“I got started in high school,” said Nathan. “We were all kids.”
“More likely one of the victims,” said Trujillo. “How many people know about the one who started selling herself? That can’t be a big group of people.”
“I didn’t even know about her,” said Nathan. “I can’t exactly pull up a list of her friends and family.”
In The Hunter’s e-mail this morning, he’d asked me: “Is there anything you want me to leave out?” Is this what he was talking about? What was he going to say about me?
“Read the rest,” said Potash. It was the first time he’d spoken. “It’s no use jumping to conclusions until we have all the clues.”
Ostler nodded. “The next part’s about me.” She read in a clear voice:
“‘Linda Ostler is a war criminal.’” She paused, but I didn’t know if she was waiting for comments or just steeling her nerve to continue. “‘In 2002 she was assigned to a task force investigating the sale of weapons and explosives across the border from the US to Mexico. She used her position to sell hundreds of automatic rifles to a drug cartel, directly resulting in the deaths of six DEA agents and more than a hundred Mexican civilians.’”
She lowered the letter and looked at us. “Obviously I had my reasons,” she said. “And ‘war criminal’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”
“That was you?” asked Diana.
“I sold coke to some rich kids trying to get enough buzz to get their homework done,” said Nathan. “You sold guns to drug lords? And they’re mad because I ruined a few lives?”
“It was a plan that got out of hand,” said Ostler. “Nobody wanted to supply the cartels, we wanted to catch the smugglers in the middle. We made a hard call and it was the wrong one.”
“That’s an understatement,” said Diana. She looked around at the rest of us. “Has anybody killed more than a hundred civilians? Is that pretty much the high score for the group?”
Potash raised his hand, and Diana fell silent. The rest of us stared at him. “I’ll be very surprised if it’s in that letter, though,” he said simply.
I’d known he was a killer. I’d known he was the most dangerous one of us. Why did this still feel like a shock? Because he’d admitted it so casually?
Potash hacked a Withered to death with a machete. While dying of a lung disease. Who had I gotten myself entangled with?
Ostler shook her head. “Here’s the only line about Potash. It comes at the end, though, after the one about John—”
“Do them in order,” I said. “Let’s see if he has anything to say about me that the rest of you haven’t already guessed.”
Ostler cleared her throat: “‘I haven’t forgotten about you either, John. I’m sure your friends know about the man you electrocuted; that was in the papers. Do they know about the time you beat your elderly neighbor half to death, and then killed her husband? What about the time you soaked your mother in gas and burned her alive in a car?’”
“Bloody hell,” said Diana.
I said nothing, only stared at Ostler.
“No excuses?” asked Nathan. “No tearful explanations of how it all had to happen and there was nothing you could do to stop it?”
“I assume there’s more,” I said, still not looking at the others.
“How could there possibly be more?” Nathan cried.
“‘You think you’re not like me,’” Ostler read, “‘but you’re more like me than any of them. They hurt people because that’s the way the world works: they want something, so they take it, and hold no pity for the rabble who get in their way. Thus it has always been. You and I are different. We hurt people because we enjoy it. Because the pain and the death are ends unto themselves.
“‘The antelope may crash their horns and call themselves strong, but all of them fall before the lions.’”
I’m not like him, I told myself. Even if we do the exact same things for the exact same reasons, I’m not like him.
I just can’t explain why.
“In John’s defense,” said Ostler, “everyone he’s killed was a Withered.”
“Even your mother?” asked Trujillo.
“She wasn’t when I started,” I said, and turned to him without blinking. Even thinking about this made me want to scream in rage, but I’d be damned if I was going to let them see me lose control. I told the story in short, even tones. “Nobody possessed Brooke, so I was trying kill her. My mom showed up, Nobody left Brooke to attack her, and … she died.” I made a small rolling motion with my hand. “Yada yada yada.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” asked Diana, and somehow that was the comment that stung me worst of all.