Every second becomes precious.
The best killer owns time.
The Big Bad Wolf hesitated, fingers above the keyboard. He could feel inexorable progress in the words that flowed onto the computer screen and the steady buildup of pages in a box at his elbow.
Weapons. Time to select each weapon.
Red One’s death would be different from Red Two’s. And neither of the first two would be the same as Red Three’s.
Three random and seemingly unconnected murders. Everything he’d learned from speaking with cops, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, last night’s lecture, and poring over popular literature, both fiction and nonfiction, had informed him that on the day the three Reds died, it had to seem like just so many unhappy coincidences. There would automatically be three separate investigative teams working three obviously unique homicides, in different parts of the county. If the authorities did take the time to speak to each other, they would see a wealth of contrasts, not three killings that were linked together. Each would have its own special whodunit nature. Each would be designed to stand alone—when the truth was something far different. That way, he truly believed, when his book arrived on the stands filled with details and truths that only a true master criminal could know, fascination in the public eye would redouble.
The publicity surrounding the embarrassment of the local police would catapult the book to the top of the best-seller lists. He was totally confident about this. The Three Reds would not only satisfy every sophisticated murderous urge he felt, they would bring him a lot of money.
Money he knew that some publisher would happily deposit into a blind anonymous offshore banking account.
Knives. Guns. Razors. Ropes. His own large hands.
There was a wealth of means at his disposal. It was simply a matter of matching the right style to the right Red. This, he thought, was nothing unusual for murder mystery novelists. It was what they routinely did with characters and plots.
He smiled and actually laughed out loud, before bending back to the design work that so enthralled him. He thought of himself as an architect. He believed that every line he drew was precise.
24
Oddly, it was Red Two who fielded the phone call of silence and reacted calmly. Sarah surprised herself. Every other contact with the Big Bad Wolf threw her into a frantic, gun-waving, panicky response, and yet this time, as ominous and threatening as the quiet on the other end of the line had been, it moved her into a place far different. She had felt cold, but not the chill of fear as much as the ice of a decision being thrust upon her. She suddenly knew exactly what she had to do. This made her feel almost warm and comfortable.
Red One, on the other hand, had burst into tears.
The silence seemed to shout incompetence to her. Her entire life had been devoted to figuring out the answers to complicated questions, and now, no matter what she did, the answer eluded her. Scream obscenities? Scream defiance? Scream some phony show of strength? So as soon as the Big Bad Wolf disappeared from the black opposite end of the line, she set her phone down on the desk in front of her and allowed herself the release of tears. They streamed down her cheeks accompanied by gasps and sobs and even a low moan of despair. Karen gave in to the unbridled, unstoppable flood of emotion, rocking back and forth in her seat, her arms clenched tightly around her, chest heaving in agony. She was unsure how long she tied herself into knots. But like a small child crying over a missing puppy, eventually she choked back her tears and was able to fight her way to normal breathing, even if she had absolutely no idea what to do next. Her only desire was to speak with the other two Reds because, as different as they were from her, they were the only people on the entire earth who could understand what she was going through. Except, she realized, perhaps the Big Bad Wolf.
Red Three had been overwhelmed by rage.
Sleep eluded her after the call, and she spent much of the night unsuccessfully reexamining the Big Bad Wolf’s YouTube video, trying to find some hidden clue that would help her fight back. At 3 a.m. she finally crawled into her bed and pulled the covers up over her head like a child half her age, afraid of the dark. But underneath the blankets she sweated, teeth clenched. Eventually she threw off all the covers and lay rigid, like a corpse, staring up at the ceiling. When her alarm sounded, she arose feeling filthy, a sensation that hot water and shower suds failed to remove. As she walked to class that morning, she stumbled and nearly fell when she passed the spot where she had been standing the night before when the phone call of silence came. It was as if she’d been tripped by short-term memory, and she kicked at a spot in the pathway as though it was to blame for her near-tumble.
Her first class that morning was advanced Spanish. Mrs. Garcia, the teacher, had grown up in Barcelona, so reversing her skills to teach U.S. high schoolers wasn’t much of a challenge. She was a thickset, dark-haired woman, with a cackling laugh and unabashed enthusiasm for anything that was even vaguely connected to her native country. She showed films like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Secret in Their Eyes and assigned books from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez, even when she doubted the students understood very much. If someone mentioned art in the class, she almost invariably launched into a rhapsodic description of Madrid’s Prado and its famous Goya and Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Jordan was just scraping by in the class, but still, Jordan liked Mrs. Garcia immensely, because she was neither parent nor administrator and didn’t try to act like she had all the answers to Jordan’s problems.
This morning Jordan took her usual seat near the back, adjacent to a window, so she could look outside and watch blackbirds roost in a nearby tree. She remained completely distracted, playing over in her memory every aspect of the silent phone call. If there had been words or even guttural noises, heavy breathing, whistling, or the slapping sounds of some man playing with himself, she could have interpreted these and formed some sort of picture in her mind. But the absence of noise left her staring at a blank canvas.
She clenched her hands into fists, placed them just beneath her breasts, and pushed them together, as if fighting with herself.
“Jordan?”
Her knuckles grew white. She wanted to strike something.
“Senorita Jordan?”
Anger covered her face like a mask.
“Senorita Jordan, que pasa?”
It was the tittering of other students that brought her back to the classroom. She looked around wildly, facing the grins and low, mocking laughter. She had no idea what was happening, until she looked to the front and saw Mrs. Garcia in front of the blackboard staring directly at her. Jordan realized instantly that she’d been asked a question and hadn’t responded.
“I’m sorry . . .” she stammered.
“En español, por favor, Jordan.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“No estabas escuchando?”
“Yes, I was listening, I just . . .” She stopped mid-lie.
“Te pasa algo?”
“No, Mrs. Garcia. Nothing’s wrong.” This was another lie, and she knew both the teacher and the other students knew it.
“Bueno. En español, por favor, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia repeated. “Cuál es el problema?”
“There’s no problem. I was not . . .” She stopped, seeing that she was about to contradict herself. She understood she was supposed to reply in Spanish, but the words were just slightly out of reach. Phrases, sentences, snippets of passages from books, dialogue from movies, all in melodic Spanish, flooded into Jordan’s head. She searched desperately for the right combination with which to answer her teacher’s questions.
Mrs. Garcia hesitated. This pause allowed a couple of the other teenage girls in the class to whisper something to each other. Jordan could not quite hear what they said, but she knew it was something cutting.
She could not help herself. Standing up, sh
e spun toward the other girls. She could see half-taunting grins in their faces. To the girl closest to her she snarled, “Pinche puta idiota!”
The girl recoiled. Jordan wondered whether anyone had ever called her a fucking idiot bitch in any language.
“Jordan!” Mrs. Garcia broke in.
But this made no difference to Jordan, who felt days of fury released within her. “Besa mi culo, puta!” she insulted another girl. Kiss my ass, bitch.
One of the boys in the class half-rose, as if to come to the defense of the insulted girl, but Jordan pulled out the most common of all Spanish insults and one that she was sure the boy would know. In fact, they would all know it, she told herself.
“Chinga tu madre!” Jordan blurted out, pointing at the boy’s chest.
“Jordan, that’s enough!” Mrs. Garcia had slipped into furious English. She rarely did this.
Jordan could feel every eye in the room on her. She threw her head back, defiant, and was about to direct another insult at the class. She remembered an old insult from one of the books they had read earlier in the semester: El burro sabe más que tu . . . The donkey knows more than you. She was about to shout this one out, but hesitated.
“You can either leave or stay—your choice, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia said in a slow, furious tone. “But either way, you will immediately cease what you are doing.”
The command demanded silence in the class. Whispers, undercover laughter, muffled obscenities all stopped.
Jordan reached down and started to collect her things. She had this vision of giving the finger to all the kids in the class, walking out, and finding some isolated, bucolic spot where she could be alone and patiently wait for her killer to find her and put an end to everything. But partway through this dramatic exit, she stopped. She looked up at Mrs. Garcia, whose red face had dimmed, and who now looked merely sad.
Jordan took a deep breath. “No,” she said suddenly. “Ésta es mi clase favorita.” She sat down abruptly.
Another silence riveted the classroom. After a long pause, Mrs. Garcia cleared her throat, looked sadly again at Jordan, and muttered, “Bueno,” before continuing with the day’s lesson.
Jordan sat back down in her seat and resumed staring out the window. She didn’t want to make eye contact with any of her fellow students. Instead she thought:
Big—that was grande.
Bad—that was malo.
Wolf—that was lobo.
She put them together in her head. Grande malo lobo. It had a nice rhythm to it. Spanish was like that, she thought. Every phrase sounded like it belonged in a song. Jordan sighed and stiffened, still refusing to turn and have any contact with her classmates. She felt like a piece of radioactive waste. She was glowing, dangerous, and no one could touch her.
When the class ended, Jordan waited for the others to leave. Mrs. Garcia had taken a seat behind her desk at the front. She gestured for Jordan to approach.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. G,” Jordan said.
The woman nodded. “I know you’re having a tough time, Jordan. Is there any way I can help?”
Do you have a gun? Can you shoot straight? “No. But thank you.”
The teacher looked disappointed, but managed a small smile. “You will let me know if you think I can. Even if it’s just to talk things over. Any time. Any day. Any reason. Okay?”
Are you a killer or just a Spanish teacher? Can you kill a man who wants to kill me? “Okay, Mrs. G. Thanks.”
Jordan slung her backpack over her shoulder and left the classroom. She hadn’t gone far when she heard a buzzing noise, which she recognized as the throwaway phone that Red One had given her. She ducked into a women’s toilet and found an empty stall before removing the phone and staring at the screen.
It was a text from Red Two.
Meet tonite. Talk. Important.
She was about to reply to this, when a second text came in, from Red One.
Pickup pizza place 7.
She texted both back: OK.
She wanted to add If we’re still alive at 7 tonight. She didn’t.
Then Jordan headed off to English class. The assignment that day was Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” She had read the story through twice, but decided that if her teacher asked her about it, she would pretend she hadn’t even looked at it.
What she had liked most was the Spanish waiter in the story. The older one who was willing to keep the bar open for the lonely ancient man, not the young one in a hurry to get home to his wife.
Nada y pues nada y pues nada.
She knew exactly what the waiter meant with every word, and it didn’t need any translation.
25
“This was the best idea I could come up with on short notice,” Red One said. “It seems like a safe place.”
A safe place was a concept that seemed alien, except that when they were together, somehow the threat they all shared seemed diminished by division: Terror divided by three equals what?
The three Reds were standing on a dark and narrow side street in a cone of wan light just outside the door of the Goddess Bookshop, away from the more frequented parts of the small city. Mainly women—various ages, varied shapes, including a few hand in hand with toddlers or pushing strollers—were entering the small store. The bookshop featured shelves filled with new-age novels, works on necromancy and female health issues, along with the occasional how-to volume on tarot card reading or predicting by astrological sign.
This night an out-of-town author was coming in for a discussion of her latest novel and rows of folding chairs had been set up throughout the modest space, close to a small podium. There was a large poster of the woman: She was between Red One and Red Two in age and wore her long black hair in what Jordan considered vampire style—straight down, obscuring some of her features to give herself a mysterious although not particularly subtle look. The writer also sported an all-black outfit—boots, slacks, silk shirt, and thick woolen cape—distinguished only by a single large necklace that featured some heavy mystical sign encrusted with sparkling stones. Copies of her book were displayed in tall stacks right inside the doors. The poster indicated that it was part of an ongoing series. This particular novel was titled The Return of the She-Killer and featured an exaggerated cartoonlike drawing of a Valkyrie warrior maiden on the jacket, gleaming sword drawn and battling against a squad of overmuscled yet clearly overmatched horned, helmeted Viking types. Dragons flew in the jacket background.
Karen led the other two Reds inside and steered them to some seats off to the side of the makeshift podium, where they would be able to see both the speaker and anyone entering the store. They settled into the uncomfortable steel chairs and each, without saying anything to the others, began to assess the face of everyone joining the gathering.
There were only four men in the crowd. Each looked slightly uncomfortable in a different way. The three Reds watched them furtively, looking for some telltale sign that might suggest they were looking at the Big Bad Wolf.
One man was small, wiry, with a mouselike furtiveness—but he had come in with a woman twice his size and a young daughter, whom he spent much time trying to keep from squirming in her seat. Another was a burly, bearded sort, not unlike the men on the author’s book jacket. He had a lumberjack’s build and sported a red-checked woolen jacket. But he had entered accompanied by a pink-haired, multiple-pierced young woman wearing exaggerated clothing similar to the author’s, and she had dutifully filled the man’s arms with copies of what appeared to be other books in the series and apparently tasked him with getting signatures on each. He had a beaten-dog look to him. The other two men looked more academic—thick glasses, tweed suit coats, and corduroy trousers—and both displayed their discomfort at being dragged along to the reading in their body language. Each man sat with his arms folded, slouched in a seat, bor
ed look on his face beside a woman perched on the edge of her chair, eyes glowing, pitched forward, eagerly hanging on every word.
None of these men seemed even moderately murderous in any fashion.
This meant little to the three Reds. They were each alert to any possibility —although none of them knew exactly what to look for. I can spot a disease that might kill, Karen thought. I can see it in a blood test or on an X ray. I don’t know if I can spot a killer.
Jordan’s look burrowed into each of the four men in the audience. She was more confident. If you’re here, I’m going to know it, she said to the Wolf that she had created in her mind’s eye. She was too young to ask herself the crippling question How? She kept trying to fix each of the men with a fierce eye-to-eye, but even in their discomfort they all seemed more interested in the speaker.
Sarah, conversely, kept her gaze sliding between the men. She had no belief that she would know the Big Bad Wolf even if he were standing right next to her, a bloody knife in his hand and a large sign hanging around his neck. She smiled. This made no difference to her any longer.
Each kept their eyes sweeping over the gathering like sentries on duty even as the bookstore owner gushed her introduction of the author, who stepped to the platform amidst enthusiastic applause.
“My books are all about female empowerment,” the writer began with expected emphasis.
That was the point at which each of the Reds stopped paying the slightest bit of attention to what they heard.
The speech lasted just shy of an hour and there was a predictable series of questions afterward, ranging from the specifics of one warrior-maiden’s murderous foibles to the more general complaints about the lack of mainstream publishing energy that went into books with “women’s themes.” The session was generally humorless.
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