"Let's start with you telling us about this meeting with Mr. Redman this morning, Mr. Mullins. And then we'll go from there," Canfield said and Nick swallowed any idea of holding out on them, though that had not been his intent when he came in. After all, he had agreed to work with them. He just hated the feeling of being bullied.
He took the reporter's notebook from his back pocket and flipped the page.
"Assuming everybody now knows Mike Redman, I got an e-mail from him that the timing signature said was sent at seven forty-five this morning. I didn't read it until two hours later when I checked my computer at the office. I already gave Detective Hargrave the information on the e-mail account that it was sent from," Nick began, hoping to first show that he had indeed tried to keep them in the loop, sort of.
"The tech guys that do computer crime and Internet porn investigations are running down the commiekid account," Hargrave said. "Looks like some student type, on the surface. They're going to get an address and we'll go from there."
Nick couldn't tell by his tone whether Hargrave was defending him or just making a verbal report to Canfield. The detective wouldn't meet his eyes, so he went on.
"The message was signed 'm.r.' in lowercase letters and asked me to show up for a meet at ten, so I really didn't have a lot of time to, you know, alert anyone other than to just call the detective and tell him what I was planning to do, to meet with the guy."
He was dancing, but it was truthful dancing.
"Description?" Canfield said like he knew what Nick was doing and wasn't swallowing it.
"I'd say he looks just like he used to when you used to work with him only a little more worn," Nick said, putting it back on the former SWAT supervisor. "Clean-shaven. In pretty good shape. Tanned. Same blue-gray eyes. He was wearing some kind of uniform like a maintenance man, you know, blue work pants and a light blue short-sleeved shirt."
"Carrying anything you could notice?" Canfield said, slightly emphasizing the you as if Nick would not have the kind of powers of observation that a trained law enforcement officer would.
"He had a navy jacket draped over one arm, so he could have had something wrapped in it, but nothing as long as a McMillan M-86 or even a broken-down MP5," Nick said, using what little he did know to defend his ground. "He might have had an ankle holster, but I really couldn't tell."
"OK, OK, boys," Hargrave chimed in. "Enough of the pissing match."
Canfield looked down, even though he did officially outrank Hargrave. Nick took a deep breath and nodded in assent.
"What the hell did the guy say, Mullins?" Hargrave said.
Without realizing it, Nick was sitting on the front edge of the chair, like he was ready to pounce on something, or run. He sat back, took in another breath and flipped another page in his notebook.
"First of all, he never clearly said that he killed anyone," Nick began. "I mean, he was being real careful about the exact words, like he thought I might be wearing a wire or something."
Nick saw both Canfield and Hargrave raise their eyebrows at the suggestion.
"Oh, is that why you guys wanted to see me before I met with the guy? To wire me up?"
"Don't go Hollywood on us, Mullins. We don't wire anymore. We usually just put a microphone inside your cell phone. That gets most of them," Hargrave said with that grin in the corner of his mouth, his way of leaving a doubt in the veracity of every statement.
Canfield just made the motion of a wheel turning with his hand. "Go on."
Nick looked at the notebook. He was about to continue when he heard the door behind him open without a knock and all heads turned. Fitzgerald, who Nick now knew was working with the Secret Service, stepped in and said, "Excuse my lateness, gentlemen. I hope you haven't begun without me."
Canfield kept a straight face. "Just some preliminaries. Nothing pertinent," he said. "We were just going into Mr. Mullins's contact this morning with Redman."
The look on Fitzgerald's face said he didn't believe a word of it. He also never asked who Redman was, so Nick figured he'd already been briefed. "Go on, then," he said as if they needed his permission.
"Redman said he'd been in Iraq. I was going to check that out," Nick continued and then looked up with his eyebrows raised, a silent question.
"Yeah, he was," Canfield said. "It was while he was still on the job. They called up his reserve unit and he went over there as a specialist. He was working as a sniper with some other military group because of his skills, according to his reserve CO. But he's been back for over a year."
Nick turned his head and saw Fitzgerald take out a small notebook of his own. For some reason it pissed Nick off.
"Like I said, he was being very careful. I was trying to draw him out a little about the recent shootings and he said the victims brought it on themselves, like he'd convinced himself that they deserved to die. But he never said in any specific words that he shot them," Nick said.
"And you didn't ask him?" Fitzgerald said, using the same incredulous tone Canfield had used.
"It wasn't an interrogation," Nick snapped. "I'm not a cop. I talk to people, I don't grill them."
Hargrave jumped in to keep things from derailing again.
"Did he say anything about what's next, Nick? What his plans were?" Hargrave asked.
Nick smiled. Now Hargrave was on a first-name basis.
"He said he had a list that had to be cleaned out before he left," Nick said, reading from his notes. "He called me his spotter-'the architect of the list' are the words he used. Then he said I wasn't personally on the list but that he was going to do one more because I was owed."
The room went silent. It was a good fifteen seconds, a vacuum quiet enough to imagine the wheels turning in each man's head.
"Did he say anything about hating the war and the man who sent him there?" Fitzgerald said, his professional focus made obvious.
"He used the phrase 'War is Hell,' " Nick said.
"Christ!" the agent said.
"But he didn't say anything about the Secretary of State," Nick said, trying to cut him off. "Not a word."
Fitzgerald's mask of professional decorum cracked at the mention of the secretary. His lips went into a thin hard line and he stared at Nick and then at Canfield.
"But he called you his spotter. Which dovetails into the list, our list, of those convicts you've personally written about that are now dead," Hargrave jumped in. "So if he's working off a list he made up from your bylines, who else is there? Who else have you done a piece on who was a blatant asshole like these other guys who he figures deserves to die?"
Nick had been running the same question through his head. He couldn't remember every one of the victims he wrote about. He used to be able to recall their faces, before his own family took their places.
"I've done dozens of stories like that," he said. "I'd have to go through them all."
"So go through them all," Fitzgerald said.
"Hey, it's not like you just put my byline and the word asshole in the search field," Nick said, getting irritated by someone telling him what to do again.
"OK, Nick," Hargrave said. "Just do a search with your byline and the word killed or raped or abused, something you know would be in the real bad ones. We could start there."
"Start with the ones that have ranked politicians or their cabinet members in them," Fitzgerald said and all eyes turned to him and Nick let the order go this time. "The Secret Service is here for a reason, which you all now appear to know," he said, again cutting his eyes toward Canfield. "Intelligence has indicated a sniper on the wing in this country, gentlemen, and it's not a threat that we think is idle. We have credible reason to believe the gunman we're looking for is somewhere in Florida and with the political climate as it is, we're not turning away from any leads, no matter how thin. The fact that you have possibly identified a suspect who has a military background and was recently in Iraq raises that profile."