Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach Read Free Book Online Page B

a top drawer, she found a tan folder that she usually used for collecting stray class notes in one location. She put the letter into the folder.
    Okay, what’s the next step?
    Jordan felt cold inside. She realized there was little right then that she could do, or should do, but one thing did jump out at her. “It would be wise for you to keep that in mind . . .”
    She nodded. All right. You want me to learn about the real story of Little Red Riding Hood. Well, that I can damn well do.
    It was time for basketball practice. After working up a sweat on the court and showering, she would have plenty of time to go to the school library and find the Brothers Grimm. She was pretty much flunking everything, so spending her time analyzing a centuries-old fairy tale because she was either being stalked by a crazy killer or was the butt of some elaborate joke by a mean classmate made perfect sense to her.
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    The Big Bad Wolf regretted not being able to see the reactions of each of his Reds when they read his message on the page in front of them. He was forced to indulge in fantasy—racing through delicious mental images of each, and anticipating the emotional contortions each was stumbling wildly into.
    Red One will be angry.
    Red Two will be confused.
    Red Three will be scared.
    He took a moment to look at slightly blurry pictures of each woman, taken with a long-lens camera. On the wall above his computer he had tacked more than a dozen pictures of each Red, along with note cards filled with information about each woman. Months of observation—
    from a distance yet intensely personal—were delineated on the wall. Little bits of their history, small aspects of their lives—all gleaned from cautious study—became words on a note card or glossy full-color pictures.
    Red One was caught smoking. A dangerously bad habit, he thought. Red Three was sitting alone beneath a campus tree. Always lonely, he reminded 39
    JOHN KATZENBACH
    himself. Red Two was pictured emerging from a liquor store, arms filled with packages. You are so weak, he whispered. He had placed that photograph above a newspaper clipping that was frayed around the edges. The headline was Fireman and Daughter, 3, Killed in Crash.
    It was not unlike the sort of display that police detective bureaus collected so that the cops could have a visual representation of the way a case was progressing. It was a staple cinematographer’s shot in a hundred movies—with justification, because it was so commonplace. There was one large difference, however: The police tacked up crime scene photos of murdered bodies because they needed answers to questions. His array was of the living, destined to die, most questions already answered.
    He knew each Red would respond differently to the letter. He had spent considerable time examining literary and scientific works that assessed human behavior in the turmoil that direct threats create. While there were common reactions associated with fear—see a shark’s fin and the heart skips a beat—the Big Bad Wolf instinctively believed fear was processed individually. When an airplane hits unexpected turbulence and seems to stagger in the sky, the passenger in seat 10A screams and grips the armrests white-knuckled, while in seat 10B the traveler shrugs and goes back to reading. This fascinated him. He liked to think that in both his careers, novelist and killer, he had explored these things deeply.
    And he was not one to underestimate the correlation between fear and creativity.
    He expected several concrete things to happen after they’d read his letter. He also tried to anticipate some of the emotions that were within them. They will stumble and fall, he thought. They will twitch and shake.
    He had recently watched a television show on the History Channel that interviewed famous military snipers. Using high-tech camerawork, it had reconstructed some of the remarkable assassinations they had performed, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in the