Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  “He was consummating a relationship that had existed only in his mind,” I told her.

  “Wolf couldn’t be alive,” the agent was saying.

  “Willoughby, you’re a sonofabitch,” Lane snapped. “You suspected that Wolf might not have died in the explosion. When you couldn’t match up any of the remains in that cellar with Wolf, why the hell didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you warn Pop? And why didn’t you tell anyone when Sarah Humphrey turned up dead?”

  Willoughby was shaking his head. “Wolf is dead,” he said.

  You have always re-created yourself, lad. What are you now? And where?

  LANE AND I STOOD IN THE ELEVATOR. “LET’S get a couple of rooms at the Willard,” I said. “I’d like a comfortable bed and some sleep.”

  “You hurting?”

  “No. I’m just tired.”

  “Do you really think that Wolf is alive?”

  “I’m never certain of anything, Lane. I don’t think anyone could do a perfect impression of a Paul Sierra painting, or one of Clapton’s riffs. As you know, I also don’t believe in coincidence. Sarah Humphrey? Why would Willoughby even have been informed about that case? It’s a local matter. Somebody must have thought he should know.”

  I was already hating every minute of what I was doing. I wanted it over.

  “Can’t you get Willoughby to help us?” Lane asked.

  “I don’t want him to. I don’t want to muck around in some federal bureaucracy. I want to resolve this and get back to the lake.”

  Janet Orr had been reduced to a case number, unsolved. A killer who wouldn’t stop killing until he was dead was free to methodically slake himself like a shark at a shipwreck.

  “If Wolf survived,” Lane said, “you’ve got no business going after him. He’d be at the top of his form. You’re hurting. You need rest.”

  Autumn bass fishing on Lake Albert is about as good as it gets, at least until winter crashes into the back end of October. I wanted to reclaim my home, build a fire in the woodstove, curl up with a good book and a cold bottle of ale. But there was a killer in my way.

  “Whoever it is could still be at the lake,” Lane went on.

  You’re here, aren’t you, lad? And you want me here.

  I had been played like a fine-tuned piano, manipulated, misled.

  “No,” I told Lane. “I don’t think so.”

  WHEN POP SAID WE WERE GOING TO STAY AT the Willard, my heart did a little dance in my chest. For years, I had been wanting to stay there—ever since I learned who Emily Dickinson was. The Willard is where she slept when she visited Washington a century and a half ago. I just wished that the circumstances of our stay were different.

  “Can we get a couple of the expensive rooms?” I asked.

  “At the Willard, there isn’t any other kind. Let’s not go crazy. We don’t need any presidential suites. Just beds and indoor plumbing.”

  Pop was in a foul mood. But it didn’t faze me at all— it’s actually rather endearing when he stomps around and acts all sullen. I suspected that he was wondering how to convince a bureaucracy that someone it has listed as dead, is not dead. Or, more likely, how to avoid dealing with that bureaucracy at all.

  “If this is official business, is there anybody we can pass the bill along to?” I asked.

  I was about two paychecks away from going on public assistance.

  “This is my business. Nobody else’s. I’ll take care of the tab.”

  It’s a little unsettling when Pop gets that tone in his voice. He seems to turn into one of those military tanks, the kind that can roll right over anything in its path. It isn’t that he’s necessarily loud or crashing around, although I’ve seen his mad elephant impression many times in my life.

  This particular tone is almost too calm, too void of emotion.

  A PROMENADE CALLED PEACOCK ALLEY. THE Round Robin Bar. The Nest Lounge. Surrounded by so many feather connotations, it was hard to keep my mind off murder and John Wolf. Leaving a feather at the scene of a homicide had been one of Wolf’s favorite signatures. I was determined not to let him ruin my stay at the Willard—the home of the promenade, the bar, and the lounge.

  When I first read about Emily Dickinson staying there, I pictured the Willard as a dowdy hotel, a dusty, dirty hole in the wall where legislators parked themselves while in D.C. on government business. Emily’s father was in politics. She accompanied him to Washington one spring, which is how she happened to stay at the Willard.

  Because of my preconceptions, I was unprepared for the grandeur of the place. Mosaic tile floors, giant chandeliers, velvet-covered chairs, marble columns supporting the massive ornate ceiling of the lobby, potted palms that were even taller than I am—it was like stepping onto a lavish movie set.

  Pop and I had side-by-side rooms. He made immediate use of the bed, deciding to take a nap as soon as we got our luggage upstairs. “Wake me for dinner,” he said, pushing me out the door.

  I went into my own room then, for the first time. Once again I was struck by what a class act the Willard was. My own private minibar, a bed big enough for an orgy, and a telephone in the bathroom. Savvy would have liked that.

  WHILE POP NAPPED, I CALLED GINGER AND Explained that I needed her help with the relational database. The message “GO TO:DEA” meant that I should pull up the dead file, she said.

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  “The file where I put all the cases that are in God’s hands. The perp’s dead. The program’s just directing you to someone with characteristics similar to what you’re looking for.”

  She explained how to open the file, I thanked her and hung up the phone. I located the disk that I had been working on when we were still at the lake, and popped it into my laptop. I went through all the steps that led to the GOTO:DEA message, then I typed DEAD.DOC, according to Ginger’s instructions.

  John Wolf’s dossier appeared on my screen.

  I kept rerunning the database—using different combinations of the characteristics that Pop and I had discussed—and each time it came out the same. John Wolf. Maybe this would boost Pop’s faith in technology.

  I called Pop’s room.

  He picked up the phone and said, “You know I hate these things.”

  “Time for dinner,” I said. “I’ll be over in a minute.”

  POP OPENED THE DOOR AND ASKED, “DID YOU bring a weapon?”

  “My thirty-eight.”

  “Good. I have a nine-millimeter. I’ll call my friend the senator and arrange to have a D.C. detective work with us. When I talked with him yesterday, he told me about a cop named Williams.”

  “What about somebody else from the Bureau?”

  “Their official position is that Wolf is dead. I told you that I don’t want to waste a lot of time getting shunted from one paper-pusher to another. I’m going to take care of this. Now.”

  “Pop, I came out to the lake because—”

  “This time it will be different,” he interrupted.

  “Very different.”

  HOURS LATER, ALONE IN MY ROOM, I TRIED TO fall asleep. I don’t know what bothered me more—the bulge of the .38 under my pillow, or the hotel’s ambient creakings that I attributed either to the ghost of Emily Dickinson or to death unkindly stopping for me in the guise of John Wolf.

  I also realized that I didn’t know what Pop had meant by “different.” Would his method of dealing with Wolf be more legal?

  Or would it be more final?

  I HAD NOT NAPPED.

  I had no intention of wasting time sleeping, coddling myself over a couple of superficial wounds.

  When Lane went to her room, I made arrangements for a car and drove to Vienna, Virginia. There, I sat on the curb of a tree-lined street, watching a green Volvo station wagon approach.

  It was time to deal with asshole number one.

  Dexter Willoughby pulled his car to the curb, then stood behind the open door. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He glance
d at his house.

  “I didn’t ring the bell,” I said. “Why don’t you go inside, check your messages, then rejoin me here at curbside.”

  “Listen,” he began.

  “I suggest you check your messages,” I said again.

  The little federal cop grabbed his briefcase, slammed the car door, and did his best impression of an indignant, angry man striding up his driveway toward the rear of his house.

  I was in no mood to play games with Willoughby. I was convinced that John Wolf was busy stalking his next victim. Despite his killing Janet Orr, and his shots at me, I didn’t think I was next on his immediate list, but neither did I know who that next victim would be.

  Willoughby came down the walk, having shed his briefcase and suit jacket. His vest and school tie were still immaculately in place as he stood behind my left shoulder.

  “Be a shame to have to sell a place like this,” I said. “Nice neighborhood.”

  “Senator Storrs said that I was to cooperate fully,” he said, dropping two files on the sidewalk next to me.

  One was labeled Humphrey, the second, Chad-wick. I looked up at Willoughby. “Alan Chadwick?”

  “Two months ago, Dr. Chadwick died in a fall from the roof of Boston City Hospital.”

  Shit. Chadwick was the pathologist whose identity John Wolf had stolen and used for years in Hasty Hills, Connecticut. Without opening the file, I was already convinced that Wolf had killed Chadwick in the same way that he had killed Chadwick’s girlfriend years earlier—when all three of them were students in Cambridge. Wolf had hurled her from the roof of her dorm.

  “What else do you want?” Willoughby asked.

  I had to exert every ounce of my energy to refrain from throttling the little prick. I patted the curb. “Pull up a slab.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  “The superiority that affords is an illusion, Willoughby.”

  “There wasn’t any trace of Wolf. He’s dead. Totally incinerated.”

  I stood up, staring down into the agent’s eyes—the eyes that had betrayed him.

  When Lane and I were in his office earlier in the day, I had watched his eyes, determined the pattern of his eye movements as they related to what he was saying. At some time in his career, Willoughby had taken a course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and knew about the involuntary movements of eye muscles. He had countered his own orientation, switching left with right, and had embellished that with a technique I had seen only once or twice before. When they lie, most people avoid eye contact. When Willoughby lied, it was the only time that he made eye contact.

  “What else did you find in Vermont?”

  He stared into my eyes and said nothing.

  “Good luck out west,” I said, turning to leave.

  “There was a sheet of paper in the loft that he used for an office. Is that what you want? It was stuck in a book. It was dated, and he wrote down the time. It was just before you got there.”

  “You found it in The Collector. The John Fowles book.”

  A year ago, expecting Wolf to have a copy of the same book that cross-country killer Christopher Wilder considered a bible was pure hunch on my part. It had been one of those intuitive grabs based only on my feeling for Wolf’s mind before I had ever laid eyes on him. I had been right.

  Willoughby went pale. “You’re a fucking nightmare. Yes. He said he was reaching the end. It was crazy. It didn’t make any sense.”

  “What were the words?”

  Willoughby sighed. “He had reached the end of the road, and he had to die. There was something about entering the long tunnel of night, then killing everyone who had destroyed him. You can’t kill anybody after you die. He’s dead. How can it mean anything?”

  You anticipated my every move, didn’t you, lad?

  Wolf had drawn me to Vermont, just as he had drawn me to Washington. He had set the elaborate scene, not me. I even had to wonder whether he gave a shit about the Fowles book, or if that had been for my benefit, too.

  Shaken, I backed away from Willoughby.

  “I told you it was crazy,” he said.

  Death, after all, had been on Wolf’s terms, not mine.

  He had planned “to die.” The bastard knew I would shove him into the coal bin, just as his stepfather had done countless times. He knew that he would have to use his tunnel.

  There was no point in trying to educate Willoughby. What he was, he would always be. He would never understand the absolute, maniacal brilliance of a man like John Wolf. Willoughby was just plain, fucking dumb when it came to a killer who had the perfect combination of intelligence, determination, and belief in his own justification.

  “Crazy? I don’t think so.” I said, hearing the tremor in my voice.

  I turned and walked away down the suburban street.

  YEARS AGO, WHEN I TALKED WITH MORGAN WYLIE, he was a man who needed an audience. He sat in a dank jail cell, three pairs of socks covering his forever frigid feet. He was doing three months for retail theft, but the cops wanted him for a lot more than that.

  He knew how to manipulate his interviewers. Others had talked with him, so he had honed his skills. He expected me to ask him about the murders, to try to wheedle a confession out of him. Instead, I encouraged him to tell me about his life, about the police harassing him, about how hard it was to make a living. I urged him to tell me his complaints about the jail—lousy food, no medical or dental care—the usual laments of the jailhouse lost.

  The approach is elementary. Create a positive response set. Get the guy talking about anything. Keep him talking. The more he determines his agenda, the better. Do not try to direct him.

  My training and experience had also taught me that when a man uses the same number in situations where any random number will do, the repeated number holds some significance for him—a date, an age, an accumulation of something that he has been counting. Wylie’s number was ten—maybe ten times a month they had a decent meal; there was often a ten-day wait to see the doctor; he had about ten of his own teeth left in his head.

  Having listened to him ramble for over two hours, it was time to take a chance.

  “Morgan, what I’m really interested in hearing is what happened to you when you were ten years old.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I found a five-dollar bill in the road. Ma said I stole it from her jar. I didn’t, though. She got Jake, her boyfriend, to beat me so I wouldn’t steal no more.”

  There was more emotion in Wylie’s voice than anyone had previously reported about any of the elaborate stories he told. “I came in the door with the fuckin’ thing in my hand. If I was gonna hide it or spend it, would I do that? I wanted to give it to her to help with the bills. She didn’t believe me, I was so happy that day She was always tellin’ me I weren’t no good, that I was a drain because I ate too much. I was gonna give her this to make some of it right. She turned Jake on me. He hammered me real bad. Then he made me suck him off.”

  There was a glaze over Wylie’s eyes. His acne-scarred face contorted in rage. “After that, he did it whenever he felt like it. I ran away some—made it all the way to El Paso once, but they brought me back.”

  “You made a decision then,” I said.

  He was nodding. Wylie believed that no one had ever cared enough about him to listen to him—certainly not the local cops who wanted him dead, or his federal visitors with their checklists. Now, here was a stranger who was willing to listen. A stranger who even seemed to understand. “Weren’t no way anyone ever again was gonna put me one down. J was gonna be the one who said, ‘Down on your knees, boy’ Assume the position, boy’ ”

  It was pure vengeance thinking. His treatment at Jake’s hands was his worst secret, the one event in his sordid life that he would not want anyone to know. Despite the fact that he was in a positive response set, I knew that he was not going to write his own death warrant. I asked him when he had developed his circulatory problem. That question would seem to him as if he were moving away from
a topic that was painful for him, toward something like our original agenda—his health and welfare. Then I redefined his reality, equating unburdening himself with saving his feet from amputation. Lethal injection was a remote thought for Morgan at that moment, but his feet were cold.

  Seventeen times across Louisiana and East Texas, Morgan Wylie played “Jake” to a boy between eight and eleven years old. He gave each victim a five-dollar bill, then killed him.

  While awaiting execution, Morgan had woven lengths of bedsheet together and tried to hang himself. He nearly succeeded. Emergency medical personnel resuscitated him—brought him back to life so that the state could kill him.

  I was convinced that someone had brought Wolf back to life. He had made it clear that he would never be caged. So someone had to kill him—again.

  Wolf was not only the perfect psychopath. He was also a narcissist—a not uncommon combination of pathologies. Wolf would never accept the ego bruises that he had sustained in Vermont. He expected all people on their knees in worshipful pose before him. When they were not, he was enraged. It festered as a “kiss-my-feet-or-I’ll-slit-your-throat” situation.

  I had failed to kiss his feet.

  BEFORE I LEFT LAKE ALBERT, WHEN I WAS STUCK with having to use a telephone anyway, I had placed a call to the Vermont State Police. The dispatcher put me through to a captain named Braxton. I explained who I was and why I was calling. The captain hesitated, then said he didn’t see any harm in telling me that a car had been stolen in Saxtons River about three hours after Wolf’s house exploded. “We get a few kids joyriding down that way occasionally, but this car never turned up.”

  It made sense to me that it would have taken Wolf a couple of hours to get to the village. He was wounded; I had shot him. He had to stumble his way through the woods. If he did take the car, where did he go?

  Two of his bullet wounds had been superficial. He could treat those himself. I did not know exactly where I had hit him the third time, but it was somewhere in the abdomen. He would have needed help with that one.