Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Sully stopped, the room heavy, the hum of the air-conditioning the only sound. He eyed her for a moment, then sat back down.

“No,” he said.

There was nothing else, her just looking at him, waiting.

“He was commiserating. In my opinion.”

“How do you think he could have learned of your mother’s death?”

“He would have seen my byline then looked me up on the Internet. It’s not hard.”

She nodded. No recognition in the eyes, though, that she knew what he was talking about.

“Like you could have, before you showed up.”

“Sully,” R.J. whispered, thumping a knee against his.

“We’ve had a rather busy morning,” she said. “We came as soon as your editor alerted us to the contact. There wasn’t, isn’t, time for research. Apologies if you’re offended I don’t know who you are.”

Sully gave her a half smile.

“Don’t get it twisted, Special Agent Alma T. Gill. I know a misquote when I hear one. I said you could have found out who my mother was. I didn’t say shit about me. But I got blown up in Bosnia. This being Washington and my employer being a fancy newspaper, it got reported. A couple of stories, some segments on the nightly news. My mother’s murder was mentioned as biography. Nothing huge but it’s on the Web. All I’s trying to tell you is that he didn’t have to be a genius, or take a lot of time, to get that intel.”

“May I ask how your mother was killed?”

“Shot to death. Tula, Louisiana. In her hair salon, such as it was. Cash left in the register. No apparent motive, no suspects. Three shots, two to the head.”

“Did he say how his mother was killed?”

“Thanks for asking her name.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Cyndy. Cynthia.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

“You’re so kind to say so.”

“Did he say how his mother was killed?”

“No. I asked. He said he might could tell me later.”

“Did he blame Representative Edmonds for her death?”

“No. You’re getting ahead, though.”

She gave him the full-on I’ve-about-had-it-with-your-skinny-white-ass look.

“Look, it’s your interview,” he said.

She sat back in her chair, listening.

“What he said, what he asked, was about my mother,” Sully said, and as he spoke, his words came more slowly, more absently, as if he were forgetting the people in the room, that he was talking to anybody at all, save himself.

“He wanted to know, he asked, not so much about the method of how she was killed and what the scene was like, and where I was when I heard. That’s usually what people ask about, you know. Details. Gunshots. People running. Like the last five minutes of their lives was all that mattered. People, they’re interested in murder. They are. Grief? No. You want to talk about a killing, you’n do that on television. Grief, the long arc of it, you have to pay somebody to listen. Shrinks. Doctors. Counselors. He, what he asked, was about me, and what it was like living with that all these years. Growing up with it. He wanted to know how that ate at me. He wanted to know, if I had the chance, if I would kill her killer. If that would make me a bad person if I did.”

The room had gone silent, everyone staring. He looked up.

“It’s my two cents that you have to have that experience to be interested in that, those, questions. Our boy’s mom died hard.”

“You say that,” Chin Man said, “like you feel sorry for him.”

Sully looked at the agents. “I don’t know I’d say ‘feel sorry.’ I’d say, talking to him, seeing him yesterday, he’s a sick man. I’d say he’s been corroding for a long time, bones wasted down to rust. You want to say that’s feeling sorry, go ahead.”

“He hurt a lot of innocent people yesterday,” Chin Man said. “Killed several. That’s the only reason we’re here, the only reason anybody gives a damn about this guy.”

“That’s the problem with victims and perps,” Sully said. “Line’s so thin. Stop the clock yesterday morning, he’s a sad story. By nightfall, he’s a monster. I don’t buy he made the transition in the afternoon. Grief is a patient bastard. It’ll take its time, twist you into something you never were.”

Gill put both elbows on the table, leaning in now. “So. The point. Did he blame Representative Edmonds for his mother’s death?”

“Not exactly. Waters, he said he had to get the attention and get his attention. My emphasis, not his.”

“Did he elaborate?”

“No. I didn’t get it either. By ‘his’ I thought he meant Edmonds’s, but there wasn’t a lot of time for follow-up. He was scattered, he stuttered, he kept thinking somebody was going to trace the call. The whole thing was, what, three, five minutes.”

“Did he seem in possession of his senses?”

“I would say so. Scared. But I mean, look, he had the presence of mind to pick up Edmonds’s cell phone, either from his body or from his office, and use that to call 911, right? He saw my story, in the paper or online, looked up my name, then, I guess, called the paper’s switchboard, got transferred to my line, got my cell from the message on the machine, and called me, again from Edmonds’s phone.”

Gill nodded, looking down the row of seats at their recorder.

“And then, then he quoted a poem?”

“Used a line. I wouldn’t say quoted. He was talking about the killing-Edmonds-and he said that after he stabbed him, Edmonds ‘lay there like a patient etherized upon a table.’ He stopped, and then said, sort of to himself, ‘as the evening was spread out against the sky.’ It seemed like it just occurred to him. It wasn’t a grand statement. Then he went back to the killing, and how he thought he saw somebody in the bathroom, which turned out to be me, and he said something about how we could have spoken when we were all but face-to-face, and then I said, because I had remembered the poem, ‘but you went through certain half-deserted streets.’”

She looked at him.

“T. S. Eliot,” Sully said. “‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ Then Waters sort of laughed. Sort of. Some noise. He said that he was glad he called and that he would call me back when he could. He said he was tired and hungry and then hung up. The end. It’s the second time we been over this.”

Gill nodded to the man on her left. Writing on his notebook, he got up and left.

“Agent Ginsberg will get research at Quantico pulling that poem apart immediately,” she said. “Maybe he’s trying to-”

“They’ll like the line about there being ‘time to murder and create,’” Sully said. “I looked up the thing, too.”

“-tell us, okay, see, that’s one of the problems here,” she said. “We have an apparently mentally disturbed Native American, lightly educated and living in rural squalor, and yet he’s broken into the Capitol, killed his target, escaped, and now he’s got his feet up, calling reporters and chatting about dead moms and obscure poetry. How would you explain that, Mr. Carter?”

Irritated, like she had been since she’d walked in. The air in the room, it felt recycled, musty, run through rusting vents.

“I would say I don’t have to,” he said. “Terry Waters doesn’t need me or you or a psychiatrist to explain him. Neither did Oswald or Booth or Manson. They just are.”

“He’s got help,” she said. “He didn’t do this himself.”

“Possible. But, look, let’s don’t go calling this guy a criminal mastermind. I’m a mongrelized Anglo from eastern Louisiana, very lightly educated, to use your charming phrase, and grew up in rural squalor. You, you’re an African American, the most trod upon of all Americans. Most of your accent is gone, but it’s still got a trace of soft South to it, I’m going for Georgia, South Carolina, a big city rather than a small town, which means-given that people of your parents’ generation were not moving from north to south but the other way around-your people have been down there a long time. And yet here you sit, a big-shot profiler for the FBI, at the center of the number-one criminal manhunt in the nation.”