The Prettiest Feathers (34 page)

“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.

W
aiting.

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 search 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.

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 from 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.

Sweet Sarah, you had been waiting for him, hadn’t you
?

Wolf was the worst of our plague of human predators. The world will be fascinated with his story—the book, the TV movie—and he was already fascinated with himself.

By making it personal, Wolf had forced the issue. When he targeted Lane, I no longer had a choice. If I didn’t succeed, nothing stood between him and my daughter.

As I fell slowly into fitful sleep in the chair by the window, I know I looked out into the night for my sister’s eyes. It was the habit of a lifetime—whenever I felt fear, and then rage, the stirring inside.

It was time.