watch my weight.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, a teasing tone in his voice. “Just this once?”

She smiled. He reached over and took her hand. Like teenagers, she thought.

“All right.” She smiled at the waitress. “I’ll have some ice cream, too.”

“Two bowls of vanilla,” the Wolf said. “We’re just plain old folks.”

This was a joke the waitress didn’t get, and the two of them laughed together as she went off to fetch their order.

He didn’t drop her hand, but leaned across the narrow table toward his wife. “The next day or so,” he said, being as vague as he could, but speaking with a slight grin on his face, “I might have an unusual schedule. You know-rising early, staying out a little late, maybe missing some meals.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding.

“You’re not to worry.”

“I’m not worried. It’s important?”

“Last bits of research.”

She smiled. “Final chapters?”

He didn’t reply, except to widen his smile, which she took as a yes. She didn’t care. Creativity isn’t a nine-to-five job. She looked across at him. Deep within her, many words reverberated, echoing doubts and fears. Is he going to kill? With surprisingly remarkable ease, she closed doors on all of them. She did not care in the slightest what he did or whom he might do it to. It is only research, just as he says. Whatever existed in the past, whatever might happen in the future, whoever he was once, whoever he might become, all was nothing compared to that moment right then, holding hands in a cheap Chinese restaurant. There is nothing vanilla about love, she thought.

The Wolf dropped his wife off at the school, giving her a playful wave as she disappeared into the administration building. Within seconds, however, his focus was elsewhere.

He had a few items left to acquire. None of them were particularly difficult to find: an insulated camouflage hunting suit available at the same sporting goods stores that Red Two had frequented the day before, and an inexpensive blue blazer and gray slacks from the local Salvation Army used clothing store. For Red One, he had to blend seamlessly into the forest beyond her house. For Red Three, he had to look like a faculty member, or a visiting parent, which required a jacket and tie-just on the limited chance that someone might see him on the campus. Of course, he wouldn’t stand out: A fake beard. Glasses. Hair slicked back. The chances of someone recognizing him were near zero, and who would lend any credence to some prep school kid’s identification of someone they only saw at a distance for a few seconds? And beyond that, it would be hours before Red Three’s body was discovered. He thought this was what was most exceptional about the twin murders he’d planned. In each, he would be nearly invisible.

The Wolf went over his mental list:

Clothes. Check.

Transportation. Stolen plates would help.

Weapon. He had honed his knife to razor sharpness.

All that remained was descending into the total concentration necessary as he closed in on the remaining Reds. As he drove away from the school, savoring what the following day held, he imagined it was like getting a phone call from an old and distant, but dear and important, friend. He summoned up memories from fifteen years earlier, the same way a distinctive voice coming over the years was still intimate and totally familiar.

The priest was using his downstairs office to work on a sermon for the next Sunday, so the three Reds met amidst the wooden pews in front of a huge wooden sculpture of the crucified Jesus wearing His crown of thorns, head bent as death neared.

They sat uncomfortably as Karen played her street video for them. They shifted against the hard wooden surface, trying to memorize details, landmarks. It was difficult for each of them to concentrate. They knew they had to be instant experts at killing, and yet, right when their attention should have been laserlike, each of the three Reds found her mind wandering in unhelpful directions, as if the realization of what they intended to do forced them to mentally go someplace else. Karen started to apologize for the quality of the video, but stopped herself because she didn’t trust her voice. It all seemed incredibly haphazard and shamefully unplanned for someone who prided herself on cautious organization. Karen felt it was her unhinged wild comedy-club persona that had taken over designing a murder, instead of her disciplined-doctor side. She didn’t know how to make the right part of her take the lead. Instead, she punched the computer keyboard, and a couple of clicks brought up the real estate information she’d acquired the night before.

When the images ended, all three Reds leaned back, silent.

Sarah reached down to the polished floor at their feet and pulled up the three duffels. She handed each of them a bag she’d packed with her purchases. She kept the yellow one for herself.

In a situation that demanded dozens of questions, they remained quiet for several minutes. A passerby might have believed they were praying together.

Jordan looked up once from the screen and fixed on the religious images that surrounded them. The sculpture was a deep brown wood, inlaid with streaks of gold paint where there should have been red-colored blood. The church ceiling reflected blues, greens, and yellows from large stained glass windows. She thought it was an unusual place to be planning a killing, but then she involuntarily shrugged, and realized that any place a spoiled teenage private school student was planning a murder would probably be pretty unusual. She glanced over at Karen. She’s a doctor. She’s seen death, Jordan thought. She has to know what she’s doing. Then she turned to Sarah and much the same thought penetrated her imagination. She had death come knocking on her door completely unfairly. It had to make her so angry that now she’s ready to kill.

Jordan believed she was the only one of the three Reds not to have an intimacy with dying. She did not expect that virginity to last the night.

2 a.m.

The motel had a side exit that operated with the electronic room key. Karen used this to avoid the young woman at the front desk. She peered into the darkness, trying to measure the distances between parking lot lights. She wanted to grip shadows the way a climber holds a safety rope. She threw herself behind the wheel of her car, tossing her blue duffel bag on the seat beside her. She fumbled with the keys before starting the ignition.

She was shaking, and took several deep breaths to try to calm herself down. You read books. You watch television. You go to the movies. Think of all the times you’ve seen good guys and bad guys act out some murderous plot or scheme in some fictional situation. Just do what they do. Only this is real.

This, she knew, was ludicrous self-advice.

Maybe you’ve seen a million fictional murders, she told herself. But all those put together don’t tell you what to do.

Putting the car in gear, her eyes constantly switching between all the mirrors, she drove fast. She had one critical stop to make before she picked up the others: her medical office.

Jordan hadn’t slept.

Around one in the morning, after having lain immobile on her back staring at the ceiling of her dorm room, she had risen and dressed. The black long underwear went on beneath jeans. She slipped into the black sweatshirt. She put her cell phone and her knife into the green duffel bag, and fitted the black balaclava over her head. She took the new running shoes that Sarah had purchased and put them on top, where she could reach them as soon as she got outside. She slid her feet into ballet slippers.

She stood up and turned slowly around. The clothing she wore didn’t even rustle.

Jordan looked around her. The only light in the room was from an outdoor streetlamp just beyond her window that pushed a yellow glow into a few corners. It was like packing for a vacation-she was worried that some key item would be left behind. Only on this occasion it wasn’t a bathing suit or a passport that she was afraid she would forget.

The mere act of dressing for murder made her hands twitch. Her breathing was shallow. Her throat was parched and it felt like her right eyelid had developed a tic.

She wondered where all her bluster, confidence, and bravado had fled to. Now, just when he might have a name, and an address, and suddenly become something other than a vaporous threat, her confidence was evaporating. She felt like a small child, afraid of the dark. She wanted to whimper.

An immense part of her protested that it would be smarter to strip off the killing clothes and hide under the covers of her bed and just wait patiently for the Wolf to come for her. She fought this desire off, reminding herself that the other two Reds were counting on her.

Imagining that she was entering into the last night of her life as she once knew it, Jordan went to her door. It was the most crippling sensation: It was as if over the time she had been stalked by the Wolf she had grown accustomed to a certain kind of fear, but this night promised to replace it with a totally different kind, when she’d just gotten used to the first kind. She wanted to scream. Instead, she listened carefully to make certain that none of the other girls in the dorm were up, either studying or taking a late night trip to the bathroom.

At some point or another, every student in the school had snuck out of a dormitory after hours, defying hard and fast rules, risking expulsion. Nobody, she thought, ever did this for the reason I have. No late night assignation with a boy. No late night drug or alcohol run. No just-less-than sadistic late night prank being played on first-year students. This was something different.

She put her hand on the door handle, and as she opened the door she felt as if it would be a new Jordan who would take the first step out into this utterly new world, leaving old Jordan behind forever.

She eased out of her room. The slippers concealed her footsteps but she walked gingerly, afraid that the old wooden boards in the floor might creak and groan in a telltale way. Each step, the person she once was steadily disappeared behind her. It was like leaving a shadow behind.

When she managed to work her way slowly through the front door, the cold air greeted her. She shivered as she pulled off the ballet shoes and tied on her new running shoes. Even though she could feel sweat beneath her arms, the bitter cold felt close to overwhelming as she made her way to the rendezvous with the other Reds. Jordan was afraid she would freeze in position, and so she raced through the night.

Sarah’s exit from the women’s shelter was equally stealthy. Her problem was making it past the night security guard-a volunteer from one of the local colleges who came on at nine and stayed, bleary-eyed, until the morning shift: a retired police patrolman, who arrived with fresh coffee and donuts. The night volunteers were taught to always err on the side of caution. Any disturbance, anything out of the ordinary, could result in a call to the shelter’s gun-toting boss, or 911.

So Sarah waited for nearly an hour, poised on the second-floor landing just out of sight, knowing that eventually the young woman would get up to stretch, or go to the bathroom, or head into the side office to pour herself a cup of coffee, or maybe just drop her head down on the books and take a nap.

Her husband’s gun was in her duffel bag, along with a change of clothes. But at this moment, she was dressed exactly as Jordan was, down to the sound-muffling ballet slippers. Karen would be wearing the same outfit.

Sarah didn’t even glance at her wristwatch. She wanted to say some sort of prayer designed to make someone go to the toilet. Her entire body was rigid with anticipation.

She licked her lips, which were suddenly dry and cracked. She felt embarrassed, dumb. All her thoughts had been bent toward what they would do when the three of them arrived at the house where they believed the Big Bad Wolf lived. Suddenly she almost burst out laughing, but stifled the sensation. It wasn’t anything amusing as much as it was the accumulation of fears.

We’ve got it all fucking backward, she thought. It’s the wolf that goes to the three little pigs and blows their houses down, except for the smart one, who built his house out of brick and stone.

Wrong fairy tale.

It had not occurred to her that her first problem might be insurmountable: simply getting out of a place designed to keep people protected without being seen. She suddenly felt like she was in the oddest kind of jail.

She heard a shuffling from below. She leaned forward, listening. This was followed by the sound of a book being slammed shut. She heard, “Goddamn, this stuff is impossible. I hate organic chemistry, I hate organic chemistry, I hate organic chemistry,” repeated in a frustrated, angry tone.

After a second or two, the phrase “I hate organic chemistry” turned into a haphazard, invented song, one second being sung high-pitched, next in a basso profundo. She heard footsteps crossing the foyer. Then she heard the bathroom door open and close, and she launched herself down the stairs, tiptoeing to stay quiet, hurrying to get outside. It was crucial that the world thought the woman now named Cynthia Harrison was asleep in her bed.