Name of the Devil Page 4

  I don’t think I’ve heard my grandfather ever say that to an adult my entire life. Is something wrong? Or is he just getting old? Sentimental?

  Sentimental? No. It has to be the scotch.

  This isn’t the time to reflect. I clumsily try to push my phone back into my pocket, forgetting that it’s under the clean-suit, and miss. The glowing screen falls from the sky like a meteor.

  “Damn it!”

  I make a vain effort to grab the phone in midair and slide forward. One foot slips off the tree limb and I find myself hanging from a branch with one hand, like the world’s worst motivational poster.

  “Nice,” I scold myself.

  I’ve been hung upside down in straitjackets. Pushed off bridges in packing cases. Suspended by invisible wires. This is just one more stupid stunt.

  I switch hands and move the flashlight back to my mouth. My phone stares up at me from the ground. Magically still functional after the fall, it could die from water damage at any moment.

  Hand over hand, I pull myself back to relative safety. That’s when I see it.

  Dull orange. Just the faintest hint of a tread.

  Not on a branch. This is on the trunk.

  Someone tried to pull him or herself up and put a foot here to gain purchase. Flexing the heel of the shoe is probably what released the mud caked in the treads of the sole.

  Red drips trail from the pattern as it melts away. Raindrops are dissolving the print. A clue is vanishing before my eyes.

  I told Mitchum to pay attention to this tree. But there’s no victory lap if I have nothing to show.

  I can’t take a photo because my camera is in the car and my phone is on the ground. So I reach into the clean-suit to dig inside my pocket, and pull out a gas receipt and plastic bag. Well, I’m half prepared. Using the receipt as a blotter, I push it down over the tread to get an impression and then slide it into the evidence pouch.

  I scrape some more mud from the print into another pouch before wrapping the trunk with the sheet of plastic wrap I saved from my sandwich.

  Back on planet earth, my phone goes off again. It makes a garbled sound as water splashes over the speaker.

  Pelting raindrops shoot at me almost horizontally, telling me to get out of the tree. I scurry down and pick up the phone before it kicks over to voicemail.

  “How’s it going?” asks Knoll.

  “Wet and painful.” I crook the phone in my shoulder and rub my sore hands.

  This catches him off guard. “Um . . . Yeah, so you hear the latest?”

  “The latest latest? I’ve been up a tree.”

  “Ah, got it.” My wet-and-painful comment finally making sense to him. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  Thunder pounds in the distance. I cling to the trunk of the tree.

  “What’s that sound?” asks Knoll.

  “Weather. What’d you hear?” I struggle to push my hair back to its tie. Wet strands cling to my face in defiance.

  “McKnight’s shoulder wound? Someone took a munch out of his neck.”

  “He was bitten?”

  “Downright chowed-on.”

  “Yikes. Human?”

  “Oh, yeah. It gets better.”

  “How better?”

  “Dental match.”

  “Who?”

  “Well it isn’t your prime suspect, Beelzebub.”

  “Who?” I repeat.

  “Sheriff Jessup.”

  “Christ.”

  “The still-missing, as in might-be-on-the-run, Sheriff Jessup. He’s our main suspect right now. It looks like we have a murder.”

  “Lord.” A shiver runs down my back.

  “You read the bio on that guy?”

  “Briefly.”

  “He’s a tough son-of-a-bitch. I pity the poor fools running around those woods with our three-hundred-pound, flesh-eating, redneck zombie on the loose.”

  “Yeah . . . fools,” I reply, glancing over my shoulder into the blackness of the forest. I reflexively pat my pistol under my clean-suit.

  “So, Blackwood, where did you say you were?”

  INSECURITY

  THE FALL THE Buick followed me home was already a time of stress. As big as the old mansion was, and as few of us as there were, every room seemed filled with sharp words and arguments over something I couldn’t quite wrap my seven-year-old mind around.

  There had been talk of a winter tour since the spring. Grandfather had wanted to rent out a string of the bigger halls on the East Coast, spending more on advertising than he’d ever done before. Rather than present the show as some kind of nostalgic tribute to his glory days, he saw it as a comeback. New illusions, new sets and costumes, this was going to be a show about the future. He’d even hired an illustrator of sci-fi movie posters to create a grand one for the production.

  Standing in the center of the poster in his floor-length cloak, Grandfather looked like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and a classical magician of yesteryear. Laser beams illuminated the sky as cards flew over his head like spaceships. There were hundreds of details in the image referencing the acts. I loved how the artist interpreted illusions, translating the box for the sawing-a-woman-in-half effect into a woman floating in midair, her two halves divided by a vast gulf.

  It promised to be an amazing production, even if Grandfather’s ideas about science fiction were a bit dated. The magic was going to be like nothing ever seen before. Both Dad and Uncle Darius had worked all summer to create some spectacular effects. They contracted a Star Trek set designer to give the production a slick, Hollywood look.

  There was even to be a part for me. I was to play a robot space princess who would be teleported with a laser beam. The act involved me crawling through a piece of conduit that looked too small for a hamster, let alone a human child.

  I’d had lots of practice going unseen and hiding in small spaces, and not just for the shows. The mansion had actually been a speakeasy, back in the days of Prohibition. Despite its bad plumbing and rotten wood, Grandfather had bought it because of its secret passages and hidden rooms. You could travel from one end of the house to the other entirely through its warren of corridors. The secret gambling room and cellar became Grandfather’s workspaces, but I found other nooks and crannies I’m not even sure he knew about. There were slim hallways that wrapped around the guest rooms, and above the kitchen there was an attic-like space. The floor was still covered with dozens of rotting mats, as if it were a kind of bunk area. Probing around with my flashlight one afternoon, I discovered newspapers that looked Chinese and some gold sequins stuck between the floor planks and the beams. Shards of broken bottles were lodged into the corners.

  My childish imagination conjured up explanations for these odd artifacts. I sort of knew from old movies that a speakeasy was like a cowboy saloon, and I assumed the sequins were from the clothes of the girls who danced and flashed their legs doing the cancan. The newspaper, I decided, was there because one of them was saving up to take a trip to China and was teaching herself to read Chinese.

  The truth, which I found out later, was a lot sadder. Our house had also been a brothel. The girls in the attic were brought out when customers came to drink, and sent back up there when they weren’t working.

  THE HIDDEN CONDUITS were a source of amusement for me at first, but I soon learned they could serve another purpose. Back then, my biggest concern in the world was uncertainty. I could be happily enrolled in school one week and then packed onto a cruise to Australia the next, all because Grandfather got a booking and needed Dad to come along, which meant me too.

  Grandfather always had plans. Some came to fruition but others did not, as talk of a tour could vaporize if he didn’t line up enough bookings. These endeavors were generally kept from me until they began to take definite shape and the first checks arrived. All too often, that mean
t a day’s notice to pack my little suitcase.

  When I was in school, I enjoyed the regularity of studying and did better than most of the other students. Even though I was off having adventures around the world they’d envy, all I could dream about was being in class and not having so much uncertainty.

  A few months before the Buick followed me, while prowling the corridors I heard Grandfather and Dad discussing a project they hadn’t yet mentioned to me. I sat still behind the other side of the plaster wall and listened. They spoke for an hour about the logistics: how many trucks they’d need, how many stagehands, which theaters were the best, whether to spend money on television or just radio ads. The conversation ended with no decisions about anything, but simply overhearing it had made me feel calm. Just knowing that it was in the works, that details were being worked out, that I could participate in some way, even covertly, provided comfort.

  I made it a habit, then, to listen whenever I could. In my world it was the one way I could gain some idea of what to expect. Tours and trips would live and die in those conversations, but being part of it gave me some sense of calm.

  THE EVENING OF the day the Buick followed me home, I pretended to go straight to bed after dinner and then rushed into the passages so I could listen as Grandfather and Dad talked. I’d already noticed that the talk of the “Beyond” tour, his sci-fi comeback, had stopped. Something told me that poster was all we’d ever see of it.

  “Is it Brutani?” asked Dad in the library.

  I could hear Grandfather’s feet shuffling across the old wooden floor. “One of his guys drove a Buick. I saw him sitting in the parking lot a few times when we went to speak to him at the restaurant.”

  “Bodyguard?”

  “Or something . . . Damn!”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” my father said quietly.

  “You damn fool. I don’t know why I listened to you.” It was always painful to hear him talk to my dad like that.

  “It could be nothing.”

  “Bullshit. That’s not how these guys work,” snarled Grandfather.

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “This was a threat. Goddamn it! He wants it all back.”

  I tried to put the bits and pieces together, but I couldn’t understand what it was all about.

  Dad pleaded, “We don’t have it. Most of it is sitting in the warehouse. I tried explaining this to him when that ice show got booked over us and we lost most of our dates. It’d just have to be next year.”

  “Guys like him don’t think that way. You tell Brutani something is going to happen, damn it, it has to happen.”

  “Why can’t he understand? It’s not like we wasted the money,” replied Dad.

  “You don’t see, do you?” My grandfather had lots of different ways to make you feel stupid by pointing to something that’s supposed to be obvious.

  “See what?”

  Grandfather said something inaudible under his breath. “Brutani is small-time. He came out here to invest in the pictures and be a big shot. He wanted in on what we were doing because it excited him. But at the end of the day, it’s not his money. It’s his father’s.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He’s putting the squeeze on us because he’s afraid of his old man.”

  “We can’t just let him threaten us! And the business with Jessica? That crossed the line. We should go to the police.”

  The business with me? Was this was about the Buick?

  “That’s a horrible idea,” interjected Uncle Darius, who must have just walked into the room.

  “We’ll make sure you’re not here when they come over,” replied my father, getting in a dig about my uncle’s arrest record.

  “There’s a quick wit,” Darius shot back. “You don’t call the cops when you borrow money from the mob and they want it repaid.”

  “I didn’t borrow money from the mob,” snapped my father.

  “You let the son of a major mobster invest money in the show. It’s the same thing.”

  “What happens if we call the cops? What can Brutani do?”

  “It’s not what Brutani does, brother, it’s what the low-rent guy fresh out of the can and desperate to go back in that Brutani paid off can do. They hit you sideways. Sending that car to follow to Jessica, that was dirty. Real dirty.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Dad.

  “Talk to someone who’s connected, so we can get to his father.”

  There’s a long pause. “Not her,” grumbled Grandfather. “God, not that bitch. I almost called her a cunt on live television. She won’t help us.”

  “Yes, she will,” said Darius.

  “Why is that?” asked Grandfather.

  “She’ll want you to owe her. She’ll want a favor.”

  “I can’t do that. I’ve got my integrity.”

  “Well, in that case,” said Darius, “I hope you and your integrity are happy here. Because I’m going to take Jessica with me and relocate somewhere under another name.”

  I’d never heard my uncle look out for me like that.

  “Bullshit!” shouted Dad.

  “You don’t solve this, just watch me. That kid is all that matters. This is your fuck-up, not hers. Swallow your enormous egos and let’s fix this.”

  “I hate that woman,” Grandfather growled.

  For a fleeting second I thought he meant me.

  “Yeah, well be sure to add an extra degree of spit and polish. You need to charm her,” explained Darius.

  “I’d rather seduce a cobra.”

  6

  DR. JEFFERY AILES, who—as head of the DOJ task force I work on—is my de facto boss, shakes his head. I feel like I’ve just been called into the principal’s office, albeit over Skype. Even in the safety of my motel room a state away, his gaze penetrates. A former Naval officer, a computer scientist-turned-black box hedge fund manager, the first African American to win the Japan Prize for mathematics, a MacArthur Fellow and rumored presidential golf buddy, he is probably the most intimidating person I know.

  He looks at my cracked phone screen as I wave it in front of my laptop camera. “You fell out of a tree?”

  “No. My phone did. I made it out fine. Mostly. You get the samples I sent with the van?”

  He reaches across his desk and holds up the plastic bags I’d asked the returning Quantico crew to bring back. “You almost broke your neck for this?”

  “It’s from the Hawkton crime scene.”

  “Why is this here? Shouldn’t this go through the local West Virginia channels?”

  “Well . . . Mitchum. She doesn’t think this is important.”

  Ailes lifts the bagged mud samples up to the light and looks at them. “So you went out and collected this yourself?”

  “I put a piece of plastic over the rest of the print so it wouldn’t all erode away.”

  “Are you going to bring this to her?”

  “Well . . .” I hesitate. I’m not sure how to get into the frosty relationship I have with Mitchum.

  Ailes raises an eyebrow.

  I continue. “I know you’ve been working on that new biome lab project . . .”

  “It’s a pilot study. We don’t even have a test case yet for admissibility. Whatever we find in here,” he points to the bags, “may not even be usable in court. We have other labs here that can try to backtrace the content of the dirt. We’ve got an excellent database for that.”

  “And they’re backed up for several weeks. This could be important.”

  “So, why aren’t you taking this to Mitchum? It’s her case.” Ailes is being patient with me. Another boss would chew me out for going around the lead agent.

  I try to find the right words. “It’s not a priority for her.”

  “You kids aren’t playing well together?”

&nbs
p; “No. I’m trying. She’s just very . . . difficult.”

  “Are you sure it’s all her?”

  The words singe. “Me? I’ve done nothing but try to help her.”

  “Blackwood, what may seem like polite and appropriate behavior to you may come off differently to others.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re a celebrity around here. The Warlock case was all you. Of the most high-profile FBI manhunts in the past decade, you’re the one face the public remembers. While a lot of younger agents look up to you, some are bound to resent you.”

  “This? Again? What for? I just did my job,” I protest, although I know his assessment harbors some truth. Part of me still thinks that pointing out the absurdity of something will make it go away.

  “Of course. Imagine what it’s like for Ms. Mitchum every time someone finds out she’s an FBI agent. Who do you think the topic shifts to? You have a very big shadow, especially among your female colleagues.”

  “I was only helping. Ask Knoll.”

  “I’m sure you were. But did you stick strictly to her instructions, or did you take ‘initiative’?”

  Our mutual respect is based in part on being straightforward with each other and admitting the truth. “I told the helicopter pilot to extend the search radius. It’s how we found the first victim.”

  “And you wonder why she doesn’t get along with you?”

  “I saved us hours, maybe days!”

  “It’s her case. You’re there just on the ground as support and you make the big breakthrough. What do you think is going through her mind?”

  Sure, I thought she was acting a little bitchy and that ruffled me. But I was just trying to help! “I don’t want her case,” I insist. “I’m not trying to show her up. I leave the pissing matches to the boys.”

  Ailes shakes the dirt at the camera. “Really?”

  “I just want to get the bad guy.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “Look at the tread on the print. I checked the report. It’s not the sheriff’s footwear. At least, it doesn’t match what he was last seen wearing. And I’ve been up the tree. There’s no way he climbed up there carrying someone. He’s built like a linebacker.”