Angel Killer Read online

  I heard the name a few days ago. Someone had managed to take our website offline and redirect the URL to another website. Not the same as actually hacking our internal computer system, but still a serious security lapse. The page that came up was a series of numbers and the name “Warlock.”

  The hack was pretty big news and caused all kinds of panic and embarrassment. Other than that, I didn’t realize it was this much of an area of concern. For all I know, someone just used a bad password and it wasn’t some large-scale brute force hack. “I don’t understand. This is a computer crimes case. That’s not my area.”

  Ailes nods his head. “It was a computer crime until two hours ago, when we unlocked the code.” There’s a pause. This code isn’t a joke. I can already tell from the tone that there is something more sinister in play.

  “The numbers were encrypted GPS coordinates. We sent local police to the point on the map. We were expecting some kind of hacker stunt. None of us expected this. Hackers don’t do this kind of thing. But the code led us to a body. Now it’s a murder investigation.”

  “I’m in forensic accounting. What does this have to do with me?”

  “I could go into the complexity of the code and why the FBI should be throwing more resources into this, but that’s not your concern. I brought you here because of the body.”

  “The body?”

  “It’s an impossibility. A puzzle. A mystery we can’t solve,” he replies. “The kind of thing you’d need a magician to understand.”

  I shake my head. I’m still not sure I get it.

  Ailes continues, “The problem is, the person we’ve identified as the victim is supposed to have died almost two years ago. But the body is only hours old. You get my drift? A magical mystery at the moment. Complicated by the suspect’s intentions. He calls himself a warlock. Another word for a necromancer. Someone who can raise the dead. In twenty-four hours, the news is going to get ahold of this. Short of having him in custody, we need to figure out how he did it. We’re already dealing with the blowback of the hacking. To the public, he defeated the security of the most advanced law enforcement agency in the world. Granted, that was just a public Web server. But it doesn’t matter. He left us a code that told us where to find the victim before she was killed. He knew almost to the minute how long it would take us to break the code.”

  “But she was already dead?”

  “We don’t know what to think. It’s unprecedented. And I’m sure this is only the start.”

  I still don’t know what I can do. I shake my head. “This sounds like a forensic matter.”

  “Can you pull a card from behind my ear or make all the aces come to the top of the deck of cards?”

  It’s an odd question. “Yes. Of course.”

  “If I sent that deck of cards to the forensic lab, what would they tell me?”

  I understand what he’s saying. Maybe they’d find a few fingerprints and creases, but that’s not enough. The real answers are in the mind of the magician. In other hands, those cards are just thick pieces of paper.

  He slides the magazine toward his end of the table and flips it open to a page with a yellow Post-it note. “You said in the interview that you like to be fooled by something firsthand, rather than have someone describe it to you?”

  “Yes, that way you might think of possibilities nobody else thought about before.” Magic works by misleading expectations. You assume the hand is empty or the box doesn’t have a false bottom. Magicians can be just as easily fooled. We assume the awkward hand at the performer’s side is hiding something or the thick table has a trap door.

  Ailes nods. “Well, let’s test your theory. I won’t spoil you with what we know. If you’re game?”

  “Game for what?”

  “I want to spring you from the paper jungle and let you work on this. I want to send you out into the field with the team. But I want your raw experience. I don’t need another FBI agent. I need a magician. The Warlock is trying to convince us that he’s the genuine article. He wants us to believe he’s created a miracle.”

  I look down at the folder. I’ve never worked a homicide. “I’m not sure this is my area.”

  “Maybe not. We just want your eyes and brains. Agents, we have plenty. Magicians, I have only one.”

  He’s been working me all along. He knows I’ve been trying to put all of that behind me. The magic, the family drama, all of those other connections I’ve been trying to sever.

  This would mean revisiting that. It means bringing a part of my past I want to forget about in front of my peers. They’ll know about the magazine and everything that goes with it. They’ll think they know me.

  Pride wants me to refuse. The scared girl that had to learn how to shut down overbearing males wants me to tell him to drop dead.

  But I didn’t become a cop because of ego. I did it for a lot of reasons. The most important one is that when I see something wrong, I need to do something to make it right, no matter the personal sacrifice. No matter the ridicule. No matter what the people who are supposed to love you say.

  “Sure,” I reply. Part of me wonders if it’s my sense of justice that said yes or my ego refusing to accept that I can be fooled.

  “Excellent. We have a plane leaving in twenty minutes from the airfield. There’s a seat on it for you. We’re sending some of our forensic people out there to assist the Michigan office.”

  “Excuse me? Plane? Michigan? Twenty minutes?”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t get them to hold the plane any longer. They want to get there before nightfall. We have only a few hours before they begin the excavation. Everyone is onboard waiting for you.”

  “Excavation?”

  Ailes puts a finger to his lips. “Let’s not spoil anything. I think you’ll do your best if you form your own thoughts. Just remember, as per the assistant director’s suggestion, you’re only there as an adviser. Still up for it?”

  I agree, but feel like it was a setup all along to get me to say yes.

  4

  TWENTY MINUTES AGO I was in Ailes’s office. Now I’m sitting in the last row of an FBI jet flying toward Michigan. Six other agents, specialists in forensics, are in front of me making small talk about baseball games and what colleges their kids are applying to. I don’t know any of them or have anything to offer the conversation. I was given polite smiles as I boarded the jet, but that was the extent of things. They look like a closed group. I get the impression they weren’t too thrilled about being kept on the tarmac for me. Explaining it wasn’t my fault is pointless.

  After the seat belt sign is off, I take a trip to the rear lavatory to try to freshen myself up. At least that’s what I pretend to myself I’m doing. The rear section of seats has been ripped out to make way for several large containers of equipment. I want to get a look at them to at least get an idea of what we’re heading into. I know I could just ask someone, but I don’t want my cluelessness to get back to Ailes, much less show the others here how out of the loop I really am. Nobody needs to know how out of place I am. They’ll figure that out for themselves soon enough.

  MY GRANDFATHER, my father and my uncle would perform mentalism as part of their acts—pretending to read someone’s mind. If you wanted an example of their different personalities, watching them try to do the same thing was illuminating.

  During an interview, Grandfather would excuse himself to use the restroom and flirt with the coat check girl so he could rifle through a reporter’s jacket for ticket stubs, receipts, sometimes even a lover’s note. Father liked gimmicks. They were safe. He’d slip a credit card carbon under a notepad and have you write down a word, then crumple the paper. He’d take the notepad back and look for the impression when nobody was watching. Uncle Darius took a different approach. Purely analytical. He’d look at your shoes, your wedding band. He’d watch what you ate, then he’d make a deduction. It’d be phrased like a question if it was a miss. His technique was similar to those of psychics. He could tell in a glance
if your dog nipped at your shoes or if your five-year-old spilled ketchup on your tie.

  Grandfather would have the most stunning revelations. Father would have the most practical. Uncle Darius was the only one who really seemed to see right into people.

  He tried to teach me how to see too. Sometimes I think he taught me too well. But it was this skill that made me think I had a chance as a cop. I couldn’t go around making tigers appear to stop bank robbers. But seeing what was in front of me, drawing conclusions that others were oblivious to, that was a useful skill. I guess that’s what made Hashimi stand out as the Greenville Killer.

  I move past the containers and look at the labels. Only one is visible. It’s a ground penetrating radar system I’d read about in some briefing. Not the old kind they have at field offices, but the new experimental one that can resolve high-resolution images through concrete. This is military-grade.

  Interesting.

  It was a pipe dream until 9/11. After that, nobody thought it would be silly to spend a hundred million dollars developing machines to look through several tons of rubble for bodies. I can assume the other cases probably contain field versions of equipment we have back at the labs or more experimental gear.

  I splash some water on my face and try not to look at myself in the mirror. It doesn’t matter how many people tell you that you look great without makeup, you still notice. Seeing my face from a decade ago on that magazine didn’t help either. I’m still fit from jogging and yoga and get hit on by college guys, but I know youth is a diminishing asset. I’m afraid there’s going to be a point when I start counting the compliments and the looks that I now ignore and feel bad when they come up shorter than before.

  After I broke up with my last boyfriend I caught myself looking on his online profile to see if his new girlfriend was younger than me. She wasn’t. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

  As I find my way back to my seat, I think about what I’ve seen on the plane and what I know so far. Body. Ground radar. Not much. The bureau is taking this very seriously. The stunt with the website must have rattled them. It’s not often you get someone capable of doing something like that as well as pulling off a murder. Semi-smart computer types try to hire outside help. They think it’s something you order like an Uber. That’s why they get caught.

  Most killers have a below-average IQ. Even serial killers. Movies like to make them out to be cunning masterminds, but most of them would fail a fifth-grade math test. They fit into the category of disorganized killers. They don’t set out to kill their victims, they just end up murdering them out of some violent impulse. It could be motivated by shame in the middle of a sexual act. A feeling of insecurity. Violence is a way for them to try to assert control. It’s usually messy and unplanned.

  The rarer kind, the organized killers, are the ones who tend to be smarter than the average person. The Unabomber is a textbook example of that. His targets were chosen well in advance and his method, a bomb, was designed to allow him to murder from far away. Bombers tend to be the highest-IQ killers you come across. It takes intense planning and discipline. Of course that could be self-selecting. The dumb bombers usually only end up killing themselves.

  Less premeditated, but intelligent and opportunist, are killers like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, who were almost in plain sight. They knew enough to stay ahead of suspicion. And when it fell on them, they were so much cleverer than the average killer, the usual rules didn’t apply to catching them.

  Understanding the difference between criminal minds is at the core of FBI behavioral analysis. But being able to describe someone isn’t the same as being able to catch them or really understand them.

  A criminology professor once shared with us a disturbing statistic. He plotted out the average IQ scores of various professions. He drew a circle around law enforcement: 104. Above average, but not by much. He then explained the amount of deviation from this number was very small and the chances of someone with an IQ in the 150 or genius range working in this field are almost infinitesimal.

  If you throw five hundred law enforcement officers after one highly organized killer, statistically speaking not one of them is going to be as smart as him. When you’re dealing with someone like the Unabomber, not one in ten thousand.

  The key, he reminded us, wasn’t being smarter. It’s being persistent. It was logic. Smarter isn’t always an advantage. You could beat a Doberman in a battle of wits on Jeopardy!, but not if you’re locked in a room with one.

  Generally, you catch the less intelligent, disorganized killers because they screw up and get caught with a body in the trunk or their intended victim manages to escape. They leave lots of forensic evidence that makes it easy to connect them to their crime.

  Organized killers take much longer to find. You have to decipher their patterns and you can often spend years narrowing down suspects. Sniffing them out like a dog in a hunt. Ted Bundy’s name cropped up lots of times as a potential suspect, along with hundreds of other names. There’s no way to know which one is the real bad guy until you get a lucky break. With the Unabomber, it came because he wanted the world to hear his manifesto. It was his estranged brother who saw the connection. The physical evidence didn’t lead us to him, his ego did. The manifesto was his scent.

  At first glance, the Warlock is all ego. The attention we’re giving to this asshole is starting to make a little more sense to me. Only one presumed victim, but he’s shown himself equally adept at two areas of crime that take high IQs. He hacked one of the most well-protected networks in the world, and he committed what looks like a highly organized murder.

  I flip through the folder Ailes gave me. Just a few sheets of paper summarizing the website hack. The GPS coordinate was encrypted with a key that took the FBI’s code-cruncher computer a week to crack.

  A note from Ailes points out that the Warlock knew how long it would take because the body was only hours old in the spot when they found it. He’s underlined the words “extremely organized.”

  Not “highly.”

  Extremely.

  This sends a chill down my spine. Ailes is suggesting what my professor had talked about, that this man could be smarter than any of us.

  I remind myself that anybody with a subscription to Wired magazine could make a guess at how long it would take to tie up the computer, and the defacement wasn’t anything that hasn’t been seen before, but this in a way makes it more disconcerting. This may not have been done by a computer expert at all, but by someone who is smart enough to pick up the skills on the side to make a point.

  Computer hacking is beyond me, so I focus on the facts I’ve been told. There’s the fresh body of a young woman who’s supposed to have been dead for two years. Some sicko calling himself the Warlock hacked a website and the forensic team has brought along a ground radar system that costs as much as this jet.

  Maybe I do know something.

  I unbuckle my seat belt and stand up. I call out to a redheaded woman in an FBI parka who’s standing in the aisle, drinking a cup of coffee and talking to another woman, “How far away is the cemetery from the airport?”

  She replies in a polite Southern accent. “About a half hour, darling.”

  So we’re headed to a cemetery. There’s no point in high-fiving myself for something everybody else already knew. I guess it should have been obvious. If you’re going to raise the dead, you might as well go to the source.

  5

  TWO SUVS ARE WAITING for us at the airfield. Danielle, the sweet redhead, finds an FBI jacket in an overhead bin and hands it to me as I exit the plane. On the ride to the cemetery I answer a few of her polite questions. Nobody is talking about where we’re going. The driver, a special agent out of the field office named Shannon, tells us we’re going to get a briefing at the location.

  He looks to be in his late thirties. He’s got a muscular build and a shaved head. His eyes occasionally flicker back at me from the rearview mirror. He’s asked me twice who assigned me he
re. I explain that I’ve been sent as an adviser, but decline to explain why. I already feel out of place.

  The sun has gone down and the sky is filled with dark, slate-colored clouds. Drab houses with lawns of yellow weeds give way to concrete and corrugated-metal buildings set back in cracked black asphalt and gravel yards. There’s a light rain that makes the roads slick. We pass through a bend in the road, and the red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles parked on either side come into view. Two television news trucks are across the street with their microwave masts pointed to their towers back near the city.

  The cemetery is in an industrial area. There are a few open fields and lots of neglected warehouses. A sheriff’s deputy in a yellow raincoat uses his flashlight to direct us to a parking spot. We get out and I help Danielle and the rest of the team with their cases. Shannon does the same and we carry them to the iron gates at the entrance.

  Reporters and onlookers are standing behind the ropes trying to get a glance as we pull up. Cameras flash when they see our jackets. The FBI is here.

  Wet and gloomy, the air has a cold nip to it. Perfect cemetery weather. I’m grateful for the jacket Danielle found me. Besides being warm, with “FBI” written across the back in bold yellow letters, it’ll let me fit in a little more than I would in just my hoodie and jeans.

  At the gate, a detective named Gimbal wearing a drenched suit and tie introduces himself to Shannon. He fumbles with his umbrella to shake hands. “These your D.C. folks?”

  Shannon nods. “Pretty much.”

  I’m not sure if that was directed at me or not. I just keep to the back and focus on helping. When Grandfather was in a rage, or Father in a manic mood, I just did what Uncle Darius did, move a piece of equipment or clean something.

  The detective glances at our faces, then nods. A thick black mustache almost covers his mouth. He looks like a charter boat captain. “All right. Hurry up. Gladys can’t wait to get the girl on the table.”