Name of the Devil (19 page)

A
FTER MY LATE - NIGHT
sojourn with Danielle, exhaustion takes over and I fall asleep in the motel room. An hour before dawn, I'm startled awake by a suffocating dream in which I'm buried alive. I can't tell if it's trauma of my own I'm trying to work through, or the thought of Marty buried in the lonely grave.

I get up, walk to the window and slide the curtain back. I crack it open a bit and gaze across the parking lot that's bathed in the yellow light of the street lamps. Cars crunch grit on the highway, early risers going about their daily routines.

I imagine that not all of them ferry convenience store clerks driving to work, or night-shift employees heading home. Maybe some of the passing cars contain a normal family headed somewhere on an eagerly awaited family vacation.

I want to hope the occupants of those cars will all go on to have happy, if mundane, lives that are unaffected by tragedy. It's a naive notion. We all have to face some kind of adversity. However, a few of us, like Marty, get far more than our fair share.

It'd be nice to know that somewhere out there are islands of sanity. I think of Danielle on her way home to make sure her boys get off to school before she heads in to work. There's so much about her I admire. She's a good agent and, as far as I can tell, a great mom. There's work, and then there's her home life.
I don't doubt which is more important. The day she thought her family would suffer, I'm sure she'd take a leave of absence—or even give up her career—to make sure what was really important to her survived.

She knows the center of things. I don't even know the shape of my life. There's work, and then everything else. Lately, the “everything else” part has been pushed so far out of my mind that I'm not even sure how to have a non-work moment.

Seeing a movie, grabbing dinner with old friends, trying to kindle a relationship: It all feels so wasteful and pointless.

I sit down on my bed and open my laptop, which I fell asleep next to, and read through the latest reports. According to our forensic audio experts, our unknown man on the tape was in his mid-forties and approximately five-and-a-half feet tall—I have no idea how they deduce that. The words he says that we can make out with certainty are “restrain” and “must confine.”

The significant thing is that English isn't his first language. His accent indicates either a Polish or Austrian background. The linguists say his pronunciations suggest he may not even have been a US resident. His English is more akin to British than to American.

This information has also been passed on to Mitchum and local law enforcement, but nobody has a clue who this man could be. None of the residents who recognized the other voices on the tape have the vaguest idea.

The team that went through town records couldn't find anyone living there in the last eighty years who matched that description ever. Expanding the search to records in neighboring towns has so far proven fruitless.

Apparently, neither the Alsops, McKnight nor Curtis had any friends or relatives that we could find who matched. There's a possibility this man may have been someone Sheriff Jessup interacted with, so investigators are now combing through arrest and court records trying to find some clue as to who he could be.

Other than if he's a stranger, the second-worst scenario would be if he's just a friend of a friend. This makes the potential circle huge. Ailes explained the permutations on this based on the research of a British scientist named Robin Dunbar. The average person has about 150 stable friends they keep in contact with. When you include old classmates and relatives, the number increases to around 250. An average couple may have 400 unique acquaintances in all. These are people you might have over for dinner or otherwise spend time with socially.

If the unknown man was a friend of a friend, perhaps of a former classmate of Alsop's in college, he'd be one of 160,000 possible people—that's assuming the connection wasn't completely random. And assuming that between all five victims at least three separate social groups exist, our unknown man is one of 500,000 possible people.

Even if we knew everyone that the Alsops, Curtis, McKnight and Jessup knew, we'd still have to conduct a half million interviews to find our man. It's an impossible job. It's too much data. It'd take a miracle . . . or at least someone who can work magic with numbers . . .

I email my new friend, Max.

My phone rings a minute later. “What do you have on this man?”

Max is well inside my circle of trust after leading me to Marty. I give him the description from the audiotape and the inferences our experts made.

“Hmm . . .” He mulls this over. “That's thin. What else can you tell me? It's a Bayesian thing. What are your gut instincts?” Like Ailes, he reminds me of my college professors.

I wonder if this is how
I
sound to other people when I explain things. I'd never thought about that before.

I think for a moment. “If he's a stranger, he'd be someone they feel comfortable bringing into the situation. Maybe a
psychologist, or a doctor. He probably wasn't from there, but he might have been visiting and was asked to stop by.”

“Hmm. Visiting?”

“I know, that makes it harder.”

“Not necessarily. It could be easier. If he was from a nearby state and just drove there, that would be hard to trace now. However, if he flew there, or into some place close by, that's a little easier. Footprints . . .”

“Airline records?”

“Well . . . ever hear of a system called SABRE?”

“The online ticket system?”

“Yeah. It started as a project between IBM and American Airlines in the 1960s. It stands for Semi-Automated Business Research Environment. Sexy, huh? Anyhow, in the 1970s they opened it up to travel agents, who could dial into the system and book flights. The system was so huge it took up a football field. Of course, you could fit that data into your pocket now. The problem is, they'd purge the system every few years for space, so technically it no longer exists.”

“Technically . . . You don't have a secret cavern somewhere hiding this, do you?”

“No. Actually, I've been thinking about buying a salt mine. But that's not where I'm going. So, here's all this data they have. Now imagine an agency,
not
the NSA, which has to do a lot of interesting computing. They've got a bunch of computer scientists working off the books on big data projects, at university research centers and think tanks with funny names and no visible means of support. You've got all this funding for hardware. That part is easy; you just call up IBM or Tandem and put in an order for whatever you need. Now you have acres of computers at your disposal. But what about the data? You need data to run experiments on and test out spy software. You can't just fill the disks with
lorem
ipsum
or a million “John Does.” Real data is a mixture
of random information that contains patterns you don't think about at first glance. It's not just smoothly random. Do people in Michigan have longer last names than people in Arizona? For a period, yes, they did. Eastern European immigration. You get my point.

“So, real data is better than fake data. Anyhow, this not-the-NSA agency funds a group to make a copy of the entire SABRE database every couple years. Only they don't purge the data. They just keep adding to the system. Hard disks keep getting smaller, and their budgets keep getting bigger. They've got the room. It's government money. Then one day, at the dawn of the tech boom, the people that run that project all go off to start some Internet company, abandoning a system full of data that is in a quasi-legal area because not-the-NSA never classified it.”

“So you're telling me you've got airline records going back that far?”

There's a pause on the line. “Further,” Max replies, “I could tell you what seat Marilyn Monroe sat in when she flew into Washington National to hook up with JFK.”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who sat next to her?”

“Oh. I never actually looked. I can get back to you on that.”

“That's okay. But that's amazing. You should write a book.” I can only imagine what someone less ethical would do with this information.

“I'm not sure I'd live to publish it. I like data, not secrets. Anyhow, I'm going to take a look and see what I can find. I should be able to give you some names.”

“I don't need all of them . . .”

“Don't worry. I'll help you find him. I'd guess a few hundred at most. I can pare them down a bit. But I'll have to think around a few things.” He stops. “It'll cost you though . . .”

“What?”

Max hesitates again. “Freddy said you have to teach me a magic trick and let me buy you dinner.”

There's something endearing in his struggle to ask me out. He's like a nervous kid in class. “Max, it's a deal. And I'll buy dinner.”

He's not my type, but there's an earnestness about him. God knows I could use more of that right now.

W
HILE
M
AX WORKS
his data wizardry to find the unknown man, I concentrate on what happened to Reverend Groom and whether or not it involved the man who put the bodies in the trees in Hawkton. Something tells me the sixth man isn't our unknown voice on the audiotape. But I do think he had something to do with Groom's suicide.

The trouble is that there are few clues with Groom. We don't have any mud or other physical evidence like corpses and broken branches. By itself, Groom's suicide would be an open-and-shut case. It's plain as day he shot himself. We're only concerned about why because of who his friends were.

All I have to go on is his behavior right before he killed himself. On camera he acts like he is following a script he doesn't understand.

On a lark, I give my grandfather a call. I haven't spoken to him since we met at the airport. I never even followed up on his hospital visit either.

Ugh, I suck at people.

“Jessica, is everything okay?” he asks after I say hello.

It's not a sign of strong family relations when that's the first thing the other person says. “I'm fine. Um, how are you?”

“Good. Good. The medical thing is under control.”

“Oh . . . um, good.” I don't know if I'm supposed to press
further. What's the right thing to do? I just ignore the situation. “So, I have a professional question I wanted you to think about.”

“Hold on. Let me write this down.”

“What?”

“The time and date you asked me to help you.” It's a gentle tease, but I can tell the old man is pleased.

I laugh with relief. I got him on a good day. “I could just call Dad, or Uncle Darius.”

“Amateurs,” he scoffs.

“They learned from the worst. I'm working on a case and I need your thoughts. There's something familiar about what's going on.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“Have you seen the video of the reverend who killed himself?”

“Good riddance.” Grandfather's opinion on faith healers is as strong as my own. I have to resist telling him why he may be justified in his response.

“Yeah, um, but have you actually watched the part before he kills himself?”

“I haven't seen any of it. I only read about it.”

“Could you do me a favor and take a look? I could send the video to you.”

“Why don't I just pull it up on my iPad?”

Grandfather has an iPad? “Yeah, I guess so. You know how to find it?”

“Found it. Give me a minute.” I hear the audio playing over the phone. It cuts off before Groom pulls the trigger. “Interesting. I see what you're saying. There's something off about him, isn't there?”

“Yes. I'm trying to figure out what.”

“Let me think for a moment. Hmm. You may have been too young to remember this. In fact, you may not have even been born yet. For a while we had a bit in the show called ‘The Antics.'
It was a hypnosis pickpocket act. Your uncle actually came up with the idea.

“I'd invite a man up onstage and tell the audience I was going to control him with my mind. Volunteers would put earplugs in his ears and make sure he couldn't hear a thing. He was behind a table with a bunch of props and I'd then stand at the foot of the stage and show a series of signs, only to the audience, explaining what the man was going to do under my control.

“One sign might say ‘He's going to choose to put on a green hat.' The man would then pick up a green hat from all the others and place it on his head. The next sign would say something like, ‘I'm now going to make him pour out the glass of beer or stand on one leg.' He'd do everything as I commanded it, without me asking him directly.

“The table holding the props had a big cloth over it. People would assume there was someone hiding underneath telling him what to do, so the next sign would say he's going to yank it away. You get the idea.”

“Sounds clever.”

“It was hideously boring. But it was deceptive. Nobody knew why he did the crazy things that I predicted he would do. But there's a reason that they never saw.”

“What was the method?”

“We just had little signs on the back of all the objects telling him what to do. ‘Step one: put on the green hat. Step two: pour the beer onto the ground.' There was more to it, but you get the idea. It was stage cuing.

“The problem was that it was dull, and the participants kept looking to me to make sure it was okay to go on to the next step. That's what your reverend looks like. He's waiting for his next instruction.”

Exactly. I couldn't put a finger on it, but Grandfather nailed it.

“Was there anyone cuing him?” he asks.

“I think we'd know. There was an audience there. Someone would have seen something.”

“Not all cues are visual. He did a bit of cold reading on people, didn't he?”

“Yes. He'd tell them the names of their children and stuff.”

“That's a lot to remember. Remember when Randi exposed that televangelist on
Carson
?”

“The one using the earpiece with his wife?”

“Yes. That's the one. Do you think this man had one of those in his ear when he killed himself?”

Did anyone bother to look? “I can ask the coroner. If he did, someone could have been talking to him via radio. But still, how do you get someone to kill himself on live television?”

“When we did ‘The Antics,' we tried a lot of different gimmicks. Some people did anything we asked, including undressing and waving around prop guns. But if someone doesn't do what you ask, what's your next step?”

“You threaten them.”

“Exactly. Would you put a gun to your head if you were afraid someone you loved was about to be killed?”

“I'd have to believe the threat was real.” Would I do this for Grandfather? Ailes? Gerald, even? I think the answer is yes. What about Damian?

“Was the reverend close to someone?”

“His wife.”

“Where was she at the time?”

I think back to notes taken by the officer on the scene. “She said she was in a different part of the building.”

“Why wasn't she in the audience, or in the studio?”

Good question. “Or was she?”

“If he's using a radio to do his mind-reading bit, there needs to be someone somewhere feeding him answers.”

I think about the layout of the studio. At the back there was a large mirror.

I'd ignored it when I saw it. But it could have been a one-way window. “Grandfather, you're brilliant.”

“I know.”

I
GIVE
D
ETECTIVE
Stafford in Georgia a call, and ask him to pull up the file on Groom and pay a visit to the studio again.

Two hours later he calls me back. “All right, Blackwood, care to tell me how you guys figured this out?”

“Actually, it was my grandfather. What do we know?”

“When Groom was examined, they removed a hearing aid from his ear and returned it to his wife. I checked and there is no record of him having a hearing problem. So I asked around the station. They were kind of cagey on the matter until I made some threats. They were afraid to admit what they knew about the mind-reading act. The station manager showed me the closet where Groom's wife would hide during the broadcast. The mirrored window looks right out onto the audience and the stage.”

“After Groom went onstage, someone could have been on the radio telling Groom he was in there with her and was going to kill her if he didn't say what he told him?”

“Possibly . . .”

“She would have never known what was going on.” Up there onstage, all he had was the voice in his ear. I think about what would tip him over the edge. “Groom was a tormented man for a long time. It could have been the voice of Azazel telling him this . . .”

“Maybe. If Azazel uses a cell phone with a Mexican long-distance plan,” replies Stafford.

“Pardon me?”

“After I found the earpiece you told me to look for, I sent one of our techs to the studio. We found a small antenna in the ceiling,
almost impossible to see. Connected to it was a box with a transmitter and a cell phone.”

“A cell phone?”

“Yeah. And a thick battery. The last call to the phone was from Mexico. The whole thing was done remotely.”

“Wait, did you say
Mexico
?” Groom was being communicated to from miles away. Someone used his little earpiece against him.

“Yes.”

“Was it from Tixato, Mexico?”

“Hold on. Let me check the area code. Yes. We traced the tower to there. How did you know?”

My pulse is pounding. “Long story. Send me everything you got.”

Tixato!

What the hell is it with that town? Why is someone from there killing these people? And why do they want to kill me?