The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  But was Robbins Wolf?

  I popped the tape out and slipped it into the hip pocket of my jeans. I wasn’t going to have time to consider Robbins as Wolf. Something about the apartment wasn’t right. Perfume—a heavy scent that I’d never use. Someone had been there. Fear was even tighter on me now than it had been in the alley. I just wanted to grab some clothes and get out of there.

  Still leading with the .32, I made my way into the bedroom, groping along the wall until I found the closet door. When I opened it and reached inside, I managed to grab some pants on my first try.

  There was just one problem. Somebody was wearing them.

  Robert

  At first I couldn’t sleep. Then I couldn’t sleep without dreaming. Then I couldn’t dream without drinking. Fifths of Wild Turkey, quarts of Jack Daniels, cases of Old Milwaukee floated like angels with brand names through the clouds of my head.

  I figured Fuzzy was a veteran at this sort of thing, so when he came in to visit, I told him about it.

  “Me, I had some winners,” he said. “In one of ’em I was riding a horse. Can you see me on a horse? I’ve never been near a fucking horse. It was Trigger, Roy Rogers’s horse. You know they got that sucker stuffed and standing around somewhere? I don’t mean like a museum or anything. It’s in their fucking living room. Maybe it’s Dale Evans. She always wore weird chaps. She’d do something like that. Anyway, it was a palomino I was riding. I’m sure of that. And I rode pretty good for the full-figured dude I am. Had a good fucking time, Bobby.”

  “Fuzzy, mine ain’t like that,” I told him.

  “Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “It’s just the weird shit your head does. One of the times I went through rehab, the shrink said you dream more when you get sober. The other time, the same shrink said research showed that alcoholics dream more when they’re soused. I think he had his head in the bottle, too.”

  Fuzzy was no help.

  The doc said it was normal.

  Lymann was even less help. “I never dream,” he said. “Once I have reality under control, maybe I’ll try it.”

  I was tired from lack of sleep. Then I was exhausted from sleeping. I had no idea what was going in through the hose they had stuck in my arm, but it had me fogged out. I always liked Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Now I knew what it was.

  They gave me a little blue pill on top of that “to help you relax and get some sleep.”

  I’d been a kid again, met the folks, revisited Christmases and Thanksgivings, B&Es I did when I was eight, somebody’s funeral when I was nine. I held Liza again. And I held Sarah again. I dodged bullets, ducked knives, greeted ghosts, ran from priests demanding my confession.

  But the one that shot me upright in the dark room, snapping out the IV line, bringing Lymann rocketing out of his sleep with leather straps in hand, started out like the drunk dream I’d had about Maine. It might have been the same scrub pine growth, the same clearing with a few scattered chunks of granite, and the man who called himself Carver-black suit and British accent—smoking the same cigarette.

  There were other people around this time. Some I recognized. Most I didn’t. And there was a group behind me applauding.

  Then it changed. All of us were indoors—my high school auditorium, then a TV studio. The applause was coming from the audience. They still clapped their hands, but now they also screamed out numbers—three, one, two, two, three. I was a contestant on that old quiz show, Let’s Make A Deal, only Fuzzy was the host.

  “Bobby, you gotta pick a door,” he said.

  I looked at the doors. The set was like a grammar school play I’d been in, except that back then the doors were the covers of giant, plywood books. I was Tom Sawyer, complete with a straw hat, ragged jeans, bare feet, and a shank of oat grass stuck in my teeth.

  “You gave away what you had for a chance to look behind the doors,” Fuzzy said.

  TWO. ONE. THREE. ONE. THREE. TWO. TWO.

  “Got any of that Irish?” I asked him.

  “Might be behind one of them doors, Bobby.”

  Then one of the doors popped open—number three—but there was nothing behind it.

  I was telling myself that I wanted to wake up. I couldn’t. But I could see through the doors. Sarah was back there, and Lane, and Carver-Wolf. They were moving around, shifting from place to place. Who would be behind which door?

  TWO. TWO. TWO. TWO.

  “One,” I told Fuzzy.

  The audience sighed in unison. The door opened. There was Wolf with his nickel-plated .32. This time he didn’t raise it toward my chest like he did with the .38 in my Maine dream. He turned toward door two.

  Fuzzy was gone. The audience was silent. Wolf smiled, and door two slipped open. Lane.

  Wolf’s arm moved upward. He pointed the gun toward her, then pulled back the hammer.

  That’s when I came up, the IV went flying, and Lymann landed on me with his straps of Spanish leather.

  “I’ll stay still. I’ll stay still,” I told him. “Just let me call Lane. I have to call her. I have to warn her. Lymann, don’t fucking do this. Wolf is going to kill her.”

  Lymann Murr did his job. He never spoke a word, didn’t even need the lights. After I was restrained, he called the nurse. She reinserted the IV, shot my ass full of something, then left.

  “I have to call Lane,” I told him. “Wolf is going to kill her.”

  He put the phone on my chest. “Touch-Tone,” he said. “You get one hand free. Play with anything else, I break the hand. Okay?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  I tried her number. I tried my number. No answer. I punched both numbers again, then her extension at the precinct. No Lane.

  “Lymann, you gotta get to her.”

  He removed the phone, rewrapped me with leather, then pulled up a chair beside the bed. “You will be sleeping soon,” he said. “I will continue to call my cousin. I take your fear seriously. But no wolves will bite Lane. She wouldn’t like that. Now I tell you more about Bob Marley, his hard life in Jamaica, the words he sings to my people.”

  Lymann might have said more. He probably did. But I was out.

  Lane

  As soon as I touched her, I knew that my visitor had been dead for a while—long enough for rigor mortis to set in. I used the penlight on my key chain to get a look at her face. It was Sheila, still wearing the same red spandex pants and metallic gold sweater she had on when I interviewed her earlier at the massage parlor.

  I no longer cared whether Hanson had anyone watching the place. I switched on the light.

  Sheila’s arms had been pulled behind her back and were bound at the wrists with gray duct tape. Another piece of tape covered her mouth. One of her red spike heels still clung to her foot; the other had fallen on top of one of my slippers on the closet floor.

  Sheila’s killer had screwed a quarter-inch steel eye hook into one of the joists in the closet’s ceiling. Then he ran a length of half-inch, yellow nylon rope through the eye to form a hangman’s noose, taking the time to make it perfect. Thirteen wraps.

  The inverted V-shaped bruise on her neck and the petechial hemorrhages in her eyelids told me that she was still alive when she was put away so neatly in my closet.

  I don’t know how many dead bodies I’ve seen during my career—enough that it no longer fazed me. But my reaction to finding Sheila went off the scale. My legs didn’t want to work, but I managed to move from room to room, checking every area where someone could conceal himself. I had the hammer back on the .32, ready to fire at anything that moved. I switched on all the lights as I went, satisfying myself that I was alone. Except for Sheila.

  Then I called Swartz at home.

  “I’ve got a problem,” I said.

  “I know. Hanson was in a huddle with someone from Internal Affairs all afternoon. They’re talking about going to the DA for a warrant on you if you don’t come in.”

  “I’ve got bigger troubles than that,” I said.

  “Y
ou went into Sarah’s house, Lane. You’re suspended. That makes it trespassing and tampering with a crime scene.”

  “Listen to me. I have a corpse in my closet. A woman named Sheila. I was talking to her just this morning.”

  “Jesus,” Swartz said. “Lane, stay there. Don’t move. I’ll call this in, then I’ll be right there.”

  “That won’t work. Hanson already wants to haul me in. Now I have a body in my closet. Look, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Swartz was silent for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Find the guy who did this. Before he does it to me.”

  I tucked the .32 into my waistband, grabbed the clothes I needed, and snatched up Robbins’s copy of Hunting Humans. Then I hurried back to Robert’s place, arriving just as a transmission from Pop was coming in. It wasn’t like him to be up so late.

  TO: Detective Frank, Semiretired

  FROM: Pop, Retired

  My question about the candles in Sarah’s house was rhetorical. There could be many other explanations, of course, but yours and mine are pretty much the same. It wasn’t just that he felt safe lingering there. It provided him with a sense of absolute control. Preliminarily, you concluded that there was no staging, no arranging of the body, etc. I concur, but there was something he did after he killed the young woman. It may not even be detectable, but he touched her somehow, maybe lifted her dress and replaced it—I don’t know. But I do know that he did something.

  Not only did he linger in Sarah’s house after killing her (some killers bathe their victims, by the way; do their nails), he had been there before, alone. That’s when he left his prints in every cranny. Maxine Harris suspected a B&E. Sexual curiosity? Power at its most perverse? Some aspect of his ritual? Maybe all of the above. Check Sarah’s phone records; I suspect that he conducted business at her expense. Perhaps he made toll calls to Hasty Hills to see if there were any fresh corpses awaiting his expertise. He believes he’s invulnerable. No one can stop him. My guess is that you should be looking for calls to the courthouse, the PD, the municipal building—wherever Connecticut houses its medical examiners’ offices.

  Why did Wolf take such a risk, entering a neighborhood where he would soon commit a murder? Because Sarah’s nest would have been irresistible to him. He wanted to feel the place, to be in secret violation of her personal life, to finger her most intimate possessions, to examine her books, the food in her refrigerator. He wanted the smell of her, without the bother of her presence. He wanted to inhale her, hold her in his lungs.

  I’ve come across another Connecticut case: Annie Maxwell—strangled, then discarded in a horse stall. In his statement to the police, her husband said that Annie had been bothered for years by dreams about a man coming to kill her. He was someone real, someone she knew from college. They met at a warehouse fire, of all places. She saw how fascinated he was by the flames, the destruction, and asked why he wasn’t afraid. “I was born this way,” he told her. They talked, went back to her place, drank, listened to music—the usual college thing.

  Annie said he was a very cynical fellow, angry, always mumbling about the emptiness of people. He intrigued her. She pursued him. He cautioned her that she had no idea what risks she was taking. She never mentioned his name to her husband, but said that during a game of some sort he had confessed to the murder of a coed. Annie kept up her part of the game, but she was convinced that he had told her the truth—that he really was a killer (there had been a coed killed a few months earlier). She was equally certain that he knew she knew.

  Annie Maxwell was at Radcliffe when Wolf was still loitering around Cambridge.

  There is no coincidence. Events conspire to make fools of us only when we allow them to. The people from Quantico observed a pattern in Albany. They failed to see it a few miles away in Troy. If their approach is that impaired, how can they see the design in two decades of events? In the face of chaos, all science must redefine itself. Anyone so presumptuous as to claim knowledge of a unified science of human behavior is destined to become the snake that eats its own tail. That is thinking at its reductionist worst.

  Linear thinking, clinical distance, logic—flush ’em all. When a plane crashes and we’re told that the cause of the crash is wind shear, we’re being told that there was an undetected movement of air so rapid and so powerful that it threw tons of metal and humanity to one side. With all our instruments, our gauges, our computers, how could something so powerful be missed? We put men on the moon. Did we bring them back? I’m not so sure now.

  Wolf appreciates our limitations. He uses them to his advantage. Think of this man—conducting autopsies, serving as a medical consultant, attending conferences—and no one ever suspecting that he’d never even attended medical school. From his lair in Hasty Hills, he ventured into the world, then retreated, hidden in his cloak of respectability. For years the arrangement was perfect for him.

  He had to kill Sarah Sinclair, no matter what the cost. Of all the deaths over all the years, hers was special. It was different. We need to know why. Sarah will also be the link to his next victim. Based on what we know, that person may be dead already.

  Lt. Swartz has determined that Wolf/Chadwick spent a great deal of time away from Hasty Hills, time that cannot be accounted for. I believe that he has another life, another world, another identity—one he visits just often enough to maintain it (in the event he needs to slip back into it permanently someday). Or maybe he has always intended to end up there. That’s where we will find him. This man is methodical when it matters (his other identity, his “collection”), and sloppy when it doesn’t matter (fingerprints).

  When you talk to his sister Sarah, ask her about the sexual episode(s) between them when they were growing up. Don’t ask if it happened—it happened. Probably it was something voyeuristic. Later, he acquired his social skills in a similar fashion—watching others, and mimicking them.

  And ask her where he is. She may not know—she may not even know what name he uses—but her guess would be a good one. I have my own. The fabrication of what would become his personality was based on fear. That’s where he came from. That’s also where the rigidity and the need for control come from. He fancies himself invulnerable and all-powerful, and he certainly has operated that way. But he came from fear. Why else create a personal world that can exist only when all that is called order or structure is what you impose on it? And, to borrow from Julian Cope, what place would fear know best? I believe that we’ll find Wolf at home. In a very real sense, he never left.

  Detective Sinclair was kind enough to have Lymann FedEx the real Dr. Chadwick’s notes on the young man he knew as Paul Wolf. Chadwick had labs in the buildings near the Peabody Museum; he saw Wolf entering or leaving there a half dozen times. Once Chadwick followed him inside and watched as Wolf stood in a room of mounted birds, staring first at one, then another. He touched the glass enclosures, as if transfixed. Chadwick wrote: “He had the strangest expression. Looked like he was somewhere else entirely. I could have said his name and it would have echoed in those vast hallways without his noticing. I think now that he should have seen my reflection in the glass. Perhaps he did. Nothing matters to him except that which is in his own mind at the moment. Why is it that no one else senses the violence that’s pulsating inside this man?”

  Interesting stuff.

  Pop

  I grabbed a sheet of blank paper and began writing as fast as I could.

  Pop,

  I’m in trouble. Just stopped by my apartment and found a corpse hanging in the closet. Sheila, from the massage parlor above the bookstore where Sarah worked. There’s the connection.

  Also, Hanson’s trying to arrest me.

  And I’m scared to death. This guy who said he was from the DA’s office has been on the edges of the investigation since day one. I don’t have time to write out an explanation, but I think he’s Wolf. Connections. Am I next?

  You said in your fax that you think Wolf ha
s gone home. But he has to be here. Sheila couldn’t have been dead long when I found her—I interviewed her just a few hours earlier. Please find a phone and call.

  L.

  While I waited for Pop’s response, I thumbed through Robbins’s book. He hadn’t highlighted or underlined anything, but I found a slip of folded paper tucked inside. It was a receipt for dry cleaning a blazer. Sheila’s receipt—the blazer Sarah Sinclair had borrowed for her date with John Wolf.

  Robbins was Wolf.

  That first day, right at the crime scene—where only hours earlier he had ended Sarah Sinclair’s life—he stood on the sidewalk in the rain and waited for me to walk out. There were cops all over the place, but that didn’t bother him. He was back in a couple of days. Coffee, he said. Read this book, he said. He had given me the answer, and I had missed it. Now Sheila was dead, and I was next.

  The fax clicked on.

  Lane:

  Get out of that apartment now. Go to a hotel. I’ve been going over every shred of information I’ve accumulated on Wolf. I’m getting a grasp on him, developing a sense of the essence of this man. If anything, I have underestimated him. His leaving a corpse in your closet dictates what I must do now. Forget everything I ever said about doing this from my armchair. After each kill, he cools off for a short time. I don’t know how long. He would go home where he feels safe, and where he maintains his permanent shrine to himself. I’m going to Vermont. You’re going to Florida—and, after you call and brief Swartz on your meeting with sister Sarah, you’re going to check into a motel on the beach.

  And stay out of New York.

  Pop

  I weighed the risks of going back out onto the street, and figured I’d be better off staying put. Holding the .32 in my hand, I curled up on Robert’s couch.

  I dozed on and off, but after only a few hours I was fully awake—tired, but feeling somewhat better, and more in control in the daylight. The medication seemed to be doing its thing. Now I had to do mine.