Name of the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

has spent twenty years in the field. In fact, some would argue that being so close to bureaucracy can make you ignorant of the real world.
    I don’t blame Mitchum for being suspicious of an outsider’s motives. I do blame her for trying to excise me from the report for the sole purpose of making me look bad.
    In the parking lot I take a deep breath of twilight air and try to calm myself. Mitchum has a million things to worry about. There’s no agenda, I reassure myself. Although I suspect she’s trying to make this her career case at my expense.
    I don’t care about a pat on the back. Just ask Knoll about the Warlock case. I made the key breaks, but I insisted he get the credit for his direction. All I want is to get the bad guys. It’s why I became a cop. It’s not for the paperwork, or the paper commendations. It’s to make the world right.
    A raindrop falls on my crossed arms. I watch the water soak into the fabric of my jacket. Another falls.
    It’s going to rain.
    It’s going to rain, and whatever evidence that may be on that tree could be washed away.
    It’s dark. It’s cold. The other agents and cops are running to their cars to get home or back to their hotels.
    The one coworker I’d trust to follow me on a stupid quest has just gone home.
    I groan.
    I’m going to have to do this alone.

5
    T HUNDERCLOUDS RUMBLE OVERHEAD as I hop out of a borrowed motor pool car and run across the meadow to the line of trees where we found McKnight. His body and the tree limb he was found on were removed hours ago. A solitary work light and generator keep vigil over the plastic-covered tree, which looks like some kind of alien artifact. The crime scene that isn’t a crime scene, according to Mitchum, is a few hundred feet away in the shadows. My feet slip in the wet grass as I try to beat the downpour, and I almost land on my ass.
    My tree is somewhere in the woods, but there’s enough glow in the sky to find it. I try to put on my clean-suit as I run so I don’t contaminate the scene. If I do find anything, I don’t want some forensic tech pulling one of my long black hairs out of an evidence bag.
    I reach the base of the tree and slip my feet into the booties that are supposed to keep me from tracking in outside dirt. The second-lowest branch, the one that isn’t broken, is a few inches higher. I leap for it, and muscles I haven’t used since high school gym start to ache. Yoga didn’t prepare me for this.
    Somehow, I pull myself onto the second branch and steady myself against the trunk in a crouch. My slick slippers want to glide right off the wet surface. They aren’t meant for climbing.
    I feel like a damn space monkey.
    My theory is that whoever put McKnight’s body in the tree tried this one first. Maybe even getting all the way to the top before realizing this tree wasn’t going to work.
    If they abandoned this tree, they might not have cared as much about tidying up after themselves. It’s a leap. A diligent criminal would check for prints, fibers, and any other clues. Fortunately, most of them aren’t that smart.
    Rain trickles down through the leaves. I pull my flashlight from my pocket and place it in my mouth so I can hold on for dear life with both hands. Besides the pain, I don’t think I could handle the professional embarrassment if someone found me unconscious from a fall.
    The first thing I look for is drops of blood on the branches and leaves. A big guy like McKnight might not have gone down without a struggle. Our killer could have been bleeding from his own wound and not had the time to bandage it, or use a towel to clean the path he took up here.
    My light casts a glowing cone in the rain. Nothing jumps out at me. I climb up to the next branch and focus my attention on the path our bad guy would have likely taken to carry McKnight, or to haul him up with a rope.
    I spot another broken branch by my elbow.