The Prettiest Feathers (36 page)

Oscar Ray was a religious man, a Roman Catholic who had attended Mass twice a week until the murders started. After the first of the killings, he avoided the church—no confessions, no Masses. Something was bothering him.

“We need a priest,” one of the cops said.

With that as the inspiration, and with the cooperation of one of Oscar’s neighbors, two weeks later I arrived at the house next door to Oscar’s, to spend ten days visiting my “cousin.” In priestly garb, with a microphone taped to my chest, I spent hours rocking in a chair on the porch, reading, sipping iced tea. Two officers were parked a block away in a telephone repair van.

On his fifth visit to the front porch, I listened to Oscar Ray’s confession. So did the cops in the repair truck.

Others in my profession raised questions about my ethical behavior. A small—but powerful—group of insufferable, self-righteous twits went after my license. They almost succeeded. At my hearing I asked how each of them would feel if their children were corn-holed and gutted by Oscar Ray. They weren’t fond of my language, but they backed off.

The law played out its own game—was it a case of entrapment? Ultimately the court said no. It could just as easily have gone the other way. All the myths and madnesses of the people become the law, and then the law is bent and twisted to suit whatever circumstances happen to be given the greatest weight.

We don’t seem to have gotten the message yet: predators don’t play by any rules but their own. We can be fools and victims, or we can terminate their stay with us—by whatever means necessary.

My cop friend, Bolton, and I used to argue the death penalty. He was for it. I wasn’t. The state can’t run itself. How can we allow it to engage in the business of homicide?

“What if it was Lane?” Bolton asked me one time.

“I’d wait outside the courthouse and kill him myself,” I said.

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

I pulled in to the driveway with Wolf right behind me.

You’re on alert, aren’t you? A stranger arrives, talks of castles, and takes you to the one place you fear—the one place that could he the death of you. You don’t believe in coincidence, do you? Connections are necessary, and they are made by men. All things are connected. Events never spin out of the wild universe by themselves
.

Wolf walked up to the car. “Why this piece of land?” he asked.

“The isolation, the view of the hills. We used to visit this area when I was a kid. My father liked to ski Stratton. I never got into skiing, but I always loved it here.”

“Do you believe in coincidence?” he asked, studying my face.

“No,” I said, and started walking toward the house.

“This land is pretty much ledge. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem for what you have in mind. You’ve got ten acres or so to play around with.”

“Let me show you this water,” I said.

Wolf moved ahead of me, stepping through the back doorway into the house. Then he waited for me to direct him. When I indicated the cellar door, he charged ahead down the stairs.

I
knew I had to drive south on I-91 to the Westminster exit, and from there to Saxtons River. Allowing for the snow, I figured about an hour. One lane of the interstate was clear, and there wasn’t much traffic, so I pushed it up to 50.

Pop’s remark on the phone came back to me. I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now. No
more sparring with evil. It’s time for an ending
.

I remembered reading some old newspaper articles about my father, from when the medical board tried to strip him of his license to practice. His techniques were “unorthodox,” one board member said. Dr. Frank had provoked serious ethical questions, and probably was in violation of board policies. “Arrogant,” another of his peers had said. The reporter quoted Pop as saying that the country was faced with a new public health menace—the psychopath who kills for pleasure—that we damn well better recognize his presence among us, and that we don’t treat cancer with aspirin. We annihilate it. Cut it out.

Time for an ending
.

I was hitting 60 when I crossed the Williams River near Bellows Falls. An eighteen-wheeler came up fast behind me, then thundered by in the snow-covered passing lane, sending up billows of white powder that blocked my view of the road. Minutes later, when I slowed for the Westminster exit, I peered through the falling snow and saw another of those big rigs on its side in the median. The state police had set out flares.

When I came down the highway off-ramp and drove west, I knew that I was looking for a left turn onto a dirt road. Bridge Road was somewhere in or very near the village. Then I saw it—just beyond the general store. I made the turn, and five minutes later I saw Pop’s rental car parked beside a pickup truck. Daedalus Construction, the truck’s emblem read.

The house was smaller but every bit as decrepit as what I had imagined. Two sets of footprints led away from the vehicles toward the rear of the property. I followed them, stepped up onto the back porch, and pushed open the door.

Y
ou’re perfection, aren’t you, lad? Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Not you
.

I called to him, told him where the water was—through the archway. Then I walked slowly down the rotting cellar stairs.

Wolf moved at an angle across the dirt floor and stopped under the arch. My hands were in my jacket pockets-one of them wrapped around the .32.

With his back turned to me, he extended his arms up and fastened his hands onto the cross beam.

You’re staring at the new hinges and hasp assembly on the coal bin door, aren’t you
?

Without turning his body, he looked back over his shoulder. His eyes were gray, lifeless. Like mine.

We’re the same now. What you see, lad, is what you are
.

“Does
your
castle have a dungeon?” he asked.

Once the animal inside stirs, there is no quieting him. When fire laps at his fur, he grabs the bars between us, wrenching them away. He holds the throne once held by
reason. All is dictated by a focused, intense rage, laserlike and precise. Calm, deliberate
.

“It would appear I’ve underestimated you. Let me guess,” he said. “A weapon in the pocket?”

I pulled back the hammer on the .32. He heard the click.

“You’re playing a very dangerous game.”

“Sarah Sinclair,” I said, almost not recognizing my own voice.

“By any chance, did a blue jay fly in through her window?”

You’ve made your choice, lad. You’re going all the way. You have a design in mind
.

“Step into the coal bin,” I said.

What do your dreams tell you? You’ve lived this scene, this nightmare, so many times before. How do you disarm your own dreams? How do you defeat them? Do you kill them
?

When he hesitated, I squeezed the trigger on the .32. The bullet tore through my jacket, slamming into the support beam six inches to Wolf’s right. He flinched.

“Sarah,” I said. “Your sister. Your imperfect lover. Sarah Corrigan. And Sarah Sinclair. Your perfect victim.”

“Look, old man—”

I squeezed off a second shot, grazing his right hand. Again, his body jerked, but he kept his grasp on the cross beam.

Lad, the boundaries of your cage have been drawn for you. For an effervescent twenty years, you included the world in your dream. Now this cellar is your world. The coal bin is your cage. The dream is mine
.

I heard the back door click shut upstairs. He heard it, too. I listened to the soft padding of footsteps across the floor. They stopped at the top of the steps.

Have you fled your body, lad? Are you flying somewhere up above us now, gazing lazily down, watching that blood as it trickles from your hand, down your arm, into your sleeve
?

“One of us won’t leave here alive,” he said.

It was an acknowledgment of sorts, a realization. It wasn’t a threat.

I heard a tentative creaking at the top of the stairs.

“Maybe two of us,” Wolf said. “I can smell that one. A woman. Hotel soap. No cloying perfume. I like them that way.”

My third shot hit him in the upper right shoulder, knocking his right hand loose from the beam. He continued to suspend himself, apelike, by his left hand.

“Lane, don’t come down here,” I said.

“Pop? Is that you?”

Wolf looked back over his shoulder again.

“Pop,” he said. “The little girl, protected by her father, watches the boy receive his punishment in the cellar. Can you do it, Pop?”

When I look into the face of my own beast, lad, I know him. I love him. It’s so seldom he gets to be free. He lusts for his freedom. Has a taste for blood. Loves to kill. I’d never try to send him away, lad. To do that would be to deny who I am
.

“Tell me about Sarah Sinclair,” I said.

I was aware of Lane coming down the stairs, but I didn’t turn. I looked at Wolf’s eyes.

“Lane,” he said, “did you like your feather tree?”

When Lane didn’t answer, Wolf said, “Sarah Sinclair was just one more.”

“You had to have her,” I said.

“I had to have them all.”

“You took risks with her.”

“She was a victim before I ever got to her,” he said. “She wanted to die. She was waiting for me or someone else. When I had the knife in my hand, and she knew—”

“She reached out for you,” I said.

“She practically asked me to cut her throat.”

It was as if his voice were coming toward me from a distant land—a topography I knew well.

“That never happened before, did it? None of your other victims were so ready, so willing,” I said.

“Never. It was in her eyes the first day I saw her. I killed two men who had seen me in her shop. I destroyed Chadwick—my cover for six years.”

“So you could accommodate her.”

“That’s it,” he said.

I heard Lane call out to me. She was at the bottom of the stairs now, maybe ten feet to my right. I ignored her.

“You kept a record,” I told Wolf. “Where is it?”

“Find it,” he said.

I had noticed the PC in his loft. “It’s in the computer. Someone can figure out the password, and I’m sure the connections are there.”

He laughed. “For more than twenty years, no one even
saw
the connections.”

“What about your trophies?”

“Most of them were less than memorable,” he said.

“Maxine Harris and Sarah Sinclair—the connection was the bookstore. The trophy was that volume of Rimbaud’s poems you sent to Robert Sinclair. Educate me.”

“You seem to know everything already.”

“The woman found dead in the horse barn.”

He sighed. “Someone from the past. A loose end.”

“Why the burial ground on your land?”

“They were the throwaways—the garbage. There was nothing noteworthy in the artistry.”

I expected Wolf to make a move—something. This man was not about to go quietly. But I didn’t expect him to move as fast as he did.

W
olf swung away from the arch. He seemed to bounce off the support beam and careen in Pop’s direction, a long knife in his hand. It was fast—a blur. I had no time to get the .22 out of my jacket pocket.