Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  I WANDERED INTO THE KITCHEN, LEAVING BUCK and Lane to compare their investigative notes. I found a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale in the refrigerator, pried off the cap, and sipped.

  Messages.

  The mind is always at work. We know things that we do not realize we know, because they have not bubbled up into conscious thought. People say that something is “right on the tip of my tongue.”

  The more effort we exert to retrieve it, the more elusive it seems. Later, when we’re not trying to remember, that bit of information “pops” into consciousness. My experience has been that the less effort I exert, the less encumbered is the associative process that is always going on in one of the far corners of my mind.

  I sat at my old maple table and fixed my gaze on the stone gorilla that Lane had given me. I allowed myself to slip into a familiar hypnotic state. Within seconds I was drifting back to the day of the shooting.

  Marinara. Pale ah for me and for the pot. Shower. Stepping outside the hack door. A flash of light. Twisting down and away. A mental snapshot—not quite in focus—of a man dressed in black, up by the fence. And me down on Chester Arthur Burnett’s “Killing Floor”— the song that played in my head as I lost consciousness.

  In 1928, as Peter Kurten terrorized Europe, Chester Arthur Burnett mounted a stage with his first band and belted out his own brand of Mississippi Delta blues. Those who heard the big man described his deep, growling voice as “lupine.” It made sense that he would perform for half a century as Howlin’ Wolf.

  Howlin’ Wolf. Charles S. Weathers from Nebraska. The inexplicable alleys of the human mind. Bruce Springsteen had written a song about a killer from Nebraska. I had stood in Janet Orr’s yard staring at the clouds and seeing the face of a kid with her thumb stuck in her mouth—a kid I’d seen in Vermont.

  I was beginning to have a notion of what we might be dealing with. “How could that be possible?” I muttered.

  What had set everything in motion, and resulted in my trip to the northeast last year, was a crime-scene photograph—a woman lying on her living-room floor, her throat cut with surgical precision.

  The wind slashed across the lake. A loose shutter on the north side of the house clattered a reminder of work I had not done. I watched as a lone, hardy sailor brought about her blue catboat and headed back down the lake toward the marina. For just a second, I was certain that I saw Janet Orr sitting in the stern, both hands gripping the tiller.

  Lane had moved on to the Roger Waters CD, Amused to Death—a soft din in the background, receding even farther as I drifted—and thoughts, pictures cascaded through my mind as if blown by the afternoon gale that churned Lake Albert.

  The thoughts and pictures slowed, in defiance of the wind, until they too floated gently through awareness.

  The dream. Drifting in a small red boat.

  When I was a child on a visit with my sister to my grandmother’s house, I walked out alone through the woods to the brackish waters at the mouth of the Weir River. A man stood on the bridge that spanned the moving water. He gripped a fishing rod—a magic wand, I thought, because he made fish jump from the water into his hands.

  Later, my sister explained what I had seen that day, but I preferred my own version of events. I wanted to be like the man on the bridge—grasping a seven-foot stick of magic, luring fish from the rivers and lakes, the bays and the seas.

  A streak of gray sliced through the water, followed by a solid pull on the line. Then nothing. The predator had become the prey.

  I learned about fishing the same way that I learned about everything else: on my own. From books that I withdrew from the library. From watching others. From practice.

  The child that I had been remained in me now—a lover of solitude, content with a stack of books, some music, and perhaps a slant on what my next act of defiance would be. When I was in my teens, my sisters husband said that I was oppositional, a troublemaker. He was right.

  I was only twelve the first time my mother grabbed the kids, left my father, and took us all to stay with my grandmother in Hull. I remember taking my first spinning rod, an outfit from Sears Roebuck mail order, and walking to a wall behind the bait house at Nantasket Pier. It was a forbidden place. Dangerous, my mother said.

  “Why?” I wanted to know.

  “You might fall in.”

  “I can swim.”

  “No one would be there to help you.”

  I resorted to my secret weapon—sarcasm. “To help me swim?”

  “You are not to go near that place,” she snapped in her sharp, clipped tone that signaled the end of all discussion.

  My secret weapon never seemed to work with her.

  Her attitude reinforced my need to claim some independence. Sure I was defiant. I was going to do it my way. Obstacles—human or otherwise—were irrelevant.

  I went fishing. Alone. Grasping my good-luck charm: a large treble hook that I used for snagging shiners for bait.

  The water wore a multicolored halo of oil—a virtual slick that coated my line, the bobber, eventually my hands. No fish could have survived there. But there is more to angling than the fish. Ask any twelve-year-old kid with a bamboo pole and an empty afternoon.

  I sat on the pier until dusk, proving my point about fishing and not drowning.

  The real danger was one that my mother knew and hadn’t told me. Its name was Hector—the pedophile who ran the bait shop.

  I didn’t know any of the clinical words then, but I did know that there was something unmistakably threatening about Hector. The gestalt was wrong—the stale smells of beer, sweat, motor oil, and bait. The stubble on his cheeks and chin. The matted black hair protruding from his Socony cap. The dirt-encrusted hands that gripped my shoulders as I stepped off the wall at the side of the bait shop.

  The hunter of fish had become a fish for the hunter.

  Much later, when I asked my sister about Hector, she told me the truth.

  “Why didn’t Ma tell me?” I asked.

  “She won’t talk about bad things.”

  “Then how am I supposed to know?”

  “She says, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you.’ ”

  “But that’s what hurts the most.”

  When Hector’s hands closed on my shoulders, he never got a chance to say a word. I turned, raked his face with the big treble hook, then ran.

  “Hector’s face is all bandaged,” my sister told me. “They say he’ll have a bad scar.”

  Months after my fishing expedition, I saw the scar. I was walking along the breakwater toward my cave—a shelter that I had discovered in my travels, formed by scrapped slabs of gray and black granite—when Hector drove up in his old, light green Packard.

  “I’m gonna get you, kid,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “You’re right. I can’t run along them rocks after you. But later. That’s when I’m gonna get you. When you don’t expect it.”

  I shook my head again. Then Hector floored the Packard, kicking up gravel and cinders.

  “He wants to give you nightmares,” my sister said. “He’s mean.”

  The bluefish closed its teeth on my arm. It was a gesture of mindless, random meanness.

  Even as a twelve-year-old, when confronted with a predatory human, I shifted into an instinctive state. Fear disappeared. Rage bubbled up in a slow simmer. Then I acted.

  Late one night, when I was sure that everyone was asleep, I climbed out my bedroom window, creeping along the side of the house to the kerosene barrel. I filled a small jar, replaced the pin in the spigot, and walked down the hill to the bay.

  Hector’s house was in a setback near the breakwater. It was abutted on each side by a bar. The three buildings shared a backyard that was nothing more than a vacant lot of cinders and stone that the two bars used for a parking area. I knew he would be in one of the bars—either Callahan’s or Surf’s Up. I walked around his cottage twice, looking in the windows, seeking any sign of life. There was none,
so I walked inside.

  His bedroom smelled like the bait shop and resembled the town dump. Clothes strewn all over, a half-eaten cheese sandwich growing blue mold on a table beside a bed of unmade gray sheets. There was a picture of a glowing Jesus on the wall above the bed board.

  I stepped into his closet and waited.

  Twenty minutes later, I heard him come through the front door. Then I heard his footsteps in the hall, water running in the bathroom, the toilet flushing. When he stumbled through the bedroom door, he was naked—his limp dick wagging beneath a bulging belly full of beer.

  Hector fell onto the bed and sighed. Then he did what I knew he would do: he tapped a Camel out of a pack for one last smoke before he passed out—just what my father would have done.

  When Hector struck his match, I hurled my jar into the face of Jesus. The son of God shattered, along with my jar.

  And the room ignited.

  What happens when the prey becomes the predator? What happens if you refuse to play the part of victim? What happens when you become more cunning and meaner than any other depravity in the world?

  Later that night, my sister sat with me after the police had gone. She looked into my eyes. “He didn’t die.”

  “I didn’t want him to die. I just wanted him to know that if I’m to be afraid, and to have nightmares, then he can’t sleep anymore.”

  Before my dream of the red boat, there was a flash of light up in the field to my right. I had stepped out the back door, a towel in my hand. A scope. A man holding a high-powered rifle. Blurred. Black pants, creased. A black shirt. Dark glasses. My height. Dark hair. So steady with his rifle, his elbow cocked out to his right. Military bearing. A sharpshooter. He shouldn’t have missed.

  “And maybe I, too, missed the mark,” I murmured.

  I was aware of Lane standing in the doorway behind me. “Buck leave?” I asked.

  “He had some state people he had to talk to.”

  “Lane, one of the reasons you came out here was to talk about John Wolf.”

  “It can wait.”

  “No, it can’t. You have questions about my actions in Vermont.”

  “It’s like you said, Pop. We don’t have to agree.”

  Lane, perhaps more than anyone else, knew that I worked from my own set of laws. Some were identical to those in the standard law books; the rest were more expedient or, in my opinion, more just.

  Anyway, most of what was on the books represented a government’s feeble attempts to regulate morality. It can’t be done. People will use their drugs of choice. They will engage in mutually consenting sexual behavior that their neighbors consider an anatomical atrocity. Some won’t stand and salute the flag. Others will express their discontent with government by burning the flag.

  “Lanie, I planned to kill him. It never entered my mind that I might not kill him, that I didn’t have to kill him. Nothing else mattered. I wanted him dead— there’s your premeditation—and he died.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Afterward, when the feds came to Michigan, what did you tell them?”

  “I saw no reason to tell them the truth.”

  She was shaking her head, running her hands back through her hair. “In the same situation, any other man would have wondered if he had any reason to lie to investigators. Your only question was, ‘Do I have any reason to tell them the truth?’ You see the world so differently, Pop.”

  I shrugged. “Your mother used to tell me the same thing. Lane, I want you to scribble a fax to Buck. His office is number eight on the auto-dial. He’ll be getting there soon. Ask him where in Nebraska Mr. Weathers said he was from.”

  “What’s this got to do with Wolf?”

  It had everything to do with Wolf. I was growing increasingly convinced that my attempt to incinerate the bastard had failed, that the most prolific killer I had ever encountered—and the one who most needed to die—somehow had walked away from Armageddon.

  The essential nature of the psychopath is the power to play the shell game on a person’s mind. When there are too many intrusions, too much abuse from too many fathers—most of them made mad from their own sense of power and mission—something snaps inside. Then, it is up to each of us to watch out for the sleight of mind game.

  When I did not answer Lane, she left the room.

  I walked to the kitchen counter, retrieved my copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, and returned to the table. I placed the book next to my stone gorilla, sat, and stared, and waited. In five minutes, Lane was back.

  She looked at me and quietly asked, “What’s he gonna say, Pop?”

  She was playing a game that we had played since she was a child.

  “Lincoln,” I said. “This has everything to do with John Wolf.”

  I had traveled inside other people’s minds. They had wandered into mine. I knew what they thought and felt and what they were going to say before they said it. When they did not want anyone to know who they were, when they didn’t want to know who they were, I pushed their faces and their souls in front of a mirror. I exposed the fallacies in their thinking, and now, I feared, the fallacies in my own thinking were about to be put on display. I had made a monstrous mistake.

  Lane stood in the doorway with a fax in her hand. “Right again, Pop,” she said, according to the script for our game.

  “Charles S. Weathers of Lincoln, Nebraska,” I said, experiencing just a twinge of twisted admiration. “Charlie Starkweather? We have a killer with a sense of humor.”

  Starkweather, like Peter Kurten, operated according to a retribution- or vengeance-based system. With his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fúgate, in tow, Starkweather set out from Lincoln in 1957—killing eleven times before he was finished. Every injustice that the nineteen-year-old garbage collector had experienced fueled his role as the ultimate rebel. He strode into Nebraska’s death chamber, expressing only defiance right to the end. The executioner had to throw the switch on the electric chair three times—each a jolt of 2200 volts—before Starkweather agreed to die.

  I flipped open my copy of Peterson and sought out the kingbird on page 108. The page was missing, excised neatly with a razor-sharp implement.

  I was on my feet, grabbing my keys and moving toward the door. “You know how I feel about coincidence, Lane,” I said. “There’s no such thing. Like so many of Wolf’s victims, Janet’s throat was sliced with surgical precision. Wolf was trained as a marksman in the military. He grew up in Vermont, so he certainly knows his way around a deer rifle like a 30.06. He was consistent about signing in for his kills. Remember his fascination with birds? This time, instead of feathers, we get a page from a birding field guide—my fucking field guide, by the way. Who else would have the brass balls to kill Janet, shoot me, rip out a page from this book, then return to Janet’s?”

  “Could we have a copycat on our hands, Pop?”

  “No,” I said, slamming the door as I headed for my Jeep.

  IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAD BEEN unable to follow Pop’s train of thought. He had come out of the hospital and latched on to Peter Kurten. Then it was Charles Starkweather. Now it was John Wolf.

  I couldn’t keep up with him.

  I remember one time when I was in my teens, and I wandered into Pop’s study He was so busy poring over some photographs at his desk, he didn’t notice me. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then he got up and walked through the door that led to the garage. I followed him, passing close to his desk, glancing down at pictures of a dead young woman, her back laced with thin, bloody, parallel lines.

  I kept moving, until I could see Pop on his hands and knees on the concrete garage floor. He raked his right hand across the rough surface of the cement, then stared at the bloody lines on his palm. “That’s how she got those striated marks,” he said. “He couldn’t pick her up. He lifted her legs, dragged her across the concrete floor, then maneuvered her into the trunk.”

  Pop walked within feet of
me, ignoring the blood that stained his hand, and sat again at his desk. After a few minutes, he picked up the telephone receiver, and as he dialed, seemed to realize for the first time that his hand was bleeding. He balled up some tissues and gripped them, stanched the wounds, and made his call.

  A few weeks later, I saw an article in the newspaper. The police had charged their prime suspect, Frank Lockerby, a mechanic, with the murder of a young woman. Pop was mentioned in the article, and so was his old police friend and my godfather, Ray Bolton.

  Years later, I asked Pop about the case. “The lines on the victim’s back were crucial to making the case,” he explained. “We could explain every other mark on her body, but didn’t know what had caused those marks, and didn’t know where the crime had been committed. Once we knew how the marks were made, we had a crime scene—the gas station where Lockerby worked— and that gave Ray the additional physical evidence he needed to make the case. Lockerby was a shade over five feet tall, and had a slight build. He couldn’t have lifted his victim. He had to drag her across the concrete floor.”

  That was only one of many times that I had learned not to question my father’s erratic behavior in matters related to murder.

  Now, I watched his Jeep disappear through the gate, and returned to my work at the computer.

  Ginger had spent months putting together the relational database for Pop, but I wasn’t having any luck making it work. I had entered all the criteria that Pop and I had been able to come up with, but every time I tried to run the program, I got the same on-screen message: GOTO: DEA.

  I knew that Pop had done a lot of work for government agencies, but I had never heard him mention anything about Drug Enforcement. When I tried to call up the DEA file, the screen seemed to freeze, as if the computer were waiting for the rest of the command. After a series of tries, and just as many failures and reboots, I shut down the system and put away the disks. I was starting to agree with my father, at least as far as technology was concerned.

  POP WAS GONE NEARLY TWO HOURS. I WAS READY to call Buck when I heard the Jeep pull into the yard.