Only the Hunted Run by Neely Tucker Page B

You’re getting ahead, though.”
    She gave him the full-on I’ve-about-had-it-with-your-skinny-white-ass look.
    â€œLook, it’s your interview,” he said.
    She sat back in her chair, listening.
    â€œWhat he said, what he asked, was about my mother,” Sully said, and as he spoke, his words came more slowly, more absently, as if he were forgetting the people in the room, that he was talking to anybody at all, save himself.
    â€œHe wanted to know, he asked, not so much about the method of how she was killed and what the scene was like, and where I was when I heard. That’s usually what people ask about, you know. Details. Gunshots. People running. Like the last five minutes of their lives was all that mattered. People, they’re interested in murder. They are. Grief? No. Youwant to talk about a killing, you’n do that on television. Grief, the long arc of it, you have to pay somebody to listen. Shrinks. Doctors. Counselors. He, what he asked, was about me, and what it was like living with that all these years. Growing up with it. He wanted to know how that ate at me. He wanted to know, if I had the chance, if I would kill her killer. If that would make me a bad person if I did.”
    The room had gone silent, everyone staring. He looked up.
    â€œIt’s my two cents that you have to have that experience to be interested in that, those, questions. Our boy’s mom died hard.”
    â€œYou say that,” Chin Man said, “like you feel sorry for him.”
    Sully looked at the agents. “I don’t know I’d say ‘feel sorry.’ I’d say, talking to him, seeing him yesterday, he’s a sick man. I’d say he’s been corroding for a long time, bones wasted down to rust. You want to say that’s feeling sorry, go ahead.”
    â€œHe hurt a lot of innocent people yesterday,” Chin Man said. “Killed several. That’s the only reason we’re here, the only reason anybody gives a damn about this guy.”
    â€œThat’s the problem with victims and perps,” Sully said. “Line’s so thin. Stop the clock yesterday morning, he’s a sad story. By nightfall, he’s a monster. I don’t buy he made the transition in the afternoon. Grief is a patient bastard. It’ll take its time, twist you into something you never were.”
    Gill put both elbows on the table, leaning in now. “So. The point. Did he blame Representative Edmonds for his mother’s death?”
    â€œNot exactly. Waters, he said he had to get
the
attention and get
his
attention. My emphasis, not his.”
    â€œDid he elaborate?”
    â€œNo. I didn’t get it either. By ‘his’ I thought he meant Edmonds’s, but there wasn’t a lot of time for follow-up. He was scattered, he stuttered, he kept thinking somebody was going to trace the call. The whole thing was, what, three, five minutes.”
    â€œDid he seem in possession of his senses?”
    â€œI would say so. Scared. But I mean, look, he had the presence of mind to pick up Edmonds’s cell phone, either from his body or from his office, and use that to call 911, right? He saw my story, in the paper or online, looked up my name, then, I guess, called the paper’s switchboard, got transferred to my line, got my cell from the message on the machine, and called me, again from Edmonds’s phone.”
    Gill nodded, looking down the row of seats at their recorder.
    â€œAnd then, then he quoted a poem?”
    â€œUsed a line. I wouldn’t say quoted. He was talking about the killing—Edmonds—and he said that after he stabbed him, Edmonds ‘lay there like a patient etherized upon a table.’ He stopped, and then said, sort of to himself, ‘as the evening was spread out against the sky.’ It seemed like it just occurred to him. It wasn’t a grand statement. Then he went back to the killing, and how he thought he saw