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]

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.

[tinstar]

Raylan cocked a grin. "My walk? I walk like a man who wears a cowboy hat?" It was on the left of ridiculous and a little charming, if he was honest. "What I wouldn't give to see you in denim and a tee-shirt." Which was as far out of Malcolm's element as Raylan could imagine.

"You saying the baseball cap doesn't fit my walk?" Oh, he was going to have fun with this one.

[abrightboy]

"I own both of those things," he conceded of the jeans and t-shirt. Maybe they weren't exactly what Raylan had in mind. He held a finger up. "But if we're going to be scientific, to find out if the baseball cap works with your walk? You have to walk across a street in New York while shouting at a taxi."

[tinstar]

"More than one pair of each?" Raylan's eyebrows and the way they were hitched suggested he doubted it. "Does that mean I have to slap it's hood and yell 'Hey, I'm Walkin' here'." It was.. well, an attempt, but due to the over campiness of it, it came out sounding more like Boston than anything else. To Raylan's credit, he seemed to notice that, wincing as he stabbed another piece of meat.

"I don't think it fits me.. or my gun." There were much more... efficient ways to stop a taxi. A little threat could go a long way.

[abrightboy]

"I have a lot of t-shirts; I wear them to bed. Can't rely on normal pyjamas if you can't trust your body not to run out into the street while you're sleeping, should it manage to wrest itself from its restraints," he pointed out.

Raylan's attempt at 'I'm walkin' here' made him laugh with genuine delight.

"No, no," he said, waving his spoon at Raylan. "If you pull a gun on the street in New York, you never know what's going to be pointing back at you. Th..."

His phone buzzed. His expression sobered and he set down his spoon to pick it up.

"Hi. ...I see. .....Oh, don't be. I somehow was expecting it. Thanks." He put the phone down and looked at Raylan. "The Surgeon received a fan letter from Robert Quarles almost a year ago. If there was further correspondance, it skirted security."

He tilted his wrist outwards to look at his watch. It was already late when they started after running around New Jersey all afternoon and into the evening.

"We can get in there at 9am," he said. "Guess we may as well turn in."

He picked up files and tossed them back into the box.

[tinstar]

Raylan didn't doubt the number of tshirts he had, but he did doubt the amount of denim to match and Malcolm's specificity only furthered that amused thought. His smirk pulled at Malcolm's laughter and he occupied his mouth with another bite. He'd have had something to say about New York and it's guns but the buzz of Malcolm's phone sucked the levity back out of the air. His face slipped into a little bit of stoniness as he gathered Dani's confirmation from Malcolm's side of the conversation.

"Well," he started, clearing his mouth and grabbing his scotch glass. "Least we get to finish eating without threats of papercuts." It wasn't much of a silver lining, but he'd take it. "Murder ruins the taste of scotch anyway, supposed to be used to wash out the bad taste."

And frankly, the scotch did taste better for their task getting put off for a few hours.

[abrightboy]

"Eating. Right." He tossed a few more files back in the box, then sat down, picking up his spoon, nodding vaguely. When Raylan mentioned the scotch, he set it down and got up, grabbing the bottle to refill Raylan's glass and his own. He rarely had more than one, but it seemed like a good idea that night.

He sat down, turning his glass around in his hands.

"Do you have any questions about what to expect in there?"

[tinstar]

Nodding his thanks, Raylan started pre cutting the last of his steak. Malcolm was glanced at as he took another bite and shook his head a little, quickly clearing his mouth.

"You've pretty much given me what I need to know already. Stable til he's not, calculating, controlling. Charming is what I read, to live so long in the open." Yeah, he'd looked up the case, did a little light reading.

"Boyd is crazier than shit and got a vocabulary and a charm a mile wide. He's nowhere near the Surgeon's level of intelligence, but it gives me a good start." Hillbillies could be just as crazy as the New York Money but they didn't get mental institutions - they got gen pop prison, despite the body count that racked up due to it. There was always the SHU; the hole. That only ever made the madness worse, in Raylan's experience.

"You got anything you think I should know beforehand?"

[abrightboy]

Malcolm took a sip of scotch and considered the question while looking down into the glass, then he looked up at Raylan.

"He'll treat you like you're an accessory to me. Secondary. Pushing your buttons will be a game that he'll play for fun and because it's potentially useful in pushing my buttons. He sees me... as his creation. Something he made and, as such, an extension of his ego. The only reason he's desperate to maintain a connection to me is because any... cleverness or success or victory is something he can claim as his own triumph. If he does give us anything that helps us catch Quarles, he'll treat it as a favour. He's helping with our case because he's a wonderful person who just wants to help." He leveled a flat look at Raylan. "He is not a wonderful person."

[tinstar]

"He's gotta find 'em first," was Raylan's only reply as he cleaned up the rest of his steak, listening to Malcolm go on. "You just gotta mind your buttons. Daddies think all kinda things - we don't have to beat him with the truth. Let 'im think what he wants, for now."

He was not above lying, himself, or bending the truth to get around people like this. Arlo had tempered him well in being forced to ignore some of the sins of the father for better ends.

Raylan nodded again. "It'll be fine."

[abrightboy]

Malcolm nodded, absently taking another swallow of scotch before putting his glass down and picking up his spoon to soldier through three more bites. Then he put the lid on it and set the rest in the fridge.

He turned to the door next to the kitchen, opening it to reveal a linen closet. He pulled a couple of blankets and a pillow from it and carried them over to the couch, leaving them neatly on the end of it before returning to the kitchen island to reclaim his crystal tumbler of scotch.

"You said before your dad wanted you to follow in his footsteps. That he was disappointed when you didn't. Is that why he wanted the last word so badly? Because when he looked at your face, he saw everything but a mirror?"