Angel Killer (3 page)

Ailes sets his glasses down and rubs his eyes. “We did a study that showed if you calculated the amount of time some supervisors spend going over incidentals like phone calls and fuel expenses, it’d be cheaper to keep all the cars running nonstop and never hang up a long-distance call. Inefficiency is the creeping death of bureaucracy and accountability. It’s what brought the Roman Empire down. While they were filing reports, the barbarians were storming the gates. You can bet at least one senator demanded a census of the number of invaders before he decided whether or not to support repelling them.”

I say nothing. It’s a topic we’re all familiar with. When you join the FBI, you think your days are going to be spent going after bad guys. The reality is that you find more and more of your time being eaten up by paperwork and procedures and hierarchy, and it only gets worse. It’s how the Greenville Killer could have slipped away from us. If I hadn’t subverted the chain of command in my own way, he’d still be out there murdering people.

The bureaucracy keeps getting thicker. Every few months another form comes along because some manager somewhere decided that if we all just spend an extra ten minutes filling it out, everything will be better, ignoring the hundred other geniuses who had the same thought about some other form.

Ailes waves his hands in the air. “My goal here is efficiency. Helping you do your job faster. One of the ways we can do that is by making sure the right person is in the right job. Decide who belongs where. You don’t seem to care much for lines of authority. Are you better than the FBI?”

“No.” The word blurts out of my mouth.

“Yet you went around Miller. You could have told him your suspicions.”

“He . . . he wouldn’t have believed me.”

“How do you know? Did you try?”

I shake my head. Miller is a well-intentioned accountant. He has no street experience. He wouldn’t believe a serial killer was hiding in a spreadsheet for a credit card case.

I only saw because I grew up learning how to do suspicious things while looking innocent. I know how to create deceptions in front of people prepared not to be fooled. It’s in my blood. Hashimi was using a stolen credit card to purchase things that he didn’t want to appear on his own credit card statement. If you’re a professional thief like him, you’ll buy iPads, TVs, prepaid gas cards; things that have a high resale value. Not rope, bleach and cutting tools. Hashimi was hiding these purchases on the stolen cards because he was more afraid of someone suspecting he was a serial killer than a credit card thief.

“Did you try?” repeats Ailes.

“No. I didn’t.” I was new in the division. Miller had little patience for me.

“Don’t you like it here? Are you sure you’re really FBI material?”

So this is what it comes down to. I’m being asked if I’m happy in the FBI.

I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately.

It’s the kind of routine I always longed for after growing up in the back of a tour bus, sleeping in airports; the FBI has a kind of stability I always craved. I wanted to help people. I just didn’t know it would be so hard.

People have been waiting for me to slip up, for my past to catch up with me. “We’re show people,” Grandfather used to say. Show people, with our own values, our own way of doing things. Gypsies who work in the open. People like us don’t belong in places like this. We belong to the fringe. Some of us, even people close to me, belong on the other side—in those files we search through . . .

My eyes drift toward the magazine. I get the feeling I’m about to be set up for a fall. I pull the folder out of the stack and flip it open to show the magazine cover.

“Am I here because of this?”

A
ILES NODS AT THE MAGAZINE
. It’s me on the cover at nineteen. I’m wearing a red sequined tuxedo jacket with my cleavage on display and what could debatably be called a thong, although I was wearing flesh-colored tights under the fishnets.

Magician Magazine
. At the time I was proud to be the youngest female magician to ever grace the cover of a major magic magazine. Even if the cover suggested the kind of thing that comes to your mailbox in a brown wrapper.

After Grandfather taught me that first trick, I pushed to learn more and be in the show more. Neither he nor Father would let me onstage until I could perform flawlessly. Better than them.

I produced playing cards from my hands until the skin cracked and bled. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t have friends. I had magic.

I needed to prove that I could be just as good as them. When I was fifteen I booked myself as a featured act at the national magic convention. I won that audience over. Grandfather still took time.

“You’re just a novelty,” he’d tell me.

“Magic is a novelty act,” I’d remind him.

He would puff away at his cigar and just stop arguing. I wasn’t going to be a pushover like his sons. I was in awe of my grandfather, but I knew he was just a man. My father didn’t have his technical skills and mind, and my uncle lacked his charisma, but people told me I had both. People except for my grandfather.

The year I got the cover of the magazine, the International Magic Alliance also named me magician of the year. Younger than my father or grandfather. They treated it like a joke. They didn’t want to admit that I’d done it mostly on my own.

My famous last name helped. It’s probably why my father got it a decade earlier. But it didn’t help me keep practicing on the concrete loading dock in freezing rain while I waited for them to finish their after-show drinks at the bar across the street. It didn’t help me get up at 4 a.m. to practice so I could have enough time to catch the city bus to Venice Beach Middle School—where I’d had to register myself.

My family’s name opened doors. Practice is what kept them open. I learned the game. I was a girl in a man’s world. I knew my looks were an asset. I played that card.

The sexy vamp on that cover is nothing like me as a person then or now, but it was a role I had to embrace. “Come for the tits, stay for the skills.” I heard Grandfather say that once when he didn’t think I was listening. Or maybe he was speaking loudly enough so I would hear. With him, it was hard to tell.

In the world of show business, the magazine cover is a point of pride, not a scandal. In the puritanical world of the FBI, where you’re expected to spend six days serving J. Edgar Hoover and the seventh in a church pew, it would look not much better than a sex tape. You become “that kind of a girl.” The wink, the pout; I stole the pose from a men’s magazine. I knew as much about sex then as I did the far side of the moon.

I lift the magazine and show the cover to Ailes. “Do you mean, should I be doing this, instead of working in the FBI? I disclosed everything when I signed up. The agency knows my background.”

“An interesting family history,” says Ailes. “Not something you need to be ashamed of.”

Shame. There’s the word. Is that how I feel? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I tried to hide it. But only because I wanted to fit in. Maybe that’s the definition of shame? I toss the magazine down on the table. “Then why is this here? Why am I here?”

Ailes looks at me for a moment, then a light goes on behind his eyes. “I see. You have my apology, Agent Blackwood. Let me start over.”

I’m confused. There’s almost a kindly look on his face. He turns the magazine facedown, telling me the photo is not the point of the conversation. Then what is?

He points to his laptop. “We go through those questionnaires that you fill out and we look at other data points. Your name came up and I was curious as to why. I did some digging in our archives and found the magazine and made the connection. I forget sometimes the holier-than-thou bent of some of your peers. I’m not here to embarrass you.”

I flip the magazine over so my younger self is visible. “I’m not embarrassed.” My eyes look at the sequins and skin. “Not that embarrassed. It’s my past. Just my past. Cheerleaders dress like that now.”

“But you weren’t a cheerleader.”

“I wasn’t much of a team player.” The words flow before I realize what I just said.

Ailes ignores it. “I don’t care about photos, Blackwood. I was interested in what I read. You were a magician. A professional magician. And from what I’ve found out, not just a pretty face who used the family name long enough to pay her way through college working cruise ships and casinos. You performed and you invented magic. In all the FBI, do you know how many agents have that level of experience?”

I shake my head. I’ve seen some guys playing with decks of cards. There’s even a small magic club at the D.C. office, but that’s it.

“None. Zero. I did some research. In the entire history of the FBI, we’ve never had an agent with that kind of knowledge. And now you’re sitting there asking yourself, ‘So what?’ I’ll tell you. My job here is efficiency. And that means putting the right man or woman on the job so it gets done quickly. I flagged your name so when the right opportunity came along, I could test this theory.”

“Is the director having a birthday party?”

It takes Ailes a moment to realize I’m making a joke. My humor, my real sense of humor, has that effect. Grandfather used to say, “The little witch is drier than the Sahara.”

Ailes shakes his head. “The director is having nightmares. We all are. We’re faced with something big. It doesn’t fit the paradigm. I think it’s time we try something different.” He reaches into a bag by his chair and pulls out a folder, then sets it in front of me. There’s only one word written on it, “Warlock.”

I heard the name a few days ago. Someone had managed to take our website offline and redirect the URL to another website. Not the same as actually hacking our internal computer system, but still a serious security lapse. The page that came up was a series of numbers and the name “Warlock.”

The hack was pretty big news and caused all kinds of panic and embarrassment. Other than that, I didn’t realize it was this much of an area of concern. For all I know, someone just used a bad password and it wasn’t some large-scale brute force hack. “I don’t understand. This is a computer crimes case. That’s not my area.”

Ailes nods his head. “It was a computer crime until two hours ago, when we unlocked the code.” There’s a pause. This code isn’t a joke. I can already tell from the tone that there is something more sinister in play.

“The numbers were encrypted GPS coordinates. We sent local police to the point on the map. We were expecting some kind of hacker stunt. None of us expected this. Hackers don’t do this kind of thing. But the code led us to a body. Now it’s a murder investigation.”

“I’m in forensic accounting. What does this have to do with me?”

“I could go into the complexity of the code and why the FBI should be throwing more resources into this, but that’s not your concern. I brought you here because of the body.”

“The body?”

“It’s an impossibility. A puzzle. A mystery we can’t solve,” he replies. “The kind of thing you’d need a magician to understand.”

I shake my head. I’m still not sure I get it.

Ailes continues, “The problem is, the person we’ve identified as the victim is supposed to have died almost two years ago. But the body is only hours old. You get my drift? A magical mystery at the moment. Complicated by the suspect’s intentions. He calls himself a warlock. Another word for a necromancer. Someone who can raise the dead. In twenty-four hours, the news is going to get ahold of this. Short of having him in custody, we need to figure out how he did it. We’re already dealing with the blowback of the hacking. To the public, he defeated the security of the most advanced law enforcement agency in the world. Granted, that was just a public Web server. But it doesn’t matter. He left us a code that told us where to find the victim before she was killed. He knew almost to the minute how long it would take us to break the code.”

“But she was already dead?”

“We don’t know what to think. It’s unprecedented. And I’m sure this is only the start.”

I still don’t know what I can do. I shake my head. “This sounds like a forensic matter.”

“Can you pull a card from behind my ear or make all the aces come to the top of the deck of cards?”

It’s an odd question. “Yes. Of course.”

“If I sent that deck of cards to the forensic lab, what would they tell me?”

I understand what he’s saying. Maybe they’d find a few fingerprints and creases, but that’s not enough. The real answers are in the mind of the magician. In other hands, those cards are just thick pieces of paper.

He slides the magazine toward his end of the table and flips it open to a page with a yellow Post-it note. “You said in the interview that you like to be fooled by something firsthand, rather than have someone describe it to you?”

“Yes, that way you might think of possibilities nobody else thought about before.” Magic works by misleading expectations. You assume the hand is empty or the box doesn’t have a false bottom. Magicians can be just as easily fooled. We assume the awkward hand at the performer’s side is hiding something or the thick table has a trap door.

Ailes nods. “Well, let’s test your theory. I won’t spoil you with what we know. If you’re game?”

“Game for what?”

“I want to spring you from the paper jungle and let you work on this. I want to send you out into the field with the team. But I want your raw experience. I don’t need another FBI agent. I need a magician. The Warlock is trying to convince us that he’s the genuine article. He wants us to believe he’s created a miracle.”

I look down at the folder. I’ve never worked a homicide. “I’m not sure this is my area.”

“Maybe not. We just want your eyes and brains. Agents, we have plenty. Magicians, I have only one.”

He’s been working me all along. He knows I’ve been trying to put all of that behind me. The magic, the family drama, all of those other connections I’ve been trying to sever.

This would mean revisiting that. It means bringing a part of my past I want to forget about in front of my peers. They’ll know about the magazine and everything that goes with it. They’ll think they know me.