Name of the Devil Read online

  At the end of the block I turned the corner. Walking under the shade of the trees, I passed the house with the large female sphinx surrounded by a circular driveway. Every now and then a heavyset man would be out washing a Rolls-Royce, and he would wave to me as I passed. I’d wave back and continue home.

  He wasn’t there that day. But the Buick was. It was when the car made another turn shortly after me that I got a little suspicious.

  Lots of people drove through the area hoping to see a famous resident, as if they expected Paul Newman to be out mowing his lawn. The funny thing is that it was almost impossible to tell the vacant houses from the ones that were lived-in. If people went outside, it was almost always in their backyards.

  The low rumble of the car engine was making me anxious so I picked up my pace, but tried not to make it too obvious. Eyes forward, I listened carefully. I was all set to run if I heard a door open. In class they’d told us the tricks a pervert might use: that he was lost, that he knew our parents. (I had retorts to all of them. Logic told me the best response would be to just get away.)

  At random, I picked a back alley that ran between the big avenues fronting the houses. This was a side road the garbage men took, or where the ‘help’ would unload groceries. Hardly anyone else ever used it.

  I didn’t have to look back to know the Buick had followed me. The sound of the engine echoed down the back fences along the alley.

  In my still-innocent mind, I thought of a million reasons why someone could be following me. Maybe it was a friend of Dad’s or Grandfather’s who was lost. It didn’t matter.

  At the end of one lot a long hedge ran perpendicular from the street to the avenue in front. The wall of the neighboring mansion was only a foot away, forming a dark, narrow corridor. I was certain rats, raccoons and other nasty creatures used it as an expressway to the trashcans. But it didn’t matter. I ducked into the passage and ran toward the other end.

  Behind me, the Buick’s brakes let out a high-pitched noise as the car rolled to a stop. I could feel the eyes of the driver looking at me from behind the tinted glass. I didn’t turn back. I sprinted toward the keyhole of light at the end of the path. A twig, sticking out like a skeletal finger, scraped my cheek. My blouse and skirt were covered with dry leaves.

  I kept going until I reached the road that led to our block.

  I slipped through the bars of the huge wrought-iron gates at the end of our driveway and clambered up it to safety.

  Out of sight and no longer a threat in my mind, the Buick became just one adventure among others in that particular day. It was just one more anecdote, like when Hayley Siegel announced to our class that her sister had got her period the day before. None of us knew what it meant, but it seemed like a big deal when she said it. From the entryway, I heard voices in the back kitchen and found Grandfather and Dad sitting around the large wooden table, looking at sketches for a new illusion Grandfather wanted to add to the show.

  “Hey, kiddo,” said my dad, not looking up.

  “Looks like you rolled your way home,” Grandfather remarked before crossing out something on the sheet of paper.

  I poured myself a glass of milk, then scooped in some chocolate powder. Being careful to not hit the spoon against the side of the glass and get myself shushed for overzealous mixing, or a quip from Grandfather about ruining a martini that I didn’t understand, I stirred as quietly as possible before placing the spoon in the sink to be washed alongside the glass when I’d finished.

  I peered between their hunched shoulders and kept as quiet as I could. They tolerated my presence as long as I avoided interrupting. If I was in a curious mood, that could be only seconds.

  Dad traced a line across the page and gave me a quick glance. “Uncle Darius will be coming over tonight.”

  I hadn’t seen Uncle Darius in ages. More lighthearted than either Dad or Grandfather, I always liked having him around the house. Although referred seemingly behind my back, and to his face, as a “fuck-up” by Grandfather, he seemed pretty okay to me. He was fun.

  Remembering the kind of thing he should ask as a Dad: “How was school?”

  “Hayley Siegel’s sister got her period,” I replied nonchalantly.

  Dad’s face grew red. Grandfather let out a chuckle. “Heck of a school you’re sending her to.”

  I knew I’d said something funny, but I didn’t get it. Trying to change the conversation, I said, between quiet slurps, “An old black car followed me all the way home. I tried to ditch it in the alley, but it kept following.”

  Grandfather jerked around to face me. His words came out slowly, as if he were giving me stage directions. “What kind of car?”

  I knew the names of dozens of cars from watching Grandfather’s mentalism act. I’d even made my own little mnemonic to remember them. My finger made the shape of a shield. “A Buick, I think?”

  Dad looked to Grandfather, his eyes wide and his mouth slack. That was the moment I saw it. That was the moment I knew fear.

  They knew something I didn’t, and that knowledge scared them. My hand grew numb, and the chocolate milk spilled to the floor.

  2

  BLACK BUICKS AND the novelty of fear were a distant memory to me by the time I visited the Hawkton Hellmouth. By now, fear—usually not mine, but more often my own than I liked—had become a constant element of my work. Hellmouth. The word sticks in my mind. This was how one hyperbolic news site described the scene of the explosion when the first aerial footage became available. It caught on from there. Being here in person, I decide it’s a perfectly suitable name.

  There’s a gaping hole in the earth where the little church once sat. Nervous couples were married there. Crying babies baptized. Worshippers found solace in prayer. Now all those memories have disappeared into a huge maw screaming at the sky.

  Splinters of wood litter the surrounding farmland and are even lodged in the branches of the trees. It’s as if a toothpick house has been smashed under the heel of an angry giant.

  The pilot brings the helicopter higher so that the technician controlling the mounted camera and laser-ranging system can get a different point of view. I can see the screen over his shoulder; the program plotting away thousands of dots to build a 3-D map forensics will use later on to decipher what happened.

  It seems farcical to think that all this destruction can be captured into data points and emailed around like cat photos. The devastation, the emotion, the passion behind what happened—reduced to digital bits. But that’s what a detective does. We see everything as numbered lists. Dispassionate, objective, we have to turn off our emotions and focus on the facts. Truth hides in little details. My instructor at the Academy told us the first thing we have to do at a crime scene is to forget everything we’ve been told about what happened—focus on the atoms.

  “Any sign of our victims?” asks Vonda Mitchum, the lead investigator from the local Bureau office, over the radio.

  “Negative,” replies Agent Knoll from the seat next to me.

  “Try going lower,” Mitchum commands, before clicking off our channel.

  “That’s helpful,” grumbles Knoll as he presses his binoculars against the window. Muscular, compact, with a head like a prizefighter, he’s as frustrated as me with how the search is progressing.

  Five hours in and we don’t have any bodies. Traces of blood were found on a few of the planks; that’s it on the victims so far. Inside the search perimeter is a truck with blown-out windows that belonged to a man named Bear McKnight. Wedged into the side of the truck is Mr. and Mrs. Alsop’s Jeep, also with shattered glass. Reverend Curtis’s Cadillac is flipped over entirely, like a belly-up turtle in the mud.

  There are four missing persons and a potential fifth. Hawkton’s sheriff, Carson Jessup, is nowhere to be found. The nervous deputy can’t confirm if the sheriff had cause to go out to the church last night, but his SUV was
found parked a half-mile away on a dirt back road.

  “You got your map data?” I ask the young technician leaning over his plotting computer.

  “I think we got enough,” he replies.

  “Mind if we take this on a wider search pattern?” I call to the pilot.

  “Not much point,” says the pilot, Bilson, a sunburned man who was flying for the Bureau while I was in middle school. “We ran the numbers. This is the outer limit of the radius. The debris field ends fifty yards back in.”

  “I know. I understand the physics. Still . . .” I gaze out the window. Bits of the church’s white planks stick out of the brown grass and dull dirt like cat’s teeth. “But the physics isn’t telling us where the bodies are.”

  “We got another hour of fuel,” says Bilson. “Fine by me.” He turns the stick to the left and brings us into a turn. Knoll and I use our binoculars to scan the trees and fields again, hoping to find some sign of whoever was in the church.

  We don’t want them to be dead. In a perfect world, we’d find them sitting on the porch of a farmhouse drinking beer and smiling up at us, eager to tell the story of how they narrowly escaped death.

  This isn’t that world. We know there’s at least one body, or at least part of a body, to be found. Maybe three or four more, if all the missing were in the church.

  Explosions can do different things to the human form. Stand one way, and even a small yield can rip off a limb. Positioned in another, an explosion that could knock down a brick wall might just leave you with only an earache and a mild friction burn.

  But bodies usually don’t just vaporize. There’s nearly always something left. Whether in pieces that have to be picked up with tweezers or ones that can fit into a body bag, our victims are somewhere.

  The ground search is going slowly. Every square inch has to be covered in a pattern that gets exponentially larger the farther away you move from the blast. Below me, men and women in blue and yellow clean-suits comb the area for clues. Igniters, bomb components, anything that points to what happened. Even a paperclip can tell a story. They look like astronauts on an alien planet searching for signs of life.

  At first glance, the blast looks like a gas explosion. The trouble is that the church wasn’t hooked up to a gas line, and it didn’t have a tank. Laboratory analysis of the wreckage will give us a clearer picture. Traces of whatever caused the explosion are likely to have squeezed into the wood and fabric of the church. The charred debris can be chemically analyzed to reveal what outside substances were absorbed in the reaction.

  The clues are here—at least the clues to what happened physically. But they don’t explain how or why.

  We have an explosion, but no victims. Just traces. Something tells me there’s more to this than just a bomb or a gas explosion.

  “Robin 2, why are you going out of the flight pattern?” demands Mitchum on the radio, like a scolding teacher.

  “We’ve decided to extend the search radius,” I reply.

  “Under whose authority, Agent Blackwood?”

  Knoll lowers his binoculars and raises his eyebrows. He mouths the words, “Now you did it.”

  “Occam’s.”

  Vonda Mitchum is the lead investigator, but not our supervisor. We are assisting because it’s crucial to get as much information as possible in the first forty-eight hours. While the helicopter is certainly under her control, treating Knoll and me like underlings is a step beyond what is appropriate.

  I decide to cut her a little slack. Obviously she’s under pressure. “I apologize for the deviation. I wanted to get another angle and see if there was anything outside the radius.”

  “The radius is a radius for a reason. Unless you don’t believe in physics, or think the victims walked out of there,” replies Mitchum.

  “I don’t think they walked . . .” I ignore her sarcasm.

  “You think this looks familiar?” she says, almost as a challenge.

  This is her case, and it could be a big one. She’s afraid I’m going to take it away from her by tying it into my previous major investigation. The last time I was involved in murder on such a spectacular scale, the perpetrator had been a man who liked to make his crimes look like impossibilities.

  “No. I just think if you can’t find something where you expect to, you might want to look elsewhere.”

  “You’re wasting resources, Blackwood. Have the pilot return to the LZ.”

  “Hold up,” says Knoll. He points out his window to a pale object in a tree.

  I train my binoculars on where he’s indicating. Something, or someone, is entangled in the branches. I see what looks like bare skin wrapped in foliage.

  “Can you zoom in on that?” I ask the technician in the front seat.

  He aims the high-powered camera at the tree and brings it into focus on his laptop screen. There’s a vague outline of what could be a body.

  We all feel that sick sensation in the pit of our stomach. What hope we had for a happy ending is gone.

  “Looks like our first victim,” I grimly reply. There’s a flicker of guilt through my conscience as I confirm the bad news. Until now, we could still hold on to that version of reality in which they are sitting on that porch, waving at us. Now it’s gone. “Send that to Mitchum, and don’t forget to include the GPS coordinates.”

  “Do you have to rub things in?” asks Knoll.

  “I don’t mean to.”

  At least, I don’t think I do.

  3

  BEAR MCKNIGHT’S NAKED body is dangling upside down from the upper branches of the elm tree, almost thirty feet in the air. A deep gouge in his shoulder has bled out onto the ground below. His eyes are wide open, gazing at heaven above. Across his chest are smears of blood. They remind me of a child’s finger painting.

  Special Agent Vonda Mitchum stands outside of the hastily erected perimeter and directs the photographer. Her blond hair tucked under her FBI cap, she taps away on her tablet as Knoll and I approach.

  “Who spotted him?” asks Mitchum.

  I point my thumb at Knoll. “Eagle-eyes over here.”

  “Good work, Knoll.” She nods to him, then turns back to her screen.

  “Blackwood was the one who said we should look over here,” replies Knoll.

  I give him a sharp look. All that matters is that we found our first victim because we extended the search perimeter. I don’t need him rubbing my defiance in Mitchum’s face.

  “I’m asking our physicist why he got the blast radius wrong,” says Mitchum. “We would have figured it out eventually.”

  “They didn’t get it wrong,” I reply, hesitantly, unsure if I should bite back my words. “There’s no other debris around here. Just this poor bastard.”

  Mitchum puts away her tablet. “You’re saying he was placed here?”

  “I’m saying he’s here. The debris isn’t. Somehow he got here outside of the blast zone.” I point to where the chunk was taken from his neck. “He may have survived the blast, but I doubt he climbed up here without his carotid artery.”

  Mitchum shrugs and calls into her radio for the bucket truck we’re using to pick debris out of the trees. In the field just beyond, two techs have finally managed to get the aerial drone working so it can take over for the helicopter. Knoll and I search the earth around the tree for clues.

  “Any bets that we’re going to find the other four bodies at equidistant points from the blast and each other?” whispers Knoll.

  “It’s not him,” I say sharply, hoping he’s wrong.

  “He’s in jail . . . but he has friends.”

  “He’s not Voldemort,” I retort. “He has a name.”

  “The Warlock,” says Knoll.

  “No. Heywood.”

  “That’s an alias.”

  “It’s a man’s name. Not some super-villain title from
a comic book. He’s in jail in Texas awaiting trial. You know this because since we caught him, we’ve spent more time in depositions than actually solving crimes,” I reply tersely. “This has nothing to do with him.”

  “I never said it did.”

  “You implied the other bodies might form a pentagram, insinuating he was involved.”

  Knoll holds up his hands. “All I suggested was a pentagram.”

  I roll my eyes. “And I guess the logical conclusion you’re suggesting is that Ozzy Osbourne did it?”

  Knoll lets out a sigh. “Wouldn’t this search be easier for you if you did it from your broom?”

  “I’m armed,” I growl

  “So am . . .” Knoll reflexively reaches for his holster to make sure I haven’t pickpocketed his gun. I’ve only done that to him once or twice, but that was enough. He finds it on his hip and shakes his head. “And you wonder why you don’t have many friends.”

  I give him a half smile and keep walking as I think about what he just said. It’s a joke between colleagues, but it stings because it has the worst possible element of a burn: a kernel of truth.

  We come to a stop in front of a large elm tree, similar to the one in which Knoll spotted McKnight. The first branch is about five feet off the ground. At the base of the branch there’s a moist crack, as if someone recently put weight on it and then let up when it began to break.

  Knoll sees this and whistles to one of the agents holding the tape and sticks we use to rope off areas for close-up inspection. We pen the tree around the outside the radius of its furthest branches.

  “Vantage point?” asks Knoll.

  I shake my head. “I think whoever placed McKnight in the tree may have taken a first attempt here. When the branch started to break, he tried over there.”

  Knoll nods. “Carried or pulled?”

  “I couldn’t guess. The autopsy will show us markings suggesting one or the other. Infrared can spot internal bruising under the skin.”

  “What if they come up empty?”