Name of the Devil Page 18

  She sets four round black discs the size of DVDs at the corners of the grave, then sticks a metal rod about a foot long into the soil. “The transponders will give us the image. The spike tells us the soil density.” She takes a seat on one of the cases and puts her laptop on her knees.

  Lights blink on the transponders, but I don’t feel the low pulsing I expected after seeing the transducers she used in the Michigan cemetery on the Warlock case. “Is this a different system?”

  “Sonar is so passé.” She gives me a grin. “Microwaves. This takes a bit longer. The antennas have to calibrate. They reinforce each other and create a kind of virtual waveform. The tricky part is establishing a baseline. Fortunately we have one here with the coffin. If it knows there’s a flat plane down there, it can interpolate the return signals that much faster.”

  “Obviously . . .”

  She smiles. “You have your tricks, I have mine. It’s kind of like trying to make sense of a blurry photograph. Calculating all those photons is next to impossible. But if I tell you the image is supposed to be a face, a computer can figure a lot of it out.” She presses a button, then changes the topic rather suddenly. “So, how’s your love life?”

  “Nonexistent.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  My face flushes. “Oh, no. I mean there isn’t one at the moment.”

  Danielle is easy to open up to. It’s obvious that she cares. As she sits there waiting for her machine to tell her what’s down there, life goes on.

  I envy her ability to multitask. Or is it multi-emotion?

  “What about the pediatrician?” she persists.

  “It didn’t really go anywhere.”

  “I’m sorry. He seemed like a nice guy. You didn’t steal his watch at the dinner table?”

  “No . . .” Regrettably, I had told her how that led more than once to a disaster. “I just . . . didn’t really follow up on things.”

  “Oh. Well, you’ve got options. Your looks aren’t going anywhere,” she replies, as she fiddles with her controls.

  “Thanks. I was hoping to find someone who loves me for my mind.”

  “Oh, that’s adorable. That’s not the way it works, darlin’. Men have to fall in love with you despite all that. Here we go.”

  I move to watch her laptop screen as the image develops. It’s just a big fuzzy block. “What’s that?”

  “Everything. Hold on. Let me subtract the dirt using the density formulas.”

  The blocks begin to disappear, cube by cube, from the top to the bottom as if we were down there digging away the soil. A rectangular-shaped object is what’s left behind. I assume it’s the coffin. To be honest, the image isn’t as clear as ones I’d seen on the older system.

  “Not impressed?” Danielle has a sly smile on her face. She presses a button and the rectangle instantly resolves into a coffin. The detail is sharp. The handles, and even the wood inlays, are visible.

  “Wow.” I look at the ground beneath our feet, trying to understand how we got all that information. “This is real magic.”

  “It helps that we know what we’re looking for. Now, let’s erase the coffin.”

  It vanishes, revealing the outline of a small body inside. Too small to be Honer Jackson.

  It’s Marty.

  Mrs. Kinder wasn’t lying to me.

  His clothing a pixelated jumble, he looks like a mummy wrapped in plastic.

  “All we’ll really get a good look at is the bones and the major organs. Until we get one of those positron imagers . . .”

  “What?”

  “Wishful thinking. We’d need a truck just to carry the antimatter containment system.”

  “Good lord. What can you show me now?”

  She taps her keyboard and the chest area and his clothing fades away. Bones begin to emerge. His lungs are two large black voids.

  “Can you zoom into the chest area?”

  “Sure.”

  The image reloads and expands to show the rib cage. Two of the ribs are at an odd angle. One of them appears to dissolve into the black lung area.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yes. This boy has a ruptured lung. The rib snapped and poked right into it. Probably filled with fluid right there. Poor thing.”

  “Oh, lord.” My nails claw into my palm. All this primal anger and nowhere to direct it.

  “Did they report any of this?” Danielle asks. Her voice is flat, all the cheer gone.

  I’d only been able to give her the broad strokes beforehand. “The death certificate says he suffocated under a mattress.”

  “A mattress wouldn’t do this.” She shakes her head. “The medical examiner would have seen the broken ribs.” She points to them on the screen. “Even without an x-ray, it’d be obvious he died from a blunt force trauma. There would be blood in the lungs as well. There’s no way he could miss this.” Shaking her head again. “No way.”

  “The coroner covered it up.”

  “Bastards. I’ll make a copy of this data for you.”

  “Thank you.” I lean against a large memorial and send Ailes a text to let him know what we’ve found.

  There’s a message from him in my inbox, saying that they’ve definitively isolated another male voice on the audiotape that doesn’t belong to any of the Hawkton explosion victims. He thinks enough of it has been captured for us to start looking for an identity.

  The break offers a little relief. But it doesn’t make up for finding out what happened to Marty.

  This last man could be the only other person who knows exactly what happened and, just as important, what’s going on right now.

  I help Danielle load the equipment back into her truck. “Have time for coffee?”

  “I got to head home and see to it my boys get off to school,” she replies.

  “When do you sleep?”

  “Sundays.” She smiles.

  33

  AFTER MY LATE - NIGHT sojourn with Danielle, exhaustion takes over and I fall asleep in the motel room. An hour before dawn, I’m startled awake by a suffocating dream in which I’m buried alive. I can’t tell if it’s trauma of my own I’m trying to work through, or the thought of Marty buried in the lonely grave.

  I get up, walk to the window and slide the curtain back. I crack it open a bit and gaze across the parking lot that’s bathed in the yellow light of the street lamps. Cars crunch grit on the highway, early risers going about their daily routines.

  I imagine that not all of them ferry convenience store clerks driving to work, or night-shift employees heading home. Maybe some of the passing cars contain a normal family headed somewhere on an eagerly awaited family vacation.

  I want to hope the occupants of those cars will all go on to have happy, if mundane, lives that are unaffected by tragedy. It’s a naive notion. We all have to face some kind of adversity. However, a few of us, like Marty, get far more than our fair share.

  It’d be nice to know that somewhere out there are islands of sanity. I think of Danielle on her way home to make sure her boys get off to school before she heads in to work. There’s so much about her I admire. She’s a good agent and, as far as I can tell, a great mom. There’s work, and then there’s her home life. I don’t doubt which is more important. The day she thought her family would suffer, I’m sure she’d take a leave of absence—or even give up her career—to make sure what was really important to her survived.

  She knows the center of things. I don’t even know the shape of my life. There’s work, and then everything else. Lately, the “everything else” part has been pushed so far out of my mind that I’m not even sure how to have a non-work moment.

  Seeing a movie, grabbing dinner with old friends, trying to kindle a relationship: It all feels so wasteful and pointless.

  I sit down on my bed and open my la
ptop, which I fell asleep next to, and read through the latest reports. According to our forensic audio experts, our unknown man on the tape was in his mid-forties and approximately five-and-a-half feet tall—I have no idea how they deduce that. The words he says that we can make out with certainty are “restrain” and “must confine.”

  The significant thing is that English isn’t his first language. His accent indicates either a Polish or Austrian background. The linguists say his pronunciations suggest he may not even have been a US resident. His English is more akin to British than to American.

  This information has also been passed on to Mitchum and local law enforcement, but nobody has a clue who this man could be. None of the residents who recognized the other voices on the tape have the vaguest idea.

  The team that went through town records couldn’t find anyone living there in the last eighty years who matched that description ever. Expanding the search to records in neighboring towns has so far proven fruitless.

  Apparently, neither the Alsops, McKnight nor Curtis had any friends or relatives that we could find who matched. There’s a possibility this man may have been someone Sheriff Jessup interacted with, so investigators are now combing through arrest and court records trying to find some clue as to who he could be.

  Other than if he’s a stranger, the second-worst scenario would be if he’s just a friend of a friend. This makes the potential circle huge. Ailes explained the permutations on this based on the research of a British scientist named Robin Dunbar. The average person has about 150 stable friends they keep in contact with. When you include old classmates and relatives, the number increases to around 250. An average couple may have 400 unique acquaintances in all. These are people you might have over for dinner or otherwise spend time with socially.

  If the unknown man was a friend of a friend, perhaps of a former classmate of Alsop’s in college, he’d be one of 160,000 possible people—that’s assuming the connection wasn’t completely random. And assuming that between all five victims at least three separate social groups exist, our unknown man is one of 500,000 possible people.

  Even if we knew everyone that the Alsops, Curtis, McKnight and Jessup knew, we’d still have to conduct a half million interviews to find our man. It’s an impossible job. It’s too much data. It’d take a miracle . . . or at least someone who can work magic with numbers . . .

  I email my new friend, Max.

  My phone rings a minute later. “What do you have on this man?”

  Max is well inside my circle of trust after leading me to Marty. I give him the description from the audiotape and the inferences our experts made.

  “Hmm . . .” He mulls this over. “That’s thin. What else can you tell me? It’s a Bayesian thing. What are your gut instincts?” Like Ailes, he reminds me of my college professors.

  I wonder if this is how I sound to other people when I explain things. I’d never thought about that before.

  I think for a moment. “If he’s a stranger, he’d be someone they feel comfortable bringing into the situation. Maybe a psychologist, or a doctor. He probably wasn’t from there, but he might have been visiting and was asked to stop by.”

  “Hmm. Visiting?”

  “I know, that makes it harder.”

  “Not necessarily. It could be easier. If he was from a nearby state and just drove there, that would be hard to trace now. However, if he flew there, or into some place close by, that’s a little easier. Footprints . . .”

  “Airline records?”

  “Well . . . ever hear of a system called SABRE?”

  “The online ticket system?”

  “Yeah. It started as a project between IBM and American Airlines in the 1960s. It stands for Semi-Automated Business Research Environment. Sexy, huh? Anyhow, in the 1970s they opened it up to travel agents, who could dial into the system and book flights. The system was so huge it took up a football field. Of course, you could fit that data into your pocket now. The problem is, they’d purge the system every few years for space, so technically it no longer exists.”

  “Technically . . . You don’t have a secret cavern somewhere hiding this, do you?”

  “No. Actually, I’ve been thinking about buying a salt mine. But that’s not where I’m going. So, here’s all this data they have. Now imagine an agency, not the NSA, which has to do a lot of interesting computing. They’ve got a bunch of computer scientists working off the books on big data projects, at university research centers and think tanks with funny names and no visible means of support. You’ve got all this funding for hardware. That part is easy; you just call up IBM or Tandem and put in an order for whatever you need. Now you have acres of computers at your disposal. But what about the data? You need data to run experiments on and test out spy software. You can’t just fill the disks with lorem ipsum or a million “John Does.” Real data is a mixture of random information that contains patterns you don’t think about at first glance. It’s not just smoothly random. Do people in Michigan have longer last names than people in Arizona? For a period, yes, they did. Eastern European immigration. You get my point.

  “So, real data is better than fake data. Anyhow, this not-the-NSA agency funds a group to make a copy of the entire SABRE database every couple years. Only they don’t purge the data. They just keep adding to the system. Hard disks keep getting smaller, and their budgets keep getting bigger. They’ve got the room. It’s government money. Then one day, at the dawn of the tech boom, the people that run that project all go off to start some Internet company, abandoning a system full of data that is in a quasi-legal area because not-the-NSA never classified it.”

  “So you’re telling me you’ve got airline records going back that far?”

  There’s a pause on the line. “Further,” Max replies, “I could tell you what seat Marilyn Monroe sat in when she flew into Washington National to hook up with JFK.”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Who sat next to her?”

  “Oh. I never actually looked. I can get back to you on that.”

  “That’s okay. But that’s amazing. You should write a book.” I can only imagine what someone less ethical would do with this information.

  “I’m not sure I’d live to publish it. I like data, not secrets. Anyhow, I’m going to take a look and see what I can find. I should be able to give you some names.”

  “I don’t need all of them . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll help you find him. I’d guess a few hundred at most. I can pare them down a bit. But I’ll have to think around a few things.” He stops. “It’ll cost you though . . .”

  “What?”

  Max hesitates again. “Freddy said you have to teach me a magic trick and let me buy you dinner.”

  There’s something endearing in his struggle to ask me out. He’s like a nervous kid in class. “Max, it’s a deal. And I’ll buy dinner.”

  He’s not my type, but there’s an earnestness about him. God knows I could use more of that right now.

  34

  WHILE MAX WORKS his data wizardry to find the unknown man, I concentrate on what happened to Reverend Groom and whether or not it involved the man who put the bodies in the trees in Hawkton. Something tells me the sixth man isn’t our unknown voice on the audiotape. But I do think he had something to do with Groom’s suicide.

  The trouble is that there are few clues with Groom. We don’t have any mud or other physical evidence like corpses and broken branches. By itself, Groom’s suicide would be an open-and-shut case. It’s plain as day he shot himself. We’re only concerned about why because of who his friends were.

  All I have to go on is his behavior right before he killed himself. On camera he acts like he is following a script he doesn’t understand.

  On a lark, I give my grandfather a call. I haven’t spoken to him since we met at the airport. I never even f
ollowed up on his hospital visit either.

  Ugh, I suck at people.

  “Jessica, is everything okay?” he asks after I say hello.

  It’s not a sign of strong family relations when that’s the first thing the other person says. “I’m fine. Um, how are you?”

  “Good. Good. The medical thing is under control.”

  “Oh . . . um, good.” I don’t know if I’m supposed to press further. What’s the right thing to do? I just ignore the situation. “So, I have a professional question I wanted you to think about.”

  “Hold on. Let me write this down.”

  “What?”

  “The time and date you asked me to help you.” It’s a gentle tease, but I can tell the old man is pleased.

  I laugh with relief. I got him on a good day. “I could just call Dad, or Uncle Darius.”

  “Amateurs,” he scoffs.

  “They learned from the worst. I’m working on a case and I need your thoughts. There’s something familiar about what’s going on.”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “Have you seen the video of the reverend who killed himself?”

  “Good riddance.” Grandfather’s opinion on faith healers is as strong as my own. I have to resist telling him why he may be justified in his response.

  “Yeah, um, but have you actually watched the part before he kills himself?”

  “I haven’t seen any of it. I only read about it.”

  “Could you do me a favor and take a look? I could send the video to you.”

  “Why don’t I just pull it up on my iPad?”

  Grandfather has an iPad? “Yeah, I guess so. You know how to find it?”

  “Found it. Give me a minute.” I hear the audio playing over the phone. It cuts off before Groom pulls the trigger. “Interesting. I see what you’re saying. There’s something off about him, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. I’m trying to figure out what.”

  “Let me think for a moment. Hmm. You may have been too young to remember this. In fact, you may not have even been born yet. For a while we had a bit in the show called ‘The Antics.’ It was a hypnosis pickpocket act. Your uncle actually came up with the idea.