The appearance of the letter fogged up his brain for a minute or so, until he realized what had happened. One of the original recipients of his letter hadn’t known where it had come from, but he had thought that Dunn might be somebody to send it to. Anonymously. Dunn didn’t know which man had passed it back, but he assumed that man might also have passed it to more people.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to shoot again.
Maybe somebody else would do it. If enough people saw that letter. He walked around with the letter in his hand, and thenwent to the bathroom, burned it, dropped the ashes in the toilet and flushed them. He sat at the kitchen table, looking out at the tree line along the backyard, and thought about it: and was surprised by the feeling of disappointment.
Somebody else was going to be important?
Wasn’t that a good thing? Setting himself up with alibis while the dirty work was done by someone else? Nobody would ever discover that he was the instigator of the whole thing.
His butt was bothering him and he got the idea that he had to keep moving it. He checked the wound, making sure it was thoroughly moisturized and heavily padded and taped, then went out in the backyard and walked around.
The next-door neighbor waved and Dunn lifted a hand. The next-door neighbor was a golfer and a fan of every major sport he could think of, even including soccer. That’s all he thought about: the guy knew so many sports numbers for so many teams that even Dunn was impressed. Would that guy, the sports guy, ever think that the man standing in the next yard was planning to kill the children of U.S. senators? Dunn smiled to himself: the idea was ridiculous.
And the spark of secret power bit him again, the feeling of importance.
As Dunn had methodically built his political stance, he’d read everything he could find about the rise of fascism in Europe, South America, and Japan. Though he despised the stupidities of Hitler and his cronies, how they’d corrupted a political ideal with their moral depravities, he’d nevertheless read the standard works on Nazism, Italian and Spanish fascism, and World War II. As he walked in the backyard, pretending to inspect the turf,he recalled a historian’s theory that Good Germans had been able to kill men, women, and even small children by dehumanizing them.
That, he thought, was why he was so stricken by his murder of the Stokeses: he’d actuallyhumanizedthem. He’d enjoyed Rachel’s company the night before the murders, had felt an attraction to her. Thought she might be attracted tohim. Was that an error that could be corrected?
Yes, it was, he thought.
He could not allow himself to focus on his targets as humans. He not only had to harden his heart, he had to re-think his whole approach to his... symbols. They were meat, of no particular value. Ciphers. They simply weren’t important when they were walking around, but they’d be important in death. Not human. Not human. Not human.
—
THAT NIGHT, he got his laptop and went out to a laundromat—another security move—that was open until eleven o’clock and had free Wi-Fi. He signed on and began researching the children identified on the 1919 site.
—
All but one of the children, it seemed, went to private schools. The exception was a tenth-grader at a high school the size of a small city. Nothing he could find gave him a home address for her. Dunn crossed her off his list of possibles—how would you ever find her?
After an hour of research, one kid seemed to stand out. Theson of Senator Ross McGovern of Arkansas, Thomas McGovern was a fifth-grader at the Stillwater School, a day school in Tysons Corner.
The school wasn’t large—fewer than four hundred children—and was built on a former par-three golf course that had gone broke during the ’09 crash. Though it had extensive grounds, it was surrounded by a thoroughly urban landscape, including a hospital with a parking structure that according to Google Earth was one hundred and sixty yards from the back wall of the school. The parking structure overlooked the playing fields—a baseball or softball diamond, two basketball courts, two tennis courts, a soccer field, a track.
The boy, Dunn thought, should be out on those fields a couple of times a day, at least until it got cold.
But a hundred and sixty yards was a fairly long shot. And he wasn’t sure how much of the playing field you could see from the parking ramp—there was a line of trees along the school fence, and while he thought the parking structure was high enough to look over them, he wasn’t sure. He needed to do some scouting and he needed to do some shooting.
By ten o’clock, the clothes he’d brought to the laundromat had been in the dryer for two hours. He retrieved and folded them, packed up his laptop, and headed home.
The next day, a Friday, he spent on the job, working until six o’clock, pushing the crew hard. After work, he drove to Tysons Corner, to look at the hospital parking structure. He hadn’t realized it from looking at the satellite photos, but the hospital was on a low rise looking down on the school’s playing field, which effectively boosted the height of the parking structure.
As he drove by, he saw one car entering, and one car leaving. Both stopped at parking gates, which would be a problem if he had to get out in a hurry. If he shot from the parking structure, the investigating cops would know the exact time when he pulled the trigger, from witness testimony. They would know soon enough that the shot came from the hospital, and would therefore know within a minute or so of when the car would be leaving the structure. And if there were cameras... and there probably were...
He couldn’t use his own car and even a rental would be dicey—renting a car involved showing a driver’s license and he suspected the rental agencies took secret videos of the renters, shot across the rental desk.
Dunn was a fan of military thriller fiction and movies, black ops stuff, and while the operators always seemed to know where to get a gun or a fake ID, or how to start a stolen car by rubbing a couple of wires together, Dunn didn’t know any of that.
It seemed simple enough in a movie: you’d go to a sleazy neighborhood where some vaguely Middle Eastern–looking guy would sell you everything you needed to go underground. He didn’t know any Middle Eastern–looking guys. He didn’t know enough about car electronics to steal one. Another problem—he didn’t know when the kid would appear on the playing fields. Could he sit in a car for an hour or two without attracting attention?
The parking structure was looking like a bad idea. He drove around the neighborhood, and four blocks behind the hospital found a possibility. An old cemetery, not more than a hundred yards long and fifty across, sat at the crest of a hill behind a neglected picket fence. The grass inside had been mown, but notrecently, and was ankle-high in most places, even higher in scattered clumps of sumac. There were a few large granite tombstones, but most of the stones were small flat arches of what looked like once-white limestone, tilted this way and that, many so weathered that the inscriptions were barely legible. A dozen mature trees were spotted across the cemetery, and there were clumps of saplings, self-seeded volunteers.
On the hospital side of the cemetery, the hillside fell away sharply toward the back of the hospital. A weed-choked track ran along the bottom of the slope, and on the other side of it were an electrical substation and a mechanical yard, probably related to the hospital, with what looked like backup generators and a couple of large tanks, possibly for diesel. The hospital parking ramp rose on the other side of that, probably two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards away.
Dunn parked on the street a block away from the cemetery, walked along the rough track between the cemetery and the electric substation, until he thought he was about at the middle of the graveyard, then climbed the embankment. The picket fence on the back side of the cemetery was more than neglected—it had crumbled and fallen in several places.
Once on top of the ridge, Dunn looked down at the school’s playing fields, which were clearly visible, but a long way out. How far? Four hundred and fifty yards? More? Even with his surveyor’s eye, he wasn’t sure.
