AND HE RESUMED HIS RESEARCHinto possible targets, eventually picking out a girl named Cynthia Cootes, daughter of Franklin Cootes, the junior senator from New Hampshire. Unlike the Coil situation, Cynthia Cootes hadn’t moved with her father to live in Washington. Her father, in fact, lived part-time on a boatin a Washington marina, while his wife and daughter remained at home.
Her photo on the 1919 site had been taken at the National Book Festival, where her father spoke about a book he’d written on offshore sailing. A feature story first in theHampton Union, and later apparently stolen (or closely replicated purely by coincidence) by theWashington Post, reported he annually sailed with his daughter from New Hampshire, around to the Chesapeake and up to Washington. Cynthia Cootes was shown standing on a stage with her father, holding the book.
He couldn’t find a reference to her school, but he did find her home address, and when he looked it up on Google Maps, he found that it was on a semirural road outside Hampton. The bad part was that the road didn’t have any immediate exit; the good part was, it was heavily wooded. He could work with it.
—
THE TRIP WOULD REQUIREsome travel. Dunn didn’t want to fly, because that would mean declaring the gun. He checked, and found that Hampton was an eight-hour drive: manageable on a three-day weekend, even allowing time for scouting.
If he waited ’til the following weekend, he might lose some momentum, but the news stations were still hot on the story of the first shooting, so he shouldn’t lose much.
A pleasurable stress soaked down into his shoulders. He’d already had an effect on the way the nation worked.
One more shot, and the founders of 1919 could go to work, if they hadn’t already. He wished he could meet them; he doubted that he ever would.
—
HE CLICKED ON THE TELEVISIONwithout thinking about it, almost as a reflex, since the remote was right there by his hand. He looked through the scope at a typically goofy family in a pizza ad, the whole bunch of them stuffing their faces with “Chicago-style” pizza of about ten thousand calories per serving; all the eager eaters were improbably thin.
The pizza eaters disappeared and a talking head said, “We have more breaking news on the Audrey Coil story. Coil has admitted that she invented the right-wing 1919 website as a way to get herself on television—”
Dunn blurted, “Wait!”
—
THE STORY STUNNED HIM IN WAYSthat the collision with the deer hadn’t. He clicked through three different stations catching bits and pieces of the story and then ran into his office and went out on the ’net and got the whole thing. Reading story after story, he sat frozen at the computer.
Couldn’t be true.
One reporter even suggested that Audrey Coil, obviously good at media manipulation, might be doing it again. But nobody believed that. Coil hadn’t just confessed, she’d been caught. The FBI was leaking details...
And he saw a press conference with the FBI agent in charge, a brisk young woman with a shoulder holster. A reporter asked her if the FBI had found the gun used to shoot James Wagner, the victim of the Stillwater School murder. She demurred, a firmcut to her mouth, and threw out some bureaucratic talk about making significant progress.
The same reporter asked about a double murder in Virginia, and again, the demurral, that said nothing butYes, we have it all...
Dunn went to bed at one o’clock in the morning, long past his usual bedtime. He didn’t sleep—he thought he didn’t sleep—but he did get a visit from Rachel Stokes.
—
SHE WAS DRESSEDas she was the night he killed her; she seemed to be alive, but there was a bullet hole in her forehead that gaped open like a third eye. He’d also shot her in the jaw, but that didn’t keep her from talking, although the bottom half of her chin and her throat were seeping blood, the same coppery smell left by the two deer.
“You killed me for nothing,” she said. “I had a good life, I was a good woman, and you killed me for nothing because you are a fool.”
“I’m not a fool,” he said, the dread gripping his heart and squeezing.
“You’re a fool and you always were a fool. I thought I might like you and you shot me and you shot me again and you killed my brother, for nothing, for a miserable little tramp who wanted to be on TV. There was never any plan, there was never any 1919, it was all about a teenager trying to get on television.”
“I’m dreaming.”
“You’re not dreaming. You’re living this. You’re wide awake,Elias. I came back with a message for you. You’re bound for hell, Elias.”
“I don’t believe in that shit,” Dunn shouted. “Go away, go away.”
“You say you don’t believe in it, but you do, Elias. You felt that hell-bound prickle when you sat in the graveyard, shooting that little boy. You felt that prickle in your arm hairs, that cemetery tickle/prickle. The one that tells you thereisa hell, and that you will burn there, all for being a fool...”
He may have been dreaming and he may have been hallucinating; at five o’clock in the morning he put his feet on the bedroom floor, rubbed his head, and when he leaned back, and put one hand on the sheets, he found it soaked with sweat, but smelling of blood. He staggered away from the bed, into the bathroom, where he stared at himself in the mirror. His face seemed narrower than it usually did, drawn, white as paper; dry, not sweaty. He felt weak, as though he might have sweated out every drop of fluid in his body.
He went down the stairs, got a bottle of berry-flavored vitamin water from the refrigerator, gulped it down, some of it slopping down onto his T-shirt. Turned on the television, searched the news channels, but nobody was talking about Audrey Coil at five o’clock on a Sunday morning.
