eighteen
Sixty miles north of the State Security Hospital, in the small maze of St. Paul city streets known as Tangletown, Nightmare parked along the curb two houses away from the duplex where Bo Thorsen lived. The side of the white van he drove carried an antenna logo and below it the words METROCABLECOMMUNICATIONS. He wore sunglasses, a gray uniform with the nameD. Solomonsewn onto the shirt pocket, a gray cap that matched the uniform, and he carried a small toolbox. He whistled his way through the shafts of morning sunlight that slanted among the big American elms in the yard, and he climbed the front steps of the duplex. Through a curtained front window on the ground floor came the sound of a television tuned toThe Price Is Right. He quietly turned the knob on the front door, but the door was locked. He set his toolbox down, glanced at the empty street, took a lock pick from his pocket, and in a few seconds was inside the house. To his right stood the door of the first-floor unit, to his left the stairway that led upward. Nightmare silently mounted the stairs. The door of the upstairs unit had only a knob lock and a dead bolt. Child’s play. Less than two minutes from the time he’d left his van, Nightmare was inside Thorsen’s apartment.
He paused and took in the feel of the place. The most imposing item in the living room was a massive bookcase that took up nearly all of one wall. The shelves were full. The other walls were sparsely decorated with small watercolors matted and delicately framed. The furniture was tasteful and spare, all light tones. The whole place felt clean and uncluttered.
Nightmare went to the bookcase and scrutinized Thorsen’s taste in reading. The shelves were nearly equally divided between classic nonfiction texts that covered a lot of territory-Bronowski, LeviStrauss, Chomsky, Jung, Heilbroner, Galbraith, Campbell-and fiction and poetry, almost entirely American-Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wharton, Dos Passos, Sandburg, Frost, Angelou, Mailer, Dove. Thorsen had a signed first edition in excellent condition of Tom Jorgenson’s autobiographyThe Testament of Time. Years ago when the book had first been released, Nightmare had read it and thought that, except for hiding the fact that he was a liar and a betrayer, Jorgenson told a pretty good tale. The worn covers seemed to indicate that many of the books had been well read, although they may simply have come used from secondhand bookstores. Nightmare couldn’t be certain yet. He was just getting to know Thorsen. The agent subscribed to several magazines. Time, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and one of Nightmare’s favorites since childhood, National Geographic. A television with a thirteen-inch screen sat like a forgotten child on a small table in one corner of the living room. There was also a sound system and a carousel of CDs that contained mostly jazz.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator was adequately stocked, though nothing in quantity. Fruit, yogurt, cheese, bagels, milk, juice. No leftovers. There were half a dozen chilled cans of beer, something called Pig’s Eye. The cupboards contained a modest supply of dishware, the basics. The small dining room table had only two chairs.
In the bathroom, clean matching towels hung on the racks. The medicine cabinet held no prescription drugs.
The first bedroom that Nightmare checked contained only a computer desk, computer hardware, and a chair surrounded by shelves of books. Thorsen appeared to have an even more inquisitive nature than Nightmare had realized. In the second bedroom, the bed was neatly made. All of Thorsen’s dirty clothing had been put in a wicker hamper. A paperback copy ofLonesome Dovelay on the nightstand. A makeshift bookmark, the ace of spades from a deck of playing cards, showed that Thorsen was nearly three-quarters finished, almost to the place where Gus bit the dust, a sad but truthful piece of storytelling. Thorsen had a large clothes closet. Half of it was used to hang suits, pants, and shirts. The other half was given over to a respectful housing of the uniform, armor, and sword of kendo, the Japanese art of fencing. Nightmare was intrigued that Thorsen was a man who apparently understood Bushido, the way of the warrior.
In the whole apartment, Thorsen had but two photographs on display, both framed and set on the bureau in the bedroom. The first was a black-and-white blowup of a beautiful woman in a party gown. From the cut of the gown and the style of the woman’s blonde hair, Nightmare judged that the picture had probably been taken in the early 1970s. The picture was remarkable in one very particular way. In her face and in her Nordic build, the woman reminded him of Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. Nightmare smiled and wondered if Thorsen even realized the similarities.
The second photograph was a shot of an elderly couple with their arms tenderly around each other. In the background stood a barn sporting a new coat of red paint. Nightmare was almost certain there were more pictures somewhere. Everyone had a history, and almost everyone had that history documented in photographs, in certificates and diplomas, in ribbons from high school track meets and medals from the Scouts. Some people kept everything, others very little. But almost everyone kept something. Nightmare discovered Thorsen’s history in a big cardboard box under the bed.
Nightmare sat on the floor and removed the lid from the box. Thorsen at first appeared to have come from a large family. A lot of the photographs were of kids, adolescents mostly, and the same couple and the same red barn framed on Thorsen’s bureau. The kids didn’t look at all alike. Some were blond, some redheaded, some raven- haired. They were tall and short, and their skins were of different tones and colors. Deeper in the box, Nightmare found more photographs of the woman in the gown whose picture sat on the bureau. In one, she had her arm around a kid who looked like Thorsen. Below those photos was a collection of articles cut from newspapers. They were about the murder of a St. Paul woman named Helen Lingenfelter. Although not particularly flattering, the photos that ran with the articles were of the same woman who had her arm around Thorsen. The newspaper stories mentioned a son, Bo, fourteen years of age, but no husband. Also in the box lay a document officially granting Bo Joseph Lingenfelter a legal change of name to Bo Harold Thorsen. Nightmare now understood the large family of disparate appearance. Thorsen had probably been taken into some kind of foster home after his mother’s death.
Beneath the change of name, Nightmare came across a certificate of valor awarded to Thorsen by the U.S. Secret Service. Near the bottom of the box was a packet of letters bound together with string. They were all sent by the same woman, someone named Robin, from a D.C. address. They chronicled a distant courtship dance that ended when, in her final communication, the woman claimed to agree with Thorsen that a relationship was impossible for two people dedicated to a career in the Secret Service. The postmarks were nearly a decade old.
The final item Nightmare drew out was an old sheet of lined, three-hole paper, the kind a kid might have had in a high school notebook. Carefully centered on the paper and written in capital block letters were three observations.
1. THE WORLD IS HARD. BE STRONG.
2. LOVE IS FOR ONLY A FEW. DON’T EXPECT IT.
3. LIFE ISN’T FAIR. BUT SOME PEOPLE ARE. BE ONE OF THEM.
Nightmare wasn’t certain of the significance, but he appreciated the sentiments. He put everything back into the box in the way he’d found it and returned the box to its place under Thorsen’s bed. Then he sat down to consider what he’d learned.
Thorsen was a loner. He had no bowling trophies, no pictures of a softball team. He had only two chairs for dining and kept only basic dishware. Thorsen didn’t entertain much. Except for the letters from long ago, there was nothing to suggest romantic involvement. A man wedded to his job, Nightmare concluded. His small television and his large book collection indicated he preferred reading when he wanted to relax. His taste in books was eclectic, though not particularly original. Still, it suggested a thinking man, someone who might be willing to use an unorthodox approach in tackling a problem, and the fact that he read so widely in fiction suggested a fertile imagination. He had a tragic background, had suffered a painful loss at an impressionable age that left him without family. Although he’d managed to put together a life that had integrity and purpose at its heart, nothing about him seemed to trumpet happiness.
The similarities between his own life and Thorsen’s were not lost on him. He felt a faint affection for the man, a rare thing for Nightmare. But that wouldn’t keep him from killing Thorsen if he had to.
Nightmare had followed the agent to St. Peter the previous night and knew that Thorsen was now at the state hospital. Nightmare had taken the opportunity to better explore the nature of the man; the more he knew about an adversary, the less likely he was to be surprised. He’d come to Thorsen’s home because he knew that a home held secrets. Uncovering those secrets took him a long way toward understanding the enemy. It was a lesson
