WOLF TIME

A Novel
By Dick Croy

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WOLF TIME 1

Dark grows the sun.

Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered,
wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls;
Nor ever shall men each other spare.

The [Icelandic] Poetic Edda

Voluspo

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming"

William Butler Yeats
WOLF TIME 2

Chapter 1

Esther watched the swell gather itself and rise, but

this wasn't the wave she was waiting for.

Waiting, after all, is the key to body-surfing.

David had taught her that, then one weekend she'd taught

herself to turn waiting into transition: land-walker

forsaking the upright and the vertical to become water-

planer. Esther, who hated waiting, had hardly known the

meaning of the word until then.

Well before last summer she had been aware for some

time that not just her body but her whole being craved

exercise, physical expression, but her imperious mind had

always said, Not yet get a firm grip on your profession

first: absorb all you can of psychological theory, the

awesome body of work that represents; home in on a

discipline to cultivate in your own practice. Get the

career solidly anchored then there'll be time to play.

That formula had worked very well: she was

established, highly regarded and justly proud of her

WOLF TIME 3

professional accomplishments. Colleagues and clients

alike found in her an example of integrity and strength

in a permissive, promiscuous society. Esther offered

understanding, compassion, and a therapists equivalent

of tough love.

Her private practice in Santa Monica was growing

rapidly as she focused her energy on finding the balance

which seemed most natural to her among traditional

behavioral psychology, the more intuitive Jungian

approach, and its further refinement into the humanistic

and more recent Transpersonal psychologies that had taken

root in the fertile cultural compost that is California.

And, finally, she was learning to play again,

surrendering her death grip on success as she'd so often

heard herself urging her well-to-do clients to do, with

the ironic recognition of failing to follow the advice

herself.

Esther craved release the most after her weekly

therapy sessions with battered women at the West Side

Women's Shelter. Floating on her back now just outside

the breaking point of the waves, she gave herself up to

the ocean's deep massage as one swell after another

WOLF TIME 4

lifted and rocked and lulled her. Which were worse, she

asked herself for the nth time, the broken bones and

reconstructed faces of the women she counseled or their

broken spirits, the paralyzing lethargy of the will that

left so many of them...she imagined her languorous

surrender as apathy, pictured herself washing up on some

flotsam-strewn desert island, anonymous, amnesiac. Names?

well of course these women had names; what they lacked

were identities, original and authentic lives. How little

she could give them! If it weren't for the children who

were usually involved she'd probably have given up this

part of her practice long ago.

This afternoon she'd learned that three-year-old

twin girls who'd become favorites of everyone at the

Shelter during their short stay had just returned with

their mother to an abusive, brutal father. Linda had been

brought comatose to the emergency room with the

frightened girls by a friend, who kept them while their

mother recovered from the injuries her husband had

inflicted. Three weeks ago they'd moved into the Shelter

together and Esther met Linda, who had refused to press

charges against her husband, the next day.

WOLF TIME 5

Her story was a familiar one: marriage, on the

rebound, at 23 to a man she'd been seeing for only a few

months though she had known him distantly in high school.

When the honeymoon was over, about an hour into the

drunken reception, there followed a period of drinking

and long unexplained absences by her intermittently

employed husband. His verbal abuse began when Linda

immediately became pregnant, the beatings shortly after

the twins were born. Esther suspected the girls were

being sexually abused but she'd had no success in getting

their mother to admit it. One more session might have

elicited the truth which is probably why Linda had left

this morning.

Esther righted herself in the water and squinted

horizonward to gauge the incoming swells, then decided to

swim farther out, still immersed in the day's backwash of

meetings, phone calls, unresolved activity. But the waves

would soon push all that aside; this was her therapy

session.

David certainly hadn't helped take her mind off the

twins' predicament by standing her up for lunch. He'd

flown to Denver this afternoon in his company's

WOLF TIME 6

Gulfstream and wouldn't be back till tomorrow. The memory

of his secretary's call annoyed her all over again.

David's success in business, like her father's, had

always kept him extremely busy; 12-hour days and six-day

weeks were normal. But he usually found time to break

their dates personally, to say the right thing and mean

it. Today it had been Margaret, in that tone of voice

Esther was never quite sure she was reading correctly.

Yet what a difference between her two-year-old

relationship with David with all its flaws and

annoyances, and the brutal servitude women like Linda got

themselves caught up in. Could the terrible childhoods,

the truly execrable parenting many of these women had

experienced really account for the entirety of the self-

destructive spiral which kept them and their children in

bondage to cruel, sadistic men? Where was the line

between the malign influences of infancy and childhood,

and the responsibility an adult must learn to take for

her own actions?

Esther rolled over and lashed out with her right arm

in a brisk Australian crawl parallel to the shoreline.

Her own childhood had hardly been ideal, though one

WOLF TIME 7

could never call her aloof father abusive. But she

certainly hadn't let the sense of loneliness or yes,

even rejection which she'd experienced then ruin her

life, for God's sake! On the contrary, her determination

to succeed had been steeled by her father's indifference.

This was all old business, however: foolish to dwell on.

She'd made peace with her past long ago, even before the

analysis she'd undergone as part of her training at the

Jungian Institute in Zurich. Dr. Krongold, her analyst

and mentor, had been favorably impressed.

In any case, battered women themselves certainly

weren't the primary source of their problem. She'd met

and observed enough of the batterers themselves at the

Shelter to draw a general but first-hand picture of their

personality type: swaggering, arrogant in their

invulnerability from all but the least significant

consequences of their behavior most of them actually

outraged at the Shelter's intrusion into their violent

little fiefdoms.

But hadn't she come out here to wash all this from

her mind for awhile? Returning to the world of now with a

vengeance, Esther saw that the swells had increased in

WOLF TIME 8

their frequency and power. Turning her back on a mounding

wall of water that looked promising, she took two

powerful strokes and extended her arms like a little girl

playing Wonder Woman. Her spine was horizontal as the sea

rose beneath her; she lay supine on its rolling breast

like a spear.

She loved the sensation, being the arrow of desire

her own, the world's. "I am the bullet!" the deranged

killer in the film Performance had screamed while in fact

you were seeing the bullet's point of view as it cleaved

his victim's flesh. So now did her body furrow air and

water in a straight streamlined rush upon the sand

Aphrodite in a sheath of foam.

Actually, the lithe brown bikini-clad body was more

that of a diminutive 35-year-old Amazon's as Esther

hauled herself unceremoniously from the water. There was

sand in her crotch, saltwater burned her eyes, and an

elbow had been scraped raw; she felt fantastic! The

physical exertion had given her day's accumulation of

ennui and fatigue a throbbing sensual edge. A spectacular

L.A. sunset, enhanced by smog and a recent volcanic

eruption in Central America, had turned receding waves

WOLF TIME 9

crimson over a mirror of packed sand. Her tingling limbs

seemed to embody this same fiery light.

Feeling both fulfillment and a lingering hunger, she

took her hairbrush from a beach bag, which she flung over

her shoulder. Her brush strokes, vigorous at first, soon

subsided into languorous half-conscious swipes that left

her lustrous dark hair stiffly sculpted from the

saltwater and sand. Her face with its full, crisp Old

Testament features softened in contentment. Like black

stones dropped into a pool together, her dark eyes

radiated a mesh of lines that normally intensified the

fierce determination gleaming there. Now they merely

glowed with pleasure.

She curled her toes into the packed wet sand as she

walked. A young couple approached, jogging with their two

dogs: a great Dane and a feisty little Yorkie, its legs a

staccato, feathery blur. Esther burst into laughter at

the tiny creature's determined effort to keep up with the

others. The lean bronzed pair smiled with her, glancing

at the little dog with affectionate approval. They were

far down the beach when she felt someone behind her and

turned, a smile still on her face. It froze there.

WOLF TIME 10

Standing before her was a man big and solid-looking

enough to play linebacker in the NFL. A black hood

covered his face. In his upraised right hand, its blade

catching the dying light, was a knife. Suddenly she

couldn't breathe. Her hand went to her open mouth and

then everything went black.

She felt herself falling in slow motion...floating.

A cluster of needles, not unpleasantly, pricked her

shoulder. She was comfortable physically, almost

luxuriatingly so, as though basking in clouds. But there

was a harsh noise...a distant rasping sound that was

getting louder. Her throat hurt.

Something was growling, snarling savagely and it

was she. She was doing it! Vomiting sound. Sounds so

primitive her mind recoiled. She was on the sand, on one

shoulder, lashing up and out with her legs. A man stood

over her. Hooded, like an executioner. Yes now she

remembered: a knife, he'd had a long knife this man!

Uncontrollable spasms swept over her, starting deep

in her abdomen and erupting as unearthly snarls more

terrifying than if they had been directed at her. As if

some beast inside of her were tearing at her bowels and

WOLF TIME 11

throat, desperate to get out. Driving her legs so that

her feet flew up toward her attacker of their own accord.

At the faceless man in shorts and windbreaker circling

her with the knife.

She was pivoting on her shoulder, the gritty sand

against it the needles she'd felt. Keeping her pointed,

slashing feet between her assailant and herself, the

deep, guttural growls erupting like contractions.

The huge man feinted nervously with the knife,

flicking it about like a snake's tongue, pressing for an

opening. Then he found it and lunged.

Suddenly Esther found herself responding, the snarl

was the shape and texture of her own rage; she had

control of it now, or at least she was in synchrony with

it. Everything suddenly came together: body, will,

emotional catharsis. The ferocious growls expressed this

unity and concentration of purpose articulating sheer

survival. There was something terrible yet magnificent in

this one-pointed wordless affirmation, calling up within

her an intensity, a will to live that imbued life

instantaneously with a cold fiery, inexpressible beauty.

She would fight with her last drop of blood to live.

WOLF TIME 12

Again and again she drove her legs, like spring-

loaded knives of her own, at the man's hooded face.

Retracting, cocking, releasing them in an eruption of

visceral hatred. The bestial snarls were like hurled

weapons.

The man backed off. Confused, afraid now of being

seen. The bizarre behavior had finally unnerved him; his

hunger was gone, his knife no longer an extension of

desire. With a deep menacing growl of his own, he folded

the blade against a muscular thigh and loped powerfully

away down the beach. In a daze Esther saw him pull the

hood off and stuff it into a pocket of his windbreaker.

Her growls had subsided into hoarse, heavy breathing,

each inhalation loud and painful. When she finally sat up

she was alone.

She dragged herself to her knees, head hanging, her

breathing turning rapid, shallower. Trying to catch her

breath, she sobbed once and quickly stifled the release.

She couldn't afford to fall apart, not here. She

staggered to her feet, weaving at first, and began to

walk. Holding herself in, holding herself together with

all the willpower she could muster, she felt her self-
WOLF TIME 13

control begin to waver. She was walking faster and

faster. Then, not quite blindly, she was running.

Chapter 2

Esther pulled into her parking space with

uncharacteristic disregard for whether or not her Lexus

SUV encroached on either of the spaces next to hers. She

had driven home in a daze, her mind more intent on

replaying the attempt on her life, in excruciating

detail, than on plotting her route through clotted

Pacific Coast Highway traffic to her condo in Santa

Monica Canyon.

She was exhausted as she gathered up her beach bag

and towel and pulled herself from the car. She hadn't

paused to pull on jogging clothes over her swimsuit, but

it didnt occur to her to feel self-conscious on the way

to her second floor apartment, a distance that seemed

twice as long as usual. Fumbling with her keys, she

noticed numbly that her hands were shaking. At last the

door was open and she was safely inside. She shut it

quickly behind her and threw the deadbolt.

For a minute or more she stood there inside the

door, trying to focus on what to do next. This should be

WOLF TIME 14

reported.

There was an apology from David on her answering

machine, but she didn't feel like trying to track him

down in Denver. His abbreviated itinerary was even more

opaque to her than usual; her mind simply refused to

connect the details into a coherent picture. In any case,

the trip was apparently important enough to have kept him

from calling her before leaving. Damn him and his

business deals, she really needed him now!

For just a moment a feeling of helplessness welled

up to blur her resolute image of the world. She'd

experienced all this before hadn't she? With her father,

the original missing man in her life until needing him,

or anyone else, was no longer an option for her.

Esther wiped her eyes and dismissed the memory

contemptuously. It was probably just as well that David

wasn't in town, either here or at the home he kept in the

Malibu Hills. Aside from the attack itself which she'd

thwarted after all she couldn't even tell him what had

happened to her. Had the man picked her out at random, or

had he been stalking her? Did he know where she lived?

Would he find her again? She had to talk to someone!

WOLF TIME 15

She texted Valerie, her best friend, then called her

home phone. Her answering machine of course! Forcing back

adrenaline-fed anger, Esther spoke as calmly as possible.

"Val, I need to talk to you. Please pick up!" She waited,

feeling the effort her self-control was exacting in her

clenched jaw, a painful tightness in her chest. Valerie

obviously wasn't home, she might be in the desert

somewhere. She often cut herself loose from the grid, as

she put it.

"It's about seven, Val. If you get this message

before midnight call me at home." Esther put the phone

down almost unconsciously. She knew her partner Dan Foley

was incommunicado in Laguna Beach because she was his

referral for the evening. She'd been extremely relieved,

in fact, that David's was the only telephone message

awaiting her.

There was no one else she had to talk to now but the

police. She called and reported what had occurred to a

bored-sounding Sgt. Someone or Other, who said she could

come in and make out a full report now or wait till

tomorrow if she wished. She hung up realizing that now

she had now become just another disembodied name in

WOLF TIME 16

police files.

She walked into the bedroom, sat down in front of

her dressing table and looked deep into the haunted eyes

of her reflection in the beveled mirror. What in God's

name had happened to her out there on the beach? It had

probably saved her life, yet the intrusion of some

unknown part of her nature was deeply troubling. Or was

she understandably over-reacting? Was her growing anxiety

far more the result of having been attacked than of being

defended by a savage part of herself beyond her

understanding and control?

Right now she was far too upset to think rationally.

She'd see Dan friend, confidant and professional

colleague first thing in the morning. Maybe by then

this would all be a little clearer and between them

they'd come up with some explanation of what had taken

place. Then she'd make a full police report. Would they

be able to identify her attacker from her description of

him? Could they offer some measure of protection? From

her own experience now, in addition to the horror stories

of indifference and ineptitude that were common knowledge

at the Shelter, she no longer had any illusions about

WOLF TIME 17

police intervention being little more than an extension

of her ordeal.

She showered, then paced nervously around her

apartment for what seemed like hours, hoping for a call

from Val, before finally lying down and falling into an

emotionally exhausted sleep. But the respite was short.

The Santa Anas were blowing and the night was full of the

sounds of restless trees in the canyon. In fitful dreams

the live oak outside her window alternately beseeched and

menaced her with long gnarled fingers against the glass.

It was about three a.m. when Esther finally woke

again. Her heart was beating frantically and she was

short of breath. A suffocating sense of dread hung over

the bed. She stared straight up toward the ceiling,

though she could barely see it in the dark, afraid to

look to one side or the other. Her heartbeat, if this was

possible, increased its fearful drumming inside her

ribcage.

But as her eyes began to adapt, she regained control

of herself, looked around apprehensively at her shadowy

but otherwise perfectly normal surroundings, then at last

got out of bed.

WOLF TIME 18

A hollow rattling sound, vaguely resembling the

muffled rumble of distant thunder, came from somewhere in

the apartment. Esther traced it to a spare bedroom she

also used as an office. The sliding doors of the walk-in

closet swung freely in the draft the wind was pulling

through the room. She started to open them but then

hesitated something held her back.

Feeling her pulse begin to accelerate again but now

thoroughly disgusted with herself, she threw open the

hollow-core doors with a flourish and slid them back into

the wall.

Then she got a drink of water from the countertop

filter in the kitchen and returned to bed. Emotionally

and physically exhausted, she fell this time into a deep

dreamless sleep.

* * * * *

Dawn found Esther immersed in three books from her

library, in a glade-like atrium off her kitchen. Filled

with a profusion of hanging, shelved and standing plants

in a wall of windows and beneath a large skylight shaded

by eucalyptus trees, the dining area's woodsy ambiance

was further enhanced by the unobtrusive gurgle of a

WOLF TIME 19

mountain stream. The melodious sounds of water flowing

over and around rocks and forest debris were from an

environmental tape David had made for her.

Spread out on the solid cherry table in front of her

were Jung's illustrated Man and His Symbols and, from the

complete Bollingen series of his works, The Archetypes in

the Collective Unconscious. At the moment she was leafing

through Joseph Campbell's popular Myths, Dreams and

Religions as she hurried through breakfast.

What the hell was she looking for, what had she

expected to find? What had emerged from the core of her

being yesterday was no dream and no symbolic mythological

drama much less a religious experience. And nowhere in

Jung's voluminous treatment of his "archetypes" did she

remember ever encountering anything that might explain

what had happened to her on the beach.

According to Jung, the archetypes or "primordial

images" as he also called them, represent an evolutionary

development within the mind somewhat analogous to the

physical evolution of the body's organs. "They are an

instinctive trend," he said, "as marked as the impulse of

birds to build nests, or ants to form organized

WOLF TIME 20

colonies." However, the archetypes are instincts

manifested in fantasies and symbolic images rather than

in physiological urges perceived by the senses.

Esther thought of them as a kind of evolutionary

media: the media of the psyche, with messages from the

interior mankind's collective past. She saw them as

bridges to the vast and otherwise inaccessible territory

of humanity's psyche. But these "bridges" were just a

mental construct after all, capable of carrying only

psychic energy like images and symbols weren't they?

She closed the books impatiently to take to the

office with her and stacked her breakfast things back on

the tray on which she'd carried them in here no more than

fifteen minutes earlier. Her adrenaline level was higher

than usual this morning.

Arriving at eight at the private clinic she operated

with her psychiatrist friend and business partner Daniel

Foley, she parked in the space reserved for her, then

unlocked the staff door at the rear of the building and

walked down a carpeted corridor lined with Dans

photographs to the reception area for her messages.

"Hi, Judy," she said brusquely, "is Dr. Foley in

WOLF TIME 21

yet?"

"Dok-tor Foley?" The attractive grad student who

worked for them part-time, arched her eyebrows and

squared her jaw to give the words the proper gothic

intonation. "Ja, he iss in."

Esther smiled wanly. "I didn't mean to sound so

formal."

Judy Williams smiled brightly back at her. On her

side at least, her relationship with Esther was more than

merely professional, although she recognized that it

would never be as warm as she'd have liked. Esther had

been willing to listen a number of times when Judy had

needed another woman to confide in. But her boss gave

away very little about her own problems, if she

acknowledged having any. Judy admired her strength,

professional standing and self-confidence. She often

wondered, though, why Esther felt the need for such

privacy. Was it from a fear of intimacy with all but the

closest of friends?

"You're in early this morning. Dan Doctor Foley's

probably just dictating. That's what he usually does

with his first three or four cups of coffee....Are you

WOLF TIME 22

okay?"

Esther affected a tight smile and nodded, not quite

sure how to respond. Her reactions and sense of timing

were off this morning. It occurred to her as she knocked

on Dan's door that this was how she used to feel in high

school when she returned to class from the dentist's

office with a mouthful of Novocain.

"The door's open!"

"No it wasn't, it was closed, that's why I knocked."

Esther crossed the room briskly and sat down in one of

the two plush swivel rocking chairs facing Dan's desk. He

eyed her with a searching half-smile.

"We didn't get much sleep last night did we."

"I was almost raped yesterday, Dan. Or murdered

I'm not sure which."

"What? Where? What happened?"

"The state beach where I swim, just south of Malibu.

Some maniac with a hood over his face. And a knife..."

She shuddered, unable or unwilling to continue but

indicating its length with her hands before raising them

to shield her eyes.

Dan came around the desk and knelt in front of her,

WOLF TIME 23

his hands gripping her shoulders.

"Jesus, Esther, I'm sorry, baby. It must have been

horrible for you. Are you all right?"

She regained control of herself and looked into his

face.

"I don't even know what happened, Dan. It was all

just instinctual completely unconscious. One minute I'm

standing there with this, this hooded executioner in

front of me...the next thing I know, I'm lying on the

ground kicking up at him with the most primitive

sounds I've ever heard coming from my mouth. Vicious,

savage...snarling! I couldn't make those sounds if I

tried, Dan and yet they probably saved my life."

"Growling? You mean like a..."

"Like a dog, or a wolf. From deep down in my chest."

She gestured to demonstrate the eruption of sound from

her throat. "It was just...unbelievable. I can't get over

it. Where did it come from?"

Dan stood up. "Have you ever experienced anything

like this before?"

"Never imagined a human being could make such

sounds. Not in this day and age."

WOLF TIME 24

"How did he react?"

"It scared the hell out of him. He was going to use

that knife!"

"...Have you reported it to the police?"

"By phone. I wanted to talk to you before making a

full report in person."

"Well, what'd David have to say?"

"He's not here, he flew to Denver yesterday. I

wanted to call him, but what can he do, besides

jeopardizing whatever this month's big business deal is?"

"Are you kidding? He'd want to know, I would!"

Esther smiled wanly and took his hand. "I know you

would. So would David, of course. But when hes working,

putting together some deal out of town... Her eyebrows

pantomimed futility.

"Do you want me to go in with you? I only have two

sessions this morning; I can cancel."

"Thanks, Dan. I can handle it."

"You sure you're all right?"

"I'm not sure about anything right now."

"But you got away! You never cease to amaze me, Dr.

Roth."
WOLF TIME 25

Esther only half heard this and when it registered

it was too late to acknowledge the compliment, although

she appreciated it. She had been longing to share this

with Dan all morning; he was someone she'd always been

able to count on. They'd known each other for what? seven

or eight years now, and had been sharing the clinic for

four. The sex thing had never been a problem since Dan

was gay, although many of his clients were unaware of

this. He was six-two, maybe 220 pounds after a long

holiday weekend and the gourmet cuisine of which he was

inordinately fond. Dark, very good-looking and in good,

if rather abundant, shape for his 39 years, Dan was

conservatively casual in dress, the soul of discretion in

his practice.

He sat down on the edge of the desk, looking at her

while trying to visualize the incident she had been

describing.

"You said this was all unconscious. Do you remember

throwing yourself on the ground, or did he do that?"

"When I saw that knife everything went black."

"It sounds like an eruption of some kind of...primal

energy, in response to a life-threatening experience. How

WOLF TIME 26

many women could protect themselves if they could get in

touch with the same kind of energy?"

She nodded. "I've thought about that myself

whether I'd have reacted the same way a year ago."

"A year ago? You mean before Valerie's dance

workshop? You've been involved in that for almost a year

now haven't you?"

"This wasn't like anything I've seen in Valerie's

studio though, Dan. It's as if...as if I were possessed

or something. Yet there was something almost glorious

about it, that I keep coming back to in my mind.

Something savage, something totally beyond my control."

"Well that's understandable, Esther your life was

at stake."

"This has nothing to do with understanding, Dan

that's what's so terrifying about it! It's the very

opposite of understanding. It's what I've always assumed

the human race is supposedly evolving away from. And it

wasn't just some kind of defense mechanism, it was more

than that."

"What do you mean?"

"I think you'd have to say it was...blood lust or

WOLF TIME 27

something like that. It was almost as if he had infected

me I wanted to kill him."

"I still say that's "

"You don't understand! This went beyond self-

defense. It was, it was almost predatory. That's what's

so frightening, Dan. Where did that come from? We're

psychiatrists what the hell does this mean?"

"Well, have you thought about analysis to see if you

can find out?"

"I've already talked to Dr. Krongold, the analyst I

trained under at the Jungian Institute he'll see me. I

was also hoping that maybe you could help me throw some

light on this."

Under her nearly beseeching gaze Dan shifted

uneasily. He'd do anything for Esther, they both knew

that. But what were these feelings, the dark glimpse he'd

just had, of something besides sympathy in response to

her account? Anyone who was gay knew of monsters lurking

beneath humanity's collective smiley face: homophobia of

course; for some, their own homosexuality; and for the

past 40 years, a virus. Yet nothing in his experience

corresponded to what Esther had just related. Part of

WOLF TIME 28

him, a small part to be sure, wanted to shout, You're

alive, Esther! Thank God for that, let's keep things in

perspective here.

"I'll do whatever I can, Esther," he said, putting a

reassuring arm around her. "But this sounds like it's a

little beyond me. I'm glad you're seeing Krongold."

Chapter 3

"Get out of his mouth, Laurie! Use your legs to tell

him where to go! That's better....Wendy, heels down!...

Inside rein, Peter. You're on the wrong lead again....All

right, let's canter your horses!"

Except for the electronic crackle of a female

instructor's bullhorn over in the beginners' ring, Red

Rock Stables in Topanga Canyon was quiet and nearly

deserted when the two attractive young women drove up in

the Rav4.

This was just as well because they were driving too

fast when they pulled off the narrow mountain road,

raising a cloud of red clay dust and the ire of the

Mexican stable boys whod been inhaling it all day.

"When will you ever learn to be on time? It'll be

dark by the time we get off the trail!" Mary Alice St.
WOLF TIME 29

Clair was a petite blonde who prided herself on her

punctuality. Her friend Pam Putnam was nearly as proud of

her own reputation for unreliability in such petty

matters. She lived by her instincts, not the social

dictates of a watch (which she didn't own) or an

agreement, which to Pam was only the rough draft of one

among a number of possible scenarios.

"I said I was sorry, what more do you want? So we

won't have quite as much time to ride so what? I'm the

one who drove after all."

"Next time I'll drive, believe me."

"Damn right you will, sweetheart!"

By the time they'd saddled their horses, however,

the animosity between the two women had been worked off

as it always was when they were having fun. They liked

each other's energy and enthusiasm for life. So many of

their other friends were either too drugged-out at one

extreme or too anxiety-ridden, about school or their

families or uncaring boyfriends, to be much fun when it

came to doing something together.

The hour-long trail ride took the two of them

through scrub-covered hills back into a pine and live oak

WOLF TIME 30

forest, where the dusty dry heat in the air was replaced

by the cool pungent moisture of ferns, the tang of

evergreens. Here you could sense that the ocean was just

a few miles away. By now afternoon was becoming evening;

the bright tips of the candle-flame yuccas had begun to

stand out against the fading hillsides.

"We'd better get back," Mary Alice finally

admonished with reluctance in her voice, "we won't be

able to see the trail much longer."

"Sure we will. Let's just ride as far as the point."

"You can. I'm going back."

"Okay, we'll compromise. Halfway to that grove of

trees. I'll race you!"

"It's too dark to gallop! If you don't care about

your horse, fine but I do!"

"At least ride halfway with me!"

But Mary Alice had already reined her Arabian mare

around to return to the barn.

Suddenly Pam's stallion neighed loudly, in anger or

fright, and her friend turned in time to see

No! her mind refused for an instant to believe what

her eyes had registered. It looked like a hooded man, a

WOLF TIME 31

big man, pulling Pam from her horse!

He must have been right there all the time, in the

bushes beside the trail. Lurking there while they talked.

It could have been, it could have been she that he...

Pam was screaming and kicking at the man. Shiloh,

her big thoroughbred stallion, spooked and went galloping

up the trail.

Mary Alice was paralyzed by fear and indecision.

Should she help? How could she help? The man was bigger

than both of them put together! But she had to do

something! She couldn't just desert Pam to this...

All at once her blood went cold. She was seeing

something now too horrifying to be real. Please God this

can't be happening!

He had a knife, she could see the gleam of the long

blade in the fading light. Then it disappeared...into,

into Pam? That scream of agony could be happening only in

a movie.

Shaking her head, Mary Alice fought to keep from

fainting. She was going to vomit but she had to stay in

the saddle! Pam was quiet now. Not a sound from her. She

was dying, or she was dead. The man had killed her. He
WOLF TIME 32

would come for her if she didn't get away.

Sophie, her Arab mare, was prancing about skittishly

on the narrow trail. Somehow, from somewhere, Mary Alice

found a reserve of strength. Horror threatened to engulf

her but she held it at arm's length and brought the

Arabian around again, this time headed down the trail.

She was fearfully calm all of a sudden, as if she were in

the eye of a hurricane. There was a great whirling wind

all around her, whose shriek she would hear for months to

come. But for the moment, at the center where she was,

all was still. She was in command. Of herself and her

horse. Go, Sophie. Fly, Sophie! Flee this terrible place.

Chapter 4

The TV was on with the sound muted as Esther waited

for the 11 o'clock news, which she usually watched as a

break in her evening's reading. Society as reflected by

the media could be more fascinating than fiction and

certainly more entertaining than the scientific

periodicals she subscribed to.

At the moment, the flickering screen devoid of sound

reflected the state of her mind, awash in images and

fragments of ideas bereft of meaning. The books strewn

WOLF TIME 33

about on her couch and coffee table had temporarily

disintegrated into disconnected words and images, with no

more significance than if scribbled in the sand and

effaced by the frenzied gyrations of a woman with whom

she found it difficult to identify. The woman on the

beach seemed more fantasy than memory.

Esther would have had no trouble analyzing a dream

of what had happened to her yesterday, no trouble

interpreting the unconscious creation of a beast-self to

symbolically confront or avenge oneself upon an abusive

individual in one's everyday life. It was confusion

between dream and reality, however, that often turned

otherwise healthy people into clients in the first place.

She could help her clients make sense of their mysterious

dream images; help them learn to own and accept them,

even to integrate them into the partial self they

identified with and whose psychic need had summoned them

from the unconscious.

But yesterday afternoon it was as if she had somehow

combined the waking and timeless dream states. As if the

instinct for survival had enabled her to cross the

threshold of the unconscious and embody atavistic

WOLF TIME 34

savagery from mankind's primordial past.

All her reading today had led nowhere. Though she

had filled a few pages in a notebook with random thoughts

and quotations, when she'd reread them earlier this

evening they had nothing new to impart. And listening

just now to some longer passages she had recorded proved

more annoying than enlightening; the exercise said more

about her compulsive study habits than anything else.

On the TV screen one of those supposedly oversexed

young women who devour their lovers was hawking shaving

cream. If one were to believe the pained expression on

her vacuously pretty face, either she was a clean-shaven-

cheek fetishist or she hadn't had sex since high school.

Esther saw women like her several times a week, all of

them far better at acting out their sexuality than

experiencing it.

Then the late news came on and she turned on the

sound with the remote. News-8 Anchorwoman Meredith

Manning looked even more upset than usual about the day's

late-breaking events.

"I'm not going to say 'Good evening' tonight because

it's not. A young Woodland Hills woman was brutally

WOLF TIME 35

murdered earlier this evening on a Topanga Canyon riding

trail.

"Pamela Putnam, a 24-year-old computer programmer,

was pulled from her horse by a hooded assailant while her

friend, whom police refused to identify, watched in

horror. Byron Stewart is there."

Esther felt her heart stop, her whole body stiffen

as she fell out of sync with time. She heard but

understood nothing of what the reporter at the murder

scene was saying as uniforms came and went, and police

radios crackled, in the background. It was the same man;

she didn't ask herself how she knew this with such

certainty, but she knew.

An impatient LAPD detective, in an interview taped

earlier, appeared on the screen, his tone of voice almost

as icily scornful as if the News-8 reporter thrusting the

mike into his face were implicated in the crime somehow.

"She never had a chance. The guy pulled her right

off her horse."

"There were witnesses then?"

"The girl riding with her."

"He must have been pretty big, to be able to just

WOLF TIME 36

reach up and pull her off the horse like that."

"I think you could draw that conclusion."

"You say she was stabbed to death?"

"No, I didn't."

"Well then I must have overheard it from someone

else. Is that how she died?"

"I'm not at liberty to say. I'll tell you this

though: the guy who killed her is an animal."

The young newsman grimaced, but there was something

like elation in his tone of voice at the reportorial coup

he'd just scored.

"Well thank you for sharing that with us,

Lieutenant," he said, as the camera came in for the

obligatory close-up. "We've been speaking with Lt. Tom

Clark of the Los Angeles Police Department." The mask of

objectivity on the newsman's boyishly handsome face had

by now given way almost completely to a gloating

expression directed at the news desk.

But although his colleague took Clark's volatile

remark and ran with it, in the inimitable tone of barely

contained outrage that had made Meredith Manning one of

L.A.'s most-watched TV news personalities, Esther was no

WOLF TIME 37

longer listening. She went to the bathroom and retched

into the basin.

When the surge of nausea had spent itself, she

leaned against the cool porcelain and stared numbly into

the mirror. Almost at once her bloodless face crumpled

into convulsive sobs that racked her whole body. In a few

seconds they were over as suddenly as they had begun.

While she looked on as if hypnotized, a fire came into

her eyes: a glint of something wild, ferocious. Her

drained, empty expression filled with anger. Her mouth

curled into a snarl of rage.

And then was it an hallucination or something

else, a revelation of some kind? her face began to

undergo an accelerating series of transformations. Only

her eyes remained unchanged, tunnels extending into the

distant past, as her physiognomy dissolved then reformed,

her features disintegrating and reconstructing themselves

in superimposed alterations carrying her backward through

time...faster and faster until in a matter of seconds the

image in the mirror had become more animal than woman.

Then a feeling as if she were going to retch again.

No, not quite the same a more compelling sensation, an

WOLF TIME 38

eruption of something other than bile: a low, bestial

growl. She watched the eyes in the mirror widen as if

they belonged to someone else.

* * * * *

"What do you mean you 'willed' the growl this time?

You made it happen? You did it deliberately?" asked Foley

in his office the next morning.

"I actually called it up, from...somewhere. I wasn't

aware that's what was happening at the time...I thought I

was just a spectator. But now that I've had time to think

about it, I think I must have done it intentionally."

"Why?"

"Don't you see? The girl's murder set it off."

Foley's baffled expression grew pensive. "...How did

you do it...call it up, I mean?"

"In the mirror. It was like looking into two

lengthening tunnels, or caverns. Into my past. Tunnels

through time rather than space."

"How far into your past?"

"Thousands of years."

"Interesting. Then you're not talking about a

personal past, Esther Roth's past, but a collective

WOLF TIME 39

past."

"I don't know, Dan. It sure seemed to be me in that

mirror." She fidgeted, reluctant to say what had occurred

to her at the time...."This was more like an experience

or delusion, I suppose of reincarnation than of how

I've always conceived the collective past."

"Reincarnation? You weren't...on anything were you?"

She shook her head. "Nothing but rage. Drug-free,

unless you want to count adrenaline."

"You suppose it has something to do with your

'research project'?" He was referring ironically to some

published material on hypnotic regression the alleged

reliving of past lives through hypnosis that Esther had

shared with him recently from one of the less rigorous

professional journals. She was preparing an article of

her own for submission, in which she indignantly intended

to refute such "supermarket sensationalism," as she had

called it.

She only scowled at him.

"Well that, that's fascinating," said Foley, clearly

at a loss for words at the moment.

Esther shuddered. "It was terrifying."

WOLF TIME 40

Both of them fell silent. Finally she asked, "What

do you think they'll do to him, Dan? When they catch him,

I mean."

Foley was surprised by the question. "You're sure

it's the same man?"

"Positive."

"I don't know but I certainly don't think you

should concern yourself with that."

"You think it doesn't make a difference?"

"Of course it does. I'm just saying that, for right

now, the best thing you can do is to forget about him and

take care of yourself. Let the police worry about this

guy. You've got your own life to be concerned with."

"That's what he tried to take from me, Dan. And now

he's taken someone else's. I can't put that out of my

mind."

"Then don't waste your energy trying. But don't

dwell on it either. Have you made an appointment with

Krongold yet?" She nodded. "Good. That and your own

clients should keep you occupied. You have a lot of

friends, Esther call on us when you need to. We want to

help."
WOLF TIME 41

She nodded again, unable at the moment to speak.

Chapter 5

Later that morning, Detective Tom Clark glanced

appraisingly around the well-appointed clinic, aware of

the taste and money that had gone into decorating it but

admiring most the attractive young receptionist who was

smiling inquiringly at him. She gave the office more

class than all its expensive furnishings could, and he

liked the openness of the mutual approval he saw in her

eyes.

"Detective Clark, LAPD," he said, showing her his

badge. "Dr. Roth is expecting me."

"Yes, she is, Detective Clark. Go on back first

office to your right. I'll tell her you're here."

Their eye contact lasted longer than was required by

protocol and Clark found himself contemplating the

receptionist's smile and pretty face as he walked down

the hall. Dr. Roth's door was open; the receptionist was

announcing his arrival on her telephone intercom. Esther

looked up from the keyboard on which she was typing, gave

him a swift businesslike smile and motioned to a chair in

front of her desk.

WOLF TIME 42

"Have a seat. Is 'Detective' Clark the proper

title?"

"Either that or 'Lieutenant,' Doctor."

His eyes swept her large office. There were plants

everywhere and the end opposite her desk had tropical

fish in one corner and a collection of folk and ethnic

musical instruments, including several drums, beside a

lavish pile of pillows in the other. On the walls were a

number of interesting collage, macram and paper wall

hangings.

"Nice office. You're a psychiatrist, I believe you

said?"

"Yes. Thank you, it's comfortable."

"Your clients musicians, a lot of them?" he asked,

nodding toward the instruments.

"Not many professionally, but we all got rhythm,

Lieutenant." Esther forced a smile.

"I believe you reported an assault at Will Rogers

State Beach yesterday, Dr. Roth, is that correct?" said

Clark, his tone official now.

"I reported it yesterday; the attack itself occurred

the day before, at sunset."

WOLF TIME 43

"And this morning you called again because you

believe there's some connection between that incident and

the murder yesterday of the Woodland Hills girl?"

"I think it's the same guy."

"I see. Tell me about the experience you had."

Esther took a deep breath. "I was...I was walking on

the beach, two nights ago. I heard someone behind me and

turned around..." She was unable to continue for a

moment. Clark said nothing, waiting for her to regain her

composure.

..."I turned around, and this big man, six-two or

six-three, very muscular, was standing there with a black

hood over his face, and a knife in his hand."

"Caucasian? Black?"

"White. He was a white man."

"What happened then?"

"The next thing I knew I was on the ground, kicking

up at him and..."

"And what?"

"Nothing just kicking up at him. It scared him

away."

"What makes you think this is the same man?"

WOLF TIME 44

"The hood...the knife. The same general area."

"The guy who killed the girl meant business. Pulled

her right off her horse!"

"You think he didn't mean 'business' with me,

Lieutenant? Because I was able to frighten him away?"

"I didn't say that."

"That was the implication. Do you think a man

walking around with a hood on his face and a knife a foot

long is just playing games? He wasn't trick-or-treating,

Lieutenant!"

"I don't doubt for a minute that you were

threatened, Dr. Roth, believe me."

He opened a pocket notepad and took a pen from his

inside coat pocket. "Tell me what you can remember."

"Let me ask you a question first, Lieutenant. Where

in Topanga was the girl attacked?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I have my reasons."

The remark took him by surprise. Who the hell did

this woman think she was? He looked at her more closely.

Someone accustomed to getting her own way certainly, but

there was more to her demand than that.

WOLF TIME 45

"Place called Red Rock Stables, one of their riding

trails," he said finally, watching her eyes for a sign of

recognition, some kind of reaction, but to no avail.

"Thank you." She sighed and prepared to relate the

whole grim story of her own ordeal once more. All but the

growling. She wouldn't tell him anything at all about

that.

* * * * *

"Excuse me, how do I rent a horse?"

A young Hispanic man, shirtless and sweaty, who was

wheeling away the pungent fruits of his stall-mucking,

mumbled something in Spanish and gestured vaguely with

his head toward the building he'd just left. There Esther

found an Anglo boy about sixteen or seventeen filling the

horses' water buckets. She repeated her question.

"Sorry, this isn't a rental stable." Although he was

ready enough to turn the interruption into a work break,

the boy kept his eyes busy, in the frank manner of the

young.

Esther was just as quick to exploit his interest. "I

know it's not, I have friends who board here," she lied,

her posture and manner softening. "But there are horses

WOLF TIME 46

here owned by the stable too, aren't there?"

"Sure." He gestured toward a dusty corral where a

number of unimpressive-looking trail horses stood

listlessly along the rail.

"Be a doll and let me rent one for an hour."

Glancing around discreetly, she took a twenty from her

handbag. "We can make it just between the two of us if

you like...or I'll be glad to talk to the manager."

"Oh, uh, that won't be necessary....If you'll leave

me the keys to your car."

"My car keys? Why?"

"Puts it in another light don't it? All you've got

to lose is your car. I could lose my job. Things are

tense around here right now."

She hesitated, sizing the boy up. "All right, it's a

deal if you'll help me saddle it."

Fifteen minutes later she was riding a spavined bay

gelding back into the hills. Although Esther had taken

lessons as a youngster and still rode occasionally, she

hadn't been on a horse in months. This one had a nice

easy gait and responded well enough, but she was going to

be sore if she was out here long. She'd told the boy an
WOLF TIME 47

hour but she was going to stay until she found...what?

What the hell was she looking for?

She didn't know the answer, only that something,

some instinct or premonition, had driven her here.

Although, or because she was almost light-headed with

nervous anxiety, she was sure she had done the right

thing in coming.

The shrill cry of a hawk pulled her eyes skyward. A

young jackrabbit dangled lifelessly from the raptor's

talons. She stared after it in fascination. Part of her

wanted to note, grimly, that the sighting might well be

an omen of some kind; but the ruling rational part of her

nature scoffed at the idea. The therapist's analytical

approach to emotion easily associated the foreboding with

her own sense of urgency, which was growing stronger.

Even the nervous gelding seemed to feel her agitation

now. It had broken into a sweat and was starting to

strain at the reins. Her own breathing, too, was becoming

labored.

Suddenly the horse neighed loudly and reared, its

eyes wild. Esther stayed effortlessly on its back

sensing something in the air. The hair on the back of her

WOLF TIME 48

neck seemed to stir. Esther was electrified! She'd never

experienced anything like this before in her life.

When the horse's hooves hit the ground she slid from

its back, hardly aware of what she was doing. Half

running, half sliding, she descended the steep side of

the ridge the trail followed to a return loop of the same

trail below. Her breathing was forced now, her

exhalations like soft urgent canine whines.

She slid onto the lower trail in a shower of loose

rocks and shale to stand facing an area of about an acre,

circumscribed by a strip of yellow plastic affixed to

stakes driven into the rocky soil and bearing the

endlessly repeated phrase, "Police line, do not cross."

There were footprints everywhere inside the irregularly-

shaped polygon, wherever the ground was soft enough to

record them. The surrounding chaparral bore fresh signs

of damage: branches were broken, the stalk of a yucca had

been snapped in two.

Esther saw all of this and none of it. As she darted

frantically about the trampled landscape in a patternless

frenzy, she was "seeing" more with a new sixth sense than

with her eyes. Seeing with her nose, the palms of her
WOLF TIME 49

hands, the downy hair all over her body, an expression of

pain or savagery twisting her features into a distorted

version of her face.

Suddenly she threw herself to the ground, where she

lay writhing in a dark stain on the earth, moaning and

snarling the way a dog rolls in excrement or death.

A moment later she looked up alertly, sniffing the

air. Then she scrambled to her feet to follow the new

scent, tracking it indecisively at first but with growing

assurance in random, seemingly haphazard changes of

direction, to a thick cluster of manzanita beside the

trail.

Esther leaped into the maroon-stemmed shrubbery and

began pawing furiously through the litter of leaves and

debris on the ground until she found something she wasn't

even conscious of looking for. It was a large man's

leather driving glove. She held it to her nose and

uttered a low vicious growl.

Chapter 6

Ten minutes till air time and the News-8 anchor team

was still trying to persuade News Chief Burt Kennedy to

let Meredith run with a report that was far more

WOLF TIME 50

editorial than straight news. But he wasn't buying it.

"There's a place for editorials at this station, and

it's not segued among traffic accidents, drug busts and

the corruption-of-the-week story. That's NAB and FCC

policy, as well as ours. You know that."

"So where's the station editorial, Burt? demanded

Meredith. I haven't seen one on the schedule. Nobody

else around here seems to think a woman's murder is

important enough to speak out on. This isn't exactly

newsroom anathema, you know. It's not unprecedented for a

news anchor to editorialize a little."

"I think she's right, Chief," said Byron Stewart,

Meredith's co-anchor. "A one-time thing isn't going to

get us into any trouble. Why let Nancy Grace beat us to

it?

"One time isn't the point," Kennedy insisted.

"Either the station has a policy on editorials or it

doesn't, period. Women and children are killed in drive-

by shootings every day in L.A. This is one murder we're

talking about. You're treating it like this guy's the

next Hillside Strangler."

"I'd like to see that he doesn't get the chance!"

WOLF TIME 51

Meredith shot back.

"Burt, get the hell off the set and let the makeup

people in there, will you? We're on in less than three

minutes." Alex Krum's gravelly voice boomed over the

studio loudspeakers. The station manager, a 3-piece suit

with zirconium eyes, had been alerted to the squabble by

one of the "peacekeepers" as he called his network of

informants. Very little occurred on his turf without his

knowledge.

He paced about the tight quarters of the control

room in irritation, watching the digital clock on the

console count the seconds down to 6 p.m.

"Thanks for taking my side, Stew," said Meredith,

palming her lavaliere mike.

"Glad t' do it," he replied as Rita, the station's

young makeup woman, hovered over them with her palette of

video make-believe. "Tell you the truth, though, I do

think it's pretty inflammatory."

"What if it is? If it wakes people up, all the

better. Or are we going to wait around till this one gets

to double figures?"

"Hey, I'm glad you're taking a strong stance on this

WOLF TIME 52

I'd like to see us blow cable and the networks out.

It's just..."

"Just what, Stew?"

"Well, what he said about the gang shootings for one

thing all these innocent people being killed almost on

a daily basis."

"Jesus Christ, Stew we've done lots of stories on

that. What the hell good has it done? This is entirely

different; I'm not even saying it's a more serious

problem. In terms of the sheer numbers involved it's not,

obviously. But it's a story that affects me personally,

and I want to do it. Maybe if you were a woman you'd

understand."

"Maybe if you toned it down a little," he said

doubtfully. "I think we're gonna take some flak."

Meredith snorted in disgust and uncovered her lav,

watching the assistant director to the right of Camera 1

for her cue.

Krum and Kennedy watched the six o'clock news intro

run its eye-candy gauntlet of special effects on the bank

of monitors in the control room. The station manager's

feelings were divided as always between pride in the

WOLF TIME 53

intro's state-of-the-art look and fresh anguish each time

he was reminded of the 22% cost overrun by which the

glitzy sequence had exceeded its half a million dollar

production budget at one of L.A.'s premier animation

houses.

With the lead story on a relatively slow news day,

Meredith adopted what she called her dry-martini tone of

voice to report that police still had no leads on the

brutal Topanga Canyon riding stable murder. Then followed

an excruciating taped interview with the late Pam

Putnam's devastated parents and younger sister. Although

anger outweighed the compassion in her voice, no

reasonable viewer would have accused Meredith of

exploiting the family's grief. She had made it her own,

with her manner implying that the reasonable viewer would

do the same.

When the searing piece had concluded, with the

survivors' Edvard Munch faces burned into the mind's eye

more indelibly than the flashiest special effects could

have achieved, Meredith lasered her righteous anger into

the camera's unblinking lens, paused for a dramatic and

expensive moment of silent air time, then launched into

WOLF TIME 54

the harangue that had so concerned Burt Kennedy.

"Why is wasting women some kind of unspoken national

sport? Hollywood, along with network and cable

television, churn out dozens of movies a year which

emphasize the savage murder and mutilation of women in

their plots. What kind of national mentality makes this

possible and profitable? What kind of society turns

sexual mutilations into million-dollar grosses?

"At least part of the answer: the same society that

allows real-life murderers and rapists to plea-bargain

their way to inexcusably lenient sentences. When they're

not back in our midst in five to ten years, the sick

people they've influenced are inspired not only by

their monstrous, sickening crimes but by their notoriety,

and their immunity from society's retribution as well."

"You see why you can't just give reporters the

freedom to editorialize?" Kennedy asked his boss, shaking

his head. "You think that won't get the local ACLU up in

arms?"

"I think she's got something to say," said the

station manager levelly, not taking his eyes from the

video monitors.
WOLF TIME 55

"But it isn't news, Alex, it's opinion. Hers."

"So what? I don't give a damn if it's 'objective

journalism' or not, if she reaches an audience. Let's see

what the numbers say."

"I see outrage over objectivity, huh?"

"Responsiveness. That's a TV station's real

responsibility to its viewers isn't it?"

"Alex, 'responsiveness' is responsibility's idiot

brother."

"Listen, my job is to get this station on its feet.

And my gut feeling is, there's a place for commentary

like this. But what I think, and what you think, don't

mean shit. What counts is what viewers think. Try to

remember that, will you?"

Chapter 7

Since reducing his practice eight years ago, Dr.

Bernard Krongold had been seeing a gradually diminishing

clientele in his home in the tony but smoggy old-money

suburb of San Marino, just south of Pasadena. Today was

much clearer than usual and the purple-hazed San Gabriels

provided the kind of backdrop for the neighborhood of

imposing fortress-like homes set well back from curving

WOLF TIME 56

palm-lined streets that had drawn the wealthy to settle

here in the early part of the century. An immaculate,

probably semi-toxic lawn swept up to the analyst's gray

stone mansion, which lacked only a drawbridge and a

mastiff, Esther reflected, to qualify the severely

landscaped residence for Baronial Digest. So much for

homes as a reflection of their owner's occupation, she

mused: you'd have guessed Freudian analyst though come

to think of it, it was Jung who lived in a castle, wasn't

it.

Although her previous sessions with Krongold nearly

a decade before had been at his former office somewhere

out in the Valley, Esther had been invited to his home on

social occasions as well but had no clear memory of the

house itself. She decided they must all have been at

night.

There was no sign, no indication whatsoever to

identify this as the office of one of the most respected

psychoanalysts in Southern California. Esther let herself

into a small waiting room in the rear of the house. The

faint but unmistakable aroma of chicken kreplach soup

drew a smile despite her unease. The fact that her

WOLF TIME 57

husband had made an after-hours appointment apparently

hadn't disrupted Theja Krongold's dinner schedule.

Esther was a few minutes early as was her custom;

promptly on the hour, an interior door opened, and Dr.

Krongold stood there looking more rumpled than ever in

his advancing years but with the same perplexing

combination of preoccupation and alertness that had

always fascinated her. It was if the brain's two

hemispheres vied for his attention, the left still musing

over notes he'd just recorded from a session with a

previous client perhaps, the right seeming to apprehend

Esther all at once: her appearance, her emotional

condition, her state of mind.

"Ess-ther!" he said with feeling, coming forward at

once to embrace her.

She struggled to contain the emotion that arose in

her throat as she felt his still-strong arms close around

her. If anyone had been her mentor this man had. The only

subject on which they had seriously disagreed was what

Esther considered Krongold's blurring of psychological

and spiritual issues at times. Attributing this to his

age and German upbringing, she had usually been able to

WOLF TIME 58

overlook it. She had often wondered, though, how the

venerable therapist had managed to reconcile his piety

with Hitler's concentration camps, in which a number of

his relatives had perished.

On his part, Krongold had advised Esther, in her

training at the Jungian Institute, that she was about as

cool, if not actually hostile, toward the idea of a

spiritual component of consciousness as a Jungian

therapist could afford to be; but, ascribing this to her

age and background, he hadn't been overly concerned by

her intransigence.

"Come in, dear," he said, ushering her into his

cool darkened sanctum. "Tell me what the problem is."

...After Esther had related the details of the

attack and its aftermath though leaving out her visit

to the riding stables, something she was unprepared to

divulge to anyone Dr. Krongold tapped a gnarled

forefinger against his temple. "You know," he said, "the

memory's not what it used to be, so I think that it would

be best to put our earlier meetings out of your mind

entirely and join me in my forgetfulness. You've never

told me anything about your past at all agreed?" She

WOLF TIME 59

nodded, telling herself to relax in the embrace of the

expensive leather chair facing Krongold's imposing

mahogany desk.

"Good. So now we're in your apartment, your bedroom

you said it was, after this...experience on the beach,

and you're looking into the mirror as you did then, into

your past, into that dark chamber with its many rooms and

corridors...and we're going to turn a light on in front

of one of the closed doors in your life. You can't see

most of them, it's too dark, but we know they're there,

don't we: so many doorways to the experiences that have

shaped us and helped make us who we are today.

"Now, you're opening the door...into a well-lit,

inviting room which seems to beckon you to enter. And so

you do, looking around for someone or something that may

tell us what is making you so anxious. Is it the attack

itself, or something in you, something in your past...

something or someone you see in the room you have just

entered?"

Esther had done enough introspection since the

attack, particularly in anticipation of her meeting with

Krongold, that it didn't take much effort or, more

WOLF TIME 60

accurately, suspension of effort to come up with the

image they were both looking for. But she was surprised

by the intensity of emotion that accompanied it.

..."I want...it's my father, I want to tell him I'm

afraid. But I can't."

"Because he's deceased?"

"No, this is when he was still alive. I want to tell

him about what happened on the beach, as if I were a

child. But he wouldn't have listened. He might have

listened if he'd been there for me, but he never was.

"You want to tell him you're afraid?"

"Not just of the man on the beach, but of all that I

don't know, even about myself especially about myself.

How can I be a psychiatrist in the twenty-first century

and know so little about myself? How can we as a culture,

a civilization, take such pride in our knowledge when

there's so much we're unaware of how is it that we've

managed to delude ourselves so?" She paused but Krongold

said nothing.

"I've always prided myself on how strong I am, how

much control I have over my life. But I don't have

control. I thought I did, but maybe I was never really

WOLF TIME 61

tested before. Maybe I'm just running along tracks laid

down over the course of my whole life. Running around in

circles."

"Could you be over-stating the case, Esther so

that, yes, this experience may have shown you to have

less control over what happens in your life than you have

always liked to think...but in fact you are nevertheless

a remarkably strong woman?"

"Oh, relative to most people, I suppose. But it's as

if the whole human race has just been diminished in my

estimation. I know that sounds grandiose or pretentious.

...I don't know how to articulate what's happened to my

picture of the world, but it's fundamentally shifted.

It's like a bad acid trip...where you can't blame the

acid. I started to say, 'except this is real,' but I

don't know what real is right now."

"Is it possible that what you're experiencing is

another way of seeing reality? Maybe even a more expanded

view or comprehension of it?"

Esther shook her head. "I keep telling myself that

I'll come through this wiser and more experienced that

given my work, it's actually a valuable experience to be

WOLF TIME 62

having. But it doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel

like a revelation or an epiphany. It feels a whole lot

more like I'm on the verge of a breakdown; like what I

know, or thought I knew, is crumbling away...everything

is in pieces, everything's so fragmented this is all

just too damn messy to be anything positive."

"But all real change makes a mess of things, doesn't

it?"

"This isn't just change, Doctor except in the way

erosion or destruction are change."

"Tell me more about your father. Did you see him

there in the room with you can you picture him now?"

Esther sighed, emptying her mind with the exhalation

as much as possible, and re-imagined the presence of her

father. "Yes, I can still see him." She grimaced.

"There's such scorn on his face!"

"Are you sure it's for you now that you can look

back on this expression and interpret it from the vantage

point of all that you've learned over the years?"

"Yes, it's for me. He tried to hide it, probably

because he considered such a thing beneath his dignity,

or because it conflicted with his self-image as a father

WOLF TIME 63

more than to protect my feelings. But it's contempt all

right. I was such a contemptible little creature in his

eyes. I hated myself for that, and then when it became

clear what hed done to me, I hated him. It took me years

to get beyond that."

"Do you think this could account in any way for the

anxiety you're feeling now?" asked Krongold.

"Not really, not significantly anyway. I feel the

need for the kind of comfort I never got from a loving

father, but I've long since reconciled myself to the

father I had."

Chapter 8

David's lips were moving but Esther had no idea what

he was saying. Part of her mind was so preoccupied it was

as if it were cut off from her by anesthesia or sleep.

With effort she dragged the detached self dazed, semi-

hypnotized survivor overwhelmed by the abyss back into

the sphere of consciousness.

..."I said, you look like you're very far away."

David smiled across the table at her with his kind eyes.

"I'm sorry. I'm trying not to be." Esther returned

his smile weakly. "At least now I know what it feels like
WOLF TIME 64

to be a victim. Even though I escaped being one."

He nodded. "I understand."

He didn't though. Even Dan had no idea what she was

going through. Because Esther herself was so bewildered

by what was happening to her that she had failed

miserably to communicate the experience to anyone else.

She chided herself again for avoiding Valerie for so

long. Is that what she'd been doing, actually avoiding

her? If so it was only because she hadn't been ready to

see her until tonight, to relive with (and for) her what

she had already had to recount for Dan, the detective and

finally David, who'd returned the day after the attack.

Esther had been as reluctant to inform him of the

incident as she had desperately needed to share it at

first with Dan. Not just because she found the retelling

so excruciating. David's genuine sympathy had been mixed,

as she'd anticipated, not only with a "gentle reminder"

of his feelings about her solo body-surfing but an

impatience for her to put the experience behind her and

be done with it. Not that he expected her to process

something like this overnight, but Esther sensed, if

unjustly, that he was measuring her lack of progress

WOLF TIME 65

against his conception of how long it should take.

If only the whole experience were just the normal

reaction to an attempted rape, even murder, that she'd

fought her way out of, unscathed. To hell with sympathy;

give her some understanding of what was happening to her!

"I'm just a little tired," she said, annoyed with

herself for avoiding David's eyes. She forced herself to

look back at him with an ironic smile. "I haven't been

sleeping well, as you know."

The waiter brought their entrees but Esther couldn't

bear to pick up her fork to sample the poached salmon

she'd ordered.

"Not hungry?"

She shook her head. "But please don't let that

affect your appetite."

"It won't. This filet's fantastic."

She found her eyes drawn to David's plate, to the

sight of the rare filet mignon yielding to his knife and

fork. Surrendering its bloody juices.

"...Could I have just a bite of yours?"

He laughed in surprise. "Since when did you start

eating meat?"
WOLF TIME 66

She offered just a facial shrug with her eyebrows,

feeling foolish. But he immediately cut off a small

piece, drawing more juice from the tender steak with his

knife, and handed it across the table to her on the end

of his fork.

Esther took it into her mouth, the first red meat

she'd eaten in years, actually closing her eyes to savor

it.

David laughed again, amused by her display of such

obvious, and uncharacteristic, pleasure and relieved by

the return of her appetite. "Do you want me to order you

one? Or you can have some more of mine."

"Okay thanks, I will."

When the hell had she last eaten, she asked herself;

she could hardly wait for him to cut the steak in half.

And why had she assumed that after all these years she'd

find red meat disgusting? This was delicious!

"You sure you're up to a party?" David asked when

her share of the filet had disappeared.

Esther dabbed at her lips with her napkin, subdued.

"Some conversation maybe. I'm looking forward to seeing

Valerie maybe she can help throw some light on what's

WOLF TIME 67

happening to me."

"I wish you'd tell me more about what you're going

through, Esther. You know I've never had a problem with

you keeping so much of yourself private. But I think this

is the time to open up a little. I'd like to help but I

can't very well if I don't know where you're at."

"I share as much as I can with you, David. As much

as I ever have with anyone."

He could see where this was going; the last time

they'd had a discussion like this Esther had ended it

with a remark something like, "You're the businessman,

remember? I'm the therapist." The last thing he wanted

right now was to provoke an argument.

"...Well, I'm here," he said. He held out a hand and

she surrendered hers. He squeezed it and Esther felt his

strength and love envelop her. But it wasn't enough. God

knows it wasn't David's fault, but it wasn't nearly

enough.

* * * * *

The home of Valerie and her Brazilian husband Juan

was nestled rather precariously, some felt amidst

huge boulders high above the Pacific Coast Highway

WOLF TIME 68

between Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Besides its

panoramic view of Santa Monica Bay, from the Palos Verdes

Peninsula on the south to Point Dume, at night it

overlooked the shimmering lights of West Los Angeles,

Santa Monica and the coastal communities surrounding LAX.

To the north, the Santa Monica Mountains sloping

gracefully to the shoreline had always reminded Esther of

a receding line of crocodiles coming down to the water to

drink.

A small gathering of their closest friends

unobtrusively rallied round her when she and David

arrived. Esther was more touched than she had

anticipated, not only by their obvious and genuine

concern for her well-being but by their tact in

communicating it. There was certainly no pity here; and

the sympathy she felt was expressed as a shared

misfortune, from which Esther had rescued them all by her

heroic escape. No one spoke of the assault itself or

knew the details of how she had fought off her attacker

but the admiration was there, in her friends' eyes and

tone of voice.

Valerie and her husband, a professor of music at Cal

WOLF TIME 69

Arts, eventually managed to create some privacy around

their special guests in the relatively soundproof study

where Juan composed his electronic pieces for synthesizer

and traditional and ethnic instruments. His wife used

much of his work choreographed or improvised by her

professional and novice dancers for Serpent, her

contemporary dance company.

Valerie combined a dancer's graceful focused

movement with exotic features, acute intelligence and an

extremely direct manner. In appearance she was a more

concentrated version of Esther: darker and with greater

intensity in her eyes. Her body was at once harder and

more lithe than Esther's fuller figure.

In her studio Valerie was a benevolent dictator,

urging her students to become more spontaneous, less

self-conscious about their bodies. To her the body was

only one phase in an evolutionary process. "You're not

your body!" she would yell at them. "It's a suit of armor

you're imprisoned in! Take it off, slip out of it for a

while, for God's sake! Let yourself breathe, let yourself

move!"

Her company, unique in Los Angeles, boasted some of

WOLF TIME 70

the most gifted modern dancers on the West Coast; but for

every one of her professional and amateur virtuosos there

were half a dozen men and women of all ages whose only

asset on the dance floor was their willpower and, under

Valerie's tutelage, their willingness to risk looking

foolish and becoming vulnerable in quest of "serpent

fire".

This was their teacher's own interpretation of the

metaphysical energy which, according to many esoteric

philosophies, lies dormant at the base of the spine in

all human beings, with the inherent potential when

tapped by disciplined practice and meditation (or

accident) to activate metaphysical energy centers in

the body called "chakras." The activation of these

centers can supposedly awaken extraordinary (though

entirely normal and God-given) "psychic" powers and bring

about a higher level of consciousness in the awakened

individual.

Dancer and healer, Valerie told her students they

could learn to release this energy, or life force,

through movement. "We don't need to wait for evolution,"

she exhorted them. "You can experience your own evolution

WOLF TIME 71

right now!"

She believed that the secret to real growth and

healing lies in our species' forgotten origins, those

parts of ourselves discarded and repressed as man evolved

into a thinking being.

"We can't disinherit our roots, any more than a

flower can pretend that its a blossom and nothing else,"

she said, "or than a river can somehow separate itself

from its source. You are energy. You have to flow freely

to stay healthy, to grow."

Esther had met Valerie a year ago at a conference at

the Ojai Institute, just north of Los Angeles, where they

had been lured as speaker/participants by noted

ethnologist and anthropologist Dr. Phyllis Hayes-Graham.

The institute's esteemed administrator and resident

shaman lived without gas, electricity or running water in

a yurt she'd helped build on the grounds herself.

Although wary (and weary) of "new-age" events, they

were both too impressed by Dr. Hayes-Graham's first-hand

knowledge of shamanism to let their prejudices stand in

the way of her invitation. The three women got along

famously, and Esther had been more or less a regular at

WOLF TIME 72

Valerie's Serpent Studio ever since.

"You're wonderful both of you," said Esther when

Juan had closed the door of his study on the party's

intrusive sounds and they'd seated themselves.

"Will we see you at the studio tomorrow?" Valerie

asked her.

"I don't think so, Val. I think it'd be too much

right now."

"That kind of stress is what the Dance is for. It

might be the best thing for you."

"I don't want to push it though, Val. I'm just not

up to it. I may very well owe my life to your workshop,

but that's exactly why it could be too much to take right

now."

"Then why don't you come and just see how you feel?

We won't let you push yourself too far, will we, Juan."

A deceptively quiet man, Juan shook his head, his

eyes seeking, and finding, Esther's when he smiled at

her.

She sighed. "I'll let you know tomorrow."

"Don't isolate yourself now. You need to act this

out. We'll do a special dance for you."

WOLF TIME 73

Esther forced a smile but said nothing. She reached

over to stroke their hosts' cat, curled up asleep in the

corner of the couch. It yawned and looked up at her

lazily then suddenly slashed at her arm with its claws.

All at once it was terrified. Tail fluffed out, ears laid

back, it hissed and growled at her, cowering against the

arm of the couch.

Valerie jumped up in alarm.

"Genevieve! What on earth's gotten into you?"

Even Valerie couldn't pick the cat up and finally

shooed her away with a pillow. Juan opened the door for

the frightened animal and Genevieve scurried out.

"Esther, I'm sorry!" Valerie exclaimed. "She's never

acted that way with you."

"I know. I thought we were friends." There were

three thin parallel scratches across her forearm.

"Come on lets put something on those."

* * * * *

When only she and David and another couple were left

at the party, Esther and Juan, wine glasses in hand,

stood alone on the patio, staring out at the moonlit bay.

At this elevation the moon's reflection was almost bright

WOLF TIME 74

enough to read by.

"I've been watching you keep up this brave front,"

he said. "Cats see right through those."

"You think she saw all the craziness in me?"

"Something. Valerie tells me you're doing some kind

of work now with hypnotic regression into past lives or

something like that."

"Oh no, I'm not. The whole thing sounds preposterous

to me. I can't take the idea of reincarnation or past

lives seriously. But what's actually going on when people

seem to be experiencing them that's what I'd like to

know."

"Why is that?"

Esther took a drink and twirled her glass slowly by

the stem for a moment before answering.

"You know, if you'd asked me that a week ago I'd

have given you some kind of bullshit answer about

protecting science and the potential of the human mind

from new-age charlatans or something like that. Now I

wonder."

He waited for her to continue.

"...The truth is, Juan...I think I'm looking for

WOLF TIME 75

some alternative to my own personal extinction....All of

a sudden I'm afraid of dying."

There! she'd finally said it, finally told someone.

Now it was all she could do to keep from losing control

in front of him. Juan put his arm around her, saying

nothing for a while as they both stood there gazing out

over the ocean.

Finally he said, "If we're made to face it, I think

we're all afraid of death. And the Unknown that lies

beyond it. But the death of what the body or the ego?"

"Well, the body I guess."

"Really? I'd have guessed you'd say ego, who we are

or think we are. Isn't that what we identify with

more?"

"I don't think many people make the distinction.

What's the difference, as long as the fear's there?"

"Because we know the body's going to die. But if

that's not what we're most afraid of, then...so what?"

"And if it's really 'ego death' we're afraid of?"

"Then we need to learn that we're more than the ego

as well and therefore, maybe, beyond death. You go

deeper than 'Esther Roth' don't you? Far deeper."

WOLF TIME 76

"In terms of the unconscious, yes, of course. But

not in any way I'm consciously aware of," she replied

impatiently.

"Maybe if you were, you'd see that what you're

really afraid of isn't dying but fundamentally changing

...leaving 'Esther Roth,' her belief structure, her life

of success behind for someone entirely new."

...Later, as David turned off Pacific Coast Highway

into the relative darkness of Santa Monica Canyon to take

her home, Esther reached furtively into her handbag for

the leather glove she had found on the trail. When she

felt it against her fingers she stiffened...then closed

her hand over it, kneading it silently in the dark.

Chapter 9

Twenty-some leotard-clad male and female bodies a

few of them beautiful to watch, others clumsy and

overweight contorted themselves on the gleaming

hardwood floor of Serpents studio. Juan's accompanying

live music was at once primitive and futuristic. Though

he seldom had time for a personal appearance at Valerie's

sessions anymore, today's was in Esther's honor. At the

moment he was plucking a variety of familiar and exotic

WOLF TIME 77

stringed instruments, their amplified, electronically

altered sounds reverberating in the large sunlit space.

Reflected in floor-to-ceiling mirrors at one end of

the room, the dancers made an approximate circle, with

Valerie, strong, supple, the magnetic focus of attention,

in the middle. Juan's eclectic assortment of acoustic and

electronic instruments took up one corner of the studio.

Plants and pillows lined three walls, with shafts of

sunlight streaming through skylights highlighting their

brilliant colors. Esther had replicated the pillows-and-

instruments arrangement in her office.

There was no apparent design or order in the

dancers' movements. Some sculpted the space around them

gracefully, fluidly; others moved grotesquely, their

faces distorted by ugly grimaces. Moans, howls, shrieks

and groans punctuated the music.

Valerie moved among them, offering advice,

manipulating limbs and bodies. At last she came over to

Esther, who appeared to be blocked this morning.

"Having trouble?"

"I can't seem to let go."

"What are you afraid of?"

WOLF TIME 78

"...Getting carried away I guess. Losing control."

Valerie hadn't stopped moving as she talked. Now,

still swaying with the music, she began to hug and caress

her friend.

"You're safe here, Hon. This is the place to let it

out."

"I'm not so sure any place is safe."

"It's safe. You can't leave your feelings locked up

inside of you."

"Don't patronize me, Val I'm a therapist, for

God's sake. They're just too strong to express right now.

Believe me."

"But, Esther, that's what the Dance is for. Several

people here have gone through what you're experiencing."

"I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing."

By now some of the others had begun to surround the

two women. Valerie continued the gently comforting,

sinuous movement in which she'd enveloped Esther.

"Everybody's different, everyone's the same. It's an

eruption!" she projected the word so forcefully she

startled Esther and several of the other dancers

"...and a release. It can be frightening at first, of

WOLF TIME 79

course but as you surrender to it you're defusing the

energy at the same time."

Esther gritted her teeth in frustration and

impatience. "I know that intellectually!"

"Right. And you know these emotions get most of

their power from being repressed. Like water behind a

dam."

"And if it breaks?"

"That's why we're letting them out now so it

won't. Let yourself go a little at a time. We'll keep you

afloat."

She signaled for the others to come forward now and,

seeing this, Juan picked up the rhythm of the music. For

the first time they all seemed to be performing the same

dance, united in intensity and purpose.

Esther felt herself succumbing to the subtle power

of the movement, the compassion of her fellow dancers.

Something began to release its talon-like hold inside of

her. She began to weep silently, tears filling and

overflowing her eyes until they were gliding effortlessly

down her cheeks.

Moments later she was sobbing, shoulders shaking,

WOLF TIME 80

her chest heaving. And then, finally, her sobs gave way

to the primal eruption of rage and anguish Valerie had

been priming her for an emotional explosion that was

cathartic for the whole group. They screamed and yelled

along with Esther, then swept her up into their arms and

swayed with her held aloft. As Valerie had promised, she

was supported as literally by the group as if she were in

a life raft.

...Yet when an hour or so later she was saying good-

bye to a few of her closest friends in the company,

Esther still felt more depressed than exhausted.

"You were marvelous," Valerie told her reassuringly.

"I was?"

Valerie nodded, smiling. "The letdown you're

experiencing is natural, you know that. After the Dance,

people go to one extreme or the other: either a terrific

high or the way you're feeling right now."

"You know how I'm feeling?"

Valerie's Bronx cheer captured it better than words

could have, but Esther answered her own question: "Like I

was faking it somehow."

"How do you mean?"

WOLF TIME 81

"Not intentionally or consciously, but as if I were

just going through the motions."

"Honey, I wish we'd videotaped you. You weren't

faking it, believe me."

"Maybe not, Val, but..."

"But what?"

"It's still there."

"Of course it's still there! You know you can't

expect to release something like this in one session. But

it was a helluva beginning."

As the two women embraced Esther couldn't help

wondering, the beginning of what?

* * * * *

After lunch and a nap following the physically and

emotionally draining session at Serpent Fire, Esther

turned down David's invitation to a movie they'd both

been wanting to see, in favor of some light reading at

home about serial killers. Her studies of post-

traumatic stress disorder years earlier had included

homicide as an area of psychopathology of course, but

serial murder was a lot more prevalent in television

dramas and front page headlines than in scientific

WOLF TIME 82

literature. A trip to UCLA's Louise Darling Biomedical

Library the day after Pam Putnam's murder, however, had

revealed a wealth of material on the subject. Esther

found this understandable after reading the FBI's

estimate that there were currently some 500 unidentified

serial killers at large in the United States. She fell

asleep reading about the psychosexual disease of serial

murder or "serial killer syndrome".

Chapter 10

"...He doesn't want me to go back to work. He won't

let me get a second car or find someone to watch the kids

part of the time. He doesn't even want me to lose

weight."

The obese woman was Esther's first client the next

day, the third session they'd had together. The two of

them were sitting opposite each other in a pair of richly

upholstered Queen Anne chairs next to the pile of pillows

and assortment of musical instruments at one end of the

office.

"Of course he doesn't," Esther replied. "That would

threaten him. But what business is it of his?"

"It's none of his business."

WOLF TIME 83

"Then what's stopping you?"

"He is, even though it isn't any of his business."

"What else is stopping you?"

"...Food, I suppose," said the woman, sighing.

"And what else?"

"What else?" Her client had to think a little longer

this time. "I guess I'm afraid to," she finally came up

with.

"Why?" demanded Esther.

"Well, I've never...been thin before. I've never

been anything but fat."

Esther felt a surge of compassion for this woman

with such a kind and despite its overabundance of flesh

beautiful face. "That's just not true, Marilyn. Part of

what we're going to find out about you in the next few

weeks is all the things you are, and always have been,

besides fat."

* * * * *

An hour later Esther was sitting primly on the floor

among her pillows, listening to an uptight-looking man in

his early 30's in a dark gray off-the-rack three-piece

suit, who was rooted to the chair her first client had
WOLF TIME 84

occupied. It was his initial visit.

"...My boss wouldn't believe that in a million

years," he was saying. "He thinks I've risen above my

capability already."

"How do you know that?" asked Esther.

"I told you: he hardly ever talks to me, and he

won't even look at me when he does."

"But how do you know what he's feeling? Maybe he's

afraid to look you in the eye. A lot of people are you

know."

"I know I'm one of them. But he isn't. I know

contempt when I see it."

"Describe it for me."

"Describe it?"

"What does it look like?"

"I can't describe it. I just know what it feels

like."

"Well then..." Esther reached behind her and picked

up a bongo drum from the assemblage of musical

instruments.

"If you can't put it in words, play it," she said,

tossing the drum to him. "Show me how it feels."

WOLF TIME 85

The startled timid man caught it awkwardly against

his chest. As alien as the suggestion, or command,

obviously was to him, a certain glint in his eye told

Esther she was going to have some success with this one.

* * * * *

Her third client of the morning was an intense-

looking brunette in her mid-20's. Within five minutes of

the start of their first session together both women were

sprawled among Esther's "armor-piercing pillows," as Dan

called them.

"I didn't think I could still make it with men after

all these years or would want to. Now I don't know what

to do."

"Well, can't you have relations with both men and

women?" Esther asked.

"You don't know what it's like to be bisexual. Men

aren't too much of a problem, they're intrigued by the

whole thing. But women wouldn't accept that even before

AIDS. Either you were a lesbian or you were nothing. Now

of course, forget it."

Esther was surprised to feel an unprofessionally

judgmental expression twist the corners of her mouth

WOLF TIME 86

slightly. Fortunately her client was so wrapped up in

herself she didn't seem to notice, but why on earth had

Esther allowed such a fatuous remark to provoke a

reaction in the first place?

"I assume you take precautions."

"Oh of course."

"Well then maybe you'll just have to educate the

women you care about," she said, making an effort to shut

out her self-questioning.

"Right now I'm more worried about getting pregnant

than anything else. I don't want a baby. What the hell

would I do with a baby?"

Esther made a conscious effort to minimize the

sarcasm in her voice when she asked the young woman how

good her protection could be if she was afraid of getting

pregnant. And was abortion unacceptable to her? Esther

pointed out that pregnancy might well be a motivating

factor behind this heterosexual affair rather than one of

its potential pitfalls. How readily we deceive ourselves.

Here it was, not even noon yet, and Esther was already

weary of hearing her clients' litany of problems. What

the hell was wrong with her today?

WOLF TIME 87

* * * * *

She fed her tropical fish, then lunched by herself

in her office: an apple, raw almonds and some low-fat

yogurt from the small refrigerator she shared with Dan

and Judy. Among the telephone messages on her voice-mail

was one from the West Side Women's Shelter. As she

listened she could feel her body threatening to reject

the food she'd just eaten.

Linda had finally mustered the courage to have her

husband removed from the family's home, but his attorney

had managed to have the restraining order dismissed on a

technicality. So, against their wishes, it was the three-

year-old twins who were leaving; Children's Services were

sending them to a foster home because of the danger their

abusive father posed to them.

Esther hadn't been looking forward to the

afternoon's sessions to begin with particularly Randy,

a successful young record company exec: mid-30's, perm,

avant-fashionable drop-dead clothes with matching

attitude. Now she positively loathed the thought of

continuing the day's schedule. But Randy showed up at one

o'clock sharp as usual.

WOLF TIME 88

This time it was Esther who sat, rather stiffly, in

the chair while her self-confident client lounged among

her pillows, completely at ease and at home here. His

manner seemed almost to imply that if only she had the

nerve she'd join him in wanton abandon on the floor and

to hell with her professional facade. Or was she being

harder than usual on him today too?

"...So I go, 'Hey, babe, who said anything about a

relationship? Who said anything about some eternal love

affair? You knew as well as I did this was just a one-

night stand. Next thing I know she's all over me I

can't keep away from her. I'm tryin' not to be cold-

hearted, but she's forcing me to do something: either get

it on with her or throw her out there's no in-between.

"I mean, I'm all for feminism and women's lib, but

that doesn't entitle women to a command performance and

some kind of exclusivity clause. You know what I'm

sayin'? You can't have it both ways; if you're gonna try

to compete on an equal footing with men, let's don't have

any misunderstandings or guilt trips about 'love' or

commitments. Let's admit that what we're talking about is

fucking, pure and simple."

WOLF TIME 89

Esther had been struggling to maintain a non-

judgmental attentiveness throughout all of this, but with

difficulty assuming either attitude.

"Hey, are you listening to me or not?"

"I'm sorry, Randy. Yes, I'm listening just having

a little difficulty remaining objective. Is it possible

that what your sexual partners want from you isn't a

long-term commitment at all, but simply better sex? There

is some room for exploration between eternity and a one-

night stand."

"What? I doubt it they keep coming back for more."

"The same women?"

"No, not the same women. Haven't you been listening?

I told you, that's the last thing I want: some kind of

long-term relationship."

"It sounds to me as if you replace your sex partners

before they have a chance to ask for more."

"Not for that reason. You're putting your own

interpretation onto it."

"For what reason then, Randy? Why do you tire of

your women so easily?"

"I don't know, that's one of the reasons I'm here.

WOLF TIME 90

Sex has gotten to be such a fucking bore the same

thing, night after night."

"Has it ever occurred to you that if you thought

less about yourself and more about the women you were

fucking, sex wouldn't be so monotonous?"

He snorted in disgust. "I'll tell you the answer to

that. If you show a woman the slightest consideration,

she'll immediately try to use that against you. It means

you're weaker than she is."

"Oh, Randy, I get so tired of hearing about the

children's sex games you bored 'sophisticates' get caught

up in. Why do you waste my time and your money?" She

stood up. "I'm sorry, but I really don't see any point in

continuing our sessions together. At least until you're

prepared to make some real changes in your life instead

of trying to solve all your problems with words and

money. Life just doesn't work that way."

"Well aren't you the professional therapist!" he

sneered, standing as well. "You're goddamned right I've

been wasting my money, and my time. I was about to quit

coming anyway."

"I know," she said, escorting him to the door, "you

WOLF TIME 91

just didn't know how to break the news to me, did you."

"That's right, you wise-ass bitch. That's exactly

it, even if you do try to make it sound ridiculous."

"Good-bye, Randy. Don't recommend me to any of your

friends."

"Hey, fuck you!" He stopped in the hall and made a

vaguely threatening gesture, but Esther closed the door

in his face. She shuddered as she slumped in exhaustion

into the chair behind her desk. Then she buzzed Judy and

asked her to cancel the afternoon's remaining two

appointments, something she very rarely did.

Sighing deeply, Esther summoned what strength she

could, then walked over and picked up two videotapes from

her credenza and dropped them in her bag. She stopped at

Foley's door on her way out.

"Who the hell was your last session?" he asked. "I

heard him swear at you and came out to see what was going

on, but he just gave me a dirty look and left."

"I'm afraid I'm losing it, Dan. I was totally

unprofessional with Randy I actually treated him like

the asshole he is for once. I'm going to take these tapes

to the post office and then I'm gone for the day."
WOLF TIME 92

"What tapes?"

"You know the hypnotherapy sessions I taped at

UCLA last week. Dr. Grof wants to see them."

Dan grinned. Melodramatically he intoned, "You mean

the 'Reincarnation Chronicles'? Hypnotic regression into

the 'Days of our Past Lives'?"

Esther felt her face go hot. "That's just what I

need right now, Dan your smug condescension!"

She turned on her heel and a moment later slammed

the side door to the building before her surprised

colleague could apologize. The light touch he'd intended

had obviously been anything but; yet Esther had

characterized the tapes in much the same ironic manner

herself just a few days ago. Apparently he'd

overestimated her recovery from the experience on the

beach. That was understandable, he decided, excusing his

lapse in judgment; she'd always been so damned strong.

Foley had a number of good female friends, from the

theater and human potential circles he frequented and

from his Silverlake neighborhood in the heavily gardened

hills overlooking downtown L.A. One trait they all had in

common was the quality of their friendship; another was

WOLF TIME 93

strength of personality or character. These women were

individuals willing to make the hard decisions, eager to

follow their own singular, generally very colorful,

paths. But of all of them, Esther was the closest to him,

partly due to the intimacy that had grown out of their

successful partnership but largely because of Esther Roth

herself. No man or woman of Foley's acquaintance

approached her steadfast, tenacious integrity toward life

as she perceived it. Esther heeded her constant self-

criticism aimed at improvement rather than reproach

with a near ferocity of purpose.

Chapter 11

Esther was still upset when she arrived at the

private neighborhood postal service which she preferred

to the long lines at the post office. Finding an

unusually long queue here this afternoon as well did

nothing to alleviate her discontent.

While she waited to mail her videotapes, feeling

more tired than impatient, she watched a man tying

bundles of corrugated cardboard in a parcel processing

area in the rear of the store. His actions had the swift

precise efficiency of a robot's, but what held her

WOLF TIME 94

attention was the talon-like blade on a ring he was using

to cut twine.

"What can I do for you?" asked the clerk at the

service counter. Esther was surprised to see that she was

the only one left in line.

"May I have a padded envelope large enough to mail

these in?" she asked, laying the videotapes she'd shot

with her Sony Hamdycam, and a mailing label, on the

counter.

"You sure can." He turned to pull an envelope from

shelves lining the wall behind him, and she found herself

regarding her hands, her well-manicured nails. She bent

her fingers into claws, the shape of the curved blade on

the ring.

The postal clerk was startled to hear what sounded

like a soft low growl directly behind him. He spun

around, surprising Esther in turn.

"Oh! I'm sorry," she exclaimed, snapping out of her

reverie. "Did you say something?"

The disgruntled clerk didn't reply. He handed Esther

the envelope, made change while she enclosed the tapes

and applied the mailing label, then stapled the open end
WOLF TIME 95

of the envelope for her and dropped it in a receiving bin

without another word. Yet another weirdo in the city of

the angels.

* * * * *

Esther and David had been invited to a group showing

the next day of "The Fourth Story", four artists who

shared that floor of a converted garment district

building downtown. One of them, Kathryn MacRae, the only

woman in the group, Esther knew well, but she wasn't

familiar with the work of the others. David, who had

little enthusiasm for contemporary art, was generally

supportive of Esther's. His own interest in such

gatherings was in the artists themselves and their

following, the denizens of the L.A. art scene in general.

This afternoon the loft studios of the Fourth Story

each an artistically distinctive expression of its

occupant in its own right were full of the usual mixed

crowd of punkers, new-age folk, smart buttoned-down

business people like David himself, and those whose

highly original mode of dress and ornamentation vied with

the work on display for one's attention.

Impromptu and staged performance pieces were

WOLF TIME 96

occurring here and there as well. The most audacious of

these involved a cage of sticks and bamboo cobbled

together to fit over the nearly naked body of an

athletic-looking man in his mid-30s or so who had smeared

himself with mud as well. He strolled through the crowded

studios mute and solemn, with the hint of an enigmatic

smile preventing the outlandish getup from appearing

pretentious so much as merely bizarre.

The turnout was much larger than Esther had expected

and she felt, although she was reluctant to use the word,

intimidated by the crowd. How much longer was her life

going to be disrupted by an assault she had thwarted

after all, Esther asked herself angrily.

She accepted a plastic glass of Chardonnay from the

caterer and scanned the room in front of her for familiar

and interesting faces. Had David been able to get away?

They'd been edgy with each other the past couple of days;

his appearance might be construed as a peace offering of

sorts.

The caged man was patiently undergoing inspection a

few feet away by a conservative-looking couple in their

mid-fifties. Esther took a sip of her wine and walked

WOLF TIME 97

over for a closer look, putting her sense of unease

behind her.

"It's fantastic!" she said when he acknowledged her

fascinated scrutiny.

His Mona Lisa smile curved just perceptibly at the

corners until it was almost cocky. It was his eyes,

haunted but unsubdued, that expressed the smile's warmth,

she noticed.

"What does it mean? Is there some kind of message?"

asked the woman beside her.

Whatever you want it to mean, said his shrug and

slightly lifted eyebrows, a restrained gesture in which

Esther could feel pain despite his gently self-mocking

smile.

The woman looked at her in amused exasperation and

Esther responded with a shrug that was perhaps cooler

than she had intended and moved on, sharing a parting

smile with the man in the self-imposed cage.

The sculpture in this particular studio was by

Kathryn's sullen taciturn lover, Paul, who shared the

loft with her. Esther paused before a piece in poured

concrete studded with shards of glass and metal, looking

WOLF TIME 98

for Paul in it. Looking for what Kathryn might see in

him. She assumed the untitled piece was meant to suggest

a chunk of millennial or apocalyptic rubble, an artifact

of a city's destruction.

What state of mind would prompt a man to construct

such a thing in the name of art, she wondered, lightly

fingering one of its sharp edges. Her contemplative

investigation produced a superficial cut. She jerked her

hand away reflexively and stuck the end of her finger in

her mouth, sucking hard enough to taste blood.

Annoyed with herself, she went looking for Kathryn,

in the studio next to Paul's. She hadn't seen any of her

friend's latest work: large bold silk-screen prints made

from high-contrast photographs of punk rock and avant-pop

musicians. Kathryn's photos were only the substrate of

the pieces, however; prior to silk-screening they had

been overlaid with her quirky graffiti of symbols,

slogans, design elements, expletives. To Esther's

delight, Kathryn seemed to have captured the spirit of

rebellion or sense of vision in those musicians with whom

she herself was familiar; at least she'd managed to

express a response Esther shared.

WOLF TIME 99

After she'd studied a number of the prints with a

growing sense of elation at their success, Esther noticed

Kathryn out of the corner of her eye among a knot of

appreciative well-wishers, observing her reactions.

"I love them!"

Beaming, Kathryn broke away from the group to share

her embrace. The two women kissed, then stepped back to

exchange a loving appraisal of the life each found in the

other's face.

"You look great!" they said almost simultaneously,

although there was special meaning in Kathryn's

affirmation, knowing as she did of Esther's recent

experience.

"Isn't it a good show!" said Kathryn.

"Your work is wonderful. I'm not sure what I think

of Paul's, and I haven't seen anyone else's yet except

for the fellow in bamboo."

Kathryn smiled. "That's Kim Jones, a friend of mine

from Venice. He's been doing variations on that piece for

years. Be sure to see Carroll's paintings before you go.

I want to know what you think of them."

"I thought you were the only woman in the group."

WOLF TIME 100

"I am. 'Carroll''s spelled with two R's and two L's:

nothing minimal about him. You'll see what I mean."

By now there were several others waiting patiently

to talk to Kathryn. "I'll be back in a while," said

Esther, squeezing her hand. She turned to see David

walking toward her.

"...I was afraid you weren't going to make it," she

said after he'd hugged her warmly.

"It took a little doing. See anything you like?"

"Kathryn's silk-screens. I'm coming back to look at

them later. She said to look for a guy named Carroll's

paintings."

"Well, he ssounds ssweet," David lisped as they

moved on to the next studio.

The look of censure Esther was about to give him

froze on her face. On the walls of the large dark room in

which they found themselves were a number of nightmarish

paintings of tormented half-human, half-animal figures.

The lurid bestial images, rendered in a thick impasto of

neon colors, their subject matter openly indebted to

Francis Bacon's harrowing hyper-existential canvases, all

portrayed the same theme: conflict between a human being

WOLF TIME 101

in terrible pain and the beast within, struggling to

assert itself. Liquescent flesh dripped revoltingly from

putrefying faces or congealed into what looked like

parasitic teeth devouring their host from within. The

disintegrating faces of the figures screamed out in a

silent agony terrible to behold. People either turned

from the tortured visages in revulsion or stared at them

in horrified fascination, as did Esther.

...The man had ripped off her dreams. They came back

to her now in a florid effusion of horrifying images like

the ones confronting her. She had been stalked and torn

awake by them night after night for the past week. Or was

she only imagining this all of a sudden? Had the

paintings somehow triggered a paranoid delusion that she

had dreamt the same grotesque imagery?

For a terrifying moment the boundary between the

real and the unreal in Esther's world disappeared; she

was in limbo. Panic threatened to engulf her. Yet "who"

was she? Where was she? Then, like the side of a life

raft or a hand reaching out to her, she glimpsed

"reality"'s hard edge the most quotidian details of her

physical surroundings: ornamental molding at the juncture

WOLF TIME 102

of wall and ceiling, glare from the track lighting on

picture frames, sunlight streaming through the large

casement windows onto the painted floor and grabbed

hold of it in utter desperation.

Chapter 12

It was the same as at the restaurant the week

before: she had suddenly lost her sense of hearing or

at least the capacity to make sense of sound. She seemed

to feel as much as hear a muffled background gabble of

distorted voices muttering unintelligible conversation,

amidst the reverberant low rumble of vibrations from the

restless crowd.

But she was cut off from these people, isolated from

them in a state of confusion that was almost tactual.

What had happened to her? As if she were outside herself

as well, Esther perceived her mind struggling desperately

to regain its bearings. The futile struggle was similar

to those in her dreams when, weighed down by gravity,

bound by constraints she was unable to identify, she

could only writhe in an agony of slow viscous motion,

virtually paralyzed.

Similar, too, she suddenly recalled, to an incident

WOLF TIME 103

years ago when, after fainting, she had willed herself

from a seductively soft, warm, tingling blackness which

her conscious mind had seemed instinctively to fear.

Disconnected memories and impressions were floating

around in her mind like debris dislodged by a collision.

Her consciousness was a transmission that had

stripped its gears. She was free-wheeling, wandering

freely in past and present but unable to engage with the

immediate concrete world around her. It occurred to her

that she was a psychiatrist experiencing mental

dysfunction from the inside for the first time in her

life.

Then someone she recognized. Here was David with

frightened yet demanding eyes, trying to communicate with

her. Was there condemnation in the look as well? A

command "Get hold of yourself!" whatever his

unintelligible words were saying?

To be this helpless was to be intolerably exposed

and vulnerable. She looked around frantically for

something normal, something that made sense. When she

looked back to David again for help, her heart seemed to

freeze in his chest. He was hooded, like the man on the

WOLF TIME 104

beach.

Esther broke away from him and fled to the elevator

but the doors were just closing. She ran to the closed

door to the stairwell and yanked it open. The stairs were

deserted. She flew down them, unaware of her feet on the

concrete steps, unaware of anything but the crushing

pressure of fear.

...When she came to her senses again in her car a

few minutes later, she had no memory of searching for it

in the lot or nearly running down the furious little

parking attendant who had hurled a stream of Hispanic

obscenities at her as she roared past him onto Broadway

or of driving against swerving, honking oncoming traffic

for two blocks on the one-way street. She remembered only

seeing the hooded man in a crowd of people, in a dark

room where hideous images from her worst dreams had been

revealed.

She was driving north on the Hollywood Freeway, no

destination in mind. Not entirely aware of what she was

doing, she opened the glove compartment and felt around

blindly for...there it was! The glove made the hair on

her neck and arms crawl. She could see its shiny black
WOLF TIME 105

leather with her fingertips.

In her mind Esther saw the hooded man again felt

the primitive guttural response she'd been unwilling to

own at first, but which she was coming to accept now.

Learning to live with.

Suddenly something spoke to her. A voice that was

not a voice, not to her ears anyway: a message her

aroused body heard. A signal her heightened senses

intercepted.

She swerved across traffic into the exit lane at

Vermont Avenue and headed north, driving too fast but not

blindly now, her thumb and forefinger rubbing the black

leather sensuously between them as if by their own

volition. It was getting stronger, she was going in the

right direction: Griffith Park.

* * * * *

"A dude your size oughta be locked up in a cage

somewhere, so's he don't hurt nobody."

The tough-looking little blonde was still new enough

at this that on a good day it was more of a challenging,

exciting game than anything else. Like many of her tricks

in the month or so since arriving in L.A., this could

WOLF TIME 106

almost be her old man sitting here on the blanket with

her. The more ways she could fuck him over, the better.

Other than his size, this big ugly dude was no

different from the rest. He looked through her the way

they all did the same way she'd learned to do. Five

minutes after she'd given him what he wanted after the

money was in the pocket of her tight faded jeans, she'd

learned the hard way she wouldn't even exist for him.

He wouldn't be able to get away from her fast enough,

which of course was just fine by her.

This guy might be big but he wasn't anyone she

couldn't handle. Besides, Griffith Park wasn't exactly

the wilderness. Just because they weren't likely to be

seen behind the big rock he'd led her to didn't mean

there weren't people around nearby. She'd already had

Johns get outa hand on her a few times and she'd always

been able to deal with the situation. But she wasn't

about to sit here with him all day. Either he came up

with the cash soon or the dude was history.

"Aw, did I hurt his feelings. Don't cwy, wittle big-

boy, Mama's only teasin'. You know, I'll bet you could be

real gentle if you wanted to, couldn't you. I'll bet we

WOLF TIME 107

could make each other feel realll good's, what I think.

Whadda you think?"

He was starting to give her the creeps, is what she

was really thinking. She'd been trying so hard to put the

make on this John that she hadn't quite realized how

little he'd actually said to her. Or how cold his eyes

were, even when his mouth was twisted into what appeared

to be his idea of a smile.

* * * * *

Esther veered onto the shoulder of the two-lane road

and leaped out of her car, neither pulling the emergency

brake nor closing the door behind her. The Lexus rolled

to a finish-scratching stop against a large century

plant.

Panting now, she sniffed the air. The "scent" a

subtle combination of pheromones and other sensual cues

that normal consciousness filters out was strong now.

She kicked off her fashionable clumsy shoes and plunged

into the trees and manzanita bordering the road.

She was unaware of the chaparral tearing at her

designer blouse and pants, scratching her arms and legs

raw. As her bloodied bare feet, insensitive to pain, flew

WOLF TIME 108

over the hard dry pebble-strewn ground, they gripped and

pushed off its uneven, unyielding surface to propel her

faster than she'd ever run before.

Her panting had turned into a soft almost inaudible

moan expelled with each breath, from the unprecedented

exertion she was demanding of her body and from the

lust of the hunt. He was close now! He was very close.

* * * * *

"C'mon now, don't play games with me. You just gonna

screw around or you gonna get laid? Just fifty bucks and

I can make you feel like a man. And don't be givin' me

that evil eye either you don't know how lucky you are."

The man was giving her a funny look as he sidled

over to the brush-covered boulder shielding them from the

rest of the park. His eyes were so intense all of a

sudden she felt almost pinned down by them. He began to

feel around on the face of the rock without ever

releasing her from the force of his mesmerizing stare.

What the hell was he looking for?

She never found out. Their seclusion and the

stillness of the afternoon were suddenly shattered by a

piercing shriek. At first, from the ferocious snarling,

WOLF TIME 109

the stunned girl thought a bobcat, some kind of predator

smaller than a mountain lion, had leaped onto the man's

back from the top of the rock. But when she recovered her

senses she realized, incredulously, that it was a woman.

Esther went for the eyes first. But the big man,

though taken by surprise, was very quick to react. And

the savage creature that had attacked him it took him,

too, a few seconds to realize it was a woman was too

light to be really dangerous, despite the momentum of her

leap. He outweighed her by more than a hundred muscled

pounds. Although she was gouging deep scratches around

his eyes and into his face, Esther was in a fight for her

life now.

In the meantime the dazed young woman had finally

found her voice. Her screams could be heard all over this

part of the sprawling park. Two men jogging nearby were

the first to respond.

"The bitch is crazy!" she cried as they ran up to

help.

Esther's face had been beaten bloody, her neck

deeply bruised by the time they pulled the man off. She

was unconscious. Having tasted blood himself now, her

WOLF TIME 110

brutal attacker was loathe to let her go.

But the joggers were strong and athletic themselves,

and just as determined to intervene. He hammered one of

them with a huge fist as soon as he'd scrambled to his

feet, but the other jumped on his back and applied a

choke hold.

The big man broke it with a vicious elbow to the

ribs, but the stupid girl was still screaming her lungs

out, and now there were others running toward them. It

was time to get away while he still could. Cursing, he

fled into the bushes, and no one was willing to pursue

him.

"She's been beaten half to death!" the uninjured

jogger yelled to the crowd at large. "Someone call 911!"

Chapter 13

"You don't believe that little hooker's story do

you, Foley?"

"I don't know what the hell to believe. The police

say someone saw Esther jump out of her car and just let

it roll to a stop. They found her shoes there."

"And that's almost half a mile from where the

joggers rescued her! The guy must have dragged her there
WOLF TIME 111

from the car."

"Then what about the witness who "

"Fuck the witness! How can you believe someone who

claims Esther just kicked her shoes off and went running

into the bushes in her bare feet?"

"I'm not saying I do, David or what the girl said

either. Nothing makes much sense right now. We're just

going to have to wait until she regains consciousness and

can tell us what happened herself."

Esther, her face swathed in bandages, moaned

faintly. The two men stopped speaking and went quickly to

her hospital bedside; but her eyes stayed closed and she

uttered no other sounds. Both of them were sickened and

enraged all over again by the sight of her bruised and

swollen face.

"Who the hell could do something like that to

another human being?" David Albright whispered hoarsely.

"Unfortunately, a lot more people out there than

either of us wants to admit. At least she's still alive."

"Not people animals! To have something like this

happen to her twice in less than a week..."

"I'm wondering if there could be some kind of

WOLF TIME 112

connection."

"What kind of connection? You mean the same guy?"

"Well, not necessarily the same guy, but something

she might be involved in, like the womens shelter or a

case of mistaken identity. Maybe someone has her mixed up

with one of their drug customers or something I don't

know."

"Jesus Christ, Foley it sure as hell isn't

something she's mixed up in, I'll guarantee you that. How

the hell could you even suggest it?"

"The only thing I'm suggesting is that she might

still be in danger. What if it isn't a coincidence that

she was attacked again?"

This silenced David. He frowned, his eyes

thoughtful.

"Have you heard anything at all from the police

yet?" Dan asked.

"Nothing."

"Let me know if you do, will you?"

David nodded. "I don't want them up here grilling

her though she's been through too damn much."

"I'm her friend too, remember? I'm her colleague,

WOLF TIME 113

for God's sake."

"I know I'm sorry. This just..."

He shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished. Dan

put his arm around David's shoulders and squeezed,

noticing with a certain amount of satisfaction that he

cringed slightly at the contact.

"She'll be all right. We need to get some answers

but she's safe now. And she looks a lot worse than she

really is."

Looking at her lying there, hearing her labored

breathing through thick puffy lips and a grotesquely

swollen nose, David found this difficult to believe. What

the hell was going on? Esther had complained more than

once about men who batter women; now she was a battered

woman herself. Had she enraged some wife-beater through

her work at the shelter? Esther knew very well what he

thought about that: "therapy-slumming" he'd called it.

The fight that had provoked was one of their worst.

Lt. Clark and Detective Arnie Costello, his heavy-

set partner of more than six years a man who pretended

to be harder and looked softer physically than he

actually was, arrived at the spot in Griffith Park where

WOLF TIME 114

Esther's car had been discovered.

"I still don't know what the hell you expect to find

up here," said Costello, heaving his bulk from the

unmarked LAPD car.

"Forget what the girl said. She was tryin' to score

with the guy, right?"

"Nah, I think she was tryin' t' sell him some Girl

Scout cookies. Vanilla thighs with a creamy filling,"

said Costello with a leer as they began walking toward

the spot where the paramedics had reported finding

Esther.

"So let's assume for now that the good doctor's not

just flat-out crazy," Clark continued. "Let's say she had

some kind of lead on the guy. Look around see what you

can find."

Costello grumbled to himself as they separated a few

yards and continued in the direction of the large rock

indicated on a sketch the officers at the scene had made

for Clark. "What kinda lead?" he asked skeptically.

"I don't have a clue, Arnie, let's just give her the

benefit of the doubt for now, okay? She says the guy who

cut that girl up tried to do the same to her the day

WOLF TIME 115

before, right?"

"So what?"

"So let's say she recognized this guy, or thought

she did. Maybe the hooker was lucky."

Costello rolled his eyes. "About to get her cookie

crumbled huh? That's a helluva lot of conjecture,

Lieutenant."

His partner didn't reply as they continued what

proved to be an unproductive sweep of the route Esther

would have taken to reach the rock most directly from her

car.

"All right, I want to leave this whole area as clean

when we're through with it as your plate after a meal at

Tony's," Clark said after they'd arrived at their

destination empty-handed.

"Hey, it's too near lunchtime to bring pasta into

this, Lieutenant. What the hell makes you think appealing

to my finer instincts is going to improve my eyesight,

fer chrissake?"

But Clark had succeeded as usual in improving his

friend and fellow detective's frame of mind. Costello

resolved that if anything did turn up on this wild-goose

WOLF TIME 116

chase, he'd be the one to find it. Both men were quiet

for the next twenty minutes or so as they methodically

went over the ground around the large rock. Costello was

the first to break the silence.

"Hey, Clark, you been holdin' out on me? Who's your

psychic?"

He'd found, concealed in a crevice of the boulder, a

lethal-looking switchblade, wrapped in a black

"executioner's" hood.

Chapter 14

Even with the door open it was hot in the phone

booth, and the big man had been squeezed in here studying

the architectural monstrosity across the street for some

time now. On the triangular shelf beneath the telephone,

today's Los Angeles Times lay folded into quarters, with

the news summary on the inside front page face-up. A

circled paragraph in one of the short articles began: "A

prominent Santa Monica psychiatrist was badly beaten in

Griffith Park Tuesday under what an LAPD spokesman

described as 'bizarre' circumstances. Police say an

eyewitness claims Dr. Esther Roth assaulted a man who

then brutally beat her and fled when she was rescued by
WOLF TIME 117

joggers..." Beside the newspaper was a notepad with the

names of half a dozen hospitals, two of which had been

crossed off.

The man dialed.

"Hollywood Presbyterian," a female voice answered.

"Esther Roth please. Uh, she's in Room 215, right?"

"Roth? R-O-T-H?"

"Yes."

"Just a minute please...no, she's not. Would you

like me to ring her room?"

"Well, not if it's the wrong one. Are you sure she's

not in 215? That's the information I was given."

"I'm sure it is, sir, but that's not what I show."

"What number do you show?"

"I'm not allowed to give that information out. But I

can connect you to the room I show her in if you like."

"That will be fine. And what room did you say that

was?"

"Room 323. Hold just a moment please."

"Never mind, operator, I have another call waiting

now. I'll call back later."

Bingo. Stupid bitch. They'd have your ass if they

WOLF TIME 118

knew you were that easy to con. But then everything's

easy for the Superior Man. You're going to be easy, Dr.

Esther Roth, whoever the fuck you are. You messed with

the wrong man, baby.

The nerve of that cunt! How the hell did she find

me? Real strange, that woman some kind of wild streak,

atavistic, some kind of throwback. You have tight genes,

Dr. Rot? Too much chrome on your chromosomes?

Stunt you pulled gouging my face like some bitch

in heat. That hurt, you cunt, and you were going for my

eyes. If you'd gotten those nails in one of them I'd have

killed you right then and there, fuck the little boys in

their jogging suits. Taken them on after I'd done you,

baby.

You controlling bitches! The gates of hell is what

you control. God's little helpers, Satan's little sluts.

Paper says you're a psychiatrist. Now that's a joke I can

chuckle at a little, can't you? Crazy man kills woman

crazy enough to think people like me can be turned. I own

you now, sweetheart. I make my own rules, you smart-ass

psychiatrist. Your rule is to follow the rules, and

that's going to cost you your fucking life.

WOLF TIME 119

* * * * *

"Sir, this isn't visiting hours. Are you a relative

of a patient on this floor?" asked one of the two

uniformed women at the nurses' station.

"Carl Potter I'm his brother," the man replied.

"I don't recognize that name, what room is he in?"

"Four-eighteen."

"This is the third floor."

"Oh, sorry." The big man flashed an "ingratiating"

smile which managed only to call attention to the

scratches on his face, the coldness of his eyes. A

coldness that drew their own eyes almost hypnotically

rather than compelling, or even allowing, the women to

avert their gaze. "Is there a stairway this way?" he

asked, pointing to an illuminated exit sign and arrow at

the end of the deserted corridor.

"Yes, but the elevator's closer," said the nurse who

had confronted him.

He nodded, still fixing them with that same cold

smile. "I'll just use the stairway."

There was only an orderly in sight when he turned

the corner, wheeling an empty gurney in the other

WOLF TIME 120

direction. Ahead of him on the left was Room 323, just

beyond the door to the stairway. Private or semi-private?

he wondered. He felt for the hood in the pocket of his

windbreaker.

The orderly disappeared through a set of swinging

doors at the end of the corridor. The man turned to see

that there was no one behind him. He hugged the wall as

he approached Esther's room. Her door was open.

He took the hood from his pocket, concealing it in

the palm of his hand. He could see her slim neck as if it

were here in front of him. If only she wasn't too drugged

to know what was happening to her.

Suddenly he froze against the wall. Voices.

"Why would anyone do such a thing?" asked the

querulous high-pitched voice of an elderly woman.

"You'd be surprised, Ma'am," replied a deep male

voice. "Don't you worry though; we'll be here round-the-

clock till they find a private room for her, so you have

nothing to worry about. We'll be right outside your

door."

Esther's would-be killer didn't hear the cop's last

sentence. Beside himself with frustration, he descended

WOLF TIME 121

the stairs in a blind rage. No one was unfortunate enough

to encounter him on the stairway that morning.

Chapter 15

Foley was in her room that evening when Esther

finally regained consciousness.

"It's all right, Esther," he murmured reassuringly.

"It's me, Dan. You're in the hospital and you're going to

be all right."

She moaned again and stuck her hand out weakly.

"Don't try to talk if it hurts, honey."

She sobbed once but stifled her crying immediately.

She didn't dare let herself go, and it hurt too much to

cry anyway.

"...Funuvabiff!"

"Easy, baby. You're gonna be all right, I promise

you." He mouthed the words again silently, realizing even

as he did so that this time it was himself he was

attempting to reassure.

* * * * *

The next morning David Albright stopped by the

clinic, extremely upset.

"They said she didn't want to see me, Foley can

WOLF TIME 122

you believe it? When I complained to the nurses, they

called the goddamn cop who was watching her room. What

the hell's going on?"

"She doesn't really want to see me either, David.

She's treating me more like her doctor than her friend."

"Has she told you anything at all about what

happened?"

"Not yet, she can't really talk at all. I asked her

a couple of questions to see what her mental state was

like, and she mostly nodded or shook her head. I spent

most of the time just sitting by her bed letting her

rest."

"When do you think she'll be ready to leave?"

"Oh, two or three days I'd guess, maybe less." He

put his hand on David's shoulder. "I know it's hard. I'm

certainly not trying to put myself between the two of

you, but I think it might be better, if she asks you to

stay away for awhile, that you try to understand and not

attempt to force the issue. She's going to need you

she's going to need all of us. But I think we should let

her determine when. Do you agree?"

"Well, sure, whatever you think is best, Foley. But

WOLF TIME 123

sometimes it's hard to tell when no means no and when it

means something else. I'm not going to stay away if my

gut feeling tells me she needs me, no matter what you or

she or the whole goddamn hospital says. Is that clear?"

"I'll go you one better. If your gut feeling, at any

time, is that she needs you there with her, call me and

I'll do what I can to help."

"Thanks, but I won't need your help, believe me.

I'll stay the hell away if that's what Esther wants as

long as she continues to get better. You'll keep me

posted?"

"Of course and, you know, she may ask to see you

any time now. I hope she does. I just want "

"I understand," David interrupted impatiently. "I'll

be out of town for a few days, but I can return

immediately if Esther needs me for anything. My office

will know where to reach me; call if anything happens."

* * * * *

Meredith Manning entered the newsroom editing suite

on the run as usual.

"Barbara, Larry, I want you to be ready in half an

hour to do a bitch of a story with me. We have an

WOLF TIME 124

exclusive."

"What is it?" asked Larry Sorenson, the station's

best video editor and the soundman/grip on Meredith's

three-person remote crew.

The psychiatrist assaulted in Griffith Park

yesterday thinks it was the perp who killed Pam Putnam.

"You're kidding! And we're the only ones who have

it?"

"We're the only ones for now but we have to move

fast," Meredith shot back over a retreating shoulder.

"Sweet." Barbara Mahone, the crew's Emmy-winning

cameraperson Sorenson had won three for his editing as

well was taking him through a puff-piece she'd come

back with the day before on a Glendale man's goldfish

whose odd swimming patterns, he claimed, could predict

earthquakes.

"We can finish this later," said Larry when she'd

left. The two of them had been massaging Barbara's

digital images into a tongue-in-cheek little fish tale

with which to tweak their fickle six o'clock news

audience some evening when no one had been mugged,

murdered or mutilated.
WOLF TIME 125

"She's always getting leads like this," marveled

Barbara. "How the hell does she do it?"

"Haven't you heard? A sergeant in LAPD's Records

Division: 'Deep Thrust'." Larry punctuated the fictitious

nickname with a graphic gesture in which his forearm

substituted for another part of the male anatomy.

Barbara was delighted with his improv. Meredith's

admiring but envious understudy found the implication

entirely plausible.

Meredith, in the meantime, had taken her lead

immediately to News chief Burt Kennedy who, as usual, was

covering his ass by deferring to the station manager.

"You're sure of this now"? asked Alex Krum warily.

"This is a reliable LAPD source?"

"If it's the same guy she's used before, I'll vouch

for him," Kennedy replied. "He seems to have an

extraordinary interest in Meredith's...career."

Meredith sent him a look just short of microwave

transmission in intensity.

"...I see," said Krum. "All right then, let's jump

on it. Drag this welterweight from her hospital bed if

you have to."

WOLF TIME 126

Meredith turned in excitement to leave.

"Just a minute!" interjected the station manager.

"There's something missing."

"What's that?" Meredith asked apprehensively,

wondering if she was going to be asked to come up with

attribution from another LAPD source.

"A name. If we're going to turn this guy into a

superstar, he's gotta have a name. Like the Hillside

Strangler, or the Zodiac killer."

"Superstar?" Kennedy repeated, in a tone of voice

freighted with disbelief.

"Goddamn right," insisted Krum. "If we're gonna

cover this, let's do it right. This guy couldn't have

come along at a better time. Here we are facing the

ratings sweeps with nothing but reruns and that crum-

that series on L.A.'s crumbling infrastructure you put

together, Burt."

"I thought you liked it," said Kennedy, crestfallen.

"It tested okay for a documentary, Burt. But look at

what Meredith's onto. Hell, we can do things with this

the network stations wouldn't touch."

"What kinds of things are you talking about?"

WOLF TIME 127

"Goddamnit, that's your job. But you know what I'm

talking about. I want everyone in L.A. looking over their

shoulders till this guy's put away."

"How about...'the Wolfman'?" suggested Meredith.

"Wolfman? Yeah! I think you've got it. 'Wolfman'!

It's sure as hell stronger than 'Hillside Strangler'."

"After what he did to that girl, it's no

exaggeration," said Meredith.

"Listen, for a station as much in the red as this

one is, blood and gore is appropriate. Let's shake people

up! Let's put some fire in their eyes! It's time someone

made an issue out of this sort of thing before it's

unsafe to step outside your own goddamn door any longer."

Chapter 16

"According to the paper, she attacked him!"

The remark, by one of two nurses walking past her

door, and the look of incredulity it prompted typified

the general reaction to Esther's exploit.

At the moment she was sitting up in bed, her face

still badly swollen, sipping an obnoxious solid-food

substitute through a straw and listening to her elderly

roommate, Freida Overmeier, ramble on.

WOLF TIME 128

"Oh, I'm not afraid," she was saying. "The doctors

may have given me just a few months, but the Good Lord

has given me a lifetime. And I've filled it, believe you

me. I have no complaints, no complaints at all."

With a rapt inward-gazing expression on her wrinkled

face, she lapsed into a silence that wasn't broken until

Foley arrived several minutes later. After Esther had

struggled through a barely intelligible introduction, he

carried on a brief but thoughtful conversation with her

roommate, then discreetly drew the screen separating the

two beds.

He noticed Esther's congealed-looking drink for the

first time and made a face. "Shall I smuggle in your

Cuisinart?" She attempted a chuckle but the effort was

unsuccessful.

"...Was this really the same guy?" he finally asked:

a question Esther had known was coming.

She nodded.

"Ready to tell me what happened?"

Esther closed her eyes, at once collecting her

thoughts and steeling herself to put into painfully

executed words what had taken place in Griffith Park.

WOLF TIME 129

"I guess...I was trying to kill him, Dan."

"You give any thought to the odds of your

succeeding? Or the consequences if you had?"

"...It's all just a blur. I think I want to keep it

that way for now."

"All right."

"You know," she said, "I've had patients who were in

Vietnam and Iraq tell me that in the heat of battle

sometimes, a cloud would suddenly come over them and

they'd lose consciousness of who or what they were and

become raging animals. They would kill dismember. Then

back here, maybe years later, they'd go berserk in a bar

and start breaking bottles over people's heads, throwing

tables...and never remember a thing."

"...Is that what happened to you?"

"I don't know. I have this feeling that I'm in touch

with something so primitive inside. Real brain stem

energy. I don't even know if it's entirely human I

don't want to know. When I start thinking about it..."

she shuddered. "I'm so confused. I don't know who I am

anymore."

For the first time, Dan had the uneasy feeling that
WOLF TIME 130

he might have misjudged the severity of Esther's

emotional reaction. He shook off the self-doubt and told

himself to listen.

"Well, I know you as someone who is certainly not

psychotic," he said, "who is intellectually keen and an

extremely competent clinician. Maybe you've experienced a

momentary hysterical reaction, some dissociative state.

Frankly, though, the reaction I'm having to you now

suggests something a little beyond that. Do you think you

could become violent? Do you feel at all suicidal?"

"What I'm feeling, Dan, is some clinical alienation

on your part. Don't try to put me in some diagnostic

category. What's going on with me doesn't fit any of the

categories that I'm aware of. I'm lost right now. I don't

know who, or what, I'd see if I looked in a mirror. I

think what I need most is to be alone for awhile. Im not

going to kill myself."

He nodded and took her hand. "You'll call me won't

you, if things should start getting out of control?"

"Yes, of course." Esther forced a smile and sat up,

swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "Now, I'm

checking myself out of here. That's something you can

WOLF TIME 131

help me with. And don't try to stop me, I've made up my

mind."

* * * * *

"I don't care if she did agree to an interview,"

replied the administrator angrily. "This isn't visiting

hours and you're not going up to her room."

"When are visiting hours?" Meredith asked coolly,

motioning for her two-person crew to set their equipment

down in the hospital's main lobby. From experience,

Barbara turned on her camcorder, just in case. Larry

jacked in his shotgun mike.

"From 1 to 3 in the afternoon and 6 to 8 in the

evening. But you'd need special permission to do any

filming."

"Oh we'll arrange for that, of course. When we're

through shooting, I'll have Mr. Krum, the station

manager, contact whoever needs to approve it. That's

normal station procedure."

"That's not the way we operate here, I assure you."

"Then may I speak to your supervisor please?" said

Meredith icily.

The female administrator turned to a clerk in the

WOLF TIME 132

admitting area.

"See if Mr. Cranston's busy please, Anna."

"You didn't really get her permission did you?"

asked Larry when Meredith came over to confer with the

crew.

"No of course not. I was going to call her from the

lobby. It's a lot harder to say no when you're at their

front door."

"So what happens when they check with her?"

"The worst they can do is throw us out. You leave

this to me, honey. I've gotten into tougher places than

this."

At that moment, Esther herself walked up to the

admitting desk, followed by Dan with the overnight bag

David had brought from her apartment the day before.

"I'm Dr. Roth, in Room 323. I'm checking myself out.

What do I need to sign?"

"Get this!" Meredith whispered excitedly. "Shotgun,

Larry!"

Barbara focused then zoomed out to get both Meredith

and the admitting desk in the picture, motioning to Larry

where to position the mike where it would be out of

WOLF TIME 133

frame.

"Dr. Roth?" said Meredith, walking toward her with

an unfeigned sense of authority, "I'm Meredith Manning

with Channel 8. I understand you were attacked by a man

you identified to police as the possible killer of Pam

Putnam, the Woodland Hills girl."

Taken by surprise, Esther was too confused to

respond at first.

"Turn off that camera!" ordered the administrator.

"How do you know it's the same man, Dr. Roth? Could

you tell us how the attack occurred?"

Dan stepped between the two women. "What do you mean

coming in here? Didn't you hear this woman?"

Meredith stepped around him to one side and Barbara,

who had moved in behind her, went the other way. Dan

didn't know which to confront.

"Dr. Roth, I noticed that you said you were checking

yourself out. Is that against your doctor's orders?"

By now Esther had found her voice. "You have no

right to be here," she replied. "I don't intend to answer

your questions."

"But, Dr. Roth don't you want to see this man

WOLF TIME 134

apprehended? Maybe something you could tell us would lead

to information from our viewers."

An authoritative man in his late-50's strode

indignantly into the lobby. "What's the meaning of this?

Who gave you permission to conduct an interview in the

lobby of this hospital?" he demanded.

"Mr. Cranston," said Meredith, who was good with

names, "this is a story of vital concern to the citizens

of Los Angeles. We feel it's our obligation to get as

much information as we can."

By now the administrator, Dan and Cranston were all

talking angrily at once, while Esther tried to shrink

within herself.

"I don't care about your story! What you're doing

here is illegal, and if you don't leave at once I'll have

you and your crew arrested!" Cranston exclaimed.

"How dare you subject a patient to this kind of

abuse!" Dan bristled.

"I'm calling the police right now!" the

administrator announced to the lobby at large.

"Please! I appreciate your concern, believe me,"

said Esther. "But I've already talked to the police and I

WOLF TIME 135

have nothing more to say. Now would you all just let me

get out of here?"

The cop assigned to Esther's room had called

headquarters the minute she and Dan left and had just

gotten off the phone. Alerted by the commotion in the

lobby, he came sprinting in with his right hand on his

holstered service revolver.

"I thought you were supposed to be guarding this

patient's room!" snapped Cranston. "These people are

filming here with no authorization whatsoever. I want

them removed at once and if that means signing an

arrest warrant, I will."

"That won't be necessary, Officer, we'll be glad to

leave," said Meredith. "There's obviously been some kind

of miscommunication. I'm sorry we've caused a

disturbance."

Her crew was already heading for the door with their

equipment.

"What a scene! I hope you got all of it," she

exulted under her breath. "Did you hear him say they had

a police watch on her door?"

WOLF TIME 136

Chapter 17

Lt. Clark was shaving in the men's room at LAPD's

Parker Center when Det. Costello bellied up to one of the

urinals.

"We're goin' t' Tony's for lunch. Wanta come?" asked

Costello.

"Nah, I'm gonna try to get a lunch date with Dr.

Roth's receptionist.

"'Business' huh?"

"If nothing better comes up."

"Oh it'll get up all right. Whether it gets

anything, besides a Big Mac and some fries, is another

matter."

Clark put his cordless shaver away and shook his

head. "You're the only guy I know could relieve a hard-on

with a hamburger."

"It'd take more'n one!" crowed Costello, zipping his

fly.

They both laughed as he came over to the line of

basins to wash his hands.

"So, is this strictly recreational or are you goin'

on a fishing trip?" he asked Clark.

WOLF TIME 137

"Both. This business in the park some

coincidence."

"You think maybe the shrink knows this guy?"

"Maybe. I don't think it's that simple though."

"How do you explain it them bein' in the same

place at the same time?"

"That's just part of it," said Clark. "Why would a

woman of her intelligence, and professional standing, try

to take a guy like that on single-handed? It doesn't make

sense."

Costello shrugged. "Maybe she just freaked. Or the

hooker's lyin'."

"If she's telling the truth, Roth had to cover half

a mile in her bare feet to get to him. That's no impulse,

Arnie."

"Hell, nothin' surprises me in this town anymore,"

said Costello as they left the men's room. "Pretty soon

it's gonna be as bad as New York in the 70s. The safest

place in Griffith Park will be the cages in the zoo."

* * * * *

Clark parked his unmarked car in the clinic's

parking lot, then took a quick look at his reflection in

WOLF TIME 138

the rearview mirror. He certainly wouldn't need to fake

his attraction to the girl to learn what he could about

her boss. She'd left him with an indelible image that had

been warming his thoughts since their initial encounter.

Sure enough, as he walked up to the reception desk

their eye contact instantly generated the same mutual

attraction he'd felt the first time.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name," he said,

smiling.

"Judy. Williams. Dr. Roth's not in, Lieutenant."

"Tom this is only semi-official. I know she's not.

Are you free for lunch?"

"Well...I sort of have plans. I usually eat with a

friend."

"Anything you can't change? I'd like to talk to

you."

"Just how official is 'semi-official'?"

"Unofficially, I'd like to take you to lunch."

"Why is a man who surrenders authority so hard to

resist?"

* * * * *

The Cycle Shop was this month's trendy West L.A.

WOLF TIME 139

restaurant: photogenic salads as tasty as they looked,

lots of fresh seafood, skylights that bathed the greenery

and de rigueur bicycle parts in an ambiance of filtered

sunlight and L.A. chic. It was neither exclusive nor

particularly expensive, Clark was relieved to see.

"I take it you're a regular," he said after they'd

seated themselves and she had spoken to waiters and

diners alike.

"So is Esther; if she weren't in the hospital I

wouldnt have brought you here."

Judy was easy to talk to. By the time they were

halfway through the glass of wine that neither of them

normally indulged in for lunch, she'd told him she was

studying for a master's in psychology at UCLA.

"When will you finish?" he asked.

"Next spring." She knocked on the red oak tabletop.

"If all goes according to plan."

"Do you plan to have your own practice some day?"

"I'd like to work in a holistic clinic. Where all a

patient's needs can be attended to, instead of just

treating symptoms."

"I see. What school of psychology does Dr. Roth fit

WOLF TIME 140

into?"

"...Still unofficially?"

"Let's call it 'off the record'."

"Transpersonal. Are you familiar with the term?"

"I don't know; would I be too far off if I thought

of her as someone concerned with the needs of the whole

person, and not just his symptoms?"

She laughed, then gave Clark a verbal sketch of her

boss's impressive background. Esther had completed her

undergraduate work at the University of Michigan in just

three years in the top ten percent of her class, followed

by four years of med school and an internship at the same

institution, then three years of psychiatric residency

training at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. The

residency experience, she'd told Judy over a long lunch

at this same restaurant, had given her an appreciation of

biological psychiatry, more than her fill of brain

chemistry and mood-altering medications, and the

realization that her interest lay in a humanistic

approach to treatment.

So, breaking from mainstream psychiatry, Esther had

successfully applied for a year at the Jungian Institute

WOLF TIME 141

in Zurich where, in addition to being analyzed by Dr.

Krongold, she had worked with art therapy as a means of

communication. She returned to UCLA for a psychiatric

fellowship, studying and treating post-traumatic stress

disorder: a condition, she discovered, common to both

American veterans and Vietnamese alike.

In the meantime, her humanistic sensibilities and

social consciousness had begun to draw Esther into

community involvement, and two years after her fellowship

training she was elected secretary of the prestigious Los

Angeles County Inter-Agency Council, whose raison d'etre

was ostensibly to improve coordination among community

services in the healing arts. Eventually, however she

had confided to Judy after an uncharacteristic second

glass of Chardonnay she became too disgusted with the

politics and power tripping which too often were the

Council's real agenda, to continue.

"Esther's very Aquarian, very forward-looking," her

protg concluded, "maybe a little too much so at times."

"Oh?" Clark managed to make his interest sound more

conversational than professional.

"She wants eventually to work not just with clients

WOLF TIME 142

who are neurotic and unhappy but also successful people

wanting to transform themselves into totally new

beings."

"Well, that certainly sounds ambitious."

"It's the most important thing that can happen to

the human race. But to be able to help in the evolution

of others, you have to be willing to transform yourself

all of you."

"And being forward-looking's not enough, huh?"

Judy took a sip of her wine, and Clark could see her

asking herself whether she was being too talkative. She

gave him a direct searching look which apparently

reassured her.

"Esther has no lack of vision, but I sometimes

wonder if she's tolerant enough of human weaknesses. Her

own in particular."

"I'd think that would be pretty important in a

therapist."

"In anyone....If you're always looking toward the

sun, you'll never see your shadow."

No sooner had Judy said this than a shadow fell

across their table. Startled, they looked up to see

WOLF TIME 143

Esther standing there, her face shockingly disfigured

with bandages and ugly bruises. Though both eyes were

blackened and one was nearly swollen shut, the expression

of hurt and bewilderment in them was all too clear.

Then she turned and limped hurriedly away. Too

stunned at first to react, Judy finally excused herself

with a stricken look and hurried after her, with Clark

following. But when they reached the sidewalk, Esther was

nowhere in sight.

"Oh no, she's gone! Do you think she heard me? Did

you see her face? How could they have let her out of the

hospital so soon?" Judy's own face was a study in

anguish.

Clark radioed headquarters to learn that Esther had

checked herself out that morning.

"If you eat here frequently she may have been

looking for you," he said as they drove back to the

clinic.

"She looked awful!" said Judy morosely. She was

slumped in the front seat of Clark's car, staring

straight ahead with a vacant look on her normally

expressive face. "Maybe she wanted to discuss her patient

WOLF TIME 144

schedule with me that's Esther." She shook her head.

Clark was impressed with this assessment. "She'd

actually come looking for you in that condition to

discuss her patients with you?"

"If she was going to be out for a few days, she

might. It wouldn't have been much out of her way, and she

knows she can find me there most of the time for lunch.

But you'd think she'd have telephoned; even Esther's not

usually that obsessive. She hasn't been the same since

that animal tried to kill her. How can there be such

monsters in the world?"

Clark glanced out the window at the porno and

slasher movie marquees, the nude show and massage parlor

come-ons, the billboards looming over the street, their

commercial messages steeped in loveless sexuality some

with blatant S&M overtones.

"...Something in the water maybe?" he replied

sarcastically. "Its the dark side of human nature, Judy.

Denying that is like failing to treat the whole person."

Chapter 18

So this is how paranoia feels, Esther said to

herself, letting the Santa Monica Freeway sweep her along

WOLF TIME 145

like a river to the sea. For some reason, finding Judy

and the detective discussing her case at lunch together

had been like interrupting them in flagrante delicto.

Were they conspiring against her? There was no rational

basis for such a fear, she realized, but that's how it

felt to her. The run-in with the TV crew at the hospital,

then having to wade through red tape at the police

impound yard where her car had been towed, had pushed her

close to the edge as it was. All Dan's powers of

persuasion had been insufficient to keep her from driving

herself home.

Of course she was being obsessive about getting the

car back, she'd admitted that readily enough. Dan just

didn't understand how imperative it was for her to

restore some order to her life now, to get as many of the

pieces and loose ends of her routine back in place as

possible. Because he couldn't seem to accept, he didn't

get, that a huge hole, a terrifying abyss, was opening up

in the center of her life. Yes, this insistence on order

at its margins was only neurotic busywork, but she

believed it might help retain her sanity.

She ended up on the beach, her beach where the

WOLF TIME 146

violation, the irrevocable transformation of her life,

had occurred. It was overcast and the strand appeared to

be deserted. She hadn't driven here consciously, but her

body certainly knew where she was. She parked the car and

turned off the engine. Why had she come back? Was it

because, for the victim, it made sense to return to the

scene of the crime, like getting back on the horse that

has just thrown you? Try telling that to her autonomic

nervous system.

But Esther was quite certain he wouldn't be here

again. Heart pounding, she got out of her car, surveying

the scene cautiously. She wasn't wearing hose so she

slipped out of her shoes and started across the sand

toward the water, unable to restrain her eyes from

darting about nervously. It was low tide.

Suddenly a man broke out from behind the nearest

house on her right. Even as it registered that this was

just a jogger and his dog, she couldn't prevent her

startled reaction from escalating into momentary terror.

There was such panic in the way she took off all at once

that the Chesapeake retriever charged after her, barking.

At a bellowed command from its owner, the dog

WOLF TIME 147

cringed and stopped chasing her at once, but Esther,

sobbing bitterly now, only slowed and circled around to

return to her car. The world and her own nature were

turning against her.

* * * * *

In the meantime, the News-8 crew arrived at Esther's

secluded condo complex in their video van; they hadn't

even returned to the TV station. Telephoning her LAPD

source to report what had occurred at the hospital,

Meredith had managed to wheedle Esther's address out of

him, and it had taken no effort at all to get Krum's

approval for a short stakeout.

"Not that I have anything better to do," said Larry

as they pulled to the curb just down the street from the

condo, "but if she's not here, how long are we going to

wait?"

"We can give her an hour or so before I have to get

back for the news prep. Both of you wait here, I'm going

to check out the garage and see if her car's there."

Automatically framing various angles in her head as

she approached the condo, Meredith turned her real

attention to the vague, unfamiliar emotion gnawing at her

WOLF TIME 148

consciousness like a tooth beginning to ache. It was

guilt. Under the circumstances, was stalking the

psychiatrist at home a little heartless even for her,

Meredith asked herself. The excitement of her coup at the

hospital had begun to wear thin on the drive over:

meeting Esther face to face seemed to be stimulating some

kind of delayed reaction. Was it on Esther's behalf

or...with a shudder, Meredith descended the ramp to the

condominium's underground garage. She wasn't the victim,

this wasn't her own story she was telling someone

else's.

Meredith was pleasantly surprised to find the

sliding gate across the entrance open. Typical. People

paid a fortune for security now, and half the time it was

out of operation. The lights apparently weren't working

either. The condo was on the south side of the street

which Meredith had noted in considering potential camera

angles outside and it was surprisingly dark in the

garage interior. Her footsteps echoed against dank

concrete block walls. Was the subterranean dampness of

the garage responsible for the frisson, the chill that

suddenly swept up her spine?

WOLF TIME 149

She didn't see a Lexus among the dozen or so

vehicles she had to identify primarily by outline in the

dark. All but a battered-looking van parked in one corner

were the relatively new and expensive cars one would

expect to find here. She decided to make a loop through

the garage to make certain she hadn't missed Esther's car

and to see whether or not she could identify her parking

space.

Although the incongruous-looking van had aroused her

mild interest, she was about to pass it by when the click

of cooling metal prompted her to walk over and examine it

more closely. It was still warm.

The very moment it occurred to her that Esther could

conceivably be the object of someone else's attention, a

man stepped out of the shadows. Meredith could see

nothing of him but a huge silhouette, looming in front of

her against the light from the distant exit. She gasped

but otherwise neither of them made a sound.

When she started to walk around him he took a long

almost leisurely diagonal step toward her which not only

cut her off but brought him to within twenty feet of her.

Frightened but in control, Meredith said, "I have a

WOLF TIME 150

camera crew with me."

He started to laugh, softly: a sound that, with its

subterranean echo, made her flesh crawl.

"Listen," she said, her voice betraying her now with

a slight quiver, "I don't know who you are, but one

scream's going to bring them running."

The soft, maddening laughter continued. He could

have grabbed her by now or made some kind of move he

was playing with her. Was this the guy who'd beaten Dr.

Roth? Pam Putnam's killer?

Make yourself think! She knew the moment she

screamed he'd be on top of her. If her crew heard her

they might be too late. What the hell could they do

against this giant anyway? He looked as if he could break

Larry in two.

Suddenly there was another sound they both heard at

once: the echo of footsteps two sets, it sounded like!

"Larry! Barbara! Sound and Camera!"

The Wolfman turned to see two people in silhouette

one with a camera; the other, a shotgun mike on a boom

walking toward them just inside the garage. He turned

back savagely to Meredith who was already darting past

WOLF TIME 151

him toward the exit. Howling in rage, he lunged for her

and missed.

Meredith ran as if the light streaming in from

outside were pulling her to safety. It was home base it

was sanctuary. She could feel his breath on the back of

her neck. Any moment now his heavy arm would grab her

around the neck and pull her brutally to the ground.

In fact, the killer had hesitated, shielding his

face from the camera's prying lens with his arm. Then he

ran to the van and started it. Gunning the engine, he

spun around and accelerated toward the exit right at

Meredith and her crew.

"Watch out! He may have a gun!" Meredith screamed.

But Barbara and Larry never stopped taping, stepping

back only far enough to protect themselves from the

onrushing vehicle behind one of the garage's columnar

supports. The man swerved, attempting to hit them, but

didn't even slow down, covering his face with his left

arm this time as he roared past the camera.

Only after the van was gone, its racing engine and

the squeal of its tires replaced by a profound silence

and the reek of exhaust fumes, did the three of them come
WOLF TIME 152

down with the shakes.

"It was him!" said Meredith breathlessly. "I know it

was him! Did you get his face?"

Barbara's face went blank. "I don't know," she said

with a look of astonishment. "How weird I can't

remember."

Chapter 19

When Esther came home to find Meredith's crew

waiting for her, it had taken all her self control to

keep from ramming the bright red video van emblazoned

with News-8's much ridiculed (though most familiar among

local TV stations) logo: an octopus whose media tentacles

extended to all parts of the Los Angeles basin. It felt

as though one of those long tentacles had been withdrawn

from whichever remote canyon or bikini-bosomed beach

community it had been attached to and was now wrapped

ravenously around her for its unwholesome nourishment:

"the news".

She sought sanctuary at the clinic, where she napped

on the couch in her office until late afternoon. When she

felt it was safe to go home, Esther stopped by Valerie's

dance studio on the way. Several of Serpent's dancers

WOLF TIME 153

were watching a videotape of themselves in the outer

lobby when she arrived, so intent in their observation

that Esther managed to avoid notice as she hurried past

them to Valerie's inner sanctum.

"They're eating me alive, Val," she said, fighting

to hold back tears after Valerie had sent away the two

young people she'd been talking to.

Esther gave her friend a brief description of all

that had happened to her since their last session

together. It sounded even more exhausting when

summarized. Valerie sat there with her mouth open, then

hugged Esther without speaking for several minutes, the

two women rocking tearfully in each other's arms.

"I don't know what to tell you, honey," Valerie said

at last, "except that I know you'll get through all this

somehow, and we'll do everything we can to help."

"Right now it feels as if I'm just a membrane,

stretched tight I'm being beaten like a drum. Things

are coming at me, both outside and inside, that I've

never experienced before, and all I can do is react.

"I've certainly experienced stress before, Val. But

this...this is way beyond anything I've ever felt. This

WOLF TIME 154

is off the chart."

Esther had decided not to mention the dreams she'd

been having. She'd already unloaded enough on Val as it

was, about all the crises in her everyday life, without

dragging the poor woman into her nightmares as well. But

night after night for the past week or so Esther had

found herself wandering through a dark, brooding,

primeval forest, knowing they were out there, sensing

them stalking her...waiting, biding their time. Wolves.

Sometimes she would turn suddenly and catch just a

glimpse, a sinister menacing shadow....

Valerie attempted to take Esther's mind off her

problems by relating some of the recent goings-on at the

studio always a fascinating topic of conversation,

given the diverse talents and personalities on which the

dance company thrived. Esther tried to find Val's

colorful stories as amusing as usual but without much

success.

While they talked, unaware of the call, someone

telephoned the studio from home and said to turn on the

Channel 8 news at once! The dancers forgot the videotape

they'd been watching the moment they became eyewitnesses

WOLF TIME 155

of the chaotic scene at Hollywood Presbyterian that

morning. Seldom guilty of squandering the momentum in a

news piece, Meredith Manning followed the taped

confrontation with her usual harangue from her anchor

desk.

"Police refused either to confirm or deny that

evidence linking Dr. Roth's assailant to the 'Wolfman',

who brutally murdered computer programmer Pam Putnam, was

discovered near the scene of the Griffith Park attack.

Also unconfirmed is a report that it was actually the

psychiatrist herself who initiated the life-and-death

struggle. Police are said to be holding, in 'protective

custody', an unidentified eyewitness who allegedly gave

that account of the bizarre incident.

"Dr. Roth, who suffered a concussion and numerous

facial and other injuries, refused to answer questions or

respond to speculation that she knew her assailant. News-

8, however, interviewed several youths who told police

they witnessed this dramatic scene moments before the

attack occurred."

Griffith Park: Meredith is surrounded by a small

group of Chicano teenagers.

WOLF TIME 156

"She jumped out of her car and it just kept

rolling," says a good-looking boy about 16. "Lucky it

didn't hit nobody."

"And you were in the car behind her?" asks Meredith.

"Yeah, that's right. Then all of a sudden she's

running off into the bushes."

"First she took her shoes off," adds the girl with

him.

"I beg your pardon?" Meredith.

"She kicked off her shoes." The attractive extrovert

demonstrates with a kick which sends one of her flats

sailing, much to the amusement of her friends.

"We drove around for awhile to see if we could find

out, you know, what was goin' on," her boyfriend

continues. "The next thing we know, they're carryin' her

off on a stretcher."

Serpent studio's outer lobby was unnaturally quiet

for several seconds at the commercial break. Finally one

of the stunned dancers sighed loudly and spoke for all of

them. "Good Lord!" she said in a hoarse whisper.

* * * * *

Less than an hour later in News-8's editing suite,

WOLF TIME 157

Meredith, her crew, Kennedy and Krum were again viewing

the footage taken earlier that day in Esther's parking

garage. With them this time was Lt. Clark, with whom

Meredith, in a typically canny PR gesture, had persuaded

the station manager to share their scoop. Unfortunately,

it was too dark to reveal much including the vehicle's

license number another reason it had been decided to

permit police to view it first rather than airing it

immediately.

Dark or not, when that van came careening toward the

screen and Barbara's rock-steady camera, everyone in the

room ducked at the last instant in an attempt to avoid

it.

"Do you think the tape can be computer-enhanced in

some way, Lieutenant, so we can see some details in the

guy's face?" Krum asked when the screening was over. He

was envisioning the ratings potential of "reality"

programming in which the elements of a sensational crime

really were real for once rather than dramatized.

"You'd know as much about that as I would," Clark

replied, "but we're sure as hell going to find out. In

the meantime, we'll alert Dr. Roth." Then, turning to

WOLF TIME 158

Meredith, he said, "No more heroics, okay? We've had

enough of those already on this case."

Chapter 20

In a bikini, standing at the farthest reach of the

rising tide, Esther wiggled her toes to force wet sand

oozing up between them. A wave came in, washing much of

the sand out from under her feet. She laughed at the

sensation, holding her arms wide to maintain her balance.

Suddenly there was a knife at her back! Too

terrified to turn around, she felt it slide up her spine,

pressed just hard enough against her skin to draw blood.

She fled into the water, and the hooded man pursued her,

clothes and all. As he waded toward her without haste,

her only escape was the open sea. She turned in panic and

began to swim.

...Sitting in her bathtub, Esther contemplated the

safety razor in her hand. She felt the edge of the blade

gingerly with her thumb: it reminded her of the man with

the twine-cutting ring, its wickedly curved edge. She

looked down at her wrist, its complexity of veins and

arteries, holding the image until it was no longer

focused in her mind...then shuddered and flung the razor

WOLF TIME 159

as hard as she could against the wall. Putting her hand

to her eyes, she lay back in the water in fatigue and

despair.

* * * * *

Angela slammed the plate of food back down on the

pass-through separating the coffee shop's kitchen from

the counter area. "Hey, the order said wheat toast!" she

barked at the fry cook.

Both were in their early twenties; he was black, she

was an attractive Chicana waitress with snapping eyes

which kept time to the impetuous Latin rhythm she moved

to while taking in everything around her.

The gangly young man spun the order wheel around

and whipped off the ticket with a flourish. "Oh yeah?

Where does it say 'wheat'?"

She grabbed the ticket from his hands in what was

more of a game between them than anything else.

"Right there 'Wheat'!"

"That little chicken scratch is sposed to say

'wheat'?" he said, grabbing it back. "That don't even

look like a word. I thought you was just checkin' to see

if your pen had ink in it or somethin'."

WOLF TIME 160

"Liar. You didn't even read it. You're too busy

thinking about that band you're in."

"How else you think I can stand this place?" he

asked, reassembling the sandwich on what passed for wheat

bread at the Panorama Cafe.

"How do you think I can stand it with you screwing

up my orders all the time?"

"Why don't you an' me just take off somewhere and

forget this place?"

"Why don't you toast that the way the order reads

before I lose my tip?"

"Money always worryin' about money," he grumbled,

taking the sandwich apart again and plopping the soggy

slices of bread into the toaster.

"You think I come in here every night to hear you

brag about how rich and famous you're gonna be?"

"Why not? There's room in my dreams for someone like

you, baby."

"I know what kind of dreams you're talking about."

"Wet ones," said Paula, another waitress, behind her

hand as she hurried past with her own order.

"You bet, honey!" agreed Angela.

WOLF TIME 161

"Wet ones? What kinda talk is that?" laughed the fry

cook.

"The truth, that's what," said Angela. She picked up

the coffee pot and went down the counter with refills

while waiting for the latest version of her sandwich.

At the far end was a man she'd seen in here two or

three times before. Only his size distinguished him from

most of the other regulars who frequented the place at

night. They were generally a close-mouthed lot, with eyes

as hungry and elusive as their gray faces were impassive.

She'd gotten used to them though; they were apparently

harmless enough, most of them far more fearful of her

than she would ever be of them.

She gave him the same bright friendly smile she

turned on all her customers when she was in a good mood.

The way she saw it this was just part of the service.

People came in here for a lift after all, and she usually

tried to get things off to a good start before the

caffeine kicked in. Less for the increased tip this might

inspire than for how much easier it made waiting on

people most of the time. Also, many of the regulars had

become her customers; they returned her smile or

WOLF TIME 162

pleasantry and looked forward, she knew, to the half hour

or so they spent with her over hot coffee and whatever it

was they unfailingly ordered with it at the Panorama.

This guy hadn't been in here enough for that kind of

attention, however, and didn't look like someone she'd

want to foster even the most superficial relationship

with. His hooded eyes had an unsavory gleam and a habit

of trying to lock onto hers if she gave him the slightest

opening. Her smile this evening was meant to imply that

nothing had come between them, good or bad; she was just

here to pour him coffee and was willing to help make his

short visit a pleasant one if he was willing to keep

their communication on that level. For once he didn't

look at her at all as she filled his cup.

"Angela's got her own dreams, she doesn't need

yours," said Paula, the blonde waitress who'd nailed the

fry cook's dream life, as Angela returned for her order.

The sandwich on wheat toast looked a little bedraggled by

now, though the cook no doubt would have liked to add a

handling charge to her check for all the extra work his

mistake had cost him.

"Hey, we've all gotta have dreams," he said

WOLF TIME 163

grumpily. "What's wrong with sharin' 'em?"

"Nothing," Angela agreed "only do me a favor and

take care a business too, okay?"

The young man threw up his hands in mock defeat as

she hurried away with her delayed order.

"That's the trouble with American women today," he

said to anyone within earshot: "business first, business

before pleasure. No time for anyone but themselves."

When Angela's shift ended, at two a.m., she counted

up her tips a little over $55: not a bad night with

her usual glass of milk and the piece of coconut cream

pie she'd been saving for herself all evening. She liked

winding down like this on the customers' side of the

counter with the girls still on duty; it helped her fall

asleep more easily when she got home.

When she came out to the parking lot and the

decrepit little Honda Civic she was trying to squeeze

another few thousand miles out of, she was surprised to

discover how warm it had gotten while she'd been shut up

inside. A desert-born Santa Ana had made the night soft,

full of the sounds of the wind in the palms and the

debris it was blowing along the pavement.

WOLF TIME 164

She walked to her car, intoxicated with being young

and alive on a night like this. Tomorrow her two days off

in the middle of the week began, and her boyfriend Ricky

had promised to take her up to her grandmother's in

Oxnard. Then they might go on up the coast, spend the

night with friends of theirs in Los Olivos. Life was

definitely turning around for her since she'd gotten off

drugs and begun to take more responsibility for herself,

as her grandmother was constantly demanding of her. The

feisty old woman was right again, and Angela could hardly

wait to share this acknowledgment with her.

Chapter 21

Esther tossed restlessly in her sleep. The Santa Ana

sighing through the pines in the canyon around her condo

had begun to sound almost like someone whispering her

name. "Esther...Esther...." The more her left brain

dismissed such a fanciful idea, the more convincing it

became to her imagination. "Ess-ther!"

Then she awakened to the startling realization

that what she had taken to be the wind all this time was

in fact the voice of a woman calling her...from somewhere

in her apartment.
WOLF TIME 165

At first the deep sibilant whisper seemed to be

coming from everywhere and nowhere, from no specific

direction. But as she lay there tense, listening

intently, trying to localize the sound, it became

apparent that the insistent one could almost call it

seductive voice was coming from the wing of the condo

containing her office and spare bedroom. Yes, she was

sure of that now.

But the moment she had pinpointed the "voice",

Esther remembered hearing the same sound once before

recently, on the last occurrence of the Santa Anas, the

night she was...no point in dwelling on that. The

mysterious voice that night turned out to be nothing more

than the hollow-core doors to the rooms walk-in closet,

rattling in the wind. Both relieved and disgusted with

herself, she got out of bed to slide the doors into the

wall as she'd done then.

She hadn't gone any farther than the hallway before

a chill shot up her spine. Goose bumps broke out all over

her body. This wasn't just doors swinging in the wind

this time. It was clearly a woman calling her name. Who

the hell was it? How had she gotten into the apartment?
WOLF TIME 166

For a moment Esther hesitated. If it were a man's

voice, she'd already be dialing 911. She'd have closed

and locked her bedroom door as quietly as possible and

retrieved the loaded .380 semi-automatic David had given

her from the locked drawer of her nightstand. But as

unexplainable, as haunting as it was, this voice wasn't

at all menacing. Its effect on her was almost hypnotic;

she could hardly resist its summons in any case, she

had to find out who had invaded the privacy of her home.

She followed the voice down the hall. Yes, it was

coming from the same room as before, but this was

definitely no damn closet door. Her skin crawled when she

entered the spare bedroom. The woman was in the fucking

closet!

"Es-ther...Es-ther...Es-ther."

She stood there indecisively, unable to make herself

open those doors. Who the hell could be in there? Why

would she be calling her? It was just too goddamn weird!

Finally, gathering what courage she still had after

everything that had happened to her recently, Esther

flung the doors open.

...It took a moment to grasp what she was seeing.

WOLF TIME 167

Instead of clothes hanging in front of her, she was

facing what appeared to be the dark, forbidding entrance

to a cavern, sloping downward far beyond the dimensions

not only of her own apartment but of the building itself.

From somewhere deep in the interior, amplified by

the reverberant cavern walls, she could hear the sound of

water dripping. And, still, the repeated whisper of her

name, in a voice calm and untroubled serenely certain

of Esther's response yet in some way urgent all the

same.

So incomprehensible was the scene before her that

Esther found herself surrendering not only to the unknown

woman's command but to the contingent "reality" of an

entrance to some kind of subterranean world behind her

closet doors. This was the nervous breakdown she'd sensed

closing in on her for days now. Very well, she'd give

herself up to it completely, explore the hidden dark side

of her mind: an imaginary, forgotten world she hadn't

visited since childhood.

She felt the cool dampness of the walls envelop her

as she pressed on, following the winding passageway down,

down into the earth, until she had completely lost track
WOLF TIME 168

of time. Her eyes had long since adapted to the darkness;

there appeared to be a faint phosphorescence emanating

either from deep within the cavern's interior or from its

sweating, slippery walls. The echoing whisper had become

so distorted by its own reverberations that it was now

only a murmuring susurration, the suggestion of her name.

But it was as demanding as ever, as much a part of Esther

now as her own breathing. She had to go on until she

discovered its origin.

The source of the cavern's mysterious luminescence

was obviously ahead of her somewhere because her

surroundings were gradually getting lighter. And what

sounded like a fountain or falling water had become

confused in her mind with the echoing whisper, though the

splash of water was the more distinct sound. She had the

impression that the narrowing passageway was leading her

downward in a spiral and that the source of light must be

very close; the wet cavern walls fairly glistened now.

Sure enough, the next descending curve of the tunnel

opened onto a vast chamber, in whose very center, like an

underground oasis, was a pool surrounded by lush

vegetation. It was illuminated by a shaft of sunlight.

WOLF TIME 169

Esther's eyes followed the dazzling light up, up to a

distant pinpoint in the domed ceiling where it pierced

the subterranean chamber from the outside.

They were pulled back at once to behold a lovely

fountain playing in the middle of the pool. The dancing

luminous column of water seemed somehow to be more than

it appeared to the eye. Surrounded by darkness in this

womb of rock, it was like the source of life itself.

Esther was so moved she uttered a cry that was part

sob and part delighted laughter, a cry of joy.

Involuntarily she held out her arms as if to embrace...

what? the fountain or this expansive feeling in her

breast engendered by the shimmering jet of water?

But as she started forward, two huge seemingly

disembodied yellow eyes blinked open in the darkness on

the other side of the pool...and a deep, low bestial

growl rumbled through the cavern. Suddenly an arm reached

around in front of her.

Esther screamed and awakened to find herself in

the bedroom closet, the arm of a heavy coat across her

face. Thrashing her own arms frantically, she fought her

way out of the clinging garments and slammed the sliding

WOLF TIME 170

doors shut behind her.

Chapter 22

The cold gray, almost silver light of an overcast

winter day had transformed Esther's wrinkled sheet into

the drapery of classical Greek sculpture. Classic as in

dead, the hermetic airlessness of a museum, like the

oppressive and brittle atmosphere in her stuffy bedroom

this morning. So weighed down by depression she could

hardly drag herself from her bed, Esther felt worn and

fragile enough to break. She had dreamt again and, though

she could remember only a few vivid fragments of the

tediously familiar scenario, they were enough to account

for her enervating lethargy. Not the images alone which

were more frightening for what had been left out but

the ineffable feeling of dread they had imparted. What

she remembered most, what seemed to linger in her very

bones, was the impending sense of doom hanging over the

dark woods where she'd wandered aimlessly and in great

pain, seeking...what?

She got up and tottered weakly into the bathroom,

where she sat staring into space for several minutes.

Without bothering to flush the toilet, she stumbled back

WOLF TIME 171

to bed and pulled the sheet over her head.

...The damn forest again: a winter landscape this

time, as still and menacing as before. She was walking

cautiously through newly fallen snow, sensing something

lurking in the naked, silent trees. After a while Esther

realized that, inexplicably, she too had become nude

though not particularly cold despite the season and the

weather. Her suffocating sense of dread had smothered all

her feelings but fear.

Was that a cabin in the clearing ahead? Could she

find safety there? What was that movement in the trees?

She looked away, not wanting even to think about it. But

over here too! Vague shapes gliding stealthily through

the trees. The wolves!

Could she make it to the cabin in time?

It would be foolish to run, she was too far away.

Besides, something was holding her back, her legs were so

heavy she could hardly move them. Whatever was stalking

her was closing in on her she was surrounded now.

Somehow, painfully, heroically, Esther managed to

drag her heavy, semi-paralytic body toward the cabin, her

only hope of safety. But the hair on the back of her neck
WOLF TIME 172

warned her the shadowy, maddeningly concealed pursuers

were right behind her. She couldn't stand it for another

second!

She broke for the front door, flung herself

frantically against its unyielding rough oak planks.

Locked. But look a key hanging from a nail next to the

jamb! Hysterical now, she fumbled with it, almost

dropping it, feeling the beasts converging upon her,

though she didn't dare turn around. In her panic her

hands and fingers were too clumsy to make the damn key

work!

Finally it turned in the lock. She lunged at the

heavy door, throwing her shoulder into it with all her

might. It didn't budge.

They were right behind her now, she could feel their

hot breaths on her neck and the door still wouldn't

open! She pounded on it, battered her fists bloody

against it, but no one came to her rescue. In a moment

they'd leap on her, tear her to pieces. The loud

insistent pounding...was on her own front door.

"Damnit, Esther, what the hell's goin' on? I know

you're in there, let me in! Please!" It was David.

WOLF TIME 173

Groaning, she struggled from her drugged sleep and

disheveled bed to let him in.

"What'd you do, change the locks? Jesus, honey, you

look terrible!" He started to take her into his arms but

she cringed so emphatically he merely brushed her

shoulders with his hands and dropped them awkwardly at

his sides.

"Thanks, that's just what I needed to hear. Now you

know why I don't want to see anyone."

"I'm talking about your injuries for Christ's sake,

Esther. Why the hell wouldn't you let me come see you in

the hospital?"

"I thought we went over all this on the phone,

David. Im just not up to seeing anyone."

"Am I suddenly just 'anyone' after two years? I

don't understand, Esther. You get the shit beat out of

you, and there's a cop posted at your door to keep me out

along with everyone else except for Dan Foley of

course. Then the hospital said youd been released and I

hear later youve been all over the news. What the hell

is going on?"

When she sagged instead of answering him, David's

WOLF TIME 174

tone and attitude softened. "Come over here and sit down,

you should be off your feet."

"I was in bed when all your pounding woke me," she

grumbled, letting him lead her to the Victorian loveseat

in her living room.

"What about the locks?" David sat down beside her.

"I had a deadbolt put on this morning the police

advised me to. There was a man in the garage yesterday;

he apparently threatened that harpy from Channel 8, who

was here with a TV crew. From the description the police

gave me I'm sure it was him."

"From the beach...and the park?"

She sighed. "Absolutely whether anyone wants to

believe me or not. The police are supposedly watching the

condo."

"Well I'm in favor of that!" He got up suddenly and

shifted into the caged predatory animal mode that

irritated her under the best of circumstances. "I'll bet

anything it's the husband or boyfriend of one of those

battered women at the shelter. It's the only thing that

makes sense."

"What makes you think it has to make sense?" she

WOLF TIME 175

replied rhetorically, halfheartedly. He ignored the

question.

"I'll confirm with the police that they're watching

this place around the clock. What would you think if I

had some of my staff take turns "

"No," she interrupted. "The police I can go along

with, for now anyway that makes sense. But that's

enough, for God's sake. I'm tired of this role of the

helpless victim. The women who come to the shelter don't

get any police protection, believe me no matter how

much danger they're in."

Again David refrained from replying. What the hell

had gotten into her? Esther was acting as if he were

responsible for this in some way. Simply because he was a

man? Was she identifying with the battered women she

dealt with and blaming all men? Under the circumstances

that kind of irrational analogy seemed plausible; he

reminded himself not to underestimate the severity of

what she was going through. He sat beside her again,

trying gently to compel her attention.

"...Let's take things a day at a time. I'm here for

you, Esther, but I'll back off, if that's what you want,
WOLF TIME 176

so you can deal with this in your own way. All right? You

tell me what you need, and I'll do things strictly your

way for as long as it takes to get you completely well

and back on your feet. What do you say?"

She said nothing at first. David felt himself

responding to Esther's unprecedented show of

helplessness. He watched a single tear well up in the

corner of her eye and run slowly down her (amazingly)

dirty cheek.

"...David, this has all changed me so....My

attraction to you has always had so much to do with, with

how you compared to my father. You're as driven as he was

but you made me feel beautiful, you made me feel good

about myself. Now, for some reason all I can see are the

similarities between the two of you. It may have nothing

to do with you at all, and it may be unfair it is

unfair: I feel such loathing for my father right now

and men in general...that it can't help but color how I

feel about you and of course that's not your fault at

all."

"No, of course not."

"But it's there nonetheless. So, yes, I do need some

WOLF TIME 177

space now, a lot of space. But I can't...I don't know

what part of me's going to come out the other side of

this. I'm sorry about that...but to tell you the truth I

really don't have the emotional energy right now to care

very much. I just don't, David."

Chapter 23

"Los Angeles police said they have no new leads in

this city's second savage mutilation/murder in two

weeks," Meredith began News-8's evening newscast.

"Twenty-three-year-old Angela Fuentes, waitress in a

Panorama City coffee shop, was killed sometime late

Wednesday night, the coroner's office reported. Her nude,

partially dismembered body was found this morning by

children playing in a flood control channel just a few

blocks from where she worked. Was it the Wolfman? I asked

that question of Lt. Tom Clark earlier today."

"We're not ready to say yet," Clark responded in the

brief interview. "There are certain similarities in the

crimes some of them obvious and others that we can't

divulge at this time."

"Meanwhile," continued Meredith at her anchor desk,

"officials still refused to confirm News-8's exclusive

WOLF TIME 178

report that the man who brutally beat a female

psychiatrist in Griffith Park was the Wolfman Pam

Putnam's hooded killer."

Esther turned off the TV with her bedside remote

control but a moment later picture and sound come back

on again on their own.

"...Dr. Roth remained in seclusion," Meredith was

saying, "unwilling to speak to reporters. But News-8 has

pieced together these details of the bizarre incident in

Griffith Park."

The scene shifted to the park location where Esther

and the Wolfman had struggled. Standing there with

Meredith was the young woman who witnessed it.

"It was here "

Again Esther tried to turn off her TV set and once

more it came right back on. She pushed the channel

selector button down with her thumb and held it there,

but Meredith and News-8's Evening News were on every

channel.

"With me," the relentless report continued, "is

Melody Summer a legal name of her own invention who

police say was with the man Dr. Roth attacked. Melody,
WOLF TIME 179

can you tell me "

The video image dissolved in a muffled explosion.

Esther had shattered the TV screen with her cast iron

frying pan.

Later, fumbling in the dark, she dropped a full

glass of wine in her kitchen. It shattered, spilling

Cabernet over the white tiled floor and Esther's bare

feet. She stepped on a jagged piece of glass, cutting her

left foot badly and leaving a trail of bloody footprints

as she hobbled, screaming in rage, to her bathroom for a

towel.

* * * * *

Looking thoroughly disheveled, Esther was sitting

with Valerie in the alcove off her kitchen, talking over

coffee.

"You know, you have all the time you need to get

your life back in order but you are missed," said

Valerie.

Esther sighed. "I have to look after myself right

now."

"I'm grateful that you are that youre able to."

"I've always been so sure of my strength. Everything

WOLF TIME 180

I've accomplished, I've had to fight for myself most of

the time."

"As do we all."

"Now I'm beginning to wonder if I've overestimated

myself all this time. Maybe I just never came up against

anything really big before."

"Of course you have. And it's helped prepare you for

this, you're doing great!" Valerie assured her.

"Sure I am," replied Esther sarcastically, with a

gesture indicating her unkempt appearance.

"Battle scars," said Valerie. "Every warrior has

them."

"Battle fatigue maybe. Shell shock."

Valerie shook her head.

"I wanted to get that guy so much. Now it hardly

seems to matter."

"You gave it a helluva try."

"I actually wanted to kill him, Val." She got up

wearily to pour them more coffee. "Did you know serial

murder is considered a disease now?"

"Uh, no, I wasn't aware of that," Valerie replied.

"That's going to change the whole concept of the

WOLF TIME 181

insanity plea. I need to do a lot more reading, but

prevailing theory seems to be that serial killers are in

the grip of an unshakable compulsion when they're

stalking and murdering their victims. That may very well

prove to be true, Val; but how can that in any way excuse

the days and weeks between killing cycles when the killer

knows what he's done and that he'll do it again and

will keep on killing until he's caught?"

The question was rhetorical; Valerie had no answer

and knew none was expected.

"You know, I suppose it's ironic and certainly

unprofessional, hardly in keeping with my Hippocratic

oath but all this has made me pretty conservative when

it comes to capital punishment. Or I was to begin with

and wasn't aware of it. I know it supposedly doesn't

deter crime, but I don't think we deserve to put it

behind us. We're not civilized enough."

"What do you mean we don't 'deserve' to put it

behind us?" Valerie asked in surprise.

"We're not ready yet. Forgoing execution is a

social experiment that's no longer working, if it ever

did. The death penalty's a stigma we need to live with

WOLF TIME 182

for a while. Until we quit deceiving ourselves about who

we really are: a society where human life is expendable."

Valerie shifted uneasily in her chair. "We're going

to teach ourselves the value of human life by putting

murderers to death? Isn't that an even bigger lie?"

"Oh, Valerie, those against the death penalty are

always harping on the 'dignity of human life'. I think

it's time we put some value on the lives of ordinary

people snuffed out by...by animals, who've lost their

humanity. We really do seem more concerned for criminals

than their victims. I'm beginning to agree with those who

consider the ACLU and their ilk some kind of societal

delusion. Meanwhile, violence is entertaining murder's

a national pastime!"

Valerie could hardly believe what she was hearing

from her best friend. "And you think vengeance is the

answer? Esther, this doesn't sound like you."

Because it isnt me. The person you think you

know.

Valerie didnt know how to respond.

"I think we're lying to ourselves if we pretend to

have grown beyond it, Esther said, answering her

WOLF TIME 183

question. I remember reading Mike Royko years ago,

writing about some murder case in Chicago. He came right

out and said it: if vengeance can repay the victims in

some way, then give them that at least. To me, this is an

honest reaction to the greatest, most irreparable of all

crimes the taking of a human life as opposed to the

endless legal maneuverings we subject ourselves to

instead: a charade meant to convince us of how civilized

we are."

"Shouldn't we be doing more to try to prevent

violent crimes in the first place, rather than placing

all the emphasis on punishment alone?"

"Oh come on, Val, I'm not calling for us to solve

all our problems with the death penalty. I'm talking

about a very small percentage of criminal acts a small

percentage of murders, in fact. We both know society's a

major contributor to its own ills, but we need to work at

healing them from both directions: instilling values in

the young that help make them better people and

enforcing real consequences for criminal acts.

"And to those who say the death penalty's a

potential floodgate to hell that it can only lead to

WOLF TIME 184

the erosion of respect for all life I say, first of

all: if we're unwilling or unable to determine what is

absolutely unacceptable in this society, then we're in

even worse shape than I think we are. I personally

believe we're capable of making that distinction."

Esther finally sat down with their coffee. "In any

case," she said, resuming the harangue, "can you deny

that erosion of respect for life has already deeply

undermined our society? But instead of steeling ourselves

to arrest it, we hide from responsibility behind liberal

pieties as pernicious as they are false. That's the real

outrage although I wasn't aware of it either until

this, this creature injected himself into my life. I was

as blind as everyone else....I was blind to a lot of

things that I see a little more clearly now."

Valerie could see that it was hopeless to argue any

longer. She looked at her longtime friend as if at a

stranger, with an almost hypnotized fascination. There

was a long uncomfortable silence before she finally said,

"...The depression you're going through is perfectly

normal. You know that."

"Depression? You think all this is just depression?

WOLF TIME 185

The only thing I know anymore is how much we don't know.

Any of us. We're all such smug little fools. We ignore

the big questions we don't have answers for. We like to

focus on the shiny surface of reality. All we see are

reflections of ourselves."

"What questions are you talking about?"

"Well all the clichs of course. Who are we? Why are

we here? Where are those two young women who were

alive, with their whole futures ahead of them a few days

ago...whose bodies now are empty and hacked to pieces?"

Valerie took Esther's hands in her own. "Do we

really have to have the answers to know they exist?"

"I do! I didn't before but I do now. The hell with

faith!"

"...There's always our work, Esther."

"Please. I don't mean to be insulting, Val, but

neither my practice nor the 'Dance' is going to do

anything significant for us. How can they accomplish what

millions of years of evolution haven't? We're still

animals at heart."

"That's right, and now you've seen our most savage

face. But isn't it like seeing just the surface of things

WOLF TIME 186

to judge all of humanity by one psychopath?"

"Which one? It's not him that scares me, Valerie

that's what I've been trying to tell all of you. It's me!

I'm the one who scares the hell out of me!"

Chapter 24

Against a clear blue sky Dan and David strolled

along a gently curving walkway.

"How long do you think she'll stay holed up in her

apartment?" David asked.

"As long as she needs to. It's probably the best

thing for her right now."

"Do you think she needs professional help?"

"She's got it," said Dan: "Bernie Krongold he's

not only a damn fine analyst, but Esther was a protg of

his early in her career. As I recall, his approach is a

little too spiritual to suit her, but she still thinks

the world of him."

"And she's seeing him?"

"I talked to him yesterday," replied Foley.

"Esther's already had one session with him, with another

scheduled for tomorrow. She can reach him by phone day or

night. Krongold feels that's enough for now, that what

WOLF TIME 187

she needs most and I agree with him on this is to

confront whatever it is that's got hold of her, the

sooner the better. She has to do that on her own."

"Just what is it she's confronting, Foley?"

"Damned if I know certainly nothing I'm familiar

with."

"The two of you are so close I assumed you'd know

what her problem was if anyone did."

"We are close. That's exactly why she's seeing

someone else. That and Krongold's background. He's seen

everything; he was a teenager when his family fled here

from Hitler."

"Jesus, how old is this guy?"

"Younger than you and I in some ways, David. I

understand he lost a number of close relatives in the

death camps, but Esther says it hasn't embittered him. I

wish I could say the same about myself."

"What do you mean?"

"I've lost so many friends now to AIDS, and friends

of friends, I've long since lost count. And I bear a

grudge for every one of them."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Dan," said David uneasily.

WOLF TIME 188

"It's a hell of a tragedy isn't it."

"You have no idea. The world still has no idea,

whether we're finally starting to get a handle on this or

not. Every now and then I still have to remind myself

that I'm one of the fortunate ones.

"I don't expect you to understand, David, and that's

not meant to be a slur. Before this evil disease came

into the world, I had no comprehension of what the

personal experience of death on such a scale could be

like either."

"Don't take this the wrong way, Dan, but you're not

one of these people who think there's been some kind of

conspiracy by the government against gays, are you?"

The therapist just stopped and looked at him, a look

not so much of outrage, or even surprise, as of a stark,

affectless fatigue, which David only now realized had

apparently been there all along beneath the facade of

civilized behavior and character.

"...No offense, I hope. I mean there's been

suffering enough hasn't there, without throwing that in

on top of everything else?"

"There certainly has, David. Actually, I try not to

WOLF TIME 189

be 'one of those' who fits too neatly into any particular

category, although of course that's beyond my power much

of the time."

"Yes, we are a discriminating society aren't we?"

said David with a cynical little smile.

Dan chuckled in spite of himself. It had taken a

long time for him to understand the peculiar dynamics of

Esther's attraction to David, but he'd made a real effort

to like the guy from the beginning and every now and then

saw in him something he himself found amusing, even

endearing in a perverse sort of way.

"...Getting back to Esther," said Dan, "Krongold

thinks and, again, I agree with him that sometimes an

emotional crisis like the one she's experiencing can be a

blessing in disguise."

"How is that?"

"When your survival's at stake, complacency goes out

the window. You can get to know yourself very quickly. A

more real self."

"Complacency? You're implying that Esther, the

driven woman we know with her work in the womens

shelter and all the other things shes involved in is

WOLF TIME 190

complacent?"

"To a degree, yes. Something like complacency

being at peace with one's place in the world is the

bedrock of sanity. Or think of it as the mental and

emotional lubricant, if you will, that the neurotic

personality lacks. Anyway, here we are, talking about the

suffering we're surrounded by. If we open our eyes to it,

we're reminded of our vulnerability every day. Somebody

picked off by cancer here, gunned down in the street over

there..."

"But you don't morbidly dwell on that, if you're

mentally stable."

"Of course not, you repress it, if you're unable to

detach from it that's my point. But some people are

forced to dwell on it. It comes right up and knifes them

in the gut."

David stopped and turned to him angrily: "All this

fucking talk! Listen, Foley, Esther's life is at stake!"

Dan's face colored slightly as he struggled to

maintain his composure. "David, if I could help Esther, I

would. She doesn't want our help right now. I trust her

enough to respect that."

WOLF TIME 191

When they resumed walking David said, "You never did

answer my question: how long before Esther starts acting

normal again?"

"I don't have a specific answer. Just that these

attempts on her life may have blown her cover, in a

sense. She may be seeing things about herself she didn't

know were there and didn't want to know."

"You're saying she's been hiding from something?"

"Shit, David, are you saying we don't all have

things we hide from? Talk about skeletons in the closet

what the hell do you think we have in the basement?"

Ever the literalist, David gave him a look of

feigned incomprehension: "I wouldn't know, my house

doesnt have one."

"I'm talking about the one you inherited. The one

the human race just climbed out of, day before

yesterday."

"Maybe that's true of your patients, Dan."

"I think Esther felt much the same way. That's the

problem in our modern cities with our high-rises and our

condos. We can't even see the stars anymore. We have such

a false sense of independence and isolation, despite an

WOLF TIME 192

overabundance of neighbors. In progressively cutting

ourselves off from nature the way we are, we're

amputating an essential part of ourselves. It's our own

natures we're losing and have to rediscover."

"So you think Esther's problem," said David

sarcastically, "can be solved by moving into a house with

a basement?"

"By acknowledging the one she has," Dan replied

evenly. "And I'm not talking just metaphorically here,

David. At the very source of life, that central psychic

core from which real change and growth are possible, is

the beast within. Our savage kill-or-be-killed past. When

it's repressed, it can turn monstrous."

"The 'beast within'?" echoed David in an 'are-you-

serious?' tone of voice

"Our animal, kill-to-survive lineage. It's a big

part of what we are, you know. It's as unhealthy to deny

that as it is to fear growing."

"The 'beast' turns against us huh? Is that what

happened to the guy who tried to kill her, this Wolfman?"

"Quite possibly. All sorts of things conspire to

create a sociopath some that we know of, like genetics

WOLF TIME 193

and body chemistry and developmental deprivation of

various kinds. Others that we haven't discovered yet. But

I personally think there's less difference than most

people want to acknowledge between this pathogen in the

social body and the rest of us so-called normal human

beings. The sociopath acts out impulses most of us have;

he just doesn't try hard enough to control them."

"So let me get this straight you're saying the

same thing could happen to Esther, if she doesn't

acknowledge this, this ancestral beast within herself?

She could turn into a sociopath herself?"

"She might act out some violent form of behavior.

Not the Esther we both know, because she has the humanity

the sociopath lacks. She exercises control of her

pathological impulses. But now, having looked death in

the eye at the hands of another human being Esther

may be facing parts of herself she's never had to face

before. She's been awakened from the dream of immortality

the self-induced trance in which we shut out day-to-day

acknowledgment of our finite existence in this world."

"This is all a little deep for me, Foley about up

to my knees, I'd say. Having faced death at the hands of

WOLF TIME 194

a maniac, Esther's now in danger of becoming one

herself?"

The therapist smiled tolerantly. "The reason I feel

fairly secure that Esther will ultimately prevail and

move ahead rather than backward David, is that I don't

think she's afraid to see herself in the mirror. In fact

she's already told me about doing just that at the very

beginning of all this. I think she'll keep looking,

whatever she discovers."

"And not repress what she finds, huh? What's

supposed to happen then? What happens when we don't

repress the 'beast within'?"

Dan smiled and opened his arms wide: an expansive

gesture which seemed to say: The sky's the limit.

...As he did so, Esthers dream revealed that the

two men were walking along the rim of a gigantic dam. And

now she saw that it was backed up by another dam upstream

and behind it, still others, one behind the next, each

mightier than the one before it, extending into the

distance as far as she could see.

Chapter 25

When she awoke the next morning Esther lay still,

WOLF TIME 195

recalling her dream of the giant dams. Though the image

was ambiguous at best, conveying the potential of

catastrophe no less than the sense of ultimate security

she'd found so compelling in the dream, it was the latter

she had felt. The more she thought about it, the more

certain she became that the true message the dream held

for her was this vision of mankind's and thus her own

capacity to contain and channel the mightiest forces of

nature with the inventive powers of the human mind.

Also implicit in the dream had been her sense of

trust in nature, the planet's and her own, so long as she

allowed herself to live in harmony with the natural

forces of the universe at one extreme of a continuum

and with her own inherited and self-created destiny, at

the other. The dream had left her with the conviction

that she could do this.

She sat up in bed and ran her fingers through her

rank tangled hair. It was time to get up, shower, water

her plants, clean her apartment. This was a new day if

not really a new life. She had done battle, as Valerie

had said, with the dark forces of self-destruction in her

nature and defeated them. She was a warrior and had

WOLF TIME 196

emerged victorious.

In a little more than an hour and a half she

stripped the bed and did a laundry, superficially cleaned

her bathroom and kitchen, mopping the floors in each;

then vacuumed and dusted in the living and bedroom, where

she was silently rebuked by her faceless, shattered

television set. Revivified, she showered, sorted out

today's Los Angeles Times from the pile inside her door,

and drove to her favorite breakfast place: the Fig Tree,

on the beach in Santa Monica.

It wasn't crowded on this weekday morning, despite

the gorgeous weather the Santa Anas had blown in. When

had the sky over the ocean ever been so blue before? She

sat there sensuously soaking up the sun and sea air and

strong coffee, taking unusual pleasure in the people and

activity around her, before venturing even just to glance

at the paper. Then with an air of determination she

opened it and deliberately searched for any news of the

Wolfman.

It had been three days since the discovery of Angela

Fuentes' body, and coverage of the on-going investigation

of both her murder and that of Pam Putnam with

WOLF TIME 197

continuing speculation as to whether or not they were

connected in any way had dwindled to a few paragraphs

in the back pages.

But Esther had no sooner finished reading the

article than a conversation between two sweatsuited men

behind their own papers at the next table caught her

attention.

"...The Raiders lose to Atlanta and they're out of

it."

"Doesn't matter, they don't have a chance anyway,"

said his companion. "They're a buncha pussies anymore.

They need more killers they oughta recruit this

Wolfman."

The other laughed coldly. "That'd be a good way to

take care of that sonofabitch wouldn't it put him

between two NFL lines till he's ground to mincemeat."

"After they cut his balls off."

"He'd lose 'em in the first pileup."

Esther was greatly relieved when the two of them

dropped the subject and returned to their papers.

After breakfast she made the 45-minute drive to San

Marino for her second session with Dr. Krongold. This

WOLF TIME 198

time she revealed everything, or nearly everything: the

"sixth" sense that seemed connected in some way with the

leather glove she'd found near the riding trail where Pam

Putnam was murdered; her battle with the Wolfman in the

park; her brief nervous breakdown, if that's what it had

been. She also talked about confessing her fear of death

to Juan at the party he and Valerie had thrown in her

honor.

"...First of all, I agree of course with your

associate, Daniel Foley? that what happens to the

murderer, or murderers, of these young women should be

absolutely no concern of yours, my dear," Krongold said

when Esther had finished. "Not because it is not right or

proper and perfectly natural to care whether or not

justice is done...but because, frankly, your mental and

emotional health are obviously not strong enough now to

cope with this issue. I think it's remarkable that you've

recovered from such a traumatic experience as quickly as

you have. But we don't know how complete your recovery

is, after all, so don't force things, Esther. Take the

time, and make a commitment, to heal yourself.

"As for the origin and significance of the symptoms

WOLF TIME 199

the 'psychic phenomena', as the media would have it

which you describe, here I am on a less firm footing

shall we say. They are fascinating, to say the least

particularly this extra-ordinary enhancement of your

sensory perceptions.

"The growls? Not so unusual as you might think,

however unsettling they may understandably be to you. I

have had clients describe to me similar situations. One

woman, for example, was stopped in her car at a red

light, and a young black man, she said, started smashing

her car window, which fortunately was rolled up. Well,

she was caught in traffic and couldn't escape, what could

she do? She tried to scream at him to get away, but no

words would come out, only growls deep growls like the

ones you've described."

"What happened to her?"

"Nothing happened; she got away but I don't recall

how. Probably the light turned green and traffic started

moving again.

"Now, this animal-like sixth sense you have

experienced I find interesting because of the way in

which it developed so suddenly. Understand, so-called

WOLF TIME 200

psychic phenomena are not at all the exclusive invention

of charlatans, tabloid newspapers and the deranged, which

those fearful of acknowledging them or of protecting

narrow scientific agendas would have you believe. In my

opinion, their occurrence is far more common than the

skeptical stewards of society will admit."

"Until all this happened you could certainly have

included me among the skeptics," admitted Esther.

"And you were certainly in good company. What I've

found though is that, if pressed, almost everyone will

eventually admit to having witnessed something that he,

or she, can't explain. Now, granted, this doesn't mean

that all such occurrences are extra-ordinary. Many if not

most of them are probably just beyond the individual's

understanding for one reason or another."

"But not science's?"

Krongold nodded. "But that still leaves enough

incidents unaccounted for over the years to have created

a whole library full of books on the subject an

avocation of mine, in fact. The point I want to make,

however, is that, even though they have no explanation

for these mysterious or unexplainable occurrences, most

WOLF TIME 201

people simply dismiss them. They don't fit into society's

consensual reality, you see. If remembered at all,

they're regarded as mere curiosities which is actually

an oxymoron because most of us are so incurious about

life.

"But I digress," he said, noticing Esther's eyes

beginning to glaze over. "What I find particularly

noteworthy in your case is not so much this sixth sense

you speak of per se, but the way in which it has

manifested itself: somehow in connection with the attack

on the beach or with the glove you found later which

may very well belong to your assailant. This is what I

find most interesting. I feel very strongly that the

police would be ill-advised to dismiss your experiences

out of hand, and I will be pleased to tell them so."

"I'm not sure Clark does, entirely. I think he

thinks I'm awfully strange but not crazy."

"Which brings us back to the murderer himself,

whoever he is and why I feel it is so important for you

to put any thoughts of retribution from your mind,

Esther."

Krongold stood up, walked over and lay a large

WOLF TIME 202

wrinkled, liver-spotted hand on her shoulder. "Let me put

this in another context for you. Let's talk for a moment

about forgiveness.

"Do you think it is at all possible that much of the

hatred you feel for this 'Wolfman' is to some degree

projected self-hatred?"

"...I've thought of that, of course," replied Esther

"particularly after our first session. I was surprised

by the amount of anger toward my father that came up, and

how that has made me feel about myself all these years.

I've been aware since I began seriously studying

psychology that I spend a lot of energy punishing myself

for not living up to my father's expectations, but I

thought that was all behind me. Apparently a lot less

than I'd hoped."

Krongold said nothing, waiting for her to continue.

"...So, yes, I can see this contributing to my

anger. But the real hatred comes from the fact that this,

this animal tried to take my life! And then actually did

kill those poor young women. These weren't just murders I

read about in the paper, Doctor. Having come so close to

being murdered by him myself, I experienced their deaths

WOLF TIME 203

in a way. I...viscerally felt the enormity of his crime.

Do you understand?"

"Of course." Feeling her tension rising, Krongold

sent a message of loving energy through the hand on

Esther's shoulder before walking back to his desk. Nearly

rigid with suppressed emotion, she spoke now without

really seeing him.

"'Murder' was just a word, a concept, for me until

all this happened," said Esther in a monotone, her eyes

focused on the mind's infinity. "I mean I would read or

hear about a particularly gruesome or heinous crime

occasionally, and it might make my blood boil for a few

minutes but then I'd put it out of my mind and go on

with my life. I can't do that this time."

"You referred earlier to your friend's comments

about the ego, at the party in your honor. In general I

agree with him; I have only a semantic bone to pick. When

he says it is the death of the ego rather than the body

that we fear more, who is this 'we' if not the ego

itself? It is the ego, after all, that believes the body

and death are real."

"Are you saying they're not?"

WOLF TIME 204

"All the world's great religions do." Krongold sat

down again, facing her, his warm smile penetrating deep

into her eyes. "But I seem to remember this as an old

battleground of ours."

"Modern psychology versus the spiritual? I suspect

it still is."

"That intransigence was awkward enough for you at

the Institute, as it would be for any Jungian analyst.

You must find it even more difficult now that you see

yourself as a Transpersonal therapist."

"I have no easy answers for my clients, if that's

what you mean," Esther replied defensively. "But I

certainly don't have to buy into the prevailing notion of

a spiritual dimension to try to get them to look beyond

themselves for strength and guidance, do I?"

"No, of course not, although I'd think that in

dealing with 'notions' like life and death you might find

it helpful. Your own horror of death tells me where you

still stand. That's what lies behind your need to

punish."

Esther saw no point in disputing this.

"You talk of the 'prevailing notion' of a spiritual

WOLF TIME 205

dimension, as if there were only one. It would be closer

to the truth, in my opinion, to say there are as many

versions of what spirituality is as there are people who

perceive it in some way or who conceive of it, which of

course is a different matter. Is there some version of

your own you might wish to discuss?"

"No, I...don't know what I believe anymore."

"Do you know Elie Wiesel's story of the trial of

God?" Krongold asked after they had both been silent for

a moment.

"I don't think so, although I've read a couple of

his books."

"You're aware then that he was an inmate of both

Auschwitz and Buchenwald."

"Yes."

"This incident actually took place, I understand

at Auschwitz. A number of brilliant theologians,

philosophers and thinkers, subjected to all the

unbelievable horror and cruelty of the Third Reich that

went on there daily, could not agree on God's place in a

world of such madness. Why would He subject his faithful

worshipers to such atrocities? How could He permit it?

WOLF TIME 206

Some said no loving God would allow such evil. Others

argued that this was blasphemy; God's inscrutable ways

are beyond man's comprehension.

"Since neither side could prevail and they could

come to no conclusion, they decided to put God on trial.

For three days and nights some of the most brilliant

minds of this or any time no matter that they were

trapped in ruined disintegrating bodies, tormented in a

manmade hell argued back and forth on the question of

God's guilt or innocence. At last the jury convened to

deliberate a verdict.

"Picture the solemnity of the occasion, Esther, as

these intensely devout and learned souls, many probably

only days or hours away from death, awaited the outcome.

Finally the verdict was in. The judge rose to announce to

the hushed assembly: 'Guilty as charged!'

"Well, everyone was stunned. Imagine, God had

actually been found guilty! Where could these suffering,

pious souls turn for guidance now?" Krongold opened his

eyes wide, enjoying the story as if he were telling it

for the first time. "There was a long silence in the

makeshift 'courtroom.' Then, finally, the judge said:

WOLF TIME 207

'Let us pray.'"

Esther found herself moved but was it by the story,

or her analyst's restrained emotion, the catch in his

voice at the end? Neither of them spoke at first.

"...God is dead, long live God," she said finally.

Krongold nodded enthusiastically. "Yes if God is

dead, it's not only we who are responsible but an

essential part of ourselves that has died. We're not

talking about an objective entity, after all, so much as

an attitude we have toward our own existence. Letting God

'die' is a bit like letting a fire go out in the cave of

the human heart; we'd damn well better get another one

started, and soon."

He leaned forward, his old but still piercing eyes

commanding her complete attention. "At the very nadir of

despair, Esther, when all hope is gone, what can we do

but pray? Not for deliverance, if hope has truly been

extinguished. But for the possibility of transcendence

to a level of consciousness which includes acceptance,

and absolute trust...of the way things are. Complete

surrender is both an act of faith and an act of will."

"Thelma and Louise driving into the abyss, instead

WOLF TIME 208

of waiting meekly to be captured. It's a movie," she

added, prompted by Krongold's puzzled expression.

"I think of black holes," he replied, an enigmatic

smile rendered all the more difficult to read by his full

white beard and mustache. "Some cosmologists speculate

that they lead to an alternative universe. I imagine

being sucked into a sort of black hole in ordinary

perception...and emerging into a dazzling firmament in

another dimension."

Esther suddenly realized that she had no idea where

all this was taking them. This time Krongold responded to

her look of bafflement. "Don't you see, my dear? At the

furthest extreme of hatred, what is left to us more

hatred? Or the same 'cosmic' or 'epistemological flip'

from one dimension to another: to forgiveness?"

"Forgiveness is the flip side of revenge?" said

Esther incredulously.

"Violence begets violence," Krongold replied evenly

with only an ancient sorrow in his eyes to rebuke her

retort. "When we can see this so plainly on a global

scale when a murderous Balkanization of the human

spirit has occurred three times in my lifetime in one

WOLF TIME 209

small corner of the world alone, and just keeps feeding

on itself from one generation to the next...how can we

ignore the implications for the individual human scale?"

"That's all well and good in theory, Bernard; but in

the meantime what do we do with the predatory monsters in

our midst, who think nothing of taking a human life? You

can't turn the other cheek when you're dead!"

"I'm not suggesting self-sacrifice, Esther. If I

thought that were the answer, I'd encourage your thoughts

of vengeance, for that's the quickest way to self-

immolation I can think of. Only question where this

thirst for vengeance comes from, and where it inevitably

leads. It's true that the idea of unqualified forgiveness

is very frightening. The power of such forgiveness is a

paradox the ego simply doesn't comprehend.

"But if you feel, as you say, that you are being

driven to the edge, then perhaps you, too, must make a

leap of faith, into the abyss like your movie characters.

Let go of hatred hatred of yourself first of all. Trust

yourself, Esther, and you'll begin to trust the world to

take care of itself."

WOLF TIME 210

Chapter 26

Esther called the office on her car phone after

leaving Krongold's, and upon learning that there was

nothing which required her immediate attention chatted

amiably with Judy Williams for a few minutes. During her

boss's absence Judy had intercepted Esther's e-mail,

reassigned or postponed appointments, and covered for her

with the press and other callers. But it was obvious that

she was pleasantly surprised by this light conversation.

When Esther ended the call, she wondered whether she

felt relieved or at loose ends with nothing on her

schedule and nowhere she needed to be for the rest of the

day. On impulse she pushed her phone's Send button and a

moment later was talking to David.

"...I didn't expect to hear from you so soon."

"Does that mean your social calendar's already

booked up?" The teasing note in her voice was as

unexpected to Esther as it was to David.

"If it were I'd throw away the book," he said. "What

the hell happened to you? You sound great!"

"Is that amazement or relief I hear in your voice?"

"A little of one and a lot of the other, baby. When

WOLF TIME 211

I last talked to you, you were down."

"I know. I haven't been much fun to be around for a

while have I?"

"Are you kidding? I haven't expected you to, Esther.

I just want you to know I'm behind you, a hundred

percent."

Her perception of Pasadena Freeway traffic receded

as she conjured up a face to express the warming she

heard, and felt, in David's tone of voice. It occurred to

her that she hadn't really seen this face in a long time.

"I do know it, she said. You've been very

understanding, David. I just...this has been such an

experience."

"Which you've handled masterfully. I repeat, you

sound a thousand percent better. I am amazed."

"So am I, to tell you the truth. I just had another

session with Bernie Dr. Krongold. He's the one who's

amazing."

"How so?"

"It's so hard for me to believe well, not believe,

I do believe him...hard for me to understand how he can

lose so many close friends and relatives in the Nazi

WOLF TIME 212

death camps and have the kind of attitude he does about

life. It would be an inspiration if I thought I had a

prayer of emulating him. I'm not sure I'd even want to,

but I certainly admire him for rising above the hell he's

gone through."

"Uh huh. Remember, though, that he didn't face death

at the wrong end of a knife. You're the psychiatrist, but

I'd think that would make a difference."

"...I don't know how our experiences are comparable,

if at all," she replied after a moment's reflection.

"Anyway, you're right, I am feeling much better. How

about letting me fix dinner for the two of us tonight.

Let me make up if I can for being such a holy terror the

last two weeks."

"Listen, Esther I told you, honey you don't have

a damn thing to make up for. But that doesn't mean I

won't accept your invitation. What should I bring, red or

white wine? Or champagne?"

"We have plenty of wine at home."

"I know we do, but I want this to be an occasion."

She felt a sudden flutter of emotion that once again

baffled her. What the hell was going on with her today?
WOLF TIME 213

"So do I, David."

* * * * *

Although she had intended to spend the afternoon

catching up on her professional reading, Esther ended up

browsing again through the books she'd taken from her

shelves almost two weeks ago, the day after the attack on

the beach. When none of them held her attention, she dug

out The Forgotten, one of four books by Elie Wiesel in

her library. But she could find no personal frame of

reference in the pages she perused more or less at

random, nothing that added weight or comprehension to

what Krongold had said this morning.

Her mind kept producing images on its own: of Death

Valley, where she and David had spent a wonderful weekend

last winter; of the high desert near Santa Fe where

friends of theirs lived, of how David had looked in that

transparent light, its intense vivid colors as self-

possessed in the raw natural setting as in L.A.

surrounded by his aides, constantly ringing telephones

and computer monitors. Of how he had looked at her.

She put her books away and undressed for a long

luxurious bath. The hot water, fragrant with her favorite

WOLF TIME 214

bath oil, seemed in some way an ablution not only from

the torment she'd experienced in the past two weeks but

from a lifetime of burying the unacceptable. How could

she of all people have been so dismissive of the

psychological burden of a narcissistic father's

indifference? She was beginning to realize how much the

revelations from her analysis at the Institute, how her

self-discoveries since then in contemplation and

seminars, in New Age "intensives" and guided meditations,

had all been limited to what she was ready to see and

little more. Yet lying here now in her healing bath, she

merely smiled at the thought of such self-deception. What

a formidable entity, the ego! You had to admire it.

Had its "predecessors", some sort of protoego

perhaps, willed the evolution of cellular life from the

primordial ooze? Were they responsible for some ancient

organism's excruciating emergence into the atmosphere

from the amniotic sea? Had the ego's ancestors brought

mankind from that beachhead at the dawn of life to this

unfathomable outpost of the future? Or was evolution a

collaboration between the ego, and its antecedents, and

some external form of consciousness?

WOLF TIME 215

Religions deified this consciousness of course,

while more liberal non-atheists such as Krongold talked

of abstractions centered upon a "spiritual dimension". It

was that word "spiritual", with all its emotional

baggage, that bothered her. It was perfectly clear to

Esther that inherent in the universe, the earth, the cell

of every living thing was some sort of intelligent design

that deserved her awe and reverence. Why muddy this

crystalline clarity with a syrupy "spirituality"? And why

all this concern about the ego not just by Krongold;

even Juan seemed to think there was "something she should

know." She pictured him delivering this particularly

juicy piece of gossip sotto voce behind the cover of his

hand: "Hey, Esther, can we talk?"

She broke into a smile again, making the bathwater

lap against her nearly submerged face, at this

uncharacteristic train of thought. What lay behind the

new openness she'd been experiencing all day,

encompassing everything from this metaphysical

speculation so foreign to her nature to the laissez faire

attitude toward her past?

And this new intensity in her perceptions! The

WOLF TIME 216

delicious sensation of warm, oily water licking her bare

skin; a striking vividness in colors she'd been noticing

since this morning; recaptured feelings of desire stirred

by the brief conversation with David and awakened even

now with the recollection. Was all this the result of a

couple of sessions with Krongold, or had her "breakdown"

itself helped in effecting the change?

Toweling herself afterwards, Esther looked with the

aroused interest of a stranger at her reflection in the

full-length mirror mounted on the bathroom door, then let

the towel fall away. To her amazement her eyes welled

with tears. With its lissome, slender limbs and

luminescent skin, her middle-aged body was ineffably

beautiful to her. How could it seem so new and different?

Had she never really seen the miraculous beauty of the

flesh before?

* * * * *

"Mmmm! Smells heavenly, Senor!"

David had just poured the aromatic combination of

pinon nuts, pecans and pumpkin seeds he'd been lightly

toasting with cayenne and cumin into a paper bag, which

he was now shaking vigorously.

WOLF TIME 217

"May I pour you a glass of cheap Chardonnay?" he

asked, wielding the bag in one hand and opening the

refrigerator with the other. ("I'll just take a little

cheap Chardonnay, thank you," was how David's 6-year-old

niece had once responded when asked her choice of

beverage at a birthday party she and David had thrown for

her. Naturally it had instantly become one of their

favorite lines.)

After her bath and a languorous massage with body

lotion, Esther had gone shopping for their dinner. She

and David both loved Thai and Indian food, but since

she'd had the desert on her mind much of the day, she

finally settled on Southwestern cuisine.

She called him at work again though twice in one

day was extremely unusual and he assured her he hadn't

eaten Southwestern recently and that it didn't matter in

any case, he just wanted to spend a quiet evening alone

with her. He even offered to leave early and help her

prepare the meal, something they hadn't done together for

a long time. She accepted the offer without hesitation.

Now as they sipped their wine and munched on David's

appetizer, he went out to tend two free-range chicken

WOLF TIME 218

quarters he was grilling on the patio, while Esther

finished preparing their lentil soup made with lime

juice. She pureed a cup of the softened lentils and some

green chilis in her food processor, returned the puree to

the simmering soup, and finely chopped a carrot and bell

pepper which she added to the pot. Then she strolled with

her chilled glass of wine out to the patio.

"How you doin' out here, big boy?" she asked in the

sultry tone of voice that was all the more amusing to

David because it was a lot more Esther Roth than Mae

West.

"Mighty fine, Ma'am. This here chicken's fixin' t'

sashay onta your plate in just about five minutes, I

reckon."

She laughed and drew her arm around him. They eyed

each other like a couple of teenagers and laughed some

more. "Looks like I'd better finish fixing our salad,"

she said when David turned the chicken for the last time.

"Bring it in when it's done and we'll let it sit for a

few minutes." She kissed him lightly and returned to her

fragrant kitchen, feeling as good right now as if the

last two weeks had been some kind of bad fever dream and
WOLF TIME 219

this soft, unusually clear evening in the canyon could

last forever.

She took the salad, which had been chilling since

this afternoon, from the fridge, poured off the juice

from the oranges in it into a bowl to which she added

lime juice, vegetable oil and a tablespoon of plain

yogurt. Letting the larger part of her mind drift while

she focused effortlessly on the meal's preparation,

Esther stirred the mixture briskly, then tossed it with

the sweet salad of jicama, oranges, chopped green onions

and cilantro just as David walked in with the crisply

browned chicken on a platter.

"Perfect timing," she said, bringing the soup to a

boil. She tasted it after a minute or so, then held the

spoon out for David, who nodded his enthusiastic

approval. While he finished setting the table she stirred

in lemon juice and olive oil, then sampled the steaming

soup again. Utter perfection.

* * * * *

"...Why has it been so long since we've done this?"

David asked with an expression that confirmed all of

Esther's positive self-impressions today. The question

WOLF TIME 220

was meant to be rhetorical, but then he expanded on it.

"I don't mean just the last couple of weeks, it's been a

lot longer than that....I haven't been here a hell of a

lot lately, have I."

"I was wondering if that had occurred to you," she

said, smiling.

"Oh yeah, I've been doing some thinking," he said;

"a lot has occurred to me since...all this began. This is

incredible, by the way."

"Mmmm you helped make it." She toasted them both

with the not really cheap Chardonnay. "But thank you."

The winter salad, soup, and lemon-broiled chicken

with chilies kept them busy for a while. Eating, like

everything else today, was almost a new experience. Were

the food and their cooking really this good, or should

she allow for the effect of whatever natural high she was

on? And how long would it last this born-again way of

experiencing life? Was it only the manic counterpoint to

her earlier depression, and would it end just as

abruptly? A couple of times today not only the more

cautious and introspective (and normally dominant) side

of her nature, but her professional skepticism as well,

WOLF TIME 221

had intruded into her idyll this 'vacation from Esther

Roth', she had light-heartedly designated the experience.

How would she feel when the vacation was over?

Prompting the pensive shadow of the moment was the

happy confidence in David's eyes, the happiness she could

feel in her own followed by the sudden memory of what

she'd told him...how long ago had it been? It seemed like

weeks but it was actually only four days ago. Last

Thursday when he'd disturbed her sleep without leaving so

much as a ripple in her severe depression, it had seemed

painfully clear that the changes she was undergoing left

little room for David and their outmoded relationship in

her life. Today there were no such certainties pro or

con; just a hunger that seemed about equal parts

tenderness for what they'd shared together, and desire.

Which was the truer snapshot of the way she really felt?

"...What Dan said about you yesterday made quite an

impression," David was saying. "To tell you the truth, I

had to ask myself whether he might even be more in your

corner in some ways than I was although right now that

seems ridiculous. Anyway, that's one thing that got me

thinking that and the pleasant little conversation

WOLF TIME 222

between you and me Thursday." He grinned as he reached

across the table for her hand.

"You met with Dan yesterday?!" Esther told him about

her dream. David confirmed that much of what she

remembered from it Dan and he had actually discussed,

although at Dan's "hillside hacienda" in Silverlake, not

on the causeway of a huge hydroelectric dam somewhere.

They found her invented setting as intriguing as the

unsettling coincidence of dream and reality, which

momentarily electrified the spines of each of them. She

told him nothing of her other dreams.

* * * * *

After dinner they put away the food but left their

dishes stacked in the sink, a self-indulgence Esther

never allowed herself which wasn't lost on David. He

picked her up in the middle of the kitchen and, with one

large hand combing her lustrous dark hair away from her

scalp to tilt her face back, kissed her with an urgency

they both felt. For now at least the kiss made all her

concerns, even all his caring words, irrelevant.

...It was the best of times...and the best of times.

The best of times. And the best of times. In the bed in

WOLF TIME 223

which she'd spent much of the past week, emotionally

suffocating, her chest almost too crushed by oppression

to breathe, she was now being lifted, lifted, wheeled

heavenward slowly....From early adolescence Esther had

never had much difficulty reaching orgasm, and she'd

never been reticent about sex. But this evening a glass

ceiling was shattered, a transparent membrane invisible

because she'd never even dreamt it was there.

Never dreamed flesh as heartbeat, sob as throbbing,

organs melting like molten glass blown thin as light

turned thought turned image turned sheer sensation...back

again: bodies evanescent as air. Endless timeless, lived-

in...shudder: being...to not being, flesh to flame to

exhalation/inhalation...dusk to dawn...dawn to dusk,

heart to heart, thrust to suction, sux to fucktion...

panting, gasping, grunting mantra: juicy, juicy, juicy,

juicy. Coming, going out, out, out-into-space, out into

time, out into in into light into...heat into...David...

David's...David...DAVID!

...Now.

Always.
WOLF TIME 224

Chapter 27

What right do you have to judge me? What right? You

really think there are "rules" on this dim, nasty little

planet? Besides who has the biggest guns and the most

bombs? The biggest dick and the most balls? You're a

fuckin' bloody fool if you do. You want to go along with

society's regulations, go ahead: take your game piece and

sit down at the board to play. But don't look for me

there. Don't expect me to hang my guns and my nuts up at

the door. I got my own game. I make my own rules. See,

I'm out on that New Frontier the dead Kennedys tried to

claim; I'm a twenty-first century pioneer millennial

maverick, that's me. Any new-age injuns get in my way

I'll scalp their ass or gun 'em down like any good, real

American would. It's the American way: you know, the he-

manifest destiny; Tonto say, "Unh, Kemosabe, he many fast

on draw," as he topple like big tree, shot right

betweenum eyes. Not like our John Wayne ex-president: now

there's a man knows how to take a licking and keep right

on ticking! My man Ronnie you hear about the time he

stomped a rattler and looked down to find out he didn't

have his boots on. Bet right then he wished they'd

WOLF TIME 225

already invented those Air Jordans. But there's no snake

alive could take out my man. One-term Jimmy, on the other

hand, had a hard time with killer rabbits. See, that's

the difference between you and me. You're one of the

little bunny rabbits and I'm the sssnake! Nature's got no

laws except digestion. Eat, shit and be merry. Be Mary,

yeah that's a good one. Create my own little man-child,

all by myself, in my own image. I am the master of my

fate! said the poet. Yes sir, I am God, step right up and

see me create the son and the holy ghost right before

your amazed eyes, without benefit of bein' fucked in the

ass. Nope, nobody fucks with me, I ain't buyin' into the

big lies of the late departed 20th Century, I ain't bein'

outFoxed.

They say we sociopaths, we serial killers who do

women, hate our mommies. I got nothing against the old

lady, she's no better or worse than the average Jo in the

U.S. of A., the average 20th Century planeteer. She's got

her hate and her greed and her hypocrisy like we all do

but, hey, that's life, right? I didn't get dealt any

worse cards than anyone else, I've just gotta make the

best of 'em. No, what made this cereal-killer was my

WOLF TIME 226

sugar frosted shit flakes. Oh, and Twinkies of course

ask any New Ager, they know the importance of good

nutrition. Sugar's what made a killer outa me. That's

where good ol' Mom went wrong, pumpin' me fulla corporate

America kid fodder. You ever heard of karma? This is

Cap'n Crunch karma: Tony the Tiger just baring his fangs

a little, what's the big deal?

You don't know me, you can't get inside of me. Can

you go without sex? How do you know I can't go without

death? Without the knife? Into flesh and gristle as slick

as slimy sex could ever be. How the fuck you know they're

not the same thing? You kill your first cat, wring its

fucking neck, you do it again, you start to get hooked.

Why not? Who says no, who says you can't? When the man's

men stick a flare gun up a Vietnamese honey and light her

fire? Said they could see the flesh bulge tight before it

went all watermelony. Fuck you! you're not me. And there

ain't no fuckin' rules for the Superior Man.

We're talkin' about a handful of split-tails against

a whole continentful of heap dead Injuns. Don't ring your

bell? How about boatloads of black folks by the fuckin'

millions? Sucked up by the vacuums of greed in the "New"

WOLF TIME 227

World. Ancient history? Well then, speaking of vacuums,

what about the high-tech way we dispose of our fetuses

now, folks? No more scrapin' or coat hangers for us. No

more lynch mobs either; hell no, we napalm our scapegoats

in the modern world. Get... offa...my...case!

But I digress let's see, where was I? Oh yeah:

this evil creature TV's calling the Wolfman. I like that,

don't you? "Wolfman": has a nice lupine ring to it. This

week's hot trash, this week's chills an' thrills, folks.

Oooh, I'm gettin' scared, Daddy, can we go now? Sorry,

darlin', we're all here for the duration. Only thing we

can do about that is re-duce it a little, cut it a bit on

the short side. You are terminated, baby. All-American

Arnie's gonna morph your ass back into the karmic

melting pot. Time for a new incarnation. Well, the next

lifetime's just gotta be better than this one, right?

God's gonna kiss it and make everything all right.

Hey! You ain't been listenin'! There ain't no god,

except me and you, baby! Gods and goddesses. Haven't you

figured that out yet? Meek and mild gods, Greek gods,

gods in machines...well, this ol' boy's an avenging god

that's my persona of choice: Deus sex smack yer ass.

WOLF TIME 228

Yeah, gonna smack you upside the head's how I get off.

What was it that sly old Mr. Stallone said? "You're a

disease, man I'm the cure." I love it. Only Sly got it

wrong of course, what'd you expect, fucking Hollywood

meat. There's a big disease, all right, the mother of all

viruses, and it's called life, baby. But...there...ain't

...no...cure! No, sorry, not even death, so don't bother

thanking me. What am I then? Just a symptom, Doctor, just

a symptom.

One final note, Doc: the next one's going to be in

your honor. Have a nice dayyy!

* * * * *

...The Wolfman, who'd been staring at himself during

this harangue, eyes locked onto eyes before his medicine

cabinet mirror, stood there a long time as if listening

to the reverberation of his words. Then he popped the

tape out of his cassette recorder and dropped it into the

padded envelope he'd already stamped and addressed. If he

mailed it now, she should get it tomorrow.

Chapter 28

Esther slept late the morning after her dinner with

David, then, feeling rested and "almost giddy with good

WOLF TIME 229

health" she told Dan who, correctly interpreting the

euphemism, awarded her a wolfish grin of approval

arrived at the office around ten to catch up on

paperwork. She had decided to begin seeing clients again

gradually, beginning with a half-day tomorrow.

After lunch she had a tennis date with a friend at a

private club in West L.A. and early that afternoon beat

her opponent in straight sets for the first time in more

than a year of competition between them.

"Give me some warning next time," said the young

woman, glistening with perspiration as they made their

way to the club's juice bar for something to drink

afterwards. "I've never seen you play like that before."

"I needed it," Esther replied, flushed as much from

pleasure as exertion.

Next to the juice bar was a cocktail lounge with a

large-screen TV which was turned on although no one was

watching it at the moment. Her companion paid no

attention to it whatever, but Esther spotted Meredith

Manning at once and stopped in front of the set in spite

of herself. On the screen a middle-aged Hispanic woman

was struggling to talk through heavy sobs.

WOLF TIME 230

"...She, she had such plans. She was going to be a

singer or an actress. She could have made it. She had

such, such determination."

The woman broke down, and Meredith stepped forward

to comfort her.

"Ms. Fuentes, I'm sure all of Los Angeles shares

your grief."

"Jesus Christ," thought Esther, feeling more grimly

resigned now than merely a hapless plaything to the gods,

as she had before, "is this ever going to end?"

* * * * *

In front of Venice's Sidewalk Cafe, Detective Clark

and Judy Williams were nearly run down by roller skaters

racing heedless of pedestrians along what the locals

called the boardwalk, a corruption of Broadwalk, the

promenade's original name. Like most of L.A. it was paved

with concrete. After waiting in line for a few minutes,

they were led by the maitre d', a tall, skinny young man

in shorts, tank top and flip flops, through the popular

restaurant's usual noisy throng to a table next to the

sidewalk.

The Venice beach scene Frisbees, skaters,

WOLF TIME 231

sunbathers and exhibitionists, lovers, winos, street

musicians, artisans, peddlers, panhandlers and dogs, in

every species and sub-species imaginable literally

exploded around them. An errant Frisbee thumped Clark in

the chest as they were about to sit down.

The detective ignored the apologetic, nearly naked

surfer-type who ran up to retrieve it, backhanding the

Frisbee skillfully some forty or fifty yards to the man

who'd thrown it.

"Best entertainment in the world," he said, pulling

a chair out for Judy.

"Unless you live here," she countered.

"Did you?"

"For almost two years. When I was ripped off twice

in one week, I left."

"Once a week should be enough for anybody."

"It was almost that bad."

A statuesque blonde on roller-skates took their

order and Clark lit a cigarette. They watched the

waitress, her uniform little more than a California tan,

thread her way adroitly between the circular tables

crammed in beneath an awning as colorful and nearly as

WOLF TIME 232

large as a circus tent.

"How's your boss doing, by the way?" the detective

asked casually.

Judy gave him a look. "Listen, Clark," she said in

mock indignation which wasn't entirely feigned, "are you

sleeping with me just to keep tabs on Esther?"

He smiled and took her hands in his own. "If I

thought so before yesterday, you shattered any such

illusions last night."

"Well that's nice to hear," she replied, a little

flustered and actually blushing. "...I don't really know

how Esther is right now. Dan says she's too depressed to

get out of bed."

"That would be her partner, Daniel Foley?"

"Yeah, Dan's a sweetheart and very capable. Not

just as a therapist; he oversees the business side of the

clinic too."

"What about the guy she's seeing, David Albright? I

know he has a house of his own. How much does she rely on

him?"

"He's been out of town most of the time since she

was attacked, working on some business deal in Denver.

WOLF TIME 233

David's an investor in high-tech start-ups quite

successful, a real workaholic."

"I guess," said Clark with a wry chuckle. "I'd say

either it must be one helluva deal or he and the good

doctor aren't exactly making the sheets crackle."

"I'd say a little of both, but that's all I'll say

on the subject."

"Out of loyalty to your boss?"

"To her and to David. He's not as bad as I've made

him sound. From what Dan's told me, his being out of town

the last few days may have as much to do with Esther's

wishes as it does with whatever deal he's working on.

That's my opinion anyway."

Clark nodded and let the remark pass, but Judy saw

in his eyes that he was assessing it and her as well. Oh,

what the hell, it was his job wasn't it?

"You'll have to admit, her case is a little

unusual," he said. "I'm fishin' and I don't know what

for. When I found out she lives alone I advised her to

have extra locks put on her doors."

"Poor Esther. Why did she have to overhear me

talking to you?"
WOLF TIME 234

"I think what she's going through has a lot more to

do with a guy and a knife, don't you?"

"Me and my big mouth certainly didn't improve her

state of mind."

"If I hadn't talked to you, I'd have had to question

her some more. Is this kind of depression unusual for

her?"

"Very."

"Have you observed any other strange behavior in the

three years you've known her?"

"I wouldn't call severe depression after what she's

been through strange at all, Tom."

"I'm talking about before the attack."

"Hardly. Esther's the most in-control person I

know."

"Rigid enough to develop some kind of psychotic

syndrome?"

"Why, Lieutenant, you've been doing some homework."

"Oh come off it, Judy. I get so goddamn tired of the

dumb cop stereotype. I'm not talking about anything the

average criminal science major doesn't have some

knowledge of."
WOLF TIME 235

"Hey, I was only kidding," she said, taken aback by

the sudden heat in his words.

"You hit a nerve." He stubbed out his cigarette.

"...Well, to answer your question I didn't say

Esther was rigid. She's just your typical high-achiever.

She wouldn't allow herself the luxury of depression under

most circumstances. But this..."

"This has got her huh?"

"You still haven't told me why you seem to be more

interested in Esther than you are in this Wolfman

creature."

"Intuition a lot of us dumb cops have it. You pick

it up after a while if you didn't have it to begin with."

"Is that what in detective work is called a

'hunch'?"

"'Job security' is more like it. A couple of the

guys in the department have actually worked with psychics

on some tough cases. Fairly big names, I understand."

"Really?"

"We don't publicize it they do sometimes. I've had

an opportunity to observe some of them. A good

detective's part psychic in my opinion."

WOLF TIME 236

"That's interesting."

"Maybe that's why I decided to be a cop. I have

this...feeling about people. I can tune in sometimes and

tell what a suspect's thinking. Or I'll pace the scene of

a crime until I get a pretty clear picture of what

happened. And I mean 'picture', not just a theory of what

might've happened. Once in a while I can almost see it

taking place in my mind."

"I think I just found the subject for my thesis.

Tell me, though, what all this has to do with Esther."

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Before she gets

herself in real trouble."

"...I still don't understand."

"Maybe that's because you think of her only as

victim, period."

* * * * *

"I know just what you need," Valerie had said when

Esther called her on returning home from the club.

Now, lying relaxed and nude with Val in her spa,

enjoying wine, a joint and her gorgeous view of the

ocean, Esther was ready to agree.

"I haven't had any in a long time," she said,

WOLF TIME 237

referring to the marijuana.

"Be careful then," said Valerie, segueing into a

Cheech and Chong impersonation, "it's muy potent, mahn."

Esther took another hit of the flavorful home-grown

that friends of Valerie and Juan kept them supplied with.

She held the smoke in her lungs until she felt light-

headed, then lay back in the hot swirling water and

groaned with pleasure. "Ohh, this was a good idea, Val."

"Juan and I don't smoke much anymore, but I thought

this might be an appropriate occasion. The only thing I

can think of that might have been even better for you is

Alison Wood's isolation tank, but she's out of the

country."

Esther was listening but just barely. "I didn't know

she had one," she murmured.

"I think she was one of the first when she was

still a stewardess if you can believe that. She was

probably the only stew in America who did; she was flying

between L.A. and Honolulu then. She said the flights got

to be so exhausting after a while, everybody wanting her

attention...she'd take in all this crazy energy, then

come home dead tired but ready to fly to pieces at the

WOLF TIME 238

same time."

"And the tank really helped?" asked Esther,

interested now.

"Instead of fighting it, she said she started

looking every one of her passengers in the eye when she

said good-bye she took everything they put out there.

Then she'd come back and just...take off."

"Oh, that's fantastic!" said Esther, surprised at

how moved by the story she was. The two women drifted off

into their own thoughts. When Valerie got out to bring

them more wine and some fruit, Esther let the high take

her even deeper into her mind...to some sun-drenched

tarmac.

She was a stewardess, greeting and making eye

contact with boarding passengers at the top of a boarding

ramp which had been wheeled into place beside her plane.

Her feeling of power and control gave way to amazement as

first Pam Putnam, then Angela Fuentes appeared in the

doorway, looking back over their shoulders in terror.

Coming to the top of the ramp, Esther peered down the

long flight of stairs to the runway. The Wolfman was

climbing toward her.

WOLF TIME 239

She fled into the empty cabin. It was crew-less.

Shed have to fly the plane herself. She sat down in the

pilot's seat, made the few takeoff preparations her

stoned daydream considered necessary...then slowly pushed

the huge hand throttle forward.

The whole point of her dream, though, was that there

was no "final" position. As engine RPMs went through the

roof, her hand just kept pushing that throttle into

infinity, in an hallucination that was both thrilling and

terrifying. Suddenly she was flying right into the sun!

Her trip disintegrated in a blinding flash.

"Esther! Are you all right?"

The dazzling optical effect was from the sun all

right, but as seen from Valerie's spa, not some kamikaze

spaceship.

Esther blinked and raised her hand to shade her

eyes, both shaken and embarrassed. "Goddamnit, I can't

even smoke anymore!"

"I told you it was potent stuff," said Valerie

climbing back into the hot tub.

"...Very," Esther agreed.

Valerie handed her a book she'd brought out with her

WOLF TIME 240

colorfully arranged tray of wine, fruit and cheese. "Juan

asked me to give this to you," she said.

It was Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial

of Death. Esther opened it to a bookmark and read a

paragraph Juan had marked.

"And so the arrival at new possibility, at new

reality, by the destruction of the self through facing

up to the anxiety of the terror of existence. The self

must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for

self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to

relate itself to powers...beyond itself."

Esther felt a chill shoot up her spine and out

across her back like fireworks exploding in the night

sky.

Chapter 29

Esther spent the rest of the afternoon at Valerie's

absorbed in the book Juan had loaned her. Becker

illuminated for her as no one else ever had the shadow

cast over her life and over the human race since the

beginning of mankind by her denial of death. Not so

much death per se, death in the abstract, since the very

act of abstracting the profoundly personal and intimate

WOLF TIME 241

fate awaiting her was a reaction to her horror of having

to acknowledge her own extinction. Turning death into an

idea for contemplation and discussion was like trying to

seal it up in its own little coffin where it couldn't

soil or contaminate her everyday life.

Becker made her aware of how much she'd fooled

herself about this for so long. All her scholarly and

academic study of the subject as a therapist, all her

candid and forthright discussions with colleagues and

clients, had actually been a desperate attempt to hold

death at bay, fending it off with the laser of her

intellect the way a lion-tamer wields his whip.

Also provocative the more so because of the

confusion surrounding it was the subject Juan himself

had broached at the party he and Val had hosted for her;

now she knew where the idea had originated. What was it

she actually feared most in confronting her physical

death: the loss of life or the loss of self, for which

death is both metaphor and ultimate example?

If the latter, then no wonder human civilization

"advances" with such maddening slowness that it is

arguable evolution is occurring at all. What mankind

WOLF TIME 242

professes to be seeking, human beings are deathly afraid

of. "Self-transcendence", which sounds so grand and seems

so vital in theory, requires self-sacrifice literally!

"The self must be destroyed and brought down to nothing"

for transcendence even just to begin.

...Esther had been down from her trip long enough

now that it was safe to drive home. Refreshed and

stimulated, she hugged Valerie gratefully, then descended

the series of switchbacks linking this cluster of

expensive mountainside homes with the rest of the world.

Simply following the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa

Monica Canyon, however, would leave her too little time

to digest the thoughts swirling around in her brain. On

impulse she took the next canyon road up into the hills

overlooking the ocean, too deep in thought to notice

another car leave the coast highway behind her.

The sun falling toward the Pacific gave the dry

hills a golden glow as color-saturated as the green

splendor they possessed for a few precious weeks after

L.A.'s three- or four-day rainy season. But Esther only

saw this, she didn't savor it as she had so often before.

All her senses were on alert. The alien and unwanted

WOLF TIME 243

extrasensory power she thought she'd put behind her was

reawakening.

She reached for Becker's book almost as a talisman

...but her hand passed over it as if by its own volition

and opened the glove compartment instead. The glove was

still there. As soon as she touched it the faint message

she was receiving was amplified, and a low growl came

unbidden from her throat. He was somewhere nearby.

Yet as unwelcome as it was, the experience didn't

panic her this time. She saw a place ahead where she

could safely pull off the road and leave the car. She got

out and locked the doors, then sniffed the air. That way,

across the road.

She was in no hurry. Angling up the hillside some

fifty yards or so above the highway on her left was what

looked like a private drive, which apparently joined the

highway somewhere ahead of her. She crossed the pavement

and headed toward a grove of evergreens through which the

narrow dirt road ascended.

Esther felt so incredibly free in her movements, so

light on her feet, that climbing the hillside came

easily. The scent or signal or sensory message driving

WOLF TIME 244

her onward was getting stronger with every scrambling

step she took.

When she reached the pine grove she stopped dead

still within the shelter of the trees and listened. Had

she sensed something behind her? Until now all her

concentrated attention had been directed ahead of her.

No...nothing.

She stepped cautiously out onto a dirt road, so

deeply rutted it was impassable to anything other than a

4-wheel drive vehicle. It continued climbing for a

hundred yards or so to the ridgeline, then turned away

from the highway below back into the hills. Perhaps from

there she'd be able to spot its destination.

Sure enough from the ridge she could see down into

a shallow canyon. And there, surrounded by more pines,

was a cabin. At the mere sight of it the hair on the back

of her neck and arms stood up, followed by another deep

low growl beyond her control. As she stood there, erect

and quivering like an animal in self-defense, she heard

or felt something move behind her.

She whirled to see the figure of a man emerging from

brush alongside the road. It was Det. Clark.

WOLF TIME 245

"Take it easy," he said, raising his hand. "I didn't

mean to scare you."

"...Why are you following me?" Esther rasped angrily

as soon as she could find her voice.

Instead of answering her Clark gestured toward the

floor of the canyon. "Whose cabin?"

"I don't know!" He wasn't buying this. "...Do you?"

"Shall we go find out?" he said, as casually as if

he were suggesting a stroll.

"No! I I don't have any interest in it, I don't

care who lives there."

"Dr. Roth, I don't claim to know what the hell's

going on in this case, but I'm aware there's a helluva

lot you haven't told me. You almost got yourself killed

once. And you'd be in a shitload of trouble right now if

you'd been more successful."

"I'd be in trouble?"

"Well hell yes, there are laws against assaulting

people, you know and we are, after all, a society

founded on laws, good or bad. I'd hate to see you come

out of this in worse shape than you are now."

"What do you mean by that?"

WOLF TIME 246

"You know damn well what I mean this personal

vendetta of yours. Even if the guy who beat you up is a

legitimate suspect in these two recent homicides, you had

no more business doing what you did...than I have

counseling your patients.

"A lot less, in fact, because of the danger

involved. It's my job to take those kinds of risks.

That's what I get paid for. So if you have any idea of

continuing to endanger yours or anyone else's life, I'm

warning you now to forget it. Put it out of your mind. Do

you understand me?"

By now Clark was literally standing over her, much

closer than Esther permitted anyone with whom she was on

anything less than intimate terms.

"Perfectly, Lieutenant," she said coldly, pushing

past him to return to her car.

* * * * *

The next day, armed with a search warrant they'd

been able to obtain only through a complicated daisy

chain of accrued favors, Clark, Costello and two other

officers from homicide turned the remote cabin upside

down. They found nothing to indicate that its inhabitant,

WOLF TIME 247

one William Sullivan Cavanaugh, 35 whose only police

record consisted of some minor juvenile charges for

vandalism and cruelty to animals, which had been dropped,

and a number of unpaid parking tickets had anything to

do with the murders of Pam Putnam or Angela Fuentes.

Chapter 30

"Goin' after griz?" asked the middle-aged clerk

facetiously.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Grizzlies. I was wondrin' if you was goin' after a

grizzly or somethin'," the sporting goods salesman

persisted, grinning broadly enough to show her the

question was meant in fun.

Yes, and the exaggeration was probably meant to mask

his curiosity, Esther decided. The less she said to this

guy, the better.

"It's a prop for a play, actually," she said,

affecting a boredom she certainly didn't feel.

"Pretty dangerous thing to be usin' for a prop if

you ask me," he said doubtfully. "They stopped makin'

these things several years ago. I kept this one around

just for looks never thought I'd sell it. But then no
WOLF TIME 248

one ever offered me that much for it either. Just

remember what I said. Be real careful with it."

Esther nodded impatiently. She just wanted to get

out of here, away from this prying clerk as quickly as

possible. Her first step had been successful, the

operation was underway. There was no turning back now.

Her next stop was the private postal service where

she did most of her mailing. The manager was surprised by

her unusual request but eager to accommodate a good

customer, especially when she was willing to pay damn

near twice what they'd cost him. He wouldn't run out if

he re-ordered right away.

Esther's first appointment wasn't until eleven this

morning so she'd been able to accomplish both errands

while allowing time for one more stop on her way to the

clinic. This was at a small welding shop she had noticed

when her plan was just beginning to take shape.

Judy, who'd been in classes in her graduate program

at UCLA the day Esther had come in for a few hours of

paperwork, was glad to see her back, although

understandably anxious about the reunion as well.

"Esther!" she exclaimed, springing up from her desk with

WOLF TIME 249

elation in her voice. But there was tentativeness in the

way she stepped forward to greet her boss, then

hesitated, her arms stiff and awkward. "...It's good to

have you back."

There was a moment of indecision on Esther's part

too. Her discovery of what she believed to be the

Wolfman's cabin, his thoughtful gift in her mail this

morning, and the errands the two events had prompted had

begun to drag her back toward the abyss. But she relaxed

into her true feelings for the younger woman, who had

somehow inadvertently been pulled into a situation which

Esther herself found incomprehensible.

"...I couldn't agree with you more!" she said,

opening her arms.

"...I'm so sorry about what happened!" Judy finally

got out after a moment of tearful silence between them.

"You had nothing to do with it, Judy, it was bound

to happen sooner or later," Esther reassured her. "...How

well do you know him?" she asked when they drew apart.

"You mean Lt. Clark? Well I we're seeing each

other," Judy said in embarrassment even though she'd

known this would have to be disclosed eventually.

WOLF TIME 250

"...I take it then, you feel he can be trusted?"

Judy nodded. "I trust him," she said. "He's quite

concerned about you."

"Oh really? In what way?"

"Well, frankly...he thinks you're too involved in

these murders, Esther and so do I."

"...Dan's not in yet?"

"Not till one."

Esther gathered up her phone messages for the last

few days and Judy returned to her place behind the desk.

"...You will be careful, won't you?"

Esther gave her a reassuring though tight, strained

smile and went to her office. She located Clark's

business card in her card file and picked up the

telephone.

"Lieutenant, this is Esther Roth," she said in

response to the gruff monosyllabic "Clark" at his end.

"Could we talk?"

"Sure where?"

"I don't know "

"Tell you what are you willing to humor a public

servant who means well?"

WOLF TIME 251

"What do you have in mind?"

"Ever been to Sybil Brand?"

"The women's jail? Isn't that a bit heavy-handed,

Lieutenant?"

"If you've never actually experienced what an

institution like that feels like," he said, "your

education's incomplete. Do it for professional reasons."

"I'll do it because I want to talk to you."

Forty-five minutes later Clark and Esther, who had

canceled her eleven o'clock, were being admitted through

heavy metal doors into a long interior corridor flanked

by two seemingly endless rows of relentlessly identical

cells. The scene momentarily reminded her of the receding

infinite repetition of images in opposing mirrors.

"The medium's the message huh?" said Esther as,

unescorted, they proceeded to stroll incongruously down

the grim gunmetal-gray passageway. Their conversation was

heavily punctuated by the loud clanging of cell doors and

the shouted comments and insults of the female prisoners.

"I guess you could say that," Clark replied. "I'd

just hate to see you wind up in a place like this. Or

dead." When Esther gave him a look he added: "Intuition."

WOLF TIME 252

"Intuition's not infallible, Lieutenant. I have

clients who can't distinguish between intuition and

fantasy."

"...For what it's worth," he said, referring with a

gesture to their surroundings. "What'd you want to see me

about?"

"The cabin. What if you got a search warrant "

"We did. Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I doubt now if I can even get the authority to put

it under surveillance."

"Who lives there?"

"You know I can't tell you that. He's clean though

no record to speak of. Mid-30's, born and raised in the

Valley mother still lives there."

"What if I told you...he's the one?"

"How do you know?"

"I don't know how I know. I just do."

"Then we're no better off than we were."

"That's what I thought."

"If we'd found something, or had something on

him..."
WOLF TIME 253

"Right. And if he kills someone else before you do

find something?"

"We're doin' the best we can on this not only LAPD

but the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico:

they're the experts on serial killers. They've already

developed a profile on this sonofabitch."

"Yes, I've read about them."

"Have you? Did you know that one of LAPD's homicide

detectives helped put the BSU together?" She shook her

head. "Pierce Brooks he and a Seattle detective who was

on Ted Bundy's trail for four years. They met on the

Atlanta Child Murders case back in the 70s. When the

Bureau saw that serial murder was becoming a nationwide

epidemic they hired Brooks and...Keppel, was the other

guy's name, as their first consultants. Anyway, if I can

put a man on the cabin for a couple a days, Dr. Roth, I

will."

"...What do you think your chances of getting him

are?"

"We'll get him whoever he is. This is a must

case."

"Then what happens?"

WOLF TIME 254

"If he doesn't cop an insanity plea, he could get

the death penalty. Life almost certainly, probably

without parole."

"What are the odds, in your experience, that he'll

be ruled insane?"

"C'mon now, you're a psychiatrist you know I can't

make that kind of prediction on a given case. We don't

even know who we're dealing with."

"Let's say in a hundred cases like this then how

many times will an insanity defense be successful? I'm

not going to quote you, Lieutenant."

Clark sighed impatiently. "The odds are probably

even or better."

"Fifty-fifty that he'll have to pay for annihilating

two young human beings."

"Dr. Roth, with all due respect, what you've

experienced we cops see every day. Yet when a cop who's

sick to death of shovelin' society's shit when he

roughs up some punk he catches kicking someone's head in,

his ass is dragged from here to hell and back. If you

feel outraged, Doctor, how do you think we feel? We're

the ones called when someone gets wasted. We're the ones
WOLF TIME 255

who have to console the loved ones, and then go risk our

lives so some liberal-ass judge and jury can put the

sonofabitch who did it back on the street."

"...How on earth do you do it?"

"Because someone has to! No, that's a cop-out no

pun intended...I guess because when you're exposed every

day to the worst in human nature, you can react in one of

two ways. You either come to the conclusion, like the

survivalists, that our society's doomed, that it's about

to tear itself to pieces, and go off and hide in some

fortified bunker somewhere...or you find hope in the fact

that we get along as well as we do. You begin to realize

there must be some good in the human race to compensate

for the kinda refuse we have to deal with every day."

"You surprise me, Lieutenant. We're not really in

disagreement though. I'm ultimately an optimist myself."

"Hey, foxy lady, you belong in here with me!" yelled

an enormous black woman from one of the cells they were

passing.

Esther ignored her. "I just happen to think harsh

measures are needed for us to realize our true potential.

And if I have to make an example of myself to do what

WOLF TIME 256

society's unwilling to...then, I will."

"Dr. Roth, anyone who's ever set himself above the

law believed the end justified the means."

"Listen, that animal knows who I am and where I

live. I felt safe there for a while, I didn't think he'd

be stupid enough to come back right away. But eventually

he's going to find out there's no one between him and me.

I'm not going to let him drive me from my home and I'm

not going to live holed up in a cage 'for my own

protection' that's the irony of your bringing me here.

But I don't feel above the law; if I were ever to take it

into my own hands, I'd be willing to pay the

consequences."

Clark snorted, gesturing to the bank of cells

stretching away on their right, the steel bars clutched

here and there in semi-rigor mortis by the hands of the

half-dead.

"If you don't want to live holed up in a cage," he

said, "you'd better take a look around you. Wouldn't this

make you no more than an animal yourself?"

"Avenging the deaths of those women would be the act

of an animal, Lieutenant. We both know that."

WOLF TIME 257

Chapter 31

His latest, most notorious patient called Dr.

Krongold in a state of extreme anxiety. Esther the

observer said she was losing control over another Esther

with a mind of her own: the embodiment of a grim revenge

fantasy. Not only had the fantasy become compulsive but

even when she was finally able to override it the real

Esther, the flesh-and-blood Esther, sensed (or imagined)

a clenched-jawed shadow-self proceeding just beyond the

threshold of consciousness with the logistics of a grisly

'contingency plan' she had begun formulating before her

breakdown. Not with the intention of actually carrying it

out so much as a release, an outlet for impotent rage.

But since her discovery of the cabin and the Wolfman's

tape-recorded message to her, the fantasy had returned

with a vengeance of its own. Esther knew she would say

nothing of it to Krongold yet hoped desperately to be

talked out of trying to realize the unthinkable.

"God knows I've tried to take what we discussed last

time to heart, Bernard: forgiveness versus revenge in the

great scheme of things. But I dont think your analogy

between nations or ethnic groups and individuals is

WOLF TIME 258

valid. I don't believe in it.

"Turning the other cheek is something to aspire to,

ideally, but it can also become a form of suicide in the

wrong situation"

Esther hadn't sat down since entering the office.

She paced in a fever of words and gestures from wall to

wall, alternately avoiding Krongold's even gaze, then

seeking to overwhelm it with her own accusatory glare.

"The convicted rapists and child molesters paroled

after scandalously short sentences to repeat the same

crimes or worse a few months later. The men I see every

day at the Westside Center who repeatedly beat the living

hell out of their wives and girlfriends and go scot-

free.

Krongold appeared unfazed by the litany of violence.

Realizing that she was actually shaking with anger and

indignation, Esther took a deep breath. Her expression

softened to one of inquiry, almost of pleading, as the

two therapists, mentor and protg, silently faced each

other.

"Would you be surprised to find that I share your

concern and indignation about the present state of

WOLF TIME 259

affairs? That I, too, feel we must hold criminals

accountable for their crimes?" Krongold finally asked.

"Well, no, of course not. But is forgiveness toward

vicious criminals really the solution to reducing crime

and violence? What is the answer? If I knew that, I might

be able to...become myself again."

"To become yourself, or who you were before the

attack?"

"Someone I can live with," Esther replied.

"Well then, by all means let's get started," said

Krongold, a wise almost grandfatherly gleam in his eyes

despite his serious manner. "I don't pretend to be a

social engineer, of course, I'm just an analyst. It's in

that role, and as an old man who's probably outlived his

usefulness to society, that I'll try to answer your

question."

"I certainly take exception to your self-appraisal,

Bernard."

"Thank you on good days I'd call that a little

severe myself. In any case, it's because we need to focus

our wisest deliberation, our most righteous anger, on

crime and violence and social injustice that we must be

WOLF TIME 260

absolutely clear about who the real perpetrators are

all of them. We can't afford to deflect this vital effort

onto mere scapegoats. Now, speaking of scapegoats, I'm

probably about to horrify you with my next statement, but

what would you say if I asked you to consider strictly

for the sake of argument the possibility that even the

most violent criminals are in a sense the 'Jews' of

contemporary society?"

Krongold appeared to have expected perhaps,

judging from his expression, even to take some sort of

ironic satisfaction in Esther's look of incredulity.

"Obviously, I feel there's value in drawing such an

extreme analogy," he said "since you found my last one

unacceptable or I wouldn't do so, my dear. Anything to

make a point with you hard-nosed intellectuals. Where

armor-piercing missiles are sure to fail, an outrageous

statement may have the desired impact."

Esther suddenly realized how tired she was. "You

don't mean, I'm sure, that anti-Semitism is in any way

justified," she replied with ennui rather than real

sarcasm.

"Of course not, just the opposite: that violent

WOLF TIME 261

criminals have become demonized in much the same way the

anti-Semite dehumanizes Jews."

"The obvious difference being that in the case of

the worst criminals, it's for good cause, Bernard!"

"Is it? Or is it for behavior that's as symptomatic

of our culture's ills as it is the result of their own

sickness and free will? Let me try a different tack. I'm

sure you'll agree with me," Krongold continued, "that

making Hitler the sole perpetrator of the Holocaust,

whether as an archfiend who wasn't really quite human or,

more prosaically, a very special case of scapegoat if you

will, would be a terrible miscarriage of justice."

"Isn't that what the Nuremberg Trials were all

about?"

"Nuremberg!" he snorted, waving his hand

dismissively. "All but eclipsed now, some fifty years

later in the monstrous shadow of...Hitler!"

Esther smiled in spite of herself at the way the

dignified analyst made his eyes bug out, his fright-night

tone of voice pitched somewhere between Vincent Price and

Boris Karloff.

"I'm not referring to scholars, of course, or even

WOLF TIME 262

right-thinking people in general just the vast majority

of the western world: the average Joe, Klaus, Pierre and

Tony. Saying, and believing, that 'Hitler did it' gets

the rest of us off the hook, doesn't it.

"And I do mean 'us,' both as Americans our leaders

knew about the concentration camps, after all and to

some extent even as Jews, Esther. For if we Jews are

willing to take no responsibility at all for the vast

scope of 'Hitler's' genocidal pogrom, then we have

sacrificed an opportunity to learn from this enormous

crime against humanity. Too many of us were smug and

complacent, my family may they rest in peace among them.

I nearly came to blows with my uncle to get him to leave

with my aunt and cousins, and he refused, called me a

'cultural coward.' Too many others were cowed. We didn't

stand together as we might have."

Now it was Krongold who stood and paced in

agitation. "Do you see the point I'm trying to make, my

dear? For some unfathomable combination of reasons,

natural forces and human drives that are simply

incomprehensible to us, the greater part of western

humanity conspired in one way or another against the Jews

WOLF TIME 263

and the gypsies, the homosexuals and all the rest who

were annihilated in the Nazis' ovens and forced labor

camps. And we'll never begin to understand why, with the

reductio ad absurdum: 'Hitler did it.'"

Esther said nothing but nodded impatiently for

Krongold to continue.

"If we attempt to demonize criminals, in the same

way that Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's problems

and the rest of the world in turn blames Hitler more or

less exclusively for the Holocaust...if we try to pretend

that rapists, murderers, serial killers are inhuman

'monsters', fundamentally different from normal human

beings, then once again we sacrifice an opportunity to

learn how the flaws, some of them terrible indeed, that

are part of being human can be overcome. Because violence

exposes the fault lines in civilization. It's an early

warning system: where it erupts something is amiss."

"Violent criminals are our canaries in a coal mine?"

interrupted Esther sarcastically.

"In addition to being legitimate dangers to society,

yes, in a sense they are," said Krongold. "And that's why

caging them, or killing them, is not the answer to our

WOLF TIME 264

problem, our real problem: the set of social

circumstances the fissure in civilization's bedrock

which they've alerted us to. But for society to accept

its fair share of responsibility for the crimes of even

the most deranged and vicious criminals to be willing

to 'stand in judgment of itself as well as the convicted

offender need this in any way entail coddling convicts?

I don't see that at all.

At the very least we must keep those who are

potentially dangerous to society off the streets, for as

long as they're dangerous permanently when necessary.

How are we to afford this? By undertaking, at the same

time, another essential social service to which we now

pay only lip service, if that: rehabilitation. I believe

that genuine rehabilitation can be successful, providing

that it's accompanied by some sort of triage, which

continually screens out those whose actions indicate they

can't, or won't, be rehabilitated, who are truly unable

or unwilling to change.

"The most intractable prisoners should be housed in

an extremely Spartan environment for budgetary, not

punitive, reasons. They should be treated decently but

WOLF TIME 265

given absolutely nothing but the bare necessities of

life. After all, these are the 'failures' in a stringent

weeding-out process which, in theory at least, is

applying society's best efforts toward resurrecting

deeply wounded, even congenitally defective, human

beings."

"In theory maybe," Esther grumbled, frustrated by

the turn their conversation had taken.

Krongold nodded. "As a mere analyst that's all I can

offer."

"Your disclaimer's more persuasive than your

argument," said Esther. "Why are we suddenly talking

about economics anyway? And why are you so certain that

your penal system would save money? It could just as

easily prove prohibitively expensive."

"Expensive perhaps, but no society can allow itself

to prohibit the salvaging of human souls, Esther, or it's

finished. Personally, not as an economist, I believe that

genuine rehabilitation will always prove far more cost-

effective in the long run than punitive incarceration

without it: mere warehousing of prisoners until their

sentences are served, then injecting them back into

WOLF TIME 266

society more hardened than they were to begin with."

Esther felt a surge of renewed indignation. "That's

not the worst of it hell, we're running schools for

criminals! They get their graduate degrees in the streets

and homes of America." She was on her feet again. "What

you haven't addressed, Doctor, is the transition from

where we are today to the penal system you describe. Even

if there were some way to prove unequivocally that it

would be both humane and effective, how can you expect

the people responsible for the travesty we call a justice

system today to approve or administer yours?"

Krongold sighed. "Well, there you have me. I'm

afraid politics is even further from my area of expertise

than social engineering is. Actually, the politics of

vengeance on which our current penal system is based is

so obviously counterproductive I think it's bound to

change but for the worse. The concept of rehabilitation

is almost pass now. We've tried 'understanding'

criminals, taking into account their upbringing in

shattered homes and neighborhoods, but at a level based

more on society's sense of guilt than forgiveness. Now,

of course, we're reverting to an emphasis on punishing

WOLF TIME 267

crime again, with increasing severity."

"Well I'm afraid we won't certainly not soon

enough to stop the Wolfman. If he can't be arrested then

he has to be stopped some other way to keep him from

murdering another innocent woman. 'Cowed,' you say? Well

this is one Jew bitch who's willing to stand up to evil."

Krongold shook his head. "Esther, Esther...there

will never be more bestial things done to man, woman or

child than occurred on a daily basis in the concentration

camps. Do you really think that vengefully killing every

single murderer and torturer at Auschwitz and Buchenwald

and the rest would have prevented history from repeating

itself? In Cambodia, or South America, or Rwanda? Has

revenge killing been a solution or a provocation in

what used to be Yugoslavia? Tell me, if you can, how

killing killers here will be any more effective. No,

Esther, we need a real solution, a totally new solution

to man's inhumanity to man not another 'final'

solution."

"That's unfair! I don't recall using the word

'final.' This is a matter of expediency, pure and simple

his life against his next intended victim's if it comes

WOLF TIME 268

to that."

"It appears that you're more than ready to reduce it

to that level."

"Oh? I have the power to move society? Come on,

Doctor, I'm not so delusional as that. This is the level

we've descended to the beast is at the gates of the

city!"

"And you'll face it if no one else will."

"I already have!"

"I don't think so, Esther. Not when you see already

the blood on your hands. The beast is within you."

Finally! Someone had spoken the truth about her.

"It's because of your own fear of death that you

find the deaths of those young women so abhorrent

that's perfectly understandable and natural. Even to

those of great faith, death is an unfathomable mystery.

In those of no faith whatsoever, holding it at bay

justifies anything, no matter how terrible."

"And so does avenging it?"

"And so does avenging it. But now life has forced

you or given you the opportunity to face what most of

us spend our whole lives trying to avoid."

WOLF TIME 269

"Which is?"

"A mystery even more terrifying than death perhaps,

since it is death, after all, upon which you prefer to

focus: Who is Esther Roth, that she can, apparently, be

extinguished so easily?

Is seeking vengeance against the 'Wolfman' a way to

avoid finding out?

Chapter 32

"Hell no! I can't send a unit out there to sit

around jerkin' each other off because of this crazy

bitch's accusation. I'd make more sense to put a tail on

her."

Clark had figured this was how the Captain would

react. Why had he let her get to him like this? She

probably was a nut case.

"You're askin' me to add man-hours on top of what

you've already wasted on this flaky woman, to check out

the most hare-brained lead I've heard this week. Get outa

here before I feed your gullible ass to the Chief!"

Clark left feeling that the chewing-out was

justified. Even if his instincts had been right all

along, he needed evidence to influence a superior's

WOLF TIME 270

decision. A photograph of the van registered to this guy

might help. If it turned out to match the one the TV crew

had videotaped, then he'd have something to go on.

Not a hell of a lot; even if this turned out to be

the guy in her garage, that alone wouldn't make him a

legitimate homicide suspect. The captain was right: they

were being inundated with leads right now, a number of

them more promising than this one. But Clark wasn't ready

to give up on it completely yet. He'd send a photographer

with a telephoto lens out to the cabin first thing

tomorrow morning.

* * * * *

If the detective could have seen Esther now, she

might have convinced him his superior was right. Dr.

Krongold's fervent argument had not dissuaded her from

her plan. If police really had searched the Wolfman's

cabin as Clark had told her, he must know by now that

he'd been discovered somehow. And she was afraid that if

she didn't act now she might lose her nerve, giving the

Wolfman the opportunity to kill again.

With the methodical, almost ritualized behavior of

the obsessed, Esther assembled a small pile of disparate

WOLF TIME 271

items from a checklist she kept referring to, in a pile

beside the front door of her apartment. The only instance

in which she showed the slightest emotion was when she

took down her douche bag hanging in the shower, and a

coldly ironic smile flickered across her face as she

added it to the pile by the door.

The night was still moonless when she arrived at the

cabin. Through binoculars she could see from the road

that someone was there now. A wisp of smoke rose from the

chimney, and there was enough light coming from behind

drawn drapes to reveal a light-colored van parked in

front. Clark had told her the man lurking in her garage

had been driving a van.

She opened her duffle bag. On top was a kit of black

stage makeup, which she proceeded to spread evenly on her

face and neck, using the mirror of a compact she'd

brought with her. Satisfied with the result, she slung

the heavy bag over her shoulder and began a long stealthy

approach to the cabin. It took her nearly half an hour

and left her neck and back and shoulders aching.

Nevertheless, gripping the Wolfman's leather glove

when she felt herself falter, she'd made it this far

WOLF TIME 272

without a sound something she'd never have been able to

accomplish under normal circumstances. She was definitely

not herself tonight not Dr. Esther Roth at any rate.

And neither was she the unthinking creature who'd nearly

gotten herself killed a few weeks before.

Now, screened by thick underbrush some fifty feet

from the cabin, she set the duffle bag down and unpacked

it quietly, then crept soundlessly to the front door.

Inside she could hear a TV blaring. Good, that would make

her task much easier. An inspection of the cabin revealed

that the windows in back were also shielded by heavy

drapes, but Esther didn't need to see who was inside. The

sixth sense she'd developed fairly screamed out the

Wolfman's presence.

Her heart pounding, she dug several shallow holes

just a few feet in front of the door with a cultivator

and spade from her bag, along with two lightweight sets

of block and tackle. Once or twice the clink of metal

from her painstaking preparations made her freeze in

terror. She imagined the door suddenly flung open and the

man looming there in the doorway, looking down at her.

She'd brought along the .380 semi-automatic David

WOLF TIME 273

had given her, and from which she'd recently fired a few

practice rounds to confirm that she still knew how. But

how well had shooting at stationary targets in a firing

range really prepared her to defend her life against

someone like this? She didn't wish to find out. Nor did

she want to shoot the man; she wanted information, not

his life.

She managed to finish without arousing him, but her

real work lay ahead of her. She had to secure each block

and tackle to a front corner of the cabin, with the

rubber-lined clamps she'd had welded onto them, without

giving herself away.

Actually faced with the task, Esther asked herself

how in the security of her apartment it had seemed so

feasible. Even if she were able to sink four long wood

screws into the log walls without being heard, one tiny

blunder, one slip of her hand or the screwdriver, could

be transmitted through the walls of the cabin. Even with

his TV blasting, wouldnt he be able to hear the scrape

or rasp of metal against wood?

Although these doubts momentarily deadened her limbs

and spirit, threatening to overwhelm her, Esther's

WOLF TIME 274

resolve quickened again and she put on the heavy work

gloves she'd brought with her. Finding a secure spot to

mount the first block and pulley, she held it noiselessly

against the flattened curve of a log and inserted a screw

into one of the holes in the clamp, then fitted a

magnetic screwdriver into the head of the screw and

slowly, carefully, began to turn it.

The effort to accomplish this in absolute silence

was excruciating. Her forehead was quickly bathed in

perspiration and soon her whole body was soaked with

sweat. But she pressed on, seemingly endowed with a

bottomless reserve of energy tonight.

The second screw was easier because she no longer

had to hold the block in place against the wall; Esther

managed to get it all the way in without incident. Next

she strung one end of a twenty-foot length of nylon rope

through the pulley, knotting it tightly to secure it, and

covered the rope and her purchase from the sporting goods

store with pine needles littering the ground. At the

opposite corner of the cabin she hid another coil of

rope, then took a moment to catch her breath. She still

had to mount the second block.

WOLF TIME 275

Almost ninety minutes had elapsed since her arrival;

the moon would be up soon. She had to be finished by

then.

But fatigue was beginning to make her careless.

Esther had the first screw almost all the way home when

she lost her grip on the screwdriver and drove it hard

against the log wall. She tensed and held her breath,

flattening herself against the side of the cabin. The

sound on the TV went off. A moment later the front door

was thrust open. In her peripheral vision Esther could

see light from the cabin spill onto the ground in front.

Her heart was pounding so hard she was almost afraid

the Wolfman would hear it in the stillness of the night.

She was afraid to release the guns safety for fear the

faint click would give her away. If he came around the

corner of the cabin, she'd have to release and fire in

one swift motion. How likely was that? Rigid with fear,

virtually paralyzed, she'd be lucky to get off a shot,

let alone one that hit its mark.

At first she could hear the man mumbling under his

breath, then nothing. Was he just standing there in the

doorway or was he creeping around the cabin? Had he

WOLF TIME 276

seen the rope? Which direction would he come from? She

didn't dare even to breathe.

...Finally, with time to imagine again and again the

Wolfman's sudden appearance around either corner of the

cabin, and her reaction, the thin light on the ground and

underbrush in front was swallowed by the night as she

heard the heavy door swing shut.

Nearly sinking to her knees in exhaustion, Esther

took a deep breath and closed her eyes in relief. She

decided to forgo the second screw the first was in far

enough, it would hold; she couldn't afford to arouse the

man's suspicions further. She fit this pulley with a

length of rope like the first, then scuttled silently

back to her duffle bag. One last task remained.

Her douche bag. Esther took off her gloves,

unscrewed the cap from a can of charcoal lighter she'd

replaced with gasoline, poured the gasoline into the bag

and secured the top. Then she looped the bag around her

neck with a length of rope.

Once again she had to smile grimly at herself. Why

the douche bag? There was no logical answer; logic played

no part in this part of the operation. It symbolized a

WOLF TIME 277

rage there was no mistaking for righteousness. Yes,

outrage and a sense of self-sacrifice: the willingness to

do what had to be done regardless of the personal

consequences to Esther Roth.

So far at least, things had come together almost

exactly as she'd planned. All at once Esther realized

that what she was feeling now was a sense of calm. Could

she actually pull this off after all? And could success

somehow make it right? No, these remained questions for

which she had no answers. This was simply necessary. Her

task.

Esther could feel her power clearly now. She was her

power, her strength of purpose, her will. Approaching the

cabin in a crouch, she put her hands on the rough

mortared stone chimney and tested it with a toe of her

running shoes. Then she scaled it as easily as if this

were something she did for recreation.

At the top, she slipped the gasoline-filled bag from

around her neck, loosened the stopper...and dropped it

down the chimney.

Chapter 33

Esther heard the bag carom off the walls of the flue
WOLF TIME 278

and was afraid for a second that it would get caught in

the damper. Then suddenly there was a muffled explosion

which sent flames shooting clear up the chimney. A moment

later the cabin door burst open for the second time this

evening, and the Wolfman charged through it bellowing at

the top of his lungs.

He'd taken only a couple of steps when his angry

roar turned into a scream of pain. Inch-and-a-half steel

teeth of the bear trap Esther had buried in a shallow

depression snapped shut around the Wolfman's left ankle,

savaging his heavy work boot as if it were cardboard.

Eyes blazing, Esther glared down at her prey from

the roof. She was possessed now by the fury that had

provoked her nearly suicidal attack on the Wolfman in the

park but this time she was in control. Without

hesitating, she leaped to the ground and snatched up the

coil of rope hidden beneath pine needles at this end of

the cabin.

The free end was looped like a cowboy's lariat.

Holding it loosely in her right hand, with the knotted

end, strung through the pulley, in her left, Esther

warily approached the enraged man struggling to free

WOLF TIME 279

himself from the trap. She didn't think he could force

open its powerful jaws, but she didn't dare let him try.

Taunting him, she whipped him across the face with the

rope.

"You bitch!" he snarled, lunging at her. Once...

twice, she flipped the rope loop toward his huge flailing

right hand. The second time, she snared it and jerked it

tight, yanking the other end through the pulley to draw

the rope taut.

Esther could never have overpowered this man with

strength alone. But with the pulley's additional leverage

she nearly wrenched his arm from its socket as she

stretched it out full-length to secure the rope. A simple

overhand knot would keep it from slipping back through

the pulley's sheave.

"You fucking cunt, I'll kill you!" In pain, one arm

pinioned so he had no chance now of freeing his foot from

the trap, the Wolfman literally foamed at the mouth in

rage. Without taking her eyes from her prisoner, Esther

darted around him to the opposite side of the cabin for

the other rope.

And now she stalked him, both of them aware that

WOLF TIME 280

he'd be hers if she could ensnare his left hand and get

this rope, too, pulled tight. But this time it would be

far more difficult.

The Wolfman kept his free hand back, away from her.

She knew this was as much to draw her in as to protect

himself. With her rope around his hand, he could jerk her

off her feet if she didn't pull it taut in time. She drew

the knotted end through the pulley to take up slack,

leaving just enough rope to maneuver with.

She feinted with the noose. Again. Each time he

countered. "C'mon, you cunt! You fucking little coward!"

After several grueling minutes of this cat-and-mouse play

they were both exhausted. Panting, nearly sobbing, Esther

finally allowed herself to get either careless or too

bold. Instead of going for the rope this time as she'd

expected, the Wolfman grabbed for her arm instead and

caught it in an iron grip.

For just a second she tried futilely to jerk free.

Then instinct took over and Esther took him by surprise,

pivoting into him instead of struggling to free her hand.

With her back to the Wolfman she bit down on his wrist

with all her might.

WOLF TIME 281

He screamed and released his hold, allowing her to

slip the noose over his hand and tighten it in one swift

motion. Then, resisting the natural impulse to get away,

Esther fell toward him to the ground, drawing the free

end of the rope through the pulley. The Wolfman's

strength was no match for her momentum, leverage and

cunning. A moment later, though she was lying at his

feet, he was spread-eagled helplessly in front of her.

Not quite helplessly. A bright flash of light

suddenly went off in her brain. He'd connected with the

only limb left to him. His free foot caught Esther with a

glancing blow to the side of her head. She fell into a

black hole, releasing tension on the pulley.

But she'd wrapped the end of the rope around her

right hand. The instant the Wolfman tried to pull his arm

free, the mighty tug was transmitted to her stunned

consciousness. Instinctively, she pulled back...then came

sufficiently to her senses to remember her vulnerability.

Even so, another kick caught her brutally in the

shoulder.

Esther pulled against the rope with all her

returning strength, simultaneously wriggling her body

WOLF TIME 282

along the ground, away from his flailing booted foot.

Then, with moaning sounds that were part sobs, part

snarls, she began to pull herself hand over hand up the

rope toward the pulley.

The Wolfman's strength was gone now. Tonight's

battle had been as one-sided as the one in the park, this

time in Esther's favor. For the first time there was a

flicker of fear in the eyes of her adversary. Behind him,

flames began to lick at the roof and walls of the cabin

around the chimney as Esther tied off the second rope at

the pulley. While her trussed-up captive thrashed and

raved incoherently, she took a few precious seconds to

catch her breath, then staggered over to her duffle bag.

Perhaps the most difficult part of her plan still lay

ahead of her.

She'd thought this through so carefully yet had

she been deceiving herself all this time? Had she been

convinced all along that she'd never get this far, that

her mission was suicidal? How could Esther have believed

she would really go through with this? No! She couldn't

allow self-doubt to start creeping in now; she had to

finish it. After all, the police had found nothing to

WOLF TIME 283

incriminate him; legally she was the criminal here.

Still gasping for breath, Esther fumbled in the bag

and dragged out her video camera, a cheap little tripod

and a small box. Clumsy with fatigue, she pulled out and

locked the legs of the tripod, mounted the camera and

turned it on. Then she opened the box. Inside, nested

like deadly-looking insects, were the eight string-

cutting rings shed purchased at the postal center. One

by one, watching the Wolfman's face, she slipped them

onto the fingers of both hands.

But, though she relished the look of naked fear now

in his eyes, just the thought of using them on another

human being brought with it a feeling of nausea and

profound revulsion. Trembling violently she turned and

confronted him.

"...You're going to tell me...how you killed those

girls," she said, panting again, her voice quavering at

first though growing stronger as she continued. "I want

the kind of details only the killer and we both know

that's you, you bastard only you could know. If I have

to use these," she lifted her gleaming claws "I will,

'Wolfman'! Now talk!"

WOLF TIME 284

Her last word was a ferocious snarl. The Wolfman

lunged forward in fear or rage, there was a sharp CRACK!

at the side of the cabin...and the rope securing his

right arm suddenly went slack.

Esther knew at once what had happened: the pulley

secured with only one screw had torn loose. An instant

later a massive arm caught her around the throat and

lifted her clear off the ground.

"Now you're gonna find out how the others felt, you

bitch! But you're not goin' as quick as they did, you're

gonna go nice and slow!"

Esther couldn't breathe! She couldn't dislodge his

arm! About to lose consciousness, she summoned all her

remaining strength...and lashed up and back with the

metal claws on both hands. The Wolfman screamed but

intensified his grip.

Again and again Esther struck at the face and

shoulders she couldn't see but could feel with hideous

clarity being shredded by her taloned hands.

Finally she was able to wriggle from his grasp. And

now, completely out of control, she turned on the Wolfman

savagely. Though he battered her a few times with his

WOLF TIME 285

free arm, her curled hands were soon warm and sticky,

drenched with his blood. As the flames on the roof spread

and fire began to consume the cabin, his bellowing

screams of rage and pain became mere gurgles. While the

snarling, bestial sounds of Esther's frenzy gradually

subsided into exhausted, anguished weeping.

The Wolfman slumped to the ground, his face flayed,

his torn and hemorrhaging body racked by spasms. A few

minutes later he was dead.

Chapter 34

Esther parked her car in a daze, with no memory of

the interminable drive home. "Reduced visibility" was the

term her bewildered mind had produced with difficulty to

describe the state of emotional shock she was in. Whether

she pictured her diminishing perception of the world

around her as a mental fog clouding her vision or as a

shrinking peephole she was trying to see through, her

mind was closing down.

She walked from the garage to her apartment aware

that she must resemble a zombie with her narcoleptic,

automaton-like movement, her fixed stare through wide

unblinking eyes. But she was too tired to resist this

WOLF TIME 286

submergence of herself into...what? A fatigue that was

nothingness, a void.

She saw the young unmarried couple who lived below

her approaching, as if in a dream: they were at once real

and of her invention. No, that wasn't it; it was the deja

vu-like inevitability of their being here at this moment

that was connected in some way with her. When she stepped

into the light their own eyes widened in horror, and they

gasped and shrank away from her in perfect unison to let

her pass.

Esther noticed all this clearly enough but it made

only the faintest impression on her, stirring some vague

unpleasant memory of a bad dream she'd had in the recent

past. Once awakened, however, the dream images rose from

the depths of her mind like bottom-dwelling sea

creatures. She could see, or sense, their vague luminous

shapes lurking just beneath the surface of consciousness

as she sought the safety of her apartment.

Inside, she went straight to the bathroom and turned

on the light. NO!

She was absolutely covered in blood her hair was

caked and matted with it. Like a giant wave breaking over
WOLF TIME 287

her, the horrifying reality of this evening's events came

flooding back, sucking the air from her lungs and bile

into her throat. She retched violently into the basin.

When she had showered, scrubbing long and

compulsively with her loofah and half a bottle of

shampoo, Esther crawled into bed in exhaustion. Drawing

herself into fetal position, she lay there naked,

shivering uncontrollably. It was then that the whispering

began again.

"Esther...Esther..."

This time she tried to shut out the female voice.

But the more she struggled to ignore it, the louder, more

insistent it became, until she finally had no choice but

to respond. She no longer had the slightest control over

her life. Whether life vest or straitjacket, the

dictatorial self-control she had always exercised had

been discarded somewhere along the way, and Esther felt

herself being swept along now. Resigned, utterly

exhausted, she got out of bed, threw a robe over her

shoulders and staggered toward the whispering's familiar

yet incomprehensible source.

The dark rooms of her apartment seemed eerie, other-

WOLF TIME 288

worldly. The walls of the spare bedroom no longer

appeared parallel but angled toward the walk-in closet,

the room's focus now behind those closed sliding doors.

There must be a subtle draft in the apartment to make

them rattle softly like this.

The inexplicable fear she'd felt in front of them

returned, rousing her somewhat from her trance-like

stupor. Again she was reluctant to open the doors but

the whispers were relentless.

"Esther...Ess-ther!..."

She obeyed. At first there was nothing but darkness.

But the voice had changed somehow. The whispers

seemed too hoarse for a woman's now, even threatening.

And Esther's name was no longer intelligible; this was

more like heavy, raspy breathing, almost like...

Two huge yellow eyes blinked open in the dark. From

deep in the closet in fact, from farther away than the

closet's rear wall they glared at her coldly. How could

she have been so mistaken? The "whisper" was quite

clearly a low, menacing growl.

Suddenly the eyes moved toward her! She found the

light cord just inside the closet and gave it a frantic

WOLF TIME 289

tug. Slinking toward her was an enormous gray wolf.

Curling its upper lip, it bared white, glistening

fangs. She could scarcely breathe, paralyzed with fear.

All at once the wolf tensed...and sprang forward with a

ferocious guttural snarl.

Esther screamed and slammed the flimsy doors in its

face, but of course the wolf's lunge simply smashed them

from their track. She spun away, knocking a lamp from a

bedside table. It crashed to the floor as Esther fled to

the living room for the front door.

But she didn't get there in time the wolf had her

cornered. Now it slunk toward her, drooling saliva, its

cruel eyes burning into hers. There was nowhere to turn,

nothing to protect herself with. She'd be torn to pieces.

She heard herself babbling as if the beast could

understand her. "P-p-please...please," she sobbed, her

raised hands in front of her either a plea for mercy or,

pathetically, a defensive posture meant to hold the

animal at bay. This was futile and Esther knew it.

All at once something in her let go. Surrendered. A

strange expression came into her eyes: a look not of

shock or even acceptance of impending death. When the

WOLF TIME 290

wolf tensed now for the kill, Esther opened her arms...to

embrace it.

It came down on her all teeth and fiery eyes.

Everything was drowned in red.

...Then, at the fire's very core, a luminous white

flame, a sense of peace. The wolf's terrifying snarl

feathered into the semblance of a human whisper again:

the woman's voice from before, calling her name. And the

"flame", Esther saw now, was a figure in white, a

shimmering white gown.

The fire surrounding her? Esther had the sudden

insight that it was her own pain, burning itself out. Was

she dead then? Was this an angel before her? Someone from

her past? Behind the dying flames, the vision in white

was growing clearer, more sharply focused.

Esther had the illusion of approaching her through

an extended archway of feminine arms. One balletically

raised pair after another opened gracefully to embrace

her, only to be replaced by other, loving arms beyond

them, in a living colonnade of unfoldment between herself

and this woman in white, whispering Esther's name in a

deep resonant voice full of love and compassion and

WOLF TIME 291

power.

Now she was at the very feet of the commanding

figure. Esther's eyes swept up, up past the white flowing

garment to behold...her own face. Not the drawn and

driven face so familiar to her, but the transcendent

beauty of the face of her true Self: the whole and

perfect being as she might appear in the eyes of God. And

on this serenely beautiful face was a smile that in its

radiant purity tore her heart.

It was a revelation Esther was unable to dwell on.

The vision vanished in a blinding flash, the sound of

splintering wood.

"Police officers! Freeze!"

...Esther's mind rebelled at what she confronted

next. Two uniformed policemen, poised inside the front

door, their guns drawn and leveled at her. Her condo a

wreck. Plants, shattered vases, magazines and broken

statuary littering the floor. In front of her, her

favorite fern, its beautiful ceramic pot shattered, with

potting soil spilled out across the floor. And in the

Rorschach of moist soil, the outline of a large canine

paw print.
WOLF TIME 292

Chapter 35

After her $500,000 bond had been posted the next

morning and she'd been whisked through the ravenous media

in front of the Los Angeles County Courthouse, Esther

took refuge at Juan and Valerie's while David made

longer-term arrangements. For the rest of the day she

mostly slept and meditated, sensing a protective cocoon

around her, as if the three of them had taken a vow of

silence in a monastery. The same couldn't be said of the

unruly clot of journalists, paparazzi and the idle

curious who began to coagulate outside the house.

David in the meantime had rented a luxurious cabin

at Lake Arrowhead, 50 miles east of Los Angeles in the

San Bernardino Mountains. Sympathetic neighbors of Val

and Juan's called 911 to report a fictitious prowler, and

when two patrol cars responded with sirens blaring a few

houses up the street, David and Esther slipped out the

back to an alleyway undetected and sped away in Juan's

Honda.

They arrived at the cabin about midnight. It was

immaculate, with even her own clean linens, which a

trusted female employee of David's had brought with her

WOLF TIME 293

in preparing Esther's hideaway. The refrigerator and

cupboards were stocked and a large stack of books,

magazines and DVDs nearly overflowed an end table beside

a large-screen TV. David was being fantastic through all

of this, as even Juan and Valerie had commented. Then,

too, Esther's carefully managed portfolio of resentments

toward him, which had been steadily accruing interest all

these months, seemed to have been wiped out virtually

overnight.

The air here, high above the smog and heat of the

city, was crisp and clear. The evergreens had a tang to

them, and when it rained a couple of times even the patio

and paved driveway had a fresh, astringent scent. At

Esther's insistence, David commuted back and forth to

work for the next few days, making elaborate precautions

to avoid being followed. Val came to visit later in the

week, followed soon afterwards by Dan. Without much real

conversation, he and Esther sat out on the patio enjoying

the view, sunshine and silence of the mountains. She had

never felt closer to him.

And David? One evening she found herself quizzing

him in some detail about his latest deal, an initial

WOLF TIME 294

public offering he was excited about. Was it merely

ironic, she asked herself, this new degree of caring and

thoughtfulness between the two of them, now that she

faced years of her life in prison? No it was largely

because of this that she wished to clean up her

relationship with David. Although their lovemaking the

first night at the cabin had been as thrilling as on the

night of their dinner together, they hadn't had sex at

all since then. Esther was just too overwhelmed by the

forces she had unleashed to surrender herself, and David

was more than understanding.

Because the media were nosing around even in

Krongold's neighborhood the analyst, sounding distressed

but reassuring, suggested meeting her at the cabin for

their next session, if and when she wanted one. Esther

replied rather mysteriously that she was still digesting

their first three meetings in the light of what had

happened since the last and promised to call when she was

ready to talk again.

She and David had been at the cabin about a week

her sense of time a little muddled not because her mind

was but because, in fact, it seemed to be getting

WOLF TIME 295

progressively clearer: crystalline days and nights

flowing from one into the next without division, like a

stream in which she was being carried along when Esther

was finally ready to swim, to set her own course.

She decided before the media circus her murder trial

was sure to become to give one definitive interview,

preempting the multitude of requests with which her

attorney was being deluged.

The meeting took place in Big Bear, some ten miles

away, at another secluded cabin which David rented, to

keep Esther's hiding place a secret. Meredith Manning

arrived with her two-person crew, humbled (in the meaning

of the word applied to media stars) and grateful. After

all, the Wolfman had opened the door to the kind of high-

profile career she'd always dreamed of, beginning in

journalism and taking her who knew where, and now Esther

had invited her across the threshold. The exclusive

interview also confirmed not only for Meredith but for

the public at large what she'd been claiming all along:

her solidarity with, rather than exploitation of Esther

in News 8's controversial coverage of her story. This was

particularly important to Meredith, who for reasons she

WOLF TIME 296

wouldn't acknowledge even to herself had become

increasingly ambivalent about her intrusion into the

psychiatrist's life.

Again, "solidarity" must be interpreted in context;

Esther was clear enough about this. She'd come to the

conclusion that the anchorwoman's head and heart were in

the right place, however insulated from flesh and blood

they might be by digital media. A novice herself, Esther

was nonetheless aware of the inevitable deterioration in

quality between successive generations of an image in the

pre-digital era. Perhaps the same thing was true of

ideas.

"You'll never guess who I interviewed yesterday,"

was Meredith's zinger of a gambit once lights had been

set up and the camera was recording, the proper mood

established. "The Wolfman's mother. She still thinks he's

innocent, even after police found those black hoods and

the victims' jewelry in her own house. She said anyone

could have put it there, even the police. The one thing

she knows for certain these were her exact words is

that: 'William could never have done someone that way; he

wasn't raised like that.'"

WOLF TIME 297

Even Esther hadn't been quite prepared for this. But

she'd recovered her poise by the time Meredith had led up

to the big question, the one everyone was asking, and

wanting to ask her. How could she have killed a man in

cold blood even a sociopath like the Wolfman?

This of course was the one question Esther couldn't

escape even when alone. But the occurrence afterwards in

her apartment whatever it had been had given her a

surprising degree of objectivity, or at least detachment,

toward the long nightmare beginning with her attack on

the beach and culminating in the Wolfman's gruesome

death.

Against entreaties by her friends and defense

attorney, Esther had decided to let her camera, which had

recorded the whole thing, speak for any claim of self-

defense or unpremeditated murder to which she was

entitled. The fact is, she had gone there prepared to

inflict serious bodily harm if necessary to get the

information she wanted; and she had killed the Wolfman in

a frenzy of blood lust, well after he'd ceased to be a

real threat to her. Could she have stopped herself? She

hadn't, and he was dead. Uninterested in either political

WOLF TIME 298

martyrdom or notoriety, Esther was content to let a jury

of her peers determine her legal fate, because she felt

more responsible for her own destiny now than she ever

had before.

"...I went after the Wolfman," she answered

Meredith's direct cut-to-the-chase question, "because of

outrage at the way we as a society overlook the deaths of

our fellow human beings not those close to us, you

understand, but those we only read or hear about on the

six o'clock news. At how we can so easily overlook the

murders of these people who never touch our lives and

then spend years and millions of dollars in legal

maneuverings, arguing over points of law. What an odious

charade! The killers in our midst are no more dangerous

to society than the self-perceived 'cultural elite' who

serve as their apologists."

Even now she felt her pulse and respiration rising,

outrage inexorably edging toward rage as she articulated

what had driven her to the Wolfman's cabin: a night and a

way of feeling that seemed part of another lifetime.

"You wished to make an example of yourself then, Dr.

Roth?"
WOLF TIME 299

"No, no, I don't want people to emulate my behavior.

I want you to be admonished by it, to say no, to howl

'Take a look at the future, people! Look where your smug

indifference and inaction are leading us!'...I guess you

could say my intention apart from recording the

Wolfman's confession was to establish some kind of

outer limit, an extreme position in the legal and moral

debate about the proper boundaries between an

individual's right to self-defense and society's need for

law and order."

Meredith's face glowed with anticipation. Here was

the hero better yet, heroine society needed; and she

herself was bringing Esther's fiery message to the world.

"And do you feel that you accomplished what you set

out to do, Dr. Roth?"

Esther smiled ruefully and shook her head. "Never in

a thousand years could I have guessed what would come of

my actions that night, Meredith. I know what I did was

wrong...I keep asking myself: 'Did you have to kill

another human being to find out?'"

"Wrong?" blurted Meredith, "But, Dr. Roth, how can

you say that? Millions of people support what you've done

WOLF TIME 300

what you alone had the courage to do!"

"I can only say what I feel in my heart, Meredith. I

can certainly understand your reaction how could I not,

when this was obviously how I felt myself...before taking

a man's life."

Esther's voice had become so calm, her face and her

whole manner so serene, that the young newswoman

spluttered for a moment before she could speak

intelligibly. "...But Esther, Dr. Roth, this man was an

animal, not a normal human being. You should, have you

seen the bodies of the two women he killed? I have! I'll

never forget it!"

"...Nor will I," replied Esther, having just

experienced a vivid flashback of the Wolfman's blood-

soaked corpse.

"So what happened to your moral outrage, Doctor?"

"Oh I still have it, believe me. I'm going to try to

make it more constructive. What are the sources of

sociopathic behavior and violence in society?

Psychiatrists have compiled a long list by now: extreme

childhood deprivation of course; genetic and learning

disorders, which, along with their parents' physical and

WOLF TIME 301

sexual abuse, further frustrate and help form young

murderers-to-be. Chronic alcohol and drug abuse,

aggravating biochemical imbalances that may have been

inherited to begin with; usually brain damage or

malformation of some kind, especially in the limbic area

or temporal lobe: the primitive area of the brain that

processes emotion. Epileptic-like seizures in many cases,

especially in serial killers, inducing a hormonal cycle

similar to menstruation "

"But with someone else's blood!" Meredith couldn't

help interjecting, her face immediately coloring in anger

or embarrassment at the unprofessional lapse. "I'm sorry,

Doctor please continue."

Esther didn't appear in the least perturbed by the

outburst; in fact its savage irony fit the tone of her

litany of abuses to which the typical serial killer has

been subjected before embarking on a career of brutal

sexual murders according to the scientific literature

she'd been absorbed in ever since learning of Pam

Putnam's death.

"Yes, that's the unfortunate part someone else,

some innocent person, ends up paying for a fellow human

WOLF TIME 302

being's misery. I was about to say that a respected

colleague of mine believes we should include vengeance

itself on our list of violence's formative causes. I'm

beginning to think he might be right. After all, if the

wretched individual who's been dealt such a terrible hand

were willing to suffer in silence, his afflictions would

end with him, wouldn't they, instead of being reshuffled

and passed on to society? Some do suffer, heroically, and

some have no choice. But serial killers get even and

then we get even with them. Maybe the whole process is as

circular as my colleague says it is. At any rate, I'm

probably going to have a lot of time for study."

Flushed with indignation and confused by Esther's

response was the psychiatrist mocking her? Meredith

declared vehemently, "But it doesn't make sense, Dr.

Roth, for you to end up having to spend years of your

life in prison because we've become too damned inept and

fearful as a society to deal with criminal violence! You

took a stand and now 'the system,'" she sneered, "has

turned on you."

Meredith was losing it; Esther could see by the way

the camerawoman and soundman were looking at her and each

WOLF TIME 303

other that this was atypical behavior even for "News-8's

harpy". On a sudden hunch she asked whether the two of

them could talk alone for a few minutes.

"Well, sure take a break, guys," Meredith replied

with a loud sigh. "I certainly need it." She stood up and

began pacing around the larger of the cabin's two rooms,

crowded at this end with lights, the tripod-mounted

camera, and plastic crates full of cables and production

equipment.

The crew left and Esther waited for the newswoman to

sit down again in the chair opposite her. When she had

done so, reluctantly, and was looking at her with

suspicion, Esther asked gently, "Meredith, have you ever

been sexually abused?"

Taken unawares like this, Meredith resisted at

first, then broke down and wept uncontrollably for

several minutes before she was able to talk. With

difficulty but also great relief she poured out the story

of how, as a sophomore in college, she had been raped in

a fraternity house by a drunken man she'd never laid eyes

on until the night of the "mixer": a word she could still

say only with bitter hatred. One thing she had never been
WOLF TIME 304

able to forget, she told Esther, was the sound of the

raucous party downstairs while her life was being torn

apart in a fetid, clothes-strewn bedroom. She had

screamed and cried out, but no one had come to her

rescue.

Then afterwards...even some of her sorority sisters

had advised her not to tell. She quit school a few

utterly miserable weeks later and waited almost a year

needed much longer than that to enroll at the state

university, her college transcript, and life, a mess. It

had taken her years to trust any man at all, and she'd

had few real lovers. Even the thought of sex was usually

just too painful. And no man since the one who'd taken so

much from her had ever known the reason why.

"...Can you still picture the man who raped you?"

Esther asked when Meredith's narrative was finished. The

newswoman merely nodded. "Picture him as clearly as

possible. Do you see him now?"

A moment later Meredith said huskily, "Yes, I can

see him very clearly."

"Where is he?"

"In the fraternity house, one of the bedrooms

WOLF TIME 305

upstairs. His face is just...inches from mine, he's on

top of me."

"On top of you or in your mind?"

Meredith gave her an uncomprehending look.

"If I'd been there that night, even after what

happened no, after what I did, to the Wolfman I'm

sure I'd have done anything I could to help protect you.

But he's no longer the one who's ruining your life,

Meredith not now....See, I think what I've learned from

my own experience is that forgiveness really isn't for

others. It's a gift you give yourself."

She related what Dr. Krongold had tried to tell her.

"I knew the loss he had suffered under Hitler, or thought

I did, but that was so long ago, the world's a different

place now, right? Wrong I was so wrong. Good and evil

have nothing to do with time.

"In one sense, I'm sure my mistake will cost me a

lot more than however many years I may spend in prison,

although I have no idea what that's going to be like. But

in another sense one of those paradoxes we fallible

human beings have no answer for I've been given

something so precious it's still hard for me to believe.

WOLF TIME 306

"The most remarkable thing is who this gift seems to

have come from. I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was

in too much confusion, too exhausted. It was only later,

in an incredible experience I had the same night in my

apartment..."

"What happened, Dr. Esther?"

"I can't begin to tell you all that happened. But I

had this overwhelming sense of being at total peace with

myself, for the first time in my life. All the anger and

hatred inside of me was suddenly gone. Looking back, I

had the feeling and I believe this now that his death

released whatever had turned the Wolfman into the crazed

creature he must have been."

"And you forgave him?"

"It was more than that, Meredith he wasn't there

to forgive. I forgave myself."

* * * * *

Her admission, the first time she had told anyone,

took Esther back to the arraignment the morning after her

arrest already it seemed a long, long time ago. But she

would never forget how she'd felt that day.

"Once you find where high is, then it's time to

WOLF TIME 307

grow," Baba Ram Dass Richard Alpert said once in

explaining how the drug experience should be used as a

stepping stone, rather than as an end in itself, in

seeking to enhance one's conscious awareness. Although

never much more than an experimenter where illicit drugs

were concerned, Esther had cited the statement a number

of times in her practice, and not just for those with

drug problems.

With her professional assistance over the years many

of her clients had experienced revelations, insights,

epiphanies showing them a way to more success and

happiness in their lives. Yet more often than not, they

measured themselves against the more-fully-realized

versions of themselves they had glimpsed, and the

comparisons they made between "present" and "potential"

actually stood in the way of fully realizing their true

natures. Would Esther herself be able to sustain the

sense of enlightenment she had experienced in that

crowded courtroom?

..."Order! Order in the court!" the judge had boomed

when the undertone of excitement in the visitors gallery

exploded suddenly with Esther's appearance to make her

WOLF TIME 308

plea.

"...How does the defendant plead?" he demanded when

she had been led forward by the bailiff and a semblance

of order restored.

Ignoring her attorney, Esther had spoken out at once

in a loud, clear voice which quavered at first but grew

steadily stronger.

"Your honor, I take full responsibility for the

crime of which Im accused. It was premeditated, carried

out by myself alone. I was aware of my actions at all

times. I understand, and I understood then, the social

sanction against taking a human life under any

circumstances other than self-defense or to protect the

lives of others. Nor do I hold myself above the law. I

bow to it willingly, understanding its rightful and

necessary place in society.

"I will not contest the finding of a jury, knowing

and acknowledging that I have murdered a fellow human

being in full possession of my sense of right and wrong.

But I..."

Esther's voice carried easily to the rear of the

courtroom. Yet so overwhelming was the emotion she was

WOLF TIME 309

feeling at this moment that she faltered for the first

time.

She paused to regain her composure. As her red-faced

counsel threw up his arms in resignation, the murmur in

the courtroom escalated again into an uproar. The judge

pounded his gavel.

"Order! Will the defendant please answer my

question? How do you plead: guilty or..."

Esther's face, all too human in its living record of

stress and fatigue to be that of the fully-realized Self-

image of her vision the night before, had nonetheless

been transfigured.

"...I am not guilty," she said.

THE END