Angel Killer Read online

I know the answer before the man in the basement says the words. I get that goose-bump feeling.

  I feel guilty for wanting it to happen.

  The serial number etched into the engine block is a perfect match.

  17

  KNOLL LOWERS THE MONITOR. “Now what?” His voice is low and grave. He knows what the match really means. “There are a dozen other serial numbers we can look for. Do we just keep at it and take the whole plane apart out there?”

  There’s got to be a better way. Serial numbers can be faked.

  It’s not a Flight 19 plane we should be matching.

  The pilot. He’s the key.

  I remember the girl in the cemetery. Her hands had been stripped raw of flesh so we couldn’t fingerprint her.

  On the monitor, the pilot’s hands look intact.

  I get an idea and turn to the naval officer we spoke with earlier. “Lieutenant Droves, does the Navy still have the fingerprint files of the pilots?”

  “We had them digitized a few hours ago and e-mailed to the FBI prints division,” he replies.

  I turn to Knoll. “We need a print off the pilot. If it doesn’t match, then we know the Warlock is going to want to cover his tracks. Maybe have the body rigged so that when we remove it the whole thing will explode.”

  Knoll shakes his head. “Blackwood, the robot can’t take a print. And if we use it to pull the body out, we’re still going to have to deal with things possibly exploding.” He looks at all the bystanders. “This is not a contained environment.”

  I’ve already thought this through. I don’t know how else to say it, so I just lay it out there. “We just need the robot to cut off a thumb.”

  Everyone standing around Knoll gives me a strange look. The thing about being an attractive female is that if you say something morbid, people get this look like they’ve finally figured you out. A little bulb in their head lights up and they go, “Of course, she’s crazy.”

  Knoll doesn’t look at me like I’m crazy, surprising me. He gets it. He turns to the lieutenant, as if he needs to ask permission from the Navy.

  The lieutenant nods his head. “I think we’re better off cutting a thumb off a dead man than putting everyone in harm’s way.”

  “All right. Let me clear it with upstairs.” Knoll makes a call on his phone. While he’s waiting for a reply he asks the lieutenant another question. “How would the Navy handle this?”

  “The easy way. We’d blow it up ourselves and go look at the pieces the seagulls didn’t get. Of course, we usually have the advantage of knowing who the bad guys are.”

  Knoll puts away his phone and picks up the radio. “Hey, robot boy, let me ask you a question. Are you the squeamish type?”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER the robot drives to the edge of the sandbar, away from viewers on the beach, and drops something into a bag held by a bomb tech waiting on a boat. He places it into an evidence bag, then into a toolbox, and brings it back from the sandbar. The thumb is rushed to a mobile forensic lab before the media have any idea of what a grisly thing we’ve just done.

  Dr. Chisholm steps over a small sand dune and approaches me. I hadn’t realized that he wasn’t around while we were watching the bomb robot cut open the plane.

  “Your idea?”

  I can tell he means the thumb. “It seemed . . . pragmatic.”

  “Probably the safest thing to do at this point.” He looks over his shoulder at the crowd behind the barrier.

  “Anything interesting?” I ask.

  Chisholm turns his attention to the plane and speaks in a low voice. “We’ve got plainclothes out there taking photos of everyone and photographing all the license plates we can find. Hotel records too. Of course in a crowd this size . . .” He glances back over his shoulder. “At least three thousand people now. We can expect at least sixty clinical sociopaths. Maybe more because it’s a workday and these people don’t seem to have anything else to do. At least several hundred convicted felons and God knows what else are out there.”

  “You must be a blast at a football game.”

  “Forty.” He throws the number out there for a moment. “That’s how many people in an average football stadium have murdered someone in the last ten years.”

  “And that’s just when the team shows up to practice,” I reply.

  Chisholm lets out a laugh. Not too loud, but genuine. “You have a dark sense of humor, Blackwood.”

  “You should meet my family.”

  “I have. Your grandfather signed an autograph for me when I was a boy. I was a little magician myself. Just a magic set. Nothing serious. Nowhere near your level. Never had much coordination. I loved seeing how adults could be fooled. That’s what got me into psychology. When I realized that some people thought magically all the time, thought angels or dogs were talking to them, whispering for them to kill, I didn’t need trick decks anymore.”

  “Me neither, I guess.” I didn’t know he’d met my grandfather. I wonder what he makes of me and my career choice.

  “So, as a former magician, what’s your reaction going to be if the thumbprint comes back as a match?”

  “You mean am I going to believe that a man vanished in the middle of last century, only to reappear just as young as the day he died?”

  “What else is there?”

  “Somebody switched the paper card in the basement of the Pentagon with the fingerprints on it.”

  “Really?” replies Chisholm. Is he skeptical?

  “I could do it with fifty bucks and a sheet of fake letterhead from a university.” I’m thinking of a stunt my father pulled on the New York Times by planting something in its archives when they were still physical. I’m sure doing the same at the Pentagon is an order of magnitude more difficult, but they all have the same weaknesses: people. Records like that aren’t national secrets.

  “Occam’s razor. Fair enough. Assuming the uniform and badges is war surplus. What about the plane? What if it holds up when we put all those serial numbers under our electron microscopes and start looking for aging in the abrasions on the metal inside the grooves of the etching?”

  “The plane could be real and it’s still a trick. Maybe the Navy records for the plane were tampered with too,” I reply.

  “So it’s always a trick?” he asks.

  I’ve known enough highly educated men to realize that almost all of them want to believe that there’s some magical part of life we can’t explain. Psychologists especially. “If it’s packaged like a trick, there’s probably a reason why.”

  “Does the idea of being fooled bother you?”

  “No.” I’ve had to deal with this question all my life. “Not if we catch this guy. I mean, that’s why we’re here? That’s why I’m here?”

  “Yep.” He sticks a hand into his pocket and pulls out a photograph of the pilot. “We just processed a bunch of stills the techs took. Nobody else has seen a good close-up of the face. What do you see?”

  He looks like he stepped out of a Life magazine from the 1940s. Unlike Chloe’s double, his face is almost peaceful, as if he died in his sleep. On a closer examination I can see abrasions on his face. The kind my grandfather and uncle had from years of alcoholism. “Burst blood vessels.”

  Chisholm takes the photograph back from me and points out the discoloration in the cheeks and around the eyes. “I won’t know until forensics gets a closer look, but it looks like he died in a vacuum. Some might say it’s as if he and the plane were transported into the middle of space.”

  “So why does he look recently dead while the plane is like something Columbus flew over on?” The Warlock is giving us too much proof.

  I see his eyes twitch at my metaphor. “Maybe because this void or wherever he’s been makes things age differently.”

  I don’t think Chisholm believes. He’s testing the limits of my belief. “Maybe because if the plane showed up looking brand-new, nobody would believe it was the original artifact. If he had an old corpse in there, people might just assume
it washed up from below. It’s an inconsistency. Like a tell in poker. It’s like in a card trick how I might flip a card over in a way that doesn’t make any logical sense if you think about the action. But taken as a whole, it makes sense.”

  Chisholm nods his head. “Keep reminding us how it could be done. Maybe we can figure out who did this.”

  He hands the photograph to me again. I try to imagine the mind that would go as far as killing a man in a vacuum chamber to create an illusion.

  I’m glad that Chisholm and his group are the ones who have to get inside the Warlock’s head. I only have to take apart his handiwork.

  I just hope he’s not as clever as I’m afraid he might be. I’m still having nagging thoughts about the cemetery murder. We reached a convenient explanation. Too convenient for a man capable of making the world think he just ripped a hole through space and time to produce a long-lost mystery.

  I get the feeling something else is about to hit us there. We’ve been leaking to the media the inferno didn’t leave enough of the body to confirm that it was Chloe. It’s a small public relations victory, but one that’s about to fall out from underneath us as the long burn plays out.

  18

  A FEW HOURS LATER we’re gathered in a hotel conference room down the strip from the airplane. It’s a hastily arranged operations center put together on the fly.

  Knoll’s making a pained face as he holds the phone. He’s listening to the forensic lab report the results on the thumb.

  The print is a perfect match for the original pilot of the missing Avenger.

  Chisholm and behavioral analysis have been compiling a profile and looking for a historical precedent while others comb the beachfront hotels for suspects. From the look of things as they huddle around their laptops, they’re not having much success.

  The Warlock appears to be a black swan. A thing so rare, there’s nothing to compare it to. On the far wall overhead projectors flash images of the cemetery crime scene and the Avenger bomber. The forensic team is talking about doing radiocarbon and chlorine-36 testing on the pilot to prove he was born after World War II, and possibly isotopic testing to determine where he was born.

  I was reminded by one of the techs of the fun fact that because the U.S. and Soviet governments freely tested nuclear weapons in the 1950s, different isotopes made it into the food chain and effectively gave us all internal timestamps based on bomb blasts.

  We can measure the rate of decay of certain radioactive elements given off in an atomic blast and find them in your teeth and bones from when you consumed said elements at some point.

  This approach is made more complicated, however, because of what happened when the bomb squad decided to test the plane for radioactivity in case it was some kind of dirty bomb Trojan horse. That’s how paranoid we are now. The plane had negligible radioactivity, but the pilot was red-hot.

  It could be proof that he was tampered with to hide his actual date of birth, or evidence that his body experienced some kind of cosmic trauma from teleporting through time and space.

  The Warlock is playing all the angles.

  Chisholm motions me over to a table where he’s talking to the head of the Miami field office, Robert Jensen, who we met briefly on the beach. Jensen has neatly combed gray hair and the look of a principal who’s decided he hates children. He gives me a moment’s glance, then turns back to the conversation. Absentmindedly, he pulls a chair out between him and Chisholm for me to sit. I keep my mouth shut until Chisholm asks me a question.

  “How’d he do it, Blackwood?”

  Again, I’m being put on the spot, frustrating me. “I don’t know.”

  Jensen rolls his eyes. “Heck of an expert you got. I don’t have to guess why she’s really here.”

  I speak calmly. “Maybe I should come back later.” I step away from the table.

  “Please have a seat, Blackwood. Jensen is just a bit rattled because he doesn’t like not knowing,” replies Chisholm diplomatically.

  I sit back down on the other side of the table, across from them. Chisholm asks me to elaborate.

  I can only lay out my inner monologue. “I guess my point is that all I have is a theory. I don’t presume to know how he did it. I just have Occam’s razor. That tells me he didn’t pull the thing through time and space and drop it on our doorstep. He’s covered his tracks enough with the pilot to confuse things. A DNA test won’t help because we have no tissue from the original pilot. Even next of kin might be doubtful if there’s no match. Failure to show a match between the body in the plane and a family member only means they didn’t share any genes. Somebody could have been fooling around and nobody knew.” I point to a group of forensic techs. “According to them, we can’t even use dental records because looking at tooth fillings would help, but his are all gone and the teeth have been washed with an abrasive that would take away any tool marks inside cavities. No matter how much we insist the Warlock tampered with the body, we can’t prove he wasn’t born in the 1920s. That’s what people will remember. Either way, the real trick here is the sense of wonder. The plane. It’s an artifact out of time. Where did it come from?”

  “How did he do that?” asks Jensen.

  I can tell he’s not expecting much of an answer but I surprise him. “I have an idea. You’re not going to like it.” It makes the most sense out of everything.

  I’d been thinking about it before they called me over to the table. “It’s the real thing,” I explain.

  “What?” Jensen almost spits out his coffee.

  There’s a trace of a smile on Chisholm’s face. I think he can read me more than I care to be read. I ignore him and turn to Jensen. “If I wanted to really impress you, there are two advantages that I can use to make that happen. The first is planning. When a magician steps onstage, he has years of practice going into the things you’re only going to have a few seconds to ponder. The Warlock has been planning these stunts for a very long time. So much so, like a good magician, he’s tried to think of every contingency. That’s why the Chloe’s double caught on fire when we wanted a closer look. That’s why our fake pilot is setting off Geiger counters.”

  Jensen shakes his head. “How do you arrange for the appearance of an airplane that went missing in the Bermuda Triangle over fifty years ago?”

  “You don’t. It’s the second thing you hope to have happen as a magician. Opportunity. I think he tipped his hand more than he wanted to with this plane stunt. But it was too good of a chance to pass up. If you know it’s a trick, but the plane is real, then answer is obvious.”

  Jensen’s face is a mask. Chisholm had asked me over to the table to show the local field director that we weren’t as clueless as we seemed.

  I raise up my hand and show it’s empty. I snap my fingers and a silver pen appears. “Opportunity.”

  Jensen is dismissive. “Neat trick. But I don’t see your point.”

  I toss the pen onto his notepad. “Look familiar?”

  His nostrils flare as he realizes that I took his pen. He picks it up and tucks it into his jacket pocket. “Okay. So you’re a kleptomaniac.” He gives Chisholm another eye roll. “My grandson could pull that off.”

  Chisholm holds up a finger. “Would your grandson see a hard-ass skeptic a mile away and find an opportunity beforehand to make a point? I think Agent Blackwood is telling us that the Warlock has been waiting for something like this.”

  I continue my demonstration, even though I can see it’s not getting through to Jensen. “The Warlock probably cast a pretty wide net searching for something to exploit. Who knows what else he was looking for or hoping to find. Amelia Earhart? Who knows. My point is Flight 19 has been a pervasive mystery, partly because nobody has ever spent the resources using modern technology to find the planes. The Navy stopped looking half a century ago. What would it cost? Time more than anything else. Maybe a little luck, but not as much as it seems. This tells us a lot about him. It also suggests he has other things planned.” I reach i
nto my purse and toss Jensen’s watch on the table in front of him.

  His jaw hangs open. I keep talking without missing a beat. “Planning and opportunity.” I look over at Chisholm. “For what it’s worth, the Warlock might have a background in drug running. Maybe he’s not a smuggler himself. Possibly a chemist. But someone who could have had the opportunity to find the plane and a reason not to tell anyone. He could be one of those treasure hunters too. This state is filled with people searching the ocean for lost Spanish galleons and gold. Boats and planes are the connection I’d make.”

  Jensen snatches the watch from the table and shakes his head.

  Chisholm gives me a smile. “That’s what we think. Anything else?”

  “Well, he could also be a guy that really wanted to find Flight 19 and spent a lot to do that. I wouldn’t rule that out. Either way, if this is like the last stunt, he’s left us a clue in there somewhere. The website told us where to look for Chloe. The sand in Chloe’s coffin came from here. If it hasn’t already been matched to this beach yet, I’m sure it will be. There’s got to be another clue to direct us to his next performance.”

  I leave out telling him what he already knows; that the next victim could still be alive.

  19

  JENSEN GRUMBLES SOMETHING that sounds like a compliment and walks over to a table of his agents who are going through a database of images of the crowd on the beach. They’re looking for anyone who stands out in the files of the Miami field office.

  Chisholm thanks me for the demonstration I gave Jensen. I’m clearly part of a little power game between D.C. and the local bureau that I can only guess at. I get the feeling I was just shown off as a pet freak. If that’s what it takes to stay on the case, then I guess I’m okay with that.

  On the far wall, a video feed from the beach shows a crane getting ready to move the Avenger to a flatbed truck. A forensic team is doing a last-minute pass on the plane before they wrap it in plastic for transportation.

  I count all the different law enforcement personnel in the hotel conference hall. There are more than fifty people working on this case while it’s hot, not counting the ones back at D.C., Quantico and the field office in Michigan. Most of these people will be back to their normal workload in a day or so, but that’s still a lot of human resource hours being spent on this.