The Devil's Only Friend (24 page)

Nobody said anything; we just looked at each other in silence, wondering what horrible secrets were about to be revealed. What had Diana done? What about Nathan? I wasn’t worried about my own secrets—anything Ostler knew, the others could know as well for all I cared. It was the things Ostler didn’t know that I was worried about.

Did the letter really reveal secrets about Potash? How could anyone know that?

“‘Mart
í
n Trujillo is a statutory rapist,’” read Ostler. “‘She was willing, by most accounts, but the law does not consider a fourteen-year-old girl to be a reliable witness.’”

I leapt up from my chair. “You let him spend months alone with Brooke! He slept in the very next room!”

“I was nineteen years old,” said Trujillo. “That was more than thirty years ago.”

“And that makes it okay?”

“He served time,” said Ostler. “He’s had a flawless record since, with a long history of helping to enforce the law.”

“You shouldn’t have let him near Brooke,” I said hotly.

“I’m not a pedophile, John,” said Trujillo, “I was a dumb kid who made a dumb choice. ‘Rapist’ is a poor descriptor of what happened, but it’s the correct legal term and I don’t deny it.”

“How does The Hunter even know this?” asked Nathan.

“He probably had to register as a sex offender,” said Diana.

I felt my left hand curling into a fist, my right hand in my pocket, clenched around my knife. “Dammit, Ostler!”

“He’s paid for it, and moved on,” said Ostler. “People change—do you want me judging you by your worst mistake?”

“You mean you don’t?”

“Just read the letter,” said Diana. “It’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

Ostler continued with the message: “‘I’ve met the girl—she’s much older now, of course. Much prettier than his real wife. Maybe that’s why the ugly one died so young?’”

“She died in a car accident,” said Trujillo, and now his face was as thick with anger as mine. He rolled up his sleeve to display a long scar on his forearm. “I was in the car, too—to even suggest that I would kill my own wife—”

“‘Diana Lucas was drummed out of the air force,’” Ostler read, cutting him off, “‘dishonorably discharged for beating another woman. The victim was sent to the hospital with two broken ribs, several internal injuries, a concussion, and a dislodged eyeball.’”

“Wow,” said Nathan. “What’d she do to you?”

“Nothing,” said Diana curtly.

“I don’t mean injuries,” said Nathan. “I mean what did she do to deserve it? What started the fight?”

“She did nothing,” said Diana slowly. “It wasn’t a fight, it was a…” Diana sighed. “Gang initiation. She wanted to join our crew, and that means you take a beating. Same thing I got when I joined.”

“They have gangs in the army?” asked Nathan.

“Air force,” Diana corrected him sharply. “And yes, every branch of the military has gangs. I was in one before and I was in one there.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Now I send a quarter of my paycheck to inner-city schools,” said Diana. “Now I volunteer at a Big Sisters program whenever we’re in a town big enough to have one. Now I think I’ve done pretty damn well for myself in paying for that mistake, and I don’t want to have to relive it for you all any more than Trujillo wanted to relive his.”

“So far these have both been a matter of public record,” said Nathan. “Kudos to him for digging them up, but anybody could have done the research. He’s not a mind reader.”

“He knows about you,” said Ostler.

Nathan shook his head. “I haven’t done anything like this—”

“‘Nathan Gentry sold cocaine in West Philadelphia for three years,’” Ostler read, “‘and then again in Harvard for two. Most of his customers dropped out, unable to continue school; one of them turned to prostitution to pay for her habit.’”

“I didn’t know about that,” said Nathan.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Diana.

“I didn’t know about the prostitution!” he protested. “Of course I knew about the drugs.”

“And you thought that wasn’t the same?” asked Trujillo. “I lived with an underage girl who thought she loved me—you destroyed dozens of lives.”

“And then tried to hide it from us,” added Diana.

“I was never caught or convicted,” said Nathan, “I didn’t think he’d know about it. I didn’t think anybody knew except Ostler, and that’s because I’m the one who told her.”

“Mr. Gentry has moved on,” said Ostler, “just like the rest of you.”

“But he didn’t suffer for it,” said Diana, and I could tell from the curl of her brow that she was furious. “Trujillo went to jail, I was court martialed, and Nathan just skates by?”

“I knew it was wrong so I got out,” said Nathan. “Do you know how hard it is to get out of dealing? And I think the fact that I did it voluntarily should say a whole lot more than you’re giving me credit for—would you still be gangbanging if the air force hadn’t forced you to stop?”

“They forced me to leave the air force,” said Diana. “I could have kept banging anywhere I went.”

“Arguing about these details gets us nowhere,” said Ostler. “I wouldn’t even be reading this if I didn’t think it would help us catch a bad guy. How did he find out about Nathan? Where is that information available? What kind of person might have access to it? Put the past behind you and let’s treat this letter like the clue it is.”

I listened to them argue without joining in. Didn’t they see that Nathan’s crime was different, though? Not just because he didn’t get caught, and not just because he only hurt people indirectly—his was different because he did it for different reasons. Trujillo was in love, or at least he was horny, and Diana wanted to fit in. They were both emotional acts, made for social reasons. Nathan’s crime was all about himself: he wanted money, so he went out and got some. He sold drugs to get ahead.

As if I needed any more reasons to hate him.

“Okay,” said Nathan, closing his eyes. “Who knows about me?… One of the other dealers, maybe? The kid who supplied me?”

“Kid?” asked Diana.

“I got started in high school,” said Nathan. “We were all kids.”

“More likely one of the victims,” said Trujillo. “How many people know about the one who started selling herself? That can’t be a big group of people.”

“I didn’t even know about her,” said Nathan. “I can’t exactly pull up a list of her friends and family.”

In The Hunter’s e-mail this morning, he’d asked me: “Is there anything you want me to leave out?” Is this what he was talking about? What was he going to say about me?

“Read the rest,” said Potash. It was the first time he’d spoken. “It’s no use jumping to conclusions until we have all the clues.”

Ostler nodded. “The next part’s about me.” She read in a clear voice:

“‘Linda Ostler is a war criminal.’” She paused, but I didn’t know if she was waiting for comments or just steeling her nerve to continue. “‘In 2002 she was assigned to a task force investigating the sale of weapons and explosives across the border from the US to Mexico. She used her position to sell hundreds of automatic rifles to a drug cartel, directly resulting in the deaths of six DEA agents and more than a hundred Mexican civilians.’”

She lowered the letter and looked at us. “Obviously I had my reasons,” she said. “And ‘war criminal’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”

“That was you?” asked Diana.

“I sold coke to some rich kids trying to get enough buzz to get their homework done,” said Nathan. “You sold guns to drug lords? And they’re mad because
I
ruined a few lives?”

“It was a plan that got out of hand,” said Ostler. “Nobody wanted to supply the cartels, we wanted to catch the smugglers in the middle. We made a hard call and it was the wrong one.”

“That’s an understatement,” said Diana. She looked around at the rest of us. “Has anybody killed more than a hundred civilians? Is that pretty much the high score for the group?”

Potash raised his hand, and Diana fell silent. The rest of us stared at him. “I’ll be very surprised if it’s in that letter, though,” he said simply.

I’d known he was a killer. I’d known he was the most dangerous one of us. Why did this still feel like a shock? Because he’d admitted it so casually?

Potash hacked a Withered to death with a machete. While dying of a lung disease. Who had I gotten myself entangled with?

Ostler shook her head. “Here’s the only line about Potash. It comes at the end, though, after the one about John—”

“Do them in order,” I said. “Let’s see if he has anything to say about me that the rest of you haven’t already guessed.”

Ostler cleared her throat: “‘I haven’t forgotten about you either, John. I’m sure your friends know about the man you electrocuted; that was in the papers. Do they know about the time you beat your elderly neighbor half to death, and then killed her husband? What about the time you soaked your mother in gas and burned her alive in a car?’”

“Bloody hell,” said Diana.

I said nothing, only stared at Ostler.

“No excuses?” asked Nathan. “No tearful explanations of how it all had to happen and there was nothing you could do to stop it?”

“I assume there’s more,” I said, still not looking at the others.

“How could there possibly be more?” Nathan cried.

“‘You think you’re not like me,’” Ostler read, “‘but you’re more like me than any of them. They hurt people because that’s the way the world works: they want something, so they take it, and hold no pity for the rabble who get in their way. Thus it has always been. You and I are different. We hurt people because we enjoy it. Because the pain and the death are ends unto themselves.

“‘The antelope may crash their horns and call themselves strong, but all of them fall before the lions.’”

I’m not like him
, I told myself.
Even if we do the exact same things for the exact same reasons, I’m not like him.

I just can’t explain why.

“In John’s defense,” said Ostler, “everyone he’s killed was a Withered.”

“Even your mother?” asked Trujillo.

“She wasn’t when I started,” I said, and turned to him without blinking. Even thinking about this made me want to scream in rage, but I’d be damned if I was going to let them see me lose control. I told the story in short, even tones. “Nobody possessed Brooke, so I was trying kill her. My mom showed up, Nobody left Brooke to attack her, and … she died.” I made a small rolling motion with my hand. “Yada yada yada.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” asked Diana, and somehow that was the comment that stung me worst of all.

“The Hunter knows too much about us,” said Nathan. “If he has all of this he could have anything—he could have my parents’ address.”

“People have been sent to your friends and family,” Ostler repeated. “The Withered bodies the FBI picked up from the hospital were more … enlightening than my superiors expected. I think they’re finally taking our work seriously, and that includes this implied threat to your loved ones.”

“You still haven’t read my section,” said Potash.

“It’s the conclusion of the letter,” said Ostler:

“‘And of course Albert Potash, the Death that Walks. How many people has he killed? What noble justifications did he claim? Let this be the most damning evidence of all: I know everything, and I could find nothing on him. He is a man without a past. In the modern age, nobody loses their past unless someone has gone to very great lengths to bury it.

“‘There are antelopes, and there are lions. And then there is something more. Think carefully about the company you keep.’”

14

When I was a little boy I used to love dinosaurs. Who wouldn’t? They were huge, and everyone was afraid of them, and they could eat my parents. I didn’t necessarily want them to eat my parents, but I knew that they could; I knew that they had the power to do whatever they wanted, and no one could stop them because they were dinosaurs.

Clayton County didn’t have a zoo, but once when I was four we went on vacation to San Diego, and we visited the zoo there, and the lions and tigers and gorillas were great and all but what I really wanted to see were the dinosaurs. I’d been reading about them my whole life, and this was my big chance. Did the zoo have a T. rex? A stegosaurus? My favorite was always the triceratops, don’t ask me why. They just looked cool. Do they have a triceratops, Dad?

He laughed, and told me the dinosaurs were dead.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve gone to a zoo, excited to see your very favorite animal—let’s say elephants—only to learn that all the elephants have died, just before you got there. That’s what I thought at first: that the dinosaurs at the zoo had all gotten sick, or been poisoned by bad food, and had passed away in a sudden tragedy. How would you react? How would you react if you were a four-year-old boy? It destroyed me. I wanted to know what had happened to them, and if the zookeepers had tried to save them, and when they were going to get new ones. And of course my parents were both morticians, and I had a vague sense of what that meant, so I wondered if we were going to embalm the dinosaurs while we were there on our trip. I didn’t know what embalming was when I four, but I knew the word. I knew it was something you did to dead people, and that it was important. I figured that dinosaurs were important enough to warrant the same treatment.

I don’t know if my father understood the depths of my confusion—if he understood what it meant to me—but around this time he figured out why I was confused. No one had ever told me that dinosaurs were extinct—or if they had, they hadn’t explained what the word meant. My father laughed again, delighted by his four-year-old’s adorable misunderstanding, and told me that all the dinosaurs were dead, in the whole world. That they’d been dead for millions of years. No matter where I looked, or how long I lived, or how hard I wanted to, I would never see a dinosaur anywhere because they didn’t exist anymore. All we had were bones, and even those were too old to touch.

Roll that around in your mind a little. The sudden realization that every animal you wanted to see was suddenly and irrevocably killed—sure, it had happened millions of years ago, but for me it happened right then and there. In my head they were alive, billions of them, and then the meteors struck, and the world ended, and they all died in fire and agony. I was a personal witness to a mass extinction. How can a child endure such a thing?