Brady Hartsfield

For a moment it doesn’t, then it clicks in. On a foggy morning in 2009, a maniac named Brady Hartsfield drove a stolen Mercedes-Benz into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center, downtown. He killed eight and seriously injured fifteen.

The investigation recalls Hartsfield’s Mercedes attack and its victims.

• • • The human guinea pig in question spent fifteen months in the dark, an inchoate spirit who at some point in the sixteenth month remembered his name. He was Brady Wilson Hartsfield. There was nothing else at first. No past, no present, no him beyond the six syllables of his name.

Brady Wilson Hartsfield is explicitly the Mercedes massacre perpetrator whose case widened Holly’s perspective in The Outsider.

The neurological team—especially Dr. Felix Babineau, the Head of Department—finds Brady Hartsfield an extremely interesting case. This afternoon he sits by the window, dressed in jeans and a checked shirt.

Hartsfield is seated in the neurological ward where Babineau studies him.

… while chasing after a doctor who had been possessed—there was really no other way to put it—by Brady Hartsfield. “I told her if she worked at the bank she could buy some decent clothes for a change and stop dressing like a hippie. She laughed at me. That’s when …

Holly’s mother recalls the case of the doctor possessed by Hartsfield.

“You and Bill stopped something much worse than this from happening,” he says. “That crackpot fuck Brady Hartsfield could have killed hundreds at the rock concert he tried to blow up. Maybe thousands.” “And Jerome,” she says in a low voice. “Jerome was there, too.”

Holly’s companion recalls how she and Bill stopped Hartsfield’s concert bombing.

If not, he may get a chance to tell him. On the Blue Umbrella. Mostly, though, it was him. Brady Hartsfield. Credit where credit is due. City Center was a sledgehammer. On Olivia Trelawney, he used a scalpel. “Are you listening to me?” Freddi asks.

Brady reflects on his City Center attack while Freddi addresses him.

Mingo Auditorium has bad associations for Holly, ones having to do with a monster named Brady Hartsfield. Barbara was there, but she wasn’t the one who clobbered Brady; that was Holly herself. Bad associations or not, she can’t refuse Barbara anything.

Holly remembers striking Hartsfield while saving the concert audience.

… had excited and engaged her in a way no case had since finishing with the late (and very horrible) Brady Hartsfield. Except that wasn’t exactly right. The truth was she hadn’t been really excited about anything since Bill had died. Pete Huntley was fine, but he was …

Holly remembers finishing the Hartsfield case and Bill’s death.

Only had she ever doubted there was something far out of the ordinary about the Maitland case? She had not. Mostly because of her association with the monstrous Brady Wilson Hartsfield. A thing like that tended to widen your perspective quite a bit. ‘And that wasn’t the only cut.’

Brady Wilson Hartsfield is explicitly the Mercedes massacre perpetrator whose case widened Holly’s perspective in The Outsider.