was an exception. He said that most people like pain, as long as it’s not theirs. Then he said, “I suppose you don’t watch horror movies, either?”
Well, I do, Ralph, but those movies are make-believe. When the director calls cut, the girl who had her throat slashed by Jason or Freddy gets up and grabs a cup of coffee. But still, after this I may not…
[Pause]
Never mind, I don’t have time to ramble off the subject. Brad said, “For every clip of killings or disasters that Grampa and I have collected, there are hundreds more. Maybe thousands. News people have a saying: If it bleeds, it leads. That’s because the stories people are most interested in are bad news stories. Murders. Explosions. Car crashes. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. People like that stuff, and they like it even more now that there’s cell phone video. The security footage recorded inside Pulse, when Omar Mateen was still rampaging? That has millions of hits. Millions.”
He said Mr. Bell thought this rare creature was only doing what all the people who watch the news do: feeding on tragedy. The monster—he didn’t call it an outsider—was just fortunate enough to live longer by doing it. Mr. Bell was content to watch and marvel until he saw the security camera still of the Macready School bomber. He has that memory for faces, and he knew he’d seen a version of that face at some act of violence, not that long ago. It took Brad less than an hour to isolate Philip Hannigan.
“I’ve found the Macready School bomber three more times so far,” Brad said, and showed me pictures of the fox-faced man—always different but always George underneath—doing three different stand-ups. Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Illinois tornadoes in 2004. And the World Trade Center in 2001. “I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t had time enough to hunt them out.”
“Maybe it’s a different man,” I said. “Or creature.” I was thinking that if there were two—Ondowsky, and the one we killed in Texas—there might be three. Or four. Or a dozen. I remembered a show I saw on PBS about endangered species. Only sixty black rhinos left in the world, only seventy Amur leopards, but that’s a lot more than three.
“No,” Brad said. “It’s the same guy.”
I asked him how he could be so sure.
“Grampa used to do sketches for the police,” he said. “I sometimes do court-ordered wiretaps for them, and a few times I’ve miked up UCs. You know what those are?”
I did, of course. Undercovers.
“No more mikes under shirts,” Brad said. “We use bogus cufflinks or shirt buttons these days. I once put a mike in the B logo of a Red Sox hat. B for bug, get it? But that’s only part of what I do. Watch this.”
He pulled his chair close to mine so we could both see his iPad. He opened an app called VocaKnow. There were several files inside it. One was labeled Paul Freeman. He was the version of Ondowsky who reported the plane crash in 1960, you remember.
Brad pushed PLAY, and I heard Freeman’s voice, only crisper and clearer. Brad said he had cleaned the audio and dropped out the background noise. He called that sweetening the track. The voice came from the iPad’s speaker. On the screen, I could see the voice, the way you can see soundwaves at the bottom of your phone or tablet when you tap the little microphone icon to send an audio text message. Brad called that a spectrogram voiceprint, and he claims to be a certified voiceprint examiner. Has given testimony in court.
Can you see that force we talked about at work here, Ralph? I can. Grandfather and grandson. One good with pictures, the other good with voices. Without both, this thing, their outsider, would still be wearing his different faces and hiding in plain sight. Some people would call it chance, or coincidence, like picking the winning numbers in a lottery, but I don’t believe it. I can’t, and I don’t want to.
Brad put Freeman’s plane-crash audio on repeat. Next he opened the sound file for Ondowsky, reporting from the Macready School, and also put that one on repeat. The two voices overlapped each other, turning everything into meaningless gabble. Brad muted the sound and used his finger to separate the two spectrograms, Freeman on the top half of his iPad and Ondowsky on the bottom half.
“You see, don’t you?” he asked, and of course I did. The same peaks