The Prettiest Feathers (33 page)

The power to heal is the flip side of the power to destroy
.

There’s an old Lenny Bruce bit in which a doctor sends a bill for services provided to a child rescued from a well. The public is outraged. The doctor withdraws his demand for payment—but the child will have to be returned to the well.

It stirs again
.

I move farther down, more deeply inside myself—through time, faces rushing by—to a place with eight sides and four windows. My gorilla turns his head, slowly, and stares at me with obvious expectation. I tell him that it isn’t quite time, but he continues to watch. We know each other well
.

Sarah Sinclair, what can you tell me
?

The child’s black-and-white notebook lies there on the bed. Though it is Sarah’s journal, it doesn’t pulsate or call to me. I feel no urge to snap it up and devour its contents. But through all the years of reconstructing the choreography of murder, of drawing a psychological portrait of the killer, victims have told me far more than any other expert on the subject. I picked up the notebook and started to read.

Sarah Sinclair had attempted suicide, and damn near succeeded. She wanted out. She was sure of it.

She also had a sense of the connectedness of things—the past, the present—the way we flash in and out of our wars with today. But there was nothing warlike about her Wolf.

I stared at the photograph of Sarah lying in a heap on her living room floor. The white dress, stained red. The blue-and-white feather, barely visible—just beyond her outstretched arm.

A
wedding? No. But her choice of that dress represented something, some kind of commitment. To what? Not to him. You were infatuated with the man, Sarah, but you barely knew him. You weren’t a fool
.

Suicide—the most meaningful ceremony in anyone’s life. Some might expect you to wear black to travel the long tunnels of night, but perhaps you chose white because it is so much like the light that guides you home
.

The white dress—commitment—to death? to life? Did he simply kill you, Sarah? Or did he first need to bring you to life?

Why was he so drawn to you? So undeterred by the risks?

He took your freedom, but he set you free. Gave you wings
.

Another stirring
.

It’s time
.

I
t wasn’t long before I heard from Pop. He had settled in at a rustic motel somewhere in the mountains of Vermont.

“We need to get this wrapped up,” he said.

“We do,” I agreed.

There were long pauses in the conversation—silences that told me Pop was somewhere else—that place he visits whenever he’s clawing his way inside a killer’s mind.

Actually, clawing is the wrong word. The way he describes it to me, it isn’t something he does aggressively. If he were to
try
, he says, he’d fail. He has to just sit back and let it happen.

I guess it’s also wrong to say that he gets inside a killer’s mind. The reverse is closer to the truth: the mind of the killer enters Pop’s head, allowing him to see the world through the psychopath’s eyes. Judging from the change in Pop at such times, the view isn’t very pretty.

When I was a little girl, I took those changes in Pop personally. I thought that he had stopped loving me; I barely recognized him. A terrible distance would come between us,
affecting every aspect of my life—schoolwork, appetite, sleep patterns. Pop finally sat me down one day and explained what was happening.

“It’s something I do to help the police,” he said. “Something that has nothing to do with how I feel about you.”

He went over to the window and opened it.

“A bird could fly in here,” he told me, “because the window is up and there is nothing to stop it. It might be a beautiful bird, brightly colored—like a parrot. Or one that sings a lovely song in the morning. Or even an ugly bat looking for someone to bite.”

I looked at the open window, waiting to see whether birds or bats would fly in.

“That’s what happens to me, Lanie,” he went on. “Sometimes an ugly bat flies in through the window of my mind. But it never stays. Soon, it flies away, and everything is fine again.”

I’m sure that my father thought he was reassuring me with this story, but I was a literal child. I envisioned a whole family of bats hanging upside down inside his skull, and the image frightened me. I had nightmares, but it was always my mother, not my father, who rushed to my room to comfort me in the middle of the night. When I told her that my dreams were of birds and bats, she didn’t understand, didn’t see the reason for terror.

I knew the signs. John Wolf had already wandered into Pop’s mind. That window is always open. He doesn’t know how to close it.

“Look,” I said. “Just tell me how to find the motel and I’ll be on the road as soon as I can.”

“I really don’t want you here, Lane.”

“I’m not giving you a choice on that one, Pop.”

“I need a composite,” he said, finally.

“Fine. Swartz will do that for us.”

There’s nobody better than Swartz with a pen and pad. He doesn’t rely on just the overlays. Once he has the
general features, he refines the drawing—makes it come alive.

“As soon as he’s done,” I said, “I’m on my way. I dragged you into this case, and I won’t leave you alone with it. Besides, I couldn’t let go of it now. I’m in too deep. I won’t let this guy kill again.”

“No,” he said. “No more victims. No more sparring with evil. It’s time for an ending.”

I didn’t like Pop’s tone. It had the same drifting quality, but there was an edge to it.

He had gone silent again. “Hey,” I said.

“Call me when you have the composite.”

I’d barely hung up when Swartz called.

“Any news from your father?” he wanted to know.

“Just talked to him. He needs a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Pop has to know what Wolf looks like. He wants you to do a composite,” I said. “Robert saw him when he was posing as Alan Carver. Let’s see what he comes up with before I add Robbins to the mix.”

On the ride out to Tranquil Acres, I told Swartz how much I appreciated his going out on a limb for me. He was risking his career just by talking to me and not turning me over to Hanson.

“Wolf is not one to toy with, Lane,” he said. “If you come in, you’ll be safe. I’ll talk to Hanson with you. Show him what we’ve got. Get the feds up there with your father.”

“There’s no time,” I told him. “I’m not sticking Pop with it while I go plead with Hanson. Wolf has to be stopped now.”

“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.