Name of the Devil (3 page)

B
LACK
B
UICKS AND
the novelty of fear were a distant memory to me by the time I visited the Hawkton Hellmouth. By now, fear—usually not mine, but more often my own than I liked—had become a constant element of my work. Hellmouth. The word sticks in my mind. This was how one hyperbolic news site described the scene of the explosion when the first aerial footage became available. It caught on from there. Being here in person, I decide it's a perfectly suitable name.

There's a gaping hole in the earth where the little church once sat. Nervous couples were married there. Crying babies baptized. Worshippers found solace in prayer. Now all those memories have disappeared into a huge maw screaming at the sky.

Splinters of wood litter the surrounding farmland and are even lodged in the branches of the trees. It's as if a toothpick house has been smashed under the heel of an angry giant.

The pilot brings the helicopter higher so that the technician controlling the mounted camera and laser-ranging system can get a different point of view. I can see the screen over his shoulder; the program plotting away thousands of dots to build a 3-D map forensics will use later on to decipher what happened.

It seems farcical to think that all this destruction can be captured into data points and emailed around like cat photos. The devastation, the emotion, the passion behind what
happened—reduced to digital bits. But that's what a detective does. We see everything as numbered lists. Dispassionate, objective, we have to turn off our emotions and focus on the facts. Truth hides in little details. My instructor at the Academy told us the first thing we have to do at a crime scene is to forget everything we've been told about what happened—focus on the atoms.

“Any sign of our victims?” asks Vonda Mitchum, the lead investigator from the local Bureau office, over the radio.

“Negative,” replies Agent Knoll from the seat next to me.

“Try going lower,” Mitchum commands, before clicking off our channel.

“That's helpful,” grumbles Knoll as he presses his binoculars against the window. Muscular, compact, with a head like a prizefighter, he's as frustrated as me with how the search is progressing.

Five hours in and we don't have any bodies. Traces of blood were found on a few of the planks; that's it on the victims so far. Inside the search perimeter is a truck with blown-out windows that belonged to a man named Bear McKnight. Wedged into the side of the truck is Mr. and Mrs. Alsop's Jeep, also with shattered glass. Reverend Curtis's Cadillac is flipped over entirely, like a belly-up turtle in the mud.

There are four missing persons and a potential fifth. Hawkton's sheriff, Carson Jessup, is nowhere to be found. The nervous deputy can't confirm if the sheriff had cause to go out to the church last night, but his SUV was found parked a half-mile away on a dirt back road.

“You got your map data?” I ask the young technician leaning over his plotting computer.

“I think we got enough,” he replies.

“Mind if we take this on a wider search pattern?” I call to the pilot.

“Not much point,” says the pilot, Bilson, a sunburned man who was flying for the Bureau while I was in middle school. “We ran the numbers. This is the outer limit of the radius. The debris field ends fifty yards back in.”

“I know. I understand the physics. Still . . .” I gaze out the window. Bits of the church's white planks stick out of the brown grass and dull dirt like cat's teeth. “But the physics isn't telling us where the bodies are.”

“We got another hour of fuel,” says Bilson. “Fine by me.” He turns the stick to the left and brings us into a turn. Knoll and I use our binoculars to scan the trees and fields again, hoping to find some sign of whoever was in the church.

We don't want them to be dead. In a perfect world, we'd find them sitting on the porch of a farmhouse drinking beer and smiling up at us, eager to tell the story of how they narrowly escaped death.

This isn't that world. We know there's at least one body, or at least part of a body, to be found. Maybe three or four more, if all the missing were in the church.

Explosions can do different things to the human form. Stand one way, and even a small yield can rip off a limb. Positioned in another, an explosion that could knock down a brick wall might just leave you with only an earache and a mild friction burn.

But bodies usually don't just vaporize. There's nearly always something left. Whether in pieces that have to be picked up with tweezers or ones that can fit into a body bag, our victims are somewhere.

The ground search is going slowly. Every square inch has to be covered in a pattern that gets exponentially larger the farther away you move from the blast. Below me, men and women in blue and yellow clean-suits comb the area for clues. Igniters, bomb components, anything that points to what happened. Even a paperclip can tell a story. They look like astronauts on an alien planet searching for signs of life.

At first glance, the blast looks like a gas explosion. The trouble is that the church wasn't hooked up to a gas line, and it didn't have a tank. Laboratory analysis of the wreckage will give us a clearer picture. Traces of whatever caused the explosion are likely to have squeezed into the wood and fabric of the church. The charred debris can be chemically analyzed to reveal what outside substances were absorbed in the reaction.

The clues are here—at least the clues to what happened physically. But they don't explain how or why.

We have an explosion, but no victims. Just traces. Something tells me there's more to this than just a bomb or a gas explosion.

“Robin 2, why are you going out of the flight pattern?” demands Mitchum on the radio, like a scolding teacher.

“We've decided to extend the search radius,” I reply.

“Under whose authority, Agent Blackwood?”

Knoll lowers his binoculars and raises his eyebrows. He mouths the words, “Now you did it.”

“Occam's.”

Vonda Mitchum is the lead investigator, but not our supervisor. We are assisting because it's crucial to get as much information as possible in the first forty-eight hours. While the helicopter is certainly under her control, treating Knoll and me like underlings is a step beyond what is appropriate.

I decide to cut her a little slack. Obviously she's under pressure. “I apologize for the deviation. I wanted to get another angle and see if there was anything outside the radius.”

“The radius is a radius for a reason. Unless you don't believe in physics, or think the victims walked out of there,” replies Mitchum.

“I don't think they walked . . .” I ignore her sarcasm.

“You think this looks familiar?” she says, almost as a challenge.

This is her case, and it could be a big one. She's afraid I'm going
to take it away from her by tying it into my previous major investigation. The last time I was involved in murder on such a spectacular scale, the perpetrator had been a man who liked to make his crimes look like impossibilities.

“No. I just think if you can't find something where you expect to, you might want to look elsewhere.”

“You're wasting resources, Blackwood. Have the pilot return to the LZ.”

“Hold up,” says Knoll. He points out his window to a pale object in a tree.

I train my binoculars on where he's indicating. Something, or someone, is entangled in the branches. I see what looks like bare skin wrapped in foliage.

“Can you zoom in on that?” I ask the technician in the front seat.

He aims the high-powered camera at the tree and brings it into focus on his laptop screen. There's a vague outline of what could be a body.

We all feel that sick sensation in the pit of our stomach. What hope we had for a happy ending is gone.

“Looks like our first victim,” I grimly reply. There's a flicker of guilt through my conscience as I confirm the bad news. Until now, we could still hold on to that version of reality in which they are sitting on that porch, waving at us. Now it's gone. “Send that to Mitchum, and don't forget to include the GPS coordinates.”

“Do you have to rub things in?” asks Knoll.

“I don't mean to.”

At least, I don't think I do.

B
EAR
M
C
K
NIGHT'S NAKED
body is dangling upside down from the upper branches of the elm tree, almost thirty feet in the air. A deep gouge in his shoulder has bled out onto the ground below. His eyes are wide open, gazing at heaven above. Across his chest are smears of blood. They remind me of a child's finger painting.

Special Agent Vonda Mitchum stands outside of the hastily erected perimeter and directs the photographer. Her blond hair tucked under her FBI cap, she taps away on her tablet as Knoll and I approach.

“Who spotted him?” asks Mitchum.

I point my thumb at Knoll. “Eagle-eyes over here.”

“Good work, Knoll.” She nods to him, then turns back to her screen.

“Blackwood was the one who said we should look over here,” replies Knoll.

I give him a sharp look. All that matters is that we found our first victim because we extended the search perimeter. I don't need him rubbing my defiance in Mitchum's face.

“I'm asking our physicist why he got the blast radius wrong,” says Mitchum. “We would have figured it out eventually.”

“They didn't get it wrong,” I reply, hesitantly, unsure if I should bite back my words. “There's no other debris around here. Just this poor bastard.”

Mitchum puts away her tablet. “You're saying he was placed here?”

“I'm saying he's here. The debris isn't. Somehow he got here outside of the blast zone.” I point to where the chunk was taken from his neck. “He may have survived the blast, but I doubt he climbed up here without his carotid artery.”

Mitchum shrugs and calls into her radio for the bucket truck we're using to pick debris out of the trees. In the field just beyond, two techs have finally managed to get the aerial drone working so it can take over for the helicopter. Knoll and I search the earth around the tree for clues.

“Any bets that we're going to find the other four bodies at equidistant points from the blast and each other?” whispers Knoll.

“It's not him,” I say sharply, hoping he's wrong.

“He's in jail . . . but he has friends.”

“He's not Voldemort,” I retort. “He has a name.”

“The Warlock,” says Knoll.

“No. Heywood.”

“That's an alias.”

“It's a man's name. Not some super-villain title from a comic book. He's in jail in Texas awaiting trial. You know this because since we caught him, we've spent more time in depositions than actually solving crimes,” I reply tersely. “This has nothing to do with him.”

“I never said it did.”

“You implied the other bodies might form a pentagram, insinuating he was involved.”

Knoll holds up his hands. “All I suggested was a pentagram.”

I roll my eyes. “And I guess the logical conclusion you're suggesting is that Ozzy Osbourne did it?”

Knoll lets out a sigh. “Wouldn't this search be easier for you if you did it from your broom?”

“I'm armed,” I growl

“So am . . .” Knoll reflexively reaches for his holster to make sure I haven't pickpocketed his gun. I've only done that to him once or twice, but that was enough. He finds it on his hip and shakes his head. “And you wonder why you don't have many friends.”

I give him a half smile and keep walking as I think about what he just said. It's a joke between colleagues, but it stings because it has the worst possible element of a burn: a kernel of truth.

We come to a stop in front of a large elm tree, similar to the one in which Knoll spotted McKnight. The first branch is about five feet off the ground. At the base of the branch there's a moist crack, as if someone recently put weight on it and then let up when it began to break.

Knoll sees this and whistles to one of the agents holding the tape and sticks we use to rope off areas for close-up inspection. We pen the tree around the outside the radius of its furthest branches.

“Vantage point?” asks Knoll.

I shake my head. “I think whoever placed McKnight in the tree may have taken a first attempt here. When the branch started to break, he tried over there.”

Knoll nods. “Carried or pulled?”

“I couldn't guess. The autopsy will show us markings suggesting one or the other. Infrared can spot internal bruising under the skin.”

“What if they come up empty?”

“I'll worry about that when it happens. Or rather, Mitchum will.” It's her case, after all.

We duck as the drone flies overhead. It weaves through the trees at high speed and vanishes into the woods. Inside a control trailer sitting on the side of the road, a technician watches the live feed from its camera for the other victims. It's a morbid video game.

An hour later, three more bodies have been found: Those of the Alsops and Reverend Curtis. Sheriff Jessup is still a no-show. I don't let on to Knoll how relieved I am that the bodies were not found in anything that looks like an intentionally symmetrical pattern; I can tell he has been watching my reaction out of the corner of his eye. The tension releases from my neck muscles the moment we're certain of that. We don't need a replay of what happened before. There are already enough loose ends.

Like McKnight, our other victims are found upside down and naked in the trees. After Mitchum vanishes to inspect the other victims, Knoll and I hop into the bucket to look at McKnight up close.

From the ground it's hard to see anything other than his pale skin, crusted blood covering his body and part of his face. Up close, we can see scratch marks and bruises: The signs of struggle.

The worst part is the lingering scent of melted body hair. Burns on his skin prove that he's been close to an intense source of heat, most likely an explosion. Bits of fabric are singed into his skin, suggesting he'd been clothed when the church ignited.

“At least we know they weren't nudists,” replies Knoll, eyeing a scrap of denim welded to McKnight's left thigh.

Something about the blood smears on McKnight's chest is odd. They appear haphazard at first, the kind of marks someone might make in a state of shock when they repeatedly touch their body. As I stare at them, though, they seem intentional. But there's no obvious pattern. I take a photo to look at later.

Knoll nudges me, then points to the man's forehead. There's a smear of ash above McKnight's nose, almost obscured by blood.

I radio Mitchum. “Which victim are you looking at?”

“Mrs. Alsop.”

“Is there ash on her forehead?”

“Blackwood, is this a joke? There was an explosion. Of course there's ash.”

I push my head past the protective bars of the lift to get a closer look at McKnight's face. The whole bucket arm begins to sway in the breeze. Knoll grabs the rail and groans.

I push the talk button on my radio, “On the forehead. It's hard to see on McKnight because of the blood from the scalp. But it looks like there's ash under the blood. Like a cross. Does Mrs. Alsop have the same marking?”

“Hold on,” says Mitchum. There's a long pause. “Affirmative. But they were in a church, after all.”

“They're not Catholics, and this wasn't Ash Wednesday. This is the kind of thing someone does to ward off evil spirits.”

“You're saying they were afraid of something evil happening?” Mitchum is dubious.

“I'm saying they were afraid, and obviously something very bad did happen.”

Mitchum doesn't respond.

I put my radio back in its holster and look again at McKnight's chest. There's something deliberate about the bloody daubs there. On my phone, I pull up the image and flip it to how it would look right-side up. It still doesn't ring any bells.

Knoll watches over my shoulder. “Think it's something?”

“Maybe. Either way, it doesn't look random.”

“It could have happened when he was moved.”

“Yeah. I don't know.” I notice McKnight's left index finger is covered in blood. “Check this out,” I say, pointing.

“He used his own blood to write the symbol? All right, maybe it does mean something.”

“But what? Hold on.” I sit on the edge of the rail and lean back, my feet tucked behind the lower guard. A ground technician stares up at me as I dangle over the edge of the lift.

“You're a goddamn circus ape,” exclaims Knoll as he grabs my ankles.

Upside down, staring up at the sky, I see the world as a dying
Bear McKnight did. If he wanted to write on his chest to tell us something, he would go from left to right. I pull myself back into the lift, to Knoll's relief, and take out my phone. Using the rotate button, I spin the image two more times. When the lines are going in the correct direction, it starts looking like something familiar. A runny, bloody mess, but one I latch on to. I remember from school that the letter “A” is supposed to be a sideways ox or something. An aleph. One way it's an “A,” another and it's an animal. This isn't an ox, though.

“Is there a Hebrew keyboard on these phones?” I ask. The aleph is still a widely used symbol in Hebrew. Before Knoll can answer, I find it hidden in the settings menu. I look for the closest match to the symbols on his chest, and type them into a search engine. Of course, the results are all in Hebrew and make no sense to me. Well, duh. I'm not sure what I was expecting.

“Check the image search,” offers Knoll.

I pull up the first image associated with the letters, and a ghoulish face stares back at me.

The letters spell out a word.

The name of a demon.