Name of the Devil Page 3

  “I’ll worry about that when it happens. Or rather, Mitchum will.” It’s her case, after all.

  We duck as the drone flies overhead. It weaves through the trees at high speed and vanishes into the woods. Inside a control trailer sitting on the side of the road, a technician watches the live feed from its camera for the other victims. It’s a morbid video game.

  An hour later, three more bodies have been found: Those of the Alsops and Reverend Curtis. Sheriff Jessup is still a no-show. I don’t let on to Knoll how relieved I am that the bodies were not found in anything that looks like an intentionally symmetrical pattern; I can tell he has been watching my reaction out of the corner of his eye. The tension releases from my neck muscles the moment we’re certain of that. We don’t need a replay of what happened before. There are already enough loose ends.

  Like McKnight, our other victims are found upside down and naked in the trees. After Mitchum vanishes to inspect the other victims, Knoll and I hop into the bucket to look at McKnight up close.

  From the ground it’s hard to see anything other than his pale skin, crusted blood covering his body and part of his face. Up close, we can see scratch marks and bruises: The signs of struggle.

  The worst part is the lingering scent of melted body hair. Burns on his skin prove that he’s been close to an intense source of heat, most likely an explosion. Bits of fabric are singed into his skin, suggesting he’d been clothed when the church ignited.

  “At least we know they weren’t nudists,” replies Knoll, eyeing a scrap of denim welded to McKnight’s left thigh.

  Something about the blood smears on McKnight’s chest is odd. They appear haphazard at first, the kind of marks someone might make in a state of shock when they repeatedly touch their body. As I stare at them, though, they seem intentional. But there’s no obvious pattern. I take a photo to look at later.

  Knoll nudges me, then points to the man’s forehead. There’s a smear of ash above McKnight’s nose, almost obscured by blood.

  I radio Mitchum. “Which victim are you looking at?”

  “Mrs. Alsop.”

  “Is there ash on her forehead?”

  “Blackwood, is this a joke? There was an explosion. Of course there’s ash.”

  I push my head past the protective bars of the lift to get a closer look at McKnight’s face. The whole bucket arm begins to sway in the breeze. Knoll grabs the rail and groans.

  I push the talk button on my radio, “On the forehead. It’s hard to see on McKnight because of the blood from the scalp. But it looks like there’s ash under the blood. Like a cross. Does Mrs. Alsop have the same marking?”

  “Hold on,” says Mitchum. There’s a long pause. “Affirmative. But they were in a church, after all.”

  “They’re not Catholics, and this wasn’t Ash Wednesday. This is the kind of thing someone does to ward off evil spirits.”

  “You’re saying they were afraid of something evil happening?” Mitchum is dubious.

  “I’m saying they were afraid, and obviously something very bad did happen.”

  Mitchum doesn’t respond.

  I put my radio back in its holster and look again at McKnight’s chest. There’s something deliberate about the bloody daubs there. On my phone, I pull up the image and flip it to how it would look right-side up. It still doesn’t ring any bells.

  Knoll watches over my shoulder. “Think it’s something?”

  “Maybe. Either way, it doesn’t look random.”

  “It could have happened when he was moved.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.” I notice McKnight’s left index finger is covered in blood. “Check this out,” I say, pointing.

  “He used his own blood to write the symbol? All right, maybe it does mean something.”

  “But what? Hold on.” I sit on the edge of the rail and lean back, my feet tucked behind the lower guard. A ground technician stares up at me as I dangle over the edge of the lift.

  “You’re a goddamn circus ape,” exclaims Knoll as he grabs my ankles.

  Upside down, staring up at the sky, I see the world as a dying Bear McKnight did. If he wanted to write on his chest to tell us something, he would go from left to right. I pull myself back into the lift, to Knoll’s relief, and take out my phone. Using the rotate button, I spin the image two more times. When the lines are going in the correct direction, it starts looking like something familiar. A runny, bloody mess, but one I latch on to. I remember from school that the letter “A” is supposed to be a sideways ox or something. An aleph. One way it’s an “A,” another and it’s an animal. This isn’t an ox, though.

  “Is there a Hebrew keyboard on these phones?” I ask. The aleph is still a widely used symbol in Hebrew. Before Knoll can answer, I find it hidden in the settings menu. I look for the closest match to the symbols on his chest, and type them into a search engine. Of course, the results are all in Hebrew and make no sense to me. Well, duh. I’m not sure what I was expecting.

  “Check the image search,” offers Knoll.

  I pull up the first image associated with the letters, and a ghoulish face stares back at me.

  The letters spell out a word.

  The name of a demon.

  4

  “SO YOUR THEORY is that these people were killed by a demon?” Vonda Mitchum looks up from the image I just showed her and turns to Knoll as if I’m invisible.

  “No,” I insist, ignoring her slight. “I’m saying McKnight traced this on his chest, in his own blood, before he died.”

  “It looks like gibberish to me.” She points to the upside-down body.

  “That’s because it’s upside-down Hebrew letters, which are of course written right to left.”

  “Turn it another way and I’m sure you’ll find a different random match.” She hands the phone back to me.

  “In what? Klingon?”

  “I think it’s random,” she says. “You’re trying to make something fit.”

  “If it was the name of the 1986 NBA Championship team, I’d still think it’s relevant,” I reply.

  “You’re not pinning this on Larry Bird,” interjects Knoll, trying to diffuse the tension.

  “Men,” Mitchum and I say at the same time. She cracks a smile. The awkwardness between us is broken briefly.

  The spontaneous moment changes my mood. “Listen, I know it’s nutty. I know it’s out of left field. But these people were in a church, and maybe they were performing some kind of ceremony. I think it’s worth noting.”

  “Noted.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Agent Blackwood, I’ll put it in my case notes. All right?” It’s her way of making a compromise.

  “And the broken branch?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” She forces a smile and walks back to the forensic technicians working on the tree where Mrs. Alsop was found.

  Although she was found like McKnight, there are no symbols on Mrs. Alsop. Knoll stands back and studies her outstretched hands.

  “Know what it looks like?”

  “Upside-down crucifixion. Isn’t that what they did to you when you were a really, really awful person?”

  Knoll checks his watch. “It’s what my wife is going to do to me if I don’t get back before the kids head to school in the morning.”

  “You’re leaving tonight?” I ask.

  “While you were obsessing over that image, they released us. I got a desk full of kidnappings to look over. You got work too.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Leave it to Mitchum. She doesn’t make the same leaps as you. But she’s methodical. You need a ride?”

  “I’ll catch one tomorrow in the van. I want to watch the debrief tonight.”

  Knoll rolls his eyes. “Leave some work for the rest of us.”

  THREE HOURS LATER, after grabbing a t
una sandwich at a convenience store and switching blouses in the bathroom, I’m sitting in the back row of the county civic auditorium as Mitchum lays out what we’ve learned so far to a roomful of local law enforcement and agents from the West Virginia Bureau of Investigation, ATF, local FBI, as well as the remaining stragglers from DC and Quantico, like me.

  She’s a confident speaker. A bit monotonous, perhaps to cover up a fear of not being taken seriously, but still authoritative. “We believe the time of the blast was around ten at night. The damage initially looks similar to that caused by a gas explosion. The blast pushed out all parts of the structure equally. Although no tank or pipeline has been found, it could well be the case that there’s a gas cylinder we haven’t found, sitting in a field somewhere, that went ballistic.

  “We’ve found four victims so far. Their vehicles were parked outside of the church. Some of them show burns and other postmortem trauma indicating proximity to the blast. It’s still unclear if they were inside or outside the church when it happened.

  “Preliminary cause of death for all the victims seem to be the explosion, although there are anomalous signs of trauma that make this suspect. We’re awaiting autopsy results.

  “While it’s too early to say whether this was accidental or intentional, much less infer a motive, the presence of Sheriff Jessup’s vehicle nearby does suggest there might be something to look into. In the last eighteen months there have been two explosive-related attacks on local law enforcement nationwide. We’re looking into the possibility that Jessup may have been the intended target here. WVBI is going through court records and cross-referencing them with possible suspects.

  “Again, let me emphasize this could still be an accidental explosion. We expect more information tomorrow when we get the preliminary autopsy report. I’ve emailed you a document detailing all of the evidence we’ve accumulated so far.”

  As Mitchum takes a question from a WVBI agent about jurisdiction, I pull up the evidence log on my laptop. For expediency’s sake, she’s indexed inclusions by agent name.

  I find mine and see my photograph of the symbol on McKnight’s chest. There’s no mention of the other tree and its broken branch. I pull up Knoll’s notes. There’s nothing there either, but I give her the benefit of the doubt. The information is still very recent and there hasn’t been a chance to catalog everything.

  However, on the crime-scene map where numbers cross-reference specific locations with what was found there, McKnight’s tree is clearly annotated—but not the other tree. She left it out intentionally.

  The tree with the broken branch could be crucial. We have no idea what happened, let alone what’s important and what isn’t. Leaving it out as an oversight is sloppiness. Leaving it out to spite me is incompetence.

  I wait for Mitchum to call the briefing to a close, then approach her at the lectern. She’s going through a binder with a local case supervisor.

  “Agent Mitchum?”

  “Yes, Blackwood,” she replies without looking up.

  “The damaged branch Knoll and I found. I don’t see that in the evidence log.”

  “It’s a large forest, Blackwood. We don’t have the ability to cover every fallen leaf or disturbed bird’s nest.”

  I ignore her tone. “I understand that. But everyone in this room knows this wasn’t an accident. The body placement rules that out.”

  “We can’t assume anything.”

  “There could be something else critical there, like fibers.”

  “The tree isn’t going away,” she replies.

  It feels pointless to mention to her that any evidence could deteriorate, or get carried away by wildlife. The potential for crime-scene contamination alone already makes admissibility a challenge.

  She gives me another of her forced smiles. “I included your devil theory.”

  There’s something behind her statement that I don’t trust. According to this entire preliminary report, my one contribution was saying the bloody smears on McKnight’s chest kind of, sort of, look like the name of a demon in Hebrew. No mention of my pushing to extend the search parameter. No mention of that possible first tree and what it might mean.

  Vonda Mitchum is writing me off as a crackpot. In the final report, I’ll literally be chasing ghosts.

  I walk away before I say something that will get me in trouble. Field FBI agents take their jobs seriously and don’t like interlopers telling them how to do things, any more than anyone else would. And I get it. Being from FBI headquarters doesn’t necessarily make you more of an expert than someone who has spent twenty years in the field. In fact, some would argue that being so close to bureaucracy can make you ignorant of the real world.

  I don’t blame Mitchum for being suspicious of an outsider’s motives. I do blame her for trying to excise me from the report for the sole purpose of making me look bad.

  In the parking lot I take a deep breath of twilight air and try to calm myself. Mitchum has a million things to worry about. There’s no agenda, I reassure myself. Although I suspect she’s trying to make this her career case at my expense.

  I don’t care about a pat on the back. Just ask Knoll about the Warlock case. I made the key breaks, but I insisted he get the credit for his direction. All I want is to get the bad guys. It’s why I became a cop. It’s not for the paperwork, or the paper commendations. It’s to make the world right.

  A raindrop falls on my crossed arms. I watch the water soak into the fabric of my jacket. Another falls.

  It’s going to rain.

  It’s going to rain, and whatever evidence that may be on that tree could be washed away.

  It’s dark. It’s cold. The other agents and cops are running to their cars to get home or back to their hotels.

  The one coworker I’d trust to follow me on a stupid quest has just gone home.

  I groan.

  I’m going to have to do this alone.

  5

  THUNDERCLOUDS RUMBLE OVERHEAD as I hop out of a borrowed motor pool car and run across the meadow to the line of trees where we found McKnight. His body and the tree limb he was found on were removed hours ago. A solitary work light and generator keep vigil over the plastic-covered tree, which looks like some kind of alien artifact. The crime scene that isn’t a crime scene, according to Mitchum, is a few hundred feet away in the shadows. My feet slip in the wet grass as I try to beat the downpour, and I almost land on my ass.

  My tree is somewhere in the woods, but there’s enough glow in the sky to find it. I try to put on my clean-suit as I run so I don’t contaminate the scene. If I do find anything, I don’t want some forensic tech pulling one of my long black hairs out of an evidence bag.

  I reach the base of the tree and slip my feet into the booties that are supposed to keep me from tracking in outside dirt. The second-lowest branch, the one that isn’t broken, is a few inches higher. I leap for it, and muscles I haven’t used since high school gym start to ache. Yoga didn’t prepare me for this.

  Somehow, I pull myself onto the second branch and steady myself against the trunk in a crouch. My slick slippers want to glide right off the wet surface. They aren’t meant for climbing.

  I feel like a damn space monkey.

  My theory is that whoever put McKnight’s body in the tree tried this one first. Maybe even getting all the way to the top before realizing this tree wasn’t going to work.

  If they abandoned this tree, they might not have cared as much about tidying up after themselves. It’s a leap. A diligent criminal would check for prints, fibers, and any other clues. Fortunately, most of them aren’t that smart.

  Rain trickles down through the leaves. I pull my flashlight from my pocket and place it in my mouth so I can hold on for dear life with both hands. Besides the pain, I don’t think I could handle the professional embarrassment if someone found me unconscious from a fall.

 
The first thing I look for is drops of blood on the branches and leaves. A big guy like McKnight might not have gone down without a struggle. Our killer could have been bleeding from his own wound and not had the time to bandage it, or use a towel to clean the path he took up here.

  My light casts a glowing cone in the rain. Nothing jumps out at me. I climb up to the next branch and focus my attention on the path our bad guy would have likely taken to carry McKnight, or to haul him up with a rope.

  I spot another broken branch by my elbow. At least I know now that our climber made it higher than the first limb. I lean in to have a closer look.

  My phone rings.

  Now? When you’re a cop, you don’t get the luxury of pushing all your calls until later.

  I unzip my clean-suit and pull the phone out, fumbling to keep my grasp on the tree and not let go of my light as I move it from my mouth to my free hand. “Hello?”

  “Jessica?” replies a familiar voice.

  “Grandfather?” This is a surprise. We haven’t talked in a long time. Things in my family are awkward. I spoke to him and my father briefly a few months ago, when I was in the hospital, but I had been too busy to deal with the drama of their presence.

  “Are you busy?” he asks.

  The ground twenty feet below begs for closer contact, the wind makes secret plans with the rain to send me flying and a branch is getting very fresh with my ass. “A little . . .”

  “I’m going to be in your neck of the woods in a few days. I’d like to talk.”

  My neck of the woods . . .

  There’s something about his voice. Grandfather is an imposing man. He has the elocution of a classically trained Shakespearean actor with the stage presence to match. But now I detect a trace of vulnerability. Vulnerability and that old bastard are two things that never go together. “Is everything all right?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait until we talk in person.”

  “Okay. Let me know when you’re in town and we’ll do lunch.”

  “Very good . . . Jessica, I love you.”