Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

The Bureau had no comment; Nick, of course, had no comment. Bob saw a glimpse of the girl Starling, her head down, racing past the assembled cameras outside the Hoover Building in DC; he thought she looked upset.

Then the shows all cut to an interview with Joan Flanders’s ex-husband, the rich oddball T. T. Constable. He was all cowboyed up, because now he lived in the West, had essentially given up his eastern identity, and by now everybody was used to seeing him in a cowboy hat and open-necked red shirt with a red bandana about his neck.

As usual, he was ornery and colorful, and the cameras ate up his rugged, tanned face and grizzle of day-old beard, as if he’d spent the day ropin’ and brandin’ instead of sellin’ short and firin’ low producers.

“Well, damn,” he said, “I do expect more from the FBI. We all know who did this, and the sooner we reach that legal determination, the sooner we can put it behind us and celebrate Joan’s great life instead of her unfortunate death at the hands of some screwball marine who thought he was still in the war or something. It’s so straightforward, it’s a mystery to me how they could get it so knotted up.”

Then the Wyoming congressman-the shows didn’t point out that he represented the district in which much of Tom Constable’s vast ranch, one of several, was located, nor did they mention that his party affiliation was the same as Tom’s and that Tom had donated generously to his campaign-this Jack Ridings took over, and promised hearings on FBI hiring and promotional practices, and wondered how a situation like this could come about. Essentially you had a sniper investigating a sniper, and was it not fair to wonder where his allegiance lay? Did he have some sort of psychological investment in the act of sniping? Did he think it was noble to eliminate a human being at long range; would that cloud his professional judgment, cause him to refuse to accept certain realities?

Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.

So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.

Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.

But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.

What could have happened? Bob wondered.

He wished he could get back into the house, maybe look more carefully at appointment books or calendars for that time period. Once he’d penetrated the safe, that’s all he’d cared about and he’d concentrated on it at the expense of everything else.

Fool! Idiot! Making mistakes! Sloppy, old, stupid, eyes not working, brain asleep.

He tried to think what to do with the information. He could go over the information from the safe again, for the fiftieth time; he could go over the notebooks again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something; he could log on to the Internet and call up newspapers from the first week in September on the possibility that it was something out there, in the real world, that had left a mark that he could understand and link to them for a clearer picture; he could go through the biography a journalist had written about them and check to see if something in their past happened around the first and they were celebrating-but that one was dumbest.

He was so tired. It was time to go to bed. His mind was blurring; he was getting nowhere.

But he couldn’t tear himself away. Silly as it seemed, he had to run it out. He got out his laptop, logged on to Google. He thought he’d just Google randomly for a bit, Jack Strong/Mitzi Reilly/September, and see what he’d get. He got nonsense. Nothing, crazy, insane, lots of refrains of some song or pieces of doggerel poetry like “Try to remember, it was the kind of September, when we were mellllllowwww,” whatever that was. He jumped through the listings, and then something caught his eye on about the seventh screen under the listing O. Z. Harris, an obituary, from the Chicago Tribune , page D15, with the lines blackened “… and was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzy Reilly, a 1997 biography.”

He called it up.

The headline read Radical journalist O. Z. Harris, 81.

He read,

Oscar Zebulon Harris, a Pultizer Prize-winning journalist who challenged the system and earned renown for his integrity and intrepidity, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, died Wednesday after a long illness.

Harris, 81, better known as “O. Z. Harris” and “Ozzie” to the many young writers who admired and loved him, covered the American left over many years and worked for, among others, The New Republic , The Nation, Mother Jones , Rolling Stone, and finally his own newsletter, called Ozzie’s Oz, a famous muckraking journal that took on the powers that be.

Frequently called an agitator and, in a different age, an activist, Ozzie was as prickly to his enemies-usually the Justice Department, four Republican administrations, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Army-as he was loving to his friends, which included a generation of progressive journalists and activists.

His reporting on war crimes in Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and he was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a 1997 biography.

He died September 3.

According to his own wishes, no services will be held and his body was cremated. Donations on his behalf may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Cook County Department of Public Administration warehouse was west of the city, even beyond Oak Park, in a town near O’Hare called Franklin Park, full of tidy bungalows and Italian, Mexican, and Korean restaurants, tracing the demographic tides that had flowed outward from the big town. It was flat, out here, and so far gone the skyscrapers that contributed to America’s second-greatest skyline were unseen. Trees filled the little crosshatched streets off the main drags, but the drags themselves were the usual run of strip malls, chain restaurants, the odd old free-standing restaurant, even a racetrack with an imposing stadium abutting it.

Washington and Swagger found the nondescript old factory building on Mannheim Road, in an area zoned for light manufacturing, each building separated from the others by cyclone fences with barbed wire discouragement up top. They turned off the busy Mannheim, pulled through a gate, earning admittance on the power of Washington’s police ID, found parking, and went through a green door to a grimy office with a counter.