Angel Killer (33 page)

The first trick I learned, because it was the easiest, involved a little round box. You would place a quarter inside of it, give it a shake, and open it to reveal the quarter had shrunk to half its size. It fooled kids and adults alike. I would perform it whenever Grandfather or Dad would put me on the spot. Somewhere there’s a photo of me, wearing a T-shirt with Grandfather’s face on it, and me grinning, missing a tooth. I’m proudly holding the little box up in my fingers.

The big quarter vanished when a disk underneath the lid fell on top of it, blending in with the bottom of the box. The tiny quarter, no bigger than a SIM card, was on the other side of the disk, under the lid to the box. The lid itself looked like a big bottle cap.

Like a cap to a water bottle.

I point the water bottle cap out to the tech. She picks it up, looks underneath it, then sets it back down. “Nothing.”

I don’t want to touch anything. I have a fear of the camera catching me picking up something we find and the footage getting played back later in court as proof that the FBI “Witch” pulled a trick. “Pick it up again. This time, tap it on the table.”

She follows my instructions and gives the cap a few swift raps. She feels something click. Even with the wind blowing across the highway we hear the sound of something fall. She pulls the cap away and on the table there’s a white disk that exactly matches the interior of the cap. Sitting on top of it is a tiny SIM card. Hidden in plain sight.

The Warlock can tell something is going on. He tries to twist his head around and is told to face forward by an arresting agent.

All his planning. All his elaborate schemes. Foiled by the first magic trick I ever owned. Child’s play.

Knoll is beaming at me.

We got him.

I think I’ll give my father a call. Possibly Grandfather. I’ve avoided acknowledging it, but I’m here because of them. For better or worse, what they taught me made me who I am.

K
NOLL AND I
watch the man in the interrogation room through a security camera. He sits quietly and ignores the questions. He didn’t need any prompting from an attorney to do that. He’s committed to not saying anything. Occasionally, he looks up at the camera as if to look back at who’s watching him. He wants me to know he’s looking back at me.

With his mask off, he’s just another sick fuck. It’s hard to connect the specter of the Warlock to the man in the wrinkled polo shirt underneath the bright fluorescent lights. That’s the disturbing part. It doesn’t take a demigod to kill Denise, Chloe, Claire or Swanson. All it takes is a man.

Up close he has thin brown hair that’s slightly receding. He looks to be in his early forties. His face is more restrained than expressive. Light brown eyes, they see everything. You can tell he’s listening carefully and thinking everything over.

He knows his best strategy is to wait things out and let his law firm, the most prestigious one in Texas, the one used by presidents and billionaires, even third-world dictators, handle things. They know the real charges we want to bring against him. They also know that a thousand things can go wrong in our attempt to prosecute him for endangering a child and intent to kidnap.

We only found the SIM linking him to Rosa. So far, his laptop has resisted our best efforts to crack its encryption. With nothing else on him or his truck, we suspect somewhere in south Texas he’s got a safe house like the Michigan warehouse where we hope to find more incriminating evidence. We hope to find some clue of what he was up to. We still have no idea what his plot was going to be here.

The search warrant for his Georgia residence turned up an empty apartment. They’re still trying to find any other record of a Michael Haywood.

“Haywood? Blackwood? Think there’s a connection?” Knoll asks me.

“I don’t know. He had to have that name before I was on the case. Just a coincidence, I guess.” I hope.

We’ve been watching the interrogation go on for hours. Sealed away in another room, Knoll, the rest of the agents and I have been trying to parse what little we’ve learned for any kind of lead to more evidence.

He didn’t expect to be caught, at least not this soon. Of that much I’m certain. We just don’t know how much has already been put into place.

Also, nagging at the back of my mind is the larger question: Is he acting alone?

So far, everything he’s done could have been accomplished by one person. It’s an incredible and difficult achievement, but we’ve found no reason to think that anyone else was involved other than an unwitting accomplice in the case of Katya. And that’s the damning thing; I don’t know what’s more unsettling—that one man could do this alone or that there might be others out there.

Dr. Chisholm says Haywood’s behavior fits the classical loner profile to a T. Which is odd, because nothing else about him does.

We may have figured out his methods, but not his larger plan. Personally, that’s the most maddening thing to me. It’s one thing to have a credible theory about how he pulled off the previous murders. It’s another to deal with the idea that we don’t know where this was going to go from here. Ailes and his team have been doing their best to see if there are any other victims out there. Our worst fear is that a double for Rosa is locked in a basement somewhere starving to death.

There’s an arrogant expression on his face whenever he’s asked a question. He knows his really important secrets are still his own. We haven’t said anything to the press about our suspicion of his identity. Our ability to connect him to the Warlock is so circumstantial that we’re not ready to go out on that limb yet.

He looks up at the camera again. For the first time he says something more than a monosyllabic answer. “Is Agent Blackwood there? I’d really like to meet her.” His voice is calm.

Our agent in the room asks him if he’ll be more cooperative if he gets to speak to me. He just shakes his head. He doesn’t want to say or do anything that implies he’s attached to the crimes the Warlock is accused of.

“I’m not letting you anywhere near him,” Knoll tells me.

“No argument here.” The last thing I want to do is gratify his ego. But if I thought it would help, then of course my answer would be yes.

Our interrogator tells the man a meeting with me is not going to happen.

Haywood looks at the monitor for a long moment, knowing I’m still watching.

“A jail cell can’t hold an idea,” he finally says.

“Well that’s almost an admission of guilt,” Knoll replies to me. “The guy’s playing games. The deputy told us he spent two hours on the phone yelling at his attorney before they got here.”

I try to pay attention to what Knoll is saying. “What’s so odd about that?”

“The line was dead. He never called anyone. He was screaming at a dial tone. He’s trying to set himself up as crazy.” Knoll pokes a finger at the screen.

“Wouldn’t that fall under attorney-client privilege still? Even if the call didn’t go through?”

Knoll shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not like we’re going to mention it to the judge.”

“Then why do it at all?” I ask.

“Why do any of this? Nothing about him makes sense.”

I
T’S OBVIOUS THE QUESTIONING
isn’t going anywhere. I don’t need to stare at him anymore. I decide to go back to the motel and finish my report, then take a car down to Santa Lucia to see if I can figure out what he was planning to do. I’ve looked at all the images and surveillance photos I can handle. I need to just go for myself.

Our Colorado team still hasn’t found anything useful to report. That part of the mystery is still a huge blank for us.

When I arrive back at my motel room, there’s an envelope under the door. I pick it up and get suspicious because it feels a little thick. But I see Damian’s distinctive D written on one side and breathe a little sigh of relief. It’s one of the rare times I’m glad to get something from him. I can open it without calling the bomb squad. I think.

I glance over my shoulder back into the motel parking lot, just to see if he’s watching. It’s empty except for our government cars. I step inside my room and lock the door behind me.

I pull a pair of rubber gloves from my jacket and use a nail file from my purse to slit the envelope open. I’ll let forensics take a look after I read the letter.

Enclosed along with the note is a flat foil pack of pills. I flip them over and look at the name on the back, Antilirium.

I type the name into my phone and it comes back as a prescription medication used for treating Alzheimer’s symptoms. Sometimes Damian likes to make weird jokes. They seem funny to him, but he’s also insane. I slip them into an evidence bag and put them in my pocket with his letter and decide to worry about the meaning later.

It takes me another two hours to finish up my notes and send them off. There’s still enough daylight left to check out Santa Lucia, so I take one of our rental cars. Just to be safe, I call our local dispatcher and tell him where I’m heading.

Santa Lucia is like most other small towns in America, a collection of buildings connected by highways and back roads lined with houses to another cluster of buildings. You’re never quite certain where one town begins and the other ends.

Other than a sign announcing the city limits, it’s the old church that tells me I’ve arrived. Since it was rebuilt twice after the fires, I’m not sure if I should call it old or not. A small building with a rock foundation and a white steeple, it’s set back from the road in a field with knee-high yellow grass.

I pull off the road and follow the gravel driveway that leads up to the hill the church sits on. Our agents have been over it several times. The priest insists he’s seen nothing suspicious. The mere mention of another fire turned the man white.

Up until a few hours ago we had a surveillance team staked out in a small shed across the highway from the church. Knoll relieved them after we found the SIM card. The church was one of a thousand possible targets. With Haywood now in custody we have to cut back on our manpower.

To the left of the church is a small graveyard overgrown with weeds. The markers look like they’ve been there since Texas was part of Mexico. The priest had explained that the church was only used on special occasions, for weddings and holiday services. Most of Santa Lucia’s worshippers attend a megachurch outside Brownsville.

Megachurches, with their concert stages and arena seating, have become the big box store equivalent of religion. Never that religious myself, I don’t know how I feel about that. If I get married, I think I’d like to do it in a church like this.

It’s the golden hour right now and the shadows of the weeds give way to a warm glow. It’s picture-perfect. The most peaceful place in the world. I roll down the window and listen to the breeze as it rolls through the grass.

I pull my phone from my pocket and hover my thumb over the address book. I think about calling my father.

The door to the church opens and a man in a priest collar emerges. He waves at me. I wave back and put the phone down. He walks across the gravel to talk to me.

“Beautiful day,” he says.

“Yes, it is.”

He turns his head to the side and coughs. “Hay fever. Gets my asthma.” He takes an inhaler from his pocket. “He’s real, you know.”

Who’s real? Jesus?

He sprays me in the face with his inhaler.

I go numb before descending.

Into darkness.

M
Y BODY WON’T MOVE.
It’s completely black. Part of me feels like I’m flying. I think I’m dreaming. A dream I have whenever I get stressed or feel overwhelmed. It’s a dream based on a memory. A horrible memory. A memory of when I almost died.

I’
M TWENTY AND PERFORMING
an illusion for a television show in Mexico. It’s the kind of show with a bunch of sweaty older men in business suits and jiggly teenage girls in thongs. Everything is sensational and over the top. The week before, a stunt rider from Argentina had tried to jump three brightly colored buses in a shopping mall parking lot and slipped on his landing, sending him into a coma.

The segment I’m on is preceded by a bedside interview with the man’s family as they prayed for a recovery. I’m here to promote a run of shows in Mexico City. The stunt is an escape from a wooden sarcophagus that is to be weighted down and dropped into the bottom of a lake dating from the Aztec era when Mexico City was called Tenochtitlán. You know, the usual.

As the chubby-fingered host secures me in chains and makes a few rude pats that would have gotten him banned from American television, a Mexican history professor cheerfully explains to the audience that this lake was once near a sacrificial temple and that they’ve found scores of bones belonging to murdered people at the bottom and I may soon be joining them.

The last thing I see before they hammer the coffin shut is the full moon. As workers pound the nails into the lid, they make a funny squeaking sound I’ve never heard before. From childhood in my family’s workshop, I know the sounds and scents of different wood. I smell the wood and realize that while the ornate lid, carved with Aztec deities, is the same one I had constructed, the rest of the coffin is new.

The producers would later claim that they didn’t do anything to the coffin. When my uncle found the original bottom half sitting at the back of a studio workshop, they changed their story to say it was damaged in transit and they had to replace it last-minute.

The chains are easy to get off. I’ve always been flexible and able to slip out of things without too much trouble. The difficulty is trying to keep them from falling off prematurely. But the real problem is getting out of the sarcophagus. The secret panel I’m supposed to use to get out isn’t there. I kick the side with my high heels over and over, but it didn’t move.