The Thomas Berryman Number

The victim was Jimmie Lee Horn, mayor of Nashville, candidate for the U.S. Senate, the most promising black political leader in the South.The "assassin" was Bertram Poole, a de- ranged young radical who, before police gun- fire cut him down, fired two shots at Jimmie Lee Horn. Every TV camera at that Tennessee Fourth of July rally photographed the two killings. Millions of stunned viewers watched the deaths replayed on their sets that night. But there was something even more horrifying about this grim shooting, something that no news film showed: the bullets from Poole's gun never reached Horn.Instead, Jimmie Lee Horn had been "hit." It was the kind of professional job only one man could do.And only one reporter had a lead on Thomas Berryman. The Thomas Berryman Number is told by Ochs Jones, an investigative reporter from Nashville and an old friend of Jimmie Lee Horn. Low-key, resourceful, with a dry humor that keeps things on the sane side. Ochs Jones heads north to sort out the facts and play his hunches through the kind of story that lands huge advances and sensational newspaper serials-the chilling biography of a young Texan named Berryman, who had an I.Q. of 166 and who decided to become a professional killer at the age of eighteen. Step by step, the trail leads Jones to uncover six more murders and a handful of people whose lives, in one way or another, are linked with Berryman and the Fourth of July killings: a man locked away in a New York psychiatric hospital says he can prove Bert Poole didn't shoot anyone; a Philadelphia hitman asserts he was paid ten thousand dollars to shoot a third gunman present at the fatal rally; and an unusual young woman "kept" in a grand Long Island shore house knows who actually did shoot the black politician-she was there.Through four months of investigation covering six states and such places as Nashville, New York City, Long Island, and Revere Beach in Massachusetts, we follow Jones as he pulls off a reporting coup that grips us from the very beginning to the violent, unexpected finish-the unraveling of "The Thomas Berryman Number." --