“I’m not a kid.”
“I mean the Mercer kid,” said Scott. “Can you take him into another room, keep him distracted?”
One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. “Of course,” I said. “Get rid of both kids at once, that’s a good plan.”
“We’ll fill you in on everything,” said Diana.
“Sure,” I said, no longer caring. If they cut me out of this investigation, I was free to start my own. I walked to the father, still holding his son. “Hey … buddy. Want to come with me for a minute? We’re going to watch…” What did kids watch these days? “Dora?”
“I want to watch PAW Patrol.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Let’s go, you can show me how to turn it on.”
His father seemed reluctant to let him go but saw Detective Scott and the others looming nearby and apparently realized what was going on. The boy climbed down off his lap and led me into the other room. He handed me a remote. “You turn it on with this.”
It looked like it had a thousand buttons, and I grimaced. “Thanks, kid.” The power button was easy enough to find, and I was surprised when it actually turned on the TV instead of killing a satellite connection or something. They had the same cable company I had in my apartment, so I was able to search through the channels and find the kid stuff pretty quickly. “Look, Sesame Street. I didn’t know they still showed that.”
“I want to watch PAW Patrol.”
“It’s not on right now, and I don’t know how your DVR works. Just … watch the puppets, I have to do something.” He sat down, relatively calm, and I pulled out my phone. Still no e-mails from The Hunter. I typed one to him:
You’re the one who wanted to talk. What do you want to say? I assume you’re not going to just tell me who you are, or how to find you. So what are we doing here?
Do you want me to kill someone for you? Is that what this is about? Because that’s not going to happen either. I don’t care if you’re a lion or a hunter or whatever the hell you think you are: I’m not like you.
I sent it, then thought a minute and wrote another one:
Why do you eat them? It’s not for food, because you don’t treat them like food. You don’t degrade them, either, like you’re punishing someone vicariously, and there doesn’t seem to be any emotion behind it, like you’re living out some kind of fantasy. You just take bites, and then give us the bodies.
And then you give us a letter, I thought. That’s the key. What do you do that you don’t have to do? You talk to us. That’s what this is all about.
The kid said something, and I looked up, but he was just talking to the TV. One of the puppets was talking back, in a weird kind of one-sided double conversation. I looked back at my phone and hit send on my message.
The Hunter was talking to us—somehow that’s what this was all about for him. Was he trying to scare us? Trujillo thought he was trying to taunt us, to show his superiority, and I’d been arguing that he was just trying to confuse us. What if there was something more? We kept trying to describe the killer in human terms—we talked about Withered powers here and there, like the ability to withstand a sedative, but we hadn’t talked about Withered motivations. Why would a Withered send us letters? What does he lack, that these letters are trying to make up for? A voice? Brooke had never said anything about a Withered without a voice. I’d have to ask Elijah.
I hadn’t logged out of the e-mail server like I usually did, so I was surprised when it beeped softly. The Hunter had sent me a message:
Tell your boss to check the police station courtesy account. She might want to get to it before the interns do.
We had a new letter. Obviously I couldn’t tell Ostler to check a specific e-mail account without exposing that I had an alternate line of communication … but who knew how long we’d have to wait before someone decided to check the police department courtesy account? If we got to it fast we could stay on his trail, we could find out where he’d sent the e-mail from and go there to look for clues. But I couldn’t give myself away. I had to be patient.
I watched the little boy and the puppets talking to each other without ever talking to anyone but themselves.
* * *
I was at Whiteflower when the e-mail was finally discovered by a police department receptionist who was manning the phones on the night shift. Apparently she got bored; now we knew who checked the courtesy account. She alerted her superior, who alerted Detective Scott, who called Ostler, who called the rest of us and told us to meet at the old offices across the street. I told Brooke I was sorry to be leaving.
“You’ll come back?” she said. “I love you, you know. You need to come back so we can get married and live happily ever after in a little white house.”
“You don’t love me,” I told her.
She looked at the floor, the corners of her mouth sagging. “Do you love me?”
I hesitated, my hand hovering over the door. How could I answer that? I didn’t love her, not the way I loved Marci. Not even the way I loved my mom, and at least half of that love was hate. After a long moment I found my voice to speak. “I don’t know what that means.”
Her voice was pleading. “Then how do you know I don’t love you?”
“Because you’re alive,” I said, and banged on the door in a sudden rage. “The only people who love me are dead.”
* * *
“You’re not going to like this letter,” said Ostler. The whole group was seated around the conference room table: six people, and an empty seat for Kelly. Ostler looked at each of us in turn. “None of us are. Know before we read it that I’ve already contacted headquarters, and they’re dispatching people to check on your families.”
“Holy crap,” said Nathan, “how bad is it?”
Ostler looked at him, put on her glasses, and started to read:
“‘To the Esteemed John Wayne Cleaver, and The People He Occasionally Associates With.’”
“Nice of him to include us,” said Nathan. Ostler ignore him and continued:
“‘I hope you liked my last gift. The clues are important, and I trust you’ll enjoy them, but don’t overlook the body itself. Bodies are important. They are what makes you human. Your humanity is a gift, in a very real sense, and so I make a gift of it to you. Do not squander it.’”
Nathan snorted. “This guy’s insa—”
“Shut up,” said Diana.
“‘Because I am in a giving mood,’” Ostler continued, “‘I offer you another gift: the gift of knowledge. You seek to understand me, but do you really know yourself? Can you be true to what is in you if you don’t know what that is? I suggest that you cannot. Your secrets must be opened, to yourself and to the world. You told me you’re not like me. It is important to understand that you are.’”
“Hold up,” said Trujillo. “We’ve never communicated with him directly, have we?”
“We have not,” said Ostler. I didn’t look at Potash, and counted my breaths slowly to keep my face from changing color. Ostler didn’t look at me. “His last letter told us to kill someone and leave a note on the corpse. I think ‘you told me you’re not like me’ is a reference to the fact that we didn’t.”
I said nothing.
Ostler took a deep breath. “This is the part where it gets bad. You each have a file, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of the key details of your lives have been redacted out of them. I did that to keep our focus on the enemy, and not each other, but some of that information is about to come out. Know that none of this information is new to me: I reviewed it all carefully, and didn’t recruit anybody to the team that I didn’t trust.”
Nobody said anything; we just looked at each other in silence, wondering what horrible secrets were about to be revealed. What had Diana done? What about Nathan? I wasn’t worried about my own secrets—anything Ostler knew, the others could know as well for all I cared. It was the things Ostler didn’t know that I was worried about.
Did the letter really
reveal secrets about Potash? How could anyone know that?
“‘Martín Trujillo is a statutory rapist,’” read Ostler. “‘She was willing, by most accounts, but the law does not consider a fourteen-year-old girl to be a reliable witness.’”
I leapt up from my chair. “You let him spend months alone with Brooke! He slept in the very next room!”
“I was nineteen years old,” said Trujillo. “That was more than thirty years ago.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“He served time,” said Ostler. “He’s had a flawless record since, with a long history of helping to enforce the law.”
“You shouldn’t have let him near Brooke,” I said hotly.
“I’m not a pedophile, John,” said Trujillo, “I was a dumb kid who made a dumb choice. ‘Rapist’ is a poor descriptor of what happened, but it’s the correct legal term and I don’t deny it.”
“How does The Hunter even know this?” asked Nathan.
“He probably had to register as a sex offender,” said Diana.
I felt my left hand curling into a fist, my right hand in my pocket, clenched around my knife. “Dammit, Ostler!”
“He’s paid for it, and moved on,” said Ostler. “People change—do you want me judging you by your worst mistake?”
“You mean you don’t?”
“Just read the letter,” said Diana. “It’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
Ostler continued with the message: “‘I’ve met the girl—she’s much older now, of course. Much prettier than his real wife. Maybe that’s why the ugly one died so young?’”
“She died in a car accident,” said Trujillo, and now his face was as thick with anger as mine. He rolled up his sleeve to display a long scar on his forearm. “I was in the car, too—to even suggest that I would kill my own wife—”
“‘Diana Lucas was drummed out of the air force,’” Ostler read, cutting him off, “‘dishonorably discharged for beating another woman. The victim was sent to the hospital with two broken ribs, several internal injuries, a concussion, and a dislodged eyeball.’”
“Wow,” said Nathan. “What’d she do to you?”
“Nothing,” said Diana curtly.
“I don’t mean injuries,” said Nathan. “I mean what did she do to deserve it? What started the fight?”
“She did nothing,” said Diana slowly. “It wasn’t a fight, it was a…” Diana sighed. “Gang initiation. She wanted to join our crew, and that means you take a beating. Same thing I got when I joined.”
“They have gangs in the army?” asked Nathan.
“Air force,” Diana corrected him sharply. “And yes, every branch of the military has gangs. I was in one before and I was in one there.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Now I send a quarter of my paycheck to inner-city schools,” said Diana. “Now I volunteer at a Big Sisters program whenever we’re in a town big enough to have one. Now I think I’ve done pretty damn well for myself in paying for that mistake, and I don’t want to have to relive it for you all any more than Trujillo wanted to relive his.”
“So far these have both been a matter of public record,” said Nathan. “Kudos to him for digging them up, but anybody could have done the research. He’s not a mind reader.”
“He knows about you,” said Ostler.
Nathan shook his head. “I haven’t done anything like this—”
“‘Nathan Gentry sold cocaine in West Philadelphia for three years,’” Ostler read, “‘and then again in Harvard for two. Most of his customers dropped out, unable to continue school; one of them turned to prostitution to pay for her habit.’”
“I didn’t know about that,” said Nathan.
“Are you kidding me?” asked Diana.
“I didn’t know about the prostitution!” he protested. “Of course I knew about the drugs.”
“And you thought that wasn’t the same?” asked Trujillo. “I lived with an underage girl who thought she loved me—you destroyed dozens of lives.”
“And then tried to hide it from us,” added Diana.
“I was never caught or convicted,” said Nathan, “I didn’t think he’d know about it. I didn’t think anybody knew except Ostler, and that’s because I’m the one who told her.”
“Mr. Gentry has moved on,” said Ostler, “just like the rest of you.”
“But he didn’t suffer for it,” said Diana, and I could tell from the curl of her brow that she was furious. “Trujillo went to jail, I was court martialed, and Nathan just skates by?”
“I knew it was wrong so I got out,” said Nathan. “Do you know how hard it is to get out of dealing? And I think the fact that I did it voluntarily should say a whole lot more than you’re giving me credit for—would you still be gangbanging if the air force hadn’t forced you to stop?”
“They forced me to leave the air force,” said Diana. “I could have kept banging anywhere I went.”
“Arguing about these details gets us nowhere,” said Ostler. “I wouldn’t even be reading this if I didn’t think it would help us catch a bad guy. How did he find out about Nathan? Where is that information available? What kind of person might have access to it? Put the past behind you and let’s treat this letter like the clue it is.”
I listened to them argue without joining in. Didn’t they see that Nathan’s crime was different, though? Not just because he didn’t get caught, and not just because he only hurt people indirectly—his was different because he did it for different reasons. Trujillo was in love, or at least he was horny, and Diana wanted to fit in. They were both emotional acts, made for social reasons. Nathan’s crime was all about himself: he wanted money, so he went out and got some. He sold drugs to get ahead.
As if I needed any more reasons to hate him.
“Okay,” said Nathan, closing his eyes. “Who knows about me?… One of the other dealers, maybe? The kid who supplied me?”
“Kid?” asked Diana.
“I got started in high school,” said Nathan. “We were all kids.”
“More likely one of the victims,” said Trujillo. “How many people know about the one who started selling herself? That can’t be a big group of people.”
“I didn’t even know about her,” said Nathan. “I can’t exactly pull up a list of her friends and family.”
In The Hunter’s e-mail this morning, he’d asked me: “Is there anything you want me to leave out?” Is this what he was talking about? What was he going to say about me?
“Read the rest,” said Potash. It was the first time he’d spoken. “It’s no use jumping to conclusions until we have all the clues.”
Ostler nodded. “The next part’s about me.” She read in a clear voice:
“‘Linda Ostler is a war criminal.’” She paused, but I didn’t know if she was waiting for comments or just steeling her nerve to continue. “‘In 2002 she was assigned to a task force investigating the sale of weapons and explosives across the border from the US to Mexico. She used her position to sell hundreds of automatic rifles to a drug cartel, directly resulting in the deaths of six DEA agents and more than a hundred Mexican civilians.’”
She lowered the letter and looked at us. “Obviously I had my reasons,” she said. “And ‘war criminal’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”
“That was you?” asked Diana.
“I sold coke to some rich kids trying to get enough buzz to get their homework done,” said Nathan. “You sold guns to drug lords? And they’re mad because I ruined a few lives?”
“It was a plan that got out of hand,” said Ostler. “Nobody wanted to supply the cartels, we wanted to catch the smugglers in the middle. We made a hard call and it was the wrong one.”
“That’s an understatement,” said Diana. She looked around at the rest of us. “Has anybody killed more than a hundred civilians? Is that pretty much the high score for the group?”
Potash raised his hand, and Diana fell silent. The rest of us
stared at him. “I’ll be very surprised if it’s in that letter, though,” he said simply.
I’d known he was a killer. I’d known he was the most dangerous one of us. Why did this still feel like a shock? Because he’d admitted it so casually?
Potash hacked a Withered to death with a machete. While dying of a lung disease. Who had I gotten myself entangled with?
Ostler shook her head. “Here’s the only line about Potash. It comes at the end, though, after the one about John—”
“Do them in order,” I said. “Let’s see if he has anything to say about me that the rest of you haven’t already guessed.”
Ostler cleared her throat: “‘I haven’t forgotten about you either, John. I’m sure your friends know about the man you electrocuted; that was in the papers. Do they know about the time you beat your elderly neighbor half to death, and then killed her husband? What about the time you soaked your mother in gas and burned her alive in a car?’”
“Bloody hell,” said Diana.
I said nothing, only stared at Ostler.
“No excuses?” asked Nathan. “No tearful explanations of how it all had to happen and there was nothing you could do to stop it?”
“I assume there’s more,” I said, still not looking at the others.
“How could there possibly be more?” Nathan cried.
“‘You think you’re not like me,’” Ostler read, “‘but you’re more like me than any of them. They hurt people because that’s the way the world works: they want something, so they take it, and hold no pity for the rabble who get in their way. Thus it has always been. You and I are different. We hurt people because we enjoy it. Because the pain and the death are ends unto themselves.
“‘The antelope may crash their horns and call themselves strong, but all of them fall before the lions.’”
I’m not like him, I told myself. Even if we do the exact same things for the exact same reasons, I’m not like him.
I just can’t explain why.
“In John’s defense,” said Ostler, “everyone he’s killed was a Withered.”
“Even your mother?” asked Trujillo.