He shuffled into the room and stopped, plexiglass and cinderblocks framing his slight figure. He looked much as I remembered him from nearly a decade earlier: big eyes in a boyish face, a thin build, long fingers, waist chains. But his eyes, once cold and flat, had mellowed into something resembling thoughtfulness.
For a moment, my reflection in the glass superimposed on his orange jumpsuit, I paused, looking at him and at me. Lee Boyd Malvo smiled. The D.C. sniper, in the visitation room of one of the United States' most restrictive prisons, smiled at me.
I have covered war, feeling the zip of bullets overhead, the giant-footstep boom of a mortar landing, the heat of an explosion. I've been inside drug dens and on police stakeouts. I have watched two men die in Virginia's electric chair, seeing the death grip on oak, the smoke rising.