Name of the Devil (16 page)

D
AMIAN.
O
F ALL
the people to hear from now. He's got a radar for locating me when I'm in a bind. “Hold on.” I send a text to the working group assigned to track him down.

call trace this
dk number

“
Y
OU'RE SUCH A
good girl, Jessica,” he replies in his calming voice. “In the future, I'd be happy to go through the FBI switchboard if that'll save you the trouble of having to tell them every time I contact you.”

“Where are you?” I ask flatly. This is one more complication, one I can do without.

“Safe.”

The events that took place less than a week ago in Tixato are fresh on my mind. “Been to Mexico recently?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Just a hunch.” I don't have too many vigilantes that like to follow me, leaving bodies in their wake.

“What would it say about your employers if I am able to reach you more quickly than they can in a time of crisis?”

“Were you there?”

“Certainly . . . in spirit. Let's change the subject.”

“Let's not. Why did you follow me down there?”

“Hypothetically, I'd only go there if I thought you were in some kind of trouble.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Hypothetically?”

“Whatever?”

“Ever wonder how your phone knows how to ring when someone calls you?”

“No. Not particularly.”

“Now you will. You see, your phone broadcasts an identifier. It tells the nearest tower you're in its zone. The tower then alerts the network and that's how they know where to send the call.

“If you are resourceful and you care for someone, you might find a way to make sure that you know the moment their phone vanishes off the network. Of course, when you turn a phone off or its battery runs down, it has the same effect as a disappearance.

“Even if said person is visiting a foreign country, in particular a region with a very nasty criminal element, you might still assume a phone going off the network is just their charge running out. But if you realize that every phone in the area has gone down with no explanation, and that the bad people might be the ones doing this, you might have cause for concern.”

This is as close as I'm going to get to an admission.

“Thank you.” The words come out of nowhere.

“Pardon me?” Damian is taken aback.

“I said thank you.” I don't believe I'm saying this.

“I thought you were going to tell me you had it covered. That you didn't need any help,” he replies.

“I don't know. I was scared. I was really scared.” I haven't confessed this to anyone, not even Ailes. I'm not sure why I'm choosing Damian. He's dangerous. He's psychotic. He's probably a murderer. Twice now, maybe three times, he's killed for me.

“I don't know what to say. Do you think . . .” he starts.

“No, Damian. I will shoot you on sight,” I reply forcefully.

“I love your foreplay.”

“I'm serious.”

“Are you ever not serious?”

“I said ‘thank you.' I'm going to hang up now.”

“Don't you want to know why I'm calling?”

This is the game he plays. He knows something but wants to tease me. He wants me to ask him. He wants me to let him know I need him. “Why, Damian?”

“Besides the sound of your voice? Speaking of voices, I heard that little audiotape you found. Heck of a performance. That kid had potential.”

“A faker after your own heart?”

“Indeed. A tragic waste of talent. I'm sure you can relate. Have you found out his name yet?” he asks.

“No. I don't suppose you have?”

“I can't do everything for you, Jessica. But I do know someone who can help you.”

“Who?”

“He's a collector by the name of Max Ripken. He lives in Virginia.”

“What does he collect?”

“Ones and zeroes.”

I don't have the time for this dance. “Yeah, um, helpful.”

“You have no idea. He has so many of them, you'll need something to start with. A name would help.”

He's already drawn me in. Why do I encourage this?

I know why . . . I just can't admit it to myself.

“If I had a name I wouldn't need him.”

“Are you so sure? You've already looked at the name of every child who lived in Hawkton that you could find. Any luck? If you have the name, Max can help you make a connection.”

“I don't have the goddamn name!”

“That's because you're thinking like an adult.”

I hate his games. “Damian, give me the name.”

“I don't have it. What you need to do is take a nice long hot bath and relax. The name will come to you. Or, at least the path to the name.”

“Damian . . .”

“It's important you do it this way. It's important for you to keep thinking differently than everyone around you. That's how you caught the Warlock. If you're chasing ghosts, then you have to think like one.”

“Ghosts aren't real.”

“Exactly. But if I force-feed you what's going on, you won't see the whole picture.”

“And you do?”

“A little bit. I know something about ghosts, and about how lost boys bide their time. Have I ever led you astray?”

“You're the definition of astray.”

“I'll leave you with this parting thought. It's actually something that has been concerning me.”

“What?”

“Between the ‘event' in Mexico and the unfortunate experience you had a few months ago, you seem to be getting in harm's way quite a lot.”

“And?”

His tone changes from teasing to serious. “Is it me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you taking these risks because somewhere, deep down, you think you have a protector?”

“No. Don't flatter yourself. I'm more afraid of you than anyone else.”

“Jessica, I'd give my life to save you. You know that. Unfortunately, I may not always be there. You need to know this. I'm just a man.”

“A disturbed, psychotic man.”

“Who loves you more than he can ever express.”

“Turn yourself in if you love me so much.”

“For what? I'm just a person of interest right now. That's rather boring. I can't even get conjugal visits. Unless . . .”

“I'd sooner shoot you.”

“There was a time when you felt differently about me.”

“I was young and didn't know the real you.” There was a time when things weren't so complex, or at least I thought they weren't.

“Perhaps you did. Looks like it's time to go.” The line goes dead.

Damian and his damn hints! He has a particular way of seeing things. I don't trust him, but I can't ignore him. He's been right before.

I lock the door and search under the bed and in the closet. He has a thing about violating my personal space.

Satisfied that I'm all alone, I start the bathtub and undress. The power of suggestion was too much. Damian knows scalding water and steam are my happy place. I place my gun and phone on the toilet seat within arm's reach and step in.

I relax against the cold tub as the water trickles over my toes and try to think of what I'm missing. Damian said to approach this from a child's point of view. I'm not sure what that means.

I've looked at every record I can find in the town. There is no way to track down children who were visiting relatives, or staying somewhere nearby.

What am I not seeing? I let the water pull me down into the suds and stare up into space.

The warmth begins to lull me asleep.

Something catches my eye and my spine chills.

The bastard.

He was here.

He was in my goddamn room!

I don't know if I should feel afraid or secure that he's nearby.

There are numbers written on the mirror, probably with soap. The steam has made them visible.

793.809

291.216

282.451

My phone rings.

“Agent Blackwood?”

“Did you get the trace?”

“Yes.”

“Was it from here?”

“No. Miami, actually.”

“I'm sure he's nowhere near there.”

Self-consciously I get out of the tub and wrap a towel around my body. There's a shiver at the back of my neck.

I write the numbers down and wonder how far away Damian really is.

A
T FIRST GLANCE,
the numbers don't mean anything. They're not a location. They can't be phone numbers. I stare, trying to decipher them. A code? I give up and just Google them all at once.

Nothing.

Next I try the first one by itself, and get somewhere. The top result is a card catalog designation from a library.

So is the second, and the third.

Library card catalog numbers . . .

793.809 = Magic.

291.216 = Religion.

282.451 = The Occult.

N
OTHING ELSE.
N
O
names. Just three Dewey decimal system categories that are already at the forefront of my mind. Damian's clue seems pointless.

But seeing things from a lost boy's point of view . . .

What are those numbers to a child? They identify book categories, just like they do for me, but they also represent something else . . .

The basement of our house held my grandfather's huge library. It was poorly lit and home to too many spiders, and I was
afraid of going down there. Unfortunately, my favorite books—the ones Grandfather and Dad had little use for—were shelved all the way at the back of the basement. When I wanted to read
Grimm's Fairy Tales
or
The
Wizard of Oz
, I had to venture to the library's darkest recesses. There was only one lightbulb there, and it was always burning out.

A scary home for fairy tales.

These numbers are not just a system. To a child, they're locations in a library.

This is the connection to the lost boy.

I barely bother drying off. I quickly put on a pair of jeans and a sweater as I call the local deputy still on duty and tell him to find someone with keys to the Hawkton Public Library
right now
.

F
ORTY MINUTES LATER,
an older woman with her hair in a net and a bathrobe around her plump shoulders meets me at the door of the small building.

“I'm so sorry,” I tell her, showing my badge.

“No, no. Whatever I can do to help.” She understands that this must be important, and that it has something to do with the explosion.

The library is one of the older buildings in town. Made from red brick and concrete, its shelves and furniture resemble a set from a Frank Capra movie.

I hand her the numbers and she leads the way. We grab all the books from the relevant shelves and set them on a table in the center of the reading room. In total, there are thirty books, worn but clean. They don't look like they've been opened in ages. I take the first one,
Hoffman's Book of Magic
, and flip through the pages, hoping for some kind of clue.

“Anything I can do?” the librarian asks.

“Look for writing in the margins.” My previous search for the child came up in a dead end, but what if he had been actually
hiding here the whole time? “Better yet, do you have records of who checked these books out?”

She shakes her head. “We never went to an electronic system. It's been hard enough keeping the doors open.”

“Damn.” That would have made things so much easier.

She takes the second book off the stack and flips to the back. “All you need to do is look here.” She removes a card and hands it to me. “Each book has its own card. When you check it out, you sign your name and leave the card at the desk. The card goes back into the book when you return it.”

The card has a dozen names in handwriting styles of varying legibility. Next to each name is a date, some going back to the 1970s. Every person who ever checked the book out is listed here.

“Can I have copies of all these cards? Wait, I can just take photos with my phone.”

“If it will help you, take them.” She starts to pull cards from the books. “I'll sort them all later.”

“Thank you. Do you have records of library-card holders? If I found a name, could I match it to someone?”

“They only go back twelve years. After that, all those records are gone.”

“Shoot. I'm sorry. Thank you.” I collect all the blue cards from her and lay them out on the table, quickly dividing them into three piles according to topic. There are hundreds of names. The one I'm looking for should be in all three stacks, next to a date of at least twenty years ago. It's really a job for a computer.

In magic, there are formulas and techniques for sorting. We call it “culling.” None of them ever held my attention for very long. Uncle Darius, on the other hand, could strip out the aces and high-value cards as he shuffled a facedown deck. He had some time to practice in prison.

“Are you looking for someone in particular?” she asks after watching me try to sort them for several minutes.

“I'm trying to find a name in all three of these piles. Somewhere in the 1980s, I think.”

She picks up the first stack and runs through it, glancing at each card before setting it on the table. She picks up the second and flips through it the same way, selecting three cards. She returns to the first pile and culls four. Finally, she goes to the last stack and pulls two cards.

“Impressive,” I tell her. “My uncle has a photographic memory.” I don't mention how he used it.

“Is he a librarian too?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Only when he's in jail.”

“I see.” She leaves it at that and points to a name on a card. “M. Rodriguez. He's in all of them.”

“Does he sound familiar?”

She taps her temple. “I'm not so good with faces. Numbers are my thing.”

That name never came up in any of my school-related interviews. “Would he have had to be a resident to have a library card here?”

“No. We're quite liberal about that. All he would have needed was a resident relative who could sign for him. To accommodate children visiting over the summer and that type of thing.”

Of course. Nobody at the school knew him because he probably never went there. “Thank you. May I hold on to a few of these cards as samples of his handwriting?”

“Sure. Sure. I'll hold the books for you too.”

She helps me search through all the school yearbooks, just to be certain. M. Rodriguez is nowhere to be found. All we have is his childish signature and a list of books he liked to read.

I email Ailes the name so he can put in a search request for state and county records. Unfortunately, for older records that could take weeks. We'll be able to prioritize the search, but it'll still have to be done by hand.

I'm at a dead end until they can run it.

Or am I?

I remember the name Damian gave me, of the collector of ones and zeros: Max Ripken.

A quick web search finds someone with his name identified as a curator of the “Archive.”

It's late, so I send him a brief email.

After a couple of minutes, my phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Jessica? Freddy told me to expect your call. I'm at your disposal whenever you're ready.” Freddy? Must be one of Damian's weird jokes. His voice is friendly and youthful. He kind of reminds me of Gerald. “Can I give you a name over the phone?”

He hesitates. “I'd prefer we handle this in person . . . you'll understand why when we meet. Freddy told me I could trust you.”

I look at the tables of books around me. I feel so close. To leave Hawkton now? “It's a little inconvenient.”

“I know, but I'm just not sure about talking to someone from the FBI over the phone about what I do.”

“I see . . .” This raises all kinds of red flags.

“You'll understand.”

I better.