The Lengths That I Would Go To

[abrightboy]

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."

Comments

[abrightboy]

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."

[tinstar]

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.

[abrightboy]

"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.

[tinstar]

"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."

[abrightboy]

"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."

[tinstar]

"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?"

[abrightboy]

"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."

[tinstar]

'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?"

[abrightboy]

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."

[tinstar]

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

[abrightboy]

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."

[tinstar]

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."

[abrightboy]

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."

[tinstar]

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.

[abrightboy]

"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."

[tinstar]

"You haven't seen me in action," Raylan boasted but nodded anyway a moment later, hand on his hip. "On the off chance it isn't your daddy we're looking for, we've got til Dani calls back with some confirmation to work through more of these files. Maybe we go see him anyway. See how he feels about child molestors."

[abrightboy]

"I think that, even when he finds someone's proclivities distasteful, he finds it amusing that they're... beholden to them. And there's still some level of kinship there. He told me and my sister not that long ago that people with his 'sickness' often seek out others with the same 'illness'."

He paused, then slid back onto his stool, though his more obvious fidgets - flexing and wringing his hands - were still absently ongoing as he considered the files on the table. Finally he stopped to reach into the box to grab a few more.

[tinstar]

Raylan held Malcolm in his gaze for a long beat before sitting back down in his stool, not bothering with the files or his food. If Quarles wasn't such a pain in his ass, if this wasn't such a hard pressed, immediate thing, Raylan would have happily thrown the files to the side for a while but time was lives and while they weren't going anywhere tonight, his point was too valid to ignore.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry this has led back to his doorstep."

[abrightboy]

He gave Raylan a thin smile.

"Everything leads back to his doorstep. Sometimes I think he orchestrates it that way, but then I think 'Stop it, Bright, that's paranoid insanity and that way madness lies'." He took a breath. "And madness is a short trip, so best not to step in that direction," he conceded.

[tinstar]

"If you cast a lot, sooner or later you'll get a fish," was the only thing he seemed comfortable saying right off the top, almost hesitantly picking his fork back up. Murder or not, this was a good steak and he wasn't going to let it go to waste.

"At least you won't be goin' back to see him by yourself. Eat your soup," Raylan prompted with a little nod of his head.

"The steak is good, by the way. I notice you didn't ask me how I liked it, but good guess."

[abrightboy]

Malcolm barely had time to ingest the idea that he wasn't going to see Martin alone when Raylan shifted the topic smoothly back to dinner.

The remark that he'd guessed how Raylan took his steak accurately made him smile and he actually picked up his spoon as instructed.

"A man with a cowboy hat as big as yours doesn't eat meat that isn't red in the middle," he said with a shrug, taking a bite of the tepid soup.

[tinstar]

"You mean someone with taste?" Raylan smirked. "Thank you."

He was sure that's not what Malcolm meant by any means but he leaned into it anyway.

"I might have to get another one. I thought I could do this ballcap but.." Raylan shook his head. "Too tight."

[abrightboy]

"You mean 'too understated', right?" Malcolm teased, taking another bite of soup. "Too subtle? Too... carpetbaggy?" That was the word, right?

[tinstar]

He couldn't stop the crawl of his smirk, especially after that last word. "I've never much cared for baseball. You know I only bought the cowboy hat because I went into a shop once and it fit. Everything else that's been put on it has got nothin' to do with me."

Actually, it had everything to do with him, but he wasn't the kind of man to see it that way.

"It's just a good fittin' hat."

[abrightboy]

Malcolm chuckled and looked over at him.

"I don't know about that. Unless by 'good fitting', you mean to your personality." A beat. "And your walk." He took a bite of soup.