The Killing Type Read Online Free Page A

enters. Have you ever seen that high-speed photo of a
bullet shot through an apple, the one taken by Harold E. Edgerton
at MIT in 1964? The effect in a human head is even more pronounced
than that: a tiny hole more or less the size of the bullet on
entry, and a large “exit wound” on the other side. The reports in
the media always tend to underemphasize, if not studiously avoid,
this kind of information, a practice I have never quite understood.
Expose people to the filthy practicalities of violence and soon the
culture would not be inured and complacent, but would raise its
voice and enforce justice on the perpetrators.
    The letters in the Gazette tend towards anger
and sadness instead of fear. The focus of most is on the widow and
nine-year-old son that Winton’s murder left behind: “My heart goes
out to Cecilia Winton and her little boy Jack. I just can’t
comprehend what monster would do something like this. How can there
possibly be a reason for this? And why haven’t the police been able
to track this person down?” There was also: “Society is really
starting to break down when there are killings at all, one human
taking another’s life, but when that is done with apparent
randomness, when there is no ‘reason,’ if one can say something
that heinous, then we must truly be in the end days.” And then the
topper, from Ryan, also nine: “Jack was my best friend and now I
don’t get to play with him any more. My Mom and Dad, who I love
very much, tell me that there are bad people in the world, people
who hurt other people, but I don’t know why anyone would want to
hurt Jack’s Dad because he was a really nice man and took us for
walks along the lake and then bought us ice cream.”
     
    The next day, a bright
Saturday when I awaken at 10:45, but eventually deteriorating to
cloud and coolness and rain by the time I have finished chores and
latte—the next day I seek a kind of solace among simple people
doing simple things. A man is dead, a second murder victim, but
there are still fake-tanned older mothers selecting extra-old
cheddar at the outdoor market. I wonder if they are as shocked as I
am, as assaulted ,
and hope to right themselves by at least pretending to be living in
a normal town on a normal day. I am not having much success: no
matter how much I walk, no matter how charming a little corner I find on whatever
historic bench with just the right amount of shade and dappled
sunshine, I am not able to shake a pervasive nervousness, a tension
which gripped me when I read the first headlines and got worse as I
absorbed more and more details. A sense of longing develops,
builds, subsides, rises again with added strength, a longing for
simpler times as an obscure academic in a big anonymous city. I
feel too exposed here among the merchant selling emu products, the
farmer still in her dirty jeans and knee-high rubber boots, the
father walking slowly to his illegally parked minivan with just
enough berries and other goodies to suffice for dessert after the
evening’s barbecue. I fear that the killer with that same gun could
be headed my way, headed for this entire group. I have a frisson of
realization that he may be primed now to move from one-at-a-time
serial killing to mass murder, giving up the soliloquy for the
crowded bloody stage. I tremble next to the display of LPs already
shot through and now reduced to a dollar each.
    There has been a rough choreography of
extreme emotion over the past few days, on the radio and
television, in the newspaper, on the street. The snippets that I’ve
witnessed are mostly anger and fear, which, as any psychological
quack with the slightest of B.A.’s will tell you, are both the same
thing. Just as the macho man with the illiberal views and the
tendency toward personal vigilantism is a weak little simp on the
inside, many of those who are ranting angrily are really doing so
out of fear. I do not criticize this fear, of course, but have to
admit that the anger