Angel Killer (11 page)

“I think so. We can cut it open. The robot has a diamond saw.” Knoll radios instructions to the head of the bomb squad.

I feel a wave of relief that we’re going to continue the inspection with everyone at a safe distance. Although I get the feeling the Warlock isn’t going to repeat the first stunt.

All of this inspecting and prodding reminds me of the setup for one of my grandfather’s illusions. For the premiere show, the police chief of whatever town we were in would be invited onstage to inspect the locks and the packing case. Local warehouse workers would manhandle the chains. Grandfather would make a big show of proving everything was real. The subtext was showing how much smarter he was than all the idiots onstage.

That was part of why Houdini was so popular. He cheated death and defied authority. Now the Warlock is teasing the ultimate law enforcement authority in the world. We’re all amped about the plane exploding because there’s just no way it could be the real missing Avenger and pilot. But maybe that’s his trick . . .

A half hour later, the bomb squad is bringing the plastic-wrapped robot over to the plane on a boat. A technician in a truck on shore will control it while the supervisors watch the robot’s camera feed in handheld monitors. Knoll holds up his screen so we can see.

Bomb robot work is a slow process. Because of the dangerous nature, the tech doesn’t want to make any mistakes, like overcompensating on the controls. It’s like trying to fix your car with baseball gloves on both hands.

An armored tech places the robot on the inside of the sandbag barrier. Thick treads push it across the sand to the plane. The robot comes to a stop near the front and starts to extend an arm on a telescoping base. At full extension, it comes halfway to the engine compartment.

To help the robot operator, a mechanic familiar with the make of the plane is on the radio explaining where to cut. He sounds so specific that first I think he’s reading from a manual. Then I overhear he’s actually on the phone from an air museum outside Orlando, describing the plane they have on display as he takes it apart.

On Knoll’s screen, the diamond-tipped blade starts spinning. The tech moves the edge a few centimeters and it begins cutting into the casing over the engine. The rusted metal sprays out a cloud of brown dust as the saw carves a hole the size of a book. The grinding sound carries across the water. Once the smoke clears, the robot uses an arm to pull the piece away and sticks a camera into the engine compartment.

The technician takes several minutes to get the camera over the location of the engine serial number. When the numbers finally come into view, he calls them out over the radio.

A new voice, someone who sounds like he’s indoors somewhere, calls the numbers back out for confirmation. He’s probably in a dark basement library under the Pentagon poring through a repair log that hasn’t seen light in half a century.

I look at the two dozen other officials watching the monitor Knoll is holding up for us. I know what they’re thinking. It’s what the Warlock desires. He wants us to hope the numbers match.

Forgetting the dead man in the pilot’s seat, probably another innocent victim, we all want this to be true. We want this to be one of the missing planes . . .

We want the mystery to be bigger than us. We want novelty of the unexpected.

We want to be entertained.

There’s a disconnect around me between the horrible acts and the spectacle.

That sickens me. I can understand the power fantasies men sometimes have about serial killers. It’s something else when we’re waiting for confirmation that would give proof to this asshole’s illusion.

We have this strange desire for symmetry. Humans are pattern seekers. We’re designed by nature to get a little buzz every time something connects in a novel way. It’s why we play Sudoku, enjoy simple video games, and watch TV shows with different characters but the same plots.

We love patterns.

Even dark patterns.

The tech continues calling numbers.

We wait for the man in the basement to respond. No one is breathing, for fear of missing the moment.

I look at everyone around me. I know it’s not real. Somehow we’re all about to be deceived, or it’s going to fall apart. Regardless of what the man in the Pentagon basement says, it’s a trick.

But I know it won’t fall apart here.

Damn him.

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.

K
NOLL 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.

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.