Name of the Devil (20 page)

A
T AROUND FOUR - THIRTY
yesterday morning, local time, Esteban was taken from the secure wing of the La Palma Mexican Federal Penitentiary, a prison used mainly for police employees and judges caught taking bribes, and led to the secure block's holding cell, which adjoins a hallway to the main prison.

Someone—a trustee, a guard, maybe the warden, who knows—left the door to the main block unlocked. At 4:44 a.m., Esteban was found stabbed over a hundred times. His head was nearly severed from his spinal column. The trail of blood traced back to the cell of a seventeen-year-old inmate who'd been in La Palma for all of seven days. He had just four months left on his sentence. He was a member of X-20.

Under intensive questioning, all he would, or could, say, was that he'd received orders to murder Esteban on a folded piece of toilet paper placed under his pillow. The instructions simply said to kill the man at the other end of the doorway at the allotted time.

Esteban was the last living witness who could reveal a connection between our case and X-20. During his incarceration he'd been kept away from the other prisoners because he was a cop and a potential witness against the cartel, but all it took was one prearranged “screwup” to get him sent to the wrong holding area and shanked by a seventeen-year-old.

Someone involved with X-20 is behind it. This much we know. Everyone I've encountered who was associated with the gang is no longer living. Although the last group, my “rescuers,” were likely killed thanks to Damian's hands.

Damian . . .

I dial the last number he called me from.

“Assistant Director Breyer's office. How may I direct your call?” replies Breyer's front-office assistant.

Brilliant. Damian is forwarding any calls to that number right back to my boss. A man-in-the-middle hack. “Sorry, wrong number.”

I could call Max and ask him for “Freddy's” current contact information. Before I have the chance, my phone rings.

“Hello?”

“I wish you'd call more often,” Damian says in his chipper voice.

“Hold on.” Per procedure, I send a text to log the call.

“Aren't we ever going to have any moments just between us?”

“I hope not.” At least, that's what I tell myself.

“That's no way to ask for a favor.”

“I'm sorry.”

“First a thank you, and now an apology?”

“The army unit in Mexico . . .”

“I never met them.”

I don't press him on that detail. Is it because I don't want to corner him in a lie?

“If someone you know did, by any chance did they take anything off of them?”

“Besides their heads?”

“Ugh.” I suppress a shiver. “There is nothing funny about this conversation.”

“There's nothing funny about what they wanted to do to you, Jessica. We live in a wicked, wicked world where evil men walk among the innocent.”

“The difference between the good and the bad is the law.”

“No, Jessica,” Damian replies sharply. “The difference is that the good look out for the innocent and protect them from the wicked.”

“Is that what you do?”

“If I were to break a law, it would only be of the kind that are designed to inconvenience. Law, like God, is only real when people believe in it. When you know the truth—that it's really just the good and bad we do to each other that really matters—you see things differently.”

“Sounds perfectly amoral.”

“No. Amoral implies I have no morals. I do. But they're not yours, or anyone else's. Legalities are like speeding on a desert highway when you know you're alone at night.”

“Enough. Tell me about the Mexican militiamen. Their phones. None were found on the scene. Did you take them?”

“Their phones? Why would you be interested in those?” There's a touch of mischief in his tone.

“I want to know who they talked to. Did you take them?” I ask him curtly.

“I deny everything. Although you may have just won an eBay auction you didn't realize you were bidding on.”

“Come again?”

“Buyer pays shipping,” he replies.

“What?”

“All right. You're a tough customer. Just leave me a good star rating and I'll FedEx them for you.”

A text alert from eBay pops up on my screen. I click the link in the message to read the lot description:

F
IVE USED CELL
phones. Perfect for narco trafficking and receiving orders for assassination attempts. Complete call log included. Previous owners physically incapable of using them. May be bloodstained. Actually, definitely bloodstained.

Auction ended 1
minute ago.

Seller: EternalUndyingLOVE

Bidder: MagicGirlDangerLover

“
D
AMN YOU,
D
AMIAN
!”

He's already ended the call.

My phone rings again. “Agent Blackwood?” I recognize the voice of an FBI agent from our call center.

“Yes. Where'd the call come from this time?”

“The Vatican.”

F
ED
E
X DELIVERS THE
package to my motel the next morning. Inside are five cell phones wrapped in plastic. Conveniently enclosed with each one is a printout of all the data on its SIM cards.

Damian not only went through the trouble of printing the information out for me, he also circled all the calls to the United States. He has drawn stars next to one number in particular.

The rest are to Mexican border states. This number's area code is in Virginia.

Like the phone found in the TV studio, these are all throwdowns designed to be untraceable to an owner. They would only have been used to call other burner phones, which would also be tossed aside after a few days.

It's a well-known fact that the prepay segment of the telecom industry, which makes and provides services for “dumb” phones just capable of calls and texts, is heavily supported by drug trafficking. I'm sure lots of regular people use these phones too. They just don't buy a new one every week.

The number he circled isn't traceable to any person in our database. Through an FBI records request made via a DEA task force, I am, however, able to get a cell tower log that tells me where the phone was located when the last call to it was made.

Not in Hawkton, surprisingly. A town in Virginia called Redford, about thirty miles from Quantico.

At least six calls were made from the militia phone and this number while it was in that area. The militia that tried to kill me must have been pretty high up in the X-20 org chart, and it doesn't surprise me that someone at that level would be running a contact stateside. I pull up an online map that breaks down cell towers by zip codes and addresses.

A Federal watch database shows me a list of convicted felons registered at addresses within the area of the calls. There are several dozen—too many to sort through. Trying to trace an untraceable call to an untraceable person is as hard as it sounds. Tapping phones only works when your suspect can't just walk into a 7-Eleven, drop fifty dollars and walk out ten minutes later with a new phone.

On a whim, I type the block of zip code addresses tied to that tower into an internal database of news reports.

Redford is a small town. Too boring to get much attention. The biggest item is the suicide of a former Air Force specialist two days after the Hawkton explosion. I click on the link to see if anything stands out.

Interesting. The victim had a technical background working on avionics and explosives.

Rene Deland has no obvious ties to organized crime. Dead of a drug overdose that coincided with a despondent text message sent to family members, there isn't anything overtly suspicious about his passing.

Except . . .

His job description is a little peculiar. According to the local paper's obituary, his family said he worked as a private security consultant overseas. People who handle private security and have serious drug problems often work for clients who are on the other side of the law. It's a red flag.

Deland suddenly interests me. If I was a lieutenant for a narcotrafficking organization who was placing calls to the US, they'd probably be to someone like him.

“I need to go to Redford, Virginia, to check on something,” I tell Ailes over the phone.

“What have you got?” he asks.

“A wild hunch. Real out there . . .”

“How far out there?”

“One of our decapitated soldiers may lead to our sixth man . . .”

R
ETIRED
A
RMY
S
ERGEANT
Charles Conner, who lives next door, pulls open the wooden gate to lead me inside Deland's compound. Dressed in a polo shirt and shorts and unfazed by the cold wind, Conner still has a military bearing about him.

“Deland sure liked his privacy,” I remark as I notice the entire property is encircled by the wooden fence. A long driveway ends at a garage set apart from the house. Deland's pickup truck is parked in the well-kept grass between the two buildings.

The grass still looks fresh underneath. This doesn't appear to be the usual place for the truck, but the first responders could have moved it—or Deland, for unknown reasons. I file that observation away.

“Quiet guy,” replies Conner. “Gave me a set of keys for when he was out of town. His sister is coming next week to take care of the place.”

“Did you talk much?”

“A beer every now and then. He'd come over to the house for a barbecue when we had them.”

“Ever see anyone else here?”

“A few times. Usually his only company were the strippers he'd date.” He shakes his head a little.

“Strippers?” There's a correlation between men in high-testosterone lines of work and women in adult industries. I'm not sure what to make of it.

“Good looking, but lots of mileage.” He pauses for a moment, looking at me sideways as he wonders if he's said something politically incorrect.

You don't last long in my field calling foul every time some guy talks like he's in a locker room. I give him a pass. “Did he ever talk about his work?”

“Said he did avionics consulting. A lot of people around here do consulting work they can't talk about. Nobody presses them.”

“The coroner's report said he died of a drug overdose. Did you know he was a user?”

“Sometimes he'd have bloodshot eyes. Some of the girls looked like they were. He didn't come across as hardcore. I was surprised to see the needle in his arm when I found him. But not shocked.”

“Why is that?”

“Once you open that door, anything can happen.”

Again with the doors.

I notice Conner answers my questions like they're checkboxes on a tax form. They're all “yes” or “no,” without any elucidation.

“I'll leave the keys with you,” he offers. “Just put them in my mailbox when you're done.”

I
LET MYSELF
into Deland's home. The police had done a quick check, I'd learned, but nothing thorough. Without any reason to suspect foul play, this wasn't treated like a crime scene. His death seemed pretty straightforward, with no reason to think it was anything other than an overdose.

After I got off the phone with Ailes, I'd called the investigator in Redford who'd handled Deland's case. I was curious if they'd found more than one cell phone among his belongings. If the phone the Mexican soldier used could be matched to a phone in Deland's possession, we'd have a clear connection. Unfortunately, the only phone they catalogued among his possessions
was the one found in the bedroom, which he'd used to send his final text message before he died. But they weren't really looking for a second phone.

His house is small compared with the size of the yard. Uncluttered, it's almost too compulsively neat. Of course, I'm the one that uses the floor of my closet as a laundry basket.

There's a living room dominated by a flat-screen television and a brown leather couch. The kitchen looks like it was used for breakfast and little else.

A plastic sheet still covers the bed where Deland's body was discovered by Conner. The bedroom is just as sparse as the rest of the house. I'll attribute the tidiness to Deland's fastidiousness, but my gut tells me someone went through here and cleaned out a few things. There's not even a laptop to be found.

That's peculiar to me. I'm not sure what kind of avionics expert doesn't need a computer.

Conner didn't seem like the kind of guy who would steal from the dead. There's also the paramedics and cops on the scene to consider. It's a horrible thing to accuse your peers of, but it happens far more often than we want to admit.

The top drawer of his dresser holds a row of watches that each cost more than my car. I assume the investigators decided there wasn't anything suspicious about the lack of a computer because anyone wanting to rob Deland would have taken the watches. If he'd been killed violently, then that would be a different matter. But opening a criminal investigation every time you notice an apparent suicide victim is missing something is impractical. It's common for people spiraling down to give things away. If they're in a financial crisis, they hawk them.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm now reasonably sure this could be a crime scene. I take a pair of gloves out of my field forensic backpack and slip them on before going any further.

Out of curiosity, I reach behind the nightstand and feel two
wall plugs attached to cords. One of them is an iPhone plug, the other a micro-USB.

Deland's phone, at least the one recovered by the police, was an iPhone. The other plug is for a different device. Could that device have been another phone—a throwaway that was removed from the scene along with the laptop?

Killing someone via a drug overdose is an easy affair if the potential victim is already a drug user. If Deland knew his presumed murderer, all the killer had to do was spike a drink with a soluble amphetamine that would then make Deland less resistant to an injectable amphetamine of a much higher dosage.

A quick toxicology report, the kind the county does when no foul play was suspected, wouldn't show the different amphetamines. Investigators would find what they were looking to find: drugs in the system. Case closed.

If I can find more evidence, which can reopen the case, then I can lobby for a more precise test. Most counties keep blood and tissue samples on file for at least a year after death. Ideally, we'd look at the body before Deland's sister claims it.

The extra phone cord is informative, but not conclusive. I need something else.

The rest of his house doesn't reveal anything to me. I check the closets for special hiding spaces, but there's only a locked safe in a fairly obvious location. It takes me three minutes to open it. Inside I find a stack of bills, mostly hundreds. Maybe twenty thousand dollars from my quick count. There's nothing else. But then again, no good criminal would use that to store his dirty laundry.

This is get-out-of-town-fast cash. Now there's a thought.

I take out the bills and have a closer look. They're brand new and smell fresh. We need to check with his bank and see if he made a recent withdrawal. If he didn't, then this may be a payoff. If he did, then he might have been nervous about something.

I sit back and gaze around. The house feels like a realtor's show house; I can't find anything to provide some kind of record of who Deland was, or what happened to him.

The money and the missing laptop and phone are suspicious. But if he's just a standard crook, doing things like making custom police scanners for marijuana dealers, his death is not really an FBI matter, or anything even the locals would care about all that much.

Back in the kitchen I take a final pass and notice some photographs on the side of the fridge. They're of Deland on the beach and at bars with attractive women. My catty side notices that they do all look like strippers. Too tan, too much boob on display and heavy makeup hiding hard living.

Underneath, almost hidden, is an older photograph of Deland in his Air Force uniform. He's posing with a wrench in his hand. Behind him is an aircraft. Long, dark fuselage, no cockpit. It's a drone.

I haven't got a copy of his service jacket yet. I didn't realize Deland had been a drone technician in the Air Force.

Interesting . . .

I
RETURN TO
the living room to take a look at the backyard. As I walk across the carpet to the window, something catches my eye. The low sun is casting shadows across the shag, turning it into a tiny forest. It highlights four deep impressions next to the wall. Something heavy must have been there until quite recently.

I glance around. None of the other furniture seems to match the dimensions of the carpet dents. This was taken from the house—and not that long ago.

Kneeling on the floor, I stick a pen in the gap between the carpet and the wall and slide it from left to right. Something clicks against the plastic. I pull the object free and it lands on the carpet.

It's a dull blue rock, worn smooth. I squeeze it. Hard like quartz, this isn't a drug like meth or crack.

It's the kind of stone you put in an aquarium.

Deland had a fish tank.

Someone took the fish tank out of here.

That's what the investigators didn't see. A missing fish tank.

This could have been where Dr. Moya's psychoactive fish were kept.

Through the curtains I see the sun dip behind Deland's freestanding garage. I wonder what's in there?

Well lit, Deland's garage is actually more like a machine shop. It has the same sense of order as his house. I can see the clear spaces on the floor where two tool chests must have sat, but they've been removed too. The center area of the shop is devoid of clutter. He'd been working on something here.

The truck parked on the grass suggests that whoever took what was in here must have had to back up to the large door to get it out. They either forgot about, or didn't bother, moving Deland's truck back.

What
was
he working on? It's impossible for me to tell because of the missing tools. Whatever it was, it required the full space of the two-car garage. Maybe forensics can find something if they go over it with tweezers. A sample of mud took me to Tixato, and a phone call from Tixato brought me here. So who knows what's waiting to be found.

I do need to be wary of trying too hard to make Deland fit. The aquarium stone is interesting, but it's not enough to link to anything here. The last thing I want is to get an FBI team out on a wild-goose chase. One blue rock is all I have; the missing laptop, phone and wild theory about a fish tank aren't enough.

I close the door to the garage back up. My best bet is to get the local police more interested in what Deland was up to. If they find something, then maybe I can persuade Ailes to stick his neck
out and channel some more resources into uncovering the connection.

As I'm about to lock the garage, I spot a crumpled drop cloth hidden behind the door and stop. My dad used to lay one out on the driveway when he wanted to paint a magic prop. I would often help him, fascinated by how the overspray formed an outline of whatever he was making. Boxes, circles, rabbits. It was like a giant after-the-fact blueprint—a kind of negative of whatever he was building.

A blueprint . . .

Deland's project may be gone, but not all its traces.

I take the drop cloth outside and unfold it across the driveway.

As it unfurls, it reveals dozens of random paint marks outlining Deland's different projects. One stands out more than the others: a large triangle.

It's shaped like bat wings.

It's much larger than the shadow in the convenience store video frame from Reverend Groom's 911 call. But it's obviously from the same family.

Besides housing exotic cave fish that may have sent the sheriff into a prolonged psychosis, Deland was using his military training to work on a drone. A large, demonic-looking drone.