Angel Killer (27 page)

I regain my calm. “Damian. You’ve lied before. There’s no reason to trust you. No reason for me to trust you.”

“Are we still on that? Fine. Before I hang up I’ll give you all the proof you need. Of course, I think you’re probably already working on that. To be honest, I called this number because I was sure they’d be tapping it. Transparency, eh?”

Tapping my phone? I catch a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror and suddenly feel vulnerable. Would they bug my phone? Of course they did. I would.

If Damian is our only person of interest and Chisholm could tell I was being evasive, why not? They know it’s only a matter of time before Damian calls me again. And now here he is on the other end of the line.

“Why are you calling?” I ask.

“A few reasons. I had an interesting chat with a man from Tulsa who brought up some curious things. A churchgoing man, he saw the news on a bar television and all of a sudden felt the urge to get good with the Lord. He ran to the nearest church. I tried to tell him nobody is home. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but late-night masses are starting to fill up everywhere. Who knows what tomorrow’s going to look like. This angel killing stunt is darkly brilliant. This country is experiencing a religious revival because of the Warlock.”

I was afraid of this. Right now when you say the word “miracle,” the first thing that comes up is the Warlock. Good or evil, he’s made himself the center of religious discussion. Each deception elevates him in people’s minds. He’s created something bigger than all the people watching Times Square.

“I doubt people see anything godly in what he did,” I reply.

“Maybe not. I think what he’s really trying to do is challenge God or at least our notion of him. And that might be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“He wants followers. He’s waiting to make sure he’s proven himself. Then he’s going to give us his real message. Unless he’s already sent you something?”

I’m silent. There’s nothing I can say, but I don’t want anyone thinking that I’m feeding Damian information. I’m under enough scrutiny.

“I think he’ll do it in a public way. He doesn’t want you hiding the message. Unless he wants to give it to you first and then reveal the fact that you were trying to suppress it. That’s the first step to creating a religion—show the people that the authorities are trying to hide the truth. I think you’ve interfered with his plans, however. I suspect he’s going to step up the timetable a bit.”

“That’s obvious.”

“Of course. This is just a friendly reminder. Remember what I said before about him having his sights set on you? I think that’s still true. But now there’s another problem. He may not have to do anything to hinder you. The kind of fervor that sends people to midnight mass is also the kind of thing to inspire the more unstable parts of our society. Proud as I was to see your face in the paper, I think you may have more admirers than you can handle.”

This is a repercussion I do not want to think about. It’s one thing to deal with Damian and the Warlock leaving vague threats in hotel rooms. It’s another to have to worry about every psycho out there waiting for a sign who might see my face in the news and get an idea.

“Don’t worry, Jessica. I’m sure after you catch him, this will die down and then I can go back to being your number one fan.”

That’s unsettling. “You may be the worst of them.”

“You know that’s not true. Anyhow, how’s the next clue going? I have to assume he’s been leaving calling cards.”

We haven’t found one yet. As I went to sleep forensics was still going over the body. But Damian’s voice sounds like it’s a certainty.

“What clue?” I ask.

“Really?” Damian sounds genuinely surprised. “I mean, it seemed obvious to me. Of course I don’t have the whole picture. Just the direction, so to speak.”

He’s being cryptic. “What do you know?”

“Fine. Make me explain everything. First off, the media has it wrong. Typically, of course. She’s not an angel.”

“We know this, Damian,” I try to keep the frustration out of my voice, remembering that others may be listening.

“No. I mean in the Christian Bible, angels don’t have wings. This girl does. In other mythologies, like Babylonian, they do. Of course, that’s academic. What they can all agree on is that winged beings are either messengers or, as the Babylonians described them, watchers. Messengers or watchers, take your pick. If she’s not here to tell us something obvious, then logic would dictate she’s watching something. What was she looking at, Jessica?”

She was looking at something? Damn. I spent over an hour at the crime scene and never bothered to think about this. I even stared down at her haunted eyes. I was so focused on figuring out how he did it, I didn’t bother to ask why. None of us did. We forgot the Warlock is trying to tell a story.

The angel herself is the clue.

A text message comes up on my phone from Knoll with a Las Vegas phone number.

Damian sighs. “I can see this didn’t dawn on you and your friends. I’m sure you were all tired. Maybe I’m wrong. But we know I’m not. Either way, if you go have a look to see what your angel is watching, don’t go alone. I think I’m going to have a nap myself. I’ve been up for three days straight. If you call this number, just ask for Mr. Smith. I won’t be here, though. But you’ll get all the proof of my innocence you need. And one more thing . . .”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Put something on. You’ll catch cold.”

He hangs up, leaving me staring at my naked reflection. He’s thousands of miles away, yet he knows me. He knows me better than I know myself.

A
MINUTE AFTER DAMIAN
hangs up on the hotel telephone, Knoll calls me on my mobile.

“We traced it to the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. We’re sending some uniformed police to pick him up.”

“He won’t be there. He knows you’re coming,” I explain with a sigh.

“It’s worth a try,” Knoll replies tersely. “We’ve told security there too.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Kind of sloppy of him to use a landline like that.”

Knoll doesn’t know Damian. “No. He wants us to know where he is. Call the number back and ask for Mr. Smith.”

“We’re checking on that. See you downstairs in ten,” Knoll says before he hangs up.

I get dressed while I wait for Knoll to call back. I have to see what the angel was looking at. I’m exhausted, but I need to know. I send an e-mail to Ailes describing Damian’s insight, then go down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee and wait for the rest of the team who were in on the phone call.

Three minutes later he steps from the elevator flanked by two of our forensic people from Quantico. Knoll sees me and shakes his head. “Security at the Bellagio said he left right after he hung up on the house phone. They’re going to double check their security footage, but they’re pretty sure the man who made that call is the same person they’ve been watching for the last three days at the poker tables. He only gets up to use the bathroom. Other than that he hasn’t moved more than a hundred feet for seventy-two hours. Nuts.”

“Yes. Insane. That would be Damian.” Leave it to him to figure out how to give himself an airtight alibi and still stay out of our reach.

“They ran his image through their own database. Nothing came up. The casino also says he broke even after three days of solid play. That’s a trick in itself.”

That would be Damian making a point.

Fifteen minutes later we’re back in Times Square. NYPD still has the street blocked off, but the body has been moved to the medical examiner’s office. There’s an outline of tape marking where the body had lain. Three techs in hard hats are using a saw to cut the asphalt out of the ground where she appeared to have landed. A road crew is standing by with hot gravel to patch it after them. In a few hours it’ll be like it never happened. This city seriously never sleeps.

One of Knoll’s agents has brought a large printout of a photograph documenting the placement of Claire’s body on the ground. It looks like it was taken from the overhead lift. The woman sets it on the sidewalk a few yards away from where Claire was found and rotates it to match her position.

We step back and take a look across the street in the same direction Claire was looking. The buildings are covered with electronic billboards. One of the agents, a tired-looking man with uncombed hair and an FBI jacket like mine, starts taking photographs of everything in front of us. I’m sure we already have this shot uploaded onto a server in Quantico by now, but it doesn’t hurt to be thorough.

Knoll takes a sip from his coffee cup and surveys the array of fashion models displaying clothing, perfume and watches. “So which one didn’t Leonardo DiCaprio date?”

There are a million things in front of us. Everything around us is demanding our attention. Anything could be a clue. The time on a watch. The image on one of the giant televisions. The models. The information overload is overwhelming. Somewhere back in Quantico, a room full of analysts will pore all over these images for hours or days trying to find something.

Maybe we’re being too literal? I remember something about a fingerprint on a cornea leading to a killer. “We ever have anything left on someone’s eyes before?”

“Dust, metal fragments. Sometimes fibers. Semen.” Knoll has another drink of his coffee in the absentminded way cops deal with the morbid.

We’re facing west and the sun is rising behind us. Rays of light start to shine through the streets. I once read an article about Manhattanhenge, a phenomenon that occurs two times a year when the sun is exactly parallel to the streets and sends shafts of light straight through the buildings like an ancient monolith. I look at my own shadow and think of something.

I call Ailes.

Gerald answers. “Hello?”

“Gerald, is Dr. Ailes there?”

Knoll raises an eyebrow.

“He’s sleeping on the couch. His wife said she’d kill me if I wake him. Can I help you?”

“Do you have the crime scene photos location-mapped on the DIVS computer?” Every time we take a photograph we record the position and angle and then upload it into the computer to make a virtual crime scene in 3-D we can go back to later on. For outdoor crime scenes, it’s useful to plug in GPS data so you can see where everything is in relation to the world. The position of a body in a ravine can tell you the direction in which someone walked down it. Sometimes that can lead right to one house out of a hundred and narrow your search for clues like hair and fibers.

“Yeah. I’m pulling it up now. What do you need?” I can tell he’s tired, but like me, he’s eager to chase down whatever clues we can.

“Looking at it from overhead, can you extend a virtual line from the victim’s eyes into the horizon?” I ask.

“One second. Let me create a vector at her eyes. What’s our margin of error, given the angle?”

I don’t know how precisely the Warlock was able to drop the body. This experiment could be way off or have nothing to do with this at all. “I don’t know. Is there some other way to make it fuzzy?”

“If you have other data points, yeah. We can approximate it.”

Other data points. I think about the push pins in the missing person’s map back in the Tribeca office. “What about the GPS coordinates of the other two murders?”

“Maybe . . . I see if anything fits nicely.”

“Imagine there are five points and we know three of them. And they’re either the same distance as New York and Fort Lauderdale or the cemetery and Fort Lauderdale.” I hope I have my geometry right.

“Got it.”

I can hear him type away at the keyboard faster than I can even think of letters. I have no idea where Ailes found Gerald. I get the impression he snatched him out of some genius startup company. The relationship feels like a professor to a prized grad student.

“Huh. That’s spooky. I think I got the pattern and the angle right.”

“Gerald, what is it?” My heart begins to pound and I get that tingle on my body.

There’s a long pause. “Let me just text you the photo.”

Knoll watches over my shoulder as the image loads onto my screen. “Holy shit.”

No kidding.

If we follow where she’s looking and assume there are five locations, she’s looking at the bottom of a star.

It’s a pentagram.

One of the most occult symbols there is. The Warlock is etching one across the United States. The Sumerians used it, so did the ancient Chinese. For the Greeks it was a symbol of the creation of the cosmos. In early Christianity it symbolized the five wounds of Christ. Turning it upside-down made the symbol into a satanic symbol. It’s not just any pattern; it’s the pattern of all patterns. And right in front of us.

So far three points are murder scenes. The remaining two aren’t. Yet.

Our angel is staring at a town in south Texas.

I’ll leave the mathematical permutations of how he managed it to Ailes and his geniuses. However he did it, the warlock got the result he wanted. One more “Fuck you” in the middle of everything else.

The angel is watching a town called Santa Lucia.

Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind.

B
ACK IN QUANTICO
, ten hours after we left Times Square, Agent Johnson—one of Knoll’s task force members, a man with a slight build and curly blond hair who resembles a wise elf—is pointing at a molecule on an overhead screen.

While I was grabbing a nap in the dorm after we got back, they made a lot of progress. They have found more clues. Not the kind the Warlock left for us intentionally, as far as we can tell. Telltale signs of how he pulled off the illusion.

Based on my conversation with Knoll, New Jersey police spoke to a supervisor at a welding supply shop in Hackensack who said a man in a taxi van picked up a cylinder of CO2 the day before. He had a vague description: medium build, goatee. He said he’d recognize him again if we had a photograph.

After being unable to find any signs of ligatures or bruising on Swanson’s and Denise’s bodies our medical examiners expanded their toxicology search. In a kidnapping case, presence of certain chemicals is a clear sign that someone was drugged. However, screenings for the usual suspects, like the date rape drug Rohypnol, didn’t show anything.