The Prettiest Feathers (22 page)

A
fter cashing my paycheck, I picked up a case of Old Milwaukee and took it back to my place. I opened one of the cans as I listened to my phone messages. The first one was from Lane, telling me to put my beer down and take notes. There was a handyman’s jawbone in the wreckage at Chadwick’s place, Hanson wanted her to take a polygraph, and Special Agent Walker was pumping her for information. No surprise about Chadwick. And I guess it was no surprise about Hanson. He’d be wanting me on the box, too, I was sure.

I finished my beer and fell asleep in the chair. I seldom dream. If I do, I usually don’t remember the plot. But this one I remember.

For some reason I want to say it took place in Maine. I’ve never been there—I’ve seen pictures, received postcards—but I’ve never been there.

There were stunted, scrub pines that seemed to grow up out of a broad expanse of flat rock. There were bushes low to the ground—bayberry, my dream said—and lichens
all over the rock. And there was a man—the man I had known as Alan Carver—sitting on a small boulder, smoking a cigarette.

He was fifty yards away when I first saw him, his hand moving down from his face, a puff of smoke billowing up and away from his head.

He was older than I remembered. His long hair had gone totally gray and he was bearded. I approached him in a friendly, sociable way, thinking it unusual to find anyone out in the middle of nowhere. I waved to him as I walked up, watching the wind blow back through his hair. His hand came down from his mouth, but no smoke emerged. Instead of a cigarette, he had a .38 in his hand.

Everything about him was different, but I knew who he was because of the eyes. They were the eyes of Alan Carver, the eyes of John Wolf. They turned yellow—glowing—as he raised the weapon and aimed at my chest.

I awakened in a sweat, with a throbbing headache. I riffled through my junk drawer in the kitchen, looking for codeine, Darvocet, even an aspirin if that was the best I could do—but then I remembered. All that stuff was over at Sarah’s.

It was early evening. I figured the Old Milwaukee had knocked me out around four. I’d spent the afternoon waiting for the phone to ring.

Somebody tentatively knocked on the door frame. My semi-shattered door is a bit intimidating. I moved it aside on its single hinge.

“If this is any indication of what the rest of the place is like, please don’t invite me in,” she said.

It was Special Agent Walker, wearing a forest green pantsuit, sharply creased.

“I have a friend with big feet,” I said.

She stepped inside and I slid the door back into position.

“He wanted in pretty bad,” she said.

“She.”

“Then if’s not just me. You really are irresistible.”

I’d never had a special agent of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency come on to me before. Since most of them are guys, I’m particularly proud of that. But this was different. She also had rings on a significant finger.

“How do you feel about adultery?” I asked her.

“I think only adults should do it,” she said, catching my glance at her hand. “The gold band was my grandmother’s. It keeps some of the wolves away.”

“I think I’m going to feel used,” I said.

“Consider it a role reversal.”

She slipped out of her jacket and tossed it on the chair. Her blouse was a lighter green, silkier, clinging in the places where it should.

“Is there a rule that says a woman can’t size up a man the way men do with women all the time?” she asked.

“I can’t say I’m totally comfortable with the idea of being treated like an object, Special Agent Walker.”

“Susan. I’ve never liked it either.”

“Beer?”

She took the can, didn’t want a glass. She was folding herself neatly into a corner of the couch when the phone rang.

“I waited until I got home,” Judy Newton said.

I grabbed a pen. “Good idea,” I said, watching Susan Walker recross her legs.

“Paul Wolf’s date of birth is December twenty-third, nineteen fifty-two. He’s a Capricorn, by the-way, if you’re into that. They tend to be very dependable, organized, somebody you can rely on to get things done. He wasn’t like that when he was a student here. He came from a private school in Vermont—was on scholarship there. He had a scholarship here, too, but he kept losing it. He was premed. Finally he dropped out. His home address was a rural route in a place called Saxtons River, Vermont. I ski at Killington, so I
remember seeing that place on the map, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where it is.”

I thanked Judy, assured her that no one would ever know where I got my information, and promised her dinner at Jacob Wirth’s the next time I was in Boston.

“I’m almost married,” she said.

“Then I’d better hurry.”

We both laughed and hung up.

Susan Walker sipped her beer and watched me.

I was thinking about Alan Chadwick—the real one. His girlfriend had been from Vermont. I wondered if there was any connection.

Here I was with a randy FBI agent in my pit of an apartment, my ex-wife barely gone to ashes, and the remnants of a very bad dream. I knew I should probably bring Lane up to date on Paul Wolf, and what I was doing, but something—or somebody—kept getting in the way.

As soon as the question formulated itself in my mind, I asked Susan Walker, “Who’s your suspect?”

“Was the call about the case?”

“An angle I’ve been following, yeah.”

“I know I’m not that unappealing. You just can’t stop being a cop.”

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she didn’t remind me of my accountant.

“Can we peel each other and talk at the same time?” I asked, loosening the buttons on my shirt.

She got up from the couch, walked over, stood up as tall as she could, and kissed me. She also slipped a condom into my right hand. I don’t know where the hell she’d been keeping it.

“I suspect Robert Sinclair in the bedroom with a club,” she said.

We were shedding clothing and stumbling into the bedroom. We fell into the bed. While I was trying to remember the last time I had changed the sheets, her tongue tied mine
in knots and the hand wearing Grandma’s ring wrapped itself around my club. So much for trying to pump a cop.

I watched Susan walk back into the bedroom wearing my bathrobe and carrying two cans of beer. “Well, you lived up to your billing, Sinclair,” she said. “No fuss, good fuck.”

“Really, Special Agent Walker, I think you’re setting a bad example for the young women of America.”

“What? They’re getting it whenever they can.”

She handed me a beer.

“So who’s your suspect?” I asked.

“You mean I didn’t even manage to distract you?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“We already did that.”

The phone rang.

“Well, at least they waited until we were done,” she said.

It was Alan Chadwick. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” I said, slipping my hand inside the robe that Susan had let fall open.

“I found that notebook,” he said.

I was drawing a blank.

“I kept those notes about Paul Wolf. I still have the notebook. It was strange. When I got home I just went right to where it was. I didn’t really want to read all that again. I kind of skimmed it. But I did follow him around for a long time. Everything I found out about him I wrote down, because I was sure the police were going to want to know about him. They never did.”

“I’d like to see it,” I told him.

“I thought you would. I have it packaged. Just need your address.”

I gave it to him.

“He was from Vermont,” Chadwick said. “Saxtons River. She was from Springfield, just north of there. He could have known her before, although she insisted she didn’t know him. Said she met him at a bar near the college. Later, of
course, I wished that I had asked her more about that meeting. The other young woman who was killed—the one who was strangled a year later? She used to hang out at the same bar. I know that’s a tenuous connection, but—”

“Do you know where she was from?”

“No. I don’t remember. Why don’t you read through this. My handwriting isn’t too bad.” He laughed. “Then if you have other questions, I’ll try to answer them for you.”

“More work?” Susan asked when I hung up the phone.

“Look, you’ve been through all those classes on the minds of killers—all that profiling shit, right?”

“I prefer not to think of it as shit.”

“Simple question, Susan. Are the victims ever connected? When one of these guys gets going—Bundy or Gacy or Ramirez—whoever they are—”

“Sometimes the victims share characteristics. Hair parted in a certain way, gay lifestyle—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean
connected.
A leads to B leads to C leads to D. That kind of thing.”

“I don’t know of any cases like that,” she said. “Sounds pretty unlikely. Sure, these guys plan everything out, but they’re still pretty impulsive. They troll for whatever happens to be out there. If that’s your angle—that they’re connected somehow—I think you’re wasting your time.”

“Probably,” I agreed.

But I couldn’t get it out of my head. The dream.

“How about a group shower and some dinner?” Susan asked.

“Sounds good. Why don’t you start and I’ll join you. I have to make a call.”

“A quick call,” she said, as she headed for the bathroom.

I tried Lane’s number and got her machine. “Yeah, I got your message. We have to talk. I’m gonna be tied up tonight. Maybe we can connect in the morning.”

Connect.

I
stopped at the office late Friday night. I was hoping that a solid lead might have dropped out of the sky and landed in my in box. While I was there, I reread Pop’s most recent communiqué. That’s when I noticed his reference to the feather near Sarah’s hand in photo #011. I had let that slip right by me the first time I read it.

That juvenile case from the sixties involved feathers—they were found among the animal parts stored in the shoe boxes in that crazy kid’s bedroom. And now a feather shows up in a crime scene photo. What the hell was going on? Was I seeing connections that weren’t really there?

I called Hal Levinson, our hair and fiber man, knowing he’d be in. There’s a rumor that he doesn’t even have a home. He takes sponge baths in the men’s room in the basement, and keeps clothes in the trunk of his car. I think it has something to do with a divorce or gambling debts. Maybe both. He picked up on the first ring.

“Levinson, this is Lane. I have a question about the Sinclair murder scene.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you find any feathers over there?”

“One.
Cyanocitta cristata
.”

“English, please.”

“The plume of a blue jay.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“What I do with all the feathers. I collected it, identified it, and filed it.”

“All
the feathers? How many do you have down there?”

“We’re in a strange business, Lane. I’ve picked up everything from raw chicken livers to uncut diamonds and hula hoops at murder scenes. Feathers are among our more ordinary finds,” Levinson said, sounding bored. My guess was that he was holding the phone with one hand and writing a report with the other.

“How long have you been with the department?” I asked.

“Eighteen years, in February.”

“And how many feathers have you bumped into at murder scenes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe eight, ten. Maybe more.”

“Indoor
murder scenes?”

“Right. Dozens more if you count the outdoor scenes, of course.”

“You’ve never considered that odd?” “What?”

“Finding feathers indoors.”

Levinson took in a deep breath, probably steeling himself for the lecture he was about to deliver.

“Listen, Lane, they could be from anything.”

“Like?”

“A feather bed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sears is running a big sale on mattresses stuffed with blue jay feathers.”

“They aren’t always from blue jays,” Levinson said. There was an unpleasant edge to his voice that made me wonder if maybe I
was
making a big deal out of nothing.

“Believe me, Lane,” he added, his voice softening; “the feather’s a red herring.”

“Prove it.”

“Prove it isn’t. I’m telling you, this is routine stuff. I talk to people at conventions all the time. We swap war stories, and I think everyone on the Eastern seaboard has at least one unexplained feather story to tell.”

I hung up feeling like Levinson’s argument about the significance of the feathers could just as easily be seen as support for my point of view. Maybe feathers kept turning up because there was a crazy out there using them as his calling card. His signature. And maybe Pop was the first one to notice.

I wanted to catch up with Robert. We had a lot of ground to cover. He had left a message on my machine saying that he was going to be tied up for the evening, so I thought that I’d call and talk to his tape for a while. When I dialed his number, I got a busy signal. I kept trying at fifteen-minute intervals for nearly two hours. By then I was worried. I called the operator and asked her to check the line; she said there was trouble and she’d report it.