Maybe that would be better.
“Of course not,” she said.
The Big Bad Wolf softened his gaze and looked at his wife in the same way that a child might look at a baby kitten. His mind was churning, part congratulatory, part racing ahead with new plans. In the first place, he felt the conversation had gone exactly the way he’d expected it to. He hadn’t known when his wife was going to stumble on his reality, but he had known it would happen, and many times, alone in his office, or perched in some vantage point watching one of the three Reds, he had played out what she would say and how he would respond. And he was pleased with the way he’d limited the lies. That was an important consideration, he believed. Always tell as much truth as you can, so that the lies are far less recognizable.
But beyond his sense of satisfaction for having successfully prepared for that moment, he was accelerating his next steps. Write a chapter entitled Maintaining the Right Disguise, he said to himself. The key to any successful murder is creating the proper hiding place. It makes no sense to be a loner, to be isolated, driven and reeking of wrongdoing to the first cop that comes sniffing around. The best killers appear to the naked eye to be something much different. No one will ever say about him, “He seemed like he was up to no good.” No. About the Big Bad Wolf, they will say, “We had no idea he was so special. He seemed so ordinary. But he wasn’t, was he? We had no idea he was so great.” That’s what they will say about me.
He looked over at his wife. He could see all the troubles and doubts that still echoed within her as if they were flashes of light shooting from her eyes. The Big Bad Wolf reached over and took her hand. It was still trembling.
“I think I’ve been far too private about my work,” he said. “Far, far too private,” he emphasized. “You know me so well,” he continued, “I think it would make much more sense if you were involved a bit more. You know so much about writing and you love words so much, and perhaps it would be an advantage if you helped out a bit. I mean, you’ve always been my biggest fan. Maybe you should be a bit of a helper on this book as well. Maybe you should be like a production assistant, or my de facto editor.”
He saw his wife lift her head slightly. His tenderness had a distinct impact. “Dry your tears,” he said, reaching across and plucking a tissue from a side table, then sympathetically dabbing it at the corner of her eyes.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf nodded. She managed to meet his smile with one of her own. “But I’m not sure what I can do-” she started, but he waved a hand in the space between them, cutting her off.
“I will figure out something,” he said.
He lifted himself up from his customary seat and sat down beside her. “I’m glad we had this talk,” he said. “I want to make you feel better, and I know when you worry so much it’s not good for your heart.”
“I was so…” again her words trailed off.
Afraid? Worried? Concerned? Well, you had every right to be. He laughed and gave her shoulders a squeeze, leaving his arm draped loosely around her as if they were a pair of preteens at their first movie theater date. “It’s hard living with a writer,” he said.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s head bounced up and down.
“Okay,” the Big Bad Wolf said, grinning. “So, you will help me kill them?” he said, surrounding kill with quotation marks. One more lie, he thought. And then we can watch television.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf nodded.
“Fictionally, of course,” the Wolf added with a happy laugh.
29
The sergeant who took her statement thought Red Three was on the verge of hysteria, but he was a twenty-year veteran of the force, with two fourteen-year-old twin daughters at home, and so he was accustomed to sorting through the high-pitched noise that stressed teenagers used for language, although secretly he wished they all had a volume switch that he could just dial down a little.
He wrote down in his notebook phrases like I saw her jump and She disappeared over the edge and One second she was standing there and the next she was just gone that Jordan had ripped from between sobs. He tried to get her to give him an accurate description of the woman she saw throw herself from the bridge, but Jordan was limited to a wild-eyed, arms-waving Dark clothes, hat, medium height, mid-thirties.
The cop interviewed the coach, the assistant coach, and all the other players and dutifully listed everyone’s cell phone number. None had seen what Jordan saw. They all had reasonable explanations for why their attention was elsewhere.
He offered to call for an ambulance, as he feared that Jordan, who continued to alternate between tears and a kind of icy, withdrawn, flat look, was going into shock. Indeed, the cop believed that the reaction the teenager had was the most compelling evidence of a bridge suicide. She saw some damn thing, he thought.
None of the other officers in the half-dozen patrol cars spread out across the bridge had come up with much of anything other than an abandoned jacket. The flashing red and blue lights of the patrol vehicles reflected off the damp roadway, and made it difficult for the officers searching up and down the narrow walkway to find any evidence. High-powered flashlights carved out small slices of black surface when shone down on the rushing waters. Eyeball examinations of the area found few signs of suicide; there was a telltale muddy footprint of a woman’s-sized running shoe at the beginning of the bridge’s footpath, and there was a scuff mark in the cement where Jordan said the mystery woman launched over the edge.
But the overall lack of overt indications of death didn’t surprise the policeman. This wasn’t the first time he had been called to the bridge for a reported suicide. It was a preferred spot. There was plenty of leftover despair in the small, fading mill town, where manufacturing jobs had been replaced by illicit drugs. He-like many of his neighbors in the town-knew that the strong currents would sweep a body downstream, maybe toward the treatment plant, possibly over the falls. The force of the unforgiving waters might carry it miles down the river. It was also possible that the body was hung up on the debris that littered the river bottom. It had sometimes taken weeks for authorities to recover bodies that went in at that spot, and there were some that were never found.
He was already writing his report in his head to leave for the morning detective crew. It would be their problem to follow up. Find a name. Notify next of kin. The fact that there seemed no ready proof available to the cop didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened. He just wanted to finish his part of the case. Police divers and a boat crew would wait until daylight before they started with their hunt for the body. They won’t be happy when they get this order, he thought. It was dark and dangerous work in ink-colored waters, and likely to be completely futile.
Better chance that body will show up by accident. Maybe a fisherman will snag it one day this summer. That would be some surprise to reel in.