I hung up without saying good-bye. Why was he being so stubborn? He was so determined his profile was correct that he wouldn’t see any alternatives.
We were back at the Mercer house, and Detective Scott met us at the door. “Good, we were just about to look for you two, we figured you’d want to be here when we questioned the husband.”
Two? I looked at Potash and Diana, then down at myself before looking back at Scott. Typical.
“Hey, John,” he said, “can you do me a favor? We’re going to ask some rough question, it’s … not good a situation for a kid to be in.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“I mean the Mercer kid,” said Scott. “Can you take him into another room, keep him distracted?”
One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. “Of course,” I said. “Get rid of both kids at once, that’s a good plan.”
“We’ll fill you in on everything,” said Diana.
“Sure,” I said, no longer caring. If they cut me out of this investigation, I was free to start my own. I walked to the father, still holding his son. “Hey … buddy. Want to come with me for a minute? We’re going to watch…” What did kids watch these days? “Dora?”
“I want to watch PAW Patrol.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Let’s go, you can show me how to turn it on.”
His father seemed reluctant to let him go but saw Detective Scott and the others looming nearby and apparently realized what was going on. The boy climbed down off his lap and led me into the other room. He handed me a remote. “You turn it on with this.”
It looked like it had a thousand buttons, and I grimaced. “Thanks, kid.” The power button was easy enough to find, and I was surprised when it actually turned on the TV instead of killing a satellite connection or something. They had the same cable company I had in my apartment, so I was able to search through the channels and find the kid stuff pretty quickly. “Look, Sesame Street. I didn’t know they still showed that.”
“I want to watch PAW Patrol.”
“It’s not on right now, and I don’t know how your DVR works. Just … watch the puppets, I have to do something.” He sat down, relatively calm, and I pulled out my phone. Still no e-mails from The Hunter. I typed one to him:
You’re the one who wanted to talk. What do you want to say? I assume you’re not going to just tell me who you are, or how to find you. So what are we doing here?
Do you want me to kill someone for you? Is that what this is about? Because that’s not going to happen either. I don’t care if you’re a lion or a hunter or whatever the hell you think you are: I’m not like you.
I sent it, then thought a minute and wrote another one:
Why do you eat them? It’s not for food, because you don’t treat them like food. You don’t degrade them, either, like you’re punishing someone vicariously, and there doesn’t seem to be any emotion behind it, like you’re living out some kind of fantasy. You just take bites, and then give us the bodies.
And then you give us a letter, I thought. That’s the key. What do you do that you don’t have to do? You talk to us. That’s what this is all about.
The kid said something, and I looked up, but he was just talking to the TV. One of the puppets was talking back, in a weird kind of one-sided double conversation. I looked back at my phone and hit send on my message.
The Hunter was talking to us—somehow that’s what this was all about for him. Was he trying to scare us? Trujillo thought he was trying to taunt us, to show his superiority, and I’d been arguing that he was just trying to confuse us. What if there was something more? We kept trying to describe the killer in human terms—we talked about Withered powers here and there, like the ability to withstand a sedative, but we hadn’t talked about Withered motivations. Why would a Withered send us letters? What does he lack, that these letters are trying to make up for? A voice? Brooke had never said anything about a Withered without a voice. I’d have to ask Elijah.
I hadn’t logged out of the e-mail server like I usually did, so I was surprised when it beeped softly. The Hunter had sent me a message:
Tell your boss to check the police station courtesy account. She might want to get to it before the interns do.
We had a new letter. Obviously I couldn’t tell Ostler to check a specific e-mail account without exposing that I had an alternate line of communication … but who knew how long we’d have to wait before someone decided to check the police department courtesy account? If we got to it fast we could stay on his trail, we could find out where he’d sent the e-mail from and go there to look for clues. But I couldn’t give myself away. I had to be patient.
I watched the little boy and the puppets talking to each other without ever talking to anyone but themselves.