Name of the Devil (7 page)

“
L
ET'S TALK ABOUT
demons,” says Ailes as I walk into the conference room at Quantico.

“Wonderful,” I reply, taking my seat. The chair, like the building, is decades old. Off from the main FBI campus, we're in our own corner.

Gerald, my lanky, mop-headed coworker who looks like a teenager who got lost on take-your-kid-to-work day, is sitting at his laptop pecking away at a furious speed. Behind them is a fullscreen video wall. In the center is the Hawkton church.

“Oh, so now we're interested?” I remark.

“I'm always interested. No, it seems Mitchum wants some more information about demons.”

“What gives?”

“This,” replies Ailes. He nods to Gerald. The church erupts into a fireball on the monitor. The roof rips apart and then the entire building explodes. When the smoke settles, the structure is spread across the ground in a thousand splinters, just as I saw from the helicopter.

“Where'd we get this footage?” I ask, surprised. I didn't know anyone was filming at the time.

“We made this. Gerald took all the laser-mapped 3-D data and put it into one of our number crunchers.”

“Impressive.” I feel a bit silly for thinking it was real. I glance at Gerald and nod. He gives me a meek smile.

“You haven't seen the half of it.” Ailes picks up a laser pointer and aims its red dot on a small white plank in the bottom left corner of the screen. “See that?”

Gerald moves his cursor over the board and the image zooms in. The individual grains in the wood become visible. He runs his finger across the track pad and the board flies into the air, reversing the trajectory of the explosion. Seconds later, I'm looking at part of a wall inside of the church, which has magically reassembled. There's a cork bulletin board a few feet away from the plank. The camera spins around, showing us the entire interior of the church. Not all the details are there—some areas are pixelated chunks—but overall it's convincing.

“We have to fudge a few things,” says Ailes. “But it's useful.”

“I'll say. It's like a time machine. So what's with the new interest in demons? Mitchum take another look at the smudge I found on McKnight?”

“Not quite. Roll forward,” Ailes tells Gerald. The camera flies back to a bird's-eye view of the hellmouth. He points his laser at a patch of ground in the field across the street. “Zoom.”

The camera pulls close to another plank. This one is darker, like flooring. On its edges are several deep gouges.

“Look familiar?” asks Ailes.

“No. Not really.”

“Roll back, Gerald.” As before, the board shoots through the air to fall back into place inside the church. Several other planks nestle down on either side. The gouges continue on to the other boards, and next to each other, the jagged carvings form a name:
Azazel
.

The same name in English that I saw written in Hebrew on McKnight's chest.

“Who wrote this?”

“We think that perhaps one of the victims carved it with a house key.” Ailes points to the blood stains on the floor in front of
it. “Maybe Mrs. Alsop. Now we have two people saying the same thing. Both of them alive long enough to tell us something.”

“Yet none of them said, ‘Jessup'?” I ask.

“Nope. Kind of odd. Even Mitchum realizes that now.”

There's a small victory for me she'll never acknowledge. At least not in a positive way. “Where's the forensics on Alsop? Any bite marks?”

“Gerald, we got the live feed from the forensics lab?”

Gerald turns the screen to a live view of one of our new autopsy rooms in DC headquarters. Two robot arms move over the body of what looks like Reverend Curtis. A separate window shows the super high-resolution images the cameras on the arm are capturing. At this magnification, the wrinkles on Curtis's skin resemble vast canyons. Hairs shoot out like black tree trunks. Each pore is a pit that fades into the earth.

“We're building a 3-D model of each victim,” explains Ailes. “We're also capturing infrared so we can see the kind of blood vessel rupturing. The abrasions might tell us another story. It's time-consuming.”

“You're scanning the body?”

Gerald points to the skin detail. “We're making a 3-D map.”

Ailes nods. “So far, cause of death appears to be our missing sheriff.”

“But nobody thought to implicate him in their last dying breath? Instead, they name a demon?”

Ailes shrugs. He's still trying to figure things out too. “That sums it up. You wanted weird, you got weird.”

“What I wanted was a nice tidy case I didn't have to be involved in. What we got was inconvenient reality. What about this ‘Azazel'? Any other meaning besides a demon?”

“He's a popular character in fantasy literature and gaming,” replies Gerald. He pauses for a moment. “Also one of the members of the Brotherhood of Mutants.”

“
G
REAT, JUST PUT
an APB out for Magneto. Case closed.”

Gerald gives me a smile, appreciating the reference.

“How'd your interviews go in Hawkton?” asks Ailes.

“The town is more eccentric than you can imagine. I even got a souvenir.” I set Black Nick's blade on the table.

Ailes picks it up and looks at the unfinished handle. “Nice fulgurite.”

Of course he'd know what it was called. I'd had to Wikipedia it. “That's from Black Nick.”

“Ah,” replies Ailes. He gives it a tap. “Iron? That's rare.” He hands it back to me. “Careful with that edge. I read the local reports on him. You think he figures into this?”

“I don't know. He seems pretty harmless. He wasn't wearing shoes when I met him. I also don't think he climbed up any trees. I doubt he'd be able to get the bodies up there without a pulley, unless his crows helped him.”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind. With enough patience, he'd be worth talking to again if we have more questions. I suggest someone with a gentle touch. He's real backwoods.”

“What was his assessment?”

“He says the devil was involved, but not the instigator. He took pity on Jessup. He thinks the sheriff wasn't under his own control.”

“Interesting . . .” Ailes's eyes drift up to the side as he starts to think about something.

“How interesting?”

He slides his open laptop over. “Our sheriff took quite a few bites of McKnight,” he says, pulling up an autopsy photo on the screen of McKnight's mangled neck. “In one of those bites, he managed to chew into the side of his own mouth. We found his DNA.”

“I can tell you that hurts.” I touch my cheek, more than one bad memory resurfacing.

Ailes zooms into the wound. “We pulled separated tissue out and ran it through a dozen different screens. Cheek cells, unlike hair or skin cells, can tell you a little bit more because they're in the mouth. In this case, we found something unusual. Just a trace, but enough to make a spike.” Ailes points to a graph. “Psilocin.”

It takes a moment for me to remember my pharmacology classes. Psilocin is a psychedelic. “Psilocin? This was in Jessup's sample? You mean he was on mushrooms?”

“That's the closest match. But it's something different. The conventional toxin screen wouldn't have noticed it. Hold on.” Ailes taps away at his keyboard faster than I can think. “Here . . .” A chemical structure floats on the screen.

It's just a bunch of ping-pong balls to me. “Care to dumb it down? I'm just a former showgirl who learned a few card tricks.”

He rolls his eyes and points. “Hardly. That's the phenyl ring. Almost all of the psychoactive drugs we have involve some variation of this. Jessup had something in his body that's a close match to psilocin, something similar to what you'd find when a magic mushroom breaks down.”

“So the sheriff did get high off mushrooms?” We've reached my limit of crazy for the town.

“No. I said close. That's the funny thing about chemistry. Rearrange an atom or two and decongestant becomes meth. Substituted phenethylamines are a whole family of molecules that can interfere with your neurotransmitters in a variety of ways. It's why synthetics aren't always precise. A right-handed version of a molecule might be a nausea-alleviating wonder drug, but the left-handed version could have the same effect and cause birth defects, like Thalidomide.”

“So the sheriff was on some kind of synthetic drug?”

Ailes shakes his head. “Not necessarily. It could be a natural substance that hasn't appeared in our databases yet. We're still finding new and different ways to mess with our brains. Archeologists have even found what appears to be psychoactive moss in ten-thousand-year-old graves. Its main ingredient is a substituted phenethylamine we hadn't seen before.” He traces his finger around the molecule. “There could be a billion permutations. Each one affecting the brain in a slightly different way. One might slow down processes in the calcium channels, while increasing the response between auditory neurons.” He looks at me like the result should be obvious. “Words would sound distorted to you, slow and drawn out.”

“Is that a real thing?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “It's an example I just made up. My point is that there are a billion ways to mess up our perceptions.”

“I think you may have missed your calling. Could the sheriff have ingested this accidentally?”

“You were there, what do you think?”

“If there hadn't been an unexplained explosion and bodies in the trees, just violence, I'd say
maybe
. But everything together doesn't quite match the behavior of one man on the worst trip ever.”

“No, it does not,” agrees Ailes. “This suggests something larger.”

“How much larger?”

Gerald snorts.

I glare at him. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“He knows where you're going next.”

“Where's that?”

A map pops up on the screen, replacing the graph. The center is a town called Tixato. I've never heard of it.

“Why would I be going there?” I ask, trying to figure out their private joke.

Ailes starts talking in his professorial voice. “In any crime scene you find a thousand pieces of evidence that are interesting, but lead you down false alleys. A blond hair from a dead prostitute gets tracked in because the cleaning lady lives in a bad apartment building. A Syrian passport found in a plane crash is actually from an overnight express envelope and not a terrorist onboard. Odd things that seem like one-in-a-million occurrences. In reality, every event has a million different one-in-a-million occurrences. The important ones are those that connect to other one-in-a-million events without an obvious reason.

“That molecule we found in Jessup's tissue? It's not a synthetic. There are only a dozen places in the world where the bio databases say animals that could produce it might live. Tixato is one of them.”

“So why Tixato? Because it's closest?”

“Because of those mud samples you brought us. From the footprint you found in the tree. Our other one-in-a-million fact. Guess where it comes from?”

I see where this is headed, or more literally, me. “Tixato too?”

“Exactly. Tixato. Tixato, Mexico.”

I
'VE BEEN MEANING
to ask my grandfather about what happened after the Buick followed me home for a while, but now just doesn't seem like the time. My flight leaves shortly for Mexico, and Grandfather has his own agenda he seems to be dancing around.

We were able to meet at the airport as he was flying in and I was flying out.

He takes a puff of his cigar, exhales and makes it vanish in a cloud of blue smoke. Behind us, an airport police officer is walking through the crowded lounge trying to figure out where the smoke is coming from. She gives the Belgian college students piled around their backpacks and trays of Chinese fast-food and cheese-dripping pizza slices a suspicious look. They smile innocently back.

“My stepfather was an asshole,” Grandfather says. “A pious man. I don't think he ever read a book in his life, besides the Bible. And even then, I think he only read it selectively. We lived on a tiny farm in the middle of Oklahoma. The world seemed so big, yet our lives so small.”

“That's why you ran away to the circus,” I reply. He's told versions of this story a thousand times in my presence.

“The circus makes for a more romantic story to how I became a magician. The truth is a little more complicated. I guess my
point is, I wasn't running to something, just away from that tiny, narrow, little life. I know what it means to run away.” He looks right at me.

“I never ran away,” I retort sharply. Although, truth be told, I've been avoiding my family since I was twenty. I don't call myself Jessica Blackstar anymore. Born into that legacy and everything that came with it, I realized that world wasn't for me. Ironically, the last time I spoke to my grandfather at any great length, was years ago in Mexico, when I almost died. And now, my plane leaves in an hour to take me back.

Grandfather's cigar rematerializes at his fingertips and he takes another draw. Hand to chin, it's his reflective pose. He's got dozens of them. Combined with his strong features, which evoke those of an aging 1940s matinee idol, he has
presence
. These are traits he taught himself. He wiped away the Okie farm dirt to create a polished, erudite man who can, in a simple sentence, convince you that he alone possesses the greatest secrets of the universe—and all that it takes to witness them is the price of admission.

I try to imagine my grandfather as a young teenager, sitting in a dark movie theater alone watching movies, trying to pronounce his words like Richard Burton and Cary Grant.

“I know you too well, Jessica. You've always had that defiant look about you. Tell me, are you happy in the FBI?”

My happiness has never been a topic of discussion. “I enjoy my work.”

“Even when it almost gets you killed?”

“I don't remember our business being all that different.”

“The illusion of mortal danger isn't the same as the reality.”

“Suffocating at the bottom of a lake seems like more than an illusion to me.”

He shakes his head and looks away. “Things were under control . . .”

“No, they weren't.”

“I've never wanted anything more for you than your happiness,” he says, with too much conviction. It sounds like a line from a play.

“But that's the problem,” I explain. “You can't see what makes other people happy. You only understand your own. You think someone without ambition is wasting their life. You have Dad convinced he'll never amount to anything because he can't live up to your legacy.”

Grandfather rattles the ice cubes around in his glass of scotch as he stares up at the massive modern art mobile dangling overhead in the cavernous atrium. “Do they accept you?”

“Who?”

“Your
peers
.”

He says the word “peers” dismissively, drawing it out. Uncle Darius liked to point out that Grandfather could add more syllables to a word than there were letters. “We get along great.”

He raises a bushy eyebrow. Grandfather's judicious use of words is matched by his scrutiny of how other people choose them. “‘Great' . . . Do they accept you? Do you get invited to watch Sunday football? Drinks at the bar after work?”

“I get asked.”

“Mostly by men looking for something? Husbands wanting to step out on their wives?”

I shake my head and roll my eyes. “You're a bastard,” I try to say the words calmly, but fail.

He inhales his cigar and swiftly sleeves it as the police officer walks past our table. She looks over her shoulder, smelling the smoke, and Grandfather gives her a smile before turning back to me. “I know what I am. Do you know what you are?”

“A cop.”

“Like that fool?” He points to the airport officer. “Hopelessly wandering around here, trying to figure out how to confront me?
While I enjoy my smoke, she'll keep circling me, ignoring that man over there on his way to the Philippines to engage in illegal acts with minors. Or our Middle Eastern friend three tables over sitting next to his veiled wife who has bruise marks on her wrists. Are you that kind of cop? Ignoring the things you feel helpless about?”

“I've told old fools to put away their cigars and I've put away murderers and wife beaters.”

“You're a garbage woman with a badge,” he replies, swiping his hand in the air.

“I see it differently.”

“Is there any less trash in the world?”

“Statistically? Yes. Crime rates are down. Are you arguing against the profession of law enforcement?”

“No. Just you being in it.”

“Because I'm a woman?”

“Hardly. I'd stack you up against just about any man I know. No. Because you're,” his voice halts for a moment. The carved scowl softens. “ . . . because you're my granddaughter.”

“Every woman is someone's granddaughter.”

“None of them are a Blackstar.”

“Well, actually, I'm a Blackwood.”

“I left that name back in Oklahoma on the farm. You should too. You're not like them. You're not like any of them.” He waves his cigar around, gesturing at the world. “You're special.”

“The FBI is where I belong. I've never felt better about what I was doing than now.”

“But do your peers really accept you? Do they consider you one of them?”

No
, I think to myself.
I'm still the outsider
. Knoll and Ailes respect me. I get along with the others, but I'm not a part of their social circles. They're polite, to be sure, but nobody tries to set me up with their friends. The female agents keep their distance. I could be resentful, but I know it's not them. It's me.

“What would you have me do?”

“You're famous again from that whole Warlock business. You're interesting. At least for a moment.”

The way in which he says “famous again,” as if it's everyone's ambition to see their name on a magazine. “Then what?”

“Write a book. You could probably get a television show while you still have your looks. Run for office. It's a great place for photogenic people who grow old. Anything. Just something bigger. It's an opportunity.”

“Then what?”

“Don't be childish. The Attorney General has less experience and intelligence than you. You could pass the bar, run for Senator, and have his job before you're forty.”

“You make it sound easy.”

Grandfather smiles. “For you, it should be. These people, they know nothing about themselves, much less how people like us think.”

I've never heard my grandfather speak of success like this before. “I thought you were going to try to convince me to do Broadway.”

“I know you well enough to see where your heart is. I recognize my own stubbornness when I see it.”

“Then why can't you accept me doing this?”

“Because . . .” He pauses for the right words. “Because it's too small.”

“Small?”

“Small for someone with your talents.”

This is his special way of giving a compliment. He tells you you're so good, you must be failing at something larger. “I'm good at it.”

“I'd bet you're one of the best. You are my flesh and blood. That's why you need to do something that challenges you. Something where the payoff amounts to more than putting some sad person
in jail for doing something to another sad person.” He points to the retreating airport police officer. “Let her take out the trash.”

“Wow.” I shake my head once more. “I knew you had an ego. I just had no idea.” I was a fool for thinking we could have a simple talk without drama.

“It's not egotistical to want something better for you than I had. Magic must seem silly to you now. It does to me. But to that boy back in Oklahoma, it was everything. Our adolescent dreams shape the adults we become. I should have dreamed bigger. I think I really could have made something of myself.” His voice trails off as he looks away.

“Could have?”

He stubs out his cigar in his empty drink and gets to the point. “Even the man that defies death has to acknowledge that it's just a trick.” He sighs. “I'm sure you guessed. I have to go into the hospital. The doctors say it's treatable. I'm optimistic. But it just puts things in perspective . . .”

“And that's why you wanted to talk to me?” I notice he conveniently waited until my flight was about to be called to deliver this news. I have a million questions now, but I know him well enough to know he's said all that he'll say on the matter.

“Among other reasons. I like to see your face. Even when it's scowling like it is right now. In my advanced age, I've begun to realize my single greatest accomplishment.”

“What's that?”

A smile forms. “You. Somehow this family of misfits brought us you.” There is a goddamn tear in his eye. Is this what old age does to you? I don't know how to respond. His large hand reaches out and pats mine.

“Jesus Christ, are you getting soft?” I try to make it sound like a joke.

“Don't count on it. I just don't want any of us to die with regrets. It's bad enough to live with them. I've got plenty.”

I give him a hug as my alarm goes off. “You're a complicated bastard,” I tell him before walking to the gate.

“Jessica,” he calls out. “Should we be worried about this hellmouth thing on the news? You're not involved, are you?”

I pause for a moment. “No,” I lie.

“Good. Risking your life once was enough.”

“Twice,” I correct.

“Yes. I guess our Mexican debacle counts too. Did you know I almost died there once? And your uncle spent some time in prison there. Nice place usually, except for us Blackstars. We always seem to have bad luck there.”

I've only told him I was heading out of town on business, not where.

“Let me know if you need anything.”

H
E RETREATS DOWN
the walkway. Suddenly his gait becomes clumsy. He bumps into the man he singled out as a wife abuser. He drops a lit cigar into the man's pocket before moving on. A minute later, the police officer walks by again and corners the man as his pocket spews smoke.

Grandfather looks back and gives me a wink.