by Andrew Mayne
“He’s looking for the devil,” Robert offers.
Satisfied, Moss Man reaches out with the bottle and touches it to my lips, inviting me to drink.
The liquid tastes like grain alcohol and vinegar. My cheeks flush, and I feel a migraine made up of ice crystals jabbing into my brain. A moment later I feel a little bit woozy as my inner ear decides to do a backflip.
I have no idea what’s in Snake Bite, but its effect is neurological as well as alcoholic.
“You’re in luck,” says Robert. “Snake Bite is very hard to find.”
Yeah, I definitely get the impression you can’t buy it at Costco.
Moss Man pushes me to sit down and then says something to Robert.
“Do you have the item that belongs to the man you want to hex?”
“Yes.”
I reach into my pocket, but Moss Man almost slaps at my hand.
“Wait,” says Robert. “He needs to build a fire first.”
Moss Man gets up and reaches into the brush around the white stones and grabs various sticks and logs, a pretty impressive feat for a blind guy.
He heaps them into a pile in front of me, some of them hitting my crossed legs.
When he’s satisfied that he has enough kindling, Moss Man sits across from me and uses a book of matches to set the pile ablaze.
It’s not a large fire, more like the kind you make to boil a kettle of coffee.
Moss Man says something to Robert again.
“Do you have the Bible?”
“Yes.” I point to the paper bag by the log. “Do I pay him now?”
“The money is not for him,” Robert replies as he picks up the bag and hands it to me.
Moss Man lays his hands out flat. I take the Bible out of the bag and lay it on his palms. He holds it over the fire and starts to rip its spine. Bills fall into the flames, followed by the pages of the Bible.
It may have been the moonlight, or my cynicism, but at least one of the bills I watched catch on fire looked like a Xerox copy. Either way, the real trick is how Robert switched them on me.
Moss Man stirs the flames with a stick until it’s a healthy blaze. He holds out his hand again.
“Hand him the item from your enemy,” says Robert.
I give Moss Man the pen. His fingers feel the shape of the object before he snaps it in two and drops it in.
What would he have done if I’d brought him a solid piece of metal like a house key?
The smell of burning plastic reaches my nose, and Moss Man takes another swig from the Snake Bite. He sprays it into the flames, creating a fireball that singes my face. He does this six more times.
The fire burns hotter, then finally reaches its peak. There’s only a little Snake Bite left.
After the last ember is gone, Moss Man grabs a pinch of the ash and drops it into the bottle. He gives it a shake, then stares at it in the moonlight.
Uncapping the bottle, he pushes it toward me, instructing me to drink it.
“All of it,” says Robert.
There’s at least three shots in there.
Against my better judgment, I take it all down in one gulp. This time my scalp burns and my throat feels like it was ripped out by a yeti.
My head suddenly becomes too heavy for my neck, and I go sideways. The ground feels really nice, and I decide to stay there for a little while. Moss Man gets up, and I watch as his bare feet retreat back into the woods from which he came as the fog and the trees envelop him.
I lie there awhile, trying to process why I came and what I hoped to get out of it. At some point, Robert comes over and helps me to my feet, slinging my arm over his shoulder.
“Let’s walk it off,” he tells me as we head back down the path we came.
“That wasn’t so evil,” I tell him as I try to keep my feet from dragging.
“Wait until the hangover,” he replies.
“Are there other kinds of magic?” I ask between stumbles.
“What do you mean?”
“Darker. Even more powerful.”
Robert carries me in silence for a while. “I know of another man. A man Moss Man and Ms. Violet will have nothing to do with.”
“And you?”
He shakes his head. “No, this I won’t do.”
“What if I pay? A lot.”
There’s a long silence as he thinks this over. “No. This man is an evil man. While Moss Man knows how to trick demons and get them to do him favors, this other man, he is the devil himself.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
DUE PROCESS
I’m awoken by the sound of my phone buzzing on the nightstand. Even after I answer it, my head is still vibrating from the lingering effect of Snake Bite, ash, and my own blood.
“Cray,” I say, stifling a yawn.
“This call didn’t come from me,” says a voice on the other end.
I check the display. It’s a 323 number I don’t recognize. “Well, you’re in luck, because I have no idea who you are,” I reply before moving to hit the “End Call” button.
“It’s Sanjay.”
“Oh, great to hear from you. What happened? Did Chen get you fired?”
“Not yet. It hasn’t hit the news, but we found a suspect.”
“The guy in Brazil? The hit man?”
“Yeah … I won’t ask how you knew that. Anyway, we found some prints that matched him in the house. Plus, the bicycle that belonged to Christopher Bostrom. We got a print from under the seat.”
“That’s great,” I say again.
“I’m not finished. The suspect, Ordavo Sims, was murdered last night in his jail cell in Rio before we could have him extradited.”
“I wish I could say I was sorry.”
“Well, here’s the thing: he was actually wanted as a material witness, because most of the prints in the house aren’t his. He may have been an accomplice.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Yeah, but Chen and company are kind of eager to declare this case closed. Ordavo was implicated in some gang-related killings. There are even witnesses that have him using a knife to kill someone.”
“But he was in jail when Latroy went missing,” I point out.
“For Chen, that doesn’t matter. All they care about are the bodies at the Wimbledon house. If they have someone to pin that on, then the matter is finished.”
“But not for you,” I reply.
“Professionally it is. I’m being told to wrap up my work on the case since there’s not going to be a trial. Chen is going to hold a press conference tomorrow and announce the hunt is over.”
I can tell this is bothering Sanjay. “So why are you calling me?”
“Because it’s bullshit. There’s things we found … and Chen would shoot me if she found out I leaked this …”
“Cannibalism?”
A moment of shocked silence. “Yes. We’ve found some small indentations. Also, some of the better-preserved corpses are missing parts. Penises, eyes, hearts, and other organs. We think he ate them.”
“Or bottled them,” I suggest, recalling what Artice said he saw in a follow-up report.
“What?” asks Sanjay.
“This guy believes in magic. For him, those body parts have supernatural properties. Is she going to announce any of that?”
“No. We’ve been told to not pursue the cannibal angle. They have a strong story if it’s just a hit man who liked to molest and murder little boys in his spare time. They’re not saying how he afforded the house. I guess he got some really good rent control? It’s all bullshit. Anyway, I’m going to send you everything.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” I reply—partially afraid it might be a trick.
“And I can’t live with myself if I don’t. There’s nothing I haven’t already told you except some more forensics about what they dug up in the backyard.”
“Bodies?”
“Yeah, and some trash. You can take a look. Anyway, I’m sending you a link to a Dropbo
x account. If Chen asks where you got it, lie.”
“No worries. I won’t rat you out.”
“Uh … sorry about what happened,” he says, acknowledging my arrest. “I didn’t say anything to her. She pulled my call logs and saw that I was talking to you when I accessed the DNA profiles.”
“It’s okay. I wasn’t trying to call you a rat. Your situation is different than mine.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks. Where are you, by the way?”
I have to look at the hotel room to remind myself that I’m not home. “Georgia.”
“Decided to get away from this bullshit? I don’t blame you.”
“Not quite,” I reply.
“Are you still on this?”
“Yep.”
“And you think he’s in Georgia?” Sanjay asks.
“I guess Chen didn’t share my messages to her about some Atlanta-area kidnappings.” This does not surprise me.
“No. All she cares about is the Wimbledon house. Have you contacted the Atlanta FBI office? They’d have jurisdiction now.”
“Not yet. All I have is a hunch and a hangover.”
“You’re an odd man. Well, if there’s anything else I can do, and I don’t know what that is, just let me know.”
“Thanks. And Sanjay …”
“Yeah?”
“You’re doing the right thing. You know it because the easy thing is to not care and keep your life uncomplicated.”
We hang up, and I get a glass of water to try to clear my system.
After I feel reasonably sentient, I climb back into my bed with my laptop and pull up Sanjay’s folder.
There are hundreds of pages of forensic data I want to go over later about the bodies. But right now I’m mainly curious about what else they found in the backyard.
I find a document that reads like an archaeological dig, describing what they found in every stratum of soil.
Aside from the bodies, there were ash pits containing charred paper and broken bottles.
There’s no bloody knife or weapons, only the kind of garbage you’d find in a lot of backyards.
I’m about to close my laptop and try to get some more sleep when I decide to click on the report again. And I get rewarded: something important was right in front of me.
When I turn to the page describing the debris, there’s an image of a shard from a broken bottle. I recognize the shape immediately. It’s why my head is still splitting.
The Toy Man was also a fan of Snake Bite. Lots of it. The report makes it seem like every kill was also accompanied by a bottle of the vile stuff.
This doesn’t prove a connection to Moss Man or Robert, any more than The Catcher in the Rye links serial killers. It does mean that my instincts were right.
I put my jeans on to go back to the botanica. When I reach into my pockets, I notice something odd: my wallet has been moved.
When I check the contents, the cash is still there, but my driver’s license is in the wrong spot.
It seems Robert was not only adept at switching real money for counterfeit in a Bible, but also an accomplished pickpocket.
He knows who I am. Now the question is, who else has he told?
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
JACKLIGHTING
In 1889, George Shiras, an attorney from Pennsylvania, developed a new technique that would go on to change the biological sciences and the way we view wildlife to this day.
Shiras, who had grown up near the Ojibwa First Nation people, learned a particular style of nighttime hunting called jacklighting, in which one puts a fire in a pan at one end of a canoe while the hunter sits in the back in the shadows with a rifle.
When animals on the shore saw the light, they’d freeze. The hunter would then aim his rifle between the two glowing dots of their eyes and kill them from afar.
Shiras’s application of the technique was far more humane. Instead of using a pan of burning coals, he used a bright kerosene lamp. And instead of a rifle, he used a camera.
When Shiras started setting his cameras on shore and using trip wires to ignite magnesium-powder flashes, he created an entirely new kind of remote photography in which the photographer didn’t even have to be there.
His photographs, published in National Geographic in the early 1900s, showed a stunning view of wildlife rarely seen before. From raccoons on riverbanks to blurs of grizzly bears leaping past the lens, Shiras showed us what animals did when no human was around.
This method of photography continues to be used to this day. Recently it’s been used to discover clouded leopards in Borneo and new species of deer in Vietnam.
For scientists, this tool allows you to be in many places at once. Rather than staking out one water hole or location and hoping to find your subject, you can place multiple cameras and see which ones hit pay dirt.
I have no idea where the Toy Man is, where he’s going, or what he plans to do next. Like a photographer seeking some elusive animal, I have to set as many camera traps as possible to try to capture my prey on film—technically SD cards.
My hunch is that his rituals involve Snake Bite, the Sriracha sauce of occult magic in this area.
Research into the company revealed that Snake Bite is manufactured by a Vietnamese distillery and sold around the world. The US distributor is in Los Angeles.
A call to them revealed that a truckload was leaving a Tennessee warehouse and was on its way to Atlanta. They kindly gave me the name of the four locations that sell Snake Bite.
Because it’s not listed as an alcoholic beverage, but instead as a “homeopathic topical salve,” they’ve been able to avoid running afoul of local liquor laws. To their point, I would readily testify that no human being should consider this a beverage.
Now that Robert—along with potentially anyone else in his small community of occult practitioners—knows who I am, visiting the other three botanicas and asking the shopkeepers to tell me if a tall black man who looks like he might be a child killer comes to purchase some Snake Bite is probably not a practical idea.
I don’t want the Toy Man even aware that I think there’s a connection between him and what I’ve learned so far. Doing so might cause him to change his behavior.
I’ve got five small cameras the size of key-chain fobs sitting on my hotel room table. Purchased online and delivered next day, each one takes a photo any time it detects motion. Otherwise, it shoots a picture once per minute.
My plan is to place one near the entrance of each of the botanicas and swap them out every twenty-four hours as their SD-card memories fill.
The risk, besides the Toy Man never showing up, is getting caught in the act of placing or switching them out. My plan is do this while they’re closed.
But getting a photo of the Toy Man is only the start. Of the hundreds of people I expect to capture in photographs, I have no way to tell who is my quarry. And once he leaves the store, without subpoena powers, I have no way to compel the store owner to give me any information about a suspect, assuming they even know anything.
What I need is a way to track them down.
Unlike Shiras’s animals, which leave paw prints in the mud and dirt, creating a trail that can be followed, the clientele of the botanicas won’t make it that easy.
What I need is a way to tell if someone who has been there to purchase Snake Bite has been in another location the Toy Man has visited—hopefully allowing me to track him back to where he lives.
Ideally, this would be some other vector I can locate before the new moon. Worst-case scenario—and this is the absolute worst case—if the Toy Man chooses another victim and we’re able to find the body, I need a way to tie him to one of the botanicas.
How do you track someone you’ve never come in contact with?
My answer is somewhat sinister and potentially illegal, depending on how one wants to interpret certain federal laws.
It’s also somewhat amusing to me that I’m doing this within throwing distance of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
When I placed my order yesterday for the surveillance fobs, I also placed an order for another item—four, to be precise.
Instead of Amazon, these items come from a laboratory in North Carolina. They sell medical supplies to the defense industry—at least that’s their cover story. What they actually provide are custom-designed bacteria used for very specific purposes.
The Toy Man’s advantages over me are numerous. I’m not a law-enforcement investigator, a forensic pathologist, or even skillful enough to spot when someone is lying to my face. I am, however, a rather unorthodox scientist who has a particular set of tools at my disposal. One of them is the ability to engage in biological warfare.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THREAT ASSESSMENT
When you sit around a hotel bar with a bunch of advanced-warfare strategists, the kind of men and women who spend half their time on campuses and the rest in closed-door sessions at the Pentagon, and ask them what scares them the most, it’s not a suitcase nuclear bomb—more people will die on our highways this year than one briefcase-size nuke would likely kill in a densely packed city—it’s the threat of some biologist working for a rogue power or a poorly monitored superpower making something in a petri dish that could wipe out a high percentage of humanity.
This isn’t a new threat. As far back as the 1940s, the US government was pouring millions of dollars into understanding the threat of biological warfare, even going as far as spreading our own bacterial agents in the wild to see how they spread.
In 1950 a naval ship in San Francisco Bay sprayed Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens, two theoretically benign bacteria, into the morning mist to see how they spread.
The results, not to mention the aftereffects when a number of people became ill from what may have been these presumed benign strains, were frightening. In addition, it reinforced the idea that a foreign power could launch an even more lethal agent at the United States. For that reason, secret biological-warfare testing continued, including spreading presumably harmless bacteria in subways and other public spaces to see how quickly they could be dispersed.
Sixty years after that first test, we have a billion-dollar germ warfare program designed to mitigate that threat, as well as a trillion-dollar biotechnology industry that keeps coming up with new ways to scare us.