The Lincoln Bedroom was more than a very expensive overnight hotel for the president’s wealthiest donors. It was more than the scene of Zach’s humiliation with Candace and the Secret Service.
If you believed the stories, it was haunted.
President Lincoln had participated in séances while in the White House. He dreamed of his own assassination the day it happened. And apparently, his spirit lingered in the White House. When British prime minister Winston Churchill was a guest in the room, he allegedly spoke to the ghost while planning the strategy that won World War II. Eleanor Roosevelt felt Lincoln’s presence while using the room as a study. President Gerald Ford’s daughter said she would never stay in the room again after seeing the ghost. Countless other staffers had seen the spirit or heard him walking over the floor of the empty room.
Sometimes it was friendly. Other times it filled the witnesses with cold, stark terror.
Cade didn’t know what it was. He was all too aware that ghosts existed. He’d fought them. But they were barely nuisances. As he’d told Zach, it took enormous effort to cross over from the Other Side and very few entities could manage it for long. Often the things there would take the shapes and faces of the dead in order to fool the living. They were malevolent and willing to pull any trick to ruin human lives.
So Cade did not entirely trust the thing he knew was inside this room.
But the blood of Lincoln still clung to him through the oath. The fetish that bound him to serve the presidents was wrapped around the bullet pried from Lincoln’s skull. Their mingled blood bound Cade to the office and to the men who served it. At times, he could feel the spirit of Lincoln like a great singing note in his veins.
When he had no other options, he came to the bedroom and asked for help. He hated it. He was all too aware that he could be talking to things that only wanted him to fail in his duty. But there were times where the answers he’d received were unmistakably true.
Cade opened the door and walked inside.
As usual, the room felt occupied to him even though no one was there.
He waited. Sometimes that was enough.
Nothing.
“I need your help,” he said softly.
There might have been a stirring in the room. It wasn’t the heating system. From the corner of Cade’s eye, he could see the thermostat. He couldn’t feel it, but the temperature had dropped ten degrees since he’d entered.
“I need to know where it is.”
Now the thermostat read forty-eight degrees. But Cade didn’t hear any response.
“It’s killing people. It wants to kill one of your successors. And I”—Cade almost choked on this part—“I don’t know where to look.”
Now the room had dropped to thirty-eight degrees. But still no words.
“I need a name. A place. Anything,” Cade said. “Give me something I can bite. You can’t let this thing keep killing.”
He heard a whisper. It was barely audible even to his ears. Hoarse and strained, it sounded like it was a struggle to form words.
Frost spread crystal fingers over the mirror. The thermostat was stuck at zero.
“My…”
My? Or why? Cade couldn’t tell.
“Why?” Cade asked. “Why what?”
“Not.”
“‘Why not’?” Cade snapped, suddenly enraged. “Why not?”
He felt the entity reach out tentatively and touch him—not physically, but inside him, in whatever was left of his soul. It recoiled immediately in horror. It was not fooled by sight as humans were. It could sense the darkness inside Cade, the foul truth of what he was. It knew he had fed on human blood. It knew he had failed the most basic test of morality once again.
The door behind Cade slammed shut as if pushed by a strong wind. The room’s temperature soared back to normal.
Cade scowled and exited.
This was useless. He learned nothing he didn’t already know: the room shook him to his core when almost nothing else could. The thought that the Other Side had a presence in the White House and used it to manipulate him was bad enough. But it was worse to imagine that Lincoln’s soul was really trapped there, unable to go to its reward, and it shuddered with repugnance every time it was forced to commune with something as unholy as Cade.
CADE GOT INTO THE waiting car. Zach looked up from his screen.
“Take us back to the jet,” Cade said.
“What happened to getting the answers?” Zach asked.
“I was wrong. I’ve left the president unguarded too long. This was a waste of time.”
“Wow, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the coffin.”
“Zach. Unless you have some new information—”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You told me to give you something you could bite. Well, I think I’ve got something.”
Zach tapped his fingers against his pad. “Take a look,” he said.
He’d been using his clearance to examine the FBI’s National Crime Information Center reports. Ever since the agency had started VICAP, the program made famous for profiling serial killers, it had also collected information on the specific methods used in murders all over the country. True, much of the information was patchwork and depended on the diligence of overworked local cops filling out forms. But certain methods tended to draw attention to themselves, flashing like red lights across the map. They were disturbing or weird enough that they made their way into the database.
He looked for killings that appeared to match the Boogeyman’s. Ones that involved hatchets, axes and dismemberment. Ones that involved couples caught in the act of sex. Ones that had weird symbols painted all over them.
Most of them were false leads. Others they already knew about. Some were just mistakenly entered into the database: Zach had no idea why he kept finding reports of cattle mutilations, but they kept coming up.
Still, there was one that seemed to jump out at him: a homeless kid killed near Minot, North Dakota. He was found off the highway, not too far from Minot Air Force Base. The base’s name rang bells. He ran another search and it came back to him immediately. The Son of Sam case: David Berkowitz, the shooter, had claimed there was a nationwide network that was responsible for other ritual slayings. One of the people he named was an airman at the base who happened to be the son of one of his neighbors. The airman turned up dead, his brains splattered all over the wall of his apartment. But he had links to another ritual killing at Stanford.
What drew Zach’s eye was a single photo, scanned into the database along with the crime report. The body had been badly carved up, but the detective assigned to the case had noted the number 666 scratched onto the kid’s hand.
The same number had been scratched into the hand of the airman before he supposedly put a shotgun in his own mouth.
Cade froze. It was like a hunting dog going on point. “Minot?”
“Yeah,” Zach said, puzzled. “Minot.”
“My. Not.” Cade said it again.
“Right. An Air Force base. North Dakota.”
“Change of plans,” he said. “Call the pilot. Tell him that’s where we’re going.”
Suddenly, Cade was eager to get on the trail again. Zach had never seen mood swings like this before. Vampires, he thought. Go figure.
“It’s a pretty slim lead,” Zach admitted.
“You don’t have to come.”
Zach flipped his pad shut. “All right. You talked me into it.”
I’m the Devil, and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.
—Charles “Tex” Watson, to his victims at the first
Manson Family murder
1:29 A.M., OCTOBER 24, 2012, DEWEY’S LOUNGE, OUTSIDE MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA
The doorman sat against the railing on the porch of Dewey’s, next to his bike. Years ago, the line of motorcycles lined up outside would have been enough to warn civilians away from the place. But times change. People who should have been driving Volvos bought Harleys now. Guy
s who couldn’t change a tire or the oil, let alone tune their own engines, wore leathers and bandannas. They took the bikes out of their three-car garages on a weekend and went looking for authentic places where they could drink $1 PBRs and pretend they didn’t spend 90 percent of their lives behind a desk. They thought that made them bikers.
They thought they would be welcome in Dewey’s.
The doorman was there to disabuse them of that notion. Dewey’s was a real biker bar. The kind of place where the titty dancers were meth-skinny and you’d get your ass stomped for wearing the wrong colors. There was serious business done inside the front door. The doorman was there to keep out the tourists.
He was feeling a little twitchy, to be honest. It was a weeknight. Nobody who wasn’t in the club had tried to get into the bar, and he was sort of disappointed. Maybe it was this new batch of crystal he was snorting, but he felt the need to flex his muscles.
As if on cue, a four-door sedan pulled off the highway and parked in the lot. The biker smiled as two young men wearing suits and ties got out. They dressed like cops but didn’t have the muscle. Lawyers, probably. This was going to be fun.
They walked right up to him. The shorter one was first. He smiled like an idiot. The other one hung back. He made the doorman a little nervous, but the meth rode right over that.
“We’re closed,” he told the smaller one.
The kid looked at him, then over his shoulder at the neon lighting up the painted-black picture window that was flashing the word open over and over. He put on an exaggerated face of confusion.
“Really?” he said. “Doesn’t seem that way.”
The sound of whooping and hollering and loud music was barely muffled behind the doorman. “You calling me a liar?” he asked.
“Hey, now, there’s no need to get surly. I’m Zach. That’s Cade. How ya doing?”
He offered his hand. The doorman stared until he dropped it. He didn’t look at all offended. The doorman was a little confused. The other guy, the taller one, just stood behind him, steady as a rock. Neither was reacting at all like he expected.
The one called Zach looked over the bike parked next to the porch with an appraising glance.
“Nice,” he said. “Yours?”
The biker nodded, smirking a little. He was used to getting compliments from yuppies about his ride. It didn’t get them inside.
“Tell me, do they charge extra for the training wheels?” Zach asked, his face perfectly innocent.
The biker scowled.
“Or does your daddy still hold the seat while you pedal?”
The scowl on the biker’s face deepened.
“I know a real car is out of your price range, but here’s what I suggest. Next time your sister brings back the fifteen or twenty dollars she makes from blowing guys behind the truck stop—”
That was as far as Zach got before the biker took a swing. Zach could have dodged the punch, but he didn’t bother.
The biker’s fist was frozen in midair, and the rage on his face melted into bafflement.
Cade held his arm locked in one hand, preventing him from moving an inch.
The biker tried to jerk away.
Cade smiled, showing his teeth.
He tightened his grip. The man’s radius and ulna broke instantly, one muffled snap followed by the next, and Cade bent the forearm at a ninety-degree angle, grinding the bones together.
The biker screamed and his legs went out from under him. Cade held him for another second before letting him drop.
Zach looked down at him. “I’ve got some questions for you.”
“Fuck you!” the biker snarled. Zach sighed. He heard the heavy tread of boots on the wooden porch. They weren’t going to listen.
When Zach looked up, the first of the reinforcements had arrived. He didn’t bother to announce himself. He was even bigger than the doorman, and he was swinging a heavy pipe wrench at Zach’s head.
Again, it never reached him. Cade slapped it away and shoved the other biker back. His feet left the porch and he hit hard enough to knock the door off its hinges.
“Someday I want to be the bad cop,” Zach said.
“You might have been more persuasive.”
“Yeah. Like they were going to cooperate.”
Cade didn’t reply. He walked through the broken door. Zach followed.
Inside the dim, smoke-filled room, everything but the music had stopped. The man Cade had pushed through the heavy oak door lay on the floor while the other patrons stared. A couple of very skinny, very young women with badly inserted implants stood on the low stage, mouths open. The other men were all one type or another: either elephant-huge with muscle and fat, or whipcord thin with muscle and gristle. Zach saw several more of the tattoos of the Devil and swastikas once his eyes adjusted.
Cade stood a few feet inside the door frame, outlined against the night by the neon of the bar signs.
“Perhaps we can save some time,” he said. “Is there any one of you who doesn’t want to spend the next six months sipping his meals through a wired jaw?”
As one, a cluster of the bikers hurled themselves at Cade with everything from pool cues to buck knives in their hands.
Zach stepped back out the door. He’d figured Cade could use a light workout. He’d been in a foul mood ever since the attack on the bus caravan. Maybe this would help.
The bikers were tough. They were also only human.
A moment later, the strippers ran out through the space where the front door used to be, fake breasts not bouncing even as they bounded down the stairs. Cade put his head back out the door. “You can come in now,” he told Zach.
Broken bodies were all over the floor. Most of the men were unconscious. Some were probably no longer breathing. Zach didn’t particularly care. They chose their team. They could take the consequences.
Once they’d made the connection between Minot and the Boogeyman, it hadn’t been very difficult to find the most likely suspects. It was right there in their name: Satan’s Service. Between their meth deals and antisocial behavior, they generated a lot of business for the local emergency room.
Cade had left one man, one of the biggest, conscious and on his back by the strippers’ platform. His face was gray and sheened with sweat, but Zach still recognized him from the old mug shot his computer had dragged up.
It was Collins, the club’s leader. He’d been discharged from the Air Force after being stationed in Minot. He wore leathers and a sleeveless denim jacket covered with patches. He had a ring of swastikas and pentagrams tattooed in a ring around his neck. On one bare shoulder was the number 88. On the other was a goatlike devil.
“I think we’ve got the right guy,” Zach said. “What did you do to him?”
There were no visible fractures, but Collins was clenching his teeth in pain. He looked like someone suffering a heart attack.
“I’ve broken his sternum,” Cade said. “And all of his ribs. Along with his collarbone.”
That would do it, Zach thought.
“There’s most likely damage to his internal organs as well.”
Zach kneeled over the gang leader. “Damn, I bet that hurts,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Collins wheezed.
“You want to keep dazzling me with your witty comebacks? Or should Cade just keep breaking bones until you’re faxable?”
Collins spat at him. About the most violent thing he could manage. “Fuckin’ worm. You don’t know.”
Cade kneeled down, looming over Collins. “I know,” he said. “I know better than you.”
A canny gleam appeared in Collins’s eyes. He was not stupid. There was a mean little rat of intelligence running around on the wheels inside his skull.
“You’re not… what you look like,” Collins said.
“No,” Cade agreed. “Neither are you.”
Collins bared his teeth in an approximation of a grin. “You’re like him. The Promised One.”
Cade flicked a glan
ce at Zach. The Boogeyman.
“You’ve seen him?” Cade asked.
“I helped summon him,” Collins said proudly. “I have amassed a great harvest of blood in my time. My master has a throne of skulls waiting for me below.”
Zach rubbed his eyes. “We don’t have a lot of time for heavy-metal lyrics.”
“I’ll speak,” Collins said. “But only to you.” Cade. “Only you will understand. And only if you agree to let me go.”
“All right,” Cade said.
“Cade!” Zach was shocked. Cade’s look silenced him.
“Give me your word. I walk,” Collins said.
Cade looked into the eyes of the man on the floor. “I swear.”
That seemed to satisfy Collins. He smiled again, even as he sucked in air like a bellows and his face went paler. “You won’t stop it, anyway. He’s already on his way. It was worth it. Fuckin’ glorious,” Collins said. “Seeing the Promised One in human clothing. It was worth every drop of mongrel and subhuman blood we spilled. Bunch of useless weaklings and faggots and fleas. Their lives were nothing until we turned them into fuel.”
“Where?” Cade asked.
“New Orleans.”
Zach and Cade locked glances. They both knew what was on the schedule for New Orleans.
The presidential debate.
Cade asked a few more questions, but Collins didn’t have many answers. His description of the Boogeyman was useless—a man in a rubber smiley-face mask—and the neo-Nazis following him only a little less so. They had a small arsenal, courtesy of his gang, a stockpile of meth and other chemicals, and Army surplus body armor.
And about thirty pounds of C-4. Enough to take out a small building.
“Not good,” Zach said. He pulled out his phone and began dialing Butler. Then he kicked Collins in his broken ribs.
“I think that’s all he knows,” Cade said.
“Your point being?” Zach said. “Tell me you’re not really going to let him go.”
“I gave him my word.”
“Cade, you can’t—”
Before Zach could finish the thought, Cade had lifted Collins from the floor and deposited him on his feet.
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