Mickey Wallace had been a good reporter. He was genuinely interested in those whose stories he wrote. He didn’t have to fake it. Human beings were just endlessly fascinating to him, and even the dullest had a story worth telling, however short, buried somewhere deep inside. But, in time, journalism began to weary and frustrate him. He didn’t have the energy for it that he had once enjoyed, or the hunger to go chasing people day after day just for the stories that he uncovered to be forgotten before the weekend. He wanted to write something that would last. He thought about writing novels, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t read them, so why would he want to write them? Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

No, what interested Mickey was good and evil. It always had, ever since he was a kid watching The Lone Ranger and The Virginian on TV. Even as a reporter, it was the crime stories to which he was most drawn. True, they were more likely to appear above the fold, and Mickey liked seeing his name as close to the masthead as possible, but he was also fascinated by the relationship between killers and their victims. There was an intimacy, a bond between a murderer and a victim. It seemed to Mickey that a little of the victim’s identity was transferred to the killer, passed on at the moment of death, retained deep within his soul. He also believed, somewhat more controversially, that, in a sense, the victims’ deaths were ultimately what gave meaning to their lives, what defined them, what raised them from the anonymity of day-to-day ordinariness and bequeathed a kind of immortality on them, or as close to immortality as the temporary nature of public attention could allow. Mickey supposed that it wasn’t quite immortality after all, especially since the victims in question were dead, but it would do until he could think of a better word.

It was as a reporter that he had first come into indirect contact with the subject, Parker. He had been among the throng outside the little house in Brooklyn on the night that Parker’s wife and child were killed. He had reported on the case, the stories getting smaller and smaller, and falling deeper and deeper into the main body of the paper, as lead after lead dried up. Eventually, even Mickey gave up on the Parker killings, and put them on the back burner for a time. He had heard rumors that the feds were looking at a possible serial-killer connection, but the price of that information was a promise that he would sit on it until the time was right.

While Mickey was genuinely interested in human beings and their stories, he also acknowledged to himself a kind of numbness of the heart that afflicted many in his trade. He was curious about people, but he did not care about them, or not enough to feel their pain as his own. He sympathized with them, a temporary, shallow emotion, but he did not empathize. Perhaps it was a consequence of his work, of being forced to deal with story after story in close succession, the depth and duration of his involvement dependent entirely on the public’s appetite and, by extension, his newspaper’s. That was, in part, why he had decided to leave the world of journalism behind, and devote himself to books. By immersing himself in only a handful of cases, he hoped to sensitize himself anew. That, and make a little money along the way. He just needed to find the right story to tell, and he was convinced that, in Charlie Parker, he had found that story.

Mickey could recall the moment when he had become convinced that there was something different about the man. He hadn’t faded away after the deaths of his family. Neither had he gone on daytime shows to talk about his pain, in an effort to keep t Jplethehe killings in the public eye and ensure that the pressure on the law enforcement community to track down their killer remained constant. No, he had picked up a PI’s license, and then he had gone hunting, both for the killer, the one who would come to be called the Traveling Man, and for others. The first one he found was the Modine woman, and that was when the bells started ringing for Mickey. That was a story in itself right there, worthy of a Sunday supplement: father loses his wife and child to a killer, then hunts down a pair of child killers in turn. It had everything that a jaded public could desire.

Except Parker wouldn’t tell it. Requests for interviews were politely, and sometimes impolitely, declined. Then-bang!-there he was again, and this time it was the big one he was trying to hook, the Traveling Man. Over the years that followed, it became clear to Mickey, and to others like him, that there was something strange going on here, something quite exceptional. This man had a gift of sorts, although it wasn’t a gift that anybody in his right mind would wish to have: it seemed that he was drawn to evil, and evil, in turn, was drawn to him. And when he found it, he destroyed it. It was as simple, or as complex, as that, depending upon how you chose to view it, because Mickey Wallace was not dumb, and he knew that a man couldn’t do what Parker had done and not suffer serious damage along the way. Now here he was, working in a bar in a northeastern city, separated from his girlfriend, seeing the child he’d had with her maybe once or twice each month, and living alone in the big house upon which Mickey was now carefully shining his flashlight.

Mickey wanted to go inside. He wanted to poke around in desk drawers, to open files in cabinets and on computers, to see where the subject ate, sat, slept. He wanted to walk in his footsteps, because what Mickey proposed to do was to give Parker a voice, to take his words, his experiences, and improve upon them, creating a new version of him that was somehow greater than the sum of his parts. To do that, Mickey needed to become him for a time, to understand the reality of his existence.

And if Parker ultimately decided not to cooperate? Mickey was trying not to think about that. He had spoken to his publisher that morning, and the publisher had made clear his preference for Parker being involved with the project. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but it would affect the number of copies that would be printed, and the nature of the publicity for the book. His view was understandable, but it would make Mickey’s task more difficult. Anyone could put together a cut-and-paste job, although not as good a cut-and-paste job as Mickey could, but that wasn’t what the big bucks would be paid for. It wasn’t just about the money, either: there was a real story to be told here, something deep and peculiar and unsettling, and the words had to come from the subject’s own mouth. Mickey would wear him down, of that he was certain, or reasonably certain. In the meantime, he had begun making contact with other prospective interviewees in the hope of establishing a more detailed background dossier about the subject, because Mickey wanted to know more about Parker than Parker did about himself.

Except, the people who were close to him were also loyal to him, and so far all Mickey had to show for his efforts was, for the most part, a series of rebuffs. True, he had sessions lined up, both on and off the record, with a couple of ex-cops who remembered Parker from New York, and a former captain from Internal Affairs who, Mickey was reliably informed, believed that the subject should be behind bars; the subject and his buddies. They interested Mickey too. All he knew about them were their names: Angel and Louis. J ju wa The captain said that he could help him with them too, just not as much. He was only willing to talk off the record, but he had promised Mickey copies of investigation reports, and some juice that a good reporter like he was would easily be able to corroborate. It was a start, but Mickey wanted more.

His clothes felt damp. The mist was a blessing in that it concealed him from any casual observer passing on the road below, and even someone coming up the drive would struggle to see his car, or him, until they reached the house itself. In fact, Mickey had parked the car beneath a copse of trees, and unless somebody was actively looking for it, he was pretty certain that it would pass unnoticed. Even if Parker returned unexpectedly, Mickey was convinced that he would drive right by it. But the mist was also cold and wet, and so thick that Mickey felt he might almost clasp a clump of it in his hand if he tried, like cotton candy.