The Devil's Only Friend (6 page)

Potash and I looked at each other.

“Probably a neighbor,” said Potash softly. “Someone on the team would have called first.”

“The only neighbor I know is dead,” I whispered, standing. “I’ll answer it, but if it’s a Withered I’d better see that concealed weapon you keep bragging about.”

Potash said nothing, only standing to follow me and then stopping just where the opened door would hide him from the visitor. I heard a foot shuffle outside,and a low canine yelp. I frowned and opened the door.

“Oh good, you’re home.” It was Christina Tucker from apartment 201; I’d seen her collecting her mail now and then, and walking to and from her car. She had a white Honda Civic with one missing hubcap and she worked part-time at a bank where she earned just barely enough to pay the rent. She hated her mother and broke up with her boyfriend three weeks ago. At night she slept with a face mask and a white-noise machine, and you probably don’t want to know how I know all of that. “I’m Christina,” she said, brushing hair from her eyes. “I live in 201.”

“I think I’ve seen you around.”

She was bent nearly in half, holding Boy Dog by the collar. “Do you know where Mr. French is?” she asked. “The guy in 202? Nobody really knows him, but I’ve seen you talking to him and I know you take care of his dog sometimes.”

Withered bodies collapse into ash when they die, so there was no decaying body for anyone to smell and get suspicious. We hadn’t reported his death, so unless his boss called the landlord, it was unlikely anyone here would realize he was gone until the rent came due at the end of the month. I looked at the big basset hound, then back at Christina. “I haven’t seen him.”

She tugged on the basset hound’s leash, dragging the heavy dog forward a few inches. “He left his dog with me yesterday and hasn’t come back. I can’t keep him anymore and I don’t want him just running around the complex pooping on everything.” She tugged the leash again, pulling the dog closer to my doorway. “I suppose we could call the pound, but I don’t really know how that works—I don’t know if he could get the dog back when he shows up again, or if they’d sell him to somebody, or God forbid they put him to sleep.” She tugged again. “Can you watch him?”

“The dog?”

“Yes.” Tug. “I’ve seen you take care of him before, maybe he’ll be better for you. It will only be a day or two, I’m sure.”

I have rules about animals: I don’t own them, I don’t touch them, I don’t even talk to them. I’d watched Boy Dog for an hour or two, twice, so that I could get closer to Cody French and kill him. Now that he was dead I needed to stay as far away as I could. Especially now that I had Potash in the house—adding a dog to the equation would be idiotic. Worst of all, despite Christina’s uninformed promise, I knew that French wasn’t coming back. If I took this dog, it would be forever. It would be stupid and irresponsible.

I started to form a protest, stepping slightly to the side to give Christina a better view of how little space I had, but she seemed to interpret the move as an invitation to let go of the leash. Boy Dog wandered in, walked straight to Potash’s makeshift bedroll, and peed on the blankets. Potash muttered a low curse, and I turned back to Christina.

“I’ll take him.”

*   *   *

I gathered my papers and retreated to my bedroom, shutting the door to study and letting Potash deal with Boy Dog. He wasn’t exactly a difficult dog—he was a basset hound, which is barely one step up from a furry statue. Give him a warm place to lie down and he’d lie there for hours without moving. The fact that he had claimed Potash’s bed gave me a petty sense of satisfaction, and I turned my attention to Mary Gardner.

I pored through my own notes, assembled over weeks of part-time volunteer work on Mary’s floor of the hospital. She lived under the human guise of a nurse, forty-six years old, competent and caring and boundlessly sympathetic to the parents of those children who died in her care. She was very careful about her kills—we had to give her that. If not for Brooke’s assurance, we would never have suspected that the children under Mary’s care had died from anything other than the diseases they were already being treated for. Many of her victims, we suspected, weren’t under her direct care at all, though we’d been observing the hospital long enough to tie her, at least superficially, to the approximate time and place of most of the deaths on three floors of the building. If she were human, we’d have enough evidence to at least get her fired, but we couldn’t afford that with a Withered. Drive her away and she’d just start killing somewhere else, and we didn’t have the time or the resources to follow her all over the world. We had to kill her here, once and for all, and the sooner we could manage it, the fewer children she’d take with her on the way out. Our own danger from Meshara was a secondary concern for now, though as Trujillo had pointed out, every dead Withered made us that much safer.

The one thing we hadn’t figured out was the actual mechanism of Mary’s kills; she seemed to gain some kind of healing boost from the process, as her cycles of health and illness seemed to follow the deaths fairly clearly, but she was never around when the victims died. My best guess at this point was a delayed reaction: she’d slip into a sick child’s room, “take” something from them—hell if I knew what it was, energy or something—and then her health would improve, and then the child would die, sometimes hours later, sometimes a day or more.

Ostler and the others insisted that Mary’s killing of children made her more evil than the others, more heinous and irredeemable. I figured a victim was a victim; she didn’t target children out of generic evilness, but because something about her process required it. Finding out what that something was could be the key to the whole mystery.

I needed someone to talk to, to bounce ideas off of. Kelly was good for this, and sometimes Trujillo, though he talked back too much to be of any real use as a sounding board. Either way, they were both working on their own branches of the project tonight, and I had to make do without them. In the old days I’d had Max, and then I’d used Marci, but I supposed I’d be paying for that mistake for the rest of my life. I couldn’t use just anyone … and I guessed, at the moment, I couldn’t use anyone at all.

I haven’t told you about Marci yet, though I’ve mentioned her a couple of times. She’s not exactly easy to talk about. Sociopathy is a tricky disease to describe—it’s not an absence of emotion, but an absence of empathy. You look at another human being, or even an animal, and feel no connection whatsoever: you don’t feel good when they’re happy, you don’t feel bad when they get hurt, you’re completely cut off. Maybe you feel jealous when they get something you want, but that’s not a connection to them—that’s all focused on yourself. What you want and what you’re willing to do to get it. And if that means hurting someone, well, you don’t care. Your needs are more important than anyone else’s, because you’re more important than anyone else. Nobody else counts.

Marci was different.

And now Marci was dead.

I looked around at my room, almost as if I expected to see her there, pale and half formed, like a shadow in reverse. I don’t know what a ghost looks like, or if ghosts are even real—the Withered are, so who knows what else is possible?

“Are you here?” I whispered. Instantly I felt the tears in the corners of my eyes, hot and cold at the same time, my face burning with anger and embarrassment. I shouldn’t try to talk to her. I know she’s not there. But if anyone could be, if there really was something after this—maybe another life, or even just a dead reflection of this one—I wanted her to be there. I wanted her to be here.

I dried my eyes, rubbing them harshly with the palms of my hands. Marci was gone, and I couldn’t change that. Worse, she was gone because I hadn’t stopped her killer fast enough. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I’d follow this new demon straight into hell before I let it kill anyone I knew.

I couldn’t turn to Potash for help—if he didn’t take me seriously, how seriously would he take the discussion? I’d have to work on my own.

The central question of criminal profiling is this: what does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do? Find that, and you find everything. As much as the average person wouldn’t believe it, serial killers have very clear, often very simple reasons for what they do—reasons you probably disagree with if you’re not a killer, but a bad reason is still a reason, and the reasons we do things affect the way that we do them. Imagine you’re closing a door: why are you closing it? If you’re leaving your house to go to school or to work, you probably close the door firmly behind you and make sure it’s locked before you go. If you’re sneaking out at night, you probably close it softly and slowly, doing everything as quietly as you can so nobody hears. If you’re leaving because you just had an argument, you might slam the door behind you and walk away without looking to see if it stayed closed. All you really have to do is close the door, but the way you close it says everything. Killing is the same. The way you choose your victim, isolate it, kill it, even the way you leave the body—whether you arrange it like killers in the movies, or just run away and hope nobody sees you. These choices, even if they’re subconscious, can tell investigators even more about you than your fingerprints.

The Withered, though they kill for different reasons, still have reasons. Crowley stole body parts from his victims, and while a normal serial killer might do that as a way of remembering the kill, Crowley did it because he was rebuilding his body. It was supernatural, and impossible to decipher in the beginning, but it still helped me to figure him out. It still helped me to kill him.

Mary killed children, exclusively. She killed remotely, or on a delay. I got out a clean sheet of paper, hoping that the process of taking notes could substitute for a human sounding board, and wrote down everything I knew about her methods. She got to know some of her victims before she killed them, but not all. Was that a crucial part of the process? Did it affect the outcome? Maybe that was why she worked as a nurse: because she needed prolonged contact to make it happen. Whatever “it” was. If all she needed was the occasional sick child, she could get the same access as a janitor or even a volunteer who visited once a week. And yet she was a nurse. Why?

I looked through my stack of papers for her timeline. Ostler had bought me a laptop to work on and sent all of these documents through e-mail, but I hated that machine. Living on my own, with no one breathing down my neck or checking my Internet history, I’d spent nearly a week binge-watching every horrible thing I could find—entire message boards and websites about death, displaying the most graphic images and even videos of head wounds, shark bites, gunshots, and more. I’d nearly lost control then, and I’d even fallen back on my old habits and started a Dumpster fire or two, on the far side of town where no one would link it to me. Nothing serious, just a little safety valve to release the pressure that was building up inside of me, pouring it out in a burst of flame and heat and dancing red—

No. Stay focused. Push it away.

I have a job to do.

I looked at the printout of our reconstructed timeline. Mary didn’t seem to kill on any predictable schedule: sometimes one a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Two of her kills were less than a week apart. Kelly was convinced this meant there were more we didn’t know about, but I doubted it. If two per week was Mary’s standard schedule, and we just didn’t know about the others, where were they? How could she kill that many people and keep them hidden? Fort Bruce simply wasn’t big enough. The hospital was the most advanced in the region, and people came in from all over hoping to get the best care they could. That created a large enough population for Mary to hide her activities. Obviously it was possible that some of the kills we attributed to her were not, and some of the kills we thought were unrelated were actually hers, but even if we gave her credit for every dead child in the hospital, it didn’t add up to the frequency Kelly suggested.

But that left us with the original problem: why the erratic schedule? She seemed to kill for health reasons, like Crowley had—rejuvenating themselves every time their bodies got too degraded to function properly—but Crowley had followed a predictable pattern. When his kills got closer together, it was because his degeneration was accelerating. Mary’s pace seemed to speed up and slow down almost at random. There had to be an explanation, and if Kelly’s was wrong, what was right?

The bedroom door opened abruptly, and Potash dragged Boy Dog in from the hall with a grunt. “He’s staying in your room.”

“I can’t have him in here,” I said, practically jumping up. “I have rules—”

Potash growled. “You said yes to him, you deal with him.”

“I have rules,” I said again, though I knew it would mean nothing to Potash. I stared at Boy Dog, panting placidly on the floor, then looked up at Potash. “We’ll give him back.”

“She won’t take him back.”

“Then we’ll…” I hesitated, knowing that anything I said would put the dog in danger. Put him out on the street? Leave him tied to someone else’s door? Send him to a pound? My rule said to avoid animals, but the purpose behind it was to protect them. I couldn’t let myself hurt an animal, even through inaction. I’d hurt too many people that way already.

“I’ll call the animal shelter,” said Potash, “but you keep him in here until they come.”

“Wait,” I said. “We have to give him to someone who wants him.”

For the first time, his facade cracked and he stared at me in a grimace of complete confusion. “Why?”

“Because I won’t let him get hurt.”

“The shelter won’t hurt him.”

“But they won’t help him either,” I said. “I have rules.”

He stared at the dog a minute. “So what do you want to do?”

I want to hit this dog with the sharp edge of a shovel until I can’t recognize it anymore.
I closed my eyes and breathed. “I want to put an ad in the … I don’t know. No one reads the paper, and I don’t use the Internet. Craigslist? Is that a thing?”