Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“It’s not their findings I’m strictly interested in. I know enough to know that findings are usually what people want to find. That’s the nature of the damn animal. See, I’m looking for stuff that wasn’t in no findings, wasn’t in no report, something that you, an experienced homicide detective might have felt , even if you didn’t know you felt it at the time. You might call it hunch or buzz or vibe, some soft, unofficial word like that. I have a specific idea on this but I ain’t going to give it to you because it’ll tarnish your thinking. So I guess what I’m asking-sorry it ain’t more specific-is, did you get any funny feelings? Was anything wrong? Did anything unusual happen?”

“I’d have to have an actual imagination to answer that, Gunny.”

“Well, do your best.”

“I went over my notebook, trying to recreate it carefully. No, there wasn’t much there, except a thing so tiny I’m kind of embarrassed to mention it. It ain’t the sort of thing that’s admissible in court. It ain’t evidence, it ain’t forensics, it ain’t factual. Like you say, a funny feeling.”

“Detective, I am so ready to hear this.”

“You know what a homicide dick is? I mean, really is? Forget all the CSI TV bullshit. From a practical point of view, he’s what you call a professional interrupter.”

“I ain’t reading.”

“Nobody ever plans on getting murdered. It’s the last thing on everybody’s mind. Even dope dealers with another gang out to get them, they don’t think today’s going to be their last day. They always live life like there’s going to be a lot of tomorrows.”

“Okay, I’m with you.”

“As that translates practically, I’m the guy who interrupts. I bust into their life on a day they never in a million years thought would be their last, and I see exactly how they lived, without scrubbing or cleaning or getting ready for company. And here’s what I’ve learned: everyone’s a secret pig.”

“I know I am. And my daughters! Wow!”

“Mine too. Those damned girls couldn’t pick up sock one if their mom didn’t yell at them. Anyhow, what this means is you go into a lot of messy homes. Mr. Brown got popped, so you go to the Brown home, and it’s the way it was exactly at the moment Mrs. Brown heard Mr. Brown checked out. She’s in shock. It’s like the house is frozen in Jell-O. Newspapers on the floor, socks on the floor, garbage cans full to overflow, the litter in the cat’s box ain’t been changed, a coupla glasses from last night’s cocktail hour are still out, maybe there’s some plates in the sink, or someone forgot to put the cereal away. You know, that’s how life is lived. To do stuff you have to take stuff out; then you have to put it away. But between the taking out and the putting back, sometimes a lot of time passes, and after having gone into a thousand houses in the past ten years with the worst possible news to deliver and then asking the worst possible questions, I’m here to tell you that most lives are lived, minute by minute and hour by hour and day by day, at some weird place between taking stuff out and putting stuff back. Stuff is everywhere. Daily life is about stuff. You follow me?”

“Sure do. You’re saying-”

“If it had been tossed hard and fast, it would have been a mess. You ever see what IRS does to a house when they toss it? Looks like a cyclone hit it. Our guys ain’t much better, and I don’t bet the Bureau’s are much better than that.”

“Got it. So the Strong house didn’t appear to have been searched.”

“That’s what you might think. But I’m concentrating here on his office, and what I saw was a room that had been searched and then overcorrected . Do you get what I’m saying? It’s subtle. All the stacks were neat. People don’t stack neat. They just throw things on top of each other. The computer monitor had been dusted, even on that pedestal and on the casing in back of the screen. Nobody dusts the pedestal, but this pedestal was dusted. The books were all neatly shelved, the stacks of-I don’t know, he was a professor, right?-articles, books, whatever research stuff a professor would have, it was all neat on the big table and it was centered on the table. It didn’t have the spontaneity of real life. It looked like a museum display. I noted it, maybe didn’t think much of it, but it was especially weird in retrospect because I went out to his office in the Circle Campus the next day with one of the Bureau’s people, and his office, well, it wasn’t a mess, but it was an office. It was kind of messy, not wildly messy, not a shit hole, no, but it had the usual human mess in it. The rest of their house: usual human mess. Glasses in the sink, unmade beds, laundry on the floor, not in the basket. No pigsty, but just the random crap of life. But that one room, it had the look of having been freshly tidied, as if a) he knew he’d be murdered in his alley and wanted his investigators to think, ‘My, what a tidy fellow this man was,’ or b) someone tossed it, but tossed it very carefully, and tidied it up so that no one could tell it had been searched. They just overtidied by a tiny degree, and only a guy like me, Mr. Interrupter with Bad News, would pick up on it.”

“Does the time line work out that someone could have been in the house between the killing and the arrival of the first units? You seem to be implying someone tossed the house, then straightened it out. Was there time enough?”

“Yeah. I checked, and that’s maybe why I’m glad to hear from you, because my thoughts on this were kind of subversive to the general thrust and momentum of the investigation. But of course once our lab people arrived, the FBI people arrived, the media, that sort of condition of his office was destroyed. I didn’t think to have crime scene photo work it, because it wasn’t the crime scene, the car was the crime scene. My bad. But yeah, in terms of time, it was about ninety minutes as far as we can say.”

Bob thought, that’s why he took them in the alley. To give the team time to penetrate, search, tidy, and disappear. No one would notice the search team, because of course it wasn’t a crime scene yet, charged with that special energy of such a place, that charisma. He kills them, the team enters and finds and-

Or maybe it doesn’t find.

Or maybe it finds but it leaves traces of what it found.

“Is this of any help?”

“It’s a great help, Detective Washington. Listen, I see now I’m going to have to come to Chicago. Can I call you? Can you help me?”

“When will you get here?”

“I’m already late.”

Nick groaned. “What’s the policy on this?”

“You can meet him or not meet him. It’s up to you. I should be there to ride herd.”

“You’re sure it’s necessary?”

“You tell me. He said one word. He said if I said the one word to you,” Phil Price continued, “you would want to meet with him.”

“And the one word was ‘Tulsa’?”

“Yeah. I checked the records. I know what it means.”

Nick sat in Price’s office, nicely appointed, on the third floor. Price was Special Agent in Charge of Public Information, but unlike most “public information” hacks in fancy offices all through DC, Price was more agent than reporter suck-up. He’d done street time in New York, LA, and San Francisco, had taken a round in his hip on a raid (a friendly round, no less, from a poorly trained SWAT moron), and now finished out his time in Public Information, cordially hating the reporters who bedeviled him even as they cordially hated him. The subject was a proposed meeting with a New York Times reporter named David Banjax, who was the Times’s man on the still-hot sniper story.