Crime Spells Part 18

Her expression was unreadable, though I saw her pulse bounding in her neck. She opened her mouth to reply, but Rollins's pager chirped. "Computer guy," he said, heading for the exit. "I'll let him know we're on our way."

I waited until Rollins had gone and then looked back at Wylde. Just came out with it. "You're Preston Wylde's daughter."

"It is an uncommon last name. My father's always tried to maintain a distance between his professional life and home, but..." She shook her head. "Things have a way of coming to roost."

An odd statement. I let it hang.

She said, "Is the fact that my father works for the FBI a problem?"

"No. But I can't imagine it's easy being the daughter of a famous profiler, especially given the men your father tracks down."

"Demon hunter is what the press prefers."

"I don't get anything near that s.e.xy when the press talks about me."

"Maybe you need to get s.e.xier then." She checked her watch. "I have to go. Was there anything else?"

"Yes. What was that, Doctor? With d.i.c.kert? And don't tell me nothing. I know what I saw, d.a.m.n it."

Her face was still as smooth gla.s.s. "What do you believe happened, Detective? What do you think you saw?"

Not what, who . And I believe you stopped him somehow. I believe you command things the rest of us only have nightmares about.

And does it have anything to do with what's happening to me ?

When I still said nothing, only then did her expression shift: a tiny blur, as if she were a projection going briefly out of focus, the pixels scattering, then coalescing around the edges until she was sharp edged, like something scissored out of black paper and superimposed upon a perfectly white background. She was almost too real.

"I've got work." She turned to leave.

For no reason I could think of, I said, "Dr. Wylde, how is the old man? Mr. Choun?"

Her back stiffened just the tiniest bit, and when she turned her face was midway to rearranging itself into something close to neutrality. But I saw the emotions chase through-and there was grief, most of all.

"He's about to give up the ghost," she said.

"That's an odd way of putting it, Doctor."

"I guess it depends on your point of view. One thing, Detective, about my father? What they call him?"

This was not what I expected. "Yes?"

"Sometimes, a name isn't all about s.e.x. Sometimes, Detective, the truth is right under your nose."

V.

"I've been able to clean up the image pretty good," said the computer guy. "Best I can tell, this is old stock film transferred to three-quarter inch and then to disk. A lot of degradation in the transfer. Black and white, silent. Almost looks like newsreel footage, you know what I'm saying?"

Black and white? I could've sworn I saw colors: the dirty brown of that bedspread, that girl's black hair. The blood where she'd bitten her tongue. That green and white thing on the bed. "Let's see it."

The thing was no easier to watch the second time around. But the computer guy had been right: black and white.

Hunh. "Can you tell us anything about where and when?"

"Yup." The computer guy tapped keys. "I've isolated a couple items in the room, did freeze-frame, blew 'em up."

What he brought up were two stills of objects on the bed: one, a triangle protruding into the frame from the right, and the packet alongside the pillow, only black and white now instead of green and white. He zoomed in on the latter with a couple of mouse clicks.

I stared for a few seconds. "Chiclets?"

"Chewing gum?" said Rollins.

"But a very special pack of chewing gum. It's only two pieces, and what store sells that? Then this other thing." He did the zoom thing again, and I now could see that the triangle was the bottom third of a box.

I said, "Does that say what I think it does?"

"It does indeed."

First line: Marl Second line: 4 CLa.s.s A CIGARE "Who sells cigarettes with only four smokes a pack?" Rollins asked.

I thought I knew.

The computer guy looked smug. "Before I get to that, there's one more thing. This is from the guy. That splotch there?"

"Yeah, I thought that was a mole," I said.

"Not a mole. Let me just enlarge it here... clean it up... there."

My whole insides went still.

Not a mole. A tattoo. One I recognized.

An ace of spades with a Jolly Roger in the center.

The computer guy said, "The gum and the cigarettes were standard C rations for American soldiers. That tattoo is a copy of a death card, what PsyOps developed during Vietnam and which some soldiers used to leave on the bodies of dead Viet Cong. Here." More mouse clicks, and this time a webpage came up with a screen, the kind on YouTube. "This is actual footage of something called Operation Baker. Happened in 1967."

About ten minutes long, the film was silent and consisted mainly of soldiers on patrol, burning a village. Then, at the end, footage of American soldiers putting cards in the mouths of dead Vietnamese.

"Ace of spades," Rollins said. "Looks like a regular card from a Bicycle pack."

The computer guy nodded. "Some lieutenant got wind that the ace of spades was some kind of bad luck symbol to the Vietnamese or something. He was wrong, but he contacted Bicycle, and they sent over thousands of packs. Said Secret Weapon right on the pack. Not all units used the same cards, though, and some designs were more popular than others."

"You know what company that was?" I asked. "In the film?"

"Yeah. Third Brigade. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division."

"d.i.c.kert," said Rollins.

"And MacAndrews." Opening my phone, pressing speed dial.

When I got Kay on the line, I said, "MacAndrews... did he have any identifying marks?"

He did.

Thirty minutes later, Rollins was still tapping keys and frowning. "Can't you go any faster?" I asked.

"Learn to use the d.a.m.n computer," Rollins said, though he didn't sound mad. It was a partner schtick. Just as Adam and I'd had ours. "Okay, it says here that Jolie has several tattoos."

"Go to Google Images. I want to see them."

"You want to drive?"

"I like watching you earn your pay." Pictures winked onto the screen. Obscure tribal signs, a huge tiger on her back, several dragons, a large cross. "The woman's a walking billboard... There, on her left shoulder blade. What is that?"

"Supposedly, a magical tattoo," Rollins said, and read. "Says here it's written in Khmer and is supposed to protect her and her loved ones from bad luck, evil, stuff like that. It's a... yantra tattoo."

Bingo. "That's it, that's what she's got."

"Who?"

"Tell me about yantra tattoos."

"Jesus, you're demanding. Hold on, hold on..." A lot of hits on Google. Silence as we read.

Then Rollins said, "This is some funky s.h.i.t."

Here was how it worked.

A yantra tattoo had to both adhere to a certain Sanskrit pattern-the yantra-and be coupled with precise muons, chants dating back to the Vedic religion, the historical predecessor of Hinduism, which the monk who applied the tattoo was to recite.

A monk. That old man, Chuon. And those smudges on his forearms and neck: They'd been tattoos.

The actual verses tattooed in special ink were in Pali, the religious language of the earliest Buddhist school, Thervada, or "The Way of the Elders."

If you believed these things actually worked, there were patterns that might make a warrior stronger, give someone good luck, allow someone to become invisible. Give you superstrength. If you believed in magic.

I thought Sarah Wylde might.

And me? Well.

I had met an angel a year ago. Maybe I was due a visit from the other side.

And I found out one more thing, courtesy of one of Wylde's papers.

In Cambodia, sleep paralysis has a very specific name: khmaoch sangkat.

Translation: The ghost knocks you down.

Because the people who suffer from this also report seeing demons that hold them down. Another paper suggested that the symptoms were really PTSD; one woman suffered an episode whenever she remembered how soldiers razed her village and killed everyone.

I don't think it was either-or. Could be both. Could be, maybe, that the old monk had been carrying the girl on the DVD. And maybe now, Sarah Wylde was picking up the slack.

Like she said: Right under my nose.

VI.

Wylde wasn't at GW.

"This is nuts." Rollins was driving fast, no flasher, the light fading and the day slipping away. Flakes beginning to fly. "We're driving a million miles an hour to intercept someone you're not even sure will be there so we can deal with a murder that's over forty years old in a country we're not by two guys-"

"Maybe just one. Maybe two of them, or even more. And this isn't about just the past. Remember what Lily said: The girl in her head had a red dress. There was the TV news saying snow in Washington."

"So you're saying-"

"We know Mackie was a pimp, and we know that d.i.c.kert's got rental properties in Arlington, right? So maybe he's renting to himself. Maybe what he's got are a whole bunch of little girls just like Lily, only they're Asian."

"Because that's where they'd have started, when they were in Vietnam. I can't believe I'm even thinking this. Jason, you're taking the word of a kid who killed a guy and said the devil made her do it. Man, are you hearing yourself? How are we going to explain this? And it still won't help Lily. She killed a guy. It's out of our hands."

But this was the right thing to do, I knew it. As soon as the idea set in my mind, the charm Dietterich had given me had begun to warm, heating the skin of my chest as soon as I slipped the cord around my neck.

Why was I wearing it? Beats me. Same reason I didn't tell Rollins what I thought about Wylde.

We were racing down Route 50 now, the strip malls blurring, and then the traffic starting to pick up. Cars started creeping. At the first flake, everyone in Washington panics and crashes into each other out of sympathy.

Screw this. I stretched, reached into the glove compartment, reeled out the flasher and slapped it onto the hood. "No choice, just don't use the siren. Go, go!"

It was like the Red Sea parting, cars scuttling right then left like headless chickens. Rollins swore, jinked the car. I hung onto the safety strap on my side as Rollins took a hard right, accelerating through the turn. "You know, it'd be real nice if you get us there in one piece."

Rollins was grim. "I'll get us there. Just hope it's the right there."

d.i.c.kert's rentals were in Arlington, but his house was in Springfield, an older section of identical 1950s ranch houses near I-495. It was dark by the time we made it. Snow silting down. A meager puddle of silver light from a street lamp illuminated the front drive, but I knew it was d.i.c.kert's place as soon as I laid eyes on a Harley in the driveway.

There were no lights. The house felt empty. I didn't see a car-I had no idea what Wylde drove-but I did notice that the house backed on dense woods. Lake Accotink Park. "They're not in there. But I think." I pointed at the woods.

"How do you know that?"

"Just do." I popped the car door.

"d.a.m.n it, Jason, wait up!" Rollins pushed out of the car as I started around the back of the house. He grabbed my arm. "You have no idea where you're going. Let me call for some backup. Man, we're not even on our own turf. We're going to end up getting our a.s.ses fried."

"You're right. So you should stay here." I pulled free before he could protest and started for the woods. "Call for backup, Justin. Cover your a.s.s. Better yet, go to those rental houses and see what you turn up."

"I don't have probable cause."

"Find a busted window."

He stood there a second, then hissed after me: "Jason, you don't even have a f.u.c.king flashlight!"

"I know," I said, and then I plunged into the woods.