The three Reds sat cross-legged on the floor behind a long table. They had Karen’s laptop between them, and they hunched forward as Jordan typed in various bits of information.
“Here,” Jordan said. She pointed at the screen. “Gotta love Google Images.”
The unprepossessing image of a man in his sixties stared back at them. He had a paunch around his middle and skin that sagged beneath his chin. He had shaggy gray-tinged hair around his ears, but a thinning top, and he wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. The picture was taken a few years earlier at a local bookstore reading series. He was clearly a little shy of six feet tall, and not heavy-set, but not athletic-looking either. His ordinariness was his most dramatic feature.
“You think that’s a killer?” Jordan asked.
“He doesn’t look like what I imagined the Wolf would look like,” Karen said.
“What do killers look like?” Jordan asked. “And what would a wolf look like?”
“Tall. Strong. Predatory. I don’t see that,” Karen said quietly. “You think that guy could chase you down?”
“He’s a writer. Mysteries and thrillers,” Sarah said.
“Does that mean anything?” Karen responded.
“Well, I guess it means he knows something about crimes,” Sarah replied. “Wouldn’t any crime writer who was good enough to get a book published know something about how to commit a felony?”
“Yeah, probably,” Karen answered sharply. “But they’d also know how people get caught.” She turned to Jordan. “Tell us about the wife,” she asked.
“Bitch,” Jordan snapped.
“That doesn’t say much,” Karen said.
“Yes it does,” Sarah interjected.
“The woman sits up in the dean’s office and never smiles,” Jordan said. “Never says hello. Acts put out when you show up to get reamed by the dean for whatever you’ve done wrong, like you’ve somehow made her day worse.”
“So, just because she’s a little rude, you think…” Karen stopped. Teenage think is simple think, she reminded herself. Except when it isn’t, when they surprise you with some truly prescient idea or observation. She looked through the dark at Jordan, trying to discern which of these moments this was. Jordan was the angriest of the three of them. Even in the room’s shadows, she could see her face lit with barely contained fury. Karen imagined that it was the teenager’s anger that made her risky. It also made her attractive. She wasn’t beset by doubts-or, at the least, no doubts that Karen could see. She wondered whether she had once been like Jordan and suspected the answer to that question was yes, because the line between anger and determination was often thin. At least, she hoped she’d once been like Jordan. She suddenly felt old, then thought, No, that’s not what I’m feeling. What I’m feeling is defeated already by what we might have to do.
“I still think she’s a bitch,” Jordan replied. The teenager hesitated, then gasped sharply, the sound echoing about the science lab.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
Jordan’s voice trembled. It was in sharp contrast to the blustery, fierce Jordan that the other Reds had grown accustomed to. “I just realized: The bitch comes to every basketball game.”
“Well, what does-” Sarah started, only to have Jordan leap excitedly into a rush of words.
“Every game. I mean, she’s always up there in the middle of the stands-I’ve seen her a million times, watching us play. Except I only thought it was us. Maybe it was me. And if she’s there, I bet her husband is there, too, right next to her.”
“Well, have you ever seen him?”
“Yeah. Sure. Probably. How would I know who he was?”
This made sense.
“And that’s not all,” Jordan said, her voice picking up momentum. “In the dean’s office, she would have access to my school record. She would know just about every scheduled place I had to be. She’d know when I was likely to be in class, or eating lunch or going to basketball or heading to the library. She would know just about everything. Or, at least, could figure it out.”
Sarah leaned back. Her mind churned. You take one thing and add it to another thing, you combine one observation with something else you’ve noticed, and it all seems to mean something when maybe it doesn’t.
To Jordan, it suddenly seemed obvious: mean secretary. Husband. Games. Her every trip to the gym. All the failed appointments with psychologists to get her back on track. She thought, It has to connect the dots. But not yet to the other two Reds. Jordan abruptly punched computer keys, and pictures of the husband’s four book jackets arrived on the screen.
The pictures were lurid, suggestive, and over-the-top images. A man wielding a bloody knife figured prominently in one. A large handgun resting on a table was in the center of another. A third sported a shadowy figure lurking in an alleyway. This jacket caused Karen to shudder.
“He hasn’t published in years. Maybe he’s retired,” Karen said. Not one word that fell from her lips had any conviction behind it.
“Yeah. Or maybe something else,” Jordan sneered. “Maybe he got tired of writing about killers and decided to try a real suit on for size.”
The three Reds remained silent. They could hear distant music from the dance. The pulse of rock and roll contradicted the dark feelings they all felt.
“What do we do now?” Sarah whispered. “Maybe it’s him. Maybe it isn’t. I mean, what the hell can we do? What are our alternatives?”
Again silence enclosed the three women. It took Karen, the organized one of the three, a few minutes to reply. “One, we do nothing-”
“Great plan,” Jordan interrupted. “And wait for him to kill us?”
“He hasn’t yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe this is all just, I don’t know…”-she waved her hand at the science lab equipment-“some weird experiment, the kind of bizarre thing a writer thinks up and-” She stopped. “We have no real evidence, other that the Wolf’s word, that he intends to kill us.”
“Bullshit! He’s been stalking us and-” Sarah countered.
“What about your dead cats?” Jordan cut in.
“I don’t know for sure they’re dead. I only know-” Karen realized she was contradicting everything she truly believed.
“Bullshit!” Jordan interrupted, echoing Sarah. “You fucking well know.”
Karen did, but she continued on, false reason and awkward compromise littering her voice. “Maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe he just wants to go on taunting us and teasing us and threatening us for years.”
Jordan shook her head back and forth. “Any one of the shrinks my fucking parents have forced me to go to over the years would grin and say that’s total denial, as if they were making some sort of really wonderful point that should straighten me out like instantly and turn me into a well-adjusted, happy, perfectly normal teenager, like there is such a thing anywhere in the world.”
Both Karen and Sarah were glad of the dark, because they both smiled right past their fears. Karen thought this was exactly what she really liked about Jordan. If she can live through all this, Karen thought, she will grow into someone special.
The word if was nearly painful inside her, like a sudden clenched stomachache or a slap across the cheek.
“Okay, so nothing and wait to see if he does kill us is one choice,” Sarah said. “And?”