Tunnel of Night Read online

  LIFE SHOULDN’T BE WASTED. THE EXPERIENCE of being alive is too extraordinary. To think that there was a brief moment, just ten months ago, when it had seemed that it all might end.

  When I first emerged from my tunnel, I could smell the smoke from the explosion and fire, and watch the growing embers blend with the light snow. As I moved away, that faded until there was just the snow, the silence of the forest, and a single, focused thought:

  Lucas Frank is a walking dead man….

  Books by John Philpin and Patricia Sierra

  THE PRETTIEST FEATHERS

  TUNNEL OF NIGHT

  For Katie Hall

  Now is the time of the Assassins.

  FROM Morning of Drunkenness BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  HER HAIR WAS LIGHTER THAN I REMEMBERED, and looked as if she hadn’t combed it.

  I watched, absorbed every detail, as she came through the kitchen door, walked to the table, put on her glasses to read the morning paper. She was heavy, dressed in baggy black Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. The once regal lines of her profile and her slender neck were gone, buried beneath puffy flesh.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The coffee cup clattered to the floor as her head spun around. Her mouth opened, and she made a noise—perhaps she said my name.

  She turned in her chair and stared at me as I stepped between her and the kitchen door. Then she stood, leaned against the table, and forced it backward.

  “Oh, my God. Why did you come here? What do you want?”

  Her body shook. Her eyes were wide, filled with terror.

  “All those years,” I began, thinking for a moment that I might answer her, that I might tell her what I had become and why.

  “You betrayed me,” I said, slipping my hands behind my back and removing the knife from my pocket.

  She gripped the shaky table. “No,” she said, but it sounded more like a question.

  She never had time to lift her arms. As I stepped toward her, her head snapped up and her throat accommodated my blade.

  For the first time in our lives, she was totally compliant.

  She never made a sound.

  I OPENED THE REFRIGERATOR. THE LIGHT DIDN’T work, so I jiggled it and tightened the bulb in its socket. It went on. People don’t take care of things, not even the simplest adjustments requiring the least amount of effort.

  I found some lettuce, cold cuts, a jar of mustard, and a loaf of whole wheat bread. Then I opened the cupboard above the sink to get a glass and a plate. I noticed the impressionistic figurine of a bird, and remembered the beautiful young woman I had sent it to so many years ago—the woman who now rested on the kitchen floor. I placed the figurine on the table, a centerpiece.

  The sunlight from the window refracted as it passed through the glass bird, cascading bands of primary color across the table. I sat with the chair facing the window so that I didn’t block the light, and so that I could enjoy my own private display of all the colors of the sun.

  Mine was a private celebration. I was completing old projects, and beginning new ones. No one who had touched my life was safe.

  I grabbed my knife—a heavy, folding Buck with a single four-inch blade. It was sticky with blood, so I wiped it with a paper towel. I sliced the bread, then placed the knife on the table to my right. In many ways the preparation of a meal is more important than the eating of it.

  I glanced to my left. If it were not for the blood, she would have looked as if she were sleeping.

  I took a bite from my sandwich, then pushed the food away and moved the short distance to her side. This complete possession, this ownership of another, carried with it certain responsibilities. With both hands, as if I were cradling something fragile, I adjusted one of her arms so that it was parallel to her side, like the other one.

  Symmetry.

  THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG.

  You can always find your way back home—so long as you know how much garlic to put in the marinara. That is the secret. Garlic. And, of course, the olive oil— Filippo Berio extra virgin. But even when you get the recipe right, people want to give you directions. They want to barge into your home and take over your kitchen. Miscreants. Philistines.

  If Thomas Wolfe had studied marinara, if he had labored over a hot stove more than he did over a typewriter, he would have changed the title of his book— and probably his life. For one thing, he would have gotten drunk more often. Oh, yes, one cup of ale for the pot, and one for the maw. You seldom have trouble finding your way home because you hardly ever leave.

  I was getting buzzed. A morning on the lake in the warm sun trying to outwit an elusive bass, followed by a stint in the kitchen starting the sauce (it has to simmer all afternoon), and I was ready for the shower. Life is grand.

  I was expecting company—a rare visit from my daughter, Lane, a detective with the New York City Police Department. She had sent a fax four days earlier. Lane was concerned that she hadn’t heard from me, and sounded as if she were having a crisis of conscience. Her note said, in part:

  We wrapped up the Wolf case nearly a year ago, but I’m still not able to put it behind me. I need to talk to you about that day in Vermont. I’ve told the sanitized version of the story a dozen times, but you and I have never sorted out what really happened. Sometimes I think it was murder. Other times I’m sure that it was justice. I just need to know why you did what you did.

  I answered the fax, assured my daughter that I was fine, and told her that I would love to see her.

  Intuition had been nudging Lane with the truth— that I had murdered the killer, John Wolf. It didn’t seem that long ago, but my daughter was right. It was nearly a year ago. Lane had been the lead investigator in her partner’s ex-wife’s murder. What began as a straightforward homicide case became a hunt for a serial killer. I had provided armchair advice to Lane and her lieutenant until it was clear that Wolf’s next intended victim was my daughter. So I went after the bastard, tracked him to his lair in Vermont, and used his own bomb to blow him to pieces. Enormously rewarding justice, that.

  The six-week bout with demons in the night that erupted when I returned home had nothing to do with my having dispatched a predator to the netherworld. The problem had been that even though he was dead, Wolf continued to live inside my head. In order to track him, to anticipate his moves, I had to invite him into my mind, to learn to see the world as he saw it, to think as he thought. When it was over, the task of evicting Wolf from my dreams took more time than bringing down the beast.

  Killing him had caused me no confusion. I had not hesitated, and I had not lost a wink of sleep over it. But it was different for my daughter.

  When she was young, Lane was always sticking bars of flowery-smelling soap in the shower. She would dump my Ivory in the wastebasket, and I would have to haul ass out of the shower, dripping wet, to retrieve it.

  Soap is not the only thing that she and I see differently. I used to lure her into the kitchen when she was a child, determined to turn her into a cook. “That’s men’s work,” she would say—and she was right, at least in our house. When it was my turn to cook, my wife, Savvy, seldom passed through the kitchen; I was not a kind cook.

  As Lane grew older, she became more specific in her distaste for cooking. “Think of the time we consume driving to the grocery, picking out the food, preparing it, eating it, clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying them, putting them away. You could solve half a dozen murders in that time.”

  I wanted her to appreciate cooking the way I did, to appreciate cooking the way it deserved to be appreciated, but it was hopeless. She was too caught up in that other part of my life—my work as a practicing psychiatrist, profiling and tracking human predators. Although she always ate whatever I set before her, she rema
ined steadfast in her indifference to the process.

  “It’s just food, Pop.”

  A heartbreaking sacrilege.

  When she was transferred from her street beat to Homicide, Lane wanted to fill my head with her cases. She expected me to offer some profound insight, some new angle on a murder that was fracturing the best minds in law enforcement. “When I quit,” I always told her, “I really quit.”

  She insisted that she had special rights—a “biological exception” to my rule. True. I have never mastered the art of saying no to my daughter.

  My daughter or my cat. I guess they are the only two creatures on earth who have me exactly where they want me.

  I looked at my massive Maine coon cat and said, “Max, do you think you’ll ever retire?”

  I was sure that he would do a better job of it than I had.

  Max flipped his tail. He was sound asleep on his kitchen chair, deep in a dream state—with his paws curled back and his lower jaw in a cataclysm of murder. Max is the perfect predator. The field mice, chipmunks, and squirrels that populate my ten acres have learned the hard way. When he comes inside, Max purrs, rubs against my leg, curls into my lap, sniffs my beard to determine what I have eaten in his absence. When he sleeps, he is back in the field—the cold, calculating killer that nature designed him to be.

  I ran my hand down his back, from his neck to the base of his tail. “Pity your jungle friends, Max. They’re capable of many things, but they can’t purr. Has to do with the arrangement of cartilage in the throat. Of course, they can roar, and you can’t. Maybe it all evens out.”

  He opened one eye, yawned, then went back to sleep.

  Because I had been somewhat out of touch, Lane assumed that I had shut myself away, struggling with a bout of depression akin to what had nailed me just before I sold my practice and headed for the Michigan woods several years ago. She was just being a dear, over-protective worrywart, although I must admit to a twinge of guilt—this time I had not been struggling with anything but road maps. Janet, my friend from across the lake, and I had sneaked away to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Blues Traveler was playing in concert. Actually, I should amend that. We did not sneak, we simply did not tell anyone, including my daughter, what we were doing.

  In truth, I had not lingered on the Wolf matter. After my six weeks of emotional recuperation, I pronounced myself sane, then promptly continued with the important things in life: fishing, good music, a new book by Harry Crews.

  Most detectives go through an entire career without encountering a serial murderer. Lane had already dealt with one—John Wolf, who had killed dozens in a career spanning two decades—and more than a hundred had haunted me. I certainly could listen to my daughter, but I did not know how much help I could offer her.

  I walked toward my bedroom at the back of the house. Lane was usually prompt, so I had perhaps an hour to get out of my fishy jeans, grab a quick shower and some clean jeans, and just generally make myself more presentable. I nipped a final time at the ale, then hit the switch on the perimeter security system. Chuck Logan was due to deliver two cords of firewood, and I didn’t want him or Lane to pull up the drive and be greeted by screaming sirens.

  I had installed the alarm system as soon as I moved to the lake. Back then, I was still feeling vulnerable to the outside world, surrounded by the ghosts and other incarnations of the monsters that I had wrestled over the years. I wanted, needed, an absolutely secure retreat.

  I had also stocked the log house with a small arsenal of rifles, revolvers, and semiautomatic pistols. But security had never been a problem. I doubted that I needed any of the hardware anymore.

  Everything seemed to be under control when I hit the shower. A bit blurry perhaps, but under control, with the promise of a pleasant visit ahead.

  As the water splashed onto my face, my head began to clear. Muscle aches that I had been nursing since the day before responded to the warm spray. I had begun splitting my winter’s firewood—a task that tests my ability to tolerate ambivalence. I always have to force myself to go out to the stump in the wood lot, but once I start wielding the twelve-pound splitting hammer, I hit a rhythm, develop a momentum, feel as if I’m thirty again. It’s when I have to break out the Ben-Gay the next day that I know I am not.

  I toweled off, then pulled on my jeans. I was rubbing the towel through my hair as I walked toward the sliding-glass door and stepped out onto the patio. The surface of the lake was dead calm. No boats. Not even a fish rising. Typical for an autumn day.

  A sliver of light off to the right caught my eye. When I saw the source of that light, recognized it, I froze—the towel still in my hand, my arm still extended upward. I watched as a man standing a hundred yards away in my field casually lowered a rifle into firing position, then aimed in my direction.

  I twisted back to my left, catching a glimpse of the muzzle flash as I threw myself to the ground. The sonofabitch was shooting at me.

  A burning pain told me that the slug had slapped the right side of my head. I heard the report of the first shot as the second bullet sliced across my side.

  This was no hunter mistaking me for his quarry. He was trying to kill me.

  I slammed against the ground as a third shot carved a crease in the gray slate patio.

  I pushed against the ground, believing that I could get up, run into the house, grab a weapon, and return fire. But I couldn’t move.

  My world faded rapidly. I shivered with cold. Blood pooled everywhere, but even that was fading, as if the color red were disappearing.

  I could make no sense of the crazy thoughts cascading through my head.

  Max came out to watch the gouge in the slate fill with blood. I remember that I wondered how long death would take.

  Then everything went black.

  THE TRIP FROM NEW YORK CITY TO LAKE ALBERT, Michigan, can be made in less than a day if you drive straight through. But I didn’t want to pull up at Pop’s place looking or feeling like a zombie, so I decided to drive only as far as Toledo on Friday. Toledo is an hour from Detroit; Lake Albert is two hours north of there. I figured that if I was behind the wheel by nine, I would be right on time for lunch. And lunch would be a piece of work, since Pop fancies himself the Galloping Gourmet.

  In Toledo I stayed at the Mansion View on Collingwood Boulevard—a Victorian bed and breakfast just off the interstate, on the edge of the city’s business district. It reminded me of the house in Boston where I lived when I was a little girl, back when my mom, Savvy, was still around. Lots of woodwork, sunlight filtering through antique curtains, fireplaces. Maybe a ghost or two.

  I remember an autumn afternoon when someone rang the bell at that house on Beacon Hill, and Savvy went to open the door. I padded along behind her, eager to see who had come to visit. It wasn’t anybody we knew—just a guy selling something. He looked at Savvy, then at me, and asked if the lady of the house was in. He had assumed that Savvy was the maid or the baby-sitter.

  I didn’t know then about black and white. I may have noticed that my father’s skin was light, and that my mother’s was more like the darkest chocolate, but I had not yet translated that information into anything racial. The first time I heard the word “biracial” applied to me, it was at school, not at home, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I did not think of myself as white or black—just closer in color to my father than to my mother. I didn’t figure out until much later that apparently it mattered what color a person was.

  That day when the salesman came to our door asking for the lady of the house, I didn’t realize that he had insulted my mother—so it made no sense to me when she slammed the door in his face. I felt embarrassed by her behavior, and I wondered why she seemed so angry afterward. Pop never acted that way, so I decided that he must be a nicer person than Savvy was.

  We were living in that house when I discovered that life with Pop was dictated by his moods, which zigzagged like the needle on a polygraph machine. I never knew from one day to the next
which end of the spectrum he would be on. Most days when I came home from school, I would charge into Pop’s office. He stopped whatever he was doing and wanted to hear all about my day. Usually, we drifted out to the kitchen and he fixed snacks.

  Whenever Ray Bolton—a Boston homicide detective, Pop’s best friend, and my godfather—was around, the two men might be deep in conversation about a murder, but I knew that I could walk in on them anyway. Ray and Pop would sweep away any crime-scene photos, close their file folders, and the three of us might talk, play Parcheesi, or, as a special treat in the summer, head for the bleachers at Fenway Park to catch a Red Sox game.

  There were other times, though, when Pop stormed into the house, said nothing, and locked himself in his office. Within seconds, he had music playing loud enough to shake the pictures on the walls, and I would usually not see him again until dinner (which was always the same on those occasions: grilled cheese sandwiches and split pea soup—obviously a dire sign). If he spoke at all, he might say something like, “Lanie, I really don’t care for people.”

  Pop never explained, but sometimes Ray did. “Your dad was in court. Judges do moronic things sometimes. Wearing a black robe doesn’t make you God, but some judges can’t seem to keep that straight. Your dad is an idealist. He can’t tolerate stupidity in anyone ever. I think he’d be much happier living in the woods and talking to chipmunks.”

  Sounded good to me.

  When I went into police work, I thought that Pop and I would grow closer—that he would be more open, more accessible. I assumed that the same thing driving me was what had driven him all those years: a need to see killers arrested and brought to trial. Get them off the street and plug them into the system.

  I quickly learned how different my father’s view of the world is. Pop does not feel bound by any rules, and his definition of justice does not involve the criminal justice system. The brilliance that allowed him to look into the minds of killers with such terrifying clarity also shaped the man and his view of the world. Indeed, such unprotected intimacy with the depths of violence that can lurk in men fostered an attitude free of self-quibbling. You create your own justice. Simple. But since Pop retreated into the great north woods to camp with the chipmunks and the fish and the birds and the trees, but no killers, he has mellowed out. I think.