Name of the Devil (17 page)

“
A
LOT OF
this is in a legal gray area,” Max says after I give him a reassuring smile at the door.

“Unless I find a meth lab, I think we're fine.” I peer over his shoulder with some hesitation.

“Freddy said you're okay. So I'm glad to help.” He has a pleasant smile and the round, boyish features I often notice on men who find themselves working with computers all day. His hair, the color of sand, is slightly receding, suggesting that he's probably a little older than he looks. Between the ten-speed in the corner and the rock climber forearms, I can tell he manages to keep active.

He leads me inside and down a long row of metal shelves filled with electronic parts in plastic bags. Hard drives and floppy disks of all kinds are stacked everywhere. It's a history exhibit of data storage evolution.

He lives in a recently built mansion in rural Virginia. The “Archive,” as he calls it, is his collection of disk drives, with which he's filled the house and an add-on building.

From my brief Google search, I'd gathered he was some kind of software millionaire, but I wasn't able to find out anything more specific, or anything about him personally.

We pass deeper into his home, past bookshelf after bookshelf of hard drives in static-resistant bags, as he explains how his
current “occupation” came to be. “After we sold the company, I was looking for something to do. A friend of mine wanted me to invest in a company that bought old computers and broke them down for scrap. There's gold, palladium and a lot of other reusable metals in there. That's how I found out about the black market for old hard drives. Criminals buy them to steal banking information, which got me thinking: What else are we throwing away besides credit card numbers?”

He's probably told this story a hundred times, but seems to enjoying retelling it to me. “We make a big deal about television shows and movies that are lost forever. But what about data?” He walks over to a hard disk the size of a large toaster. “This has hospital data from a Northern California payment processor in the early 1980s. One of the first to computerize. It doesn't actually have patient charts, those weren't digitized yet, but it holds billing information. This lists prescriptions, what tests were done. Everything you'd pay for. You know that you can make a vector of the spread of HIV from that information? Think about it. While we were trying to solve that mystery through other means, we could have discovered right here what was going on. There's a pattern in the data.

“It would have been illegal to have done that in the early 1980s. So I guess it's even sadder that the HIV epidemic exploded under our noses. We'll pass secret laws if we think terrorists might be a threat to an infinitesimal percent of the population, but we can't do anything remotely like that to stop something that harms far more people.”

We walk down another corridor and come to a room containing something the size of a large washing machine. A single track light illuminates it like it's an art exhibit. Max's face brightens. “I found this in Guam. It's from a naval tracking station that monitored the moon landings—secretly. It's also got all sorts of spy satellite intelligence in there too. Satellite orbits, images of
Soviet bases.” He looks at me anxiously. “Don't worry. I told the Department of the Navy about it.”

“What'd they say?”

“They still haven't got back to me. That's the thing with this information. We'd rather pretend it doesn't exist. I'm afraid we're going to lose it all before we know what we have. It's disposable.”

I'm not too surprised. A colleague and I had recently found a crashed MiG jet in the Bayou that our military never bothered to track down.

“My biggest project now is buying up old phone books and digitizing them. For a hundred years we've been tracking the migration of people from rural areas to the city without even realizing it.”

I get the sense he could go on for hours. I find it, and his enthusiasm, fascinating, but I'm trying to track a killer. Mitchum could have me completely removed from this case at any moment. “I don't think the person I'm looking for had a phone number,” I reply, steering him back on topic.

“We'll see what we can find. I have all kinds of random records. Not a complete life record on any one person, but everybody and I mean
everybody
is in my system somewhere. Even you.” He gives me a half grin.

“I'm afraid to ask.” I feel self-conscious.

His expression changes and he flushes. “I didn't look you up. That would have been rude. Some of this data is very personal. I'm just saying that we leave footprints everywhere.”

We step into an office that's empty except for a computer sitting at a desk next to two padded chairs. “Where is all the data stored?” I ask.

Max suppresses a smile. “That's a secret. Freddy said I could trust you, but I still would like to keep that to myself.”

“Of course.” He's still cagy about the fact that I'm in the FBI. This data could be a legal minefield.

He points me to a chair and sits down at the desk. “What do we know?”

“A boy around 1985. His name is M. Rodriguez. He was in Hawkton, West Virginia, around that time. I'd guess an age between ten and thirteen.”

Max nods. “Okay, anything else? Any other people?”

“Yes.” I give him the names of the victims.

“Oh.” Mentioning Hawkton was all it took to link this to what's all over the news. “This boy is connected?”

“I can't say how.” It's a polite way to ostensibly deny knowing anything while implicitly confirming to him that he's correct.

“I understand.” Max types for a moment, then leans back.

“That's it?”

“Basically. It's not quite a search in the traditional sense. The Archive isn't just a database. It's a piece of artificial intelligence software. There's way too much noise for the signal. It has to make educated guesses and then keep approaching the data in different ways.”

“I was expecting a printout or zip file or something.”

“Well, that's the problem. Most people either rely too much on human intelligence or too much on big data. That's the difference between the CIA and the NSA. The best answers come from somewhere in the middle. Ask smart questions, then use your smarts to examine the data.” Max looks at the screen. “I could give you a list of the seven thousand M. Rodriguezes near West Virginia around that time, but that won't do much to help you find the one you're looking for. Sometimes the information is in the gaps.

“Say, for example, I wanted to track you down from all the other Jessica Blackwoods using phone records. Maybe there are twenty? I'd find your latest address and note when you got that address. Next, I'd look for when a Jessica Blackwood disappeared from a phone directory in some other city. It's highly unlikely
that two people with your name moved at the same time. I can then go backwards all the way until I find your first phone number.”

“What if I have an unlisted number or no landline?”

“There are lots of other ways. Subscribe to a magazine? Ever ask yourself how junk mail finds its way to you? Same thing. They sell that information to advertisers. And that's just the legit data. I'm more interested in the gray data. The things people don't realize are important.” He glances at his computer. “Hold on . . . I think we have something. What do you know about the couple named Alsop?”

“A little. Why?”

Max studies his screen. “That's your connection. M. Rodriguez shows up in a database of kids who were in the West Virginia free- and reduced-lunch program.”

“He never enrolled in the school at Hawkton.”

“No, because he lived there during the summer. But they start that paperwork early.”

“How do you connect him to the Alsops?”

“They have about a half-dozen free- and reduced-lunch students in the system.”

“But they never had children!”

“Not of their own. But from 1980 to 1985, it looks like they were foster parents.”

This was a new revelation. “Foster parents? You have those records?”

“No. Just the lunch records. But that's the deduction the software makes. It's making a guess.

“All those databases aren't tied together. Especially ones from back then. A child-services database might wipe out all the information after the kids reach a certain age and never get imported into a new one.”

“Yeah, it's just that nobody mentioned this in the background check or the interviews.”

“1985 was a long time ago.”

“True. Before my time.”

He checks his screen. “Marty Rodriguez left Sparrow Oak Elementary in North Carolina at the end of the 1985 school year and then vanishes from the rolls altogether.”

“Wait, so how do you tie him to the Alsops?”

“ACME Fun Toys has a card with his name and their address. It was scanned and added to a database.”

“ACME Fun Toys?”

Max clicks through some information. “He responded to an ad in the back of a comic book, listing their home address.”

“Any idea what for?”

“Hold on. It's an old database, but they might have kept it. Yep . . . it was for one of those books on how to throw your voice.”

“Ventriloquism?”

“Yeah.”

This is interesting. The allegedly possessed boy on the audiotape had been reading up on the occult, magic tricks, and also how to throw his voice.

A little faker, indeed.

But where is he now?

“
I
THINK WE
may have our sixth man,” I explain to Ailes. I trust him enough to share the broad details on how Max helped me identify Marty Rodriguez. I can hear him type the name into his own database on the other end of the line.

It took an uncharacteristically long time for Ailes to get back to me after I called and left a message. I know something is up, but I don't want to pry. It might be personal.

“Interesting . . .” he replies. “We've been working on the 3-D reconstruction of the audio environment. We've got all the main players in there, but there's still another voice we're trying to track down.”

“That could be crucial. If we don't find Rodriguez before our missing man finds him, there's no telling what's going to happen.”

“Yes . . .”

I hear his uncertainty. “What is it?”

“I'm looking up the name. I don't show any arrest records in West Virginia for a Marty Rodriguez in that age range. It'll take me a moment to get the other data.”

“Maybe he stayed out of trouble. And foster kids move around a lot. What about a driver's license?”

“Nothing that matches what we're looking for. Foster family records will be harder to get, but doable if we can look through actual paper files.”

“It's him. It's got to be him on the tape.” I'm certain. My gut tells me that all the pieces fit.

“I'm sure too.”

“Then what's with the hesitation? You seem unsure about something.”

“It's the acoustic model, Jessica. We've been able to enhance certain parts and extrapolate reconstructions to test against what we're listening to. The moment where the voices stop . . .”

“Yes?”

“We picked up a sound in there . . . We've checked it against various potential sources. One match stands out more than any others . . .”

“What are you saying?”

“This isn't easy.” There's anguish in his voice. “It's in no way certain. We have software that shows bullet trajectories and other kinds of physical trauma. You can also use it to create sound models. But it's not a precise technique.”

“Tell me.”

“That sound may be the boy being crushed. The data model matches the noise made when a ribcage collapses.”

“Jesus.” I have to stop to take a breath. “You mean they killed him?” The thought hits my heart like a hammer. I'd never even considered that possibility.

“We don't know that he's dead. It's just a computer model. But now that we have a name . . .”

I suspect Ailes is searching through death certificates as we speak. If his acoustic model is correct, Marty Rodriguez didn't grow up to become a criminal mastermind as I suspected.

He died a little boy.

A foster kid, shunted from home to home and desperate for attention, he came up with a gimmick. It was a game for him. A prank that went too far when some terrified people tried to rid him of the “demons.”

I've heard other stories about children dying during exorcisms. Adults, while trying to hold back their small and flailing limbs, lean on them with too much pressure and kill them.

It's murder.

“Oh . . .” His voice trails off. “On October 20, 1985, a Marty Rodriguez died of suffocation. Oh dear . . .”

“What is it?” My stomach churns.

“Cause of death is listed as accidental. The report says he fell off his bunk bed in the middle of the night and it landed on top of him.”

“They killed him, Jeffrey. They killed him!” I can barely breathe. “That little boy . . . they murdered him!”

“We don't know yet.” Ailes tries to soothe me. “This may have happened afterward. It could be a coincidence. The report doesn't say anything about broken ribs.”

He's rationalizing. “You've heard the tape. Tell me that's not the sound of him dying? This kind of thing has happened before.”

There's a long pause. He has kids. I can tell he's just as affected by this as I am. Part of me feels guilty for wanting to think Marty was somehow responsible for all the evil that came afterward. I tried to make him into the next Warlock.

He was just a victim. The only truly innocent victim in this whole sad story.

“The death certificate was signed by the sheriff.”

“Jessup? Of course. Anyone else named on there?” He had to have had an accomplice in his deception.

“Just the coroner. He died several years ago.”

“It's a goddamn conspiracy! They killed the kid and they covered it up.”

“We don't have any proof. All we have is an audiotape and some shaky computer modeling. We can't definitively tie the two events together.”

“So we leave it?!” I yell. Sometimes Ailes's dispassionate, logical approach makes me want to strangle him.

“I'm not saying that. We're just in a hard place here. If we go out with allegations that all the victims, as well as our missing sheriff, were culpable in the murder of Marty Rodriguez before we can substantiate them, there will be hell to pay. We need to have this locked down.”

“This could be the link we need, though. It might help us find someone else willing to come forward who knows something.” I'm trying to cling to some single fact we can hold up. “Wait, what about the body? Could we get an autopsy?”

“No. It says the body was cremated.”

“For fuck's sake. Of course. The sheriff knew what he was doing. Damn it. Somebody has to know something! I'm not going to let this go. They can pull me off this. I'll goddamn spend my vacation time out here.”

“We won't drop this.” He means
he and I
won't drop this. “But that still leaves the larger question unanswered . . .” He trails off at the end of his sentence, bringing my attention back to the center of all this.

Of course. In my frustration, I'd forgotten there still has to be someone behind all this. Part of me wants to believe there is an avenging angel serving out retribution for Marty's death. I don't know that any of our victims deserved what happened to them, but I do know that they needed to be punished.

“Who is behind this?” asks Ailes.

“I don't know. I just don't know.” There's so much to process here. I couldn't even tell you my phone number right now, let alone the person I think we should be pointing the finger at.

“There's something we shouldn't lose sight of either,” he continues.

“What's that?”

“This tape, what happened, it may have nothing to do with any of this. It could just be one more coincidence that ties them all together. We can't let our emotions dictate our perceptions.”

“They murdered that kid. It has to be related.” Ailes may be correct logically, but ignoring this feels wrong.

“Yes. I believe so. But who killed them? Is it our sheriff, acting out of some weird delayed guilt? Is the sixth man just hired help?”

“Is that what Mitchum is going with?” I'd bet anything she's pushing for a self-contained case in which all the parties are accounted for.

“I think so. Easiest path.”

“Damn it. So the sixth man becomes a minor player. A footnote and then they bury this thing. We can't let her do that.”

“We need more, Jessica.”

“I'll find something. I can't . . .” I have to put down the phone. I don't want him hearing me get emotional.

I regain my composure. “I can't let them just throw that child away.”