Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  “Fuckin’ phones,” he said as he came through the door.

  “If you put one here in the house …”

  “I’d have to talk to people.”

  “What about a fax with a handset? Stick an answering machine on it and turn off the ringer.”

  Pop ignored me as he stomped around the house. Max dove off his chair and headed for cover under the sofa.

  Pop mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I hate it when you do that.”

  “I said you get more like your mother every day She had to have a phone in every room. Even the fucking bathroom.”

  Pop was seething. He didn’t say why he was angry, and I had long ago learned not to ask. When he’s ready to talk, he talks. Not before.

  “I booked a flight to Washington, D.C.,” he said. “You can come if you want.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Lincoln Memorial.”

  I knew that there was only one Lincoln on his mind. Lincoln, Nebraska. Charlie Starkweather—and whatever connection he had to our shooter. But the trail was here, not in Washington.

  “Pop, what are you talking about? You’ve got a case to work. We do. You are somebody’s target, and that somebody made Lake Albert his personal shooting gallery.”

  “Fine. You stay. I’ll go.”

  He stalked into his bedroom. I could hear him yank open drawers and pull back the zippers on his duffel bag. I walked to the doorway.

  “You know I’m not gonna let you go off alone,” I said.

  “Then go pack.”

  THE 737 LIFTED OFF THE RUNWAY.

  I looked down, watching the earth recede and race away. Lake Albert was far behind me. I was roaring toward something that I wanted nothing to do with, but I knew that I had no choice.

  I was chasing a killer who consumed victims as if they were handfuls of cheese-flavored popcorn. He was a man who had operated according to his own agenda, who had lived as a god deciding who died and when, until I had tracked him down. For most of his adult life, John Wolf had sought his own justice for the physical and emotional pain inflicted on him by a sadistic stepfather. Now, a different vengeance drove him: I’d had the gall to interrupt his mayhem.

  I had more questions than answers. Number one on my list was how anyone could walk away from an explosion that blew flames and debris a hundred feet into the air. I had locked him in the coal bin of his family’s Vermont home and flipped a switch that triggered the load of the plastic explosives buried in the bin. Explosives he had planted to kill me and my daughter. Number two nudged for the top spot: Why hadn’t he killed me when he had the chance?

  When I first opened my practice in Boston, most of my referrals originated with the courts. Spousal homicide, familicide, patricide. I needed to know how the events of violence had evolved. The killer’s dynamics could be understood only in the context of his or her relationships. Lengthy interviews with survivors— relatives, neighbors, the accused—provided a complete biography that moved inexorably toward a single convulsive moment.

  Albert DeSalvo—“The Boston Strangler”—had changed everything. There were many other serial killers before him. Who knew what the werewolf legends of Europe really were? DeSalvo had brought his carnage into my neighborhood, and forced himself into my consciousness.

  I was living on Beacon Hill when DeSalvo, in his cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, identified himself— first to fellow inmate George Nassar, then to the fiery young attorney, R Lee Bailey—as Boston’s most feared killer. It was close. One of the strangler’s victims lived on Charles Street, within walking distance of my apartment. For me, in my practice, DeSalvo had changed the face of murder. He had known none of his thirteen homicide victims, nor had he known any of his countless “Measuring Man” or “Green Man” rape victims.

  The sixties—a benchmark decade in music, political assassination, social revolution—also saw a sharp increase in the number of strangers killing strangers. How was it possible to trace the evolution of an act of violence that had no apparent context, where there was no discernible relationship? I was determined to find out, and developed my own approach to the art of identifying the characteristics of a killer from the evidence left at the crime scene, and from what I could learn about the victim’s personality. It was a process of working backward.

  I decided that examining the grab site and its circumstances were as important as microscopy of everything found at the kill site, the location that my colleagues in law enforcement insisted on calling the “crime scene.” The crime, I decided, moved through several locations— whether within the same room, apartment, or house, or spread all over the city and throughout Suffolk County. The homicides that I studied had scenes, multiple locations that were equally important.

  I remember one homicide detective telling me, “The perp grabbed her at a supermarket on the Cambridge side of the river, but he did her here.”

  “Here” was an alley in Boston’s North End.

  “Did he grab her inside the market, in the parking lot, what?” I asked.

  “Inside. He didn’t exactly grab her, Doc. They walked out together. What fuckin’ difference does that make?”

  “He established face validity,” I said. “He was believable, seemed trustworthy, a nice guy.”

  “Nice guys don’t do this shit, Doc”

  The knee-jerk reaction had been to call these murders random, senseless, motiveless. They weren’t. In our revulsion, our need to assign a label, and an equally strong need to distance ourselves from these killers, we hastened to dismiss them as sick, demented, insane. They weren’t. Many of them were “nice guys.”

  What I eventually concluded offended everyone’s sensibilities. It arrived one day in a blinding flash from Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “they” were “us.”

  When I was young, in addition to a taste for the comics, I learned many things from my father. It is difficult to gain enlightenment from someone who is inebriated most of the time, but when he spoke in that thick brogue of his, I listened. He was uneducated, at least formally, but intelligent—a working-class drunk who imbibed philosophy when he wasn’t sucking down Seagram’s Seven in his tea.

  He was … an unusual man. I wanted to know him, and I wanted him to know me. I remember wandering into his room one morning. He was reading, so I sat at the foot of his bed.

  “Did you know that William Blake saw God?” he asked.

  His voice had a raspy quality. It always did. Like someone shaking off the morning’s alcoholic rust and trying to jump-start the day.

  I shook my head.

  “When he was a wee lad, about your age, he saw God looking at him. Blake wasn’t crazy. He knew that the things we touch and smell and hear can matter only when they lead us back into our minds to what we can imagine. He knew that we must have evil. How else would we measure good? If we have heaven, we must have hell. He trusted his own mind, lad. He didn’t wait for the priests and teachers to catch up. It’s a heavy burden to bear, this trusting of your own mind.”

  “If I saw God,” I said, “I might believe in Him.”

  “Aye, but ye’d probably be wrong. Maybe Blake did see the old guy. Maybe he didn’t. But he definitely felt God inside his mind.”

  He coughed, lighted a Pall Mall, then added, “That never happened to me, but I remain open to the possibility.”

  Now, my father’s words echoed in my head: He trusted his own mind, lad. That’s what I had always tried to do, and it’s what I had to do now. My mind would lead me to a killer, if I allowed it to.

  After the pilot’s announcement about our arrival time and the weather in D.C, Lane flipped open her laptop computer.

  “You kids can’t go anywhere without those things,” I said, trying to focus my attention on a volume of poetry by Christina Rossetti.

  “Do you think you’re ever going to join the twentieth century, Pop?”r />
  “Doubtful. I’m in the nineteenth right now.”

  I watched as she popped disks in and out, tapped commands, read whatever it was that the screen had to tell her.

  “When did you ever work for the DEA?” she asked.

  “Never did.”

  “When I get all of these characteristics in here and run the search, it says GOTO:DEA. But when I type DEA, nothing happens.”

  “Give Ginger a call when we get to D.C.,” I suggested. “I don’t know anything about it. We don’t have those things here in the nineteenth century.”

  “Used properly, it saves time. Think of it as a tool.”

  “Technology is a drug. If we allow ourselves to become dependent on it, we’re going to forget how to use our own powers of reasoning. People don’t read enough anymore. They have ‘multimedia experiences.’ Sounds vaguely obscene, if you ask me. I’ll take Lady Chatterley’s Lover any day.”

  Lane laughed as she slipped the small computer back into its case.

  It was time to include my daughter in my thinking, so I started with the day of the shooting. “I saw him. He was dressed in black, dark glasses, maybe six feet tall. From his posture, I’d say that he learned to shoot in the military. He shouldn’t have missed. Then he walked into the kitchen and tore the page from Peterson—an elaborate game. Put that together with all the other characteristics you were tapping into your twentieth-century toy.”

  I paused to allow Lane time to absorb that information, then said, “We’re talking about John Wolf.”

  “A copycat. Like I said before. Somebody who studied Wolf, who is imitating him.”

  “Copycats are rare, Lanie. The concept appeals to the law enforcement community more than it equates with reality. Fear of the copycat becomes a convenient excuse to withhold more information in a case than is necessary. There have been a few. The Tylenol case comes to mind. When it does happen, it’s a different pathology from what I’ve encountered among serial killers. Typically, it’s someone at the fringes of sanity, about to tip over anyway. He hasn’t had any formulated plan. There hasn’t been anything to copy. The actions of the first killer serve as a catalyst, a trigger, and off he goes.”

  I looked at Lane and said, “We’re going to see Dexter Willoughby.”

  Willoughby was the FBI agent who showed up at the old house in Vermont right after the explosion that I assumed had taken Wolf’s life. Willoughby took over that scene, sealed it, then headed thirty-five miles north to secure Wolf’s entire business operation.

  “Willoughby wouldn’t take my calls when I tried to reach him from Lake Albert. That’s why I was … out of sorts when I got back from town.”

  “There’s no way Wolf could have walked out of that inferno.”

  “I didn’t think so, either. I’m still not convinced. Everyone, including me, assumed that Wolf was dead simply because of the force of the explosion. As far as I know, his death was never confirmed.”

  “How could he have survived that, Pop? No one could.”

  I thought about the last time that I had seen John Wolf. The killer was in the cellar of his boyhood home, sprawled on top of a bomb that was buried in the coal bin. It was the same coal bin that he had been locked in as a child—his stepfather’s preferred method of discipline over the years.

  “Lane, what might Wolf have done with all of those childhood hours alone in the terrifying darkness of that dungeon?”

  Claw at the earth. Dig. Make your way toward freedom. Slow and steady, lad.

  There was a large slab of sandstone in one corner of the coal bin. I had noticed it when I reburied Wolf’s own explosives and changed his timing device. What would I have found if I had lifted it?

  Wolf was fascinated with birds. The killdeer is a bird that builds its nest in a depression in the earth. If someone comes too near the nest, the bird emerges, feigns injury, hobbles with bent wing. I could see Wolf collapsing to the ground, wounded, like the killdeer only pretends to be. I could see him tunneling free from the cellar, dragging himself far away from the house.

  Alive. Healed now. Taking flight. Seeking vengeance.

  “If Willoughby wouldn’t take your calls, he’s not gonna let us through the front door.”

  “I’m confident that he already regrets not talking with me,”

  “Huh? Pop, he shut me out of the Wolf case totally. He didn’t let the Vermont authorities in on any of it, either. After the first couple of days, he even began keeping his partner, Susan Walker, out of it. I hear he got all the credit for a major case cleared. He probably landed in a corner office, and sits behind a mahogany desk.”

  “I called a friend,” I said. “Agent Willoughby will see us. If Wolf did get out of there alive, Willoughby is the one person who would know.”

  SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE CORNER OFFICE. Willoughby’s secretary ushered us in. But the desk that the FBI special agent was sitting behind was walnut, not mahogany. I nodded at the desk.

  “Win some, lose some,” I mumbled to Lane.

  The small, slender man had been with the FBI for twenty years. He had worked with John Douglas, the legendary profiler who later retired and went to work trying to catch up with Robert Ressler in the book and sound-bite business. Both men regurgitated the same cases over and over—the famous felons they had visited and felt threatened by—without contributing anything new to understanding why any of them had done what they had done.

  Willoughby had the requisite credentials, and because he was in the right places when the pictures were snapped, he was thought to be heir-apparent to those Quantico gurus. Willoughby was a political animal. He didn’t want any part of the Behavioral Science Unit’s windowless offices sixty feet beneath the earth at the FBI Academy in Virginia. Slithering around Washington was more his style.

  He had the requisite flag, the photograph of the president, the customary “praise” and “thank you” plaques, what I assumed was a photo of his family— posed like a Rockwell painting around a fireplace that could exist only on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post—and a framed snapshot of himself as a child, shaking hands with J. Edgar Hoover.

  Willoughby was a linear thinker—A leads to B leads to C. It’s the curse of the Western intellectual tradition, but our public schools keep shoving it down our throats anyway. I had told Lane that I imagined Dexter Willoughby doing the New York Times crossword in precise numerical order, never leaping ahead to the word at the heart of the puzzle—the one item that led to its solution. I also doubted that he had ever finished any of the puzzles.

  “The senator called,” Willoughby said.

  “Ah…yes. A friend of mine from college,” I told him.

  The agent’s face was the color of sourdough. “He threatened me with Boise if I didn’t cooperate.”

  For a fed, that’s worse than Havana. “They even take shots at the forest service people out there,” I said.

  I wanted this bastard to squirm, and he was well on the way.

  “What is it you want?”

  “Wolf.”

  The room was silent.

  “Snows a lot in Boise,” I reminded him gently. I am perfectly capable of being diplomatic.

  “We found five discrete sets of partial remains buried in the cellar. We were able to identify four. We still don’t know who the fifth victim was. They were all female, of course.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “The place was incinerated. Completely demolished.”

  Silence again. So I cracked my knuckles. One at a time. Diplomacy.

  Finally Willoughby spoke. “There was a tunnel.”

  I flashed on the slab of sandstone in the right rear corner of the coal bin.

  “It ran parallel to the foundation for about twenty feet, then cut away,” Willoughby went on. “The first ten feet collapsed in the explosion. The rest was intact.”

  Toward the crawl space beneath your parents’ bedroom. If you couldn’t get through the bolted door, you’d come up through the floor.
Once you had tunneled that far, you didn’t stop. You kept digging, excavating an escape route that led far from the house.

  “We figure that he worked on it over a number of years. He probably used a knife and a spoon. We found a spoon down there. We do not, however, consider the tunnel a means of egress for a six-foot adult of medium build.”

  The determination, the absolute will, the consideration of every contingency. Kill them all, lad, then crawl away to a world you created.

  “What else did you find?”

  “Nothing,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.

  “Did it occur to you that Wolf might not be dead?”

  Willoughby cleared his throat, but continued to look at me. “I never saw any basis for that assumption. Our official position is that he is dead. No one could have survived the devastation caused by that bomb.”

  “What’s your unofficial position?”

  “I wanted proof,” he said. “I didn’t get it. I had to be content with the circumstantial evidence which, as I’ve indicated, was quite compelling.”

  “Another woman has been murdered,” Lane said.

  Willoughby nodded. “Yes. I was sorry to hear about that.”

  “She was a friend of Pop’s. He tried to kill Pop, and nearly succeeded.”

  Willoughby’s eyes widened. He looked confused. “A month ago, Wolf’s sister, Sarah Humphrey, was killed in her home near Orlando. That’s who I thought you meant.”

  I stared into the agent’s muddy brown eyes. “Let me guess. The local cops worked it as an isolated case. As what? Home intrusion? Sexual assault?”

  “There was extensive postmortem cutting, and evidence of rape.”

  Sarah Humphrey. Once a young, slender, attractive object of her brother’s fantasies, but approaching middle age now. Remember when you lusted for a taste of her, lad?

  “We never found anything that suggested that Wolf sexually assaulted any of his victims,” Lane said. “Why would he rape her, Pop?”

  You have gone beyond power, control, humiliation— even beyond destruction. “Extensive postmortem cutting,” Willoughby said. You hacked her to pieces.