Angel Killer Read online

  I tried describing to Ailes that there could be any number of ways. Without more evidence, I wouldn’t be able to say exactly how.

  He’d shake his head, “Agent Blackwood, we’re not asking how exactly he did it. We just want to know that it could be done. Could you do it?”

  “Of course,” I replied. It seemed to me like the backwards version of the buried-alive stunt. Instead of getting a living person out of the ground, you were putting something in the grave after the fact.

  “Could you do a demonstration?”

  He must have seen my face go white at the thought of being buried alive in some field at Quantico. He clarified, “I mean, can you just show them you can get something inside a sealed box under difficult conditions? I just want them to keep their minds open.”

  “A small demonstration?”

  “Yes. Just a proof of concept.”

  “Okay.” I told him my idea. He gave me a grin and asked if I’d do a demonstration for the assistant director as well as Knoll and Chisholm. I resisted the idea, but he was relentless.

  “You need to show these people, Jessica.”

  “I think they’ll get the idea if I just tell them.”

  He shook his head. “I mean, you need to show them what you’re capable of.”

  “It’s just a trick,” I insisted.

  “So is the Warlock’s stunt. We need to be reminded of that.”

  I gave in. I knew he wouldn’t stop. I don’t want to be the performing magic girl. I just want to be a good cop.

  THE WOODEN CHEST I asked Ailes to bring to Assistant Director Breyer’s office the day before is sitting in the middle of his desk. Breyer pokes a finger at it and gives me a smile. “I had them lock this in a safe overnight. So what gives?”

  I check my watch. “You’re an Orioles fan, right? What’s the score?”

  He clicks open a screen on his computer to check. “They just finished. Ouch . . . Sox beat them by two.”

  “You have the envelope I asked Dr. Ailes to give you?” I’m standing while everyone else sits, looking at me like it’s a goddamn magic show. I guess it is.

  Breyer pulls the envelope from his desk and hands it to me. I check the seal and open it up. There’s a key inside. I put the key into the lock on the chest and give it a turn. It makes a click. I step back and motion for Breyer to open the chest.

  He gives everyone a look, then lifts the lid and peers inside. He takes out the envelope inside the chest and holds it up. “Am I supposed to open this?”

  “Please.”

  Breyer takes a letter opener from his desk and slits the top open. There’s a smirk on his face.

  His smug expression vanishes when he looks inside. “Holy crap!” He pulls out his business card. Written on the back is the final score for the game. Breyer presses his intercom button, still holding the card. “Jill, did anyone get into the safe?”

  “I hope not . . .” she replies from the next room.

  Breyer shakes his head at me. “All right, witch. Explain.”

  It’s an old method. Nobody uses it anymore. Not that I would feel any guilt explaining it to a room filled with FBI agents trying to solve a murder.

  “Look at your business card.”

  Breyer gives the back a closer inspection. “It looks like it was rolled up.”

  I point to the key on his desk. He picks it up to examine more closely. Breyer shakes his head and hands the key to Chisholm when he sees the hollow end. He lifts the chest and looks through the keyhole. “The prediction was inside the key? You slipped that in there while we were all watching you?” He nods his head and gives me a smile of approval. “Clever, Agent. So the sand?”

  “It’s only a theory,” I reply. “At first I thought he might have tried to drill a hole from above into the casket. Then I realized he didn’t need to. When he took out Chloe’s body out he probably installed a piece of PVC pipe going straight into the open lid and hid the other end under a few inches of dirt. When he planted the second body, he just poured the sand and water in through the tube, then pulled the tube out of the ground. If Danielle’s team still has the density data, they’ll probably find something odd in the direction the sand was pooled in the coffin. Maybe.”

  Breyer nods and gives Ailes a grin. “All right.”

  Ailes replies, “Maybe we can reassign Agent Blackwood to work on this full-time with Dr. Chisholm and give behavioral analysis an assist too? I think she’s being wasted in the paper jungle.”

  I hadn’t expected him to ask that, much less in front of me. He just put Breyer on the spot. I didn’t want him to. I’d love to be able to work on this full-time, but I’d never dreamed about asking myself.

  Breyer’s eyes go to the floor in contemplation as he sits on the edge of his desk and taps his fingers. “I think Agent Blackwood is very clever. I don’t doubt that.” He waves a hand toward the chest. “But I think we got this mystery under control now.” He looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “And we need clever people in the paper jungle as well.”

  A polite rejection. “I’m happy to do my part wherever I can.” My words are half true, yet I feel like I’ve been rebuked for wanting something I didn’t ask for.

  He thanks me for the demonstration. Ailes and I head for the door.

  Dr. Chisholm calls out after me. “Just a second, you didn’t tell us how you got the prediction into the key locked in his desk.”

  I turn around. Ailes catches my arm and calls back, “I thought you had the mystery under control?” He gives me a wink.

  Breyer has his arms crossed. “Noted.”

  In the hallway I turn to Ailes, barely able to control my anger. “What was that all about?”

  “I’m sorry. They’re a little resistant to a change in the status quo.”

  “I didn’t ask to be reassigned full-time. I’m happy to still contribute to the online working group.” I feel like I just made a fool of myself in front of the assistant director. My little magic show was turned into a plea for a better position. It looked desperate and pathetic. They’re probably laughing at me now.

  Ailes can see the hurt in my eyes. “Agent Blackwood, when you give up one thing to be taken seriously in another, you can’t expect it to come easy. It’s going to be hard. Just look at me. Do you know how many other black men got their PhD in computational mathematics the year I did?”

  “Not many.”

  “They didn’t know if they should treat me like a prodigy or a special case. All I wanted to be was a mathematician. They don’t know what to make of you. But you’re not going to conceal it by hiding what makes you special. Even if sometimes that means being a little pushy.”

  “I don’t know if those men will ever take me seriously again.”

  “They will. Trust me. Things are converging. It’s hard to explain. I don’t even understand it. But trust me,” he reassures me. “They’re about to realize how badly they need you.”

  I give him a skeptical look.

  “It’s in the numbers,” he replies.

  13

  BEFORE MY APARTMENT was broken into as I slept, I was dreaming about being forced onstage to perform a trick that went horribly wrong.

  I look on in shock as Elsie is burned alive in one of my magic illusions. It’s an older Elsie who looks like Chloe. But the scars and the smile are the same. Fire and sparks spew from her mouth as she stares at me helplessly. Only I can’t do anything to help. I’m eight years old and made up to look like one of those poor girls in a Texas beauty pageant. I’m doing one of my first shows in a theater full of magicians at a magic convention. My dad is giving me stern directions from backstage while my grandfather, drunk, is sitting in the front row shaking his head in disapproval.

  Elsie is in flames and nobody will help me.

  The dream hurts because parts of it are true. I know my family has always loved me. I’ve never doubted that. But sometimes having three generations of ambition forced on you is too much.

  I was persist
ent with my family, pushing them to let me become a magician. Once they saw the potential, at least the novelty of it, I became the center of attention. Father was relieved to have someone else fall under Grandfather’s hypercritical eye. Grandfather, having given up hope on his son, began to increasingly look to me to continue his legacy.

  After the incident in Mexico, my contact with them has been minimal at best. I didn’t invite any of them to my graduation from college or the FBI academy. It was a selfish thing. I try to pretend they wouldn’t have cared. But I know that’s not true.

  Ailes asking me to put on a show for Breyer and Chisholm scratches a little too deep. I can remember being a teenager, not quite fifteen, and noticing the way some men looked at me. The glances were different from when I was a little girl. It made me self-conscious about my magic and so I practiced more. I made sure my show was better. I created illusions, I took it seriously. I didn’t want them to see me that way. I wanted them to respect me for my skills. Some did, but most others continued to look at me like a piece of ass in a tight costume. Then there were the men like Breyer and Chisholm, who just saw me as a little girl putting on a show because she couldn’t get enough attention.

  As I lie in bed trying to put the dream out of my mind, I realize the television is on in the other room. Half asleep, for a moment I think it’s Terrence, but we broke up months ago.

  I know who it is.

  It’s Damian.

  Of course it would be him.

  At one of the worst moments in my life, of course he would drop in like thunder from a rain cloud.

  I reach over to my nightstand and take my pistol from the drawer, then get out of bed. I move toward my door and slowly turn the handle.

  The news is on in the living room. I can feel cold air coming from under my door. He must have slipped in through the veranda and left the sliding glass door open.

  I keep the gun pointed to the ground with my right hand and open the door with my left. I swing it open.

  He’s sitting there on my couch dressed in khakis and a blue polo shirt, with his feet on the coffee table like he owns the place. Today his hair is a light brown. It’s cut close and he has a tan and a lean build like a tennis pro. With Damian, I never can tell how he’ll appear next.

  He looks up at me and gives me a broad smile.

  “That. Is. Hot.” He emphasizes each of the words. “The gun especially.” His eyes linger over me. I’m still wearing the T-shirt I slept in and a pair of pink boy shorts.

  “I’ve already called the police,” I lie.

  He shakes his head and points to a cordless phone on the coffee table. “No. You did not. But I did.” He checks his watch. “I’ve got about six minutes until they get here.”

  Knowing him, he did.

  Damian Knight, the world’s only known instance of serial personality disorder—a clinical designation a friend of mine studying psychology made up when I explained his case to her.

  I FIRST MET him at a magic convention when I was seventeen. He was polite and charming and said none of the creepy or suggestive things the creepy men who go to magic conventions like to say to the few women who stray into their domain. We spent a few hours sitting in the hotel lobby. He showed me a few sleights with card tricks I’d never seen before or since then. Mostly he asked why I wanted to do magic, where I thought I was going with it and about my philosophy of life.

  I was a teenager trying to impress someone older and did my best to sound as intelligent as I could. At the end of the conversation he said good-bye, and I didn’t see him again until I was twenty-one and majoring in criminal justice at the University of Miami. He was working on a graduate degree in biology, or at least that’s what he told me when he sat next to me in the library. He looked almost the same as when we met at that magic convention four years prior. In fact, the conversation started where we left off as he leaned over and asked me if my philosophy on life had changed.

  We ended up dating for several months. He was funny, charming and always knew how to say the right thing. He was the first man I had sex with that I more than just liked. He was perfect. Because that’s what he does, he tries to be perfect at anything he tries. He’s the type of man that surprises you by speaking Thai at a Thai restaurant or sits down at a piano when nobody is looking and plays something as beautiful as anything you would hear in a concert hall. He could remind you of your friend’s birthdays and would pick out a flower arrangement you couldn’t imagine doing. Perfection was a kind of game for him. Or the illusion of perfection. The relationship ended when I found out that he wasn’t enrolled in the university and his entire story was a fabrication. I confronted him about the lie and he just nodded his head and walked out of the restaurant.

  I thought that was the end of things. I was heartbroken. I hated myself for being a fool. I hated myself for ending it.

  Three years later I was at a bookstore and met a man with dark hair, a bit of an unkempt hipster beard and a Radiohead T-shirt. He invited me to coffee and we had a fascinating conversation. He asked me for my phone number. As he leaned in to watch me write it down, I noticed a mannerism that seemed familiar. You can change your voice, your hair, even your face. But it’s the little things we overlook. His habit of scooting back while straightening his back, like someone sitting down to the piano. You pick up a lot of things when you love someone.

  Deep down I knew something was wrong. I looked up at him and couldn’t understand for a moment. He was thirty pounds lighter, looked taller, and his eyes and hair were a different color. But it was him. Damian. Again.

  I couldn’t feel myself breathe.

  He didn’t say anything. He just gave me a smile and left.

  I sat there stunned for a half hour trying to understand what had just happened.

  Since then, Damian has kept showing up in my life. Each time with an almost unrecognizable look. It’s uncanny. I’ve tried to run his fingerprints, but he discovered a trick a long time ago of putting super glue over his fingertips and manually etching them with the tip of a pin.

  After the encounter at the bookstore, I got a friend in the police department to run his prints from the coffee cup I swiped from the table. When the results came back, she asked if I got William Shatner’s autograph too when I met him. It was one of Damian’s little tricks. God knows how long it took him to etch that. He knew I had studied criminal justice and probably thought it would be fun to see how far I’d push my professional life into my personal.

  He’s crazy. Certifiably insane.

  I once ran an old photograph I have of him from college through a facial recognition database. It came back with a newspaper article from the 1980s of a teenager who was arrested for posing as a train conductor and taking a train cross-country to Seattle. A hundred-car-long train. Technically speaking, it was the biggest theft of an object in history.

  His name was left out because he was a minor and the records were sealed. The grin was unmistakably his. When I asked him about it, he just replied that he’s had lots of different careers.

  That’s what Damian does when he’s not pursuing me. He pretends to be other people. The role he wants more than anything is to be my lover again.

  But that’s never going to happen. He’s dangerous.

  “Why are you here?” My knuckles are white on the grip of my gun.

  Damian points to the television. “I just want to make sure you have sunscreen. I’d hate for something to happen to that beautiful skin when you go there.”

  14

  I’M TOO DISTRACTED by Damian sitting on my couch to realize what he’s talking about.

  He takes a sip from a beer he stole from my fridge. “When I saw that Michigan trick, I figured you’d show up eventually. I could have sworn I saw you in the news footage in the background. I’m glad you’re living up to at least part of your potential.”

  “Get out.” I don’t point the gun at him, but I give it a flick with my wrist.

  He looks away from the tele
vision and stares at me. His eyes are almost ice blue. That’s the reason he often uses contacts to color them. His one unforgettable trait. His gaze drifts down to the gun and smiles. “Jessica, if I could die right now from your bullet, looking at you like that, I can’t think of a better way to go.”

  The scary part is I think he’s telling the truth. He knows I won’t kill him. But I think he likes to toy with me in that way. He’s never harmed me other than with his lies and his total ignorance of personal space.

  It’s hard to call him possessive. I think “fixated” is the better word.

  I’ve been in criminal justice long enough to know a harmless fixation can change into something deadly. That’s why I’m holding my gun.

  He might die for me, but I also strongly suspect he may have killed for me. He’s never admitted it, but he’s hinted at it before.

  Before I joined the FBI I spent two years as a street cop in south Florida after graduating college. Eleven months into the job, I answered a domestic disturbance call about a man beating his girlfriend. He was a known drug dealer and a pimp. As soon as he saw a lady cop at the door, he kicked me down a flight of stairs and broke my nose. It happened so fast I didn’t have a chance to react.

  His girlfriend later testified that I’d entered the premises without knocking and threatened to kill him, so he was acting in self-defense. It’s hard for me to hate her, knowing what her life was like. He had two other witnesses, who probably worked for him. The judge dropped the assault case and the asshole walked.

  It was a raw deal. Two days later his attorney filed a lawsuit against me to sue for damages.

  It’s stuff like that people forget cops have to deal with. I’m not even a cop for a year and I get a broken nose and sued by a drug dealer who drives a car more expensive than the house I was renting. It’s why our suicide rate is so high.

  I was at rock bottom after that happened. I don’t complain about being a woman in a man’s field, but I felt like everyone around me was just waiting for me to snap. They have no idea how close I came.