THE ELEPHANT HUNTER

by Shane Ryan

“The fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one good one.”

—Archilocus, c. 700 BC

PART ONE: THE RISE OF THE HUNTER

“Please don’t confront me with my failures…I had not forgotten them.” —Jackson Browne

Chapter 1: The Bird Watcher

Carthage, NC, September 18

For the third straight morning, he had come to kill the Senator.

Rivers of sweat streamed down his back as the relentless North Carolina sun shimmered and burned. He lifted the binoculars hanging from his neck and peered west down Union Church Road—nothing yet. No Senator, no bike, no cars.

He took a deep breath. The smell of pine on the wind gave him the briefest sense of peace—not quite serenity itself, but a faint shadow of something he had lost a long time ago.

His only true companion, for years and years, was his rage.

He peered into the tall trees. In the very unlikely case that anybody was watching the desolate road, they would see what appeared to be a stereotype—khaki suit, hiking boots, thick gardener’s gloves, and an olive-colored hat with a drooping brim that hid his face. It was a face he needed to hide, because it had become bone thin from the years of never being hungry, of forcing himself to eat at regular intervals, of forgetting too often…a face that was too memorable.

He looked cartoonish, and he chose the outfit for that exact effect. Someone might lay eyes on him, but even ten minutes later, they wouldn’t be able to describe him beyond generic terms—a bird watcher. That was one of the mantras he had repeated to himself in the planning stages: Not invisible, but unknowable.

The fragrant pine boughs were a welcome distraction, and not just from the mission that lay before him. It was more—he desperately needed to escape a gnawing thought. It was a demon he’d first confronted years ago, but managed to drown with action. Now it had returned: the truth that deep down, what he wanted more than almost anything else…

Just say it—

You want to die.

As the hour for killing approached, he was forced to admit that the old desire had gathered its forces once more in the secret chambers of his mind.

This time, to his surprise, the realization didn’t fill him with panic or dread. There would be no crisis. This time he had approached something like acceptance.

Yes, you want to die. But you want them to die first.

1 *

It required so much waiting. Three days and counting, not to mention the lonely years of preparation.

He had to kill now. This morning. The Senator had seen him twice, and while the man might chalk that up to coincidence, meeting the same person in the same spot at the same time on three straight days could raise alarm bells in even the most unobservant mind. If it didn’t happen today, he’d abort, move on to the next target.

Failure would be a fitting end to an odyssey of frustration. On the first day, several cars had come at the wrong moment, leaving him no choice but to delay. Conditions were perfect on day two, but he’d lost his nerve. He didn’t even open the door of his gray Honda Civic…just gawked like an imbecile while the Senator pedaled past, raising a friendly hand. The memory filled him with shame.

Conditions were perfect again. The collaborating sun was just where it should be, high in the sky at his back, bright enough to blind anyone coming up the road from the west.

He ran through his preparations. The Senator was an avid road cyclist, a fact he’d learned from a local newspaper one year earlier and confirmed during two scouting missions. On those trips, and again this week, he’d slept in the back of his Civic in a Wal-Mart parking lot two hours to the west in Charlotte. He bought the car a year ago, with cash, from an obvious drug addict, and he had his lies prepared if a cop or a security guard tapped on his window. His cover story even included a favorite bird, the Antillean nighthawk.

He knew that the Senator, a fit 45, would cross the Sandhills on his bike every day during the recess periods when he was home from Raleigh. And as good luck had it, the man was a creature of habit who rode the same route each time.

Most of the 25-mile ride was lonely and isolated, but one spot stood out above the others as an ideal ambush spot. And so, for three straight days, the bird watcher had parked his car facing west at the top of this short, steep valley in Union Church Road. The depression went on for a half mile before it rose again, just as steeply, and the road bent out of sight on both sides of the dip to form a horseshoe. Thickets of tall loblolly pine crowded the shoulder on either side, cutting off sight lines from the north and south. As for people? No chance. These were the boondocks—no homes within earshot.

Whatever happened in that hollow was invisible and inaudible to the outside world. The fact that a cyclist would necessarily be crawling as he scaled the eastern face, and that he’d have to shield his eyes against the morning sun, made it perfect.

2 The margins were tight. He’d have approximately three minutes from the moment the Senator appeared on the crest of the western hill to when he finished his climb. Three minutes to stage the hit-and-run. Three minutes to kill.

*

He raised his binoculars again. He spotted a motorcycle in the distance, but no bike. The Senator was late.

He tried to admire the scenery, to pretend he was less nervous than he felt. If you only paid attention to the acres of undulating trees, he thought, you might mistake this place for verdant.

In fact, the soil was hard-baked, sandy, tough. Millions of years ago, before the ocean retreated, this had been the beach—an endless stretch of sand dunes. Now it was a bridge between the mountains and the new coastal plain, but you could see the remnants of its littoral history on the dry forest floor.

The endless minutes passed. He spotted a hazy shape on the horizon. He adjusted the focus, and…

Okay.

The Senator.

The man himself, in the flesh, unmistakable in his red-and-white cycling jersey and blue padded shorts atop the expensive Trek bike.

In his reverie, he had lost precious seconds, and so he raced to the car.

He gunned the engine, pulled out, and realized he had forgotten to check for other cars. He knew he should stop, but for once he felt ready.

You’ll have to take your chances sooner or later.

When the senator reached the valley floor and began his climb, the bird watcher took a deep breath and started down the hill. The hesitation from the day before hit him again, but now he was ready for it. He accelerated, and the needle on the speedometer jumped. At the critical moment, almost sick with fear and anger, he made his move. With a wrench of the wheel, foot hard on the accelerator, he steered his car into the bike.

A muffled shout, a thud of flesh and pavement.

Now the adrenaline surged. He steered away from the ditch and executed a K-turn. With the sunlight in his face, he could barely make out the scene before him. The

3 senator had been unable to dislodge his shoes from the clips when he fell, and now he tugged at them as he lay on his side, the bike locked between his knees. His face went through a series of pained contortions—he may have broken his hip, or his collarbone—and he screamed something in the direction of the car.

Paralyzed, the bird watcher sat in his car and watched as the man finally freed his left foot. He crawled on his hands knees downhill, his right shoulder hunched around his ear, and began to reach for the rear pouch of his jersey.

A cell phone. Shit.

He never expected his victim to be coherent enough to make a call. The car sped forward, as though operating in defiance of the driver’s indecision. The Senator tried to protect himself, and the fender slammed into his back. The impact shook the car, and the Senator tumbled forward and seemed to skid when he landed.

The bird watcher drove away, up the eastern hill, where he parked the car on the shoulder, threw the door open, and made it fifteen feet into the woods before he vomited into a bed of pine needles. He sensed his entire body shaking, but he couldn’t focus enough to see—he moved through a gauzy mist, heavy and slow, floating above his own body.

He wanted to escape. He walked back to his car, put both hands on the hood and leaned forward. He heard himself panting.

He might not be dead. The whole purpose was to kill him. What good would it do if he were left alive?

He returned to the Civic. Blinking against the sun, he spotted the Senator at the bottom of the far hill. He’s moving.

This time the wounded man saw the car approach, and began dragging himself toward the forest.

So he knows, now. He knows what this is.

The wounded man made it to the tree line, so the bird watcher parked, tossed the bike into the woods, and listened. He heard the faint wind, and birdsong, and even the whisper of drifting pine needles touching the pavement. Had the Senator vanished? Was the God he constantly referenced in his speeches protecting him now, at the final hour?

And then the silence ended, and there rose a loud, keening moan—the noise of a dying animal. Fifteen feet from the road, hidden from view, the Senator sat against one of the huge pine trunks, facing the deep woods.

4 The bird watcher found him fumbling with his cell phone, which he kicked from his hands. Needing a moment to think, he rested his head against the trunk of the tree, but only felt the sticky resin of pine sap on his forehead.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to plan.

The Senator held out both hands in supplication. There was blood on his right leg from the road rash and his jersey was torn at the chest, but the rest of his injuries must have been internal.

He might die from them, or he might not. It might happen too slowly.

He needed a rock. He looked to the forest floor, where he found nothing but loose sand. Could he use a pinecone? No, it would break instantly. Then he felt the weight of the binoculars around his neck, dragging his head to the ground.

He stood above his victim. For a moment, all he saw was a human in pain. The sustaining rage began to desert him. He would have to act on willpower alone.

His grip on the binoculars was awkward, but when he snapped the barrels together, he could hold them securely. The Senator made a last feeble gesture with his hands, but it offered no protection as the hard metal descended. The first blow made a hollow noise against his skull.

“No.”

The word was a croak, a whisper, and it sounded more tired than afraid. The Senator brought his hands to his head and managed to curl into a fetal position.

The bird watcher had imagined this moment a thousand times, had delivered a thousand speeches about unforgivable crimes. But now, in the moment, he couldn’t summon a single word.

“I’m a senator,” the man slurred. “I’ll pay you. For God’s sake…”

A mistake. His voice resurrected the past. Finally, the memory flooded, and with it the precious rage, the pure white animal fury that coursed through the bird watcher like a drug—equally transporting, equally ruinous. He felt light-headed and close to bliss.

“I know who you are. That’s why you’re dying.”

He had spoken better words in his dreams, but now he understood that words didn’t matter.

5 The second blow produced another moan—lower, almost guttural. The bird- watcher hit him again, and again, and again. The light in the Senator’s eyes turned to despair, and then dull recognition. The ninth blow rendered him unconscious. Soon the hard skull cracked. Blood sprayed onto the bird watcher’s clothes, his face, his eyes, but he kept hitting, lost in the beautiful violence, until there was no longer any doubt.

By the time he finished, there was a deep cavity where once there had been a face.

He felt the urge to vomit again, but though he retched and coughed, and though he sunk to his knees and gagged into the hard earth, nothing came.

Standing, staggering, he wove his way through the tree line, hitting his shoulder on the last thick trunk. He spun and fell, landing on his knees in the drainage ditch.

Just as concrete thought returned to his brain, he heard an engine to his left. There, at the peak of the western hill, a pickup truck appeared.

Paralysis. Shock and indecision. He knew he should sprint for his car. But all he did was turn his back to the road, lift the binoculars, and scan the treetops. The view was obscured by seeping red rivulets.

If the driver could see his face, he’d see a bloody head staring out from a bloody khaki suit into a pair of bloody binoculars that were glued by pine sap to his bloody forehead.

But because the driver had the sun in his eyes, and because he only saw a stereotypical bird watcher, he drove on.

*

When it was over, the killer drove a mile away to a small creek. He washed off the blood and changed his clothes. He bagged the soiled clothes in plastic, to be burned later. He threw on the hooded sweatshirt over his t-shirt, and turned on Deer Trail Lane—the first of the many back roads that would deliver him west to Charlotte, where he would send the letter.

A week ago, he’d paid a homeless man $100 to buy him a cheap USB flash drive. The same day, he brought the drive to an Internet café that took cash and had no visible security cameras. He transcribed the letter from his notebook—the letter he had slaved over, the one he would send to blogs and newspapers when he finished— onto Microsoft Word. When it was finished, he saved the file to the USB and deleted all traces of it from the café computer.

The letter was important, he reminded himself as he drove. Almost as important as the murder itself, or at least equally so—one without the other would be useless. He

6 could no more afford to bungle this part of his mission than he could afford to let the Senator live.

He parked the Civic a few blocks away from the public library, walked the rest of the way, and logged into a public terminal. He plugged in the flash drive, made a fake Gmail account, and drafted an email to the journalists he’d picked out in advance. Then, using a simple script in Google spreadsheets, he scheduled it to send ninety minutes later.

He wept as he left the city, first quietly and then uncontrollably. The ferric smell of blood lingered, and each time he shut his eyes he saw a human face transform into pulp, blow by gruesome blow. He screamed once, but the high piercing wail frightened him into silence.

*

He threw the USB drive and the notebook into the Catawba River. Once he hit Spartanburg, he reversed course and drove north through the Appalachians on I-26, missing the scene of his crime by about 130 miles.

His belief came back to him like a benediction. By the time he saw the city lights of Asheville, his own words were being recited to him on National Public Radio, resonant and beautiful even through the medium of disapproving voices. The opening line brought him the first bit of happiness he’d felt all day.

Ted Harwood died today for his sins.

He pushed on through the mountains, sleepless on a starry night, bound for home.

7 Chapter 2: Best Friends

Durham, NC, Oct. 17: One Month after the death of Ted Harwood

Charlie McGrath belonged to a lost generation of smart boys—the ones who never looked very hard for their destinies, and thus never found them. Clinging to the dregs of his mid-thirties, he felt the weight of time’s awful gravity bearing down with greater force each day.

Instead of transitioning gracefully into middle age, he had become more frustrated, more helpless at the prospect of a life where every dream was sinking into a nightmare of wasted potential. At night, he stared at his dark bedroom ceiling and thought of lost chances.

But now, waiting for his friend in the bustling sandwich shop, he felt a surprising calm. Equanimity was a rare gift these days, and he had not expected it here, amid the bright red tables and chairs, the drone of the soda machine, the headache- inducing glare from the recessed fluorescent lights, and the cross-talk of a 12-person cable news panel blaring from a hanging television. It was a scene to depress even the most tranquil soul.

It couldn’t touch him tonight. He was lost in a trance, gazing through the front window into the settling dusk. When he arrived an hour earlier, the sky over the highway still held traces of blue, and the clouds to the west were lit up in pink. Now the sun had nearly set, leaving a purple haze in its wake. On the sidewalk, the leaves of a thin willow oak still showed faint hints of green in the gathering dark, and the sky above the parking lot had faded to a slate gray.

He always felt happiest in weather like this—the overcast days of autumn, when the hidden sun exercised a more subtle influence on the world. The slow, armada-like drift of the clouds made the approaching night portentous, even ominous, and it filled him with anticipation.

Maybe it was his Irish blood, a gift from ancestors who had lived their bleak lives in mist and rain. Or maybe he just liked the feeling that he could hide in the coming gray, blend into the shadows, and lose himself in a private romance.

*

He arranged the spice shakers on the table with exacting precision along an invisible axis, in descending order of height: red pepper flakes, parmesan, salt, pepper. Something looked off when he finished—too much white with the parmesan and salt—so he shifted the pepper between them.

He was still tinkering when the door opened and Elijah D. Wilder, bona fide FBI agent, stood in half silhouette—tall and slim, with a double-breasted beige trench

8 coat, gray vest, black pants, black wingtips. Around him, heads rose. Their gaze lingered a moment too long—the room had changed with his arrival—and so, self- conscious, they turned away, waited for him to pass, and cast furtive glances until they could reconcile his presence with their ordinary lives.

But Eli’s eyes were fixed on Charlie, and his embrace was for Charlie, and everywhere the jealous world looked on.

*

Eli didn’t have much time—he never did—and neither of them felt hungry, so they bought sodas and found a corner table. Eli locked his fingers beneath his chin, planted his elbows on the table, and adopted a look of pained sympathy—one of their oldest jokes.

“Charlie, tell me…” Eli lowered his voice to a meaningful whisper, playing the passive-aggressive southerner to the hilt. “How are you?”

“Eli,” Charlie said, mustering his best salesman’s grin, “I’m 36 years old, I hate my job, and the girlfriend I loved—no, love—is off fucking someone else. On top of that, I can’t stop ruining my body with bad food and worse drink. Other than that, no complaints.”

“Bless your heart.”

Without breaking eye contact, Eli reached out and pushed the pepper shaker an inch backward, knocking it out of line.

This was another old joke. Eli had recognized his friend’s obsessive proclivities from the start, and would never miss the chance to provoke him. Liz, his ex, had hated it. She found it cruel, but Charlie knew better. These moments proved the strength of their friendship. They knew each other, they loved each other, and by refusing to treat him like a mental patient, Eli showed that he understood and accepted Charlie’s strange brain.

“Do they miss their friends?” Charlie asked, as he pushed the pepper shaker back into place.

Eli narrowed his eyes, sensing an attack. But he played by the rules, and walked straight into it.

“Who?”

“The last hairs on your head.”

9 Eli gave him a generous laugh, though the joke wasn’t very funny—the laugh of a man who was very good at pretending he wasn’t vain.

In college, and for years after, Eli would have bit back with a remark twice as savage, and they’d be off to the races. But there the relationship had changed—friendly abuse is never quite as casual when it veers too close to a bitter truth, and the truths of Charlie’s life had been nothing but bitter of late. So Eli sat back and accepted his portion without a fight, which was its own kind of superiority.

Charlie refused to spare himself.

“Better bald than a confirmed failure, I suppose.” He lifted his soda. “Here’s to you.”

Eli knew better than to smile, but Charlie detected in his friend’s eyes just a hint of pity. More, he knew that in some way he was fishing for absolution—putting his own insecurities into the ether so they could be contradicted by the better man. He felt a wave of self-loathing wash over him. He was too old to need somebody else’s approval.

*

They had been college roommates once, and they’d shared a sense of destiny—two clever kids with the world by the balls.

Charlie was the intellectual, the shyer of the two, where Eli was the force of nature, tall and charismatic and ethnically ambiguous, a protean actor suited to every role. He had been born to the one of the few Mormon families in the mountains of western North Carolina—an identity he would share only at gunpoint—and his parents tried for 18 years to cement his feet to the soil. But the things he craved drove him away; painfully, irrevocably.

They had been equal lights then, but in the decade and a half since graduation, their paths had diverged. Eli focused his significant ambitions on his career, and had already attained the rank of supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. Charlie had worked as a journalist, where he pulled off intermittently brilliant investigative work for a number of small Internet outlets that paid him nothing, earned him no recognition, and then folded when the rich men bankrolling them grew bored.

Burnout came far too early, and was far too vicious to withstand. He put up a token fight for a year, gave up pretending, and tried law school, where he lasted just long enough to be swallowed in debt. That experience broke him, and after flirting with a nervous breakdown, he took a clerical job at the university’s cancer hospital. Five years later, he was still there.

10 The comparisons grew more lopsided the closer you looked. Eli had been married almost a decade and had three children. Charlie always believed he’d marry Liz, until she came to him a year ago and showed him on her iPhone calendar that they hadn’t had sex in seven months. Things moved quickly after that—she remedied the drought with a mutual friend before the week was up, and if you could believe Facebook, they were still together.

Eli kept in shape, barely drank, and, aside from a receding hairline, looked every bit as sharp as the glory days. Charlie hadn’t been slim in a decade; he bordered on fat, flirted with alcoholism, and was lazy enough to know exactly how many sick days he could take in a year.

He found it difficult, in Eli’s presence, not to feel vastly inferior.

*

“Actually,” Eli said, sensing the need for a bit of flattery, “I’ve been thinking about you lately. I’d give a fortune to have your bloodhound nose.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow.

“Any inkling why I’m in North Carolina?” Eli asked.

“I figured it had something to do with the Elephant Hunter.”

There it was, thought Eli. The nom de guerre for America’s latest psychopath, invented by some cunning little blogger whose identity was already lost to history. Once conceived, it spread to Twitter and then like wildfire to every digital outpost. The elephant is the Republican symbol, and the killer hunted Republicans—two of them, so far—so why not?

The tipping point in the mainstream came when Daryl Lee started using the name on MSNBC, which gave the other pundits tacit permission. The major papers and network anchors caught on after about a week, though they still tried to distance themselves from any whiff of sensationalism with disclaimers like “the so-called ‘Elephant Hunter,’” or “the political assassin popularly known as the ‘Elephant Hunter.’”

The last hold-outs were Fox News, who preferred “terrorist,” but even they gave up when their guests failed to take the hint. At this point, a different name was out of the question—it would be like inventing a new word for water.

“You figured right,” Eli told his friend. “I spent three days running between Columbia and Carthage, thumb planted squarely in my ass.”

“I told you to stop doing that. It blows your cover as FBI.”

11

*

But Charlie leaned forward, intrigued. This case had caught his imagination weeks earlier and wouldn’t go away, especially after the second murder in South Carolina.

As a rule, he kept a certain distance from politics. To engage only reminded him of the career he’d lost, but the Elephant Hunter had a magnetic pull on him. For the last month he had stayed awake researching online, sleepless in the glow of his laptop. He read the same articles again and again. He watched the same news clips, reviewed the same photographs, re-read the killer’s two notes to date—one for each murder.

To hear Eli bring it up now, at this unexpected meeting, provoked in him a sense of kismet. This story is attached to you, Charlie..

But this thought was not yet verbal—it drifted in the instinctive backwaters, waiting to take solid form.

“No luck?” he asked Eli.

“We know he’s white. Might be tall.” A silence in which real frustration crept through. “We almost had some DNA, but even that’s only useful if there’s a match. Otherwise, except for one witness who didn’t actually witness anything, we’re drawing dead. And not just here. South Carolina too. It’s worse there, actually.”

“Worse how?”

“He learned not to vomit.”

“He puked in Carthage?”

“We think.”

“Can’t you track him from that?”

“In theory. But we didn’t find it until the second day. It wasn’t anywhere near the murder, and there was no usable sample. We’re not even sure it’s him. Could be some yokel—what else is there to do out there but drink and puke?”

“What about surveillance cameras?”

“Not even close. Witness said he was driving a gray car, no clue what make or model, no memory of any distinguishing feature beyond “tall,” no license plate. We found nothing on the major roads to or from Charlotte, which means he probably didn’t

12 take major roads. Which was smart. And he’s probably dumped the car by now anyway.”

*

Eli had decided when he joined the FBI that Charlie would be privy to a few of his best secrets. It was against every rule, of course, and his sin became more egregious the higher he rose, but his secret suspicion—one he was always too careful to confirm—was that all of his colleagues had one civilian confessor in their lives.

Most assigned the role to their spouse, but he hadn’t had a meaningful conversation with lovely, fragile Ann in half a decade. In the rare instances when he took a chance, her eyes went vacant and she muttered banalities like, “that’s terrible.”

So he unburdened himself to Charlie. Not often, and not out of any pressing desire to lighten the weight of his secrets, but simply because he enjoyed it. The prevailing archetype at the FBI was the Very Serious Man, whose individuality was only hinted at by faint expressions of what passed for humor inside the gray walls. But Eli liked to feel impressive now and then, and he knew one important thing about Charlie—a long history of exposing secrets had made him very good at keeping them.

Charlie popped the lid off his soda and tipped an ice cube into his mouth. Eli smiled, but it was a thin smile. For a moment, he looked almost old, almost worried.

“The whole thing could go to shit really fast. If we can’t catch him, or if we catch him too late…”

Eli let the thought dissolve into the hum of conversation, the squeaking door, the knives fighting through bread to the plastic countertops beneath.

“Copycats?”

“Yes. Or the reverse.”

“Right wingers. They have more guns.”

“Or imagine this—our fearless president sending leftists to jail under the pretense that they’re all future killers. Think any of Cornwell’s Republicans would have the balls to stop him? Think any of the Democrats have enough power?”

“Jesus.”

“The political climate”—these words in air quotes—“means that once the powder keg is lit, boom, we’re fucked, it’s too late. The idea is to catch him fast, tell the world he’s a solitary lunatic, and pretend we still live in a functioning society.”

13 “Isn’t it already too late?”

“Maybe.” He let his gaze drift past Charlie to the TV screen.

Eli felt a profound impotence, and it showed. He knew that “working” the case at this stage mostly meant hoping that he botched his next attempt, since it was almost impossible to catch a serial killer operating in what appeared to be a random pattern. At this point, he was waiting for the Elephant Hunter to catch himself.

*

Charlie’s head was spinning as he remembered Eli’s words: “I’d give a fortune to have your bloodhound nose.”

His thoughts quickly devolved into fantasy—the kind of egotistical wish fulfillment he’d caught himself slipping into since Liz left, the kind that worried him sick because it had never enticed him before. Begin the silent monologue:

Why is he telling me about the Elephant Hunter? What does he see, when he looks across the table? Does he see someone who had been more than a journalist? Who broke legitimately big stories? Someone with talent, maybe even genius? Someone whose obsession could help? Is he giving me a hint?

He dimly recognized his own narcissism, dimly registered alarm, and then ignored both.

Why had this case proven so irresistible, long before Eli entered the picture? He didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in unseen forces pulling you to the unknown. And now those forces had brought the Elephant Hunter to his doorstep. Signs and wonders…

The wish had escaped from the penumbra of submerged thought, even if he was too afraid to acknowledge it:

This feels like destiny.

He forced himself to speak.

“What about profilers? Don’t you have an army of mind-readers?”

“We do. In fact, they gave us an hour-long presentation last week. By the end, we knew to keep our eyes open for a college-educated white man between the ages of 35 and 60.”

“That narrows it down.”

14 “Oh, I forgot—he’s also unhappy.”

“All hail the FBI’s finest.”

*

Eli had to suppress a wave of irritation at Charlie’s jab. He could fulminate against his own tribe with the best of them, but he also held the unspoken belief that this cynicism had to be earned over the disenchanting years. You could mock the place— viciously if necessary—but only if you had worshipped it first.

“You probably think he’s a folk hero, right?” he asked, channeling his aggression. “I know your politics. Maybe you want to build a shrine to him like the rest of the Che Guevaras online.”

“And you have zero politics, as always. If you had your druthers, it would solve itself.”

“Charlie, my boy, you read me like a book.”

In fact, Eli thought, I would love if the man turned up gruesomely dead.

The questions continued. Eli shook his soda in a slow circle, listening to the ice cubes collide. He appeared to be mulling over an impossible puzzle, but his concern grew as Charlie pressed for details. What happened to the friend who would just listen? Would he have to resort to a disclaimer, for Christ’s sake?

It was time to go. He stood, threw his soda in the trash, and walked outside without a word—a famous quirk deployed only on those closest to him. Charlie remained seated in an attempt to prove some stubborn point, lasted almost a full minute, and rose with a curse on his tongue. He caught up on the sidewalk. Now a chill had settled with the darkness, and he hugged the sides of his hoodie to his chest.

“So how do you catch him?”

Eli offered only a cryptic shrug. Charlie felt the ennui of a decade fall off him like a shroud.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

Charlie didn’t answer.

Something was happening inside his friend, Eli knew. Something he didn’t like. But the fatigue of a rotten month was eating at him. More than anything, he wanted to

15 get away. He grabbed Charlie’s shoulders hard enough to imply something beyond the kindness of friends.

“Be wise, amigo.”

A branch of the willow oak above them dipped low with a gust of wind. A sliver of moon shone between two clouds, and disappeared again. Charlie wondered if he’d just been given a chance at something, while Eli had the vague sense that he’d committed a nameless betrayal.

*

That night, Charlie gave his mind to the Elephant Hunter. He opened his laptop, and started at the beginning. The first murder. The first letter.

16 DOCUMENT: THE HARWOOD LETTER

First published on Sept. 9, NewsObserver.com. Removed after 20 minutes. Posted 17 minutes later on PoliticsNC.com. Re-posted on NewsObserver.com one hour later, and removed again that evening. Later published at multiple outlets.

Ted Harwood died today for his sins.

I have sent this man to hell, but there are too many like him still living. I want you to help me kill them.

There is a rotten sickness in America, and it is caused by the virus of wealthy men who don’t care about the lives of anyone else. They hate the poor, they hate the weak, and they will do anything to make our lives worse.

Perhaps it sounds strange, to hear these words from someone who has just killed a man. I did not want to be a killer. In a better world, we would vote these people out of office and wash our hands of them forever. I used to believe in democracy.

But they have so thoroughly rigged the system, and so thoroughly brainwashed so many of us, that they have taken democracy out of the hands of good people.

The average American has been put in chains. Their laws make us miserable, their state media corrupts our minds, and they stoke racial and cultural division so that we fight each other instead of fighting them. When we try to vote them out, they gerrymander the system and destroy our voting rights.

We are frogs in a boiling pot, slowly being cooked to death. They are the men who work the burner.

I want to be clear about my words. When I say “they” I mean powerful elected Republicans and their corporate bosses. The spineless Democrats have abandoned us, so now we are at their mercy.

I am starting to see that there is no such thing as wealth without evil. I have no enemy so vicious and hateful as the rich. The rich are killers, and the Republican party is their army.

Ted Harwood was assassinated for three sins in particular.

1. He was part of the effort to deny the national Medicaid expansion to North Carolina, which would have provided health insurance for more than 600,000 state citizens, the majority of them poor, old, or disabled. Republicans fought the expansion to score a petty political win against the last president and to protect their handlers in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The result has been

17 unnecessary death and suffering on a scale that should infuriate all good people. It deprives adults and children of important treatment. Men like Harwood are killing us.

2. He sanctioned the appointment of former energy executives to the state’s Oil & Gas Commission, which was a clear conflict of interest that led to the approval of hydraulic fracturing in seven of the poorest North Carolina counties, even though the EPA and others have warned that it causes groundwater and air contamination that leads to cancer. Sure enough, much of the private well water in these counties now has seventeen times the methane as anywhere else in the state. And lobbyists from the same companies that profit from the fracking have donated thousands to Harwood, and hundreds of thousands to Republicans across the state. That money buys them permission to poison us.

3. He continued to support a Republican candidate for the national Senate even after that man was accused by a dozen women of statutory rape. One of his colleagues even joked about it with a live microphone nearby. You might remember his idea of humor: “Hell, some of these girls don’t look 14.”

There are dozens of men in North Carolina just like Harwood. He may be a cog in the machine, and it is true that I chose him randomly. But this randomness has a purpose. Men like him, not matter how low on the totem pole, do not deserve to feel safe while they destroy our country. I want them all to fear for their lives, as they have made us fear for ours.

People will think I am a monster, but how is a citizen supposed to react when the decisions a politician makes cost innocent lives? Should we frogs stay in our boiling pot?

Our lives are disposable to Harwood, nothing more than sacrifices in a game. But today he discovered that when you play the game, you can also lose.

He killed others without remorse and would do so again in the future. His policy, and the Republican policy, is death. He deserved to die in turn.

I promise you this: If I have anything to say about it, he will not be the last.

18 Chapter 3: Song of Eli

I-85 North, Oct. 17

When he left Charlie at the sandwich shop, Eli tried to let his mind go blank on the dark highway. He drove past amber lights, beneath cobalt skies, and he remembered in younger days how hours would pass on these drives without a single complete thought breaking the spell of the road.

The days of peace were over. There were too many competing interests in his head now, and only one that mattered: The Elephant Hunter.

When they made him lead investigator on the case, he’d felt the thrum of excitement. He’d even jockeyed for it. Now, he recognized it for the albatross it was.

Too eager, Eli. Unattractive in a man your age.

He’d laid a trap for himself, more brilliant than anything his worst enemy could plot. It reminded him of a metaphor that stuck with him from a college English class, where a man is so eager to mount a horse that he jumps too far and tumbles off the other side. Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.

And yet he wanted the job, still did, even as he saw the shape of the thing take hold. He wanted to catch this absurd criminal, this second-rate assassin who killed a man in the clumsiest way imaginable not once, but twice, and somehow got away with it and left behind not a single usable strand of evidence. Who had captured the national interest, and poured gasoline on the bonfire of its mutual hatreds. Who crafted, for Eli, the perfect no-win situation.

As of now, the case was not remotely solvable. Eli felt as though he’d heard the briefest snippet of an alien language, and the fate of the world depended on him translating the words.

At what point was catching the killer no longer good enough? After four murders? Five? When would the country pass the point of no return, when the man’s inspiration meant more than his initial crimes, when the copycats and retaliations would start the avalanche in earnest?

If that moment arrived, catching the Elephant Hunter would be as useless as finding the spark that started a forest fire.

*

Like many charismatic people, Eli was born cynical. He did his best to hide it— cynicism and ambition aren’t supposed to match, though they often do. He had never loved his country. He didn’t hate it, either. He just felt nothing. Not this

19 country, not for any country. To him, the idea was artificial. Inside any border on the planet, you found the same people, the same forces, the same corruption, the same beauty, and the differences between them were mostly a matter of historical luck. All he wanted was to keep his brain stimulated with work, and to cover himself in power and maybe a little fame.

But lately he found himself reckoning with America. The outrageous optimism, the cruelty, the bitterness. He wondered if the whole thing should be allowed to implode, in the hope that something better might rise from the wreckage. He even caught himself wondering if the Elephant Hunter was a necessary corrosive agent, eroding the façade of democracy that was clearly failing and bringing us all closer to the great transformation.

Did he believe that? Maybe. But then his mind would change, and he’d see the Elephant Hunter as no more than a basic thug with delusions of grandeur.

Eli hated the old TV cliché about agents—that the best ones were those who could identify with their prey. Psychodrama fell flat in the real world, but even so, he didn’t have to think hard to draw a parallel with his quarry. He and the killer were both going for broke, and their audacity had earned them the kind of beginner’s luck that can only be explained as God’s love for the brazen. And they were both doomed.

Stop with the romanticism, Eli.

It began to rain in Petersburg when he switched to I-95, as it always seemed to do on this highway. There was no such thing as a light rain, either—it was sunny skies or the apocalyptic torrent. His wipers were too slow to part the floodwaters, his headlights too weak to pierce the darkness. Hazards flashed from the most cautious cars, and only the trucks were moving at the speed limit now, heedless of the weather, menacing the safe drivers. In sour moods like tonight, Eli imagined them smashing through the guard rail, twisting and skidding and colliding in a violent karmic lesson from above, and the thought gave him a shudder of ugly satisfaction.

Was he a bad person?

If he wanted to make the argument, he could find a few good reasons.

*

Oh, the affairs. The endless affairs, the beautiful women. The glint in their eyes that told him, I’m here if you want me. The affairs that proved irresistible, that carried him along like a rip tide into the turbid waters of marital stagnation. Poor Ann. She didn’t have the courage to leave, or the moral relativism to forgive, or the inner fortitude to recover happiness on her own terms. So she dedicated herself to the suburban warfare of the unhappy spouse, spinning secret webs of discord across the thresholds of their lives until he set off a trap with every step. He played the resolute

20 husband, the loving joker, enticing her into the odd smile until the accumulated instincts—the visions of betrayal she could never forget—shut her down again.

And the funny thing was, it made him furious. The privilege of the sinner, to despise the one he hurts. Her passivity, her cowardice—the endless complaints to her vapid sisters. He would fall in love with her again if she could only tell him to fuck off.

He knew he would leave her one day, and she would hate him more than she thought possible for violating their second covenant. Cheating was one thing, but liberation after the fact? Refusing to pay a lifetime’s penance? That was against the vow of eternal guilt she and all her Catholic tribe had swallowed as infants with the water of the baptismal font.

He remembered the proverb: Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die. But poor Ann would choke to death. Poor breakable Ann, with the lingering beauty that invites you into worlds more claustrophobic than you could have dreamed. Poor Ann, who lived a stifled existence and took exactly one risk in an entire lifetime. Who would have been much better off if she’d never met Eli Wilder.

There were others who could say the same.

Would his daughters grow up to revere distant men who belonged fully to the world, but never to them? Would his son nurture a secret resentment, only to live out his father’s patterns? Would they charm their own progeny for transcendent moments, but always, always flee?

He hated that his problems were so mundane.

He had dreamed of forging a unique life, escaping the guarded, rigid institutions of his youth, never falling into the deep grooves from which a man is funneled from middle age to death.

He still dreamed of being a complete person. He moved through his day in a series of shifting roles. The star agent, the brief father, the guiltless husband who demanded nothing and offered everything except loyalty.

*

He thought again of the Elephant Hunter. Whatever else you could say, this man had set out to discover himself. He had found his cause—or a cause, which is good enough—and burned the bridge after he crossed it.

Do you resent his independence? His sense of destiny?

No, too glib. This man will die, and die soon. I want to live.

21

He drove into the storm just outside Baltimore, and when he emerged from the tunnel, flashes of lightning lit up the indigo sky. He saw outlines of baneful clouds, and the city under bombardment. Harbor to his right, wretched industry to his left—the Domino sugar factory, smokestacks, skyscrapers. He didn’t look. He knew their stolidity, but in his mind they were precarious towers, thin and leering.

He opened his window, and the attacking wind shrieked above the highway, gusting ahead of the storm.

Keep working. He didn’t have a better plan than that, but he could work with the devotion of a fanatic. He had been passive, idle, chained by inertia. He must transform the Elephant Hunter into everything. Let him loom larger than family, than sleep, than serenity, than fulfillment.

Success would preserve his career, but also his dream of wholeness. A midlife crisis is the sudden awareness of fragmentation, of the lost ideal that is the original unbroken man as conceived by the boy. It was not the loss of happiness, which no human could ever obtain for more than the time it took to blink, but the loss of the pursuit.

He didn’t need ideals. He didn’t need happiness. He didn’t even need to be whole.

You are a weapon. You will simply take the next step, and entire universes will unfold.

Why?

Because, you despondent motherfucker, they always have. God isn’t so sure about you, but all his beautiful angels love you to death.

22 Chapter 4: The Hunter’s Approach

South Durham, NC, Oct. 18

The night after Eli met Charlie, in a very different part of Durham, the Elephant Hunter waited for his gun.

He sat in his car—a gray 2003 Toyota Camry, this time—on Sima Avenue, just off Lawson Street, where he had a perfect view of a courtyard in the middle of the McDougald Terrace housing project. He was in the epicenter of the city’s most crime-ridden district.

He was a compulsive newspaper reader, and this particular street caught his eye in a feature about the city’s homicide numbers, which had risen to 43 in 2016, with almost 200 people shot—the highest since they started counting in 1980. In the article from the Raleigh News & Observer, a police officer was quoted blaming the murders on the number of illegal guns in the city, and a woman from McDougald Terrace concurred:

“People can go buy a gun from anywhere…they just grab them and start shooting.”

The quote stayed with him—he woke up in the morning with the words on his lips—and they helped make up his mind between Durham and Charlotte, the latter of which had more violent crime, but was spread over a wider area. He had come just in time—he read in that morning’s paper that the city police would be setting up a substation at the McDougald projects within weeks.

An illegal gun, unattached to his name and bought here, far from home, was exactly what he needed right now. He was sick of inefficient weapons and sloppy killings. After the debacle in Carthage, he thought he’d conceived a better plan for Alonso Clements in South Carolina. But after approaching the man’s country vacation home through the woods, dressed in black from his sneakers to the balaclava mask, and using a lattice to climb to the low shed roof, he found it extremely difficult to leap down and strangle the 54-year-old governor when he emerged to smoke a cigar.

The piano wire held, but his body almost did not—particularly after the obese man slammed him into the wooden siding repeatedly, and then nearly flipped him over his broad back. It had taken ten minutes to subdue him, the fat man screaming bloody murder all the while, and another two or three before he stopped breathing entirely. When it was over, he left the governor on the porch and dragged his own battered body back through the forest and to his car. He ached for three weeks, and his hands were scarred by the wire.

There had been a woman, too. He still couldn’t believe it. An unexpected woman who wasn’t Clements’ wife, and who stared at him in shock through the sliding glass doors. Quiet as a lamb. He knew he should kill her too, but he knew also that he

23 couldn’t. She embodied his silent conscience, and she would cost him everything. But he never read a thing about her afterward, and they didn’t discover the body until he sent his letter.

No more bullshit—from here on out, his work would be done with guns.

It violated some vague beliefs, but when he searched his soul, he found that he really didn’t care. What he was doing now—exploiting an impoverished black neighborhood for his own gain—might have filled him with guilt in an earlier life. But then, he was living a paradox, using murder to stop those who were murdering the country. He stood guilty of the ultimate hypocrisy, and he knew it, so what did it matter if he violated some private credo along the way? He was an agent of death now, and as long as the right people were dying, the little contradictions didn’t matter.

*

The week before, he spent two nights scouting the terraces, always on the move to avoid police. If TV had misinformed him about the ease with which he could strangle a person, certain crime shows had prepared him well for what the urban drug trade looked like. Junkies lining up, paying their money, receiving their pills from an apartment two doors down. The dealers and spotters no more than children. Scouts on the street corners, and their bosses, barely 18 themselves, observing from benches.

Then, on the third night, he had followed one of those pit bosses when he left on foot, down Lawson Street to Alston Avenue, and pulled up beside him in a near- empty Burger King parking lot. He pulled his red baseball cap low, rolled down his window, and got the dealer’s attention by throwing an envelope at his feet.

“There’s $2,000 in that envelope, cash,” he said, using an absurd Irish accent, artificial even to his own ears. “Meet me behind the restaurant at the dumpster if you want a lot more. Easiest money you’ll ever make.”

He ignored the glare that nearly froze him—a glare of lived violence he could never learn, not if he killed 1,000 Republicans—and put the car in reverse.

Ten minutes later, taking his sweet time, the boy approached the car holding the envelope and a bag of fast food. He rolled down his window, and the kid leaned in. Not without menace. The Elephant Hunter saw pink scar tissue on the left side of his jaw, spreading down to the back of his neck.

“Fake,” the kid said, tapping the envelope. His voice was hoarse, almost a whisper.

“It’s real.”

24 But the kid had opened it already, and he knew it was real—spotting counterfeit currency was an important part of his life.

“Uh-huh. Okay.” His voice changed—grew more precise, whiter, and he pushed the envelope through the window. “Please take your money back, officer.”

“Spare me the drama.”

“Thought we was all doing voices.”

The Elephant Hunter ignored the jab. “I need a handgun and a dozen bullets. Don’t care what kind, as long as it can kill someone up close. I’ll be here next week with $3,000. If the gun works, I’ll be here two days later with $5,000 more. That’s ten grand for you total. I know guns don’t cost that much, but I don’t give a shit because I want it with no hassle and I’m going to die soon anyway.”

The kid laughed at him—a short, mirthless burst. “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I heard today.”

And the Elephant Hunter knew he was right. It was another fucked-up plan that could go wrong in a thousand different ways. But it also made sense. This kid wouldn’t go to the police, not ever. He would definitely want the money. He had access to guns, or knew someone who did. And if it worked, there’d be absolutely nothing to connect him.

Now the kid sounded insulted, almost angry. “What if I just take your money?”

“Then you’ll have $2,000, but you’ll miss out on $8,000 more. And then the people who paid me will come, and they’ll take more than their money.”

It was a line he remembered from a film, but the look he got in return made him wish he’d kept it to himself. After a long stare, the kid clicked his tongue.

“Man, you ain’t got no people.”

The Elephant Hunter was silent.

“Maybe I don’t want to do it.”

“You already took the cash.”

“And this is fucking entrapment.”

“It would be if I were a cop. Which I’m not. So let’s stop playing games.”

25 He didn’t care about the money. He had enough money to last him thirty years without working another day, and he knew he wouldn’t be alive and free for that long. If he lost the two grand, all he’d really be losing was time—a steeper price by far.

“It’s Wednesday. A week from today, I’ll be here at 10 p.m. Come alone if you come at all.”

He studied the kid’s facial expression. Inscrutable. He hoped the prospect of money would be enticement enough.

“Why me, though?”

“Because I’ve been watching you, and you look like you know what the fuck you’re doing.”

*

Now, exactly a week later, he watched the same kid saunter onto Sima Avenue from the courtyard and head south to Lawson. He pulled alongside him on the empty street, this time in a blue Hyundai Elantra.

“Hey.”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “You said the Burger King.”

“Plan changed. Do you have it?”

He walked to the car window. “And you ain’t a cop?”

“I’m no cop.” He showed him the envelope, but didn’t offer it.

The kid hesitated a moment longer, and then pulled a brown paper bag from inside his parka. He handed it through the window, and took the envelope in return.

“If it works, be here tomorrow at the same exact time for the big one.”

“How ‘bout I take to you to a place I know, you test that shit right now. We finish it tonight.”

He shook his head. He had prepared for this. “Wouldn’t matter. The money’s not with me.”

There was a long stare between them.

The kid laughed, but he kept his hand on the driver’s window. “5,000 tomorrow?”

26

“Have I lied to you yet?”

“Not yet.”

The word lingered, and so did the hand.

“I don’t lie. Not to you. Tomorrow night.”

He held his breath, and the tension gave him a strange tingling sensation in his stomach.

The kid finally nodded. “I’ll be here.” And he spun away, moving quickly back to the courtyard where he was king.

The Elantra lurched into motion, and its driver nearly gasped in relief. The promise of a big payday had been just enough to make it work. He risked a glance in the side mirror, and he saw the kid look back from inside the cylindrical beam of the block’s only streetlight. Both of them knew they would never see each other again.

27 Chapter 5: The Hunter’s Meditation

Oct. 19

He lived in a fifth floor apartment in the heart of a downtown district far from Durham, above a metro station and an excellent cafe, and across the street from a pet grooming shop. It was a narrow street, one-way, with looming brick and stone buildings, young walnut and maple trees on the sidewalks, and theaters and ethnic restaurants and bookstores and bistros.

The goliaths had wormed their way in, too—Domino’s, Subway, Urban Outfitters. It was the compromised American idea of a Europe that barely existed, once—an enclave built for the white artistic class. A safe haven from the suburbs, and a sanctuary amidst the projects surrounding them, which they would never visit except by mistake. The true citizens of this place were younger than him by far, and they wanted recognition and sex, in that order, before they left to make money. But they did not want to know their neighbors, and that suited him fine.

Overall it was lovely, he thought—the kind of place he’d wished he had the courage to live as a young man before he signed his life away. At night he took long walks down to the massive skyscraper hotels by the river. He would visit the famous battleship, and once he saw a Norwegian three-masted barque called the Statsraad Lehmkuhl. With its white and blue hull, the rigging that rose into intricate webs, and the sails furled on its topgallant mast, it was the most beautiful ship he’d ever seen. For a moment, when he first beheld it, he forgot his pain.

He took such a walk tonight. The white Christmas lights had already been strung between the lampposts, and each fluted green pole had a red bow tied beneath its beacon. The last rays of sunlight angling over the rooftops reached as far as the uppermost maple leaves, which had already begun to redden with the autumn. He walked past the classic marquee of the music hall, past the park and the church, and down to the promenade by the water.

He couldn’t resist the memories of his first two kills. Strangely, it was the first that remained clearest in his mind. The images played whether he invoked them or not.

Harwood.

That day in North Carolina, he learned he was incompetent. A plan that had once seemed elegant in its simplicity now seemed like blunt idiocy. He had made the novice killer’s mistake of obsessing about every small detail, but trusting the bigger ones to fate.

It was a miracle they didn’t catch him.

You have to be better. For the sake of what you’ve lost.

28

But so much had gone well. The car, for instance, bought to look nondescript, which he’d been smart enough not to destroy. That was too conspicuous, carried too much risk. He took it instead to a garage far from home where he’d paid for a year’s rent up front, also in cash. He’d never drive the thing again.

He had five other cars ready to go, all slightly different, all equally ordinary, bought the same way from five different owners in five different towns.

The precautions he set for himself seemed ridiculous at times, but the last thing he wanted was to underestimate law enforcement. He didn’t know very much, but he had studied the prevalence of security cameras, knew of concepts like digital metadata, and he guessed that there was no limit to what they could track. He avoided highways like the plague. He had a natural advantage—the element of surprise—but he planned as though he would be chased by geniuses.

And of course, he knew that caution would only buy him time—never freedom. They would catch him eventually. Part of the bargain he made with himself was accepting that truth.

His mission had to end, and it had to end badly.

*

By the waterfront, he reckoned with that mission.

The truth first dawned on him six years ago, not long after the worst day of his life. That was back in the time when he still dreamed of salvation. He took the advice of a friend and treated himself to a week of solace and ease on the white sands of a beach resort on St. Thomas. He drank bitter cocktails and stared at the terraces far inland where the dirt-poor natives lived in shanty towns. But all he felt was listless, anxious, and sad. He took unsatisfying jogs, tried snorkeling until a pair of inky black manta rays scared him off, and watched American couples with healthy sons and daughters act out a life he would never know.

When it came to an end, the first leg of his return journey was a short flight over the Caribbean to Puerto Rico. An hour outside San Juan, the turbulence got so bad that a very tan woman shrieked over the captain’s muffled warning, a boy moaned with dim terror, and an old Dominican nun chanted her litanies. The fear ate him too, but a deeper hope spread in his heart.

It would be so easy, he caught himself thinking, if the plane just crashed.

When they landed in one piece, he was forced to name the secret wish he’d been carrying in his heart…and to reckon with the disappointment of being alive.

29 The unsettling thought hit him with a bracing clarity the minute he stepped off the jet bridge and inhaled the stale airport oxygen. It stunned him so badly that he vomited into a recycling bin. Others stared, but with sympathy—they had been through the same flight, and they mistook his fear for theirs. “You’re safe now,” an unlikely tattooed giant told him as he rubbed his shoulders. But that man was wrong.

Three years passed, and when the thoughts came too close to ignore, he woke on a beautiful sunny morning and was born again with his mission. It was the second greatest gift he had ever received.

The mission brought him clarity, if not peace, and delivered him in time to North Carolina. Intended first and foremost as an act of justice, it also gave him purpose when he was days or hours from the cold end.

It was a vision from a dream. It swept him away in its awful, wonderful energy. To date, it had removed Ted Harwood and Alonso Clements from this world. But as those men had learned, nothing lasts forever.

*

By the time he reached his apartment two hours later, his thoughts lost form. The visible world grew smaller. As usual, he wished for eternity.

*

The musty smell of the stairway broke the spell. He felt the demons begin to stir, and when he unlocked his door, he could already feel the distant storm.

The interior was spartan in its furnishings—an old gray couch and an end table in the living room, two high chairs set against the granite island in the kitchen area, a full-size mattress and box frame in one bedroom with a bedside table and lamp, and his supplies and papers in the second bedroom. It was more space than he needed, but he wasn’t counting dollars anymore, and he needed the living room empty.

In place of a television, he had hung a painting high on the wall opposite the three large picture windows. When his back ached, as it did today, he eschewed the couch and sat on the floor.

And he meditated. He sought the closest thing to god that he had ever known.

He stared at the picture, and for an hour or more he let his mind wander into realms of memory that preceded…everything. He had become surprisingly adept at transporting himself this way, at forgetting what came next.

30 But this journey was not meant to be permanent, and it was certainly not meant to heal. It was a new kind of meditation.

It was a prelude, and an act of heightening. When it was time to remember the end, the nostalgia and the love collided with the truth, and like a river too long subdued behind a dam’s crumbling concrete, the anger rushed into him. It hit everywhere at once—he could feel the surge in every nerve, top to bottom, and it came with an overwhelming warmth. Now every muscle tensed, breath halted, and he approached the point of syncope. He had never done a drug more potent than marijuana, but he knew that nothing could electrify him this way.

He must feel pain. He must feel loss, must feel it acutely, must let it fracture him. He must moan, and the moans must change to a high wail, a lamentation, and it must permeate his soul, fresh as the first day, fresh as the awful moment. This, and this alone, must not fade. His commitment depended on it. Without the piercing, unbearable pain, he had no mission, and without a mission it was all for nothing. Without a mission, he was a dead man too.

Only after the devastation, eyes fixed on the picture, could he allow the pure, blissful rage to provoke him to rapture.

And yes, once more, the rapture was coming. This was his last conscious thought, each night: It’s coming.

*

Like a migraine headache, what follows is too shattering to co-exist with language. He moves beyond the human plane, into the raw red kingdom of savage fixation, the picture now a blur on the wall but crystalline in his mind, plangent and animating, the focal point of the violet circle that forms as he presses the base of each thumb hard against his closed eyes, and when the circle is fully formed he rises from his seated position, reaches in desperation for the pillow on the couch, and screams his vision of hell into its muffling void. He gnashes it with his teeth, he rips at its seams, he throws himself onto the couch and begins bludgeoning the cushions, hurling them across the room into white walls, slapping the floor with an open palm, biting the flesh of his knuckles until they bleed.

Then the vibrations begin. Everything is held so tight that it can no longer remain still, and his skull begins to shake as his skin flushes and the oxygen leaves his brain. He lifts his hand, and it is shaking. He curls the hand into a fist, and the fist is shaking. Something is bound to break, to rupture, to explode inside him with the energy and light of a nova, and so he saves himself by howling until he goes hoarse, by baying at the godless ceiling, by sending his agony forth for the rest of humanity to bear alongside him.

31 Lost in the radiance and cruelty of his exaltation, he escapes loneliness, he rips the scab, the blood rushes, he escapes the impossible notion of healing.

When it’s over, he drops to his knees, raises his arms to the painting, and weeps.

“I am so sorry,” he says, and each time the words leave his mouth, he breaks into heaving sobs, guttural moans, and the one-word protest against pitiless time, persistent memory, and the tragedy of tragedy’s permanence.

Why, he wonders, as linear thought fights for a foothold, why?

When it’s over, he falls into exhaustion. Some nights he can’t make it to the bed.

But no matter where he wakes up, he is revived. He can see the past clearly, and he can see the future. One feeds the other, and he exists in both. He has achieved the miracle of escaping the agonizing, insurmountable present.

*

When he left the house the next morning, he didn’t need to look at the painting. She lived inside him now. She guided him. She was the courage to do everything that must be done, and he was the vessel that would endure.

Until I break, my love. I promise you. Until I break.

32 Document: Television transcript, Brass Tacks, Oct. 22

BRASS TACKS, SEGMENT ONE

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[21:00:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DARYL LEE, BRASS TACKS HOST: I’m Daryl Lee, and it’s just past 9:00 p.m. on the east coast. Tonight we lead with the story of the week, the story of the month, the story of the year and maybe the decade too. Surprise surprise—we’re talking about the Elephant Hunter. This is Brass Tacks.

(BEGIN MUSIC)

(BEGIN GRAPHIC)

DARYL LEE: It’s been eight days since he claimed his second victim, and to say that he’s touched a nerve in this country would be a massive understatement.

By the time this show is over, about 70 Americans will die of heart disease. Almost as many will be taken away by cancer. Four will die in a car crash. Four more will be killed by guns. But none of those deaths will resonate like the two politicians killed in the last six weeks by the still unknown, still at-large, still dangerous man we call the Elephant Hunter.

Tonight, we’re talking about the national reaction. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Earlier this evening, we saw a “Rally of Understanding” in New York City. It was attended by almost fifty people armed with signs and elephant costumes. Many of them sang the killer’s praises—sometimes literally. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(FOOTAGE OF DEMONSTRATION)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We believe that the people running this country are criminals, and that includes all Republicans in power. All of them. None of us would ever consider pursuing a path of violence, but this rally is to show understanding.

REPORTER: So you support his actions?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would never use the word ‘support.’ This is a rally of understanding.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

33

DARYL LEE: So clearly what you see there is someone who does, in fact, support the Elephant Hunter, perhaps with a hint of irony, but who is parsing his language to make sure he doesn’t get arrested for inciting violence. And on the other side of the spectrum, well…watch this clip from President Cornwell’s rally in front of 20,000 supporters last night in Shreveport, Louisiana.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT CORNWELL: And he’s a murderer! A murderer! Imagine if Cornwell praised a murderer. Imagine it! They’d have me in chains! They’d have me in chains, and they’d say, ‘what a savage, what a monster, what an animal!’ But I can promise you this, I can promise you I’m not scared of the Elephant Hunter. Every day I wake up, a thousand crazies want my blood. ‘Death to Cornwell!’ What’s it to me? Bring it on!

Of course, it’s terrible stuff, and we’re all so sad for Alonso Clemmons and Ted Harwood. They were great men. I didn’t know them, not personally, you can’t meet everybody, but I’m told they were great men. I spoke with their wives, these poor women, out of their minds with grief. Two dead husbands. Awful.

And we have to do something about it. Very soon we’re going to do something big. I mean, should some of these liberals be allowed to praise this guy? (Loud cries, boos) Should that be legal? There are a lot of people saying to me, ‘Cornwell, throw these people in jail! They’re traitors! They’re supporting a terrorist!’ (chanting begins)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DARYL LEE: Aside from President Cornwell mispronouncing the last name of Alonso Clements, the former governor of South Carolina, the rest of that speech is unmistakably clear. Those 20,000 people really don’t like the Elephant Hunter, they don’t like anyone who supports him, and they seem to be okay with President Cornwell jailing anyone who believes otherwise. Is that a threat to the first amendment?

I want to bring in former Cornwell campaign adviser and Republican strategist Larry Klift. Also with us tonight is Anika Shankardas, democratic congressional spokeswoman and co-author of the book “Conquer By Compromise: A Liberal’s Guide to Pragmatic Politics.” We’ll hear from her in a moment. Larry, let’s get down to brass tacks. What do you make of the scene in New York today?

LARRY KRIFT: Well, frankly Daryl, what we saw is the hidden violent soul of the American left showing its face. These people may not be ruthless killers like the Elephant Hunter, but they’re all in favor of it. Give them enough time, and they’ll start killing too. You heard them. It’s not an interpretation. It’s their words. And

34 considering how some of us on the right have been treated lately, we’ll tell you this is no surprise.

DARYL LEE: Anika, how would you respond to this radical leftist position of tacit, and in some cases overt support of a man who is killing Republicans?

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Well, not to pass the buck, Daryl, but you’d have to ask a radical leftist. Quickly, I want to respond to Larry’s absurd remarks about this “inherent violence” that supposedly comes from the left. I think it’s unfair, I think it’s ridiculous, and I think it’s offensive. Imagine if every time a white nationalist shot up a church, or a school, or committed a hate crime in the south, we said, “well, this is the true soul of all Republicans.”

LARRY KRIFT: I will be the first, the first, to denounce any white nationalist crime. Where’s the denunciation from those New York City liberals?

(CROSSTALK)

DARYL LEE: Hold on—hold on one second. It’s a fair argument you make, Anika, but I want to keep this discussion on track, and I want to press you on the first point. Regardless of whether all liberals, or most liberals, or whatever, actually believe in the “mission” of the Elephant Hunter, the question is, how do you explain the growing numbers of people who do? Let me show you this tweet by Brian Fanning, the younger brother of Leo Fanning, who created two of the two most popular comedies in America in the last decade, “City Hall” and “Lunch Break.”

(BEGIN GRAPHIC)

DARYL LEE: Fanning writes, “I don’t believe in everything the Elephant Hunter does, but killing evil Republicans? That’s hilarious and good. I do have one piece of constructive criticism, though: Kill more.”

Anika?

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Well, let me be clear about one thing. Speaking for myself and the Democratic party, and, I think, the overwhelming majority of Democrats, I do not support the Elephant Hunter. Unequivocally, I do not. What I will say is that there are many frustrated people in this country. There are a lot of people who believe, with good evidence, that powerful Republicans line their pockets by making other people suffer. And that’s especially true under this administration, which has attempted to slash healthcare for millions, passed a punishing tax bill, cut environmental protections, eroded voting rights, and pursued racist immigration policies. It’s endangered us all, and maybe it’s inevitable that some of the frustration gets channeled in unhealthy ways.

35 LARRY KRIFT: So you’re saying these men deserved it? They deserved to die because they won an election?

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: You know very well that’s not what I’m—

LARRY KRIFT: What I’m hearing here, Daryl, and I’m shocked, is a more moderate version of the Elephant Hunter’s so-called manifestoes. Republicans are evil, and if they get murdered, well, so be it, that’s the price you pay. You’re hearing it all over. And let me tell you, it’s going to end badly. I’ll just say that. It’s not going to work out how they think.

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: And what does that mean, Larry? Because it sounds like a threat.

LARRY KRIFT: It’s not a threat. It’s a promise that if these murders continue, and the rhetoric on the left keeps going in this radical direction, somebody is going to have to do something about it.

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Like throw people in jail for expressing an opinion? It would be nice if some Republicans were as familiar with the first amendment as they are with the second.

LARRY KRIFT: Joke all you want about the second amendment, but if either of those great men were armed, we wouldn’t even be talking about the Elephant Hunter anymore, because he’d be a corpse, and that would be a terrific thing.

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Oh, and it’s the left who supposedly worships violence?

LARRY KRIFT: Well, the right kind of violence wouldn’t be so bad in some cases—

ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Like when the white nationalists ran over Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, or did that cross some line—

LARRY KRIFT: How dare you even suggest—

(CROSSTALK)

DARYL LEE: Okay! Okay! A little decorum, please! We’re still running a TV show here, and we have 30 seconds to break. Larry, you want to close this out?

LARRY KRIFT: I’d love to. Unlike Anika, I feel no need to be equivocal. The Elephant Hunter is a traitor, the people who support him are traitors, and the violent left is the biggest threat to American society we have today. There’s a way to change things in this country, and it’s called voting. We’ve been doing it for 300 years. Killers belong in jail, and so does everyone who aids and abets them.

36 ANIKA SHANKARDAS: Does that include people with no connection who exercise their free speech?

LARRY KRIFT: It includes who it includes.

DARYL LEE: We’ll be back in a moment.

(END SEGMENT ONE)

37 Chapter 6: Song of Charlie

Durham, NC, Oct. 24, Memorial Beachstowe Hospital, Medical Records Division

Inside his head, at least, Charlie was on a roll. The epiphany was on the tip of his tongue.

He stared past his office computer and through the grimy glass of the sliding window that looked onto the floor’s narrow vestibule. There the corporate pilgrims passed, awkward in their feigned gratitude for the unkempt secretary in 11th floor reception, the one who worked the electric strike lock system that buzzed them through to the medical records unit of North Carolina’s second-largest hospital.

In this stifling climate, rich with the aroma of cleaning supplies and old industrial carpet and stale coffee and dust, a daily fog crept into his brain. It overwhelmed him, despite the long idle hours that required so little. His job was blessedly limited: Press the button to open the doors, process payroll, book the meeting rooms, order toner for the printer and copying machine, and field phone calls for the two female bosses who loved Charlie despite his abysmal attitude and worse performance—the way only hyper-competent mothers can love their lowest achieving sons.

And he was bad at his job. Very bad. Every three months or so, one of his doting guardians would bring him in her office for a chat in which, using the kindest tones at her disposal, she threatened to fire him. But three months later they’d both take him out to a merry lunch—nominally to show their appreciation for some bit of dubious improvement, but really because they were bored too, and they liked his company.

He was smart enough to understand them, yet so unmotivated that he couldn’t possibly pose a threat—not like the vultures in corporate who took every chance they could to undermine a woman who committed the sin of ambition. They could even get a little too drunk around him, complain a little, tell him something they really shouldn’t, and he’d break out the old journalist’s smile, full of complicity.

And three months later the whole cycle would repeat, but he’d survive. Who really cared if someone in his position was all that capable anyway?

*

“How did you spend your life?” the angel would one day ask. “Dying,” he’d reply. And the angel would stamp his form, thoroughly unimpressed.

*

Today was different.

38 After his meeting with Eli the week before, even the drudgery of office life couldn’t slow his firing synapses. He was thinking about the Elephant Hunter, but about so much else, too, because his brain had expanded beyond the usual boundaries—at 10 a.m., for instance, it occurred to him precisely out of nowhere that there is nothing more painful in the life of a comfortable American than the notion that time is passing. Always, no matter where we are, the sense of life slipping away plagues us. It keeps us from true happiness.

He chased the thread, because he felt it going somewhere strange and important.

As a child, he had felt it subtly, because children are not conditioned to understand their own impermanence. It had hit him only at moments of great pleasure—kicking field goals with his father at the empty football field, or riding the ocean waves with his cousins on the bright early days of summer. Just as he felt his excitement peak, a shadow would cross his mind, and this shadow was the knowledge that the beauty and joy would pass, that one day he would have to live without his parents, that one day he would feel sad, that the nice things of today would be nothing more than memory—a pale imitation of the vibrant experience. And memory was no consolation. Memory brings longing for the absence of what it recalls.

As he aged into adolescence and beyond, this feeling evolved but never departed. In the post-college era of roving journalistic coups and serious ambition, he felt a sense of melancholy after his greatest triumphs—always in the exact spot where the satisfaction was meant to be. The adventure over, the chapter closed, empty life threatened. The only thing for that malaise had been to drink, and drink he did, bingeing in the aftermath where previously he had been too focused to take a sip.

Now, approaching middle age, that childhood sorrow, that mid-20s celebratory gloom, was converted to bitterness. He had missed his ship somewhere along the way, he knew not how. Sometimes he asked himself the banal question: Where did it go wrong?

He bore most of the blame. It was his nature to fade, to burn out, to become lazy and aimless.

But there was also the sheer size of the enemy facing a solitary writer. When he learned their power, he came down with the fatal realization that the rich and immoral never pay for their crimes. Not in America. A small-time crusader like Charlie McGrath was destined to lose—no matter how profound his stories, no matter how revealing. He saw the monster in the flesh, and the name of the monster was capitalism.

He thought his breakdown should have been more dramatic, but the world’s sharpest sword for boys like Charlie is the slow, degrading procession of time.

39 There are no second acts in American lives, he thought. The worst, most inaccurate quote ever uttered, but it fits me to a tee.

*

He was getting close. He had to keep thinking.

Maybe if he had been more afraid, he could have found a domineering woman and let her plot out the rest of his life. But he wasn’t afraid—he was terrified. And terror won’t let you stay in one place.

Thoughts of fleeting life, even abstractions like time, were reminders of his failure. The individual acts of happiness that he witnessed, the love shared between others, offended him. He understood why certain old people became misanthropes—it was not that they had soured on life, but that the sense of a definite end had become more imminent. Time moved faster, bodies deteriorated, and they no longer had the shield of youth to relegate these grim epiphanies to the hinterlands of the mind, to be felt and forgotten.

Worse, they could not rid themselves of the hope. It rattled around inside them, echoing off the walls, immortal and impossible, surfacing at the most infuriating moments. They couldn’t ignore it, and thoughts of transience and death resonated. So did the idea that they had lived a life without apprehending their destiny, that they now faced an end without resolution.

So they became cynics, and maybe they tried to hide behind irony. Or they became Republicans, or lived life for money or sex or hatred or some other corruption, or…

Forget the political statement, Charlie. Race to the dramatic conclusion. You’re nearly there. Shout it in neon letters:

Bitterness and cynicism did not arise from the end of their love affair with life itself…no, it was the terminal disease of a people who had loved life intensely, only to discover that it did not love them back.

Yes.

Goddamit, yes.

He slapped his desk, and shouted out loud.

“Fuck me!”

*

40 He did not stop to consider whether these thoughts had any practical truth. What mattered was the path they illuminated, a path that could only be reached by a question: Why, why, why was he thinking about destiny?

Nothing is random, Charlie. It’s not random that you care about the Elephant Hunter. The brain speaks for a reason. Intuition is just concrete thought we haven’t processed. It’s not random that Eli knows the Elephant Hunter. The world speaks for a reason. He is your conduit.

So why? Why had the mind led him here?

Because, just like you, the Elephant Hunter was a man without destiny.

The killer had suffered. He had watched a lifetime of hope and effort come to nothing. He had lived in drudgery and possibly depression. But he pulled off a miracle—after life denied him a destiny, he invented his own. He had the courage to look beyond the failed love affair with existence, and to resurrect himself without the only lover that was supposed to matter.

And his miracle was so big, and so profound, and so expansive, that—Charlie stood up, caught his breath—that yes, it could accommodate another soul or two. A soul like the one pacing this godforsaken office.

State it plainly, Charlie:

That madman’s salvation is murdering Republicans.

My salvation will be to stop him.

Not because he cared if one monster killed another—to hell with them all—but because it was an honest-to-god purpose. It was something to chase, and now he knew, in his manic fever, that what they shared was orbital gravity, dangerous and magnetic. They could not fail to meet.

*

The full weight of the truth hit Charlie then, a nuclear payload of cosmic dread, and the life of resignation he’d led for the better part of a decade rooted his feet to the floor, stirred the anxious chemicals in his stomach.

You must quit this rotting corpse of a job.

The allure of the safety net is never so strong as when they begin to drag it away. Fear clawed at his neck. He told himself that there was safety in the slow funeral procession he’d chosen.

41 No! You are a Viking. The Vikings burned their ships when they landed on the shore of foreign lands they meant to conquer. No going back—victory or death.

“I’m a Viking,” he announced, to the empty reception room.

The room made no objection.

He gathered his coat, slipped through the foyer. The stillness of the elevator tortured him, and he hit both shoulders against the retracting doors in his haste. But then he was past the lobby, through the revolving doors, and into the brisk reviving air. In the quaking shadows of his subconscious he could almost see the man’s face, could almost complete the sketch.

You and me…I know so little about you, but we are soul mates. We are going to collide.

42

PART TWO: THE MISTAKE

“Everything changes, nothing disappears.” —Proverb

43 DOCUMENT: NYTimes.com

Third Republican Politician Murdered; “Elephant Hunter” Suspected; Killer Escapes

By Tracy Lydle - Oct. 26

The domestic terrorist known as “The Elephant Hunter” has claimed his third victim.

Georgia state representative William Bostick, 46, was found dead Sunday morning near his home in Dahlonega, Ga. Local police discovered the body in the forest surrounding Bostick’s house at approximately 11 a.m. Authorities believe that the killer, who is the target of an ongoing nationwide manhunt, successfully escaped the area.

FBI sources have told the Times that Bostick was shot in the head multiple times at close range on a footpath a quarter mile from his home just after dawn Tuesday morning. In a short Facebook post published at 1 p.m., Samuel Bostick, the victim’s brother, confirmed that Rep. Bostick went missing while walking his dog.

“The walk was a daily ritual when he was home from Atlanta,” Samuel Bostick wrote. “It brought him peace, and today that peace was shattered.” He requested privacy for the family.

The initial search for Rep. Bostick was prompted by the publication on two political blogs of a letter claiming credit for the murder. Several other media outlets, including the New York Times, received the same unsigned letter indicating that the killer was the same man responsible for the earlier violent deaths of South Carolina Gov. Alonso Clements and North Carolina State Sen. Ted Harwood. Like Clements and Harwood, Rep. Bostick was a Republican.

The alleged killer’s letter was immediately forwarded to authorities by the Times. In accordance with the Times’ policy and requests from the FBI, it will not be published in full.

This mode of killing represents a seeming departure for the so-called “Elephant Hunter,” who allegedly murdered Gov. Clements by strangulation with piano wire and struck Sen. Harwood with a car before beating him to death with a blunt object.

The FBI sources would not speculate on the possibility that the murder weapon used to bludgeon Sen. Harwood was the same weapon from Tuesday’s shooting. As of 2 p.m., authorities had not announced the type of firearm used to kill Rep. Bostick, and would not indicate whether any evidence was gathered at the scene. This story will be updated as new information becomes available.

44 An exhaustive search for the killer has been underway since September. In a series of statements released in the last two months, FBI profilers have speculated that the culprit is a white man, likely in his forties or fifties, with leftist political beliefs and a possible history of mental illness. A source close to the case said some investigators believe the killer has a fixation with mutilating the faces of his victims.

Emergency road blocks were set up by state police on major highways surrounding Dahlonega within a half hour of the letter’s publication, but police sources said Bostick had likely been dead since at least 8 a.m. It is believed that the killer left the scene hours before the road blocks were put in place.

In the letter claiming responsibility for Bostick’s death, first published at the websites Peach State Politics and Splinter News, the killer pointed to three factors that led him to target Bostick: His push for “voter suppression” measures taken against the state’s African-American population, his unsuccessful attempts to privatize Georgia’s water utilities and his support for the Pine Bluff oil pipeline, which also runs through Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama before reaching its Georgia terminus.

Opponents of the pipeline claim that a series of high-profile spills outside Redbud, Ga. in 2013 led to environmental destruction and a higher incidence of cancer rates among the local population.

Despite outlining his motives in broad strokes, the killer maintained that the choice of Bostick was essentially random. He noted that his victim’s political activity was “indistinguishable” from dozens of other state politicians. Authorities have speculated that Bostick and the two previous victims were chosen for their semi- rural locations, which made it easier for the killer to operate unseen. They further speculate that the killer is targeting victims without children.

In the assassin’s first message to the public, sent to local and national media after Harwood’s death in September, he wrote, “this randomness has a purpose. It is partly that [Harwood] is not hidden behind an army of Secret Service. But it is mostly because men like him don’t deserve to feel safe while they destroy our country.”

As in his previous letters, the “Elephant Hunter” encouraged others to emulate his actions by assassinating Republican political figures. To date, there have been no known copycat crimes.

Across the country, the ripples of the Elephant Hunter’s campaign have been felt. Dozens of Republican politicians have taken protective measures in response to the killings. Several have hired private security personnel, while others have armed themselves.

45 In Nebraska last week, Republican state rep. Herman Bailey fired a shot through his kitchen window at a part-time Amazon delivery driver who was carrying a package to Bailey’s front door. Bailey later said he believed the man was the Elephant Hunter. The shot struck the driver in the shoulder, who fled before calling authorities. Bailey was arrested and now faces charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Bostick was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2006 from the ninth State House district. He ran unopposed in every primary and general election since 2012, and his legislative history is relatively unremarkable—in the last decade, he has authored only five pieces of legislation that made it through the state house, and his voting record is consistent with his Republican contemporaries.

He lived for 17 years in Dahlonega, a town in northern Georgia on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest, less than 30 miles from the North Carolina and Tennessee borders. Along with representing the district in the state house, Bostick worked from his home as an independent financial advisor.

Bostick is survived by his wife, Judy Latour Bostick, his brother Samuel, and his mother, Olivia Bostick. His dog, a golden retriever named Buckley, was recovered unharmed.

46 Chapter 7: Confidence

Eastern Virginia, Oct. 26

The Elephant Hunter had been listening to news talk radio for the entire drive north, and now the light rain hit his windshield on the dark rural roads of U.S. 58. The shooting that morning had been perfect in planning and execution—a first for him— and his meandering route home had given him time to savor the kill. Now, as he slowed to avoid a notorious speed trap in Brunswick County, he considered his emotions; surprisingly calm, free of guilt, even satisfied.

The gun worked perfectly. Better by far than his first practice session, an exercise in total incompetence, in an isolated patch of woods in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp.

He loathed the memory—how he’d parked his car at dawn off Railroad Ditch Road, aware from two days of scouting that the first ranger from the Fish & Wildlife Service never came before 8:30 a.m.. How he trudged a half mile in near darkness to the interior. It was wet, which he should have expected—the name “Great Dismal Swamp” was the giveaway—and he spent the entire walk terrified of the snakes that may or may not have been in hibernation.

It had been years since he fired a weapon of any kind, and the gun he bought in Durham was completely foreign to him. A few YouTube videos had helped, but he’d been too nervous to load the gun in his apartment, and out in the swamp, nothing seemed to fit. Loading more than seven bullets into the magazine was impossible with no leverage, even though it had a nine-bullet capacity, and he wasted ten minutes trying to shove the magazine into the gun before he remembered that the slide had to be locked in the rear position. It was another 20 minutes before he figured out that the slide wouldn’t move without pressing the grip safety. Finally, with the magazine loaded and ready to fire, he put in his ear plugs, held his breath, and pulled the trigger.

The gun only clicked. Twice, three times, four times. He hadn’t chambered a round, he realized, which he accomplished by racking the slide in two clumsy jerks, the first of which peeled a chunk of skin off his fight index finger. Then he took aim at a thick bald cypress trunk about 20 feet away, squeezed the trigger four times, and missed completely.

But he liked the power of the gun. The way it sat in his hand, the light trigger, the slight recoil, even the noise. For the first time in his life, he could understand the appeal of holding a deadly weapon.

He only had the nerve to stay for 20 minutes—if someone found him, he realized he’d have to shoot them, run away, or tell a bad story—and when he re-loaded the magazine, he had more luck. This time he hit the Cypress tree with five of seven

47 shots, mostly because he discovered that the two dots at the top of the barrel could be used to aim.

Even after that success, he knew he was no natural. He’d have to get close to Bostick, very close, or he’d flub the job completely. He trudged back to the car, satisfied at least that he knew how to fire the weapon.

*

He’d been scouting William Bostick off and on for a year, from afar and up close in Dahlonega, and had even greeted him on more than one occasion on morning walks through the forest trails near his home. He had almost made Bostick his first kill, but back then he didn’t plan on having a gun, and the Georgian was the most physically imposing of his potential victims.

With the addition of the .40, the Bostick plan became the simplest of the three by far. He knew he’d have as long as he needed to execute the plan. He could take his time—no need to force the matter if conditions weren’t ideal.

As it happened, the first day was perfect—a slight mist rose from the forest floor, Bostick was home from Atlanta, and it wasn’t cold enough to keep a habitual walker inside. The forest paths showed no sign of another soul.

Just a few ticks past 7:20 a.m., he spotted Bostick walking toward him through a thin cover of elms and willow oaks where the path curved around a pond. He’d coached himself to turn the trigger safety to the “off” position the minute he caught sight of his target, and he did that now. He risked a glance at his gun, and saw that the small metal tab of the chamber indicator rose, indicating a bullet in the chamber, ready to fire.

The night before, now confident enough to handle the loaded gun in his car, he had the bright idea to chamber a bullet ahead of time so he wouldn’t have to remember in the heat of battle and have a repeat of his practice session in the swamp. He made sure the safety was on and placed the gun carefully on the passenger seat.

He tried to sleep after that, but obsessive preparation got the better of him, and an hour later he ejected the magazine to count the bullets. There were six—he thought he had loaded seven, but six would be plenty. All that mattered was that he knew the precise number.

He lifted his binoculars to the trees as Bostick rounded the bend. He moved to the edge of the footpath. He fingered the gun in the deep pockets of his khakis.

“Anything good up there?” Bostick asked. He was 15 feet away, and loud.

The Elephant Hunter dropped the binoculars, turned to him, shook his head.

48

“No.” His insides burned.

And he lifted the gun from his pocket, aimed, and fired before the puzzlement could spread from Bostick’s eyes to his frozen limbs.

The first shot surprised the shooter with its loud crack—it was louder than before, somehow—and he covered his ear with the hand that held the gun. He felt the cool metal against his face as he twisted away, and found himself staring at the pond.

The barking dog drew his attention back to Bostick. Focus. The man was down. The bullet had passed through his cheek, and now he made a sick moaning noise as he held a hand to the wound. Amazingly, he still stood. The dog erupted in fury, but stood back a careful distance.

The Elephant Hunter walked forward, aimed the gun at Bostick’s head, and squeezed the trigger until there were no more bullets.

At last, the man fell.

He dragged the body by the feet to the edge of the pond—he wanted it to be invisible for a few hours, but not forever—and came back to complete the crucial final act of his mission.

The golden retriever whined, his red leash dragging on the ground, the silver tag proclaiming “BUCKLEY” rattling beneath the scruff of his neck. The killer dropped to his hands and knees. He crawled to where he had fired, then a few steps back and to the right. There, on the dirt path, among the leaves of the forest, he spotted five empty cartridges strewn on the ground. Ten feet away, he found the sixth—the shell from his first shot.

He pocketed them all—they could track shells better than bullets, he’d read—and left the way he’d came. He risked one last look backward, where the dog had curled up by its owner’s side. The animal watched him, silent now, covered in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the trees. His slow, labored breath came out in great clouds of steam. The Elephant Hunter met the animal’s gaze, and in the consuming silence he felt inexpressibly sad.

*

Now, minutes from home, the melancholy had faded. He felt triumphant. He felt proud. More, he felt that he could allow himself this pride. He had reached the stage where the years of planning, the anxiety, the frustration, and the grief had spilled out into success. In the days of imagination, of fantasy, he was never certain if he would manage to take even the first step. Now, three of the bastards were dead— three of the godforsaken scum who took from him what couldn’t be recovered.

49

He was not in a smiling mood. He hadn’t been in years. But somewhere inside, he felt a burden go light. It brought tears to his eyes.

*

But he had made a mistake.

The night before the killing, sleepless in his car, he’d removed the magazine and found six bullets. The number “six” stayed in his mind, but he forgot the one he chambered an hour earlier. Inadvertently, he had executed something close to a maneuver that gun owners called “topping off”—getting one more round of capacity by chambering a bullet and re-loading the magazine. He hadn’t reloaded, but the effect was the same—he was carrying one more bullet than he expected. Six in the magazine, one in the chamber. Seven total.

When he emptied the gun into Bostick without counting the shots, he had fired seven rounds. And when he crawled on his hands and knees looking for the spent cartridges, he should have been looking for seven shells.

He pocketed six, but one remained—a rogue shell hidden beneath an inconvenient leaf.

50 Chapter 8: The Extra Shell

Dahlonega, GA, Oct. 26

Lumpkin County police captain Gerard Roach, feeling the first faint stirrings of resentment, lingered on the perimeter of the crime scene. While the FBI assholes from Atlanta investigated, Roach, a gun enthusiast himself, began to think. He estimated by the tight grouping of wounds on the victim’s face that the shots had been fired up close. He stepped under the unnecessary yellow police tape—they were too far in the middle of nowhere for any crowds to gather—and scanned the ground just off the footpath to the rear of where the killer had likely stood.

It didn’t take him long to find it. The shell was partially disguised beneath a golden leaf fallen from a young cedar elm, but with the sun high above the trees, there was no mistaking the gleam from the exposed brass. He bagged it himself.

Eli Wilder arrived on the scene like a whirling dervish twenty minutes later, having flown by private jet from Quantico to Atlanta and completed the trip to Dahlonega by helicopter.

Roach decided to keep the spent cartridge to himself, just for a moment, while he plotted how to reveal it to the greatest fanfare. The moment became a full half hour, and he held on even as he saw a few of the agents search in the same spot. He couldn’t distinguish between the various bigshots on the scene, but he recognized authority in Eli. Finally, sensing that he’d waited a beat too long, he handed him the shell casing personally.

Eli lifted the plastic evidence bag level with his eyes.

“.40 caliber.”

“Yessir. Just like the bullets.”

“This the only one?”

“Only one I found, and I looked pretty good. You’d think any others would be in the same spot.”

“How long have you been holding this?”

“Wasn’t sure who should get it.”

“What’s the mystery? We should get it.”

“Well…I, uh…”

51 Eli saved him from further stammering.

“Forget it. How many shots?”

“More than one.”

Eli hid his annoyance at the colloquial, withholding style. “So he picked them up.”

“Not all.”

Eli looked up from the bag, and into Roach’s eyes. He didn’t trust good luck, and he took out his suspicion on Roach.

“This could be from something completely different. It could be a whole fucking different gun, different day, different asshole. You’ve given me a cartridge from some target shooter.”

“Could be,” said Roach, trying to ignore the sudden, inescapable sense that he’d landed under the wrong microscope. “But it’s awful shiny for an old shell, and I can’t imagine many of the old boys around here play with .40s.”

Eli tried to summon more doubts, thousands of them, but he was bone-tired and needed a little hope.

“Goddamn,” he said, and Roach knew it was as close as he’d get to a compliment.

They both knew that a single shell casing could be more valuable than all the bullets they recovered from the body. In theory, the ballistics experts could enter bullets into the databases, but most had stopped in the ‘90s, burdened by backlogs measured first by months, and then years. If you wanted to get lucky, you needed a shell.

“Does the FBI love me now?”

“I don’t know about love,” Eli said, already walking away, “but we’d fuck you ‘til you squealed.”

It was better for Roach that Eli was gone, because he didn’t quite know how to respond. So he stood in place, and he watched the special agent whose name he didn’t know powwow with two of his colleagues. The man pointed back at Roach, then at the ground where he’d found the shell, and the other agent wore a look like he’d just spotted the man that keyed his car. Then the agent spoke with his boss, Lumpkin County Sherriff Bill Stanhaus, and showed him the shell casing. After a few minutes, Stanhaus nodded. A little reluctantly, Roach thought.

52 Maybe I should have turned that shell in a minute or two earlier. Then Stanhaus— mustache twitching, which Roach had learned was a bad sign—raised both hands at him in a gesture that could only mean “what the fuck?”

Yes, he thought, that would have been the wiser course of action. But who can resist a little glory in a world where it is in such short supply, even for a humble officer of the law?

He took out his pad just to have somewhere to look, and when he risked another glance, Eli was gone and the other FBI agent was marching in his direction.

The chopper rose above the tree line moments later, and Roach was grateful for the way it briefly drowned out the merciless ass chewing that had just commenced. A few feet away, his sheriff was waiting impatiently to take a turn.

I never catch a break in this life, he thought, even when I catch a break.

He longed to be on the helicopter, and he had a good idea where they were going.

53 Chapter 9: Identification

Decatur, GA, Oct. 26

The best way to think about the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, implemented by the ATF in 1997 and called “NIBIN” for short, is that it functions like a DNA crime lab for firearms. The governing principle is the same—examine the invisible patterns, find a match, solve the crime.

Each gun comes with its own unique tool marks that work like fingerprints, and when it’s fired, these specific bits of DNA are imprinted on the ejected ballistics— both the bullet and the shell casing. The ATF and its law enforcement partners, which include the FBI and police departments, use these fingerprints to search for matches from a nationwide database of more than 16 million digital images.

Shell casings yield the overwhelming majority of these matches. Bullets are increasingly rare—they take longer to enter and yield fewer hits, so at some point the people operating the hundreds of NIBIN labs across the country stopped bothering altogether.

There are two sides to the NIBIN system. Investigators use a piece of hardware called IBIS BrassTrax—the Integrated Ballistics Identification System—to photograph shell casings and produce 2-D and 3-D images. The IBIS looks like a Rube Goldberg device as dreamed up by H.P. Lovecraft—a cumbersome black-and- white contraption that moves with the slow rhythms of a predatory fish, complete with an array of metal tentacles extending from the side and a protruding ocular lens.

Once the casing is entered, the images go to the second stage—a comparative analysis software called Matchpoint. There, a computer examines minuscule details invisible to the naked eye, from the impressions where the firing pin strikes the casing to the scratches where it slams backward against the breechface—are they parallel linear, cross-hatched, arched?—to the striations and line breaks and loops created from the impact with the ejector. From those marks, it scans the database for matches.

It takes ten minutes to enter a shell into the system using the IBIS hardware, but it takes about an hour for the Matchpoint software to run its sophisticated algorithm and produce a list of ranked “possible associations.” If one of these leads looks promising, the typical protocol is for a forensic scientist to compare them side by side on the computer screen to weed out bad hits. Once the two exhibits have been isolated, a skilled technician can identify a good match in five minutes. After that, the match is confirmed by examining the two shells under a comparison microscope.

Eli’s mission now was to enter the shell casing from Dahlonega into a NIBIN database. It was a long shot, but it was the best lead he’d unearthed in the two

54 months since the Elephant Hunter began to kill. And even a long shot is better than a shot in the dark.

*

To reach a NIBIN entry station, he had a few choices. His people would prefer that he bring the shell casing back to Quantico, but that was his farthest option, time was of the essence, and he could run into bureaucratic headaches by crossing state lines. Those inter-departmental conflicts would be resolved in his favor—the only good thing about the Elephant Hunter case was that it had become so big as to override the usual bullshit—but he couldn’t spare the hours.

That left three options in or near Atlanta. First was the ATF laboratory, which meant the same turf war he was striving to avoid, and a risk of running into a big shot with a chip on his shoulder for for the FBI. Next was the Atlanta Police Department, a low-slung building in the shittiest part of town whose walls looked like the ancient bowels of a long-dead community swimming pool. He could pull rank on them, but he had a prejudice against their ballistics specialists—perhaps unfairly, he assumed they wouldn’t be as good as those at a specialized facility. That left the Georgia Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Decatur, a few miles south of the city.

Despite its name, the GBI was independent, no affiliation whatsoever with the FBI. Their remit was the entire state, but as an assisting agency they had no real jurisdictional turf. They intervened only when requested, by local police departments or DAs or judges. Those requests came often. They had some of the state’s most advanced resources, and their only real job was to be good at investigative work.

Eli hadn’t worked with the GBI directly, but he’d heard good things, and he knew they were full-time specialists with their eyes on the big picture. One mention of the word “Elephant Hunter,” likely from the director himself, and they’d be hopping. He guessed their backlog stretched back at least two years, but no matter—his shell casing would jump to the front of the line.

Most importantly of all, he could get it done today.

So the chopper took him to Atlanta, and a company car attended by a police escort sped him to Decatur. After ten harrowing minutes, they drove through the wrought iron gate outside the GBI’s Phil Peters Building—an odd two-floor brick structure built like a pyramid of rectangles laid on its side, with the flat imposing wedge facing the road. Rounded white canopies shaded every window, and the Georgia state flag flew at the entrance.

Eli was met at the door by the GBI Director, Elmore Keeley, who made a special trip from the Atlanta headquarters. Keeley was a wide man in every regard, face to

55 shoulders to hips. A football player in a different life, Eli guessed, and evidently a man who liked to talk. He greeted Eli with a booming, stagy voice.

“One of the strangest goddam things I’ve seen. And I’ve seen some strange ones, believe me.”

Eli made the quick calculation that Keeley was the kind of man who seized initiative with pure volume—someone who wants to be thought of as eccentric, but is really just a control freak—and the only way to deal with him right now was plain old rudeness. He regretted the way his job deprived him of the niceties, but he didn’t regret it too much.

“Mr. Keeley, we’re on quite a time crunch.”

He refused to lighten the message with a smile. Keeley paused, just for a moment, and in that moment his hurt pride was exposed. But he gathered himself quickly— this wasn’t a business for sensitive souls.

“Of course. Of course. Listen, before we go in, I gotta warn you—you’ll be working with our best forensics guy, best ballistics guy, best everything. Corliss Clifford. True genius. Also strange as a dream. Anti-social doesn’t quite begin to cover it.”

Anti-social sounded great to Eli, but now it was time to sweeten the interaction.

“I appreciate that. Extremely helpful.”

“He’s the only one who wears his white lab coat,” Keeley continued, as if Eli hadn’t said a word. “Supposed to be the standard uniform, but it’s not really necessary for most of these boys. Corliss, though, Corliss never takes his off. Comes in with it, leaves with it. Some of his colleagues told me they dragged him out drinks once, back in the early days, and he wore the coat to the bar. Probably sleeps in it too.”

They took the stairs to the second floor, and Eli waited at the top for Keeley, who did his best to pretend he wasn’t winded.

At the ballistics lab, they found Corliss Clifford sitting in the hallway—more rail than man, even in the promised white lab coat.

“Corliss!” Keeley roared, but the man’s saturnine expression only deepened. He stood up in a weary but bizarre fashion—toppling to his side, rolling over into push- up position, and slowly walking his feet to his hands. Springing to full size, he was taller than Keeley, and gaunt in all the places where his boss was round.

“I hope you’re not going to look over my shoulder every second,” he muttered to Eli in soft admonishment.

56 “Good to meet you, Corliss.

“The shell, please.”

Eli handed it over. “How long will this take?”

“That’s up to the computer.”

Eli felt the chemical wave of anger that came so quickly these days, but he restrained himself. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, the algorithm has to work. I’ll have the shell entered in ten minutes, but I can’t control the computer.”

“Give me a ballpark.”

Corliss shrugged and seemed to retreat into his own bony recesses—the appearance of a man who won’t be forced into a straight answer. But Eli’s expression brooked no equivocation.

“An hour to run the automatic correlation.”

Eli did the quick calculations—either he stayed in the lab with this hostile nut, or he let Keeley talk his ear off in the interim.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he said, and practically sprinted to the stairwell.

*

He told his driver to find an empty parking lot, and once there he slept for 45 minutes. He dreamed an unsubtle dream of a man with the face of an elephant strangling him to death with his serpentine trunk. When the tap came at his window, he hit his head on the door waking up.

He found them in the lab, the door open. Corliss’ face was unreadable, but Keeley’s disappointment was written on his entire body. And it was a big body.

“Tell me,” Eli said.

And they told him. No matches.

Still groggy from the nap, he felt an air of unreality. And in that strangled other world, he could feel his body deflating. There was such a thing as a career-making case, but there were also career-ending ones, and he understood now that the Elephant Hunter was a torpedo that would crush him. He felt a flush of rage overtake him, and in a fit of petulance—the kind he hadn’t experienced in years, the

57 kind that pierced his usual self-control—he kicked the closest thing he could find, which was a metal trash can. It toppled over, spilling a collection of paper cups.

He righted the can without apologizing, and collected the cups in a humiliating act of contrition that Keeley mercifully interrupted.

“They gave us the 25 best matches, but Corliss says none of them were close. He looked at each one in Matchpoint, which isn’t normal, but I told him these are special circumstances. Nothing even close to a match. And in 19 of those cases the guns were already recovered.”

“Is Corliss ever wrong?”

They both shook their heads.

He had to get the hell out of there. After he scooped up the final cup, he headed for the door.

“There is one more thing,”

It was Corliss, hesitant. Eli turned, slowly, but the most he felt like giving this man was two raised eyebrows. Well?

“NIBIN is set up by regions. When we run the casing, the system automatically correlates with Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama. If you want to expand to other regions, you have to run a broader search. Some places have to call the National Correlation Center in Huntsville to do that, but we could do it here. It’s still a headache.”

At that moment, Eli imagined he had blood in his eyes, and it was fortunate for everyone involved that Keeley got angry for him.

“Corliss. Corliss,” Keeley’s voice was almost a whisper, but it contained infinite rage. The good-ole-boy façade vanished, and Eli saw, for the first time, how this man had the raw energy to rise to the head of the GBI. “Are you out of your damn mind? Jesus Christ, son, of course he wants to expand the search. He’s looking for a damn serial killer that roves around the whole southeast!”

Corliss had widened his eyes dramatically. “What serial killer?”

“The Elephant Hunter,” said Eli, his lips tight enough to press coal into diamond. “Did nobody tell you?” He gave Keeley a hard look.

“No. And I’ve never even heard of him.” Sensing the rage inspired by that answer, Corliss hastened to explain. “I don’t read very much, and I don’t have a TV.”

58 Eli paced toward him, hard enough that Keeley took a cautionary step between them.

“Corliss, listen to me,” Eli began. “I don’t give a fuck about your news consumption, or how you spend your free hours outside this lab. I just want tell you that right now, I’m feeling this strong urge to fold you in half and stuff in you that trash can I just kicked over, and then to run the whole fucking thing through a meat grinder.”

Keeley deployed the odd swear word for effect, but Eli’s rant made him anxious. “Okay, now—

“But instead, I’m going to ask you a question—how long to do it all? How long to get permission, or whatever, and run it again?”

“What regions?” Corliss asked.

“The whole fucking world, Corliss.”

“I can only look in America, but the whole country…that would take some time.”

“Let’s start with the east coast. All of it, and a few other states too. Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi…” Eli ran over the map in his head. “Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio. Start there.”

Corliss nodded. “I can do an east coast correlation.”

“How long?”

“Four hours,” he said, stifling his usual instinct to hedge.

“I’ll be outside, Corliss. And I’ll be holding a fucking sniper rifle. If you try to leave, or you try to take a piss, or you even peer forlornly out the window, I’ll blow you sky high and tell your loved ones that you died shitting yourself.”

Silence filled the room. Keeley coughed.

“Agent Wilder, that’s a bit much.”

And so he turned sweet.

“Who do I need to call for you, Corliss? Who can make this easier?”

And Corliss answered.

*

59 More hellish sleep in the car, more fantasies of death and destruction. At some point, night fell, blurring the lines between heaven and hell.

When his phone rang, he woke with a growl.

“You should get up here,” said the voice. He hung up. The clock on his phone said 8 p.m.

Back in the lab, Corliss had forgotten fear, or reticence, and was practically vibrating.

“Only one match worth anything, but it’s excellent,” he said. He waved Eli over to the computer.

Eli looked over his shoulder, and saw two 3-D images of shell casings, along with a wall of text below.

“Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“This is Matchpoint. It’s basically a comparison program that lets me look at two shell casings side by side. The one you see on the left is the shell you picked up this morning.”

“And the right?”

“A shooting in Durham, North Carolina from 2016. Murder. Victim named Malik Townes, known affiliation with the United Blood Nation. He got shot with two different guns. One gun they identified, a Glock. Police got the shooter on a wiretap from an unrelated case, got his Glock too. Rival gang member. But they never found the other shooter.”

“Or his gun?”

“Or his gun.”

Keeley leaned his big body between them and indicated the casing on the right with a meaty finger. “That shell, the potential match, is from the other shooter.”

“Jesus,” said Eli, more mystified and than enlightened. “Do we know where the known shooter is now? The one with the Glock?”

“Bad news on that front,” Keeley said. “Overdosed in prison earlier this year.”

Eli decided to pace.

60 “Help me understand this—you’re telling me the shell from a gun I just found in the Georgia boonies comes from the same gun that killed a gangbanger in Durham?”

Keeley held up a cautionary hand. “We won’t know for sure until we can look at both shells in the flesh. With two pairs of human eyes. The computer is just a first step.”

“It’s more than that.”

That was Corliss, and now he took Eli through the paces—the distinctive cross- hatching from the firing pin, the triangular dents from the ejector, and most tellingly, an identical series of looped, spiral-like striations on the breechface.

“I’m not supposed to use definitive language,” Corliss said, his voice now low and confiding. “It says so in our handbook. I’m supposed to tell you, ‘IBIS indicated a possible association.’ And then we get out the comparison microscopes.”

“But?”

“But the odds of everything I just showed you occurring on two spent shells from different guns? It’s a million to one. Maybe worse.”

Eli sat down on the floor. He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair. What the hell was happening?

He threw a questioning look to Keeley—does this make any sense to you?—but Keeley only shrugged.

“He’s never wrong.”

Eli could barely ask himself the question. He had come here for a case-breaking revelation, and instead he was leaving more confused than ever. He wanted to give himself a day, a week, a lifetime before he let the words creep into his brain. But he didn’t have the time, so he asked:

How is a street killing in Durham related to a white, middle-aged serial killer who hates Republicans?

In other words: What the fuck is going on?

61

PART THREE: THE STORY OF A GUN

“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.” —Proverb

62 Chapter 10: Brisko’s Glory

Durham, NC. Two Years Earlier

Calvin “Brisko” Weems, owner of the Paradise Night Club and the soon-to-be- opened Paradise 2, swung his black Ford pick-up onto Pico Lane. He was smiling— this was the best day of his life.

At 42, he had graduated beyond the rigors of club promotion just before he’d aged out of the game—maybe a few years after, truth be told—and a lifetime of hustling had started to pay dividends. He was about to get paid, and he damn well deserved it. He wasn’t clean, but he was smart, and through pure craft and a bit of luck he’d situated himself as the middle man in the largest cocaine operation on the South Side of Durham.

That meant he was straight-up earning—more than anyone in town, almost—and it also meant he had no exposure. Privately, he had begun thinking of himself as Mr. Invisible.

The only way he could lose was to flash the money, and that wasn’t on the agenda. Call it a benefit of being a little older, a little wiser—he had nobody to impress but himself.

And anyone who fucks with Mr. Invisible, fucks with the Mexicans.

Fucks with Teddy.

He met Teddy through a true friend on another slow night at the failing Paradise Night Club—probably because of the failing Paradise Night Club—and in the near darkness Teddy didn’t look like a Teddy. He looked like skinny Mexican death, actually, and he left Brisko with no confusion on where things stood. He talked up the “opportunity” long enough to hook him, and then made it clear that if Brisko ever decided to get too curious, he’d end up dead…but not just dead, amigo.

“Good.” Brisko had tried to keep the tremor out of his voice. “I’m the least curious motherfucker you’ll ever meet.”

Teddy stared back, the ice chips in his eyes freezing to a paler shade of blue.

“Is this true?”

“Man, I ain’t even know my momma’s first name. Never asked.”

And Teddy, thank God, had laughed—this man who one moment earlier looked ready to carve the oversized heart out of Brisko’s body. He laughed long, and loud, and clapped him on the shoulder, and at some point Brisko remembered to breathe.

63

Now he flew to Los Angels every six weeks, saw Teddy for ten minutes, worked out the details of the shipments, and that was that. If he had his guess, the drugs probably came from Colombia, by way of some vicious Mexican cartel—Tijuana, probably—of which Teddy was a convincing emissary. But he didn’t need to know, and he’d never be dumb enough to ask.

“You’ll be doing my dirty work, Brisko,” Teddy said. “Just like I’m doing the dirty work for someone else. And if you’re smart, you’ll get someone to do your dirty work, and at the end of the day we’ll all be filthy rich.”

He smiled at his wordplay, so Brisko smiled too.

His second shipment had arrived that morning from Los Angeles at the abandoned lot on Jefferies Road. The truck bore a load of furniture, innocent to the naked eye. Five wooden dressers, unfinished, cheaply made from birch. Three of the four drawers in each unit opened as normal, but the bottom drawers wouldn’t budge. If somebody cut through the wood, they’d find a layer of spray foam, black electrical tape, cellophane, and a bit of motor oil to confuse any sniffing dogs. And inside all of that, packed tight, were two bricks of cocaine—one kilo each, ten total.

He and his son Malcolm had loaded the dressers onto the pickup bed, liberated the cocaine at home, and delivered the bricks to Morris Bellamy—Mo Bells on the street, or just Bells—an hour later.

The shit was pure, too. Or pure enough—they cut it with Levamisole up the line, enough to rot your skin if you stayed addicted too long, but that wasn’t Brisko’s problem. “Up the line” was California, and California was Mexico, and Mexico kept themselves to themselves.

In a month, he’d meet up with Bells again, and he’d walk out with around $400,000 in street cash separated into $5,000 wraps. Three hundred of that would go back to California through various bank accounts, and the rest was his.

Brisko was always good at math, but it didn’t take a genius to know that if he kept clean, he’d clear a million in a year. He knew Bells wasn’t sweating it either—he was connected with the O-Line Bloods on the South Side, and by the time he distributed it to his two main dealers, five-star Bloods named Rio and Ghost who operated in tandem out of Enterprise Street, he’d be walking away with twice what Brisko made.

Rio and Ghost, who also happened to be his muscle—a man like Bells was known around town, and needed protection—would sell it to the mid-level dealers, who would step on it with baking soda, boil it down to crack, and distribute it to the street dealers who did the actual selling, protected by a network of kids acting as lookouts and clockers. The smart ones would cut it again, the greedy ones would cut it twice and get a beatdown if the shit got too weak.

64

And at each step, the profits were enormous—the kilo that cost $400 to make somewhere in Columbia could fetch $200,000 by the time it was in the hands of the fiends on the street. And everywhere along the way, money rained down.

Brisko had the best job of all—he had the connect. In theory, only Teddy and Bells should even know his name. And now, merging onto the freeway, the drugs safely out of his hands, he rolled down his window and howled. The sun was shining in Durham, and he could do anything.

But Brisko Weems had two problems he didn’t know about.

*

The first problem was a three-star Blood named Malik Townes who rolled on the East Side.

In Durham, the two gangs with the most clout—and the most mutual hatred—are both offshoots of the United Blood Nation. The Omega Line (O-Line for short) rules the South Side and Bentwood, and the Fire Line controls the East Side near downtown. Despite the common affiliation, they were violent rivals. Nobody—not the Crips, not MS-13 or the Sureños—come close in terms of money, drugs, or manpower.

In peace time they rarely met. To be in the O-Line meant you stayed on the South Side, sometimes your whole life, and to be in Fire Line meant you never strayed from the east. They had their own clubs, their own stores, their own blocks. Separated by less than two miles and a freeway, they may as well have been in different countries.

But when a war was on, they crossed the borders and they killed.

Brisko didn’t care about gangs. He had no ties to any of them, and he wanted to keep it that way, but word travels fast in Durham, and Malik Townes learned through the grapevine that the legend Mo Bells was out of jail and dealing huge quantities through O-Line.

He put the question out: “Where he get the shit from?”

And the answer came back, eventually, because there are no secrets on the street.

Brisko, man.

The fuck is Brisko?

Brisko who run Paradise.

65

Fat motherfucker owns the club?

You see how high he livin’? He pushin’ weight.

Well he got a lot to push, don’t he?

Yo, I’m serious. Listen—how you gonna open a second club when nobody goes to the first?

Shit.

Brisko was the perfect target—lots of cash, and unlike Bells, no muscle. He probably didn’t even own a gun.

So Townes recruited a small team, including his boy Wes, and it was Wes who had the bright idea to put a small GPS tracker on the underside of Brisko’s truck one night at Paradise, which led them to his apartment complexes out in the demilitarized suburban zone of Morrisville. That’s where he kept the cash, Townes told his crew, and knowing a thing or two about cocaine profit margins, he thought they might be on the mother lode.

So they hatched the plan—hit him where he sleeps.

*

The second problem was Rio—Bells’ shooter and main distributor, and a rapper with a big mouth.

Rio had taken it upon himself the summer before to release a song on YouTube called “South Side Unite,” and contrary to the harmonious title, its purpose was to single out every prominent Blood in the Fire Line and attack them for their suppressed homosexuality, their faint hearts, and any personal demons he knew or could invent.

That prompted a response from a much better East Side rapper named Blacka Soul, in which Rio’s brother was called out as a snitch—a rumor that had been going around since 2013—and the response to the response prompted the first drive-by shooting. From there, everything went to pieces.

There was already some necessary violence on the South Side. Brisko’s emergence as a major supplier, and Bells’ ascendance to the top of the O-Line syndicate, created a few minor turf wars that couldn’t be resolved by negotiation alone. But it had all been manageable. Bells paid Messiah Moody, the “high” who ran O-Line for all of North Carolina, to guarantee himself and his people a little security, and they swept up the trash who weren’t smart enough to put a finger to the wind.

66

Rio’s music, on the other hand, had lit a powder keg, and if he weren’t such a powerful figure on Enterprise, Bells might have handled it himself.

As it was, Rio ran loose, and by the time five bodies had piled up in two months, the O-Line had attracted the attention of the Safe Streets Task Force operating out of Durham and Raleigh. That meant police, FBI, DEA, and even, eventually, the IRS.

To them, drugs mattered, but only a little. Murder mattered a lot.

With a network of CIs, and information gleaned from the buy-bust arrests of South Side block hustlers, a picture began to emerge. And the picture was conspiracy, with Morris Bellamy at its head. They suspected Brisko was the supplier, and when they began listening to Bellamy’s phone calls on a Title III wiretap, they knew it for sure.

The day after Brisko received his second shipment—the best day of his life—a judge named Jeremiah C. Devlin signed a second and third affidavit for a Title III wiretap, this time on Brisko and Ghost. (Rio, for all his musical indiscretion, was painstaking about his phone use, and they couldn’t get a number). The phone company routed their calls to a live monitor in an administrative building in Durham, and within a week, the Feds were listening.

*

One of the first things they heard was Ghost complaining to Bells about Rio’s raps:

“Bells man, I’m sayin’, he bringin’ heat we don’t need.”

“I know it.”

“I mean, Rio my boy, but he layin’ it out. He drawin’ them a goddam picture, Bells.”

“You right. I know you right.”

“I’m begging you Bells, talk to the man. Motherfucker gonna put us in a cell.”

And Bells did, when Rio called him two nights later from a South Side pay phone.

“You the face of Durham right now, Rio, and that ain’t what you want to be. You’re putting it out there on YouTube, Twitter, Instagam. You took on that responsibility. We didn’t take that on. You feel me? We was playing like it was. But you making yourself hot, and that makes us hot.”

“Yo, but—

67 “No man, listen. Listen. Stop instigating. You got your thing back, you got your people who been with you, you got them making their money. Don’t fuck that shit up. Too many hitters, too many bodies. That’s all the police need to see. Next thing, they on our asses. Stop the beef, Rio.”

After that, Rio did what he was told and went quiet.

It was far too late.

*

The Feds couldn’t get the really good stuff at first—every time the main players discussed business, they used Facetime. They tried to subpoena Apple, but Facetime messages were encrypted at both ends, so the company politely told them to go to hell.

Lucky for them, Brisko came up before the Internet, and as he told Bells over the phone, “I don’t fuck with that computer shit.” In February, the case finally broke when they intercepted a call about an incoming shipment from R&L Carriers to an abandoned lot on Jefferies Drive.

The day Brisko’s third batch was set to arrive, the Task Force had its surveillance team set. They followed Brisko from his home to the lot, let him load the package and meet Bells, and then waited for Bells to leave his house. But there was a problem—Bells had noticed their cars, and a nervous call to Brisko later in the day shut down the phones for good. The Task Force leaders froze, and ultimately decided not to raid the house. They wanted more, and for that they would risk losing it all.

The disaster was only redeemed by one fact: they had the delivery address where the “furniture” was sent. In a state of desperation, they subpoenaed records from the shipping company and prayed like hell that Brisko wouldn’t switch it up. Three weeks passed with nothing, and then it came—notification came that a shipment to the same vacant lot, carrying the same cargo of furniture, was due in a week. They intercepted the dressers at a holding facility outside Wilmington, replaced the cocaine with sham powder, and let the process play out again.

This time, Brisko wasn’t making the pickup.

*

Two nights before, Malik Townes finally made his move. With a crew of three, he hid in the walkway leading to Brisko’s door until his son Malcolm came by for dinner. Not one to waste good luck, Townes put a gun to Malcolm’s head and encouraged him to knock nicely. When Brisko’s longtime girlfriend Sandra answered, they

68 kicked their way in and shouted everyone to the floor, including Brisko’s four-year- old daughter Nekisha.

Brisko immediately gave up his cash, but it wasn’t the score they imagined. He kept his drug money in a safe in the locked basement at Paradise, laundering it little by little through fake customers drinking fake booze. He pointed Townes to a sock drawer, where he found $2,000 under a false bottom. This was just enough to really piss them off—they knew there was more, and after a destructive search came up empty, Townes’ pal J.O. had the great idea to drag Brisko’s daughter into the bathroom and threaten to drown her in the tub.

When Sandra heard the water running from the living room, she stood up and slapped Townes, who responded by hitting her with the butt of his pistol. Seeing his girlfriend collapse, Brisko raced for the patio door. He made it to open air, but Wes, in a panic, shot him twice as he leapt over the balcony.

“Man, what the fuck!” Townes shouted.

They ran, and by some miracle they escaped.

But the miracle didn’t last long for Townes—there are no secrets on the street, and word got out that he was the ringleader.

Brisko, who survived the two shots to his shoulder and the fall over the first floor patio, looked at the picture of Townes that Bells showed him, and mistakenly fingered him as the man who fired the gun.

Bells went to Rio and Ghost on the South Side, where he conveyed the urgent need to send a message. A message of revenge to the Fire Line, and a very different one to the Mexicans who supplied them—“we can handle our own shit.”

The next night, coming out of his grandmother’s house on Elizabeth Street, Malik Townes took six bullets to the head—three each from Rio and Ghost. The police found shell casings from a Glock 27 and a Springfield XD .40. The Glock shells matched three other unsolved shootings in Durham from the past year, all of them linked to the rap feud Rio started. The XD .40 shells came back unknown.

*

When the next shipment came, Brisko was still laid up, so Malcolm made the pickup. This time the feds got antsy before he met up with Bells, and they popped him at his grandmother’s house while he was burning the furniture. They arrested Brisko next, and then and nabbed Bells at home…where they found five more kilos of coke and two pounds of heroin they weren’t expecting.

69 It took another week of paperwork to collar Rio, and in that time Ghost encouraged him—in person rather than over the phone, to his great fortune—to dump the Glock. But Rio had a soft spot for the weapon, so the Glock stayed. When they arrested him, the FBI found it in a cabinet of the home he shared with his son’s mother, along with pyrex cookware caked with cocaine residue, a digital scale with cocaine residue, a money counter with cocaine residue, six cell phones, ski masks, and $16,000 cash.

Ghost was smarter, but no less sentimental. He loved his gun too—a high school girlfriend had bought it in her name at a Raleigh gun show while he watched over her shoulder—and he didn’t want to toss it for no reason. But he needed a temporary fix, and two days before they picked up Rio, he made one last phone call.

“Yo, it’s Ghost. Don’t say shit to me on this line. Swing by. Got something for you. And hurry the fuck up.”

“I’ll be there in 30.”

“Man, I told you not to say shit.”

With nobody on shift to monitor the call and send out surveillance, Ghost managed to hand off the Springfield XD .40-caliber he used to murder Malik Townes.

*

It was a good move—he got pulled in after Rio, and the D.A. nailed him on conspiracy to distribute 28 grams or more of cocaine base. But they couldn’t connect him to the murder. They could only play the last phone call for him, and ask the question:

What did you want him to have?

Some food.

What kind of food?

Can’t remember.

Who were you talking to?

Can’t remember.

Why the rush?

He must have been hungry.

70 And whatever else you could say about Bells or Rio, they weren’t snitches. So the DA, despite enough ambition to fuel ten careers, let the murder go. Ghost pled guilty, refused to cooperate otherwise, and got 10 years.

Rio, a fighter, wouldn’t plead guilty. His friends all came to support him on the first day of the jury trial, where they learned that his real name was Rayvon Latrelle, and that he had all but confessed to his crimes on a phone call from prison—despite the message at the start of every call that the conversation was recorded. His friends didn’t come back.

Even without the attempted cover-up, the ballistics from the spent Glock cartridges tied him to four different murders, and in combination with his role in the conspiracy confirmed by the wiretap, it was enough to lock him up for life. No parole. By the time the Elephant Hunter started killing, he’d already overdosed and died in prison.

As for Bells and Brisko, the DEA tried to get them to roll over on the suppliers in California. But Bells had no clue, and whatever temptations Brisko felt, he suppressed—the cartel scared him more than jail. They both got 35 years.

*

While they waited to be processed one afternoon, the deposed kings of Durham had a moment alone in the hallway at the county jail. Brisko, on the verge of a panic attack and swearing more than usual to hide it, appealed to his distributor in a whisper.

“Why the fuck was Rio so motherfucking stupid? Our shit was fucking working, Bells.”

Bells only laughed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been to jail, though he knew it would be the last.

“Reconcile, baby. There’s always someone stupid.”

71 Chapter 11: A Boy Called Turtle

Durham, NC. Two Years Earlier

When the last Confederates surrendered and the Civil War came to an end, a few Union soldiers bound for home decided to loot a tobacco factory in Durham. The owner lost everything to the hated invaders, but it turned out that the sweet- flavored “bright leaf” tobacco was a hit, and before long orders for Bull Durham Chewing Tobacco were pouring in from across the north. The man got rich beyond his wildest dreams, and a few others followed suit.

One of them was a subsistence farmer named Washington Duke. When he returned from the war, having walked hundreds of miles from a Yankee POW camp, he gave up farming and began to sell tobacco under the name Pro Bono Publico.

“For the public good."

He worked himself and his sons to the bone, and his youngest boy, James Buchanan Duke—“Buck” to those that knew him—had the ruthless qualities necessary to become one of the era’s sociopathic industrial geniuses: a bona fide robber baron.

Competitive, obsessive, and inventive, Buck moved W. Duke Sons & Company into cigarettes. He adopted rolling machines before his rivals, and marketed his product by including pictures of scantily clad women in his cigarette cartons. He wasn’t content to be merely rich—like all robber barons, he felt compelled to crush his competition, and he did so by incorporating many of them under the umbrella of the newly formed American Tobacco Company. By 1898, he had acquired or destroyed the rest of the Durham tobacco giants, and by 1910 he controlled 90% of the American cigarette market. When Teddy Roosevelt finally busted his monopoly a year later, he had already expanded to textiles and electric power.

Durham was his city, and Durham was exploding.

*

Duke’s businesses needed workers, and by 1910 Durham had grown from a sleepy town of 2,000 people to a fledgling city of almost 20,000. Many of the newcomers were poor and black. And though they toiled alongside poor white workers in the same tobacco factories, and though the poor whites breathed the deadly cotton dust of the textile mills just as the poor blacks contracted tuberculosis from the long sweltering hours stemming dirty tobacco leafs in airless rooms, there was no solidarity between the races.

Like everywhere else in the country, Durham’s oligarchs fought against black-white solidarity in order to kill unionization, keep wages egregiously low, and prevent a

72 populist reckoning. And just like everywhere else, it worked—in America, racism hurts everyone except the rich.

As the city grew, the vast majority of Durham’s black citizens lived in squalid, overcrowded, disease-ridden slums. Unlike the rest of the city, the black areas had no sewage treatment, no paved roads, no trees planted on the streets. In the largest black neighborhood, the Hayti—aka “The Bottoms”—there were dirt roads until the 1950s, and outhouses as late the ‘60s. In those foundational days, one out of every three children born to a black mother died within a year, and the majority of all black people died before they made it to 40.

The Civil Rights movement brought hope, but it couldn’t undo a system of disinvestment designed to kill them. It couldn’t undo the real estate covenants and racial steering and deed restrictions—“don’t sell to blacks!”—that kept them out of nice neighborhoods. It couldn’t undo the federal government’s redlining policies that kept black families from securing mortgage loans and accruing wealth. It couldn’t undo the 14-year “urban renewal” program which obliterated the Hayti neighborhood and all its homes and business, leaving the city with a brand new freeway and a serious housing shortage—a shortage they fixed with public housing projects built almost exclusively in black neighborhoods.

With the poor black population contained in near-ghettos, it meant fewer businesses, more vacant properties, shoddy “maintenance” of the projects, frequent evictions. Three miles to the west, the sons and daughters of American aristocrats attended the elite university named after the Duke family, but in Hayti, the underfunded public schools rapidly deteriorated.

The decades passed. When the major industries left Durham for greener pastures and lower taxes, the usual blights crept in—poverty, drugs, crime. That transformed the relationship between police and black citizens into something antagonistic and violent. Economic opportunity dried up, and Durham became the symbol of the southern rust belt. In the Hayti and other black neighborhoods, gangs spread, and the drug economy took root.

Life deteriorated. The projects became their own neglected slums, and the landlords in charge did nothing about the leaking ceilings, the backed-up sewage, the pervasive mold, the infestations.

It was in the largest of these decrepit projects—Hayti’s McDougald Terrace apartments, aka “The Mac”—where one day in 2009 an eight-year-old boy named Demarcus Cobb gathered his courage to attack the man who was strangling his mother.

*

73 The man, a junkie, was so new that he didn’t yet have a name. Not one Demarcus heard, anyway. And they were new too—just moved up from Fayetteville the month before because his mom thought she could get clean and find a job in one of the hospitals. Everything around him looked strange, but the themes were the same. This wasn’t paradise, and the bitter haze of violence was all too familiar. One angry giant was the same as the next, but he had reached his breaking point. Something in him stopped caring about the consequences.

So what the fuck?

He leapt on the man’s back and clawed at his eyes, and the man yelped in pain and indignation. He dipped his shoulder, and Demarcus tumbled to the floor and landed on his head. The man grabbed his hair and pushed the side of his face into the floor.

“Don’t you ever fuck with me, boy.”

What he didn’t realize, until he heard Demarcus scream and smelled the burning flesh, was that he had pinned the boy to a floor grate. The terraces used radiant heat to save the landlords money, and in order for the warm air to reach the second story apartments, the grates in the first floor lay exposed in each living room. In the winter, residents knew to steer clear of the scalding metal.

Demarcus rolled over, whimpering now, and the man saw the seared flesh—open burns covered the boy’s upper back, shoulder, and neck, spreading as high as his cheekbone.

Demarcus’ mother saw it too, even in her drugged state. She cowered in a corner and wailed, while his little sister Kayla, just five years old, sat at the kitchen table holding her doll, scared silent. The man fled.

After a month in the hospital, and two more weeks to heal at home, the doctors told Demarcus he could go back to school. His voice had become a rasp by then, which the doctors couldn’t explain—the burns hadn’t affected his vocal cords. His mother, in one of her rare sober moments, took him out on a special shopping trip. She bought him a set of black turtlenecks and some jeans at J.C. Penney, and that’s what he wore on his first day back.

The other kids asked to see his burns, and when he refused, they barraged him with pens and paper clips. On the second day, wearing another black turtleneck, a small group gathered around him while he sat in the corner of the cafeteria looking at a Mad Magazine. The rest of his classmates were outside, but he couldn’t be in the sun for another year.

“Why you wearing the same shirt as yesterday?”

“It’s a different shirt.”

74

“No it ain’t. You wearing the exact same one.”

His face flushed, and it felt curiously cool in the spots where he’d been burned.

“It’s a turtleneck.” His voice was almost a whisper now. “They come in a pack of three.”

The ringleader turned to his friends. “Yo, he wearing a turtleneck!”

This made the rest of them laugh, and they repeated the word “turtleneck” at him. He slouched lower.

“Give me that.” The boy snatched the magazine away.

A day later, when he made the mistake of wearing his third straight turtleneck, the same boy began calling him “Turtle.” His friends followed suit, and Demarcus willed the hot tears forming in his eyes to stay put. Crying would only make it worse.

“Turtle” stuck.

It stuck even though he never wore a turtleneck another day in his life. It stuck for the rest of that year, and it stuck when Turtle was fully recovered and only the scars remained. It stuck when his mom lost her job as a Certified Nurse Assistant at Duke, which was never a good job in the first place because the hospital hired its CNAs through a contractor, and the contractor paid $8 an hour and stopped just shy of giving her enough hours to earn health insurance. It stuck when his uncle came down from the north side of the terrace, and saw their mother strung out on dope, saw the roaches crawling across the floor, saw the rat shit swept into the corners, smelled the mildew under the sink, smelled the leaking gas from the pilot light that always went out, and took him and Kayla away.

It was stuck three years later, when the boy who first called him Turtle shouldered him in the hallway, raised his arms in a challenge, and yelled “what, bitch?”

It stuck after Turtle tackled him into the lockers, and, having dreamed of the moment for years, shoved a thumb into his eye as deep and hard as he could, to make him feel what he felt, to maim him, to change his life.

It stuck through the year with his uncle, who lived in the same kind of apartment, and gave them a life that was different but not much better. The house was never empty, and he never went to bed before 2 a.m. That meant that Turtle didn’t either, because he slept on the living room couch. His teachers yelled at him for drifting off in class. His grades—never great in the first place—tanked, and he had to repeat the sixth grade.

75 It stuck with him after they want back with their mother, who was clean again but couldn’t find a job, and it stuck with him when he made his way to the South Side.

And that nickname, Turtle, would stick with him on the streets—in the days when he was nobody, and in the days when he became a legend.

*

He found Enterprise Street when Kayla got sick with the flu. They had no money, no insurance, couldn’t even afford to take her to the hospital when she puked up the chicken soup they fed her. Hospital meant debt, debt meant losing the shitty apartment, and the shitty apartment was all they had. Kayla got better, but Turtle knew he needed to step up. One morning before school, waiting on the steps, he listened to the older kids talking and heard the words that wouldn’t leave his head:

“South Side’s where it goes down, man.”

“They riccccchhhhhhhhhh,” screeched another.

He was 12 years old and not stupid, so he had an idea about what happened on the South Side. The same thing that happened at the Mac, probably, but bigger. That day, after school, he dropped off his backpack and walked northwest. Once he hit the end of Alston Avenue, he was in unfamiliar territory, but he was shocked when Enterprise Street came up much faster than he expected. Worlds away, but just a five minute walk.

He didn’t know what to look for, so he walked the three blocks from Scout Drive to Fargo Street, then re-traced his steps, then did it again. He saw a few older kids race past on dirt bikes, bandannas over their mouths. He saw cars coast slowly by, drivers hidden beneath flat-brimmed hats, low in the seat. When he glanced at one of the front yards where a small group had gathered—none of them looked rich, even though they wore Timberlands—he was finally noticed.

“Fuck you looking at?”

He was too shocked to speak, so he just stared, and his stare felt stupid even to him.

“You deaf?”

He forced himself to speak. “I want to help.”

His voice sounded like it had come through a cloud of dust.

“He wanna help.”

“Fuck outta here.”

76

“Cut my grass, motherfucker.”

They laughed, and then one looked closer.

“Oh shit. He a burned-ass little bitch.”

Turtle looked away to hide his burns. It never took long.

“Damnnnn, Milk right. I ain’t even notice. Look at that shit.”

“Someone lit his ass up.”

“Took a torch to the motherfucker.”

To his shame, he felt the tears rising. He turned away, toward home, but after a few steps he turned back. The house on the other side of the street had a small embankment leading up to the main yard, so he sat down and hugged his knees.

Normally, they would have thrown him a beating, but there was something about Turtle, maybe the mystery of his burns, maybe something else entirely, that evoked a feeling that wasn’t quite sympathy and wasn’t quite respect, but that granted him unusual tolerance. And though he wouldn’t have been able to put it into words, he knew from experience that if he hung around long enough, that tolerance would change into something better.

So he came every day after school for three weeks. They switched between ignoring him and insulting him.

“Yo man, go the fuck home.”

“Ain’t you got no friends?”

He did. But they couldn’t help him now. Maybe if he had an older brother, or knew his dad, but no—he was on his own.

Finally, one day as the sun was setting, the boy called Milk shoved his cell phone into his pocket.

“Fuckin’ Bone, man.”

Milk was one of those people who, not content with his brain alone, used every part of his body to think, including his mouth. He shook his head, bit his lower lip, turned in a slow circle, shoved both hands on his hips. His eyes came to rest on Turtle, and they stayed there for a moment.

77 “Yo. Burn boy. Get over here, man. You want to make twenty?”

He had never jumped up so fast. Milk sent him to the corner of Overhill Terrrace and Enterprise. That’s where the cops came if they were coming from the west, Milk told him, and don’t be fooled if they fuck with you by taking that right on Forest Hills, because sure enough they’re going to swing right back around and come up Overhill. Turtle wouldn’t be alone. They had people on Fargo, people on Scout, people on South, but if he saw them come past Overhill, his job was to shout “5-0.” They’d hear him. And the cops couldn’t do shit. Yelling wasn’t against the law.

No cops came that day, but he made his $20.

“What’s your name?” Milk asked as he handed him the cash.

He could have said Demarcus, or just “D” like he always imagined. But he didn’t.

“Turtle.”

“Turtle.” He spit the word out like a bad grape. “Why turtle?”

He shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

And he made $20 the next day, too, and the next day after that, and after two weeks his refrigerator was full and he bought new Jordans that were the envy of his classmates. More than envy, he noticed a new quiet in their eyes that it took him a full day to recognize. It was something entirely new—respect.

*

Months later, in the spring just before school let out, he sat through a presentation where three white cops and one black one talked about drugs. The black cop had a son in the school—a slight, nerdy boy called Jules. His father had been impressive on the auditorium stage, so for the first time in his life Jules held court on the playground at lunch. He puffed up with the attention from the kids who fired questions him, and he spoke just like his dad, in clipped, serious tones. Turtle listened inattentively as he leafed through his history textbook on the swing, but his ears perked when he hear Jules mention a drug raid.

He caught up with him when the bell rang.

“Your dad’s the man,” Turtle said, clapping him on the shoulder. Jules gave him a serious nod, a cop’s nod, proud. “You say he does lots of raids?”

“All the time. Going on one tonight.”

“No way.”

78

“Yup.”

“Where?”

“Can’t tell you.”

Turtle laughed.

“Man, there’s no raid. You can’t tell me because it ain’t happening.”

Jules dropped his police imitation cool and began to look a little desperate.

“But there is one, Turtle. It’s going down tonight.”

“It’s all good Jules. Your dad’s cool. You ain’t gotta lie about him. They only let the white cops go on raids.”

Jules grabbed his arm. “Turtle, listen. I’m telling the truth. You promise you won’t say anything?”

“Sure.”

Jules looked around them.

“It’s on Enterprise. That’s who they’re raiding tonight. My dad calls them the O-Line fuckheads.” He giggled in nervous delight.

Turtle walked out of the schoolyard without looking back. When he got to Enterprise, Milk was already there—he had quit high school a year earlier—but he was dismissive of the story. Turtle wouldn’t let it drop.

“Yo Milk, what if something happens and you didn’t say nothing?”

That pissed Milk off because it sounded like a threat, and he wanted to reach out and smack his young lookout. But he thought about it too long, and then he dropped his shoulders, shook his head, rolled his eyes, and finally sighed.

“Fuck. Guess we gotta do this. Gonna beat your ass if you wrong though. Believe that.”

He dialed, spoke—the words “a boy called Turtle” drifted on the air—and hung up. He kept his back to Turtle, but soon his phone rang again. He just listened this time, said one word, and hung up again. He beckoned.

“Turtle.”

79

Turtle jogged to his side, and they walked around the block to a house he had never seen before. It wasn’t where they kept the dope, he knew that, but it must have been important because just inside the door stood two of the biggest men he’d ever seen.

They nodded at Milk, who led Turtle through the living room and into the kitchen, where another enormous man stood guard. He stepped aside, and they opened a door that led to the basement. The air turned colder, and there was a faint smell of mold. Sitting behind a wide desk that looked like the ones his teachers used was a thin man wearing a loose checkered shirt.

He had to be 25, Turtle thought, or close. He was speaking on the phone, but he waved them forward. Milk stayed back, and when Turtle looked at him for direction, he just nodded toward the desk.

The thin man put down the phone. His skin was inky black, but his eyes were light, almost yellow.

“Tell me what you heard.”

Turtle told the story, but got no reaction from his audience.

“Tell it to me again.”

He did, then he was ushered out as fast as he came in. He spent the next morning wondering if he had gotten himself into trouble. Within minutes of arriving on Enterprise that afternoon, they brought him back to the same spot in the same basement, where he stood before the same man.

“You heard the news?”

Turtle shook his head.

“Police raided the street last night. This house, a few others. Not too long after you was here, matter of fact. Know what they found?”

No.

“Fuck all, man. Not a loose fucking nickel. And that’s down to you. What you think, Milk?”

Behind him, Milk mumbled. “He did aight.”

“Aight? He did better than aight.” He scoffed. “Fuck aight. He saved our shit.”

80 Now he looked straight at Turtle. “You did good, little ma. I think Milk over here jealous. They call you Turtle, right? Come here.”

And the man handed him a wad of bills that Turtle knew better than to count.

“You smart?”

He nodded, and the man laughed.

“How old?”

“Fifteen.”

“I know why you lying, but don’t do it again. Let me ask you one more time.”

“Twelve.”

“Okay.” He stared at Turtle, lost in thought. “Listen, this is just the beginning. We’re going to hook you up.” He looked over Turtle’s head at Milk and raised his voice. “Need some smarter folk in here.”

Back on the street, Milk—now thoroughly pissed—asked how much he’d been given.

Turtle counted it up—five hundred dollars. More than he’d seen in his life.

“Nah man. He give you two fifty. Other half he give to the brother that hooked you up. Feel me?”

Turtle felt him—reluctantly. He handed over the bills and worked up the courage to ask a question.

“Yo Milk. Who was that?”

Milk almost physically recoiled. “Who was that? Shit. That was Ghost.”

The name didn’t mean anything to Turtle. But he already loved Ghost.

Ghost was the man who made him rich, and he never once mentioned his burns.

*

Turtle stayed a lookout for the next two months, and thought Ghost had forgotten him. But one day the man himself came along with Rio—crazy Rio, who scared the shit out of Turtle with his perpetual sneer—and asked if he was ready. The answer was “yeah.” He didn’t know what he was ready for, exactly, but that didn’t matter.

81

As it turned out, they put him on the money. He’d collect street cash from the fiends on the porch of a house on Scout Drive, signal to the lookout on the corner, who conveyed the buy using the same gesture to another porch on Enterprise Street, where the fiend would walk to collect the little bag. Mostly crack, but some heroin, some weed, occasionally meth.

Turtle knew he was lucky—most of the young boys who got past lookout started on the drugs, which meant a good chance of arrest and juvie, but Ghost had promoted him right past the hot stuff. Harder to arrest someone for the crime of taking dirty cash.

Ghost told him never to use the product, so he didn’t, and he was efficient at his job. He never fucked with the count, he was good at math, and he took home about $600 every month. He gave some to his mother, who never asked him a single question, and spent the rest on clothes and food for Kayla.

He was young, so they kept him on the money for two years, and in the meantime he learned as much as he could. He learned that he was working for the Omega Line of the Nine-Trey Gangsters, a set of the United Blood Nation.

And he learned how the gang worked. He learned that Ghost and Rio were 5-star generals who controlled the South Side, and that they worked under the “low” who controlled Durham, a man everyone called Face. Face came to the neighborhood once in a while, dressed in sweatpants and old sneakers, and he didn’t look like much to Turtle. Above him was the “high,” Messiah Moody, who was spoken about in whispers but never seen. Milk said that Messiah ran the whole state of North Carolina. Below Rio and Ghost came the four-star Debo, loose and smiling, who ran the day-to-day shit on the south side. Milk was a two-star, and though Turtle wasn’t officially a Blood, they called him a “soldier” or a “scrap.”

He wanted a tattoo. Either “DAMU,” the Swahili word for “blood,” or the five-point crown that Ghost had on his calf. But he couldn’t get that kind of ink until he was in.

It finally happened the spring he turned 14. Blood in, blood out—the only way you enter the gang is to have the shit beat out of you by your friends, and the only way to leave is to die.

Or so they said. Turtle learned that the first part was true. At least for him.

“I could bless you in,” Ghost told him, “and a lot of these guys you see, I’ll be honest, they didn’t have to go through this shit. But you an outsider, and you want that respect.”

So for 31 seconds exactly—one second for each of the 31 rules that supposedly governed the United Blood Nation, rules he never saw or heard mentioned—Milk

82 and the others beat him senseless. And when they helped him up, gasping, bleeding, but still conscious, he was an official soldier.

“Big things are coming for us,” Ghost whispered in his ear.

He had never felt better about himself.

*

But the next time he heard from Ghost was in the early summer, and it was a short phone call from a number he’d never seen.

“Yo, it’s Ghost. Don’t say shit to me on this line. Swing by. Got something for you. And hurry the fuck up.”

“I’ll be there in 30.”

“Man, I told you not to say shit.”

*

So he was back in the same basement, this time just the two of them alone. Without saying a word, Ghost handed him a gun with the words “Springfield Armory” written on the barrel. Not as flashy as Rio’s Glock, but it felt good in his hands.

“I want you to hold this for me. You listening?”

Turtle’s eyes were fixed on the gun, but he managed to look at Ghost and nod.

“This gun ain’t yours, and it never will be. You ain’t even gonna have it long. One of two things could happen. One, I give it to you, you hold it, and in a week or two I come get it back. And if the gun ain’t in my hands when I say the word, like something happened to it or you did something stupid? That’s on you.”

Even when Ghost threatened him, it sounded almost kind.

“The second thing is that I go away. And if that happens, that piece you holding is hot. So hot it fucking burns. You do not want to be caught with it. You understand what I’m telling you?”

He nodded again.

“And then you take a walk down Third Fork Creek on a night when there ain’t nobody around, and you find the widest, muddiest part, and you throw that shit in the water and never think about it again.”

83 Turtle found it in himself to nod, but just barely. He didn’t want Ghost to go away. He felt like crying, and Ghost could sense it.

“I ain’t going nowhere. And listen, T—don’t use the scrap. I mean it. Anybody catches you with it, they gonna tie you to some shit you never did.”

*

So he left, and he carried it home, where he cut the underside of his mattress with a switch blade and stored it among the padding. One week later, Ghost was gone— hauled in on the cocaine conspiracy that took Rio and Milk and Gucci and Say Say.

He never bothered going back to Enterprise Street to see who rose in their absence, and that’s how he learned that “blood out” was nothing but words—if you were low enough, nobody gave a shit if you walked away.

But he kept the gun, because it was Ghost’s gun, and even though he hadn’t talked with him more than five times in his life, Ghost was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. At night sometimes he’d take out the .40 and hold it for a while, and sometimes he felt the urge to lean out his window and shoot at something—the loud idiot across the way, the sheets blowing on the clothesline, the teddy bears and deflated balloons and fake flowers at whatever shrine was set up for whoever had just been killed. Or maybe he’d shoot at the stars.

But he remembered Ghost’s words, and just put it back in his mattress. He dreamed of the day he’d get out of prison, and how he’d hand it back to him, and they’d embrace as men, as equals, and take over the city.

He kept the piece for two years, and in those years he started dealing closer to home, with some low level independent operators in the Mac, and at 16 he quit school. His mother left, and he didn’t care where she went. He struck a deal with the landlord, paid him more rent so he wouldn’t get ratted out to CPS, and did his best to take care of Kayla and make sure she did okay. But he knew his limits. He could keep her in school, he could buy her nice clothes, but he couldn’t make every choice for her, and he couldn’t control bad luck.

Of which there was plenty to go around—one of Kayla’s friends took a shot to the kneecap while she sat on a stoop one night, and the police said the bullet fell from of the sky. Someone angry, they said, letting off steam, shooting his .9 into the air like a bandit from a movie, and one of the bullets came down in the wrong place. But Turtle didn’t have the money to move them out of the Mac.

Then, one night in the fall, a white man with a fake accent stopped him on the street and offered him ten Gs for a gun, didn’t matter what kind. He looked like a cop, but he threw an envelope with $2,000 at his feet and drove off with nothing—just a promise to be back the next week. What kind of cop acts like that?

84

And Turtle though, shit…I can’t use it anyway. Maybe this dude will get caught and they’ll blame whatever Ghost did on him.

The man would definitely stiff him on the last $5,000—he was stupid and smart— but even the first five would see him through a few hard days, maybe give him a chance to buy some product and turn it around. And if that worked out, he and Kayla could leave the Mac for good.

More than that, he’d been hoping for a chance like this. For one reason or another, he felt ambitious lately.

So what the fuck?

85 Chapter 12: Parker’s Favor

Durham, NC, Oct. 27

After matching the shell from Georgia to the shell in Durham, Eli made as much noise as possible on the way to Durham. It wasn’t long before FBI field agent Steve Parker, a member of the Safe Streets Task Force that took down Brisko Weems and Mo Bells, got wind that the Elephant Hunter’s gun had been matched to the shells from the Malik Townes killing—the gun held by the mysterious second shooter not named Rayvon Latrelle, aka Rio. He had suspected, very strongly, that the second killer was the O-Line five star Ghost, because Ghost and Rio were tied at the hip and always had been.

But he could never prove it. The Durham cops all liked Ghost, but Parker never met him, and was pissed that he got off with a reduced sentence.

But his memory was like a steel trap. So he went back to the evidence stored at the Durham Police Department, and pulled up the tape of an obscure phone call that had nagged him for two years. He listened to Ghost’s words again.

“Yo, it’s Ghost. Don’t say shit to me on this line. Swing by. Got something for you. And hurry the fuck up.”

“I’ll be there in 30.”

“Man, I told you not to say shit.”

And he thought, that child’s voice is not the voice of the Elephant Hunter.

No way in hell. Not even in this clusterfuck of a world.

But I will bet dollars to donuts that it’s the voice of the little hopper who sold him the gun.

So he dialed a familiar number—a friend of a friend from the academy who was currently the unlucky asshole bashing his head against this case. He had never liked Eli Wilder, and was almost gleeful when he heard they’d dumped the Elephant Hunter on him…and even more gleeful when it came out that Wilder had actually wanted it, the ambitious fuck. Maybe it was his punishment for going behind his wife’s back and fucking everything that moved. But FBI was FBI, and when the rubber met the road, he wasn’t a bad agent.

The friend of a friend picked up on the first ring.

“Eli Wilder.”

86 “Eli, this is Steve Parker. Listen, I’ll spare you the bullshit—I’m at the Durham Police Department, and I’ve got something you need to hear.”

87 Chapter 13: Debo’s Choice

Durham, NC, Oct. 27

When Ghost and Rio went off to jail two years earlier, Wayne Gaston kept up appearances on the south side—a smile for everyone, a solemn look, a meaningful nod. “There’s a plan,” he’d say, his voice rich with secret import, “and we’re about to move fast.”

And for a week straight, he went home and had a breakdown on his bedroom floor.

Wayne Gaston was called Debo, and everybody liked him. He’d made four-star the year before, and when the police took Rio and Ghost and Gucci away, that meant he was next in line to be the man.

But Debo knew something about himself that he’d worked most of his life to hide— he knew he couldn’t be the man.

Ghost had the respect of the city, but Ghost could be a bastard when it mattered. Gucci liked the violence, Milk was too dumb to care, and Rio was more dog than human. Debo didn’t have what they had. What had he done, really? Dealt some coke, gone along on a few robberies where he shouted from the back of the crowd, and climbed the ladder fast because he was everybody’s boy.

Never been hurt, never gone to jail.

“Debo too pretty to get caught!”

Not too pretty. Too damn scared. And a little lucky.

Now Face was in his ear, and Face spoke for Messiah Moody. You gotta step up Debo. You the man in South Side. You don’t show some heart soon, people start believing there’s blocks to be had. And the Mexicans is getting impatient, Debo.

And then the Fire Line was moving south. Of course they were—when you feel weakness, you press. And the hungry fools below him wanted to kill the invaders. They lifted their shirts to show the guns in their waistbands, to prove how tough and ready they were, and from the top and bottom he was getting crushed.

He couldn’t even get a hard-on anymore.

One night in that madness, he got a phone call from the white lady Marie who worked at Bull City United. She and her people had been out there on the streets almost a year, and her people were from the streets, which is why they’d done some good. Marie was the only white face among them, and between the outreach workers and the violence interrupters, they had actually gotten a few ex-Bloods

88 some jobs after prison, and twice now Debo had seen them get between two boys who were a day, maybe less, from drawing down.

And Marie wasn’t afraid. She gave it to you straight, she joked, she didn’t care who talked shit. She wasn’t a cop, and she didn’t look at them the way the rest of Durham’s white angels did, like animals. Even when Rio called her a “white cunt” and the rest of them were too afraid to say anything, she didn’t blink.

They liked her pitch, too: “We want to treat violence as a disease that can be cured, and not something the police need to fix. It’s a public health issue, and we fight it the same way. Same as a flu. If you get the flu, you can pass the flu on, and if enough people are exposed to the flu enough times, they’re going to catch it. Same for violence, same for drugs. We need to change the environment, and we need messengers from the community, not outside. You can do more than I ever could.”

It made them feel less like criminals, less like bad people. More like they’d been unlucky, but still had a shot to turn it around. To be leaders. They believed her—she made them believe—even if the belief only lasted until she walked away.

She loved Ghost. “Ghost,” she’d say, “join us and you’ll lead our team right away.”

Smart lady, because Ghost would have been good at that shit. Ghost was the only O- Line blood he knew who could walk into a Fire Line party, or a Crips party, and be greeted like everybody’s best friend. If Ghost said the word, the whole South Side and the whole city would go straight. Maybe.

But Ghost would just laugh, so she’d turn to him. “Debo, you’re next on my wish list.” And he’d smile, and he’d flirt, and she’d tell him she was old enough to be his mother, and he’d say, “Marie, why you act like that’s a bad thing?”

That night, with Ghost and the others in jail, he saw her name on his caller ID: “White Marie.”

He hung up after a ring. She called back.

“Marie, what you want?”

“I just want to tell you a story.”

“I’m busy tonight…”

But he left her a sliver of space, so she used it.

“About a week ago, I got a call from Ghost. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘that job you’re always waving in front of my face, is it still good?’”

89 Debo felt a warm flush spread from his forehead to his neck.

“I said, of course. Of course it is. And he said ‘I just might take it.’”

She let that sink in. Debo couldn’t speak.

“I was thrilled, Debo. And then the next day, I understood why he called. He must have known. He must have been praying for one last chance. But you know how the story ends. Next day, he’s gone. And you won’t see him for ten years.”

“He called?”

But Debo’s voice cracked, and she didn’t need to say another word. The hell of the past week, of his whole life, came bursting out of every nerve, and he wept. He wept without shame, without reservation.

And the next day, he called a meeting with Face and Messiah north of the city. He believed he needed a dramatic gesture, so he placed his gun on the table.

“Kill me if you got to,” he told them. His courage was faltering, but he did his best to fake it. “Kill me if that’s how it’s gotta go. But I’m done. You both know I don’t have the heart for this. I made a promise, now I’m breaking it, and whatever you gotta do, I understand. But I ain’t going back. Never should’ve been a four-star in the first place. I’m ready to die, but either way I’m out.”

Face, looking a small step above homeless as usual, just raised his eyebrows, giving nothing away but vague surprise. Messiah, who had always loved him, let out a small laugh.

“Yo what you think, Face, should we light this dramatic motherfucker up?”

“Cut his ass to pieces. “ Face’s voice was no more than a humorless mumble. “Feed him to the doggggs.”

Debo needed to make them see that he was serious, that they couldn’t just talk him down. “I’m not kidding—

Messiah held up a hand.

“Ain’t nobody going to kill you, Debo. Walk if you wanna walk. If you was somebody else? I’d say ‘don’t trip, go home, get some sleep,’ and then two, three days from now, some little homey who ain’t scared to pull a trigger would put you down.”

Debo let the insult pass. He knew Messiah wasn’t lying.

“And let me guess, you joining up with Marie?”

90

He was amazed. They said the man knew everything, but damn. He certainly wasn’t going to lie, so he just nodded.

“So you leaving me with nobody higher than a three-star on the South Side, Fire Line itching to push us out to Cary, and now you going all civilian to steal some more of my people?”

“Don’t know what to say, man.”

“Don’t say shit. And definitely don’t say that Messiah ain’t showed a stupid motherfucker some mercy he didn’t deserve.”

He looked a little angry now, and Face shook his head at the floor. If it was up to Face, Debo realized, he’d be fucked. Face saw him as someone who broke a rule, and he wasn’t given to philosophy or favoritism. To him Debo was nothing special, nothing to get upset about. He liked him, but so what? He wouldn’t let him walk away.

Messiah, though…Messiah was hurt, Messiah was pissed. But you don’t get emotional unless you have a weakness.

He looked straight into Debo’s eyes.

“Tell you one last thing, man, even though you ain’t gonna listen. With me, with us, you got a family. You wasn’t the best soldier, no, but you was smart, so we pulled you up. And you’d keep going up. Out there, without us, you know what you are? You’re shit. No money, no respect, just shit.”

He watched Debo to gauge the effect of his words, and Debo lowered his eyes, trying to look chastened.

“You ever get sick of being shit, you come back and we’ll pretend this didn’t happen. Until then, best I can say is I don’t know your name. You ain’t Debo to me no more. You just some scared faggot who ran away when his time came.”

*

So he left the O-Line.

It stung, no lie, but mostly he felt relief. A little humiliation beats the alternative, and in his new life he wouldn’t have to impress the likes of Messiah Moody.

And it was funny, Debo thought, how the man left a few things out of his speech. Like, say, the extremely good odds of ending up dead or in jail. Or how nobody really

91 gives a fuck about you once you’re locked up, and how it doesn’t matter what anyone feels once you get killed.

So for the last two years he’d earned a decent living as a violence interrupter for Bull City United. And he found out that Messiah was wrong—he was more. He had brotherhood with the others at BCU, and because he was Debo, they still loved him on the south side. The east side was taking longer—to some people there, he’d always be O-Line—but that was coming along too. He wasn’t going to get rich, but he wasn’t poor, and it felt good to make a living the honest way.

And he was noticing things about his neighborhood that he never had before, though he’d lived there all his life.

He noticed the unique skill set it takes to be poor and black. He noticed how everyone got together on the streets, from the grill-outs to the block parties to the vigils to the protests. He noticed the shrines, how they kept going up time after time, even though the violence and the killing never stopped. He noticed that when someone got locked up, there was always a friend to take up a collection and make bail before the police could do what they do. He noticed the energy, the volume, the drama, the music, the dancing, the love. Marie told him that in the white world you could go years without talking to your own neighbor, much less anyone else on the street. There was none of that here—these people got close, and they really knew each other, because they had to.

No matter what, they tried. Disaster is always just around the corner, and nobody can stand on their own. So they stand together, and when Debo was in the right mood, he thought it was beautiful. Everywhere around them, million dollar companies were building million dollar facilities, new homes went up, new jobs were created, and none of it came to their communities until the moment the people with money wanted them gone. The heart of this place was being ripped out, a little bit more every day, but the heart beat on.

In short, he was learning to love his people. He knew that if they could shake their hang-ups, their almost unconscious sense that the white world would always cut them down to size…well, beyond that lay paradise.

*

And they were making a difference. Debo had never been more connected.

In the South Side and Brentwood, shootings were down more than 50 percent at last count, murders even more, and Debo was the reason why. He had more Ghost in him than he knew—he had people talking to him every day, people he’d never expect, telling him where the beef was going down. He had shown these scared boys he cared, and it amazed him how much it mattered. Many just wanted an excuse to stop, and he learned that the terror he felt in his O-Line days wasn’t as rare as he’d

92 thought. They wanted to be told that backing down didn’t make them bitches, that they wouldn’t lose face, that there was a way out that didn’t involve someone dying.

In return, they get more than just words. He had connections at school, if that’s what they wanted, and he had jobs—not the bullshit $7/hour jobs either, but good ones that could feed them. It sure beat working for 40 cents a day in America’s biggest state prison system. He had a special affinity for the kids like him who were in way over their heads, and in a move that must have pissed Messiah off even more, he had turned a half dozen of them, including a two-star, away from gang life entirely.

His best pitch was Rio and Ghost—they were the baddest motherfuckers in town, he told the kids, but look at them now.

“If we had a chance doing it the old way,” he’d lie, “I’d still be out here. But I know how this shit ends.”

He visited schools, he visited courts and jails, he talked to judges, and most of the time he was on the street so they could see him, could see that he was staying, that he wasn’t being run out of town, that he wasn’t a cop. He wanted them to know that for the first time in living memory, the streets offered a real alternative to the adopted family of a gang.

And the city paid him all the while, which was a small miracle for which he remembered to thank Marie on the days when he felt more sentimental than usual.

In all, he felt better. Not hopeful, exactly—things were too bad for that—but miles better than the despair that had shadowed every day of his life before the change.

And one day in late October, he got a text from the woman who had saved him: “Stop by my office when you get in.”

*

Marie was standing in the back corner, pissed off. Nobody was behind her desk, but sitting in two of the chairs from the lunch room were a pair of FBI agents.

He didn’t know what they were at first—he just saw two men in suits. But everything about them said “cop,” and when they introduced themselves and he heard “FBI,” he smiled to hide a few contradictory emotions. He recognized one of them from long ago.

“Super-cops,” he mumbled, playing it close to the vest.

The hardest thing for Debo to shake from his old life was his hatred of the police, and the old feelings came back now. He looked to Marie. One of the reasons Bull City United had any street cred was because they never talked to the cops. Never. It was

93 an ironclad rule, and without it the whole neighborhood, the whole city, would reject them.

“I don’t want them here,” she said, “but it’s a special circumstance and I can’t keep them from talking to you. But you do not have to say anything back.”

Debo said nothing.

“Hey Debo, I always wondered something,” Agent Parker began, flashing what passed for a friendly smile, “and I bet you’re the man to ask. What makes a good gang member?”

Debo didn’t like his false familiarity, and he liked the patronizing tone even less. But he decided to answer anyway.

“What makes a good employee? Same traits. Loyalty. The brains to move up. Skills to match the position. Always do what the company says in the end, even when you don’t like it. Ain’t nothing different.”

Parker nodded to himself.

“You’re not in trouble,” said the one called Wilder. “Not you or anyone you know. We just heard from a few people that you’re connected, everybody likes you, and frankly, we need your help.”

He paused to let the significance of his next words hang in the air.

“Debo, have you heard of the Elephant Hunter?”

Now that was a surprise. Debo kept his cool. If he had to lie later, it was best to tell the truth now.

“Yeah, I heard of him. Man killing Republicans.”

“That’s right,” said Parker. “What do you think of him?”

“I don’t know,” said Debo. “There’s worse people to kill.”

Parker stared daggers at him, but Wilder didn’t even try to hide his laugh. When Parker spoke, Wilder put a hand on his knee to stop him. Debo was no stranger to a power struggle, and he saw one here—Wilder was dispensing with whatever courtesy he owed the other man. The interview belonged to him now.

“Well,” said Wilder, “we’re trying to catch him. Everything we tell you here is totally confidential, and that goes both ways. We’re not going to say anything to anyone, Marie’s not either, and we’d ask the same from you. Can you promise us that?”

94

Debo was feeling defiant, and wasn’t going to promise a thing. But he was starting to get curious, so he wouldn’t close himself off. He summoned a small dose of hostility.

“Man, what you need?”

Parker sought out Wilder’s eyes, but Eli pressed on.

“We can’t tell you everything, but we can tell you that we’ve got a lead that brought us here to Durham. We’re going to play a tape for you in a second, and I want to make it extremely clear that nobody on this tape is going to get in trouble. The first voice you’ll hear is Treveon Diggs, who went by Ghost when he was on the South Side. He’s in prison now, but you knew that.”

Debo knew. He also remembered where he first saw Parker. He had been in the court room when Ghost was sentenced, and for all he knew, Parker might be the one who put Ghost in that prison.

And now these FBI agents played their tape, and it was Ghost. He was talking to the boy Turtle, the little hopper he liked so much for tipping him off to the police raid a few years back, and it was clear he was going to hand him the gun he’d used to do Malik Townes. Why didn’t he just toss that shit? Debo wondered. Must have thought he was safe. Stupid.

“We need to know who Ghost is talking to.”

“So your theory,” Debo said, “is that Ghost was dumping a gun on someone before he went to jail, and maybe that someone sold the gun to the Elephant Hunter, not knowing who the hell he was, and maybe that someone knows a thing or two about the Elephant Hunter that might help you.”

He saw Wilder’s jaw clench, and Parker’s almost hit the floor. They were prepared to give him some of this information, if necessary. Maybe he’d tease out the threads eventually, but there wasn’t a world in which they expected him to know it all immediately. Marie had told them he was smart, but they weren’t listening.

“We can’t comment on that,” Parker said.

“Debo, we don’t care about anyone else,” Wilder cut in. “I’m not here to punish somebody who sold a gun. We just want to talk.”

A pause in the room grew long enough to be uncomfortable. Wilder silently begged Parker to keep his mouth shut. Finally, Debo started to laugh.

“What’s funny?” Parker snapped.

95 “White people made this place,” he said, beckoning to the streets outside the window. “Rich white people. They tried to make it into hell, and now a gun from hell got out, and what’s that gun doing? Killing rich white people.”

They didn’t see the humor. He didn’t expect them to. He looked only at Wilder now.

“Tell you what. I’ll take you at your word. Your eyes are on the Elephant Hunter, and the rest of these boys got immunity for whatever else you think they might have done. No more time for Ghost, no trouble for the boy even if he can’t tell you what you want to know. Even if you find him doing some shit he shouldn’t be doing.”

Wilder nodded. “We promise.”

“Normally I wouldn’t say a damn thing, and personally I hope you all don’t catch the man. I hope he kills the whole damn Congress and the president too. But I know you ain’t going to leave us alone until you get what you want, so I’m thinking maybe if I do this the easy way, it gets y’all out of here a little quicker. And if you break the promise, and somebody gets arrested who shouldn’t? Best drone my ass or something, because I’ll talk to any journalist who wants to listen.”

That was a lie—the last thing he’d ever do was out himself as a snitch, and he hated journalists for their unwillingness to cover Bull City United. But Wilder nodded again.

“Boy’s name is Turtle. Don’t know his government name. You can find him in the Mac.”

Wilder’s eyes grew wide. “What’s the Mac?”

“Ask Agent Parker. He fucks with the Mac all the time. Puts us in prison, thinks he’s doing some good. Parker knows the Mac. Don’t you, Parker?”

96 Chapter 14: Small Breaks

Durham, NC, Oct. 27-29

Parker knew the Mac. He didn’t know Turtle, and neither did any of his loyal cops, but one of their CIs knew him, said he was a comer in the Mac—hadn’t been shit when he worked for Ghost on the South Side, but was on the move now. At midday they watched from across Lawson St. as the informant walked directly in front of where Turtle sat on a wooden bench—possibly coordinating traffic for the terraces—and dropped his phone. That was the sign.

They waited 20 minutes to protect the CI, and then one of Parker’s boys drove up and shook him down. Nothing on him, but—surprise!—they’d take him to the station anyway. Bad attitude. Suspicious glint in the eye. Malevolent demeanor.

*

Wilder and Parker faced Turtle across a conference table in one of the interrogation rooms. Eli watched the boy, and found him inscrutable. Burn marks on his face, from the lower half all the way down his neck and probably further beneath the plain white t-shirt he wore under a blue hoodie.

“Why do they call you Turtle?”

“Don’t remember.”

The boy was quiet, but not taciturn. More like studious, giving nothing away. He looked like Debo wanted to look—emotionless, immune to pressure. Wilder held up a set of stapled papers.

“What I’m about tell you is going to sound strange, and the good news is that unlike any other time you get pulled in here, there’s a good chance you’ll walk out free.”

The boy didn’t speak, didn’t nod, didn’t so much as blink.

“What we know is that you received a gun two years ago from a man named Treveon Diggs, who you know as Ghost. You held that gun for two years, and then you sold it to a man who I’m guessing was a stranger to you. We have reason to believe that man was the political assassin called the Elephant Hunter. You heard of him?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

Eli kept talking—a lot of this was guess work, and he tried to ignore the nightmarish possibility that he had some of the details wrong, that maybe there were more intermediaries between Turtle and the killer, or that the entire story was bullshit and the NIBIN match had been bogus.

97

“That man used Ghost’s gun, a Springfield XD .40 caliber, to kill a Georgia congressman named William Bostick, and we suspect he’ll attempt to use it again.”

The boy took a minute to look at his hands, but still betrayed very little reaction. Eli had hoped to intimidate him. Not a chance.

Now he prepared to deliver the speech he’d recited four times that morning. He prayed it would work.

“These papers in my hands are a full immunity agreement. If you can give us information about the man with the gun, we’ll let you walk out of here today with the promise that you won’t leave the country, and that we can reach you again when we need to. It says we can’t use anything you say against you, nothing, even if you implicate yourself in a different crime. I’ve signed it, and so has Agent Parker. It also says we’re not interested in prosecuting Ghost, no matter what we find out. He’s not going to do any more time. All we’re concerned about it is the Elephant Hunter.”

“But if you don’t give us anything we can use, we’re going after you for felony obstruction of justice, probably for this case and Ghost’s too, and because you had the bad luck to sell a gun to a serial killer, you’ll get the max in both cases. That’s four years total. And then we’ll hit you for selling a gun to a buyer without a permit, and for possession without a permit. We’ll get you for five years before it’s over, and I’ll make sure there’s no time off for good behavior. And that may not sound like a lot, but your life will be ruined. And I don’t need to tell you that you’re old enough to be tried as an adult now.”

“One more thing. After we found the gun, we matched it to the shells that killed Malik Townes. That means if you don’t help us, we go after Ghost for murder. Maybe he’ll say it wasn’t his gun, maybe he’ll say he got it somewhere else, but maybe that won’t work. He’s behaving himself right now, we checked, which means he’s out in five years. If he gets murder? He’ll fucking rot, Turtle.”

In fact, that was bullshit too—Ghost had refused to say a word from prison, about anything, and at this point nobody, after he’d been convicted of minor crimes and someone else had gone down for the murder, nobody would take the case.

“There’s no negotiation on this. It’s one choice or the other, and I’ll tell you again that I want the Elephant Hunter. This man is not your friend, so there’s no reason to protect him. I don’t want you, I don’t want Ghost. To tell you the truth, Turtle, I don’t give a fuck about either one of you.”

*

The speech worked.

98 Turtle thought of his sister—what would Kayla do without him?—and he thought of himself. Things were going good now. It would be a shame to fuck it all up. He skimmed the agreement that Eli handed him. He figured he was probably supposed to ask for a lawyer, but he didn’t know any lawyers, and while there was a chance to get out of this before anyone important knew, he had to take it. He also had the rare ability to recognize when he was in an untenable situation, and the instinct had already saved his life once. This felt like one of those moments.

He signed. He told himself he was signing for Ghost, but the truth was that sometimes you had to trust what sounded like a good thing. When he pushed the paper back across the desk, he looked up.

“Can’t tell y’all much about him. He looked like any white man. Maybe 40 years old.”

“Fat or thin?”

“Very thin in his face.”

“Tall?”

“Couldn’t tell. Man never left his car.”

But a cardinal rule of interrogation is that the subject always knows more than he thinks. They spoke for five hours, late into the afternoon. He told them everything— the strange approach, the hat pulled low, the packet of money thrown at his feet, the second meeting, the failed promise of a third, and the accent.

“What kind of accent?”

“The fake kind.”

They played him examples of different accents from YouTube, and he picked out the Irish one.

“Telling you, though, it was bullshit. I even told him it was bullshit, and he didn’t say nothing.”

They talked on, exploring every angle, pushing his memory to its limits.

“What else did he say? Anything you can think of, even the smallest detail. It all matters, Turtle.”

Turtle started to shake his head, and then his eyes lit up. “Shit, I forgot. He was explaining why he was paying me so much. Said he knew guns didn’t come that steep, but said he didn’t care. Said he was going to die anyway. Die soon.”

99 Wilder and Parker looked at each other, and Eli did his best not to scream for joy. That was his man. He turned back to Turtle with the most solemn gaze he could muster.

“Where’s the money now?”

“Gone.”

“I want to remind you, you’re safe from prosecution for whatever you did with it. If we can just get a sample, a few dollars, we might be able to track him down that way.”

“I gave all $5,000 to a man for a thing I had my eye on, and I don’t know that man’s name, and I don’t have any clue what he did or where he went with it. And If I started to inquire, officers, you’d find my head in a box and you wouldn’t get close to the money anyway.”

They didn’t let it go—Parker dramatically ripped one of the pages of the deal in half, yelled for five straight minutes while Eli stared daggers at the boy. Nothing changed.

“You think I’m lying to y’all now? Y’all already got me. This man was from out of town somewhere, never said his name, and believe me, he ain’t got the money neither.”

What about the envelope it came in? Wasn’t no envelope. Who set him up with the man? Nobody. Can’t remember.

They threatened him some more, pounded the desk. Parker in particular was beside himself—while Wilder was chasing some assassin, they were giving immunity to a kid who was pushing $5,000 worth of what was probably crack all over the McDougald Terraces? Who sold a gun? Who knew about a murder?

But Turtle wouldn’t budge, and he wouldn’t give up the name of his supplier. “I’d give it to you all if I could, but, I mean…that shit is gone.”

And it was in the fourth hour that Eli, embarrassed for having taken so long, remembered to ask him about the cars.

“See, that was the weird thing,” Turtle said. “Two different cars on two nights. One like a silver color. Second one blue.”

“What kind?” Eli asked, hoping like hell that Turtle gave a shit about cars.

“First one was a Camry. Don’t know the second.”

“You see the license plate?”

100

“I always look. I like to see the ones from other states.”

“Remember the numbers and letters?”

“You serious?”

Eli shuffled his papers, and wondered if the Elephant Hunter had slipped away again.

“That was the other thing, though.” Turtle yawned. “Both cars had Virginia plates.”

*

And though they brought him in again the next day, inconspicuous as possible, and the day after that, and though a half dozen others from Quantico insisted on sitting in on the meetings, scribbling their own questions to pass to Eli, they never got anything more.

In the meantime, they were chasing down the thousands of people in Virginia who owned a silver Camry, especially anyone who might be Irish, but Eli suspected this purchase was made separately and off the books. So far, his hunch seemed right.

Nothing else was clicking. No CCTV at the Burger King where they’d done the first deal—they’d long since taped over it—or anywhere else nearby, and no footage from the roads, which wasn’t surprising because there were a million ways to get between North Carolina and Virginia without hitting a highway.

*

When they finally let Turtle go on the third day, Parker met him outside the station and offered him a ride back down to the Mac. Turtle shrugged his acceptance, and just before Parker ducked into the car, he looked across the hood at Turtle.

“Tell me something,” he said. “We’re off the record now, so this is just between us. The other shooter in the Malik Townes thing…that was Ghost, right?”

And Turtle, who to that point had been nothing but cooperative, who never lost his cool or spoke a cross word, gave the FBI agent his laziest smile.

“Ghost did to Malik what I’m going to do to you one day.”

Parker tensed. This little fucker was going to threaten him?

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

101 Turtle crossed his arms on top of the car and leaned forward.

“Nothing at all. Far as you know.”

Parker told him he could find his own ride, and stormed back into the station.

That was just fine with Turtle. It was a beautiful day for a walk, and he was moving with the lightness of a man who can’t quite believe he’s free.

102 Chapter 15: Eli’s Hint

Quantico, Virginia, Oct. 29

Eli was lost in the shadow zone between faint hope and total despair. He didn’t expect much from the shell casing, but when they found a match, and Debo knew Turtle, and Turtle knew the damn Elephant Hunter…well, he had started to believe they were on the cusp.

From all that, what did he have? A fucking state. And not even a small one.

But that’s not all he had. He had a new enemy, too, in Steve Parker. A dull wedge of a man who believed that a drug dealer pushing major weight and hiding a potential murder rap was an unacceptable trade-off for dubious information on the Elephant Hunter. And who would make that opinion known to men above Eli.

He also had a series of leads that were going absolutely nowhere.

After breakfast, his phone rang. He looked at his caller ID and considered not picking up. But on a day like this, a friend sounded good.

“Charlie,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about you. Caught him yet?”

“Hardly.”

They exchanged a few pleasantries, but neither one felt like small talk. Eli was ready to make his excuses when Charlie brought it back around to the Elephant Hunter.

“Any new clues?”

Eli thought about it, but not for long. The day had put him in a mood, and the mood was “who gives a fuck?” Plus, Charlie was his confessor. Old habits die hard.

“One,” he said. “A state.”

“Which one?”

Eli put on his best southern accent. “We reckon he’s one of ours, Charlie.”

“North Cackalacky?”

“Jes a step north.”

“Virginny?”

103

“Didn’t hear it from me.”

*

They said their goodbyes, and Charlie felt that he could climb the walls. He threw the phone down on his bed, he pounded the couch cushions. The word “Virginia” danced in his vision; the information like oxygen to a suffocating man.

He repeated it to himself like a mantra. “Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia.”

He stopped before the repetition made it meaningless. Because “Virginia” was not a meaningless word.

Charlie began to pack his bags. He would leave immediately, get to Richmond by lunch. To do what? He had no idea. But his research in the past week had become repetitive, and his phone had been going off nonstop—calls from work, from each of his two forgiving bosses. A day earlier, one of the women had actually come to his door, and it took every bit of shame and courage he could muster to pretend he wasn’t home.

He needed a change of scenery.

What the bosses didn’t know, and what Eli didn’t know—what nobody knew—was that Charlie had been doing some work of his own. And the work lived in its own shadow zone, between genius and insanity.

It was time to go to Virginia.

104

PART FOUR: SHIFTING TIDES

“Little ships cannot change course as easily as the winds that drive them.” —John LeCarre

105 Chapter 16: Symphony Number Four

The Adirondack Wilderness, Upstate New York, Oct. 30—Nov. 1

“When Dean Rasch needs a break from business and philanthropy, he relaxes in true Adirondack fashion by escaping to his beautiful cabin on a small island in the middle of Follensby Clear Pond just off Upper Saranac. His chalet is the only private home on the pond, which is otherwise dotted with public campsites. There, he enjoys canoeing, fishing, and solitude.

“Weather permitting, I’ll be up the last week of October, maybe even risk a second week,” he said. “Going to leave [wife] Angela in the city. Only a fool tries to predict the upstate weather.”

And Dean Rasch is no fool.

—Adirondack Daily Enterprise feature, “Rasch’s Next Mission,” Oct. 12

*

It wasn’t snowing, and it wasn’t going to snow, but the Elephant Hunter thought the cold might kill him. The temperature wouldn’t rise above 45 today, and he’d vastly underestimated how long it would take to canoe eight miles. It seemed simple enough on paper—a three-inch journey on his map, starting at the launch area across the street from the abandoned Church of the Ascension and finishing at Follensby Clear Pond. All he had to do was row the length of Upper Saranac Lake, pass through Fish Creek Bay, and then kill Dean Rasch.

He had a good canoe, purchased with cash at a Dick’s Sporting Goods in New Jersey and strapped to the hood of his car for the rest of the journey north. The surrounding lakeshore was beautiful, with sparse jack pines hunkered against winter’s approach, stands of birch displaying bright yellow crowns, and sugar maples shining orange and red in the autumn light. The sun threw long white shafts along the calm surface of the lake, and on either side of the canoe the water sparkled with reflected light.

But a freezing man has trouble appreciating the scenery. Above the waist he had only a thin t-shirt, a camouflage windbreaker, and a red flannel that hindered his movement. He had taken the flannel off briefly, and now it was soaked with the lake water he had paddled into the canoe with clumsy, uneven strokes.

He bore reluctant witness to every exhale, his breath streaming out in long vapor trails as he coasted along the shore. He forced himself to work hard, when he could, because the exertion made him feel temporarily warm. His fingers and wrists ached from where he banged them against the side of the boat at least once every five minutes, and the thin leather gloves offered no protection. Maybe, he thought, his

106 paddle wasn’t going deep enough. Or maybe it was going too deep and only looked shallow because of the refraction. With the sun declining in the west, he had no idea if he could even reach Rasch’s cabin by dark.

In an attempt to raise his morale, he thought of the letter. It waited for him on a thumb drive in the glove compartment of his car, and he wondered if this was the one he’d never send.

*

Dean Rasch died today for his sins.

Rasch is the first man I have killed who is not an elected official. He is a businessman, the owner of the Rasch Atlantic paper and timber company, and they say he donates money to charity too. That’s all well and good, and not worth dying over. But that is not the whole truth. It is not even part of the truth.

Dean Rasch is much more than a businessman—he is a billionaire propagandist who has systematically set out to destroy our country. If you are at all political, you know men like him, but you may not know Dean Rasch himself. He is not as famous as the O’Neill brothers who financed the tea party movement and work like hell to destroy the environment, or the propagandist Samuel Love who spends his billions gerrymandering Republicans into permanent power so they can sell the country for parts.

But he is every bit as guilty as these men. If you think of the destructive forces operating in America today as one human body, politicians are the arms and the mouth. They speak the lies, and they carry out the reign of terror. But none of them could function without the brain.

Dean Rasch is the brain. Whether we know it or not, we all march to his orders, and unless you are one of his billionaire friends, he is trying to ruin your life.

*

Horrible, near-ironic realities gnawed at him. First, he’d forgotten that daylight savings time kicked in three days ago, giving him one less hour of afternoon sun than expected. Second, he knew he could have docked closer to Follensby Clear Pond, leaving himself a shorter ride. He could have parked a half a mile away, in fact. In that alternate universe, he had already hiked through the woods, paddled for 30 minutes, and finished the job inside two hours.

Where had his great plans left him? With nothing but a pair of blankets, a cooler with a few sandwiches and his beloved .40, and this canoe.

107 The idea had its brilliance. Nobody would expect him in the wilds of upstate New York, and while their eyes were on the mid-Atlantic and the south, he would turn up unseen in the middle of nowhere. He would shock the world.

But all he’d done was expose himself to more eyes for no gain. He had to settle for being thankful that most of the private cottages and the enormous craftsman-style camps along the shore of Upper Saranac were empty for the winter. In fact, he had passed only one kayaker since his journey began, and the roads past the tree line were nearly silent.

He hadn’t planned with the usual focus; he felt adrift and slow. Helpful paranoia had abandoned him lately, replaced by a kind of lethargic dread. His old errors were errors of the moment, his failures were failures of vision. Now, he was a victim not of circumstance, but of his own stupidity—his increasing retreat into misery and depression. In this state, it was easy to see a new plan as salvation, and to treat it without the critical eye it badly needed.

Look at him now—a freezing fool lumbering toward another messy death, this time in a canoe.

*

It would take 10,000 words and a decade of research to illuminate all the ways that Rasch has betrayed this country and punished its people, but I will give you the quick version. These are just a few of the Dean Rasch’s crimes against his country:

1. In order to undo environmental laws that hurt his company’s profits by curbing pollution, Rasch has bankrolled and even founded “nonprofit” groups that lobby congressmen, criticize the EPA, and create the impression of a grassroots movement in support of ending regulations. I do not have to tell you that these regulations exist to protect our planet and its people. When they are gone, we are exposed.

Rasch managed to use his propaganda network to prevent formaldehyde from being classified as a known carcinogen, despite several comprehensive studies proving the case. His money talked, and through delays and protests, he has kept the EPA at bay, which means that the government cannot control or limit its production.

It is no coincidence, of course, that Rasch Atlantic produces billions of pounds of formaldehyde each year. And it is no surprise that his workers and the communities around his plants have abnormally high rates of leukemia. All this while he sits on the board of one of the country’s major cancer research organizations! Guess where none of that research money goes? Formaldehyde, or anything else that might interfere with his precious profits.

Another example: A 200-gallon sulfuric acid spill at a plant in Montana killed three teenagers swimming in a nearby river, and the only penalty for Rasch was a $10

108 million civil fine. The reason it was so low is that he lobbied Congress for decades to reduce “punitive financial measures” against good, upstanding businessmen like himself. He knew he would kill people, and he wanted to make sure the price was not too high.

*

The Elephant Hunter was barely moving. He had begun to lose faith in his mission. Lately he’d caught himself wondering if the whole idea was wrong—if in fact there was hope in democracy, in the stories of brilliant young people he kept reading, the ones who were winning elections with brazen ideas that were supposed to be outside the American political paradigm. What if theirs was the real courage, and he was making everything worse?

At night, he dreamed of dead men.

He wanted very much to turn back, to retrace his steps, spend a warm night at some local Bed and Breakfast, and carry out the simpler plan in the morning. But he was too far gone now, too close. He entered the narrow sinuous strait that led into Fish Creek Bay, and by the last rays of the sun he realized he could neither turn back nor reach his destination before nightfall. The sweat beneath his flannel had turned cold, and now he was shivering. It would fall below freezing overnight.

He paddled harder, against the protest of his screaming triceps, and made it to the final strait, called Spider Creek. After navigating this last winding stretch—it took him beneath the road he could have driven on, which heightened his despair—and after scraping the bottom five times, he was finally in Follensby Clear Pond. Rasch’s plot was somewhere on the island that loomed hazily in front of him, but it was almost fully dark now, and he’d have no way get his canoe out and get back to the car if he attempted an approach.

He paddled instead to the first small campsite he saw, abandoned like all the rest. He spotted a small but promising lean-to among the spruces. He paddled into the cove, cursed himself for stepping into the ankle-deep freezing water by the shore, dragged his boat up the launch, and collapsed in the middle of a stone campfire ring.

He would love a fire, he thought, but he knew less about starting a fire than he knew about paddling a canoe. He inhaled the two inadequate sandwiches, drank two bottles of water, and carried the blankets to the lean-to. By the light of his watch, he saw what looked like a large xylophone made from sticks and twine hanging by the entrance. He huddled against the far wall and wrapped himself against the cold. Exhaustion prevailed before long. He slept.

*

109 2. He has spent billions of his own money establishing and supporting various think tanks.

If you don’t know what a think tank is, you should. These are organizations that pay loads of money to “academics” who produce papers on government policy. And though every think tank in existence claims to be neutral, it is no coincidence that their conclusions always benefit the men who bankroll them. This so-called “research” is used by politicians who are also being paid by Rasch, through lobbyists and direct donations, to justify laws that avail the extremely wealthy while hurting everyone else. When George W. Bush became president, he came up with a list of government regulations he wanted to kill, and every single one of them came from a policy paper written at one of Rasch’s think tanks. The same is happening with Cornwell.

Through these think tanks, Rasch and a handful of other mega-rich, politically inclined businessmen are responsible for the destruction of our social safety net, a steep decline in corporate taxes (he has earned millions in government contracts, aka “handouts”) and the weakening of the EPA and its environmental regulations—not to mention the systematic denial of climate change, which will kill us all. If it were up to him, none of us would have social security, healthcare, welfare, public education, or a clean planet.

The hard truth is, he is winning.

*

He awoke minutes or hours later, shuddering. The bottoms of his jeans were frozen where he’d stepped into the water, and his hands and feet felt like ice. He walked stiffly from the lean-to and looked to the sky, where the moon shone over an island in the middle of the lake. He checked his watch—9 p.m.

The rest of his night played out like a grim horror. He discovered that he could not fall back asleep. He was too cold, dangerously cold, and the night was only growing colder. It had to be near freezing now, and the only way to retain even a semblance of warmth was to move. He tried walking, but in the darkness he stumbled over a tree root and twisted his ankle. Unseen branches scratched his face when he fell, and the rogue arm of a prickly bush lodged into his neck. He tore himself away and hobbled to the shore.

There was simply nowhere to walk, so he lifted himself into the canoe and began paddling. He couldn’t go far, because though the moon provided some scant light, the shoreline was too irregular and unfamiliar to retrace his path, and the lean-to was invisible from the shore.

The other problem was that while he rowed, his legs were stationary, and only by kicking them around could he get the blood flowing. When it did, the pain from his ankle fought past the numbness and made him gasp. The canoe rocked dangerously.

110 As he considered his situation, he wept. The sobs sounded pitiful to him, echoing off the water, and that made him weep harder.

He made it to midnight paddling slowly back and forth past his campsite, and the cold now felt lethal. He found a small stretch of open shoreline, and he docked his canoe and began pacing, then jogging, then running short sprints. Both blankets hung on his back. This generated some warmth, but the lulls only made his situation seem more desperate. He began to hyperventilate, and that lasted two minutes before he collapsed onto the damp shore.

Time moved with agonizing slowness, each minute a torture of pain, cold, and boredom. His calf muscles cramped up, hunger gnawed at his stomach, and in his most lucid moments he cursed his own stupidity.

How hard would it have been to buy a sleeping bag? One of the geothermal types that could handle temperatures below zero?

His muscles grew stiff, and once when he fell asleep, he woke up with his teeth chattering. For ten minutes his mouth wouldn’t form a coherent word, and he couldn’t close his right hand into a fist. Salvation lay just a short walk away, but in the dark he couldn’t find the road if he tried, and would likely just get lost in the deep woods.

It was his good luck that the temperature never fell below 20 degrees, and that by stamping his feet like the Soviet guards he’d seen in old movies, he could fight off the worst effects until morning came. When the sun began to cast its first tentative rays over the eastern horizon at 5:30 a.m., the air warmed by barely perceptible degrees.

He forced himself to act. For a miserable half hour, he paddled along the shore, teeth chattering, before he found the lean-to. He loaded the cooler into the canoe, checked to make sure the gun was still inside, and set off for Rasch’s cabin.

*

3. Beyond the politicians, Rasch buys judges without a second thought. When the EPA passed an anti-smog rule in 1999, he bought an entire circuit court. The judges he needed were invited by one of Rasch’s foundations to an all-expenses paid “legal seminar” that was truly a month-long retreat on a Wyoming ranch. Later, when Rasch’s lawyers appealed the case to them, those judges decided that smog was good because it prevented skin cancer. They reversed the EPA rule. I wish that were a joke, but it is only too real. Now, around the country, millions of people are breathing polluted air from factories in every industry and getting sick because of it.

4. By donating to so-called “social movements” like the tea party, and using cutout organizations to run vicious and false attack ads in close elections, he has sowed division between the very people who should be allied against him. The populists on

111 the right are marching to his beat as they fight for a government that will crush them, and most of them are too brainwashed to even know it. But it is perfect for Rasch, because if we are fighting each other, we are not fighting him.

Thanks to men like this, the state of wealth inequality in this country has become disastrous. All our money goes upward into the pockets of the few. We are a rich country, rich beyond belief, but only a few people reap the rewards. This is how so many of us can suffer, how the planet can die, while they horde unimaginable sums of money. Money they could never use in ten lifetimes.

*

He didn’t know exactly where to find the cabin, but there were only four islands in the entire pond, and he thought it would be easy enough. It wasn’t—it took him another hour to cross to the largest landmass, and an hour more to discover that there wasn’t a single manmade dwelling to be found.

He paddled to the second island, and that’s where he saw it—an unmistakable three-story cabin in the Swiss Chalet style. The shingles on the steep gable roof were painted the deep colors of autumn, the eaves projected almost to the ground, and a curved staircase led from the imposing wooden door to a wraparound balcony on the second floor. To erase all doubt, a wooden sign nailed to a pine tree hung above a hammock. The sign said “Rasch.”

He docked his boat on the stony shore, and when he took his first step, his right leg gave way beneath him. He hit the ground shoulder-first. He shook his leg back awake, felt some life, rose, and collapsed again. This time he felt a screaming pain from his left ankle—a pain he’d almost forgotten in the cold. He pounded his thighs, his calves, and within minutes he was up again. He opened the cooler, removed the thin cloth bundle, and wrapped his shaking hand around the butt of the Springfield .40. He flipped the trigger safety off, heaved himself over the short seawall, pushed himself back to his feet, and limped toward the house.

The massive wooden door wouldn’t budge, and he was so delirious that he almost lifted the ring of the black iron knocker and let it fall against the striking plate. Instead, he struggled up the staircase, putting all the weight on his right foot and lifting his injured ankle step by step.

A small stream of smoke came from the thin chimney, drifting sideways beneath the gabled cowl. When he reached the balcony, he saw his reflection in the glass panes of the living room window—his neck was bleeding.

He limped to another door. He tried the cumbersome deer horn that served as a handle. It pushed open.

112 The first thing he saw inside was a wood stove, glowing red through the cast iron door. A wide black pipe ran to the ceiling. Then his eyes found a dinner table, a small refrigerator, and in the far left corner, a man leaping to his feet and reaching beneath a cot.

*

The simple truth about Rasch is that he cannot succeed without the vast majority of Americans failing. He is unapologetic about using his wealth to pursue his ends, and every victory he achieves is a loss for people like us.

And when I say “loss,” I mean death. Rasch is responsible for the death and suffering of too many Americans to count. He has pursued our deaths relentlessly, and it is not for his own survival, which might be something I could understand. It is only for his enrichment. He must always be richer. To put it plainly, men like him belong to death cults, yet unlike most cult leaders, they kill everyone but themselves.

It is too late to prevent much of the damage, but today I pursued Rasch’s death as relentlessly as he pursued ours.

*

He fired twice into Rasch’s body, and was sure by his shaking arm that he missed.

Rasch rose from the cot with a gun in his hand. He tried to lift it, but his arm wouldn’t work—he winced and dropped the weapon onto the mattress. There, a woman who had been sleeping beside him grabbed it with a speed that astounded the killer. Before he could process his frozen thoughts, she fired a shot that splintered the wood above his head. Her next shot grazed his face, and then he fired back, a miss followed by two shots to the gut that crumpled her in half.

Rasch began crawling toward him, trailing blood as he went, so he fired at the man’s head. He hit him on the second try. A hole appeared at the top of his skull.

He walked up to the woman. His hand was wavering wildly now, so he steadied it by grabbing his wrist with his left hand. He placed the barrel against her head. He pulled the trigger, but nothing happened—no more bullets, and he hadn’t brought extras.

With the impotent click, calm settled on the room.

He crouched to see her face. She was a slight woman, maybe 40, attractive and hardy. He pulled her off the cot. He dragged her across the room and set her down against the far wall. Her gun was on the bed, but now he didn’t feel like firing any more shots, so he took it with him outside and threw it in the water. Then he hauled the damp, heavy blankets from the canoe and walked back to the cabin.

113

He closed the door behind him, ripped off the bloody sheets, put his own gun under the pillow, and pulled the blankets to his neck. He lay down on his side and absorbed the beautiful warmth. The warmth that made him tired. He was looking directly into the woman’s eyes now. She slumped next to the door, and she stared at her husband’s dead body.

“Angela, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“You weren’t supposed to be here.”

In response, she took two long gasps, retched, and then gasped again. She held her stomach, but the blood spilled through her fingers and spread on the open white robe.

Dimly, a part of his brain urged him to finish the job, to bash her head in with the gun. But he didn’t feel up to it.

“I’m the Elephant Hunter,” he told her.

She had no reaction.

“You were almost a hero, but…”

He shrugged. What can you do? His eyes lowered with sleep until the woman was a blur.

“When I wake up, I’ll tell you everything.”

*

But when he rose from a dreamless sleep, hours later, the light was nearly gone outside the small windows, and the woman was dead. She had crawled halfway across the floor, toward the cell phone in her purse, until she could go no further. She looked angelic now. Her pale, peaceful white face faced the sky, her blond hair splayed like a halo on the wooden floor.

He didn’t care anymore, about anything. “Fuck you,” he said to the woman. “You were one of them.”

But he couldn’t muster any rage. Or guilt. Despite the sleep, he still felt overwhelmingly tired. He ate some crackers he found on an open shelf. He wandered around the back of the cabin to a small covered wood shed stocked with

114 good mountain ash. With the help of some old newspaper, a few chips of kindling, and a bic lighter, he managed to get the wood stove burning again.

Then he slept, and the dreams returned.

*

I want to say one last thing. My time is coming to an end. I can feel it in my soul. They are coming for me, and it’s a small miracle that I have lasted this long. I am not a trained killer. I am not even a good killer. I have been lucky beyond belief, and maybe this means there is some kind of god up there who likes what I’m doing. But I doubt it.

When I die, I need you take my place. I mean YOU, the person reading this letter right now. If you care about this country as much as I do, you will pick up where I left off. If you do not, nobody will.

Men like Rasch are good targets. The academics who work in his think tanks and lie to you are good targets. The lobbyists who press his agenda are good targets. The politicians who do his bidding are good targets. Everyone who works to hurt us should lose their lives.

None of them should ever feel safe. My time on earth is almost over, and I have done the best I can. I hope you will make sure that my mission does not die with me.

Yours,

–The Elephant Hunter

*

His eyes opened with the light. It was morning, and the bodies had begun to smell.

He took a look around the room. The police would find no fingerprints, but they would have everything else—hair, skin, perhaps the blood from his scratched face. He had no idea what to do, so he lifted the mattress from the bed, threw the sheets and blankets on top of it, and carried the bundle to the water. He dumped the entire mess in the pond and watched it float away.

Next he wandered to the back of the house, past the woodshed, and found a generator and a can of gasoline. He brought the gasoline inside and sprayed it over the entire floor. He wasn’t going to light anything on fire—the attention would finish him for good—but he thought it might contaminate any DNA he had left. Finally, he took a hunting knife hanging by a nail on the side of a cabinet and cut Rasch wide open from neck to groin. He turned the body face down and dragged it by the feet across the room, spreading his blood over the floor and especially by the bed. If they

115 were going to find any usable samples from him, they would have to find it amidst a sea of the other man’s blood.

He should do the same to the wife, he knew, but when he looked at her body, the blond hair now damp and stringy with gasoline, he couldn’t stomach the idea.

With the hunting knife, he started to carve “Elephant Hunter” on the log next to the door. But the “E” was so hard that he settled for the initials: “E.H.” Then he left.

He found he was better at paddling this time, and made the return journey in four brisk hours. He knew the pain in his arms was still there, but he couldn’t feel it. The car was still alone in the church parking lot. He left the town limits without spotting another human being.

He dumped the canoe in the deep woods outside Harrisville, and sent the letter by delayed email from a coffee shop outside Watertown. When the first park rangers found the bodies on Follensby Clear Pond, he was already driving along dismal Lake Erie in Ohio.

He let himself drift into fantasy—of wrenching the wheel hard to the right, crashing through the barrier, and drowning beneath the placid gray water. Even with his eyes wide open, he dreamed of the dead.

116 Chapter 17: Charlie’s Opening Salvo

Richmond, Virginia, Oct. 29-Nov. 1

Charlie decided he no longer cared about money, so he established headquarters at the most expensive place he could find, which was the ornate Jefferson Hotel in downtown Richmond. A mere $291 per night bought him a “grand premier room” with a king bed and headboard, an enormous bathroom with a marble tub, and, most importantly to him, a desk with an excellent hard-backed wooden chair and a dim lamp.

With the $10,000 he had saved in a lifetime, he calculated that he could stay inside these pleasant walls for about a month before they kicked him out. He hoped he wouldn’t need that long.

The only problem, he thought, as he sat on a blue velvet bench and surveyed the room, was that he didn’t quite know what he was doing.

*

He spent his first afternoon walking along the James River in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood. He loved Richmond the way you can only love a small city that you visit once a decade at most—a place that is more idea, more sensation, than reality. He loved the old train station with the clock tower looming over the highway, he loved the revival homes in the Fan, and he loved how you could feel the south in its arteries and bones without being bludgeoned by The Legacy.

But he loved Shockoe Bottom the most—the narrow cobblestone streets, the deep red brick buildings, the Japanese elms and swamp laurel oaks arching into canopies across the shaded avenues. He spent the afternoon on Cary Street, with an hour-long stop at the Fountain Bookstore. After lunch at Nota Bene, where he drank a full bottle of the house cabernet, he stumbled southwest along the canal walk and the capital trail until he was sober. When it turned dark, he felt tired of walking, so he caught a cab back to the Jefferson.

He needed the day to clear his head, and to form the basis of a plan. By the time he sat at his desk, legs pleasantly aching, clarity came over him…if not sanity. He had reached an important conclusion, and it co-existed within his fantasy of finding the Elephant Hunter. He would get lucky, because luck was nothing more than destiny.

*

With the aid of more red wine from room service, these certainties brought him back to the epiphany he experienced when he quit his job. It was the one thing he couldn’t forget:

117 Nothing is random.

Just as it wasn’t random that he and the Elephant Hunter found themselves bound together by fate and fortune, he must also assume that the killer was not picking his targets at random.

No matter what the media claimed, no matter what he said in his letters, this wasn’t a crime spree with only a broad theme. His anger went deeper than political affiliation—it had to. The “Republican” umbrella tying the victims together wasn’t good enough.

Charlie knew there was a good deal of self-interest in this mental leap. If the Elephant Hunter was simply what he claimed, a man who hated Republicans and attacked them with no underlying pattern, Charlie had no prayer of catching him. It wouldn’t be worth the effort to try.

There were two things he had to believe. First, that Eli was right about the killer living in in Virginia. If it wasn’t true—if Eli was lying or had reached the conclusion on faulty evidence—then Charlie was chasing a ghost.

Second, he must believe there was a method to the Hunter’s madness—something that tied his victims together. And the missing connection—the invisible “why”— had to be so personal that it would Charlie to his doorstep.

*

He turned to the letters, looking for secret themes.

Reviewing the three the Hunter had written so far, the strongest common denominator was environmental destruction. It appeared in all three: Ted Harwood smoothed the way for energy executives to implement fracking in the state; Alonso Clements dismantled protections that limited both power plant emissions and the amount of herbicides used by its major agrochemical company; William Bostick supported the Pine Bluff Oil Pipeline and the privatization of state water.

What else?

Harwood and Bostick were both accused of voter suppression, but no mention of that topic was made in the Clements letter. And though he railed against Clements for passing right-to-work laws for both the public and private sectors—laws which, despite their name, essentially gutted the state’s unions and led to lower wages— that issue was absent in the other two.

Two minor themes ran throughout. The first was children—Harwood backed a colleague who had committed statutory rape against young teenagers, Clements passed a law granting qualified amnesty to drivers who ran over protesters, which

118 indirectly led to the death of a nine-year-old girl and her mother at a woman’s rights march, and Bostick’s letter alluded to child cancer victims from the pipeline spill.

The second theme was racism—from immigrants’ rights to racial gerrymandering— but as with children, the references were broad enough that Charlie couldn’t find a solid link between them. They might have deeper meaning, or they might be tacked on to bolster a point. There was nothing to suggest that they constituted a central component of the killer’s mission.

Charlie could take the obvious approach and pursue the climate angle. He’d look for people who had become sick or died in Virginia due to deregulation or pollution, and from there try to find the person close to them with a strong revenge motive.

Problem was, the FBI was already far ahead of him. Or they should be, anyway. There was even an entire online forum called “Who is the Elephant Hunter?” that focused almost exclusively on environmental causes. If Charlie walked down that path, he’d be miles behind the crowd, and with fewer resources.

That brought him to a different approach. He could treat the letters for what he suspected they were—red herrings.

He didn’t believe that the Elephant Hunter was an eco-terrorist. It wasn’t that the killer didn’t care about the issues he enumerated in his letters—he likely felt very passionately about them, and he probably believed that each sin by each politician merited its own death sentence.

But that wasn’t why he killed.

Anger abounds in politics, but assassinations and murder are still rare in America. What would trigger this kind of violence? Charlie came up with two answers. First, severe mental illness, in which case the victims could be unconnected beyond ideology and he was once again at sea. But the Elephant Hunter didn’t write like someone who had lost his critical faculties.

The second was simple: A personal tragedy.

If the Elephant Hunter’s motive came from intimate trauma, it meant that his targets would be chosen not because they were run-of-the-mill cretins from the same political party, but because of specific actions they’d taken that were somehow related to the tragedy.

In his heart, Charlie knew that the Elephant Hunter killed for revenge. But what was the common thread? What, exactly, was he avenging?

*

119 Charlie understood that he was making huge assumptions. Instead of asking what the existing evidence said about the killer, he was working backward and asking a different, more dangerous question: Under what perfect circumstances would Charlie McGrath have a chance to catch this man?

By establishing those parameters, he was narrowing the case down to a thin sliver and excluding some very good alternatives. It would have made for very bad journalism. As a mercenary detective, it was his only chance.

As his first day in Virginia wound to a close, all the lights were off in Charlie’s hotel room except the desk lamp. Even that obscure light was too much, so he pulled the beaded string and sat in darkness. He felt exhausted, and he was parched from the wine. A small hangover fought its way to the front of his skull as he plotted his next move. It wasn’t complicated—he had to dig deep on Bostick, Clements, and Harwood. He had to discover the hidden thread that bound them. He had to find what nobody else had found.

Whatever else he rejected, he knew this: The murders were tied to the power these men held as politicians. If there was a useful clue, it would come from examining how they wielded that power.

*

He started the next morning with Bostick, the Georgia state rep, whose history was online. When he saw the list of bills and committees for the last legislative session alone, he groaned—he had not imagined the volume. Going back to 2006, he found more than 500 policy acts attributable to Bostick. The accounts of his death had often referred to the meager total of bills he managed to pass through the House, but they didn’t account for those that died in committee, or the various measures, successful and otherwise, that he’d co-sponsored.

Categorizing them all took up most of Charlie’s day. It wasn’t good enough to simply read the summaries, or even the text of the bill itself. In many cases he had to follow up by researching the bill online. Some of the local journalists were good, some clearly didn’t understand what they were reading, and some just regurgitated quotes the Republicans gave them. It was the non-profit sites he mainly relied on— their writers had the time and ability to look beneath the surface.

The good news was that some of the 500-plus “bills” were frivolous. He could ignore the motion to honor the state spelling bee champion, or to raise the salary of the judges and clerks in Lumpkin County, or to commend the retiring CEO of an electric company, or to recognize “Georgia Purebred Dog Day” at the capitol.

Everything else went in the spreadsheet—the failed attempt to repeal tax credits for residents of low-income housing, the successful one to keep colleges from designating themselves as “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants, a recurring

120 fight to allow optometrists to inject “pharmaceutical agents” into patients, efforts to change the definition of “free expression” on college campuses (Bostick seemed to have a special hatred for schools), and the amendment to bar citizens from early voting on weekends.

The more he read, the more dispirited he became—to dig into the inner workings of Republican government was to confront the reality of the party’s ugly political aspirations.

He pressed on, with just a short break to get fresh air and pizza. Every half hour or so, he changed his workstation—from the desk to the bed to the bathroom floor.

Twelve hours later, all of it spent starting at a computer screen, he finished. He had 240 entries on his spreadsheet. Many of them could be culled because they didn’t make sense as motivations for killing—were too abstract or too minor—but that was a project for later.

He took another walk to the pizza parlor, picked up the biggest tub of Tums he could find from CVS, and floated on his back in the hotel pool until they kicked him out at midnight.

*

The next morning, bloated and groggy, Charlie set to work on Ted Harwood—the first victim. His Senate career spanned just a decade, but his prolific behavior made the volume of legislation just as overwhelming.

The first bill of substance Charlie came across, in an echo of Bostick, was called “The Expanded Early Voting Act,” which did indeed add two days to the early voting calendar, but also removed the final Saturday before the election—which, data showed, was the most popular voting day by far for the state’s black population. The second was a “Farm Act” that protected a Chinese-owned factory farm worth billions from being sued when they sprayed hog feces over their fields, polluting the air and making life miserable for anyone within smelling distance. Needless to say, the Chinese were generous donors and bankrolled lobbyists who had worked for years to erode state regulations. Both bills passed.

Charlie put his head in his hands. It was going to be an extremely long day.

In a small act of rebellion, he entered the words “fuck with voters” and “protect pigshit” on the Harwood column of his spreadsheet.

He pressed on, drank three cokes, and tried to ignore the enervating smell of grease from yesterday’s pizza boxes. A maid ignored the “do not disturb” sign, and he snapped at her when she opened the door.

121 As the morning turned toward afternoon, he navigated the hellish decade of Ted Harwood’s career. The man honored boy scouts, he fought for early refills of prescription ear drops, and he insisted that schools teach “private property rights” and “alternatives to prevailing climate science” to their students. He battled vigorously against the usual hobgoblins: Unions, colleges, perceived socialism, corporate tax of any kind, environmental regulation, and poor people. He loved charter schools—those low-performing, highly segregated, for-profit parasites that ate up public school funding. He would have been happy to pay teachers a poverty wage, and to demolish their pensions. He never met an immigrant whose rights he wouldn’t chip away at or outright revoke, and one of his more noteworthy ideas was to empower private citizens to not just snitch on anyone they thought might be undocumented, but to actually pay them for it on the taxpayer’s dollar. He voted to stop funding the state’s suicide hotline.

When Charlie finished, an hour after the beautiful and coveted pool had closed for the night, he felt a dark hopeless halo circle his brain. What hellish world could produce a man like this?

He had noticed many repeat themes between Harwood and Bostick, and he dreaded the idea of repeating the act tomorrow with Clements. More than anything, he began to question if he even wanted to stop the Elephant Hunter.

The only saving grace was his fatigue, which obscured the heartless world by degrees until it became briefly absurd and then faded away entirely.

*

On the fourth day, as the Elephant Hunter left Dean Rasch’s cabin, Charlie pored over Gov. Alonso Clements’ record. After two hours, his pallor lifted. Something very peculiar caught his eye. A similarity between Clements and Bostick—easy to miss, but striking once you noticed. He searched through his entries to find the same topic among Harwood’s history. It wasn’t there.

Shit.

But wait. Harwood wasn’t just a senator. Harwood had been a House representative for two years at the start of his career. Charlie spent twenty minutes searching, but couldn’t figure out how to find former members. He considered the terrible irony that he might have go back to North Carolina.

Frantically, he searched for the contact information of a professor of political science he had once used as a source for a story about a lunatic congressman who tried to privatize regional airports. The professor was an encyclopedia, and he knew a little bit of everything. He no longer had his number in his phone, but to his deep relief he found an email from seven years earlier with a cell number. He dialed, praying it still worked.

122

“Hello.”

Charlie remembered three facts the minute he heard the voice—first, this man liked to be referred to as “Dr.” Second, he was dry as a bone, with a mode of conversing that treated niceties as attacks. Third, he was a paranoiac who recorded every phone call.

“Dr. Shour, my name’s Charlie McGrath. You and I spoke a few years ago—

“I remember you. The Toffin story.”

“That’s right.” Toffin—the airplane lunatic. Charlie had forgotten his name. “I’m in a bit of a rush on a story, and I thought maybe you could help me. I’m looking for legislative records of an old General Assembly House rep from North Carolina, but I’m only finding current members online. Any idea where I could find the old stuff? I’m out of town and don’t have time to get back to Raleigh to check the books.”

“Which representative?”

“I’ll give you three guesses.”

“I only need one. Ted Harwood.”

“Bingo.”

“Tell me about your story.”

Charlie fed him a tale about a legislative profile he was writing for Vice, and how he didn’t want to miss anything big from Harwood’s tenure in the State House.

“Two ways. First, you go to the Legislative Library in Raleigh.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Second, you go to the search page. You run a search of bill texts, and you select the 2009-2010 session, which I believe is when he served in the House. Third, instead of searching by a keyword, you just search the name ‘Harwood.’ Any bill he authored or co-authored, he’s going to be in the text of it.”

That’s genius, Charlie thought, but he kept it to himself—Shour despised compliments.

“Okay. Good.”

“A little trick I picked up over the years. Just as good as if he still had his own page.”

123

“I can’t thank you enough,” he began, and soon realized by the silence on the other end that Shour had hung up.

*

The simple search turned up everything Harwood had done in his lone House term. As the results filtered in, he fought off a wave of anxious nausea—his pet theory might be about to sink into the familiar depths of disappointment. He prepared himself for a let-down. But even as he erected his defenses, he saw it. Halfway down the page. Exactly what he was looking for.

A surged of adrenaline hit, and his fingers began to tingle. This was the old rush. This was what he had missed.

He paced around the room. He suddenly felt ravenous.

*

At Valentino’s Pizza, everyone was watching the two enormous televisions flanking the front door, which until now had only showed Italian soccer matches. He ordered his bacon and onion slices, and as he checked out, the young man at the register nodded toward the screen.

“You see this shit? He hit again. Got a woman this time too.”

Charlie turned to the screen and froze. He saw a cabin lit up by a helicopter’s spotlight in the darkness, and a lake, and the police boats. But what stunned him was the text below:

“Elephant Hunter Strikes Again; Kills Businessman Dean Rasch and Wife”

He dropped a $20 bill on the cash register and raced back to his hotel. It took him the rest of the night, but he found it at last—the common thread he was too nervous to state aloud.

This was something. Sweet Jesus, this was something.

124 Chapter 18: The Arrest

Charlottesville, Virginia, Nov. 2

“In its rush to show the world how quickly it could get its man, the FBI trampled on my rights as a citizen. In its rush for the headline that the hero was the bomber, the media cared nothing for my feelings as a human being. In their mad rush to fulfill their own personal agendas, the FBI and the media almost destroyed me and my mother.”

—Richard Jewell, 1996

*

Eli stared over the heads of the gathered reporters into the bank of TV cameras on the dais, blinked against the photographer’s flashes below them, and spoke.

“My name is Elijah Wilder, and I’m a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s counterterrorism division. We’re based in Washington, D.C. and our office has taken the lead in investigating the recent political assassinations committed by the man known as the Elephant Hunter. Since the first killing on Sept. 18, the FBI and its law enforcement partners have been working nonstop to investigate this matter and bring the man responsible to justice. Our collective team has pursued thousands of leads and tips. We’ve worked methodically, and with a sense of extreme purpose, to bring this case to a conclusion. Recently, we received one such tip from a private citizen, and it led us to a person of interest. This morning, outside Charlottesville, Virginia, we approached this man to question him on a voluntary basis. Again, our intention was not to arrest him. He attempted to flee when we approached him, and is now in federal custody.”

The flash bulbs ramped up in intensity, and Eli looked down at the speech he had prepared.

“I want to emphasize,” he continued, with appropriate sternness, “that this person has not yet been charged with any crime, and the investigation is still ongoing. We cannot yet confirm that this man is the Elephant Hunter, and it may be some time before we reach that point. If ever. At this time, we will not be releasing his name. We will, however, provide updates as soon as we can. No questions today. Thank you.”

And then he was off, ignoring the shouting journalists, and his team followed—the Roanoke police chief, the Carroll County chief, two ATF agents from the city’s satellite office, and his boss, Counterterrorism Assistant Director Craig Barkley. Trailing the group was Senior Special Agent Robert Willett—the man just a rung below Eli on the ladder, and the one most likely to trample him to death in his ambitious climb to the top.

125

It was Willett, the snake, went off script. Just as they broke through the horde and stepped into the black SUV that would take them to the helipad, the voice of one journalist pierced the din.

“Just tell us—did you get him?”

Eli sat beside Barkley, stone silent, but Willett couldn’t resist. He turned to the scrum, gave a short, reluctant, tight-lipped sigh. Then he spoke the line that would lead every news show that night, and headline every paper in the morning

“We think we’ve got our man.”

Motherfucker.

When the door closed, Eli tried to kill him with a stare.

But then he looked on the bright side: At the end of this shitshow of a day, all he really knew for sure was that Willett was wrong.

*

He knew it in his bones. He also knew that Willett was heavily invested in being right, which was always a big mistake—one committed too often by people who take the short view when launching themselves to the dizzy heights. Willett was the one who received the anonymous tip, and he was the one who went over Eli’s head straight to Barkley. It was Willett who stood to benefit if it panned out—catching the Elephant Hunter would light a fire under his career.

And it wasn’t a bad play, Eli thought. He didn’t like or trust Willett, and Willett knew it…or should, if he had any brains. So instead of spending a lifetime under someone who will never give you the oxygen to fulfill your massive ambition, he took a big chance. Eli might have done the same in his shoes, but he would have done it smarter.

The minute they got back to Arlington, Eli demanded a meeting—just the three of them.

*

He and Willett sat in uncomfortable gray folding chairs in front of Barkley’s massive desk, and Eli looked at his adversary from the corner of his eye. Willett was younger by two years, thin and pale, and tufts of stiff, short hair that seemed to grow at random from his scalp. He had a face that would have been featureless if not for the glasses hanging on the bridge of his nose, enlarging his drowsy eyes—a good asset, Eli had to admit, for how they concealed a pitiless streak.

126

Loyalty, Eli learned early, was to Willett a useless abstraction. Nevertheless, he had the kind of raw persistence, born of that dull inner fire and a natural unpopularity, that sparked a zealous commitment to the job. He didn’t have a crowning success yet, but he rose nonetheless.

Across from them, Craig Barkley had erased any trace of emotion from his features. It was his favorite trick when he was pissed off—somewhere in a long and distinguished career, he’d learned that a blank face is more terrifying than a furious one. And he wanted them terrified.

Barkley was once a legendary agent, beloved of his peers, and Eli had been his chosen apostle from the start. But he never let himself forget that the man was upper management now—not his friend, but his boss, and someone who probably needed a scapegoat.

He didn’t look like a functionary. Gray-haired at the temples, with the wide, sharp shoulders of a high school football star and the dogged face of a man who is certain he will steamroll every obstacle in his path, Barkley seemed too bullish for the bureaucratic china shop.

Still, he had survived the game. He could bring Eli down with a word. More importantly, he was the man who reported to the assistant director, who in turn reported to the deputy director at the top of the heap. Shit fell downward, and the bags under Barkley’s eyes matched Eli’s own—they said that he’d been under immense pressure from above, and he was about to transfer that weight to the man in front of him.

Eli had to fight for his life, but he liked his odds—at least for the moment. Willett, he was sure, had fucked it up bad.

*

He quickly conducted a mental review of what they knew: A man named Alfie Terrell had been sending letters to Dean Rasch for decades. He lived in Fancy Gap, a town in southwestern Virginia—about 100 miles from Roanoake, despite Eli’s statement at the press conference—that suffered from abysmal poverty, and where the average life expectancy of a man was 15 years less than his counterparts in the rich D.C. suburbs in the northern part of the state.

Along with the letters—angry, fixated, unhinged—he had once, four years ago, linked a news article from the Charleston, SC Post and Courier on Facebook. The piece discussed the herbicide controversy that the Elephant Hunter had mentioned in his Alonso Clements letter. Terrell added a one-word commentary: “Criminals!”

127 After getting the tip about the letter, Willett found the Facebook post on his own, and that’s when he rushed to Barkley, skipping right over Eli in his breathless dither.

He looked golden for a while. When Carroll County police drove by, they found several cars in various states of disrepair in his front yard—including a gray sedan of the kind that matched the vague description from the Harwood crime scene.

Now Willett spoke first, the audacious prick. “If this is our man,” he said to Barkley, “I want Eli’s contribution recognized. He brought us to Virginia, and we probably needed that. Whatever else happened after that, he narrowed the search.”

Why you condescending shit. In a stroke, he had reminded their boss that he caught the Elephant Hunter, that Eli for all his blundering had only managed to point to a state (which was not even necessary, as the “probably” neatly implied), and that Willett himself was in a position to congratulate Eli, meaning that he was above him. Not bad.

Yet Barkley had no time for this display of fake magnanimity, which might have played better in a board room.

“Talk, Eli.”

He talked:

“My problem here is that aside from the circumstantial evidence, for which Bobby deserves a ton of credit, by the way,”—Willett hated to be called Bobby—“I’m seeing several red flags.”

Barkley’s hostile neutrality somehow deepened. Not what he wanted to hear, Eli knew, but too bad.

He had to hear it. The mission had started to turn sour the minute they raided Terrell’s rundown house—a shack, really, across from a Gulf gas station, with maroon clapboard siding peeled to the bone and a rusted tin roof. “Raided” was the operative word, and Eli hated it. He wanted a small force of three or four people in street clothes and unmarked cars. Instead, he got a 15-man crew complete with local police, a small SWAT team, and black SUVs galore—all of it in broad daylight. Which meant, of course, that everyone nearby would see it too.

The only concession he wangled from the higher-ups—who had lost themselves in Willett’s fantasy—was that he be allowed to knock on the door first. They probably thought he craved the glory, but what he really wanted was to control the situation and keep it from going completely sideways.

128 He had knocked, all right, but the most he got in response was a curtain parting from a living room window, revealing the enormous police presence in the man’s front yard. That was followed by a low, guttural moan resounding from inside. The moan became a scream, and a moment later they heard the squeaking hinges of a back door.

When they reached the rear, they found an obese man in underwear and an enormous Buffalo Wild Wings t-shirt sprawled out on the overgrown grass where he’d tripped over an old water heater. The underwear was torn, and half of his ass was exposed to the SWAT team.

His attempt to flee gave them the right to arrest him on suspicion, and as they put the handcuffs on, he pissed himself. They brought him back inside, did their best to clean him up, and found a pair of stretch whitewashed jean shorts and blue hospital slippers to complete his wardrobe. He struggled all the way to the SUV, screaming bloody murder—Willett asked the cops to use a taser on him, and they were eager to comply before Eli intervened—and he barely fit through the back door. On the ride to the police station, he kept repeating “scum, scum, scum” with an explosive lisp that covered the seat ahead of him in saliva. He smelled like hell on its hottest day.

The interrogation had been even worse. As a very unofficial guest of the Roanoke police, Alfie didn’t ask for a lawyer. But between bouts of hyperventilation during which he sprayed spittle around the room, he could barely form a coherent sentence. When Willett led him ham-fistedly into discussing the environment, he finally began ranting about the polluter Dean Rasch. Then the two had a priceless exchange in which Willett tried to turn up the heat.

“Funny you bring him up, Alfie. You murdered Dean Rasch, didn’t you, Alfie?”

Willett had an annoying habit of repeating the suspect’s name during interrogation, as though it might demean him into confessing. He had undoubtedly learned it from television.

Alfie seemed suddenly very interested.

“He’s dead?”

Willett smiled like he’d just met a criminal mastermind. He threw a series of explicit photos on the table.

Alfie reviewed them one by one.

“He’s dead!” the man lisped. “He’s dead!” Eli had never seen a person happier—or crazier.

129 “And I don’t think it stops with Rasch,” said Willett, yelling now to make himself heard over Alfie’s squeals. “I think you’re the Elephant Hunter.”

This confused him momentarily, but then he smiled and took full credit.

“I killed ‘em all! All ten!”

At this, Willett slammed his palm on the table—that came from TV too, Eli guessed—and lowered himself within range of Alfie’s atrocious breath.

“He’s only killed five.”

At this, Alfie paused. Then, with the slow, ecstatic smile of a clever child, he clapped his hands together, rattling the chains on his handcuffs.

“There’s five more you ain’t know about!”

*

Rather than recount this embarrassing episode to Barkley as he presented his case, Eli played the role of a reluctant skeptic.

“What worries me,” he said with a gentle, patronizing tone that he knew would infuriate Willett, “is the competence. See, I won’t argue that the Hunter is the most efficient killer we’ve run across. But I will argue that there’s a level of planning that suggests…well, it suggests intelligence, actually. Whatever else we think of him, he’s killed four public figures and one woman without leaving a trace of DNA, without getting caught on a single surveillance camera, and without leaving a reliable eyewitness behind.”

“It almost sounds like you admire him, Eli,” said Willett.

Rather than tell his subordinate to fuck himself with a plunger, Eli turned in his seat and gave him a thin smile. They both knew Willett had overstepped—the first one to get personal inevitably loses.

“What else?” Barkley snapped. “Enough banter. If I have to eat shit, I prefer to eat it straight.”

“Nobody has seen him in the last three days,” said Willett quickly, “not one person, and it’s a tight-knit community. This is not some big city he can disappear in.”

“You’re omitting something pretty important,” Eli countered, “which is that nobody has seen him for weeks. He never leaves his home. He’s a shut-in.”

130 “Yes, exactly. He’s a paranoiac and a loner, which fits in with what the profilers have been telling us from day one. In the short time we’ve held him, we’ve witnessed enough to know he’s unstable—the kind of man who could commit murder.”

Barkley chimed in. “He’s never even asked for an attorney.”

“I think he’s reveling in his crimes now that he’s been caught.”

Eli snorted. He couldn’t help himself.

“Talk,” said Barkley.

“Well,” said Eli. “We’ve all seen the letters Alfie sent to Dean Rasch”—those had been provided by Rasch’s people, who had thoughtfully saved them all—“and if you can honestly tell me the man who wrote those letters, which I’d politely call haphazard, though ‘deranged’ might be a better word…if you tell me he could write what our guy wrote to the papers, well…simply put—and I’m sorry Bobby, I know how much this means to you—I don’t agree.”

Barkley offered nothing, and Willett wouldn’t look at him.

“And we have no connection to Harwood,” Eli continued, finding his rhythm. “None to Bostick. No gun. No canoe, if you can even imagine a man his size rowing one. And I know Bobby thinks he was lying in the interrogation, but my honest interpretation is that he didn’t even know Dean Rasch was dead until we told him. We have the tapes, Craig, and when you listen I think you’ll agree. I’m afraid to say the whole thing was more or less a clusterfuck.”

He stayed quiet long enough for the humiliated Willett to get a word out, and then spoke over him.

“Lastly, I’m not seeing an inciting incident.”

“Fine, but it’s a hell of a lot of evidence to ignore,” Barkley said. “A hell of a lot. A hell of a lot more than you’ve turned up in six weeks, I might add.”

Eli knew he had to tread carefully now. The pressure was on Barkley, and that pressure put Eli in the crosshairs. But wanting something to be true is different than something actually being true, and he had to maintain his resolve.

“I want him as bad as you do,” he said, with just a hint of firmness that said he wouldn’t be losing his self-respect. “But I also don’t want another Richard Jewell on our hands.”

For the first time that anyone noticed, Barkley slumped. They all remembered Jewell—the security guard falsely accused of the Atlanta Olympic bombing, which

131 led to a trial by public opinion when his name was leaked to the media. He was exonerated too late to save his name and died a decade later at age 44, a permanent black mark on the FBI. That kind of disaster scared Barkley, as well it should. He may have resented the manipulation, but the hidden career preservation instinct kicked in.

Eli forced himself to frown. He knew he’d won this small skirmish, and gloating would be a mistake. Barkley was spoiling for a fight—he didn’t like being cowed.

“Willett, you’re awfully quiet. Anything to say? Are we wasting our time?”

Whatever thoughts were coursing through his head at that moment, Willett had finally realized that Alfie Terrell might not be the hill he wanted to die on. He realized further, with an encroaching despair that he had trouble hiding, that Eli might be right. And he still had some knack for survival—he knew when to retreat.

“I still think this is worth pursuing,” he managed, rather meekly.

“Absolutely,” said Eli, now the soul of forgiveness. “And I hope you’re right, I really do. I admire the work you did, and I think you should see it through. Personally.”

Willett resumed pouting, and Barkley hated a pouter. “Anything else to say, Willett?”

He shook his head.

“Then why the fuck are you still here?”

In a moment, Willett wasn’t.

When they were alone, Barkley steepled his hands and leaned forward.

“This isn’t about professional jealousy, right? Worrying that a slithering little shit like Willett might crawl his way right into your asshole, eat your guts from the inside?”

“No.”

“Eli, I know this is a hard case, but you’ve given me fuck-all. Do you have anything? I’d take a fucking theory at this point.”

“I’ve got more theories than I can use. Everyone has a theory. The smartest agent I have, or the agent I thought was smartest, thinks he’s a cross-dresser. Won’t get off the idea, actually.”

132 But Barkley didn’t respond immediately. He wouldn’t allow him the satisfaction of ordinary dialogue. He watched with his impassive eyes for so long that Eli considered it almost dramatic.

Finally he spoke.

“We can’t have him kill again, Eli. It’s your ass if we do. People are excited about Terrell. It was supposed to be our break. And let me tell you, it’s a goddam disaster if he’s not our guy. But at this point, I hate to say it, it’s an even bigger disaster for you if he is. As in, a career-stalling-in-its-tracks disaster.”

Eli ignored the anxiety in his stomach, and summoned his last reserves.

“Craig, no bullshit. I’d be willing to bet my career on it.”

Barkley gave him nothing. He worked his prominent politician’s chin back and forth, and began to move his head in quick, small nods. Then he stood abruptly.

“Doesn’t matter if you’re willing to bet it or not, my boy.” He busied himself with a stack of papers on his desk. “You already have.”

Eli stayed seated for just a defiant second longer. His momentary sense of triumph over Willett spilled out of him like a gallon of blood.

*

He decided to pay Willett one last visit in his office. He was feeling angry enough to swing his dick a bit, and he knew the perfect target.

“Listen up, Bobby,” he said, after he barged into his office. He opted not to shut the door—better to undermine him in front of the secretaries and staff. “You’re about to humiliate this whole agency because you thought you could go over my head and score a point. I get it. I’m not mad, but I am going to lay out exactly what happens next. It may take a day, maybe two, but we’re going to let him go. Any idiot can see that. When it happens, you’re going to have to eat some shit. You know you have to eat that shit, right Bobby? Just nod at me if you understand me. Nod like you’re unable to speak. Like you have a mouthful of shit already.”

“Eli, I don’t think this—

“Because this isn’t my fucking rodeo.” He kept his voice perfectly level, which was one of his more disconcerting traits. “And this fat motherfucker we have in custody is not my fucking clown. He’s your clown, Bobby. And you can dress him up, and you can honk his big red nose, but soon you’re going to have to release that clown into the wild. And when that moment comes, you’re going to have to explain to the world why the FBI kept a clown in a cage.”

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“Eli, I have to ask you—

“But you like cameras, don’t you? You’ve always liked them. This is going to be your chance, Bobby.” He clapped him on the shoulder, hard. “Personally, I think you’re going to be a breakout star.”

There was strong feeling in the eyes of the staff that watched him leave the foyer. He couldn’t tell if they wanted to applaud him or burn him alive.

*

Alfie Terrell’s identity still hadn’t leaked. Eli, still miffed and feeling a bit ruthless with regards to Willett’s career, decided to do it himself.

134 DOCUMENT: Heavy.Com

Alfie Terrell: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

No Byline — Nov. 2, 6:15 p.m.

A 34-year-old unemployed shut-in with an intense hatred of the recently murdered businessman Dean Rasch has been arrested by the FBI in connection with the Elephant Hunter assassinations.

Alfred Louis Terrell, nicknamed Alfie, was arrested at his home in Fancy Gap, VA, where he lived alone with more than a dozen pet hamsters. An FBI spokesman said he was merely a “person of interest,” and that they only arrested him because he attempted to flee, but an iPhone video shot by a gas station attendant showed a team of at least 12 men descending on Terrell’s home Sunday morning. He fled through the back door, and was dragged kicking and screaming into a federal vehicle minutes later.

No charges have been filed, but at least one FBI representative, identified as Senior Special Agent Robert Willett, felt confident. “We think we’ve got our man,” he told reporters in Charlottesville this morning.

We don’t know everything about Alfie Terrell, but here’s what we do know:

1. He was a “loner” and a “paranoiac”

Neighbors of Terrell’s describe him as a man who mostly remained inside his house, and wasn’t particularly social with anyone in the small town.

“I never saw him leave his home,” said Eric Potsmer, speaking to local television station WRNK. “Except for the time he tried to steal my mail and my dog bit him.”

Melinda Baez, a Fancy Gap resident who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for town assessor in 2016, remembered knocking on his door while she canvassed the town.

“It was the worst experience of my campaign,” she said. “He hissed at me through his screen door, hissed just like a snake, and told me he knew who had sent me. I’ll never forget it. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he did them murders. And he stank something awful.”

2. His last known job was at an auto body shop in 2010

Buddy Colquitt, who runs Colquitt Collision in Fancy Gap, called Terrell “one of the worst damn mechanics I’ve ever seen.”

135 “I tell you one thing,” he said to the Roanoke Times, “and they can lock me up if I’m wrong, but I seriously doubt he killed all those men. I couldn’t get him to show up to work on time, and when he did, he’d ruin everything he touched. It’s like he didn’t know the first thing about cars. Didn’t work here but a week, but he probably cost me six grand before I got my head straight and canned him. Found out after that every single reference he gave me was made up.”

There’s no record of his employment since that short stint at Colquitt Collision. Prior to that, he worked for a period of roughly one month at an A&P grocery store in nearby Crooked Oak, NC. He was fired from that job after a month for eating candy bars from the display rack.

Speaking of which…

3. His fitness level is not exactly, um…peak?

We only bring this up because the Elephant Hunter’s crimes to date have involved beating one man to death, strangling another, and paddling a long distance in a canoe to shoot Rasch and his wife. These are not minor physical feats, and from the looks of it, well…it’s not easy to imagine ol’ Alfie pulling it off. We’re not saying, but…we’re just saying.

4. He really hated Dean Rasch

This is the crux of the matter. Carlton Rasch, Dean’s son and the only heir of the Rasch paper and timber empire, released a batch of letters to the FBI. Later that day, on Twitter, he posted one of the letters for people to read. “We used to read these and keep them as a joke,” he wrote. “Now I look at the text and see the heart of evil.” All of Alfie’s prose—spelling, grammar, usage, and everything else—is (sic):

“god gave you the right name RASH, because your a big itching RASH on this country. you belong with the SCUM OF THE EARTH, the algy and the critters of the mud that only move at nite. I see pictures of you on the inter net and tv and i shout to god, SMITE THIS MAN, i bellow your name to satan and his little red devils that you will shorly spend all of your days with. YOU CAUSED GLOBEL WARNING. you CAUSED it and for that i curse you to be infestid with demons. 100 years of agony. pitchforks stabing on to every part of you. I mean youre anis balls and feet.”

Despite his reference to the Internet, there’s little evidence that Alfie kept up much of a social media presence. He has a Facebook account, but aside from the odd link about global warming and the Clements post, there are only a handful of long rants about truckers making too much noise at the Gulf station across the street from his house.

5. Everybody online think he’s innocent

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Jess Lavelle, stand-up comic and star of ABC’s Signs and Wonders, started the “Free Alfie” movement, which now boasts thousands of posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

“If the man don’t fit, you must acquit,” she tweeted, with the hashtag #AlfieCantCanoe.

In response, one of her fans photoshopped Alfie winning an Olympic kayak race.

If they’re right and he gets released, he’ll be happy to know that local animal control officers are looking after his hamsters.

137 Chapter 19: The Common Thread

Richmond, Virginia, Nov. 3

Tired and disheveled at his desk in the Jefferson Hotel, Charlie summoned the last of his energy to present his evidence in a coherent manner, if only to himself. Nothing but the facts, as entered in the document staring back at him from his laptop.

He refused to think about Alfie Terrell, at least for the moment, but he couldn’t resist following the story online. It had been touch-and-go for Charlie at the start. I’m a fool, he’d thought as he watched Eli speak in Charlottesville. I’m no better than the idiots on Reddit who thought they were sleuths and flooded the FBI with false leads after the Boston marathon bombing. I’m worse, because I believed in destiny.

Alfie Terrell’s identity leaked later that afternoon, and as Charlie learned more about him, his heart leaped and his spirit was restored. Any idiot could see this man wasn’t the Elephant Hunter. Along with everyone else, Charlie read his gibberish letters and Facebook posts and knew right away that he didn’t possess the same gifts. The rest of the information—his physical condition, especially—just confirmed it. He almost felt insulted on behalf of the real killer.

Four different late night hosts on four different networks got cheap laughs with an identical joke about how the Elephant Hunter turned out to be an actual elephant, and Charlie couldn’t resist texting Eli that night. “Not your man. Read Facebook posts. Not remotely similar.” Eli hadn’t responded.

And then, today at noon, Charlie watched as some FBI hack named Willett stood up in front of the press and informed the world that Alfie Terrell had been released. He looked like he’d just eaten a wheelbarrow full of crow, and Charlie silently congratulated Eli on avoiding that unpleasant duty.

There was a silver lining to the stress, too—the fact that they’d arrested a man from Virginia showed that Eli had been telling the truth, and that Charlie was looking in the right place.

The relief he felt was enormous, but now, he had to focus on catching the killer before he struck again. He turned his attention back to the laptop—to the document that represented four days of intensive research.

*

It was time to confront his secret theory. He was dreading this moment. His fingers typed, and he forced himself to look at the result on the laptop screen:

The Elephant Hunter is murdering political figures who have attempted to pass discriminatory legislation against the transgender community.

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Even couched in formal language, he hated how it sounded—outlandish, conspiratorial, unlikely. But the evidence compelled him.

Charlie knew the basics about what it meant to be transgender: When someone’s gender identity is different from his or her sex assigned at birth, that person is transgender. Some people transition medically, some don’t, and as he researched, he began to understand how little he really knew about a group that comprised nearly one percent of the U.S. population. But he had no real opinion on the topic—the concept had never entered his world, so he had never spared a thought for it.

He vowed to remedy his ignorance, but for now he turned to the three dead politicians. William Bostick first. Charlie scanned his notes, mouthing the words to himself like a child just learning to read:

February 2017. Bostick introduces House Bill 2790, titled “An ACT prohibiting Medicaid from paying for sex reassignment drug or hormone therapy or surgery.” Analysis section reads, “this bill provides that sex reassignment drug or hormone therapy or surgery shall not be covered under the state Medicaid plan.”

Almost simultaneously, he submits House Bill 2792: “This bill prohibits gender reassignment surgery on persons under the age of 18 years.”

Language not ambiguous. “Citizens living under the poverty level have greater medical needs than elective cosmetic surgery…the state of Georgia should prioritize critical care costs over elective cosmetic surgeries for this population.”

And: “neither drug or hormone therapy, nor surgery are able to impart the reproductive function of the objective sex, resulting in permanent sterility, possibly violating the Hippocratic oath.”

Both bills sent to Health & Human Services committee, both read twice, both promptly sent to wherever it is that bills go to die.

In the meager coverage he’d found, Charlie concluded that even most Republicans on Bostick’s committee wanted no piece of the bill. The media didn’t notice beyond two sentences in a dull Atlanta Journal-Constitution legislative round-up and a poorly written Tumblr post with no comments. It had a very short, very unremarkable life.

Next was Alonso Clements, and where Bostick’s foray into transgender issues died with a whimper, Clements would not go quietly. Charlie reviewed:

Governors in South Carolina can’t write own legislation, but open secret that Clements uses GOP rep Clive Blasingame as stalking horse. When Clements

139 wants something passed, Blasingame on scene submitting bill that says exactly what Clements wants it to say.

Late 2016: Clements takes page from North Carolina’s infamous HB2, so-called “bathroom bill,” has Blasingame write up the “Physical Privacy Act.”

The “PPA” first ensures that bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings, schools, and highway rest stops have no unisex bathrooms—only separate male and female facilities allowed.

The good stuff: “An individual shall not enter a restroom, changing facility, or private area located in such a building unless said individual is a member of the sex, as shown on the individual’s original birth certificate, designated to use such facility.”

On this fiasco, there was more literature, and Charlie had spent hours reading everything from bland newspaper accounts to activist websites to hack conservative blogs clearly funded by an outside party. Nevertheless, this bill also fizzled before it could reach much more than a local audience:

SC House saw what had happened in NC w/ HB2, where businesses & public orgs boycotted state—most noticeably the NCAA basketball tournament, hurting them in wallets and heart—and cost governor his job.

Nobody knows why Clements following same path. Dark money? Controversy scares them, private businesses loathed idea.

Bill referred to Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs Committee, where instead of merely letting it die, they allow full hour of testimony and hold semi-anonymous “voice vote” to kill it themselves.

Clements furious. Calls fellow Republicans “disgusting,” won’t let it drop for weeks.

That brought Charlie to Ted Harwood. Harwood was the earliest of them all, and Charlie silently thanked the eccentric Dr. Shour for the clue that illuminated Harwood’s House career. As it turned out, Harwood had been a pioneer in anti- transgender legislation—sort of:

Years before HB2 passes (with his support), Harwood attacks concept of transgender marriage.

2010: Solo authors HB45, “an act to amend North Carolina code annotated, Title 94, Chapter 6, relative to defining certain terms used in vital and historical records.”

140 Uses alleged concern for historical accuracy to issue following edict: “The term “husband” and “wife” in all governmental records and public filings shall be defined and designated as a natural-born male or female as defined by the person’s original certificate of birth.”

Same-sex marriage already illegal at time, so bill goes further to outlaw marriage for couples where either husband or wife transgender. Unlike Bostick and Clements, Harwood’s measure passes House. Dies in Senate. Very little (no?) news coverage.

Three for three. Charlie exhaled. When he considered the symmetry of what he believed the killer had done, he couldn’t help but feel impressed.

It worked like this—there were a few main categories of anti-transgender legislation in America. And with his victims, the Elephant Hunter had taken down one figure for each category. That couldn’t be an accident. Could it?

Charlie scrolled to the fifth page of the document, where he’d made a bulleted list of the categories:

*Anti-transgender marriage (Harwood)

*Legislation attempting to deny or limit access to medical care (Bostick)

*So-called “bathroom bills,” taking fight to sex-segregated spaces in government buildings and schools. (Clements)

There was more—in his all-night research session, he began to grasp the true, massive scope of the anti-transgender political campaign in America. Republicans wanted to legislate these people into misery, and they had never been so prolific.

Though the bills from all categories were broadly similar, Charlie found that they came with various special quirks—some made it mandatory for schools to inform parents if their children identified with a gender “different than their biological sex,” some tried to deprive children covered by state healthcare of necessary counseling, and some made it a form of child abuse to provide any transgender medical care to a minor.

Across the categories, children were a primary target. Charlie remembered the Elephant Hunter’s letters, and the minor theme of crimes against the innocent that appeared in each.

It didn’t end there. Other bills played semantics by trying to prohibit any citizen from changing his or her sex designation on their birth certificate. Some would require parental permission before any teacher even spoke about gender identity. Many states wrote laws preventing cities and towns from enacting local anti-

141 discrimination ordinances that went against the conservative state government. In rare cases, anti-transgender policies made it to ballot initiatives, where the authors would try to scare the public with stories of fake transgender predators sneaking in on their daughters in public toilets—a scenario that, in America’s long history, had never actually happened.

That brought him to a fourth category. Charlie’s eyes wander to the final bullet, and read the bold words he had typed that morning:

*Plain Old Discrimination.

That’s where Dean Rasch came in.

*

While studying discrimination cases, Charlie repeatedly came across two pieces of legislation. The first was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of “sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.”

The CRA doesn’t include explicit language about gender identity or sexual orientation, and that omission has sparked a longstanding debate between the left and right as to whether it should apply to gay and transgender people. In 2014, the Democratic attorney general wrote a memo saying yes, they were protected. In 2017, that memo was rescinded by the new Republican attorney general.

Then there was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was new to Charlie. It passed Congress with bipartisan support in 1993 in response to two American Indians being fired from their jobs for using peyote in traditional ceremonies. The law stated that even neutral rules and regulations can burden a religion, and Congress came down on the side of the smokers—simply put, you can’t fire a man for using peyote if it’s part of his faith.

But for all its good intentions, the RFRA had been perverted by conservative activists who saw it as an opportunity, and a weapon.

The scam quickly became clear to Charlie: Republicans used the combination of the two acts to pass discriminatory legislation against the gay community. Since gay or transgender people aren’t specifically protected in the Civil Rights Act, and because the RFRA bolstered freedom of religion, why couldn’t someone discriminate against those groups on the basis of their own religion?

This new kind of bill spread across the country in a coordinated ripple effect. Republicans targeted workers in both the public and private sector, and they went after everything—hiring practices, workplace policy, and the right of a private company to refuse service based on these “religious convictions.” (If you’re a

142 Christian baker in Colorado, the new logic went, you can use God as a justification for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.)

It took some digging, but the trail led—slowly but surely—to Dean Rasch. The man was concerned with much more than killing environmental regulations and burying the truth about global warming. You’d never know it if you only read the Elephant Hunter’s letter, but Rasch cared about what people did in private too, and his vision of how to police their behavior was pure fascism.

Rasch had a deep interest in preserving the hierarchies of social power in America, and to him, anyone who identified as gay or transgender belonged on the bottom.

*

Charlie’s breakthrough came at 4 a.m. that morning when he stumbled across the watchdog website Center for Media and Democracy. There, he learned that in the mid-2000s, Rasch began donating money to several anti-LGBT foundations, and he even started one of his own with a $3 million investment: Women For American Values.

WFAV was another group with a confusing name and a nebulous website full of meaningless platitudes, but their only real goal was writing and promoting anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation—to be used free of charge by any state or federal politician who wanted to take Dean Rasch’s money.

There were always takers. But they were dealt a major blow in 2015 when a relatively conservative Supreme Court shocked the country by guaranteeing same- sex couples the right to marry. That, plus the increasing acceptance of gay people in the broader culture, made anti-gay legislation a losing horse even in very conservative parts of the country.

As such, some Republicans began to flock to the next battleground. Slowly, at first, and then with breathless speed, Rasch and WFAV turned the full light of their attention to the transgender community. A series of bills appeared as if out of nowhere in state legislatures, often introduced by multiple far-right representatives or senators. The language in the text, from state to state, was nearly identical.

Charlie found dozens of examples, and each contained the same word-for-word passage:

The state may not take any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially, on the basis that the person believes, speaks, or acts in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction that:

143 The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.

In other words: If my religion tells me to discriminate against transgender people, you can’t discriminate against me.

*

Charlie was relieved to find that these bills were enormously unpopular even in heavily Republican states. Some cultural battles were winners—abortion, to name the golden goose—and some were losers. This was a definite loser. Despite the money behind the bills, they had an almost 100 percent failure rate.

In the rare occasions when an anti-trans law passed, as in North Carolina’s HB2 bathroom bill, the economic fallout was so severe that it had a chilling effect on other state legislatures.

That led to relative apathy from the media—it was easy for them, and therefore most citizens, to ignore the smaller, unsuccessful discrimination efforts. That’s why the common thread between Bostick, Clements, Harwood, and Rasch had gone unnoticed, at least publicly. The failure of their efforts explained it all. Why would a doomed political campaign, backed by an ideology that was losing support every day, inspire a serial killer like the Elephant Hunter?

How could it, when nobody was really paying attention?

But Charlie had started to believe, with an intense conviction that grew by the hour, that one man had been paying very close attention for a very long time—especially to the failures.

It made sense, he thought: If you wanted to exact revenge but also escape notice and scatter the authorities in fifty wrong directions, this is exactly how you’d do it. You’d target the people you hated, but not the ones with the highest profile. Instead, the Elephant Hunter chose his victims carefully. It took days of research for Charlie to make the connection, and that’s only because he was looking for it.

In moments when the idea seemed too conspiratorial, Charlie remembered that the killer hadn’t mentioned transgender discrimination or gay rights even once in all his letters. Maybe that didn’t look so strange in passing, until you realized that he managed to cover every other issue under the sun. His avoidance of this one specific issue solidified Charlie’s conviction. Despite the misdirection, he now believed that Harwood, Clements, Bostick and Rasch died not for their sins, but for one sin only: transphobia.

And while the wider world ignored their efforts, one man noticed.

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PART FIVE: HUNTING THE HUNTER

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.” —Vincent Van Gogh

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