The Red Hunter

Something weird happened then, a kind of hard flash on the moment when I drove the hunting knife into John Didion’s heart. You have to be strong, purposeful to drive a knife blade through the powerful intercostal muscles of the chest. That blade was razor sharp, though—it slid right in, and he had no strength to resist me. It was easy. Didion released a soft wheeze, then slumped against me as if we were intimates. His weight, suddenly a ton, pulled us both to our knees. I pressed that knife in deeper. I felt the life leave him, a drain, a passing, something held then released. Then a strange total silence surrounded us, driving away all the noise from outside. I’d hoped for a blast of rage, or a deep surge of joy that vengeance had been delivered. Anything. Anything but the deep nothingness that followed, the yawning hollow inside me. I sat with Didion awhile, watching his blood spill, thinking of the black pool that my mother had lain in. I waited to feel something. Even remorse. Nothing. What does that make me?

“You look horrible,” Seth said. He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and inspected me. “Are you sick?”

Maybe. Yeah. Maybe I am. I caught something that night, and it’s been wasting me slowly ever since, eating me from within.

“I thought you might come,” he said when I didn’t say anything.

He stepped aside, and I walked into the foyer, then followed him up a narrow flight of stairs into a large loft space. The kind of space he had—cavernous with exposed pipes and vents, wood floors—would have cost a fortune in the city. He probably paid less than a grand a month. Tall windows looked out over the other surrounding buildings, to a parking lot, to the woods beyond.

I followed him through the room. There were several desks, all the monitors dark. Each workstation had some personal items—photos of people, kids, pets, a mug that read World’s Best Dad, a compact, and lipstick.

“Expanding?” I asked.

We walked through a doorway to his living quarters. A galley kitchen, a tossed bed, a plain gray couch, and an enormous television mounted on the wall. The set was tuned in to CNN, with the sound down. President Obama looked characteristically grim, graying, issued a condemnation of ISIS.

“I hired a couple of people part-time,” he said. “They have their own gigs, too, pay me a percentage for office space.”

“I wouldn’t have thought there would be so many mysteries in a small town.”

He snorted.

“There are as many mysteries as there are people,” he said. “Life is one big unanswered question.”

I nodded, my eyes falling on some pictures on his round kitchen table. A woman, youngish, plain with glasses and some acne scarring, mousy hair. There was a professional portrait where she smiled stiffly, one with a friend, one where she sat awkwardly atop a horse.

“Take Mariah Penny for instance,” he said, when he saw me sifting through the photos. “Missing forty-eight days.”

“I didn’t hear about it.”

“Twenty-eight years old, CPA, unmarried, lived alone, caregiver for her aging parents. She left the firm where she worked one night and didn’t come home. Somewhere between her office and her nice condo, she and her Mercedes C-Class fell into the vortex.”

“Drugs?” I offered. “Depression? Caregiving is hard.”

“She is a straight arrow,” he said. “A good girl. Cheerful, friendly, helpful by all accounts. No debts. No boyfriends. No secrets.”

I sat, continued sifting through his notes and photos. “Maybe she just got sick of it all. Took off.”

“No withdrawals or credit card usage since she went missing. Phone off the grid.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“But you didn’t come to talk about that.”

“No. This is the endgame,” I said. “Rhett Beckham is out of jail and back in town.”

He rubbed at the stubble on his jaw, sat heavily on a stool over by the counter. “Living with the brother.”

“I’m not interested in the brother,” I said.

Josh Beckham tried to help me. He was a kid like me that night. It was Didion, Rhett Beckham, and the fourth man that I needed. One down, two to go. Closure.

I reached into my pocket and felt for the key. It was smooth and cold beneath my fingertips.

“What about the fourth man?” I asked. “Any progress?”

Something—quicksilver—flashed across his face. Sadness. Fear.

“What is it?” I asked. He moved from the stool and sat across from me at the table. He folded up the file, Mariah’s bespectacled visage disappearing from view.

Seth had long claimed that there was someone waiting in the car that night. He saw the shadow of a figure. I never saw him. Boz wondered if maybe in his state of shock, Seth had been mistaken. But Seth was certain, and I believed him. We’d spent a lot of time talking about him, the fourth man. Who waits in the car? The boss? Maybe Whitey Malone himself, not wanting to get his hands dirty but not trusting his thugs not to run off with the money.

The police questioned Seth vigorously. Had he lured me from the house on purpose? Had someone asked him to do it? Paid him to do it? No, he swore. There was no evidence to the contrary. What did the fourth man look like? He was big. A bulky shadow, wider than the seat he was in. And he smoked. Seth saw the plumes drift up from the open window, the glowing orange tip. But that was it.

Seth and I always stayed in touch. I wouldn’t say we were friends, like Boz and I weren’t friends. We just shared the same obsession. It bonded us. It has only been the last few months that we’ve actively been working together, though.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “Something I’ve been working on. Kind of a fluke, really.”

He got up and spun around one of the case boards. He flipped on a lamp sitting atop one of the desks and shined it like a spotlight on the clutter that hung there. There were maybe half a dozen photographs pinned, ordered by date, starting about a year earlier, each captioned with a note in Seth’s tight, tidy handwriting, addresses, some news articles.

October 3, 2016, Riverside and Ninety-Sixth Street. A slim hooded figure stopped mugging in progress, injuring the perpetrator with a low kick that fractured his shin.

Hanging above these notes, a grainy image showed a man on the ground, gripping his leg, his face a mask of pain, a woman standing stunned, cell phone in hand. In the background, said slim, hooded figure strode away.

There were others.

East Village, November 12, 2016. A little boy pulled from the subway tracks where he’d fallen, apparently pushed by his mother’s boyfriend.

The hooded figure is caught mid-leap from the platform, the light from on the oncoming train a moon in the distance.

Harlem, December 1, 2016. A homeless man is saved from a group of marauding teens. Hooded figure delivers a blow to the bridge of the biggest boy’s nose with the heel of her hand. Boy tells cops: It was a girl!

Eyes everywhere. Sloppy. On those endless romps I take through the city, every now and then I come across a situation that demands involvement. There were other incidents, too; they just happened not to be caught on film.

“What’s all this?” I asked, leaning in closer to pretend to take a closer look.

Seth flipped over our case board, the one we’d been working on, compiling all the events related to my parents’ murder, beginning with the drug dealer robbery, our list of suspects, speculations about the fourth man—Whitey himself? Hired man? Dirty cop?—to the whereabouts of each of them. Seth had added a new element, a new story about Didion’s death. And that grainy image captured by the camera across the street.

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