abrightboy | The Lengths That I Would Go To

Entry tags:

The Lengths That I Would Go To

The killer was moving around the country. Malcolm Bright could see the pattern, but he wasn't working for the FBI these days and they weren't exactly taking his calls. Short sighted of them, but they did fire him on suspicion of being crazy. The NYPD's jurisdiction was New York. With the killer beyond its borders, they handed it upwards and left it at that.

Let it go, Bright, had been Gil's sage advice. You can't catch every killer in America single-handedly.

Challenge accepted, some part of him retorted, though he'd only nodded mutely and forced a smile. Gil knew he hadn't simply let it go, but he wasn't going to have him followed to stop him doing anything stupid, either. He didn't have the will or the resources to keep tabs on Malcolm Bright 24/7 and Malcolm Bright knew it.

His mother, on the other hand, had extensive resources, so he simply didn't tell her he was leaving town. He did arrange for Ainsley to feed his bird, so the truth would come out eventually, but he'd be several states away by then.

He rode the bus. There was something oddly comforting about the anonymity of being in a crowd of strangers who had no interest in him whatsoever. He stared out the window and watched the country go by. When he stepped off the Greyhound in Lexington, Kentucky, he walked to a nearby hotel and checked in, then headed straight to the US Marshals office. There was no point in trying to talk to the FBI. If he was going to stop a killer from killing again, he needed someone in law enforcement to listen to him. The pattern suggested the next murder would happen in one of the rural communities around Lexington and it would be precipitated by a young woman's disappearance. He needed law enforcement with local knowledge, specifically.

He wandered into the Marshals' offices in a tidy three piece suit, charcoal grey with a burgundy tie perfectly knotted at his collar. He got a few suspicious sidelong glances but nobody asked if they could help him. He cleared his throat.

"Um, hello? I'm wondering if there's anyone here I can talk to about murder." He held up his hands. "Stopping murder, specifically, not... like... smalltalk."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

Malcolm sat up a little straighter as that thought caught him off-guard. It was a point of view he hadn't considered.

"...If he's proud of that connection.... he might," Malcolm admitted. He did have a parallel he could draw on: he'd defend Gil, the father figure that wasn't his actual father. He put his spoon down in his bowl. "He expressed an interest in seeing this mentor, too. He told his friend that he wanted to meet him, but didn't know how to manage it. Another possibility would be laying a trap, though I don't know how we'd create a scenario that made it not suspicious for him to have an easy opportunity to meet someone in maximum security confinement."

"If we can get something to pressure the mentor, we might be able to get him to reach out to Quarles, assuming Quarles hasn't reached out first by then. There's only one way to see the guy so if we control that - get the guards to keep us in the loop, an eye on the visit requests.."

Raylan bobbed his eyebrows with his head. Wasn't a bad idea, something to keep in their pockets, if they could find the guy in question.

"How many prisons check the ID they're given for validity or check the wanted lists?"

"That's a good question. I only..." His phone buzzed and he pulled it from his pocket, expecting it to maybe be Gil or Ainsley or Dani or his mother... the caller ID said Claremont Psychiatric. He took a deep breath, then got up from his stool at the counter.

"Excuse me," he told Raylan politely, then stepped away towards the bedroom, though it wasn't like there were walls to prevent his conversation from being overheard.

"What?" was all he said when he picked up the call. It didn't fit with Malcolm's typically polite demeanour and might give Raylan a clue. After a moment listening, he replied "I can't talk right now. I'm busy." Another pause. "No, I'm not on a date," he said with exasperation. "I'm working." A sigh. "I don't need your help. I've got it." Pause. "No." Pause. "I don't know." Pause. "I have to go." Pause. "I have to go." And he hung up, turning and walking back towards the kitchen. "Sorry about that," he told Raylan, sliding the phone back into his pocket. He got back on his stool and picked up his spoon to poke at his soup with one hand as he reached for a file with the other.

Raylan's eyes swept back over at Malcolm's deep breath, watching the lean man walk away and completely ear hustling from his position. He didn't know Malcolm that well, but that was the first time he'd heard Malcolm use that kind of tone.

"Something important?" he questioned innocently. "That sounded.. tense."

Malcolm huffed out a sound that was almost a laugh and he let go of his spoon to clench his right hand on the counter next to his bowl.

"Uh. It was my father." He pressed his lips together and then turned a wry smile on Raylan. "Speaking of raging narcissistic psychopaths." He flexed his hand and clenched it again. "He likes to check in. For some reason he's allowed to make phone calls." His tone suggested neither of these things pleased him to report.

Raylan had thought about what Malcolm had told him in Arlo's kitchen that month or two ago, perhaps little more often than he should have, and his eyebrows crept back down into a carefully constructed look as Malcolm clenched his fist again.

"There's nothing stopping you from not answering." He paused, just as carefully choosing his tone. "Why do you?"

He was no profiler, but he had a sense it came back to that core trauma. Malcolm couldn't let his father go, because he'd loved him. Loves him. Not Raylan's place to say, but he still had to ask.

"Sometimes I don't," Malcolm said easily. "And sometimes when I don't, he leaves me 28 voicemails in a day. But..." He shrugged a shoulder and then flexed and clenched his hand again. "It's more complicated than that. I mean... I suppose I want to understand. How someone can be what he is. How he fooled us all." He looked over at Raylan. "He was a great dad, you know. Until he wasn't. And it was just..." He snapped his fingers with his left hand, his right still tightly clenched. "It changed just like that. One moment it was all bedtime stories and games and he was my hero who went to work every day to save lives and the next it was a woman shoved in a box and chloroform and gaslighting and murder." Malcolm levelled his gaze at Raylan. "He didn't just kill people; he tortured them to death because it tickled him. That's the real him and that's what I've told myself since the night I called the police, but the really scary thought is what if he's both?"

The Marshal let a half moment of silence linger between them, holding Malcolm's gaze. He killed people, and was a father; would his daughter have to ask the same question of him some day? Yeah, he didn't torture 23 people, but still.

"It's possible. Doesn't make it an excuse." The 'but' was implied and Raylan stabbed another piece of meat to pop in his mouth. "I'm sure you've seen just as many other examples of it as I have. Our parents were people before we were around; we're an interruption to that."

He paused again. "Why's that bother you so much?"

He had to think about that.

"I guess... because I trusted him and he tried to make me complicit in his crimes. And they were horrible. ...And because I trusted him, so I didn't see it sooner." He tilted his head in concession. "I could have saved more people," he admitted, his posture and his tone laced with guilt.

It made sense. It was the ultimate betrayal of everything that Malcolm's young mind had built up; his expectations and admirations.

"I'm sure I'm not the first or last person to tell ya this but you were a kid. You did as much as any other adult would have done which is more than enough for a child." Should have done, anyway. "How many people did you save by calling it in? How many more people got spared because he wasn't on the streets anymore?"

They couldn't save everyone, even if that wasn't an answer that Raylan himself really accepted. He didn't say it and wouldn't, despite it's truths.

He smiled faintly and slowly unclenched his hand, picking up his spoon and stirring his soup.

"I know. Intellectually, I know that. He would certainly have continued to kill. He loved it. He loved exercising power over life and death. He loved watching the light leave a person's eyes." He took a heavy breath. "And... that's basically what Gil told me the night he arrested my father. He said I was a hero." He shrugged a shoulder. "I didn't feel like one." He looked at Raylan. "They couldn't find the girl. The box was in the basement and it was empty. It was too late. They never did find her."

If Raylan was the touchy feely type, this would be the place where he went over and put a hand on Malcolm's shoulder but he wasn't, so he stayed where he was, hazel eyes locked sympathetically on his friend. He'd avoided the word 'Hero' because that felt like it.. ignored the rest of Malcolm's concerns, as illogical as they might be.

"Something tells me you haven't stopped looking though, have you." It haunted him, this girl and her box, Raylan could see that well enough.

"Is this why you do this job? Trying to balance out your father's murders?" While Raylan's situation was different, tonally at any rate, that was something he could understand. He had spent the past ten or so years trying to balance out all the bullshit Arlo did. To stop people like him from costing more lives on dirty back road bridges.

"Partly," he admitted. "And partly... Gil took me under his wing when I was a kid and I've never known a better man. I wanted to do what he did. Catch badguys. Save innocent people. And maybe, if I saved enough innocent people, make up for the ones I failed." He took a breath and hesitated, then looked at Raylan again, leaning towards him conspiratorially. "I am still trying to find her," he confessed. "I've started to uncover some of my lost memories. She comes to me in my nightmares and demands to be found." He watched Raylan's face carefully. This was the part where a person might start to think he was a little too crazy.

"He seems like a solid guy," Raylan praised with a faint nod of his head. As Malcolm continued, Raylan's face didn't change much. "I'd scream like I was getting skinned if a dead girl was always in my bed around 3 am."

Raylan didn't think Malcolm was crazy. Obsessed, maybe. Damaged. Trying to answer questions that wouldn't leave him alone long enough for him to even consider letting it go.

He stabbed another bite of potato.

"Maybe solving it will let you.." Raylan gestured uselessly. "Put her to rest."

"It's not always her," he admitted, the lack of judgement spurring him to reveal more. "Mostly her. Especially lately. But sometimes I'm trapped in my father's cell. Sometimes with him, sometimes on my own. Sometimes it's the cell he's in now, sometimes it's the cage I used to visit him in when I was a kid."

"Well, one snake pit at a time... They really kept him in a cage? Like.. Hannibal?" He'd never dealt with That kind of Crazy in real life before. "How-.. Your mom. She was okay with you visiting him?"

"It was...yeah. It was a metal cage inside a locked room. Now he's in a very fancy...library, really. Somehow he's managed to collect a lot of books in his padded cell."

He considered the question.

"She was never wild about the idea, but I had a succession of therapists before, during and then after the trial - I had to testify and it was a media circus - and one of them thought, if I could talk to him about what he did, I could... let go of it. So she had her driver take me every Saturday afternoon."

'Huh' was his only answer, an new bite taking spot in his mouth.

"Sounds like, much like any Father, you're not getting rid of him that easy. Do you still go see him?"

Malcolm's expression sobered.

"Sometimes."

He went back to poking at his soup, though it'd been some time since he'd taken a bite.

"He knows things I need to know, but he's a pathological liar so prying them out of him is work."

Raylan nodded again. "If he didn't know what he did, would you still go see him?"

Malcolm considered that very carefully, because it was a question he'd asked himself more than once and he wasn't sure he'd come up with an answer.

"...I don't know," he finally said. "I didn't for ten years. I washed my hands of him and moved away. When I told him I wasn't coming back, he went ballistic. I left. He sent me letters. I never opened them; I just burned them. But then I lost my job and I came back here..... My mother was worried I'd start seeing him again, but I didn't really want to. I guess I knew if I did, it'd be hard to stop. He... physically and viscerally disgusts me but... I just. I want some kind of... answers or closure or...something. I guess if there was no girl in a box I'd still want to understand how he could be what he is. That's why I studied criminal psychology and slid into law enforcement from that side of it instead of straight up becoming a cop." He gave Raylan a wry smile. "Of course he's now pretending he's pleased with my career choice and he calls wanting to help me with cases. He just has to be a mentor to..." His voice trailed off an he paled slightly. He blinked, his hand covering his mouth, then suddenly he grabbed his phone and dialed Dani Powell.

"Dani. It's me. Have you contacted Claremont yet? ...You might want to start there." A pause. "Well. Obviously I hope not, but Dr Whitly fits the profile." A pause. "Let me know. Thanks."

He looked at Raylan. "I have a very bad feeling about this."

Slowly but surely, Malcolm was giving Raylan enough information to build out a whole chart of his life, but Raylan didn't find himself minding so much. It didn't hurt that Malcolm's whole story was.. bizarrely fascinating on its own.

Raylan frowned, sitting up a little more strictly as Malcolm looked like he was about to turn a dead shade of white.

"No way your dad is connected to this.." But for once, Raylan did not sound sure at all. "That would be a.. hellva a coincidence."

Malcolm shook his head. "He needs to feel superior. He needs the attention. He needs someone to mentor - to worship him - and I'm not giving it to him the way he wants it. And maybe he hoped that at some point it might get my attention."

He got up from his seat, agitated, pacing a tight circle in the kitchen.

"I hope it's not him - that makes getting information out of the 'mentor' infinitely more complicated; he gets off on misleading and obfuscating - but I think it's a very real possibility. He's extremely infamous; Quarles certainly would have heard of him. He made his victims suffer, which Quarles would definitely appreciate. He considers himself an artist. He'd definitely respond to a 'fan' who admired his work."

Raylan stayed where he was but there was a half tension in his frame, like he felt like he might have to get up and stop Malcolm from going off a short cliff. Maybe.

"Well shit," he swore. "Guess shootin' him for information is out of the question." Malcolm would have to guess how serious Raylan was about that. He took a deep breath before rocking to his feet anyway, one hand propped on the counter.

"We can leave you outta this, you know. If we have to. Find someone else to talk to him with me." Because if it turned out to be right, Raylan knew his ass would end up in the cell, questioning his suspects accomplice.

"He won't talk to anyone else," Malcolm told him, pausing in his pacing as the Marshal rose so he could face him. "If it is him, I have to go. It's the only way there's even a chance of getting it out of him."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject