Name of the Devil Page 8

  “The paper you published didn’t say where it came from specifically, just that you had isolated it from biological samples.”

  “That was a precautionary measure.”

  “For what?”

  “Toads,” he replies.

  “Toads? I didn’t know they kept up-to-date on the latest scientific literature.”

  Moya’s boisterous laugh fills the cavern and continues to echo. Evidently he’s been spending a lot of time by himself. He wipes away a tear. “I am sorry. I imagined a little toad reading Nature. When people found out you could get high by licking the skin of certain toads, young people and mental incompetents started doing this. I didn’t say where I found this because I didn’t want the same thing to happen. There are drug tourists who seek out these things. I couldn’t care less about the fools that want to do a stupid thing, but I’m worried about the creature. This substance is very powerful. It’s unlike other hallucinogens. It literally takes the mind to a dark place.

  “There are stories of shamans coming back from the Iluicatl michin and killing entire villages. The dark spirit was powerful in them.”

  “You mean the drug?”

  “Perhaps. But most drugs simply lower our resistances. We say things when we’re drunk that we secretly hold in our hearts. A drug doesn’t make you creative as much as it stops you from not being creative. It lets out what’s inside you. But when it comes to this, where does that evil come from? Some might say it’s a doorway. But although I’m a rational man, I can’t understand why a man who never had a violent thought in his life would act out in such a way.”

  “Are you suggesting possession?”

  “Which frightens you more? That each of us harbors in our soul the potential for evil, to do such wicked things as murder others? Or that real evil, the kind you came here to find, comes from outside and that we’re safe as long as we remember we’re fallible and don’t invite it in?”

  “I didn’t expect this metaphysical discussion from a scientist.”

  Moya aims his beam in the water. “Look. Just wait.” After a moment a small school of fish swim by. Tiny, each no bigger than my fingernail, they pass in and out of the light in a flash. “What is the water to them? The cave? If they have minds, do they have any concept of what’s above their heads? What’s an ocean to them? The universe? What are our legs to them? Do you imagine that for even a glimmer of a moment, they think we’re something like them? No. We’re part of their world. Transient. In a fraction of a second their brains will have moved on to some other stimulus.

  “We’re like that. We don’t have the attention to focus on problems for a long time. We ponder things, we make equations until something new comes along. The deep questions, the big mysteries, you’re not going to find the answers in the words of any one man. Not even the questions. You have to take the long view. What questions have we been asking collectively? What have we observed in tiny fractions, but can’t describe as a whole? I think of these as slow questions. You know the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant as they touch it? Each one feels something different: the trunk, the tail, a leg? None of them see the whole. Science is good for specific questions. It’s not so good at seeing elephants.

  “Still, I don’t believe in the supernatural, Agent Blackwood. I believe in science. I believe the universe can yield answers to our questions and our experiments. I’m just not sure if we really know how to ask the right questions yet. The slow ones.”

  I get a little of what he’s trying to tell me. You can learn a simple sleight-of-hand and fool someone, but never fully understand why holding your hand a certain way as opposed to another evokes an almost mystical experience—a suspension of disbelief. It’s not just that you tricked their optic system. Something happened that struck a primal chord in our relationship to the universe.

  “Fortunately for me, I have simple questions. I just need to know the source of the chemical.”

  He veers down another passage. “Yes. Yes. Iluicatl michin. It means ‘fish ceremony.’ Our tiny little friends just swam past you. They’re the source. The toxin is a defense mechanism they developed to keep hungry predators from eating them. When a coyote or a lizard travels down from the surface and swallows them, they release it. The animal then gets disoriented and lost. It dies down here, its body decomposing and feeding the bacteria that feed the fish. The fish have their revenge, as the corpse provides for their children.”

  “The circle of life,” I reply, the song from The Lion King playing in my head. “Do you have any samples I can take with me?”

  “Like psilocin, it breaks down in hours. You’ll have to take some living fish with you. I’ll help you get some tonight.”

  “Tonight? Why not now?”

  “They like to sit in the pools of water where the moonlight reaches them.”

  Were-fish. Of course.

  “It’s so they can know when the bats come home. The fish eat their droppings.”

  “Delightful.” I shake my head and follow him to the next chamber. “Moonlight, dark caves, bat guano, psychoactive fish. Quite a job you have.”

  “Gracias.”

  12

  “THIS CAME FROM a bad place. You don’t want to go there,” says Patience Viñalon as she scrutinizes my mud samples from the tree in Hawkton. Moya had said she was the local expert on soil. He wasn’t kidding. Where I just see mud, an expert like Patience can spot the color, clay content and environmental makeup on sight. She puts her books into her bag and hugs two waiting girls before they run to the playground outside. Tall, with long black hair, she’s just over twenty. Her intelligent eyes suggest she doesn’t have any trouble keeping up with Dr. Moya. She’d started doing field research into the geology of the area before she was a teenager. Moya picked her over scores of graduate students because of the quality of her undergraduate research.

  A little boy with dark hair in his eyes wanders across the classroom, stares up at me, and whispers something under his breath to Patience as if he’s too scared to say it out loud. My Spanish is barely passable enough to understand the whisper.

  “He’d like to give you a hug,” Patience translates.

  I lean down and let the boy wrap his arms around my shoulders. He flashes me a gap-toothed smile, then runs after his friends.

  There’s a soft pang in my stomach. I remember that need for affection. My house wasn’t a hugging household. If I initiated one, it would be politely reciprocated, but never more than that.

  I was jealous of the cat because Grandfather and Dad would absentmindedly pet him if he happened to sit near them on the couch. Of course, when the poor beast sat in Grandfather’s chair and got hair on it, he’d find himself tossed across the room by the scruff of his neck with the threat that next time it would be “into the fireplace!”

  I watch through the window as the boy climbs onto a swing set. I’d pity him if I wasn’t a little envious of the attention he seems to get from Patience and the other staff here. I feel guilty for my envy. I had it better than most kids, I’m sure.

  “Some of them have parents. Some don’t. We try to do the best we can for them,” Patience explains as I watch the children through the window. “When I’m not helping Dr. Moya, I come here and teach science.”

  “We have foster programs in Mexico, but they’re still quite new,” says a woman standing by the door. Her English is perfect. Short, dressed in a blouse and slacks that I recognize as being more expensive than they first seem, she looks like a plain woman—the exception being a Parmigiani watch on her wrist. Her hair is pulled back to reveal a face with simple makeup. She has a soft face, making her age difficult to tell.

  Patience makes the introductions. “Sister Marta, this is Jessica.”

  “Hello, Sister,” I reply.

  Marta politely smiles. “What do you think of our school?”

  “It’s
quite nice,” I respond with sincerity. “The children seem very happy here.”

  “Lots of hugs. We make sure these children are very loved.” Marta gazes out at the playground filled with new swing sets and toys. Her smile seems genuine.

  “They look it.”

  “What brings you to Tixato?” She eyes my bags sitting on the desk.

  “I’m on vacation and a friend asked for a favor.”

  “A favor?”

  “He’s a geologist and wanted some samples.” I feel guilty lying to a nun, but it’s important to keep a low profile. You don’t know who knows who.

  “Oh.” Her expression changes to one of suspicion. “Are you a scientist too?”

  “No, no. I’m a bookkeeper. Between jobs, actually.”

  Patience doesn’t know as much as Dr. Moya, but she knows I’m not telling Marta the truth. Although she keeps silent, her eyes narrow as I lie.

  “I’m sure something will come up.” She nods to the window. “Tixato may not be much, but it’s a special place.” Marta gives Patience a pat on her shoulder, then leaves the classroom.

  “Sister Marta is wonderful,” Patience says enthusiastically. “She’s the reason this place exists. She found the money and made it possible for these children to have something special.”

  “They’re fortunate to have you.”

  “They’re like my little sisters and brothers. Are you close to your family?” She’d have to charge by the hour for me to tell her the full story on that. “My mother left when I was young.” I’ve used this truth before to end the conversation.

  Patience’s face turns sad. “Were you raised by your grandmother?” Her expression shows how deeply she cares.

  “Um, no. Mostly my dad and my grandfather. My grandmother died before I was born.” It’s an odd subject for me to address. Dad never spoke too much about his mother. He was in his teens when she died. Grandfather would mention her name in passing, but they were divorced years before she passed away.

  I think I learned from their example when it came to dealing with the absence of my own mother.

  “Cousins?”

  “I never had much contact with my mother’s side of the family.”

  “None at all?”

  “It’s . . .” I decide not to explain to her my mother came from a difficult background. She was young when she had me. Younger than Patience. I’ve never been really bitter about her departure. After all, I barely remember anything about her from when I was a child.

  I pick the mud samples off the desk along with the printout from the lab. “You were saying this came from a bad place. What do you mean? Dangerous?”

  “Yes.” She gives me a solemn nod.

  “Could I at least see it?”

  She thinks it over for a moment. “Okay. You’ll understand when we get there. But we must take my car. If they see someone from not around here, that would be bad.”

  Twenty minutes later we are on the other side of the small range of hills dividing Tixato. I see what Patience meant by a “bad place.” Hundreds of shanty houses pile on top of each other up a red dirt hill, above which it looks like part of the mountain has been scooped away. Assembled from rotten plywood, pieces of plastic and metal siding, the houses embody the poorest side of Mexico. I remind myself that even the United States still has pockets like this.

  One paved road runs through the area. Half-naked children hide behind doorways while scowling teenagers linger on carcasses of rusted cars, shooting suspicious glances.

  “What’s that?” I ask. “X-20” is spray-painted on a number of walls. I know it’s one of the fastest-growing gangs in Mexico and now the American Southwest, but I want to hear Patience describe them.

  “It’s a gang. Many of the young people who live here are in it. It’s not as violent here as it is elsewhere, thankfully. It was started by some former members of our special forces. Most of them are dead now.”

  “Who runs it now?”

  Patience shrugs. “I don’t know. They used to just be involved in street trafficking. Now they’re supposed to be in narcotics across the border. I don’t pay attention to those things.

  “They don’t like outsiders here. Tixato is mostly a safe place, but if you went wandering around here alone, it would be no good.”

  “Is this why you say this is a bad place?”

  “No. There, see the side of that hill? That’s why.” She points to where the vegetation and rock give way to the reddish earth that slopes down into the shantytown. “There used to be another village here. Then they had mudslides and the whole hill came down on them. This village was built on top of the wreckage.”

  “That’s horrible,” I reply, trying to imagine the houses buried under the ones I’m staring at. My chest tightens at the thought.

  “You don’t understand.” Patience’s voice descends to a whisper as she points to the ground. “They’re still down there. Over a hundred people, children. The old orphanage. They just built over them. They never dug them up. At the top of the hill there’s a small marker. That’s it, and even that marker has been covered by graffiti.

  “It was bad. They killed one of the rescue workers because it took so long to get here. Officials barely checked for survivors in the buried homes. Government ministers won’t even come here for fear they’ll be killed. It’s like this place doesn’t exist.”

  The dirt is the same color as my mud. “This is where the dirt sample came from?”

  “Yes. You can tell by the mixture of clays and volcanic ash. Soil composition is like a fingerprint.”

  We reach the end of the road and Patience turns the car around. On the second pass I see more than the weariness of poverty in the eyes of the people watching us: anger and resentment burns. These are people who feel betrayed not only by society, but also by God.

  I don’t know how the mud got from here to the tree in Hawkton, but I have no difficulty understanding how they could be connected in some way. Both places of devastation, Hawkton and Tixato are linked by anger.

  Patience drops me off at my car by the orphanage. Sister Marta waves to us as she pushes the boy who hugged me on the swing. I wave back and head to my hotel to call Ailes. Hopefully I get a cell phone signal. I’ve been out of range almost since I got here.

  13

  BACK IN THE hotel, I click on my television and don’t like what I see. The Spanish version of CNN is showing the aftermath of the church explosion juxtaposed with images of the sheriff. You don’t need to know Spanish to understand the words “caníbal” and “zombi.”

  It’s futile to point out that technically, the sheriff isn’t a cannibal. He just used his teeth in the attack. Of course, the fact that if he was in the explosion he would be dead by now doesn’t deter the zombie theories. Not that anybody takes them seriously. Scratch that, nobody serious takes them seriously. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that do.

  The television cuts back and forth to clips of helicopters buzzing over the hills of West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Tracking teams with dogs are scouring the ground. Even heat-sensing drones and satellites have been called into the search.

  “This is getting out of hand,” I tell Ailes on my check-in call.

  “Wait until the details of the satanic symbols gets out. We’re going to move on from half-joking zombie panic to something worse.”

  We saw this happen before, with the case of the Warlock. A case too sensational to be true is irresistible to the media. “And I thought things here were crazy,” I say, dreading the escalation of things.

  “Anything come of Dr. Moya?”

  “He says the toxin is from a cave fish. They’re nocturnal and only come out in the moonlight. We’re getting a sample tonight.”

  “Of course,” he replies dryly. “What about the mud?”

  “One
of his students showed me the area it came from. It’s a shantytown barrio. They collected samples after the last mudslide buried half the village. They’re hoping to find some kind of shrub or tree with deep roots to plant there to keep it from happening again.”

  “Anything to suggest how that mud got tracked all the way to West Virginia?”

  “Tixato has a strong gang presence. Especially in that barrio. It’s X-20 territory. We know they’re involved in cross-border narcotics smuggling. If I was going to hire a killer, that’d be where I’d look.”

  “The Hawkton incident seems a little more sophisticated than a gang-style slaying.”

  “True. But X-20 has a number of former Mexican Special Forces guys. Our sixth man may have grown up in Tixato, gone off to serve, then come back. I’m sure X-20 pays better. Some of those Mexican troops were involved in Indian scuffles. There are rumors of death squads doing heinous stuff. Nothing that’d be out of place in Hawkton.”

  “True, but how is our lead suspect, the sheriff, connected to them?”

  “Directly? I don’t know. But Moya told me the chemical we found could cause very violent auditory and visual hallucinations. Somehow there’s a connection. That might explain Jessup’s strange behavior.”

  “The X-20 lead is interesting. It gives us another angle besides looking at locals. Maybe the sheriff did something to piss them off?”

  “Like ticketing an X-20 lieutenant?”

  There’s a pause. “Sorry, dealing with another crisis. Maybe.”

  “Here’s the thing I’ve been trying to wrap my head around. This . . . whatever isn’t a gang-style killing intended to warn off others. It was about the people who died, not the ones they left behind. They were the target.”

  “Interesting perspective. Behavioral analysis has drawn a similar conclusion. If it’s not just the sheriff, we might be dealing with a more complicated person than we realize. Several people with resources change the picture quite a lot. Has anybody ever explained how X-20 has been able to get hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics across the border?”