Name of the Devil (4 page)

“
S
O YOUR THEORY
is that these people were killed by a demon?” Vonda Mitchum looks up from the image I just showed her and turns to Knoll as if I'm invisible.

“No,” I insist, ignoring her slight. “I'm saying McKnight traced this on his chest, in his own blood, before he died.”

“It looks like gibberish to me.” She points to the upside-down body.

“That's because it's upside-down Hebrew letters, which are of course written right to left.”

“Turn it another way and I'm sure you'll find a different random match.” She hands the phone back to me.

“In what? Klingon?”

“I think it's random,” she says. “You're trying to make something fit.”

“If it was the name of the 1986 NBA Championship team, I'd still think it's relevant,” I reply.

“You're not pinning this on Larry Bird,” interjects Knoll, trying to diffuse the tension.

“Men,” Mitchum and I say at the same time. She cracks a smile. The awkwardness between us is broken briefly.

The spontaneous moment changes my mood. “Listen, I know it's nutty. I know it's out of left field. But these people were in a church, and maybe they were performing some kind of ceremony. I think it's worth noting.”

“Noted.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Agent Blackwood, I'll put it in my case notes. All right?” It's her way of making a compromise.

“And the broken branch?”

“I'll see what I can do.” She forces a smile and walks back to the forensic technicians working on the tree where Mrs. Alsop was found.

Although she was found like McKnight, there are no symbols on Mrs. Alsop. Knoll stands back and studies her outstretched hands.

“Know what it looks like?”

“Upside-down crucifixion. Isn't that what they did to you when you were a really, really awful person?”

Knoll checks his watch. “It's what my wife is going to do to me if I don't get back before the kids head to school in the morning.”

“You're leaving tonight?” I ask.

“While you were obsessing over that image, they released us. I got a desk full of kidnappings to look over. You got work too.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Leave it to Mitchum. She doesn't make the same leaps as you. But she's methodical. You need a ride?”

“I'll catch one tomorrow in the van. I want to watch the debrief tonight.”

Knoll rolls his eyes. “Leave some work for the rest of us.”

T
HREE HOURS LATER,
after grabbing a tuna sandwich at a convenience store and switching blouses in the bathroom, I'm sitting in the back row of the county civic auditorium as Mitchum lays out what we've learned so far to a roomful of local law enforcement and agents from the West Virginia Bureau of Investigation, ATF, local FBI, as well as the remaining stragglers from DC and Quantico, like me.

She's a confident speaker. A bit monotonous, perhaps to cover up a fear of not being taken seriously, but still authoritative. “We believe the time of the blast was around ten at night. The damage initially looks similar to that caused by a gas explosion. The blast pushed out all parts of the structure equally. Although no tank or pipeline has been found, it could well be the case that there's a gas cylinder we haven't found, sitting in a field somewhere, that went ballistic.

“We've found four victims so far. Their vehicles were parked outside of the church. Some of them show burns and other postmortem trauma indicating proximity to the blast. It's still unclear if they were inside or outside the church when it happened.

“Preliminary cause of death for all the victims seem to be the explosion, although there are anomalous signs of trauma that make this suspect. We're awaiting autopsy results.

“While it's too early to say whether this was accidental or intentional, much less infer a motive, the presence of Sheriff Jessup's vehicle nearby does suggest there might be something to look into. In the last eighteen months there have been two explosive-related attacks on local law enforcement nationwide. We're looking into the possibility that Jessup may have been the intended target here. WVBI is going through court records and cross-referencing them with possible suspects.

“Again, let me emphasize this could still be an accidental explosion. We expect more information tomorrow when we get the preliminary autopsy report. I've emailed you a document detailing all of the evidence we've accumulated so far.”

As Mitchum takes a question from a WVBI agent about jurisdiction, I pull up the evidence log on my laptop. For expediency's sake, she's indexed inclusions by agent name.

I find mine and see my photograph of the symbol on McKnight's chest. There's no mention of the other tree and its broken branch.
I pull up Knoll's notes. There's nothing there either, but I give her the benefit of the doubt. The information is still very recent and there hasn't been a chance to catalog everything.

However, on the crime-scene map where numbers cross-reference specific locations with what was found there, McKnight's tree is clearly annotated—but not the other tree. She left it out intentionally.

The tree with the broken branch could be crucial. We have no idea what happened, let alone what's important and what isn't. Leaving it out as an oversight is sloppiness. Leaving it out to spite me is incompetence.

I wait for Mitchum to call the briefing to a close, then approach her at the lectern. She's going through a binder with a local case supervisor.

“Agent Mitchum?”

“Yes, Blackwood,” she replies without looking up.

“The damaged branch Knoll and I found. I don't see that in the evidence log.”

“It's a large forest, Blackwood. We don't have the ability to cover every fallen leaf or disturbed bird's nest.”

I ignore her tone. “I understand that. But everyone in this room knows this wasn't an accident. The body placement rules that out.”

“We can't assume anything.”

“There could be something else critical there, like fibers.”

“The tree isn't going away,” she replies.

It feels pointless to mention to her that any evidence could deteriorate, or get carried away by wildlife. The potential for crime-scene contamination alone already makes admissibility a challenge.

She gives me another of her forced smiles. “I included your devil theory.”

There's something behind her statement that I don't trust. According to this entire preliminary report, my one contribution was saying the bloody smears on McKnight's chest kind of,
sort of
, look like the name of a demon in Hebrew. No mention of my pushing to extend the search parameter. No mention of that possible first tree and what it might mean.

Vonda Mitchum is writing me off as a crackpot. In the final report, I'll literally be chasing ghosts.

I walk away before I say something that will get me in trouble. Field FBI agents take their jobs seriously and don't like interlopers telling them how to do things, any more than anyone else would. And I get it. Being from FBI headquarters doesn't necessarily make you more of an expert than someone who has spent twenty years in the field. In fact, some would argue that being so close to bureaucracy can make you ignorant of the real world.

I don't blame Mitchum for being suspicious of an outsider's motives. I do blame her for trying to excise me from the report for the sole purpose of making me look bad.

In the parking lot I take a deep breath of twilight air and try to calm myself. Mitchum has a million things to worry about. There's no agenda, I reassure myself. Although I suspect she's trying to make this her career case at my expense.

I don't care about a pat on the back. Just ask Knoll about the Warlock case. I made the key breaks, but I insisted he get the credit for his direction. All I want is to get the bad guys. It's why I became a cop. It's not for the paperwork, or the paper commendations. It's to make the world right.

A raindrop falls on my crossed arms. I watch the water soak into the fabric of my jacket. Another falls.

It's going to rain.

It's going to rain, and whatever evidence that may be on that tree could be washed away.

It's dark. It's cold. The other agents and cops are running to their cars to get home or back to their hotels.

The one coworker I'd trust to follow me on a stupid quest has just gone home.

I groan.

I'm going to have to do this alone.

T
HUNDERCLOUDS RUMBLE OVERHEAD
as I hop out of a borrowed motor pool car and run across the meadow to the line of trees where we found McKnight. His body and the tree limb he was found on were removed hours ago. A solitary work light and generator keep vigil over the plastic-covered tree, which looks like some kind of alien artifact. The crime scene that isn't a crime scene, according to Mitchum, is a few hundred feet away in the shadows. My feet slip in the wet grass as I try to beat the downpour, and I almost land on my ass.

My tree is somewhere in the woods, but there's enough glow in the sky to find it. I try to put on my clean-suit as I run so I don't contaminate the scene. If I do find anything, I don't want some forensic tech pulling one of my long black hairs out of an evidence bag.

I reach the base of the tree and slip my feet into the booties that are supposed to keep me from tracking in outside dirt. The second-lowest branch, the one that isn't broken, is a few inches higher. I leap for it, and muscles I haven't used since high school gym start to ache. Yoga didn't prepare me for this.

Somehow, I pull myself onto the second branch and steady myself against the trunk in a crouch. My slick slippers want to glide right off the wet surface. They aren't meant for climbing.

I feel like a damn space monkey.

My theory is that whoever put McKnight's body in the tree tried this one first. Maybe even getting all the way to the top before realizing this tree wasn't going to work.

If they abandoned this tree, they might not have cared as much about tidying up after themselves. It's a leap. A diligent criminal would check for prints, fibers, and any other clues. Fortunately, most of them aren't that smart.

Rain trickles down through the leaves. I pull my flashlight from my pocket and place it in my mouth so I can hold on for dear life with both hands. Besides the pain, I don't think I could handle the professional embarrassment if someone found me unconscious from a fall.

The first thing I look for is drops of blood on the branches and leaves. A big guy like McKnight might not have gone down without a struggle. Our killer could have been bleeding from his own wound and not had the time to bandage it, or use a towel to clean the path he took up here.

My light casts a glowing cone in the rain. Nothing jumps out at me. I climb up to the next branch and focus my attention on the path our bad guy would have likely taken to carry McKnight, or to haul him up with a rope.

I spot another broken branch by my elbow. At least I know now that our climber made it higher than the first limb. I lean in to have a closer look.

My phone rings.

Now? When you're a cop, you don't get the luxury of pushing all your calls until later.

I unzip my clean-suit and pull the phone out, fumbling to keep my grasp on the tree and not let go of my light as I move it from my mouth to my free hand. “Hello?”

“Jessica?” replies a familiar voice.

“Grandfather?” This is a surprise. We haven't talked in a long time. Things in my family are awkward. I spoke to him and my
father briefly a few months ago, when I was in the hospital, but I had been too busy to deal with the drama of their presence.

“Are you busy?” he asks.

The ground twenty feet below begs for closer contact, the wind makes secret plans with the rain to send me flying and a branch is getting very fresh with my ass. “A little . . .”

“I'm going to be in your neck of the woods in a few days. I'd like to talk.”

My neck of the woods . . .

There's something about his voice. Grandfather is an imposing man. He has the elocution of a classically trained Shakespearean actor with the stage presence to match. But now I detect a trace of vulnerability. Vulnerability and that old bastard are two things that never go together. “Is everything all right?”

“Nothing that can't wait until we talk in person.”

“Okay. Let me know when you're in town and we'll do lunch.”

“Very good . . . Jessica, I love you.”

I don't think I've heard my grandfather ever say that to an adult my entire life. Is something wrong? Or is he just getting old? Sentimental?

Sentimental? No. It has to be the scotch.

This isn't the time to reflect. I clumsily try to push my phone back into my pocket, forgetting that it's under the clean-suit, and miss. The glowing screen falls from the sky like a meteor.

“Damn it!”

I make a vain effort to grab the phone in midair and slide forward. One foot slips off the tree limb and I find myself hanging from a branch with one hand, like the world's worst motivational poster.

“Nice,” I scold myself.

I've been hung upside down in straitjackets. Pushed off bridges in packing cases. Suspended by invisible wires. This is just one more stupid stunt.

I switch hands and move the flashlight back to my mouth. My phone stares up at me from the ground. Magically still functional after the fall, it could die from water damage at any moment.

Hand over hand, I pull myself back to relative safety. That's when I see it.

Dull orange. Just the faintest hint of a tread.

Not on a branch. This is on the trunk.

Someone tried to pull him or herself up and put a foot here to gain purchase. Flexing the heel of the shoe is probably what released the mud caked in the treads of the sole.

Red drips trail from the pattern as it melts away. Raindrops are dissolving the print. A clue is vanishing before my eyes.

I told Mitchum to pay attention to this tree. But there's no victory lap if I have nothing to show.

I can't take a photo because my camera is in the car and my phone is on the ground. So I reach into the clean-suit to dig inside my pocket, and pull out a gas receipt and plastic bag. Well, I'm half prepared. Using the receipt as a blotter, I push it down over the tread to get an impression and then slide it into the evidence pouch.

I scrape some more mud from the print into another pouch before wrapping the trunk with the sheet of plastic wrap I saved from my sandwich.

Back on planet earth, my phone goes off again. It makes a garbled sound as water splashes over the speaker.

Pelting raindrops shoot at me almost horizontally, telling me to get out of the tree. I scurry down and pick up the phone before it kicks over to voicemail.

“How's it going?” asks Knoll.

“Wet and painful.” I crook the phone in my shoulder and rub my sore hands.

This catches him off guard. “Um . . . Yeah, so you hear the latest?”

“The
latest
latest? I've been up a tree.”

“Ah, got it.” My wet-and-painful comment finally making sense to him. “We'll talk about that later.”

Thunder pounds in the distance. I cling to the trunk of the tree.

“What's that sound?” asks Knoll.

“Weather. What'd you hear?” I struggle to push my hair back to its tie. Wet strands cling to my face in defiance.

“McKnight's shoulder wound? Someone took a munch out of his neck.”

“He was bitten?”

“Downright chowed-on.”

“Yikes. Human?”

“Oh, yeah. It gets better.”

“How better?”

“Dental match.”

“Who?”

“Well it isn't your prime suspect, Beelzebub.”

“Who?” I repeat.

“Sheriff Jessup.”

“Christ.”

“The still-missing, as in might-be-on-the-run, Sheriff Jessup. He's our main suspect right now. It looks like we have a murder.”

“Lord.” A shiver runs down my back.

“You read the bio on that guy?”

“Briefly.”

“He's a tough son-of-a-bitch. I pity the poor fools running around those woods with our three-hundred-pound, flesh-eating, redneck zombie on the loose.”

“Yeah . . . fools,” I reply, glancing over my shoulder into the blackness of the forest. I reflexively pat my pistol under my clean-suit.

“So, Blackwood, where did you say you were?”