Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

The quote went high in the story.

"Maurice?" Nick had said on the phone after asking for Hargrave's full name.

"Shut up," the detective had answered.

On the drive home Nick paid little attention to the traffic rules. He was in the passing lane of 1-95 northbound doing well over the sixty-five limit. He had promised his daughter that he would no longer show up from work after her bedtime and that he would no longer be the father who was absent from his family's dinner table, even if it was just the two of them. And because he missed her. His wife was gone. Lindsay was gone. All Nick had left was this dry, document-chasing, linguistic-game-playing pursuit of the truth that he called work, and Carly. There was no competition. Carly would win hands down, he told himself over and over and over again.

He skipped up the driveway and walked through the front door, dropping Margaria Cotton's box of letters on the couch out of sight. Elsa passed him with a basket of laundry and said good evening in a professional manner and her strict avoidance of eye contact screamed that he had fucked up again.

Carly was at the kitchen table doing homework. Dinner was done. The dishes cleared. Nick fought the mood with a chipper "Hi, sweetheart, whatcha' doin'?"

His daughter did not look up. He pulled out the chair next to her and sat. He studied her hair, the hues of blond the sun had put in it, the glisten, just like her mother's. She used her left hand to pull one long, loose strand and tucked it behind her ear and he still stared, now at the exposed profile.

"What," she finally said, without moving her eyes from the page, "are you looking at?"

"A pretty girl," he said. He got not a crinkle of response in the corner of her eye or flinch of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

"One that is trying to get her homework done?" she said instead and the exasperation in her voice was much too mature for a nine-year-old and even though it was a good approximation of a pissed-off adult, it didn't quite work.

"No. One who cannot hide her wonderful heart," Nick said. "I'm sorry I'm late, babe. I got kinda caught up at the office."

"I know," she said, still not looking up. It had been his standard excuse for years.

"I know you know," he said, pushing back his chair, the wooden legs screeching on the floor.

The noise seemed to startle the girl. She jumped, just slightly, and then she pushed her own chair back and rose as Nick pivoted and she climbed into his lap and he could feel the wetness from her eyes against his neck and he held her and could think of nothing to say but kept repeating, "I'm sorry, honey. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

After he had dried her tears, after they put the homework away, he waited for her to get ready for bed and this time laid down next to her and read some of her favorite Shel Silverstein poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends. When her eyelids fluttered and she yawned, he stroked her hair and told her he promised never to come home late again and then stared up at the ceiling thinking how often he had made that same promise to his wife. Don't go there again, Nick, he told himself and then tried to block out everything but the sound of his daughter's breathing. When it became deep and rhythmic, Nick slipped out of the room and retrieved the box of letters and sat it on the kitchen table.

He started randomly. The first letter was dated a week after the killings and was from another mother of two who scribbled condolences and then copied a psalm that included something about lambs and innocence and God's love. Nick slid it away.

Another was from a parent at the school where Ms. Cotton's girls had attended sporadically. She had known the children "both of them bright and beautiful and I cannot comprehend your anguish." No, you can't, Nick thought and flipped that one into a growing pile.

After a dozen, he started from the back of the box and became more systematic in his search, not knowing what he was searching for. He first concentrated on the place, the postmark and the date sent. Then he studied the name to see if it sparked even the slightest memory Then he scanned the contents, getting the gist of each letter without focusing on the words. The messages were familiar. He had thrown out a similar pile a month after the death of his wife and daughter without reading or even opening the majority of them.

He was more than halfway through the box when he picked up a long envelope, business-sized, with no return address. Ms. Cotton's address was typed on the face of it. Inside was a folded sheet of stiff stationery. No card. The message was also typed: Condolences on your loss… a complete and utter lack of justice… we failed you and your children… something must be done, and will… the elimination of those that threaten civil society…

Nick jumped to the bottom of the page where the name of the writer was not signed, but simply typed, in an uncapitalized format: yours, mike redman

The name was so out of place Nick recognized it immediately. Redman. The SWAT team member. Five killings in the line of duty. A professional with a sniper rifle.

Nick had written an extensive story about a SWAT shooting that took place in Deerfield Beach a few years ago. His editorial board had taken the opportunity to chastise this guy Redman for killing an armed man, one of a group of guys who were selling weapons out of some motel room and then tried to shoot their way out when the team busted them. Nick had been so incensed over the editorial, he'd gone out and interviewed every team member, including Steve Canfield. He was allowed to view the video- and audiotape of the bust and heard, with his own ears, the whumph of the door breaking down, the shouts of "POLICE, POLICE, DON'T MOVE" and then the scuffling of feet and the sound of gunfire. He'd pulled schematics of the parking lot setup, measured the distances himself and sat in the room where this Redman guy had been acting as sharpshooter and cover man. He'd even gone out on a training day to see how the team was trained. He'd come away impressed and wrote a detailed Sunday story called a tick-tock that gave a second-by-second unfolding of the drama. He had not been allowed to interview Redman, who was still waiting to be cleared by a shooting board investigation. But Nick remembered him. Six-foot. Muscled. Close-cropped hair. And strange eyes, the kind that seemed to absorb everything around him and give nothing back. Nick had read somewhere that his partner had been killed in a SWAT operation years ago. When Redman was eventually cleared, Nick had felt a personal vindication. No one from the editorial board ever said a word to him.

He flipped over the envelope and checked the postal cancellation date. One week after the trial that found Ferris guilty of rape and murder, but long before his sentencing was overturned. Redman. Hell, when was the last time Nick had even heard the name? Last thing he could remember was the pressure of moving the guy off to another division in the Sheriff's Office after the newspaper's editorial board pissed all over the guy.

He looked down at the letter again and first thought about copying it in his home office and then second-guessed himself. He took out a reporter's notebook and a pencil instead and then turned the page, using only the tip of the eraser to touch the paper. He then copied the message word for word into the notebook, and sat back, staring at the collection on the table in front of him. He was fighting an urge to call Hargrave and tell the detective to get the hell over here. "Chill, Nick," he actually whispered out loud.

There was nothing in the letter that said the writer was intending a specific act or what form of "something" would be done. It was also some three years ago when the thing was written. Ferris had been in jail most of that time and Nick didn't even know where the hell this Redman guy had been. He knew that a cop writing to the victim of a crime was unusual because of legal considerations. But after a case was adjudicated? He'd never heard of it, though that didn't mean anything. Coincidence again? Redman writes a vague letter to the mother of two dead girls. Their killer gets shot by a sniper three years later. Redman is a sniper. He must be the avenging shooter. It was the basic logic progression you used to construct in school, always of course in a vacuum. But Nick had learned long ago that logic rarely includes the spins that unpredictable humans can put on it.