by Andrew Mayne
However, being too quick to rule out a hypothesis is just as misguided. Although dinosaurs died out millions of years before the first primate walked upright, the early Egyptians were putting capstones on their pyramids while wooly mammoths were alive and well on a tiny island near Siberia untouched by man.
In trying to tell people there’s something more here, they think I’m pointing at dinosaurs. I’m simply saying mammoths might be involved.
I’ve also drunk half a bottle of wine while flipping between the science channel and the news. Back in my apartment lying on the couch in my pajamas, I’m trying hard not to be a cop for a moment.
The investigation isn’t going the way it should. Ailes just called to tell me it’s unfolding the way he feared. To his credit, Knoll saw this coming. Mitchum is giving a press conference announcing the case has for all intents and purposes been effectively solved.
Solved. Right.
Mitchum is standing at a podium outside the Hawkton sheriff’s department. There’s a crowd of news trucks and crews that’s easily bigger than the single-story brick building. She thanks the laundry list of agencies involved in the case. Flanked behind her, symbolically representing the unified face of law enforcement, are the remaining Hawkton deputies.
“We have concluded that the body we found is indeed that of Sheriff Jessup. This brings the manhunt to a close,” she says. She smiles with pride, but she looks tired. Real tired.
“Are there any other people involved?” asks a reporter from CNN.
“We have a person of interest who we think may have been an accomplice.” She means Deland.
“Is this person in custody?” presses the reporter.
If you count a mortuary table, sure.
She hesitates, not wanting to say he’s dead. That would make the case a little bit thinner. “This person is not at large.”
I’ll say.
“What about the connection to Reverend Groom?” another reporter interrupts.
“We believe this person is connected. That’s all I can say.”
Yeah, that fits, except that the phone call to Groom came from outside the country when Deland was in Virginia.
“What about allegations of involvement with Mexican drug cartels?” asks an NBC correspondent.
“We have no evidence the sheriff or any of the victims were involved in anything like that.” Mitchum gives the journalist a sharp look, frustrated with the line of questioning. She keeps trying to form a bubble around the case and the reporters keeping poking holes.
“Was the shootout in Mexico, between Jessica Blackwood and alleged cartel-aligned military, related?”
“There’s no evidence for that. She got caught in the crossfire with a rival gang. Wrong place, wrong time. We’re just glad she’s safe.”
Oh, that’s what happened. Thanks for clarifying.
Her words are too clipped to be sincere. I’d swear she flinched when my name was mentioned.
“What about the satanic connection and the mention of demons?”
Mitchum rolls her eyes. “Likely planted by the perpetrator to instill fear.”
In dead people? I want to shoot my television. Not her, just the TV. I think.
“Is the sheriff a suspect or a victim?”
“We have reason to believe that he may have unwillingly been under the influence of a substance that caused erratic behavior.”
And that substance came from where? My bruises from the cave are still a nice shade of purple, but hey, you’re welcome.
“Of course, there are more details to come. But we confidently feel that, with an end to the manhunt and the hard work of my colleagues in locating the other person of interest, we can bring this matter to a close.”
Thanks for the name check, sister.
Mitchum prays for the back and forth to end. She just wants to go home with a pat on her back and no loose ends.
“What was Jessica Blackwood’s involvement?” asks another reporter.
Oh. As much as I hate my name being mentioned, it’s worth it to see Mitchum cringe a little.
She definitely flinches that time. “There are hundreds of people who’ve worked hard on this case. Singling them all out would take too much time.”
She sounds colder than she means to, I think. Oddly, I almost feel bad for her. Almost.
“Will there be an investigation into the audiotape that was leaked?”
“I can’t comment directly on evidence that may or may not be relevant to the case.”
Relevant. As in, throw it in a drawer and forget about it.
The press conference ends and the news camera cuts away as she retreats back into the sheriff’s office. I go back to my pile of printouts containing the information Max sent. I should probably be looking at them with a clearer head, but that’s not going to happen for a few hours.
Flipping through the list of events in the Hawkton area, I try to find something that might bring an outsider into the world of the Alsops and their troubled foster kid. There are no psychology or medical conferences, but the Star Trek convention held at the War Memorial auditorium twenty miles away certainly opens up the possibility of intergalactic operatives.
The bulletin board system (BBS) announcements are somewhat cryptic. People want to hook up with others, but also don’t want to expose themselves too much. I have to look up a few acronyms to understand what’s going on. Even modern online dating is a mystery to me. I go back over the first list and find events that stand out and compare them against the BBS records. This catches my attention after my third drunken pass of the BBS logs:
Purple Collar looking for similar attending the Interfaith Rituale Romanum Series at Gregory College
APPARENTLY, “PURPLE COLLAR” appears to be a code name for a gay priest. The Rituale Romanum sounds boring, but the window is open. I do a Google search anyway.
Holy crap.
Of course.
Here I am, getting wasted while I bemoan my colleague’s ignorance, and I can’t even acknowledge the mammoth.
The Rituale Romanum is the religious text that Catholic priests use for exorcism rites. It’s for dealing with the possessed.
Confronted with a possible case of juvenile possession, Reverend Curtis could have gone to the interfaith conference in search of guidance.
The unidentified man on the audiotape is a Catholic priest.
I go through Max’s reduced list of twenty names from the SABRE records. Three of them departed from the airport in Rome.
One name looks familiar, but I’m not sure why.
I don’t know too many priests. Was he on a list of witnesses we already went through?
I do a system search of the files on my laptop. No . . .
The middle and last names throw me off at first. At a loss, I type the full name into Google.
There we go. The first result is a priest identified by the European spelling of his first name and a truncated surname.
But that’s not his name anymore.
Holy shit . . .
I knock my wineglass over and ignore the pooling red liquid as I pull my laptop onto my knees.
My hands almost don’t want to type as I pull up a YouTube clip of him speaking.
I’m getting that buzzing feeling in my head.
Same voice.
He’s the man on the audiotape.
Fuck.
Holy fuck.
It’s got to be the wine.
It can’t be.
I’m drunk.
I’m dreaming.
This is insane.
Jesus. H. Christ.
Reverend Curtis didn’t just find himself an expert on the Rituale Romanum at the conference; he talked the man into coming to the Alsops’ house and delivering the rite himself.
And not just an
y man. The expert at the time.
A man who would keep going up the Vatican ladder.
Thirty years later, that man is now the pope.
The pope.
No. This is insane.
I take a deep breath and try to clear my head.
I find another YouTube clip of him speaking. I recheck Max’s records.
I sober up fast.
My head isn’t spinning so much. I have focus now.
This all points to the same thing.
The current pope was there that night in Hawkton when they tried to exorcize Marty Rodriguez.
The pope helped kill Marty Rodriguez.
Maybe not kill, but Marty is dead and he was there.
And now someone is killing everyone who was responsible.
There’s only one survivor left.
The pope.
The goddamn pope.
Christ.
I need another drink before I tell Ailes.
39
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR BREYER sits behind his desk and has me go through the entire sequence of events that led to my conclusion. After I’d drunk two cups of coffee and showered, I wrote what I thought was a reasonably cogent email to him and Ailes.
Breyer replied by asking me to meet him in his office on a Saturday. I still haven’t heard from Ailes and that has me really concerned. Usually he has my back on these kinds of things. I guess this is part of the growing-up process.
Breyer is wearing a polo shirt, which makes the meeting seem a little more casual. But that’s a deception. I’m here alone with the most ridiculous allegation of my career.
“The pope?” asks Breyer. There’s no humor in his voice. No trace of sarcasm.
“Yes.”
“There are only two audible words on the entire tape from this man and you think he’s the pope?” He asks me this as if he’s a father questioning me, his teenage daughter, about the dent in the family car.
Do men see these power relationships in the same way? Do other women? I put that question on the side burner.
“Yes . . .”
He sits back and folds his arms. “Could you run through how you arrived at this conclusion again?”
I make sure to detail this point by point. I don’t even have to look at my notes. I had to prove this to myself first, and I’m the most skeptical person I know. “Travel records show he was in the area at the time the audio recording was made.”
“What records?”
“I have access to the SABRE database from that period.”
“You have access?” He sounds suspicious, and rightfully so.
“An informant has access.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Is this person an official informant?”
“No.”
“How do you know this database is even real?” replies Breyer.
“I don’t, but I trust the man who provided me with the information. He was the one that helped find the Alsops’ foster child, Marty Rodriguez.”
“And how did you come to find this person?”
Oh boy. I didn’t want to go there. At least Breyer knows about Damian. I don’t have to explain that again. Once was embarrassing enough. “The individual known as Damian Knight contacted me.”
Breyer looks straight at me. “You’ve been in contact with Mr. Knight?”
“Yes. He still contacts me. I’ve logged every call. You can check with the unit tasked with tracking him down.”
Ailes has taught me to do things so by the book that it’s too heavy for them to throw it at me.
Breyer pauses for a moment to process all the information. “So, Blackwood, let me understand this. A man we believe may be a felon, with a demonstrated pattern of psychotic behavior, puts you in touch with another man, whom you refuse to name and has dubious access to restricted information, and that man says the pope may be guilty of manslaughter?”
“No. I drew my own conclusions.”
“Put yourself on my side of the desk. How does this sound?”
“Ridiculous. Utterly absurd. But we have the audiotape.”
“Yes. I had the lab run a comparison first thing this morning.”
“And?”
“It shows a sixty-three percent match to the pope’s vocal pattern.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No. If you compare the voice sample to our linguistics database, it matches over twelve thousand recorded voices. It could just as well be a false positive.”
“We can check, right? He’s older now.”
“We can make inquiries into the pope’s whereabouts in 1985, but that’s going to raise some questions. The Vatican has no reason to tell us. Especially if our reasons for inquiring are because we think the pope is guilty of manslaughter.”
“Wait? We’re not going to do anything?” My voice rises a little too much.
“I can make an inquiry through diplomatic channels. That will take time and sensitivity. The more urgency we put on the question, the more suspicious they’ll be.”
“We may not have time . . .”
“Why do you say that?”
“Everyone else on the tape is dead.”
“Nobody else on that tape gets driven around in a bulletproof popemobile. I think his eminence is safe.”
He’s not getting it. I was up all night doing my homework. “Pope John Paul II got shot by a rumored KGB operative, stabbed by an angry priest, and then almost blown up in the Philippines by Al-Qaeda. It’s the most dangerous head-of-state position there is. Safe is not a word I’d use.”
“I get that. But assuming for the moment he is on the tape, what can we do? You still haven’t given me a suspect.”
“X-20. There’s a connection. Every step of the way, they’re involved.”
“Who? Why them?” He holds the fiasco in Tixato against me. I know he’s not a stupid man, but that wasn’t my fault!
“I don’t know. Someone close to the boy.”
“The boy was an orphan. We pulled his records. No known father, his mother died shortly after he was born. There was no family or close friends. If there had been, he probably wouldn’t have ended up in the foster-care system.”
“What about the tape? That’s evidence of a crime.”
He waves his hands in the air. “It could be coincidental. Or, who’s to say this didn’t start with the sheriff?”
“What do you mean?”
“He was there at the exorcism. He heard the demon’s name there and it stayed with him until he went insane.”
“He was drugged. We have the evidence.”
“Whether it was his idea or Deland’s, they’re both dead.”
“Maybe he’s a victim? What if the sheriff wasn’t in control of himself? Toxicology research says that hallucinogen could provoke extremely violent reactions. It wasn’t his fault.”
“At this point, we’re not going to prosecute him posthumously.”
“You know there’s more here!” I insist, and immediately regret pushing my point so forcefully. Breyer has cut me some slack so far.
He shoves a finger at me. “Don’t tell me what I know and don’t know! You come in here with evidence but you can’t tell me where, or who it came from. You imply a connection to one of the most powerful people in the world. Then you tell me he’s going to be assassinated? Let alone what happened in Mexico.
“You’ve done good work. Although I think Ailes gives you too much leeway. You have solid intuitions some of the time. But at a certain point you have to realize when you’re overreaching. We all want that career-making case. You had yours with the Warlock. It’s time to consider the fact that the rest of your time here is going to be filled with the same monotonous work we all have to deal with.”
“You think I’m making this up?” I try to keep my voic
e level. The words come out haltingly as I contain my anger.
“I didn’t say that. I think you see a very, very tenuous connection and you’re letting the enormity of it get away from you.”
I take a moment to try to calm down. “So now what?”
“I’m not going to ignore this. I’ll forward the information on to our European liaisons.”
“It’ll get buried.”
“What else can I tell them? You don’t know who is behind this. What are they supposed to do? The FBI can’t just call over there and say they think maybe somebody wants to harm the pope. They get those calls every day. We’re the FBI. We need evidence. In absence of that, we need a suspect. You have neither.”
“I’ve said it already, X-20. One of the most powerful cartels in the world. They’re behind this.”
“That’s just a name. Who is behind them? Why would they care about the pope?”
“I don’t know.” I know I should have had more before I sat down here. But I couldn’t just sit on this!
“Exactly. You’ve done a dutiful job. I’ll make sure you get the credit you deserve for the Hawkton case.”
I shake my head. Why can’t people understand? “I don’t want credit. I just want justice.”
“For who? The boy is dead. The pope is unreachable. You just want to be proven right.”
“That’s not fair. There might be more victims . . .”
He doesn’t waste time putting me in my place. “The case is closed as far as you’re concerned. Furthermore, if I catch you leaking any of this to the press, your career here is over.”
On that threat, he ends our meeting by gesturing to the door.
I MANAGE TO make it to the bathroom before letting my face show my rage. It takes ten minutes of sitting in a stall with my eyes closed before I can go back into the hallway. I need to talk to someone who understands.
I call Ailes’s office number. Gerald answers instead.
“Where’s Ailes?” I ask.
“He’s at the hospital.” His voice is somber.
“What? Is he okay?” I feel like I just got a blow to the stomach. The last leg under my chair just got kicked away.
