by John Philpin
I’ve read many of the interviews. I’ve seen the photographs—Ressler and Douglas posed like midgets on either side of Edmund Kemper. They went to obtain their own trophies. Is the motivation to collect souvenirs any different for them than it was for Joel Rifkin, the Long Island killer?
I found the unmarked road that I was seeking, made my turn, and began the long drive to the gatehouse.
Profilers are amateurs, racing around the country speaking authoritatively because they have a collection of numbers—probabilities. They drop names. They have talked to Charles Manson, John Gacy, Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross. The caged killers kept them running in circles—telling them partial truths and total bullshit—but the agents didn’t care. Their audiences on the workshop circuit looked up at them in awe.
I stopped at the small enclosure, handing the rent-a-guard my identification, my instructions from Agent Cooper, and the name of my contact—Special Agent Hiram Jackson.
“Straight ahead, then to the right, Dr. Krogh,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Of course, I had no trouble finding the large gray building with the sign in front—FBI Academy. The offices of the Behavioral Science Unit, Investigative Support Services, were underground.
The site of the carnage to come.
At the entrance to the building, I presented the same materials that I had at the gatehouse. A middle-aged woman with a soft southern accent informed me that Special Agent Jackson was “in the field.”
“I’m not certain when he’ll be back, Doctor,” she said.
“That’s a shame. I have only today and part of tomorrow to complete the preliminary work that Special Agent Cooper wanted. He seemed so sure that Agent Jackson would be available.”
“Let me see if there’s another agent who can help you,” she said, then, after a moment on the phone, asked, “How much time will you need?”
“I won’t know that until I’ve seen the site photographs and the soil samples. I just need a corner somewhere. Space isn’t a problem, but I don’t know about the time.”
She repeated that information into the phone, listened, then hung up. “It’ll just be a minute.”
I didn’t recognize the agent who opened the door, “Sam Draper,” he said, extending his hand. “Sorry about the inconvenience. You’re here on the Oklahoma case, right?”
“For Herb Cooper, yes.”
“Let me just ask you to walk through the metal detector. Any keys you have, pocket change.”
I smiled. “I know the routine. You’d better take this, too,” I said, handing him my briefcase.
“What’s in this thing?” he asked, hefting the case.
I walked through the metal detector, setting off no alarms. “Magnifying glasses, small hammers, picks, tweezers, a microscope. Open it. It’s not locked.”
He slipped the two latches and gazed at the trays of tools resting in velvet compartments. He snapped it shut and handed it back, returning a .44 Magnum, two knives, and my strips of plasticized cyclonite.
“Follow me, Dr. Krogh,” he said.
I stepped through the door behind the agent, glancing at the institutional decor, then began my descent into the catacombs that housed those who most wanted me.
LANE WAS AT THE DISTRICT PD. SHE AND DETECtive Williams were reviewing more of the lead sheets they had generated when they distributed the Wolf composites.
I scribbled a note explaining where I was going and why, then left for the airport.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that answers awaited me in the mountains. I just wished that I had a better grasp on what the questions were.
I HAD PHONED AHEAD AND ARRANGED TO MEET Corporal Lucy Travis of the Vermont State Police at the airport in Burlington. Travis had eight years in with the VSP, had worked the double homicide in Swanton, and she could communicate in sign language.
“I appreciate your meeting me on such short notice,” I said.
She was tall, and seemed to be a slender woman, but she was bulked out by the uniform and equipment she carried. I was reminded what my daughter looked like before she moved to Homicide and was permitted to wear her own clothes.
As we drove north on 1-89, Travis said, “I remember reading about the Wolf case. The house blew up with him in it. I thought that was the end.”
“So did I. Events seem to be proving me wrong.”
We left the city limits of Burlington and Winooski, driving through countryside that glowed with the dying traces of autumn.
“How early do you get your first frost?” I asked.
“We’ve had a couple,” she said. “We had snow this time last year.”
Of course they had snow at this time last year. I was here for it.
After a few moments of silence, Travis said, “You think Wolf is responsible for our Swanton cases.” “Those two, and at least four since.” She didn’t say anything more, just nodded.
TRAVIS AND I SAT IN THE POLICE STATION IN Swanton. I looked into the dark eyes of a young Abenaki woman named Terry.
She was not the homeless waif that I had expected. Terry was a poised sixteen-year-old dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt bearing the logo of a rock band, “BugJack.” She wore a silver nose ring.
Her inability to speak did nothing to conceal a streak of defiance to rival any other teenager’s.
I explained who I was and what I wanted.
Terry stared at me.
When I placed the composites in front of her, she pushed through them with one hand, found the picture she wanted, and shoved it across the table at me. Then she signed briefly.
I looked up at Lucy Travis. “Terry said, ’He told us he was like us, of the wolf. He lied. He is a jackal.’”
“What happened at the trailer?” I asked.
I listened to Travis as Terry stared into my eyes and signed. She had seen Wolf shoot her uncle.
During the time that Wolf stayed at the trailer, Terry avoided going home. She stayed with her boyfriend or relatives because of the meanness, the evil that she sensed in the man. It was in his eyes, in the way he moved, the few gestures that he made. He was too relaxed, like someone who believed that he had the answers to all the questions in the world. Whenever she returned to the trailer, Terry looked through a window before entering. If Wolf was there, she went away.
On the night of the shootings, Terry approached the trailer and peered in through a front window just as Wolf fired his handgun. Her uncle fell. Terry ran to the diner where her mother worked, hoping to catch her, to warn her before her mother went home. Another waitress told her that Echo had gone to the local library.
“ ‘I ran into town,’ ” Corporal Travis translated, “ ‘but my mother was gone. Everywhere I went, I missed her. When I got back to our road, it was dark. I went into the woods. My mother was lying on the walk. I could see her blood. He came outside, stepped over her, and drove away in my uncle’s pickup.’ ”
“I’m sorry, Terry,” I said.
She shrugged, then signed.
“She wants to know if you’re the Frank who haunted the jackal’s dreams,” Travis said.
I raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Perhaps.”
“ ‘When he first got there, some nights I watched him sleep,’ ” Travis continued. “ ‘I sat near the couch and listened to him talk in his sleep. He said that Frank shot him. He was buried as dead, and it was Frank’s fault. My mother helped him to heal and he killed her. I wish you were a better shot. You should have killed him, Frank.’ ”
I gazed down at the computer-enhanced drawing that Terry had selected.
Death had not changed John Wolf.
CORPORAL TRAVIS DROPPED ME AT A CAR RENTAL agency.
“Thanks for all your help,” I said.
“I’m wondering how I explain to my captain that John Wolf is our suspect in the Swanton double murder.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help, of course I will. You’re welcome to the material we have. I don’t know how cooperati
ve the FBI will be, but Hiram Jackson would be the agent to contact.”
Travis gave me her business card, and I gave her the number at the Willard.
WHEN I SWITCHED ON THE IGNITION IN THE RENTAL car, the radio came on. On my trip south on 1-89 toward Saxtons River, I was saddened to learn that Wal-Mart had conquered Vermont. Even the Green Mountain State—declared the most liberal state in the nation after the last election—had allowed the monster chain store and corporate censor to open up shop. The bad news got worse.
The same elected officials who seemed hell-bent on leveling the population’s taste and destroying old downtown areas now had focused their acumen on the mind-body relationship. What thousands of years of theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology had been unable to understand, the Vermont legislature would decide by fiat. They were debating a “parity bill,” an action that would require insurance carriers to offer equal coverage for emotional and medical disorders. There was no mention of the soul.
At the same time, a separate government committee was investigating whether HMOs were sacrificing quality in health care to increase profits, exactly what some prognosticators had predicted years ago. Now, of course, managed care horror stories were being told nationwide.
With insurance money weighing more than Wal-Mart’s fortune, and “Boomers” entering their arthritic, menopausal, depressed, bowel-clogged, and prostatic years, there was more money to be made. Since the politicians had rolled over for Sam Walton’s empire, there was little justification to hope for reasonable access to health care for the body or the mind.
Somewhere near Bethel, I switched off the radio. Vermont’s few remaining non-plywood cows were far more enjoyable to see than the state’s surplus of simpleton politicians were to hear.
I had no idea what I would find at the old place. I was guessing, just as Dexter Willoughby had guessed. I figured that Willoughby probably had spent most of his time around the foundation and whatever else remained of the house. I wasn’t going to have much daylight, so as I drove, I thought about how to narrow my search.
I had disliked Dexter Willoughby, but I knew that he was not a stupid man. He had been searching for something more than evidence of Wolf’s death—souvenirs, trophies-—a cache of special things that the killer had collected. Joel Rifkin had kept his victims’ jewelry on his bureau. Jeffrey Dahmer had kept his victims in his freezer.
Jesus, what were we coming to?
I remembered the apple trees where Wolf, as a child, had built a town. He took scraps of wood and other building materials that his stepfather had left around and designed a miniature village on the hill behind their house.
He built his perfect world. No people.
When I turned onto the road that led to Wolf’s old house, I knew immediately where I was, and remembered my last trip there. I had gone away thinking that I had ended a killer’s life.
Terry said that I should have been a better shot. She was right.
It was odd. As I pulled off the road and parked, I felt fear bubbling somewhere inside of me. Willoughby had intended that his fence keep out intruders. What if he had locked something in?
The place had been leveled by the explosion and fire, then excavated like an archaeological dig. The sweet scent of honeysuckle was in sharp contrast to the stench of charred wood and paint. Separate piles of foundation stones, dirt, and ashes were scattered on the house lot. The entire place looked like Willoughby had gone over it with a backhoe. Even the tunnel— winding its way from the building site, up through the field and onto a slope beside the orchard—had been opened up and lay like a jagged wound upon the earth.
The agent fervently believed that Wolf had concealed something there.
Clumps of beech and birch leaned like gray and white sentinels over an open grave. A soft breeze through the grass and leaves whispered like mourners, or the ghosts of the dead.
Wolf had buried victims here. It had been my intent that this mass grave receive its creator, but I had failed.
I unlocked the gate, then walked around the foundation hole toward the hill in back. I wandered out among the apple trees, looking at what had once been a clearing, long since reclaimed by nightshade and sumac.
In the 1920s, Carl Panzram kept a journal that documented his years in a brutal reform school, his twenty-one murders, and his thousands of other crimes. John Wolf, a Proustian obsessive, had kept a meticulous computer record of his own savagery. His was a rigid and self-serving attention to detail.
When police searched Rifkin’s bedroom in his modest Long Island home, they found his collection— photographs of his victims, their jewelry, credit cards, clothing. Wolf, too, was a collector, and a meticulous labeler of whatever he accumulated.
Wolf’s words were logged in his computer, or jotted on scraps of paper and filed alphabetically. He had altered crime scenes by adding objects to some, removing items from others. No one had ever found the cache of materials that were most important to him, that gave him the greatest pleasure when he fingered through them. These items—possibly a lock of a victim’s hair, a photo, a piece of clothing—would have anchored him to the reality he had created for himself, and allowed him to relive his conquests.
I wandered through the clearing into the surrounding brush, kicking at the clumped grass, occasionally gazing back at the cellar hole where Wolf and I had struggled.
I had nearly died here.
On that day a year ago, I had told Wolf to get into the coal bin.
I asked him, “What about your trophies?”
He said that most of “them”—his victims—were less than memorable.
Bullshit. He knew all the details. He recorded every last bit of information.
I turned to look at the sun disappearing behind the hill.
What was most important to you, lad?
I imagined Wolf answering, “To defeat fear.”
He had returned again and again to the one place that frightened him most, the house where fear resided. I remembered the taped music that played as he killed Sarah Sinclair—Julian Cope’s “Fear Loves This Place.”
His stash contains objects that he loves.
“Where the hell would he put it?” I muttered.
The apple trees marked the boundaries of your sanctuary, didn’t they, lad?
I walked to the middle of the triangle formed by the three gnarled trees. Willoughby had not dug here. I kicked at the dirt, unearthing fragments of ancient lath and plaster, metal wire casing—the remnants of Wolf’s town.
If you could defy the night, survive your stepfather’s cellar, you believed that you would emerge stronger and more powerful. You had to do it over and over. Taste your fear, then spit it out.
I was preoccupied, drifting, and didn’t hear the footsteps until the last possible second. I swung around, my hand on my gun.
“Just leave it be,” the young man said, leveling a long-barreled .38 at me.
He was tall and muscular, in his twenties, and wore a knapsack over his red flannel hunting shirt. His John Deere cap held his scraggly blond hair captive, and he gripped a Budweiser in his left hand. He also had a deer rifle strapped over his shoulder.
“You another fed? Jesus. All you fuckin’ assholes carry”
“I’m not a fed,” I told him.
His eyes were glazed. I figured the beer probably wasn’t his first of the day.
“The other dipshit chased me out of here with a nine,” he said. “You Lucas Frank?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “How did you know that?”
“I’m gonna want to see some ID. I got something for you, and I’m gonna be fuckin’ glad to get rid of it.”
“I have to reach into my pocket to get my wallet.”
“Go ahead and do it. You come up with something besides a wallet, you ain’t gonna have no balls left. Maybe a guy your age don’t care about that.”
He drained his beer can and tossed it. “I’ve taken all the shit I’m gonna take over this fuckin’ th
ing.”
I reached for my wallet, and held it up so that he could see my photo ID. He glanced at it, then slipped the knapsack off and tossed it at my feet.
“What I’m supposed to tell you is that a guy came here a couple of months ago and left that for you. He said his name was Charles Weathers. I don’t fuckin’ believe him. He paid me a thousand bucks to make sure you got that. Said if I didn’t give it to you when you came, he’d come back and stick a Buck knife in my chest. That I believed. You got your shit. Now I’m leaving.”
“Wait. The man who owns this land …”
“The fed? First time he came was way before Weathers did, not long after the old house blew up. That’s when he put up the fence. After Weathers gave me the money, I seen a car parked where yours is and came up here to see if it was you. I got as far as the gate, and the asshole chased me off. Other times, I saw it was him and I didn’t bother. Weathers told me the little prick would keep coming back. He was right. He also called you a killer. That true?”
“I’m a doctor,” I said.
His laugh was a short, derisive bark. “I don’t fuckin’ believe any of you,” he said as he backed down the slope.
“Look, I need your help,” I said. “Just a few questions.”
“I done what I got paid to do. That’s it.”
I watched as he walked out through the gate and headed up the dirt road.
John Wolf had known that Willoughby would come here to search. Two months ago, Wolf had also anticipated my visit to the land, and made his arrangements. The man was uncanny.
I crouched over the knapsack and lifted out a rusty, dirt-encrusted lockbox that had obviously spent some time beneath the earth. Using my pocketknife, I jimmied it open.
I imagined that I could hear Wolf’s voice whisper, “What have you got?”
I fell back on the ground, lifting out musty, yellowed papers and photographs. I know what I had expected—a collection of artifacts related to Wolf, the moments of his special kills. I expected his whole life.
“My whole life,” I said into the emptiness. “My whole fucking life.”