“What, son?”
“I dunno, Dad, I guess I’m not that used to people dying around me, like you are.”
I sighed, said, “I’m sorry it happened. You knew the guard?”
“Carter. Everyone knew him. Carter was a good guy.”
“That makes it worse,” I said sympathetically, and despite my concern, or maybe because of it, tried to change the subject. “How’d the calculus test go?”
“It was physics, and it went fine,” he said, distracted now. “Listen, I gotta go. Dinnertime.”
“Looking forward to seeing you next week.”
“I am, too, Dad,” he said, and hung up.
I drove the rest of the way home in silence, feeling my skin prickle with worry, wondering why in God’s name someone would want to bash in the head of a security guard at my son’s school.
And what the hell did “Hey, D-top” mean?
Chapter
47
The following day, a Wednesday, I was drinking coffee and scanning the newspapers when Sampson tossed an envelope on the desk that looked like a lunatic had written it.
Postmarked the day before, addressed to me, no return address, and the fonts on the envelope were random, the letters multicolored. The same was true of the letter inside, which made the words hard to decipher at first sweeping glance. The margins were covered in strange and troubling cartoonish doodles.
One lurid caricature appeared to depict me holding a magnifying glass to my eye like Sherlock Holmes, and possessing an enormous penis on which birds were perched. Feeling rightfully disturbed by that, I was about to toss the letter and chalk it up to being in the public view from time to time and therefore a target of ridicule by the mentally ill. But there was something about it. Forcing myself to deal with the strange font sizes, styles, and colors, I read the letter.
Dear Dr. Bungler Cross,
You have no clue, no vision, and you are barking up the wrong tree.
In my considered opinion, the killings at the Superior Spa had nothing to do with Mad Man Francones. He just happened to be a sex addict who got in the way. The media jumped all over it because of his celebrity. So you, a man of little imagination, jumped all over it because of Francones’s celebrity.
Dog wanna bone?
If you’d done your homework, you’d have discovered that there have been other incidents like the killings at the Superior Spa. Look in Tampa, two years ago. Look in Albuquerque, four years ago. It will penetrate your thick skull eventually, and you’ll see what you’ve really got on your hands.
No regards,
Thierry Mulch
I read it twice more, seeing things like that phrase: “In my considered opinion…” That’s the kind of language an expert testifying at a murder trial might use in response to an attorney’s question. So Mr. Mulch was smart, well educated, and—if the stuff about similar mass killings proved true—an amateur sleuth who knew what he was doing.
But why the crazy typefaces? Why draw me like that?
Was Mulch the killer? I’d had serial murderers taunt me over the years, but in those cases the killer was up-front, making it a game of him against me. In this case, however, Mr. Mulch was calling me an idiot from the sidelines.
Or was he? There was clearly something way off about the guy, as if he had a chip on his shoulder, calling me Bungler and talking about my thick skull. And the penis?
Who are you, Mr. Mulch?
Turning to my computer, I ran the name Thierry Mulch through Google. I got fifteen hits.
The first lived in Santa Clara, California, and appeared to be some kind of social media entrepreneur. Another Thierry Mulch was a regional sales manager for Kirby vacuums based in Nebraska. A third was involved in the feed, seed, and fertilizer business in southern Kentucky. The closest any of them got to Washington, DC, was Thierry Mulch of Covington, West Virginia, but according to a brief obituary in the local paper, he’d died in a car crash sixteen years ago at the age of eighteen.
The others were spread from Maine to Arizona, a cross-section of men who did not stand out and scream “smart crazy bastard” in any way whatsoever. I ran the name through Facebook an