The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  “You’re underestimating Wolf,” Swartz said.

  “Maybe in the beginning,” I said. “Not now. What I know I was doing was underestimating me, but I got over that. Now don’t you start.”

  Swartz looked at me. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  We drove in silence for several minutes. Then Swartz said, “You know, your father and I worked together on a messy one about eight years ago. Guy’s name was Orvis Hobson. He took a hatchet to a woman—left her in a Dumpster. And in the basement of a downtown hotel. And in a sewer over by the ball park. Your dad was able to tell us how the killer thought, how he lived—his personal habits, the kind of work he probably did, the type of vehicle he drove—the usual profiling stuff, only more detailed.”

  I looked over at Swartz.

  “We got Hobson before he killed again,” he said. “The profile helped us stay focused, even when a couple of leads pointed in other directions. He told us where we’d find the hatchet—wrapped in plastic and buried under some rosebushes. He said it was common sense.”

  “He’s tried to tell me the same thing.” I said.

  “He got a confession out of Hobson. Your father walks into the interrogation room, sits opposite the guy, and doesn’t say a thing for a long time. He just stares at Hobson’s hands. Then your father makes some kind of gesture with his own hand. The guy’s been real jittery, but he starts to relax. Your father says, ‘I’m listening—whenever you choose to begin.’ Hobson spills his guts.”

  I nodded. “Kinesthetic hypnosis. Pop says it’s a distraction technique.”

  “That’s not what Hanson called it,” Swartz said, laughing. “He said it was voodoo.”

  When we arrived at Tranquil Acres, Swartz went in first, to make sure that the captain didn’t have someone waiting there for me. After a few minutes, he came to the front door and waved me in.

  Robert and Lymann were playing cards and listening to the radio in the solarium. Robert had already lost weight. His face was drawn, he hadn’t shaved, and he looked as if he were in pain.

  Swartz worked with Robert for over an hour, putting the composite together. When they finished, Robert asked if we could have a minute alone. We went down the hall to his room.

  He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs. I sat next to him, on the side of the bed. His eyes were dark, lifeless. I figured it was his medication.

  “How’s it going for you?” I asked.

  Robert looked down at his hands—first the backs, then his palms. “It’s scary. What about you? How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  He looked up then, and gazed off into a corner of the room. “The only way I ever coped with anything was booze. I don’t know how well I’ll do without my safety valve.”

  Robert was silent again, but when I put my hand over his, he looked at me and said, “You know, Lane, you’ve never seen me sober before. How will you get along with this guy?”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” I told him. Then I leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  From Tranquil Acres, Swartz and I drove back to the city to see Inez Flint, a plastic surgeon who had done work for us before. Swartz had put together a detailed composite. Now Inez scanned the image into her computer so we could see how it looked with a variety of changes and possible disguises: beard, mustache, different hair lengths, weight gain, weight loss.

  When Swartz was satisfied with what he saw on the computer screen, he called me over. “Now, you tell me how this needs to be refined.”

  I looked at the monitor and saw Robbins’s face—the eyes—and felt a chill at the back of my neck. “No changes,” I said. “That’s him.”

  I called Pop to tell him that I had the composites and would bring them with me.

  “I need something else. The thirty-two you pulled out of Robert Sinclair’s desk drawer.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  “I’ll reserve a room for you,” he said.

  “You’ve found him, haven’t you?”

  “Leave now. I need the composites first thing in the morning. I have an early appointment with him.”

  I looked at the clock. The late news hadn’t even come on yet. I’d get there in plenty of time.

  I was tired, but I like driving—especially at night. With a thermos of coffee and something decent on the radio, the trip wouldn’t seem so long. I was packed and putting my things in the trunk of my car when the dark blue sedan pulled up behind me.

  I saw Susan Walker coming toward me. Dexter Willoughby was right behind her.

  “We need to talk about Alan Chadwick,” Willoughby said. “Could we step inside, please?”

  “I was just leaving.”

  “I’m afraid I have to insist,” he said.

  We went up to Fuzzy’s apartment, but none of us sat down.

  “As you know,” Willoughby said, “the state police have been digging up Chadwick’s land.”

  “Right.”

  “They’ve located eleven sets of bones. Our people are working on the IDs right now. But the ID that I’m trying to pin down is Chadwick’s. He’s not who he said he was.”

  I remembered my conversation with Walker—her promise that she’d talk to Willoughby. “So you’ve finished with Purrington?”

  “We’re satisfied that he’s responsible for the cases upstate,” Walker said.

  “So we work together on this?” I asked.

  “Two of our agents were out to your father’s place in Michigan,” Willoughby said. “He’s not there. He’s working the Chadwick angle, isn’t he?”

  There wasn’t going to be any “working together.” This guy was going to crash into the case at the worst possible time—when Pop was about to get a look at the man he believed was John Wolf.

  “Chadwick didn’t die in that explosion, and we want to know where he is,” Willoughby said. “We also need to know what name he’s using now, and we think you and your father can tell us that.”

  “I don’t know that I can help you,” I said.

  “Look, Detective Frank,” Willoughby said, “You’re on suspension, and I don’t think Captain Hanson is going to be pleased when he finds out that you’re still working this case. Let me make this clear. I’m not asking you to cooperate. I’m ordering you to.”

  I noticed Walker trying to make eye contact with Willoughby, probably to signal him to cool it. I think she sensed that I wouldn’t respond well to his threats. But either he didn’t catch it, or he chose to ignore it.

  “If I have to charge you with obstruction of justice, I’ll do it,” he said.

  Walker tried again to lower the heat a notch or two. “What he means is—”

  “What I mean is,” Willoughby said, “I won’t hesitate to take you into custody. It’s up to you.”

  I could see that he was serious. “I don’t know what name Chadwick is using now,” I said.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Willoughby began.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let me call my father.”

  I got Pop on the line and told him that my trip might be delayed. I described the situation in as much detail as I could.

  Pop said, “I don’t have any secrets. Invite them to join us in Vermont.”

  So that’s what I did. Our two-car caravan hit the highway shortly after midnight.

  Pop

  Waiting.

  John Wolf had carved his way across the country, and I was convinced that we were sitting on his doorstep. But from the time the feds arrived with Lane, that was the assignment.

  Wait.

  They were checking with the local authorities, no doubt doing the kind of thorough job that would fit nicely onto a prepared report form. Date of contact. Time of contact. Officer interviewed. Location of interview. All easily keyed into a computer database.

  When Quantico came into being, a computer was at the center of it. They could cross-check and recheck and sea
rch and match and generate all sorts of lists. Age of victim. Weapon used. Make of vehicle. Rural or urban setting.

  Anything that couldn’t be programmed into the computer was irrelevant to the task. Motive was in. Motivation was out. There on the cutting edge, they sowed the seeds of their own ineffectiveness. The computer, after all, was only as good as what went into it. And most of what went into it restricted inquiry.

  Willoughby was a company man. He would go far. Walker was barely postadolescent—not quite home from the prom—but she was smart. Maybe she would be the one to break the lockstep procession toward ignorance. But at that moment, she was half of the team that was making me wait. I’d been told to postpone my appointment with the suspect for twenty-four hours while they checked him out. And, like the loyal American I was, I did precisely as my government requested. Changing the appointment hadn’t created any problem for me. If anything, it added to the role I was playing—a busy investor constantly on the move and at the mercy of his cellular phone.

  Lane spent the day wandering the hall between our rooms, while I sat and watched the light snow fall and blow around. Now she was pacing my room.

  “There’s a good pay-per-view movie,” I said.

  “When did you start watching TV?”

  “Since it became a portable theater that I can enjoy without leaving my motel room. It’s Natural Born Killers.”

  “You watched that?”

  “It’s a picture of what we have become. The old argument was about life creating art, or art influencing life. It’s all the same now, from the cradle to the grave. Life is art.”

  “I can’t believe you turned on a television,” Lane said.

  “It used to be a big deal to have a police scanner in the house. Now, when you hear the police call that A. C. Cowlings is driving O. J. Simpson in a white Bronco on the L.A. freeway, you turn on CNN. Pass the popcorn. I remember some media expert saying the only thing missing was a minicam in O. J.’s cell. Life and art have become indistinguishable.”

  “I thought the Oliver Stone thing was just an excuse to bloody the screen—another Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Throngs leaving the theater in disgust,” I said, remembering some of the reviews. “They couldn’t see the message because they’re living it. They are the message. Marshall McLuhan and all that.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus. Would you please go back to school somewhere and study something?”

  I turned and looked at her. She was radiant—just sitting there, studying me so intently. I can raise my voice to my daughter only when my back is turned to her.

  “Never mind,” I said, returning to the snow. “Your friends should be back soon.”

  She laughed. “Right. My friends. And what will my friends have to say?”

  When Lane was a child, and Savvy and I had friends coming to the house, Lane would say, “What will they talk about, Pop? What will they say?”

  It was a game. I’d tell her—make some predictions about how the conversation would go—and at the end of the evening, or the next day, she’d say, “Right again, Pop.”

  “When I handed them Wrenville—” I began.

  “Who?”

  “Christopher Wrenville. He owns Daedalus Construction. He’s our killer, but they’ll say he’s been here for years, a successful businessman well known in the area, highly respected—all that sort of thing. If they can find any record of prints on him, and I imagine they will, the prints won’t match Chadwick’s. They’ll be diplomatic. They won’t call me an old fool, but the charge will be there, hanging in the air.”

  “Then what?”

  Another time I have trouble looking at Lane is when I’m lying to her.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  A knock on the door cut off the conversation. Lane let the two agents in.

  “This is a dead end,” Willoughby announced.

  The double-entry bookkeeper was blunt.

  “It has to be him,” Lane said.

  “Wrenville has owned Daedalus Construction for ten years,” Willoughby said, snapping open a narrow pad and scanning his notes. “It’s pretty much a hobby for him. He’s wealthy. Owns a condo on the waterfront in Fort Lauderdale. Has a sailboat docked there. Spends a lot of time on the ocean. From nineteen eighty-seven to nineteen ninety he was on the school board here. They were putting up a new building, and he played a substantial role in that. Even donated the land.”

  “That’s just what we expected,” Lane said. “Pop said he’d have a life like that to go back to.”

  Willoughby cleared his throat and straightened his tie. I knew he was about to drop his bomb.

  “For purposes of his business, he had to be bonded,” the agent said. “His prints were on file in the state capital.”

  I finished it for him. “They don’t match Chadwick’s.”

  Willoughby looked at me. “Correct.”

  Walker was talking to Lane. “Our people feel he would create a new identity, leave the area completely. It’s too hot for him here. They think one of the West Coast cities.”

  I shrugged. “Well, that takes care of that.”

  “Not quite,” Willoughby said. “I have been asked to remind you, Dr. Frank, that you haven’t been retained in this matter by any law enforcement agency.”

  I walked to the door and opened it. “Drive carefully,” I said.

  Lane and I had dinner at a restaurant in Hanover, New Hampshire, near the Dartmouth campus. The food was good, and the atmosphere decidedly collegiate.

  We were both on edge by the time we returned to the motel. We said our good nights in the hall, and I headed for my room. I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it, staring at the red digital readout on the clock in the darkened room. Ten P.M.

  I could see the shape of the package that Lane had brought with her—composites and gun—on the bed. I touched it—felt the weapon—as I walked through the room, then opened the drapes and sat in front of the window.

  Once more I picked up Sarah’s journal, and read by the lights from the parking lot.

  In the house where I grew up, there was a fan-shaped window above the front door. One morning—I was young, no more than fourteen—as I was coming down the stairs from my bedroom, nearly to the bottom of the stairs, I noticed the way the sunlight was coming through the window, casting a rainbow on the floor. I stepped into that puddle of light, not realizing that I would remember it forever afterward as a magical moment. Although the rainbow never appeared again, I always looked for it whenever I came down those steps. I couldn’t make myself quit hoping.

  Whatever love I’ve felt for Robert was like that rainbow—here and gone in an instant, never to return. One night, soon after we met, we were sitting on my sofa watching a movie when my cat jumped up on his lap. As I watched Robert’s hand come to rest on the cat’s back, I fell in love with the gesture, the gentleness of it. He was the hand, I was the cat—and so I married him, confident that he was the person I had assumed him to be in that snippet of time. For years, I waited for that man, that Robert, to reappear, but he never has. And never will. I’ll see the rainbow long before I ever see that tender man again.

  It is good that Liza is still a baby, still unable to speak, unable to frame the question that may already be forming in her mind. I am afraid that someday she will ask me why I married her father. How can I explain to her about love that is born in an instant of misinterpretation or projection; how can I make her understand that much of my life has been spent waiting for the return of someone who was never really here?

  At least the rainbow was real.

  She needed someone to bring her alive. John Wolf succeeded where Robert had failed.

  All the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. The elaborate preparations in Sarah’s living room. The lack of defensive wounds. The incredible risks that Wolf had taken.

  But now, I waited.

  Quantico’s limited understanding of people like Wrenville comes fro
m the jailhouse interviews after they’ve been captured and convicted of some piece of their mayhem. The clerks march in with their questionnaires. The killers have their own agendas.

  In the early years, I, too, followed them to their jail cells, until I realized that I already knew each one, and knew how they would answer my questions. Their signatures in the wild—carved into flesh, painted in blood on walls—told me volumes of truth. In their caverns of steel and stone, they reveled in their celebrity, quibbled over irrelevant details, and either justified or rationalized their actions.

  There were exceptions, of course. Barry Lee Barnes was one.

  “No one helped me to understand,” he said. “No one listened to me. I clicked out. I went into a whole different world. I remember what I did. I know what I did was wrong. I can tell you every detail. It was me doing it, but it wasn’t me, too.”

  Barnes didn’t know it, but he was describing dissociation, that phenomenon that seems universal in the population of homicidal psychopaths. It’s ironic. The strategy that allows victims of trauma to cope—the splitting away from the experience, becoming an observer instead of a participant—also allows the human predator to act on his violent fantasies.

  “If they let me out of here today, I’d do it again,” Barnes told me. “It was like a dream, like it wasn’t really happening.”

  I asked Barnes a question that didn’t appear on any of the forms. “Barry, if we were sitting over a couple of beers in a neighborhood bar right now, would you talk to me? Would you tell me any of this?”

  “Hell, no,” he said, and laughed. “I’m not gonna help you catch me and put me away. It didn’t bother me—it wasn’t a problem—until I got caught. Out there, it didn’t scare me. It felt … okay.”

  I looked at the night outside, the flashing lights of the few cars up on the interstate. From this darkened room, to that darkened world—waiting—my eyes snapping back and forth from the backs of my hands to the edge of the forest.

  I thought about Sarah. The purchase of the white dress. Her rapid infatuation with Wolf.