The Devil's Only Friend (23 page)

We got the address for the Mercer family and joined the cops already on the scene. The father was holding his boy tightly, crying in shock while detectives scoured his home for clues. The boy, about six years old by the look of him, seemed disturbed by his father’s crying and by the strangers in his house, but mostly he was curious. They hadn’t told him about his mother yet.

“It doesn’t look like anybody came inside,” Detective Scott whispered. “There’s no signs of forced entry, and the attack itself took place on the highway.”

“We’ll start talking to the neighbors,” said Diana.

I checked my phone again, but The Hunter hadn’t written back.

Nobody was home at the first house. The woman in the second house hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary and said that the guy from the first house left for work at five every morning.

“Define ‘nothing out of the ordinary,’” I said. “Did you not see anything, or did you see the same people you see all the time?” If the killer lived on this street, he might be one of the ordinary things this woman had seen and not thought twice about.

“Who’s the kid?” asked the woman.

“He’s one of our investigators, ma’am,” said Diana. “Can you tell us exactly who you saw this morning, if anyone?”

“Seems awfully young to be a policeman,” said the woman. She was older, with her gray hair dyed brown, and wearing some kind of shapeless bag with a floral print. “How old are you?”

“I’m forty-seven,” I said.

“You don’t have to get sassy about it.”

“Please, ma’am,” said Diana, “can you answer the question?”

“Do I have all morning to sit and stare out my window?” she asked, her eyes wide with indignation. “Sure, I saw Kristin take her boy over to the Smith place, which I told her not to do because I don’t trust the Smith family. Look at their yard! And Mr. Smith was already gone by then, of course, because he works in an office downtown, though I figure he can’t make much money from it or they’d fix up their house a little.”

“Did you see anything else?” asked Diana.

“The Mexican man in 2107 left to go to his job at eight, but then he came back at nine, or maybe a little after nine, so he may have gotten fired. He left again by 9:30: I know because my show hadn’t gone to commercial yet, and it always goes on the half hour.”

“Kristin Mercer took her son to Margaret Smith at 10:15,” I said, reading from my notes. “That’s the house across the street from you, correct?”

“And just look at it,” said the woman, waving toward it disdainfully.

“Did you see anyone near her car while she was inside?” I asked.

“Should I have?” asked the woman. “Has something happened to Kristin? It was that Mexican man, wasn’t it?”

“Please answer the question,” said Diana.

“No, I didn’t see anyone near her car,” said the woman. “What am I, some kind of a spy with nothing better to do than watch my neighbors all day?”

“Thank you,” said Diana. “We’ll get back to you if we need any more information.” She closed the door, and we walked to the next house. Potash met us coming the other way.

“They don’t know anything,” he said. “Nobody does.”

My phone rang; I hadn’t put any contact numbers in it yet, so I was surprised to hear Trujillo on the other end.

“John,” he said, “any luck at the Mercer house?”

“Nothing yet,” I said. “Ask Elijah if Kristin stopped anywhere else before getting on the freeway.”

“He already said she didn’t.”

“Ask again,” I said. “His memory’s terrible.”

“I want to talk about your theory,” he said. “It’s interesting, but it doesn’t hold water.”

Yes it does. “You think we’re chasing a ten-thousand-year-old veterinarian park ranger cannibal scholar who’s well-spoken and careful except for when he’s not?”

Trujillo sighed. “Is that really any more ridiculous than a ten-thousand-year-old plague goddess who packs a gun she never uses and makes sick kids sicker so she can hide in a hospital?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mary Gardner had solid reasons for everything she did. We don’t have that for The Hunter.”

“We don’t have it yet,” said Trujillo. “That doesn’t mean we never will.”

“So how does he not pass out from the sedative?” I asked. “He can’t inject it into their bodies and then eat them. Especially not Kristin Mercer—we found her hours after she died, but if he ate a sedative in her shoulder he’d have been too asleep to finish the attack, let alone dump the body.”

“We know he injected her,” said Trujillo, “and we know he ate her. We have clear evidence of both.”

“You don’t know it was him,” I said, and began to grow excited as I thought more about it. “That would actually explain a lot: what if he has an accomplice? Or a pet, I don’t know what you’d call it—someone he brings bodies back to, and then they eat them. That gives us the meticulous mastermind
and
the feral cannibal, in a way that makes sense.”

“And then the pet falls asleep instead of the mastermind,” said Trujillo, as if mulling the idea over in his head. “Still doesn’t work: whoever eats the body will fall asleep before they’re finished, unless they’re immune to the sedative, in which case we don’t need two people, we’re back to just one. Simpler is better. And the bite wounds are still too … deliberately random. They don’t follow a normal eating pattern, the way you’d expect from a feral accomplice like you’re suggesting. The best theory is still Nathan’s: that this killer somehow fetishizes the sedative—possibly because he’s immune to it—and then takes weird bites out of the corpse.”

“The best theory is mine,” I insisted. “That the reason this doesn’t make sense is because it’s intended to confuse us.”

“But that theory doesn’t solve any problems,” said Trujillo. “It denies all of our other answers without positing any of its own: it doesn’t solve the sedative eating, it doesn’t tell us how he slashed the tires without being seen, it doesn’t give us anything new we can work with.”

“It tells us our other answers are wrong,” I said. “We have to give them up and start over.”

“I have to go,” he said. “Ostler needs something.”

I hung up without saying good-bye. Why was he being so stubborn? He was so determined his profile was correct that he wouldn’t see any alternatives.

We were back at the Mercer house, and Detective Scott met us at the door. “Good, we were just about to look for you two, we figured you’d want to be here when we questioned the husband.”

Two? I looked at Potash and Diana, then down at myself before looking back at Scott. Typical.

“Hey, John,” he said, “can you do me a favor? We’re going to ask some rough question, it’s … not good a situation for a kid to be in.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“I mean the Mercer kid,” said Scott. “Can you take him into another room, keep him distracted?”

One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. “Of course,” I said. “Get rid of both kids at once, that’s a good plan.”

“We’ll fill you in on everything,” said Diana.

“Sure,” I said, no longer caring. If they cut me out of this investigation, I was free to start my own. I walked to the father, still holding his son. “Hey … buddy. Want to come with me for a minute? We’re going to watch…” What did kids watch these days? “Dora?”

“I want to watch
PAW Patrol
.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “Let’s go, you can show me how to turn it on.”

His father seemed reluctant to let him go but saw Detective Scott and the others looming nearby and apparently realized what was going on. The boy climbed down off his lap and led me into the other room. He handed me a remote. “You turn it on with this.”

It looked like it had a thousand buttons, and I grimaced. “Thanks, kid.” The power button was easy enough to find, and I was surprised when it actually turned on the TV instead of killing a satellite connection or something. They had the same cable company I had in my apartment, so I was able to search through the channels and find the kid stuff pretty quickly. “Look,
Sesame Street
. I didn’t know they still showed that.”

“I want to watch
PAW Patrol
.”

“It’s not on right now, and I don’t know how your DVR works. Just … watch the puppets, I have to do something.” He sat down, relatively calm, and I pulled out my phone. Still no e-mails from The Hunter. I typed one to him:

You’re the one who wanted to talk. What do you want to say? I assume you’re not going to just tell me who you are, or how to find you. So what are we doing here?

Do you want me to kill someone for you? Is that what this is about? Because that’s not going to happen either. I don’t care if you’re a lion or a hunter or whatever the hell you think you are: I’m not like you.

I sent it, then thought a minute and wrote another one:

Why do you eat them? It’s not for food, because you don’t treat them like food. You don’t degrade them, either, like you’re punishing someone vicariously, and there doesn’t seem to be any emotion behind it, like you’re living out some kind of fantasy. You just take bites, and then give us the bodies.

And then you give us a letter
, I thought.
That’s the key. What do you do that you don’t have to do? You talk to us. That’s what this is all about.

The kid said something, and I looked up, but he was just talking to the TV. One of the puppets was talking back, in a weird kind of one-sided double conversation. I looked back at my phone and hit send on my message.

The Hunter was talking to us—somehow that’s what this was all about for him. Was he trying to scare us? Trujillo thought he was trying to taunt us, to show his superiority, and I’d been arguing that he was just trying to confuse us. What if there was something more? We kept trying to describe the killer in human terms—we talked about Withered powers here and there, like the ability to withstand a sedative, but we hadn’t talked about Withered motivations. Why would a Withered send us letters? What does he lack, that these letters are trying to make up for? A voice? Brooke had never said anything about a Withered without a voice. I’d have to ask Elijah.

I hadn’t logged out of the e-mail server like I usually did, so I was surprised when it beeped softly. The Hunter had sent me a message:

Tell your boss to check the police station courtesy account. She might want to get to it before the interns do.

We had a new letter. Obviously I couldn’t tell Ostler to check a specific e-mail account without exposing that I had an alternate line of communication … but who knew how long we’d have to wait before someone decided to check the police department courtesy account? If we got to it fast we could stay on his trail, we could find out where he’d sent the e-mail from and go there to look for clues. But I couldn’t give myself away. I had to be patient.

I watched the little boy and the puppets talking to each other without ever talking to anyone but themselves.

*   *   *

I was at Whiteflower when the e-mail was finally discovered by a police department receptionist who was manning the phones on the night shift. Apparently she got bored; now we knew who checked the courtesy account. She alerted her superior, who alerted Detective Scott, who called Ostler, who called the rest of us and told us to meet at the old offices across the street. I told Brooke I was sorry to be leaving.

“You’ll come back?” she said. “I love you, you know. You need to come back so we can get married and live happily ever after in a little white house.”

“You don’t love me,” I told her.

She looked at the floor, the corners of her mouth sagging. “Do you love me?”

I hesitated, my hand hovering over the door. How could I answer that? I didn’t love her, not the way I loved Marci. Not even the way I loved my mom, and at least half of that love was hate. After a long moment I found my voice to speak. “I don’t know what that means.”

Her voice was pleading. “Then how do you know I don’t love you?”

“Because you’re alive,” I said, and banged on the door in a sudden rage. “The only people who love me are dead.”

*   *   *

“You’re not going to like this letter,” said Ostler. The whole group was seated around the conference room table: six people, and an empty seat for Kelly. Ostler looked at each of us in turn. “None of us are. Know before we read it that I’ve already contacted headquarters, and they’re dispatching people to check on your families.”

“Holy crap,” said Nathan, “how bad is it?”

Ostler looked at him, put on her glasses, and started to read:

“‘To the Esteemed John Wayne Cleaver, and The People He Occasionally Associates With.’”

“Nice of him to include us,” said Nathan. Ostler ignore him and continued:

“‘I hope you liked my last gift. The clues are important, and I trust you’ll enjoy them, but don’t overlook the body itself. Bodies are important. They are what makes you human. Your humanity is a gift, in a very real sense, and so I make a gift of it to you. Do not squander it.’”

Nathan snorted. “This guy’s insa—”

“Shut up,” said Diana.

“‘Because I am in a giving mood,’” Ostler continued, “‘I offer you another gift: the gift of knowledge. You seek to understand me, but do you really know yourself? Can you be true to what is in you if you don’t know what that is? I suggest that you cannot. Your secrets must be opened, to yourself and to the world. You told me you’re not like me. It is important to understand that you are.’”

“Hold up,” said Trujillo. “We’ve never communicated with him directly, have we?”

“We have not,” said Ostler. I didn’t look at Potash, and counted my breaths slowly to keep my face from changing color. Ostler didn’t look at me. “His last letter told us to kill someone and leave a note on the corpse. I think ‘you told me you’re not like me’ is a reference to the fact that we didn’t.”

I said nothing.

Ostler took a deep breath. “This is the part where it gets bad. You each have a file, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of the key details of your lives have been redacted out of them. I did that to keep our focus on the enemy, and not each other, but some of that information is about to come out. Know that none of this information is new to me: I reviewed it all carefully, and didn’t recruit anybody to the team that I didn’t trust.”