Page 28 of Mastermind
“I can’t imagine trying to diagnose a kid that knew my subject better than I did,” she replies with a smile.
“It wasn’t quite like that. But yes. I told him that I had feelings, but I felt like they were something I visualized existing two feet to the side of me. I could tell what they were experiencing, but I could also decide to ignore them if I wanted.”
“Jesus, Theo. It’s no wonder our behavioral-science guys have written books about you.” She picks up the stack of folders. “Anyway, one of the cadets at the FBI academy has been keeping track of weird stuff for me, filtering out the usual noise.” She flips through the pages and hands me a photo. “Cattle mutilation. The bite marks are big and don’t match coyotes or wolves.”
I glance at the photo. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked to explain cattle mutilations.
She’s right, though—the mouth is much wider than a coyote’s, yet not a wolf’s. I hand her the photo back. “Probably a mastiff/coyote hybrid. The larger jaw and broken bones are the indicator.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, I knew once you said ‘bite’ that it was an animal. The fact that it was weird means that it was an animal they hadn’t seen before. Because it was clearly canine, it means there’s either an entirely new species out there or some domesticated dog humans hooked up with a coyote and morphed into a pseudospecies.”
“Okay. How about strange light formations over Orem, Utah? There’s been YouTube videos of them.”
“There’s a secret testing ground for unmanned aerial vehicles twenty miles from there. Think there might be a connection?”
“Wait, how did you know that?”
“I was looking at internet routing patterns and started noticing regions with unusually high traffic. That area was one that came up. There’s also an FCC blackout zone nearby.” I don’t point out that she asked me how I knew that and not how I could prove it. She’s testing me with things she already knows.
“This is a hobby of yours? Looking at internet traffic patterns?”
“I like patterns. What can I say?”
She digs deeper into the folder pile. “How about this? There have been cases of people who have experienced unusual disease remissions who also claim to have had weird visions of angels in their hospitals or their homes.”
“Interesting. Does that sound like Heywood to you? Angels? Miracles?”
“He’s not exactly the healing type. If they spontaneously combusted or were found to have died years before, that’d be more his style.”
“You’d know better than I. But sometimes patterns aren’t what we think when we’re up close. Joe Vik was loved locally. Even after he went on his rampage, murdering his family and several police officers, he still had defenders. There were many aspects to Joe.”
In truth, there are things about him I still don’t know . . . unproven suspicions. Part of me wants to go back. Another part of me is afraid.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She sifts through the folders. “I’ve got a weird zombie thing, but it’s in Eastern Europe . . . so. And then there’s this one, which made my Spidey sense tingle.”
“You have Spidey sense?”
“I’m sorry, can only boys have it?”
“Uh, no. Just Marvel characters.”
Jessica’s got a funny edge to her. She’s the girl who liked nerdy stuff but someone told her she was too pretty for that kind of thing.
“What is it?”
“In the last two years, the heads of five different cults around the world have gone missing. There was a doomsday group in Belgium. A ‘retreat’ in Australia. Another in Mexico. And two in the US. One outside Anaheim, another in Michigan.”
“When you say ‘missing,’ what do you mean?”
“One day they’re running things, the next, someone else is calling the shots,” she replies.
“Someone appointed from within?”
“It appears so.”
“What was that cult out in the desert . . . the one that . . .” I stop talking when I realize who I’m talking to. Jessica was the one who found the vault filled with bodies.
