Cindy skimmed the new comments on her blog, gobbled them down, then went back to the top of the page and read them again. The posts were about the love of violence and, to her mind, had been written by psychopaths.
Like this one: “Daily life is gray. When you’re a soldier, you’re trained to kill, given direct orders from your CO, and compensated with the guilt-free experience that’s the greatest high in the world. Then you come home, and everything is gray again. If you’re like me, gray is not good enough.”
The post had been signed with a screen name, and the writer hadn’t confessed to a specific killing. Interestingly, he’d gotten dozens of likes.
Other writers had expressed similar thoughts, sending her anecdotes about blood lust that only war could satisfy. Some veterans of foreign wars had detailed the taking of trophies—ears and hands and fingers—spelling out in loving specificity the pleasure of taking body parts, as well as taking photos of piles of the dead. The language used to describe these atrocities was too graphic for the Chronicle to print.
More to the point, the posts were about killings in war.
Nowhere in this avalanche of gory imagery was there a connection to the snipers and the victims in American cities. Cindy kept reading, and finally, at the bottom of the fourth screen, she found a post with a completely different feel, a declaration.
Her vision narrowed. She knew who he was. She read fast, then again more slowly:
There are killers who torture, who revel in taking life, sometimes in rage, sometimes for pleasure. This is not my style. When I kill a drug dealer, I am in control. My fellow travelers and I know our targets long before we fire a gun. They are guilty of ruining lives and of taking them by the tens of thousands as a byproduct of their sales jobs.
I’m proud of the recent work we’ve done. We’ve saved countless lives while only taking a few. I feel no pleasure in the shootings. I feel proud of the results. I’m doing good work. And I stand by it.
The post was signed Kill Shot, and Cindy knew from the cadence and structure of his post that this was the man who’d declared the “new war on drugs.”
She grabbed the phone to call Tyler but stopped because McGowan had appeared in her doorway. She put down the receiver.
“What is it, Jeb? What do you need?”