Name of the Devil (14 page)

W
HAT WAS
G
ROOM'S
sin? Why did he have to kill himself in such a public way? I'm hoping the church, which is actually a run-down television studio on the outskirts of Atlanta, can give us some clue. Agent Knoll was able to hop on a flight out of Reagan with me, with the promise we'd get him back to DC that night. Ailes pulled him off the sheriff manhunt to help me out—and, I suspect, keep me out of trouble.

While the local detective assisting us talks to the station manager about turning on the floor lights, Agent Knoll stands behind the podium inspecting the scene of the death. Sitting in the front row of chairs set out for the live audience, I watch him search for some physical clue: A piece of tangible evidence that ties what happened here to what happened in Hawkton.

Knoll looks like he'd be more suited to leading a platoon of soldiers than detailed investigative work. Appearances are misleading. I've seen how his mind works. He's not known for sudden flashes of insight; instead, he builds the whole case together in his head and then surprises you with the most minute, but key, observation that everyone else had missed.

I'm afraid there won't be a breakthrough piece of evidence like our muddy footprint on the tree. The autopsy report already came back negative for the chemical we found in the sheriff's tissue. Whatever happened to Groom was psychological in
origin. Or, if you believe the religious rumormongers, supernatural.

Reverend Groom's suicide has made national news. Not quite supplanting the “Zombie-Sheriff-on-the-Run” story, but definitely enhancing it. Once it got out, his Hawkton connection was too powerful to ignore. The claim of possession made it so sensational that it was impossible not to sensationalize it even more.

The lights in the studio finally come on as Knoll leans down, flashlight in hand, to have a look under the podium. How Groom got the gun is still a mystery. Not licensed in his name, it's an artifact that came out of nowhere. Forensics found only his fingerprints. The bullet casing and everything else was clean. He only touched the gun when he removed it and placed it in his mouth. It's as if the gun didn't exist before that horrible moment.

Knoll stands up and crosses his arms. I can tell he suspects something else is at play here. “What do you think?” I ask.

Knoll wrinkles his brow and stares at the floor. “I think it was planted. He could have just brought his own gun. The placement here? It's like someone else put it there.”

I agree. The problem is that the studio has an audience of a hundred people during their broadcasts. Probably a thousand people go through here every week. Bussed in or lined up at the door, there's no record of who has been here. They have footage of all the people in each audience, but there's no way to stop someone from walking in with the crowd and leaving before the show starts.

Detective Stafford, an affable cop from the local police department who met us here, takes the seat near me. “You folks need to see anything else?”

“What kind of man was Groom?”

“A bit churchy, of course. Not as much as some of the other folks here. It's a bit of a racket,” he continues, apparently not afraid of being overheard. “They get old folks in here and work
them for donations. They do okay with the call-in contributions, but the real money is when they bring in their ‘special guests' and pray over them.”

“Sounds sleazy,” I reply. In both my former life and my current one, my history with these kinds of people goes way beyond my first encounter with Julia Vender.

“It is. Nothing we can do about it from a legal point of view. Groom got involved years ago. He helped build up the church. He was doing healings and claiming God was speaking through him. Sometimes he'd tell people stuff about them he couldn't have known. That was a big draw.”

“A faith healer,” grumbles Knoll, who's been listening.

“When it's fashionable. He started doing more of that lately. Ratings, I guess.”

“Nobody noticed anything odd about him recently?” I ask.

“People here say he kept to himself. He'd show up for his tapings, do a meeting or two, then just go home. He's a private man.”

“Any chance his so-called ‘sin' might be something criminal?”

Stafford shakes his head. “He doesn't have a record other than a couple DUIs. Which is bad enough, but he never hit anyone or did damage. He doesn't have a reputation, like some of them do, for engaging in the kind of behavior they admonish.”

I look over my shoulder. The three of us are alone for the moment. “What's the word around here? Why do the employees think he did it?”

Stafford scratches behind his right ear and makes an earnest face. “Hawkton. He knew those folks. It was just too much for him. Some think he had a devil in him. Others think he was afraid
of
the devil and just went nuts.”

“Did any of the people here say anything about him witnessing strange things, like we've been hearing out of Hawkton? Maybe like he was being followed?”

“No. None that I spoke to.”

If Groom was a private man, he probably would have kept that to himself anyway. With the multiple DUIs, he's apparently got an alcohol problem. From wrestling with some inner turmoil?

“What about his regular followers? Did anyone have a grudge against him?” asks Knoll.

“There were complaints from the families of some of the viewers they fleeced. Angry children who found out their parents had given up their inheritance to the church. But nothing I'd think would lead to anything like this.” Stafford pauses for a moment. “You think there's something more to this suicide?”

“While it appears open and shut,” I reply, “we're having a hard time closing the book on Hawkton. Our sheriff is still on the loose and we think others may be involved.”

Stafford looks at me. “Do you know what caused the explosion?”

“We're still working on that. It looks like a gas explosion.” I don't tell him the latest setback, which is that we can't conclusively prove it was propane. The lab results have yielded some crazy findings.

“Could you see if Groom made any 911 calls from his cell phone in the past few weeks? Just look for outbound. He may not have left a name.”

“Sure. I can get that in a few minutes.” Stafford gets up and walks over to a corner of the studio to make the call.

I join Knoll onstage and look out into the empty studio. The chairs are cheap fold-up aluminum ones, the type that makes your ass hurt after ten minutes. I can't help but notice that all the chairs onstage have plush padded pillows. “What are you thinking?”

“A bat,” he replies.

“A bat? The thing I saw in Tixato? What was stalking the people in Hawkton? Maybe he was being surveilled?”

“Maybe. We're getting more of that kind of thing.” Knoll is methodical. He doesn't always see eye-to-eye with me on my leaps, but during the Warlock case we developed a mutual respect. Coming to Atlanta was a favor on his part as well as Ailes's. Knoll has his own cases, but he's always ready to roll his sleeves up.

Stafford lowers his phone. “Well, that's odd.”

“Anonymous reports of being followed? Noises around the house?” I suggest.

“Yes. Yes, indeed. There's a photo too.”

“A photo?” My ears perk up.

“Someone calling from Groom's number reported something was following him as he drove home. A deputy answered the call but couldn't find anything. Just to be safe, he went to a convenience store on the route and pulled the security footage from that night. It ended there. They're sending me the photo now.”

“A photo? Of what?” Knoll asks.

“What they saw on the footage from the night Groom says he was followed,” responds Stafford, who is just as confused as we are. “They say it looks like a demon.”

A
S SOON AS
Detective Stafford receives the file, we sit around the studio trying to decipher the image. Opening the file on his phone, he'd revealed a single frame from a time-lapse video showing the street in front of the convenience store. In the darkness, the only light on the street came from an overhead source mounted somewhere high.

Grainy, hard to see for sure, but it's there and it's got a defined shape. A big shadow with wings. To my eyes it looks like a bat. A large one—as wide as a car.

“Things weren't this weird before you came along,” Knoll whispers to me.

“Or as interesting,” I shoot back.

Stafford zooms in on the image then opens a browser. “You have other sightings of this?”

“Possibly,” I reply. “We haven't made it public yet for obvious reasons.” I'm not even going to go into my Mexican misadventure.

“Yeah, I don't think we need to tell people there's a flying demon on the loose that chases people before they die.” Stafford holds his phone screen up to me. “Have a look.”

It's a picture of a drone. Similar in shape to the shadow, but not quite the same. Close, though. The image and its caption confirm my earlier suspicions.

“We used ones similar to this for recon when I served in Afghanistan,” he explains. “That was a long time ago. Who knows what they look like now.”

“Let's forward this to one of our military experts,” suggests Knoll. “Some of the newer ones look more and more like real creatures.”

“Good thing demons aren't real creatures . . .” Stafford offers.

“Maybe we could tell people it's an angel?” jokes Knoll.

“Remember, only two creatures have wings in the Bible: birds and demons,” I point out.

“Well, if they're fallen angels, how do they get the wings? You'd think those would keep them from falling.”

I take one last long look around the studio before going to the car to call Ailes. I'm sure there's something more here that I'm not noticing. Maybe not a physical clue, but I can't forget the way Groom kept looking around the studio. His last moments play over and over through my head. All I can see is the three cameras, the glass-walled control booth, and a mirror on the back wall. If someone had been standing there, threatening Groom, someone else would have seen him.

“Are you two sitting down?” asks Ailes over speakerphone.

Knoll glances at me from the driver's seat and shrugs. He doesn't like what we've heard so far. The forensics lab was finally able to make progress on the source of the explosion, but the answer just leads to more questions.

“The explosion has all the hallmarks of a gas explosion,” Ailes explains. “A distributed agent that was able to push out on all sides with enough force to rip the church apart, as opposed to a pipe bomb or a high-yield, which pushes with more force on one part than another. So we know that is what we are looking for.

“If you don't find a ruptured propane tank, as in this case, you look for incomplete combustion, things that didn't burn all the way, and do spectral analysis to see if you can identify any
suspect chemicals. That comes back incomplete. So the lab starts cutting into the wood fragments, hoping that they are porous enough to have trapped the propane from the compression wave of the explosion. There isn't any propane gas to be found.

“The next step, which would have been the first step if it hadn't initially looked like a gas explosion, is to examine the residue. This is where it gets strange.

“In a house fire you have several kinds of propellants, the things that keep the fire burning. There's the wood. There's the furniture, carpet and wall coverings. In some cases there's another foreign propellant . . .

“We think this was an aerosol explosion. A fuel air bomb, of sorts.”

“What was the fuel? Why didn't we see it right away?” asks Knoll as he tries to follow along.

“Because it was an aerosol. That is what baffled the lab. At a hot enough temperature, our fat burns. If it gets even hotter, it can explode if it turns into a gaseous state.”

At Quantico they'd given us a pretty good understanding of the kinds of explosives we might encounter on the job. Growing up in the family I did, I'd tried more than a few in the backyard, nearly singing the rose bushes. This was something new to me.

“Fat? Like human tissue?” Knoll is as confused as me.

“Yep,” says Ailes. I can tell he's beside himself about this one too. “Vaporized into the air, aerosolized and ignited. The questions are severalfold. First, other than Jessup, we're not missing anyone. Second, it'd take a
lot
of human fat to do this. One person isn't just going to burn up and cause this. You'd need to isolate the fat, use a small explosion to disperse it, then ignite it. If the igniter is somehow removed from the scene of the crime or it self-destructs, all you're left with is an explosion of fatty tissue. And this leads us to the perceptual problem. We may think of it as a ‘fat bomb,' but people have another way to describe what happened.”

I see where this is going. “The simplest explanation is that the explosion was caused by a person spontaneously exploding. Spontaneous human combustion. We've got a zombie sheriff, demons and now this? What's next, ghosts?”

“It's an inaccurate conclusion, but it's the one we're afraid the press will run with when it gets out. Someone prone to believing such things are possible will probably assume the supernatural hypothesis. We have to get ahead of this and explain the fuel-air bomb mechanism before discussing the propellant. A reasonable mind will understand.”

I wish I shared his optimism. Some people still think the Warlock murders were divine acts. “We're sitting outside the building where someone, by all accounts in possession of a somewhat reasonable mind, blew his brains out on live television because he thought it was real. Who else is going to react this way?”

“That's what we need to know. The connection to Hawkton is more important than ever. Do you have anything yet I can pass on?”

Knoll and I exchange glances. “You're not going to like this if you're worried about an optics problem. Remember the reports of odd sightings from Hawkton? And the thing I said Dr. Moya saw following us?”

“The bat?” Ailes recalls.

“We got a photo.”

“Of a drone?”

“Of a shadow of something that could be a drone . . .”

“Or a demon,” adds Knoll. “I'm just playing devil's advo—poor choice of words. I'm just saying that's how some people are going to see it.”

“Well, that is interesting. Can you send us the image? In the meantime, I have more mixed news,” Ailes continues. “They want Knoll back in West Virginia. There's been a lead in the manhunt for the sheriff. They found a blood sample from him.”

“Where?” I ask.

“On a fulgurite near Black Nick's cabin that had been carved into a blade like the one he gave you. Evidently, before the cabin burned down there may have been an altercation between the two.”

“Between Black Nick and the sheriff?”

“It looks that way.”

“Still no trace of Black Nick?” Please, let there be no more victims in this nightmare.

“No. I take it as a good sign that he was able to avoid getting killed by the sheriff. Find out what you can about Groom, Blackwood. The bat is an interesting lead, but I think this whole case is going to get shut down when they find the sheriff. They don't have a lot of patience upstairs for this kind of stuff.”

I grab the phone off the dashboard. “What do you mean? What about the sixth man or Tixato?”

“Bureaucracy favors simple explanations. Bring me something back from down there. Otherwise it's going to be ruled a coincidence and you'll be put on something else.”

“That's bullshit!”

“Yes. But they're always going to choose the simplest line between two points.”

“And ignore everything else?”

“Some of them think that's what they're paid to do.”