Red 1-2-3

43

Karen spread three items out on the floor directly in front of the Big Bad Wolf. If he’d been able to stretch his foot out, he could have touched them with his toe.

His computer.

His manuscript.

His scrapbook.

She said nothing. A fourth item-his hunting knife-was in her hand. She waved it in the air idly, as if trying to cut atmosphere. She just wanted the Wolf to stare at these things for a few minutes, digesting what she might be able to do with them.

He shifted in his seat.

Karen wondered for a moment: Has anyone ever spent this sort of evening with a serial killer and lived? She suspected the answer was no.

She gave the Wolf a wry, small smile that she hoped would unsettle him further. Inwardly, she was warning herself: Push. But don’t push too hard. Act, but don’t overact. Medical school didn’t teach me anything about the stage. I had to learn that for myself. She wondered whether any comedian had ever faced as hostile an audience as she had this night.

She left Red Two and Red Three across from the Wolves, not saying anything to them while she went first to the kitchen, then to a bathroom. It did not take her long to find what she needed: Plastic baggies. Scissors. A bread knife with a serrated edge. Cotton swabs. A black marking pen.

When she returned to the living room, it looked to the others as if she’d been on a very odd shopping trip. She was grinning, even though her ribs throbbed where she’d been struck. This was all performance on her part, but she also knew how to not let an unruly crowd upset her routine. Keep telling jokes. Don’t let up. Don’t let the heckler or the disruptive asshole take over the show. You’re in charge.

She began singing disjointed snatches of a hit 1960s song. No matter how clumsily she did it, she knew that the Wolf would probably recognize her version of the tune Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs once made famous: Little Red Riding Hood. She hoped it would irritate him.

She waited for a moment, picked up the scrapbook-idly flipping through a couple of sheets, using the hunting knife to turn them-and looked up: “So, how many people have you killed?”

The Big Bad Wolf didn’t immediately answer. His eyes narrowed and his smile widened. He had a sudden surge of confidence. His hands and feet might be restrained, but Red One was engaging in conversation. This was seductive. “None. One. A hundred. Do you mean on the page or in my head or in real life? How many do you think?” he replied.

Karen looked at the Wolf. She tried to pick out some feature in his face, some indication in the way he sat on the couch, some body smell, or posture, some tone of voice-anything that would give away what he was. It was like staring into a shapeless gray-blue sea in the last minutes of daylight. The ripples of waves on the surface hid all the currents that could join together with winds and tides when darkness fell to suddenly become dangerous. That was where his power lay, she understood: in the unprepossessing appearance that obscured his true nature.

Beside him, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s entire body shook with rage. She scowled and nearly shouted her answer to the same question: “What makes you think he’s killed anyone!” she burst out. “I checked! I even spoke with the cops. There’s no proof of anything! He’s just a writer. I told you, he has to research!”

Karen nodded, ignoring what Mrs. Big Bad Wolf said. “You always get away with it, don’t you?”

The Wolf shrugged. Not a yes. Not a no.

She turned to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. “And you…” she began, but then she swallowed her question. She could see every answer she needed in Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s face. Your life is changing tonight, too, isn’t it?

Karen shuddered. She took a deep breath and turned back to the Wolf.

“What do you really like to use?” she asked. “Guns? Knives?” She waved the hunting knife in the air again. “Your hands? Something else? How many different ways are there to kill someone?”

“There are advantages to every weapon, and disadvantages, too,” he responded smugly. “Every thriller writer knows that.” He glanced over at the manuscript on the floor in front of him. “It’s in the book,” he added sharply.

Karen the doctor and Karen the comic had learned one lesson from both her lives that she was applying at this moment. “Can you kill someone with uncertainty?” she asked.

She continued, coldly, fingering the blade, but speaking about something different: “Is doubt a weapon?”

Again silence crept into the room. Karen used it just as she would have a moment on the stage. Make him think. Make him wonder. Make him unsure.

All these words were as effective as razors.

“Have you ever imagined what it is like to be a victim?” Karen asked.

All three Reds saw the Big Bad Wolf’s face freeze. Doubt can do that, Karen thought, as if making a diagnosis. His wife, on the other hand, merely looked confused, as if she didn’t understand the question.

Karen stepped forward. She put the Wolf’s knife on the floor and picked up the scissors. The first thing she did was cut a lock of his hair. This went into a baggy. Then she swiped a cotton swab in the blood congealing on his throat where Jordan had nicked his skin. This, too, went into a baggy. She used the black marking pen to identify each, carefully writing the time and date on the outside. Then she held up her surgical-gloved hand and snapped the sterile surface as if it were a rubber band. She whispered to the Big Bad Wolf, “I suspect your fingerprints are all over that computer. Shouldn’t be too hard for an expert to obtain them. But ours are not.” She snapped the glove in his face a second time. She took out another cotton swab. “Open wide,” she said, just as if she were in her office.

The Wolf clenched his teeth together. Karen looked at him. “Come on now,” she said, in a pleasant voice that hid all her fury. It was the tone she would have used with a scared pediatric patient, reluctant to do as asked.

He opened his mouth. She swabbed the inside. “A few extra cells,” she said. She dropped this swab into another plastic bag. Then she moved over to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. “Same drill,” she said.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf looked genuinely astonished as a lock of her hair disappeared into a bag with her name on it, followed by a blood sample and a swipe from the inside of her mouth.

Karen took her collection over and placed it all in Sarah’s duffel, alongside the hunting knife. “We’ll be keeping that,” she said smugly. Then she took one of the cell phones and quickly snapped several pictures of both the Wolves. She took close-up shots, being careful to get images from full front and profile. “Smile,” she said. Neither Wolf did.

When she was finished, she turned to the Big Bad Wolf. “Tell your wife what we’ve done,” she said.

“Blood. Hair. DNA. It’s the medical version of who we are,” he said. The softer his voice, the greater his fury, Karen thought. She ignored this.

“Maybe not medical,” Karen said, shaking her head. “Do you think forensic might be a better word?” Then she added, “I wonder if there’s anyone out there who might be interested in those samples. You think there’s a cold case cop somewhere who might find them… I don’t know… intriguing?”

She smiled. “Here’s the situation. All this material is going into a safe place. Maybe a safety deposit box. Maybe a lawyer’s office safe. Maybe we’ll just dig a big hole somewhere and bury it. Maybe we’ll send it all wrapped up with a nice red bow to one of those police agencies. Of course, we could do that today. Or tomorrow. Or maybe next year. It’s up to us, and we’ll figure it out. But you can bet it will be someplace you could never find. Your computer, the scrapbook, your manuscript… we’re taking everything tonight. Three people will have access to that stash: Red One, Red Two, and Red Three. Maybe… we’ll let Sarah-because she’s the one you will never be able to trace-pick out a nice hiding place somewhere far away. Or maybe it won’t be her, it’ll be me that hides it. Or Jordan. She’s real good at keeping secrets. Anyway, you will know, from this second on, should anything, anything at all, ever threaten any of us Little Red Riding Hoods again, the remaining Reds will know what to do with this stuff. Have you got that?”

The Big Bad Wolf nodded. His face had darkened. All three Reds imagined that every muscle was straining to rip free of his duct tape bonds. His anger would be murderous. But as they watched, they saw throbbing veins on his neck relax and a frightened resignation slip unbidden into his eyes. It was as if he saw a different kind of restraint, far tighter than duct tape, binding him.

He had become them. They had become him.

Karen’s smile had disappeared. For an instant, she thought, How many people have you killed? And she understood with a doctor’s understanding of death that there was nothing she could do about the people who had already died. But she could immunize everyone else from that moment on. So, she used the flat tone of voice that she would employ if she were delivering harsh news of a virulent and inexorably fatal illness to someone she truly hated.

“You gave us nothing but uncertainty, and then you were going to kill us. Now we’re giving you the same. You will never be able to hear a knock on the door without thinking it’s the police. You will never look up and see a cop car behind you and not think that this time it’s all over, or walk down a street and not imagine that some detective is following you. When you wake in the morning, you will know it might be your last day of freedom. When you go to bed at night, you will not know if the next day your little fucking pathetic life is going to end. And it’s not just the cops. No, I imagine there just might be some family members of victims out there who would be interested in these connections. Or maybe some defense attorneys who can use this stuff to set a client free. And I wonder just how some poor fucker who has spent fifteen years on death row is going to feel about you. I don’t think he will be generous.”

She gestured toward the items. “Think of all this as a disease. A terminal one.” She hesitated, then added, “Don’t try to run. If you disappear, we will know it-and all this will be… properly distributed. And don’t think that you can say goodbye to us and find some other poor woman to kill, and get your kicks that way. Someone new dies, some new Red wherever she might be, and this lands in the right hands. It’s just all over for you. Totally. Whoever you were right up to this minute, now you are finished. From now on, you’re just an ordinary guy with absolutely nothing special about you. No killing. No writing. No nothing at all. In fact, if I were you I wouldn’t even go outdoors.”

She paused for an instant, before continuing: “You see, from now on, we’re watching you.”

Karen took a deep breath. She was unsure how much of what she said was a bluff and how much wasn’t. But neither did the Wolf. She stared at him and thought she detected a twitch in his lip. She thought that to fall so fast from Wolf grandiosity to less than zero might be fatal. She hoped so. Humiliation, she thought, is a dangerous weapon. “I’ll ask you again: Can you kill someone with uncertainty?”

There was silence in the room.

Karen turned to the other Reds. “Ladies,” she said. “Time to leave.” She took the serrated bread knife she’d lifted in the kitchen and placed it on top of the television set. “Here,” she said. “I sure hope it doesn’t take you too long to make your way to this, get it into your hands, and figure out how to cut yourselves free.”

She couldn’t resist a final sardonic joke. “It’s almost morning. Hey, don’t be late for work.”

They picked up everything. As they started to exit, Jordan also couldn’t help herself. She whispered to the other two Reds, “You know something? I’ve learned that I absolutely hate fucking fairy tales.” She cackled with an unrestrained enthusiasm. Then she turned to the Big Bad Wolf as they were heading out the door, waved the manuscript pages tauntingly at him, and said, “I guess there’s gonna be a different last chapter than the one you expected, huh?”

The cold air outside hit all of them at once. At first they remained silent as they carried the items robbed from the Big Bad Wolf toward their car.

Sarah spoke before the others. “Are we really safe now?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” Jordan said.

“No,” Karen replied.

“Maybe,” Sarah answered her own question. “So what do we do now?”

“Everything,” Jordan said.

“Nothing,” Karen muttered.

Sarah paused again. They had reached the car, and Karen opened the trunk for the stolen materials.

“Something,” Sarah said.

8 a.m.

Jordan made a point of jamming every inch of her breakfast tray, with bowls of cereal and milk, a plate of toast and eggs, fruit, coffee, and orange juice. She waited at the end of the line for a hulking linebacker on the school team to move in front of her as he headed toward the breakfast bar, and then she swung the tray into his path. It fell to the floor with a clatter of breaking dishes, an instant disgusting mess. There were close to seventy-five students and faculty in the dining hall that morning. The students-as was typical when a tray was dropped-broke into applause. The faculty-equally typically-immediately moved to get a janitor to clean up the debris and to silence the cheering students. All Jordan could think of was that everyone would remember her that morning, and the idea that she had spent the better part of the night facing down a killer would seem crazily irrational, like some completely made-up teenage fantasy that no one in their right mind would ever believe. She knelt down and began to wipe away at the mess on the floor. Goodbye, Red Three, she thought.

Sarah slid into the group of women getting a gaggle of children ready for the school bus outside of the women’s shelter. Even with all the stress of threats from estranged men, the kids still had to go to school. It was always a time of tension, with the scary idea that one of the men might arrive on the scene suddenly mingled with utter don’t be late for school normalcy. It was a bit of a melee, and the other women staying at the shelter appreciated the extra set of hands and eyes as they tried to maintain some sense of order in lives that had been completely disrupted by domestic violence. None noticed that Sarah had joined the pack not from inside the shelter, but from outside. They knew only that the single woman named Cynthia was being really helpful, double-checking with children that they had their lunches packed and their homework done, teasing and laughing with the kids in a friendly fashion, while simultaneously keeping a wary eye out for any of the threats the women knew might show up at any moment. They did not realize that for the first time in days, Sarah, who became Red Two and was now Cynthia, was imagining that she just might actually be free.

Karen greeted her first patient of the day with a cheeriness that might have seemed inappropriate for dealing with someone suffering from a painful case of shingles. She kept up a warm banter as she did a physical examination and then prescribed medications. She was careful to make certain that all her notes were time-stamped on the electronic medical records sheet for that patient. When the appointment was over, she walked the patient out to the main waiting room so that all the other people scheduled for that morning could see her on this incredibly typical, nothing-in-the-slightest-out-of-the-ordinary day. But before she went to see her second patient of the morning, Karen turned to her receptionist.

“Oh,” she said idly to the woman behind a small partition, as if this were the most unremarkable thing in the world. The doctor with the secret love of comedy handed the receptionist Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s chart. “I’d like you to call this patient this afternoon and schedule an appointment for sometime in the next few weeks. I’m just really concerned about her heart.”