Red 1-2-3

4

The Big Bad Wolf regretted not being able to see the reactions of each of his Reds when they read his message on the page in front of them. He was forced to indulge in fantasy-racing through delicious mental images of each, and anticipating the emotional contortions each was stumbling wildly into.

Red One will be angry.

Red Two will be confused.

Red Three will be scared.

He took a moment to look at slightly blurry pictures of each woman, taken with a long-lens camera. On the wall above his computer he had tacked more than a dozen pictures of each Red, along with note cards filled with information about each woman. Months of observation-from a distance yet intensely personal-were delineated on the wall. Little bits of their history, small aspects of their lives-all gleaned from cautious study-became words on a note card or glossy full-color pictures. Red One was caught smoking. A dangerously bad habit, he thought. Red Three was sitting alone beneath a campus tree. Always lonely, he reminded himself. Red Two was pictured emerging from a liquor store, arms filled with packages. You are so weak, he whispered. He had placed that photograph above a newspaper clipping that was frayed around the edges. The headline was Fireman and Daughter, 3, Killed in Crash.

It was not unlike the sort of display that police detective bureaus collected so that the cops could have a visual representation of the way a case was progressing. It was a staple cinematographer’s shot in a hundred movies-with justification, because it was so commonplace. There was one large difference, however: The police tacked up crime scene photos of murdered bodies because they needed answers to questions. His array was of the living, destined to die, most questions already answered.

He knew each Red would respond differently to the letter. He had spent considerable time examining literary and scientific works that assessed human behavior in the turmoil that direct threats create. While there were common reactions associated with fear-see a shark’s fin and the heart skips a beat-the Big Bad Wolf instinctively believed fear was processed individually. When an airplane hits unexpected turbulence and seems to stagger in the sky, the passenger in seat 10A screams and grips the armrests white-knuckled, while in seat 10B the traveler shrugs and goes back to reading. This fascinated him. He liked to think that in both his careers, novelist and killer, he had explored these things deeply. And he was not one to underestimate the correlation between fear and creativity.

He expected several concrete things to happen after they’d read his letter. He also tried to anticipate some of the emotions that were within them. They will stumble and fall, he thought. They will twitch and shake. He had recently watched a television show on the History Channel that interviewed famous military snipers. Using high-tech camerawork, it had reconstructed some of the remarkable assassinations they had performed, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in the Iraq war. But what struck him was not merely the extraordinary competence of these snipers who stole lives, but the emotional detachment they displayed, what the French call sangfroid. The military killers called their victims targets, as if they had no more personality than a black-and-white bull’s-eye, and boasted that they had not the slightest hint of a subsequent nightmare. He did not know that he believed this. In his murderous experience, the stealing of a life was only as significant as the mental reverberations afterward. Indeed, reliving moments was where the real satisfaction rested. He embraced nightmares. He guessed that the snipers did as well. They just weren’t about to say that in public with a documentary camera rolling.

That, too, made him special. He was documenting everything. That was what he found delicious: actions and thoughts, the stew of death. He typed furiously, words racing at him.

One of them-at least one, but not all-will call the police. That’s to be expected. But the police will be as confused as they are. Preventing something from happening is precisely not what the police are skilled at. Maybe the police are capable of finding out who performed a murder, after it happens-but they are relatively incompetent at preventing one from taking place. The Secret Service protects the president, and they devote thousands of man-hours, computer time, psychological analysis, and academic study to keeping one man safe. And yet-they fail. Regularly.

No one is protecting the Reds.

One-maybe all three of them at some point-will try to hide from me. Think of the children’s game of hide-and-seek. The advantages are always with the person doing the seeking: He knows his quarry. He knows what drives them into concealment. He probably knows the places they will try to hide, and he knows the uncertainty that fuels their fear.

One-I’m sure at least one-will refuse to believe the truth: that they are going to die at my hands. Fear corners some people underground. But sometimes fear insists that people ignore danger. It is much easier to believe nothing will happen to you than it is to think each breath you take may be one of the last you’ll ever enjoy.

One-maybe all three-will think they need to seek out assistance, only to have no idea what sort of assistance they need. So they will be stifled by uncertainty. And even were they to seek out another person’s counsel-well, that person is likely to downplay the threat, not underscore it. This is because we do not want to ever believe in the capriciousness of life. We do not want to believe in thunderbolts and accidents. We do not want to believe that we are being hunted, when in truth, we are every day of our lives. And so, whoever they consult will want to reassure my Red that everything is going to be all right, when the exact opposite is the case.

What is the challenge facing me?

My Reds will try to protect themselves in any number of ways. My task, obviously, is to make certain that they cannot. To achieve that, I have to get close to each of them, so that I can anticipate each pathetic step they will try. But at the same time, I have to maintain my anonymity. Close, yet hidden-that’s the approach.

He paused. It was nearing the dinner hour. His fingers flew across the keyboard. He wanted to finish up with some of his initial thoughts before breaking for the evening meal.

No one has ever done what I intend to do.

Three wildly different victims.

Three distinct locations.

Three different deaths.

All on the same day. Within hours of each other. Maybe within minutes. Deaths that tumble together like dominoes. Each one falling against the next. Click. Click. Click.

He stopped. He liked that image.

Maybe one of those military snipers had achieved multiple kills all on the same day, or in the same hour, or even in the same minute, he thought. But they had a single enemy to focus on that walked stupidly and thoughtlessly directly into their line of fire. And there were killers he had studied who had achieved multiple murders in short order. But again, these were genuinely random acts-shoot this person, walk across town, shoot another person. The D.C. Sniper. Son of Sam. The Zodiac. There were others. But none had done anything as special as what he planned. What he was attempting was truly something that no one had ever tried. Guinness World Records-worthy. He could barely contain his excitement. Proximity, he told himself. Get closer. That was what the Big Bad Wolf did in the children’s story. That was what he was busy planning.