Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  “Is she the one who used to take you to the zoo?”

  Pop looked at me with a strange intensity. “Lane, what is it that you want to know?”

  “How you think. Why you think the way you do. How you came to be the person you are.”

  “Because I killed a man?”

  “That’s part of the reason,” I agreed.

  Pop placed the stone gorilla on the table beside him. “Well, it looks like we’re finally going to have that talk. Lane, for thirty years, I immersed myself in murder and murderers. The reason I experienced the success that I did was that I never tried to deny my own violent impulses. Whenever I felt it necessary to rip into and expose a killer’s secrets, to bring him to tears or rage, I did it. I had the knack of ‘out-psychopathing’ the psychopath. John Wolf was going to kill you. I wouldn’t let that happen. Period. The criminal justice system would have diddled around with him—or he with it—for years. That was unacceptable. Does that answer your question?”

  “I had more than one, Pop,” I said, smiling.

  “You know, it isn’t a requirement of the father-daughter relationship that we agree on any of this.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. Now, I’m going for a boat ride. I’m headed for Janet’s. Want to come?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m gonna bang around in this database some more. You sure you should be bouncing around on the lake so soon?”

  “There’s just a light chop on the water this morning. I’ll be fine. Back in an hour.”

  When he got up, Pop touched the side of my face. “I love you, Lanie,” he said.

  “Love you, too, Pop.”

  I watched him when he headed out through the sliding-glass doors. He stopped on the patio, gazed to his right, up into the field where the shooter had stood.

  Only then did I notice that my father was carrying a gun.

  I GUIDED MY EIGHTEEN-FOOT BOSTON WHALER across Lake Albert’s choppy surface. In the distance, I could see Janet’s boat secured to her dock.

  I remembered my first week at Lake Albert. Janet paddled across the lake in a kayak to bring me a house-warming gift. Someone had briefed her. The gift, neatly wrapped in the previous Sunday’s comics section, was a book on how to make the most of an early retirement.

  Janet was tall, forty-two, and wore her black hair fashionably short. She had a college student’s preference for black clothes—sweaters, shirts, jeans, an occasional skirt, onyx rings, and necklaces.

  “You’re the prematurely tired shrink,” she said, welcoming me to the lake.

  “Word gets around fast.”

  “All the waterfronts come equipped with cans and string.”

  “Are you the welcome wagon?” I asked. “Janet Orr. I’ve got the small clapboard place over there,” she said, pointing to the northwest.

  There were only four houses at our end of the lake, so I had no trouble placing it.

  “Lucas Frank,” I said, smiling, and we shook hands.

  We talked about everything—music, the weather, cooking, her work as a potter, politics, her estranged husband in Wisconsin, my estranged wife in what was then called Zaire, and cats. I had one. She had three.

  That was six years ago. We had dinner together— her place or mine—once or twice a month. Occasionally we would take off, like we had for Vancouver. We became the best of friends.

  As I stepped onto the dock, I wondered again why I had not heard from Janet. News travels fast at Lake Albert, especially bad news. I walked up the steps to her deck, and when she did not respond to my knocking, I shoved at the sliding-glass door. It was locked.

  I wandered around the north side of the building. She had parked her Honda in the driveway and left the garage door open, something she often did when she was working in the yard, but she wasn’t in the yard.

  The front door was also locked. Janet’s garden gloves and a trowel rested on the brick steps. I tried the door knocker and chimes, but again there was no answer, and no sound of anyone stirring inside.

  It was possible that she had locked the house and driven off with a friend, but she would not have left the garage door up.

  I walked down West Shore Drive to Ann Chelsea’s house. Janet’s only neighbor met me on the dirt road.

  “Is she back?” Ann asked. “I’ve been calling and getting the machine.”

  I shook my head. “When did you last see her?”

  The gray-haired octogenarian thought for a moment. “It was right before I heard you were in the hospital. Eva Logan called me. There was a man here from a foundation, and he was looking for Janet. He showed me his business card and all. I’m worried, Lucas. I almost called Buck Semple.”

  For Ann Chelsea to consider calling Buck meant that she was damn near in a panic state. “Call Buck now,” I told her. “Ask him to meet me at Janet’s.”

  “Oh, God. I hope she didn’t have a fall,” Ann said as she turned back toward her house.

  My bandaged side stinging, I jogged back up the road, went directly into Janet’s garage, and tried the door to the house. Like the others, it was locked. I grabbed a screwdriver from the tool rack and pried between the doorjamb and the lock housing. On my third try, the door popped open.

  The rancid stench of death knocked me back a step.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered, grabbing the nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol from my hip.

  I stepped into the mud room and moved toward the kitchen door that I knew had no lock. The house was silent. I covered my left hand with a plastic bag from Janet’s recycling bin, then grasped the knob and pulled gently. The smell came on stronger.

  I saw an arm on the floor, extending out from behind the sink. The hand was palm up. The fingers were curled.

  Janet’s left hand. The wedding ring she still wore.

  As I moved farther into the room, I could see Janet’s body, facedown, her head surrounded by a pool of hardened black blood.

  Janet is dead.

  I didn’t know what had hit me harder—the two slugs that had slammed me to the ground, or staring down at my friend’s corpse.

  Janet Orr was dead. I knew the words. I had the information. I saw her legs stretched out behind her in black jeans, work boots on her feet. I pulled my gaze away and scanned the kitchen. My eyes were watering, blurring my vision.

  My knees threatened to buckle.

  “What the hell were you doing at McDonald’s?” I asked, half expecting her to answer.

  I was staring at a take-out coffee cup and paper bag. Janet hated that shit.

  There was blood spatter on the sink and on the few dishes stacked to the right. Janet was probably standing at the sink, with her back to her killer.

  I looked again at Janet’s wedding ring. After twenty years of marriage, her husband, Lou, had announced that he was gay. He had left her, and now he was dying of AIDS. Janet had been paying for his hospice care.

  Who would want to kill this woman?

  I reholstered my gun and dropped to one knee so that I could see the source of all the blood. Her head was turned slightly. Someone had slit her throat and she had fallen, twisting slightly on the way down.

  “Why did you turn your back? Who the fuck was here?”

  Had her killer toyed with her? Talked to her for a while? Lulled her into a sense of security? The cupboard door was open, revealing shelves of dishes, mugs, and tumblers. Maybe she had been reaching for a glass when he grabbed her.

  I looked at Janet’s hands and forearms, then glanced again around the room. There was nothing out of place, nothing that indicated struggle, no defensive wounds.

  He approached her from behind and cut her throat.

  The McDonald’s bag stood like an ornament on her kitchen table. In addition to the coffee cup, now I also saw a Big Mac box.

  I had noticed no evidence of forced entry. She let him in, trusted him. Was it someone she knew?

  She spent time with him.

  “What the fuck for?”

&n
bsp; “Lucas?” Buck called from the garage.

  I ran my hand back through my hair. “In here, Buck.”

  He stepped through the kitchen door. “Oh, shit.”

  I nodded. “You’d better get whoever it is you use for crime scenes.”

  “You touch anything?”

  “Just the doorknob,” I said, holding up my left hand, still clad in its plastic bag. “Oh, and I grabbed a screwdriver off the rack out there. I had to jimmy the door.”

  “You okay?”

  “No.”

  My friend was dead, and I was overwhelmed with the sense that this wasn’t happening for the first time.

  Buck grumbled into his handheld radio, barked commands, snapped directions.

  Since I had entered the room, my eyes had focused on Janet’s body, then the kitchen table, then back again— like someone watching a tennis match. I stood, walked to the table, and gazed down at what was probably a killer’s residue.

  Bag. Cup. Sandwich collar and wrapper. Receipt dated the day before I was shot. A single page torn from a book.

  “What book?” I muttered.

  “You say something?”

  I waved Buck off, and he continued talking into his radio. I leaned over the table. Page 108 from the text section of what looked like a birding field guide. Flycatchers. At the top of the page was the eastern kingbird—Tyrannus tyrannus. The cruel ruler. The tyrant.

  “State guys are on their way,” Buck said. “You been through the place?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lucas, if you want to go outside …”

  “No. Let’s look around.”

  Buck handed me a pair of latex gloves and I snapped them on. I wandered into the living room, hearing the occasional burst of noise from Buck’s radio, his voice as he responded to the calls, then I wandered back to the kitchen, unable to stay away.

  Janet Orr had detested the sharp edge of violence that she said she saw surrounding me. Lane often sent murder over my fax machine. It had been my work, then it was my daughter’s. Janet hated it.

  She had kept Max when I went to Vermont to deal with the killer John Wolf. The night I returned to the lake I stopped at her place to retrieve the cat, but he did not want any part of me. I remember how Janet stared— first at him, then at me. Standing in the dim light of a kerosene lamp, she said, “Go home, Lucas. Get human.”

  Now, I stood looking down at her body. Her corpse. And I, too, hated the violence. I looked up at Janet’s bookcase. She had three bird books, two of them field guides—Peterson’s and Audobon’s. The Peterson was the right size, so I removed it from the shelf and found page 108. Tyrannus tyrannus. It was identical to the page on Janet’s table, but not as worn.

  What the hell is going on? Did this guy bring his own bird book to a murder? And why the fuck do I feel as if I should know what’s going on?

  “I don’t think this has to do with Janet,” I said.

  Buck walked through the archway behind me. “So what does it have to do with?”

  “Did Ann Chelsea mention some guy who was up here looking for Janet?”

  “Something to do with a charitable foundation, she said. I’ll get a complete statement from her later.”

  “I figure that was the day before my visit from our assassin.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “My perimeter security system was down. Chuck Logan was delivering wood, and Lane was arriving. Janet knew both of those things.”

  “Lucas, you’re stressed out. We’ve got totally different MOs here. You were shot…”

  “Fuck the MOs,” I snapped. “You’d rather believe that somebody came here, hung out for coffee and lunch, slit Janet’s throat, then went merrily on his way? And the next day, a totally different person blew me down? That gives us two assassins, unrelated, taking out two people who do share a relationship. Bullshit. This is Lake Albert, not the Bronx.”

  A call on Buck’s radio pulled him away.

  I remembered sitting with Janet in my den late at night a month after my return from Vermont. She said, “One day this is all going to end.”

  I misunderstood. “Oh, I don’t know. The Berlin Wall’s down, Moscow’s gone democratic. Who’s left to drop the bomb? North Korea, maybe, but I don’t think they have a plane to fly it this far. Unless we sold it to them, of course.”

  Janet pushed a wisp of black hair away from her forehead. “The world is more stable, but you aren’t. You’re volatile. I used to wonder what you were like when you were younger. Then I saw you when you came back from New England, and I knew. There’ll be another one, another killer who will twist you inside out. You say there won’t, but there will.”

  She looked hard at me. “I don’t want to be around when it happens,” she said.

  She was right. There was another one, and she had not been given a choice about being around when it happened.

  I wandered out through the kitchen and garage, and into Janet’s front yard. I could hear the trees creaking as they moved gently in the wind, and the scurrying of a small animal through the fallen leaves. I felt shock giving way to frustration and anger. I was totally bewildered, unable to make any sense out of Janet’s murder or the attempt on my life, but I knew that somehow the two events were connected.

  I looked back at Janet’s house. Why did I feel as if I had observed this scene before?

  Like someone had dropped quarters into a jukebox and played the same song over and over.

  I gazed through the skeletal branches of the trees at the sky and watched as the clouds seemed to form faces.

  I remembered a man in a John Deere cap, and a woman in a yellow plastic jacket with the logo of a volunteer fire department.

  They were real people. Where had I seen them?

  The plastic woman grasped a child with straw hair, vacant gray eyes, her thumb stuck in her candied mouth.

  Buck shuffled through the leaves behind me.

  Wherever I had been, I remembered loud young men at a bar. Women mud wrestled on TV. Aggression and sex were fused for humor and entertainment. And the same song played over and over on the jukebox.

  “Lucas?”

  Where was I?

  “Yeah, Buck.”

  He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “State folks are on their way. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded, and then I remembered.

  Vermont.

  POP WAS DOZING IN HIS CHAIR WHEN I HEARD the knock on the door. I slipped my .38 from its hip holster and headed for the front of the house.

  “It’s probably Buck,” Pop called after me. “Don’t shoot him.”

  It was Buck.

  When he had settled into the overstuffed chair opposite mine, the chief made his announcement. “The day before the shooting, Murphy’s—that store up on the state road that sells everything from rubbers to Rugers—sold a Remington 30.06 to a guy named Charles S. Weathers from Nebraska. Said he was up here hunting. He had all the right papers, waited his three days, paid cash. But there’s no such guy. All his IDs are genuine; they’re in the computers. He left all kinds of tracks, but he isn’t real.”

  “You can add multiple identities to your list of characteristics for the computer,” Pop said. “Also, he’s smooth. He was convincing in whatever role he selected for himself. Janet invited him in and spent time with him.”

  I hadn’t seen my father look so miserable since my mother left for Africa.

  “Ann Chelsea’s description of the foundation guy who was looking for Janet’s place sounds pretty close to what I got from Murphy’s,” Buck said. “White male, forties, six feet, dark hair with some gray, mustache. Lucas, you’re right. He didn’t bust into Janet’s. It does look like they talked some. Far as we could tell, nothing was missing from the house. She was still wearing her diamond ring. The TV, VCR—everything was where it belonged. This was well organized.”

  “Well organized” was a quality that I had heard Pop attribute to many killers over the years. Serious killers.


  “No signs of struggle,” Pop said. “No defensive wounds. While he was playing his part, he knew that he was going to kill her. He chewed his hamburger, sipped his coffee. The whole fucking time he was into his own private excitement. Only he knew what he was going to do. That’s an enormous amount of power—a natural for sadistic fantasies.”

  “We figure that when he had what he wanted, he cut her throat,” Buck said. “The county doc who came to the scene said she was probably grabbed from behind. He also said the cutting was a neat job. ‘Precise’ was the word he used—like somebody who knew exactly what he was doing.”

  “I think he got his information about the security system from Janet,” Pop said. “At the very least, he had to have known that it was there. How else? Nothing’s making sense. My thinking is all muddy.”

  As Buck and I continued to examine the bits of information and the impressions that we were collecting, I noticed Pop drift away from our conversation. Finally, he left the room.

  “He gonna be okay?” Buck asked.

  “This has hit him hard.”

  “I’m beginning to think he’s right about what went down over there. Janet Orr was one stop on the killer’s way here.”

  “Pop said something about a page torn from a book.”

  Buck flipped through his notebook. “Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds. It didn’t come from Janet’s copy. It was on the table with the crap from McDonald’s.”

  “Any similar crimes?” I asked.

  “Nothing in-state. I haven’t done the VICAP form yet. Damn thing’ll take a weekend.”

  “So, this guy probably found out about Pop’s security system—that it would be off—from Janet.”

  Buck thought for a moment. “At first, I didn’t think so. There’s no telling how he got it out of her, but I guess I have to agree.”

  “So he went after Janet for information. Why’d he go after Pop?”

  I was thinking out loud, not necessarily asking Buck, but he answered anyway.

  “Lane, I don’t know why this guy has a hair across his ass about your father. But he does. He wants Lucas Frank dead. And I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him.”