The Devil You Know (18 page)

“What’s wrong?” Josh said, retrieving his cup of coffee.

Tiger stopped slopping kibble all over the kitchen floor and growled at me.

“Can I keep this picture?” I asked Josh. “Just for a little while?”

“Sure. I guess.”

While Josh availed himself of my shower, I made a call to an old friend of mine down at the Sixty-sixth Precinct in Brooklyn. Deputy Inspector Ari Spencer picked up on the third ring. I immediately said, “So, Spencer, are you for hire?”

“Must be smartass Englebrecht,” Spencer said.

I grinned. “How’d you guess?”

“The gravelly voice, mostly. You’re the only guy I know who sounds possessed,” he laughed.

Spencer, Peter and I had all been new recruits back in the day. Obviously, only Spencer had gone on to live the dream. We passed a few friendly words before I dropped the bomb. “Is there any chance you could run a few names for me? I also have a pic of a potential suspect.”

“A suspect? I thought you were out of this game?”

“I’m gumshoeing it,” I told Spencer. “This is important.”

I heard Spencer fumbling around for a pad and pen. Of all of us, Spencer had been the least organized. I found it pleasantly ironic that he had climbed the ranks so fast. “Go ahead.”

I gave Spencer the names of Thom Berger, Billie Berger and Rebecca Coledale. “Do you have an email? I can send the pic right over.”

“Wow, you know how to use the internet, Englebrecht?”

“I’m evolving,” I told him. I used my phone to snap a picture of Josh’s photo and send it on to Spencer’s email. “How long before you can get back to me on this?”

“I don’t know, Englebrecht. I have this thing called a
job
, you know.”

“Now who’s a smartass? Call me as soon as you have something.” I smiled. “Please.”

I hung up.

Tiger padded over and cocked his head at me. A long thread of drool hung from one corner of his mouth.

“You want another treat?” I asked.

Tiger whined.

I put my hand out. “First you gotta pay the devil his due, buddy. Nothing in life’s free.”

Tiger moved closer. I petted him on the ears, then gave him another Beggin’ Strip.

I was down in the shop, selling some herbs to Mrs. Bailey when Spencer called me back. He said things were huge. I thanked Mrs. Bailey for her business and closed down the shop for lunch. Then I planted my ass down on the stool behind the counter and got my pad and pen out. “Shoot.”

“That one name you gave me, Billie Berger, came back pretty hot. She had some rap, Englebrecht. Possession, prostitution, assault. She finally disappeared about five years ago, presumed dead. She’d been involved with a lot of bad people over the years, so it’s not really a shocker.”

“Like?”

There was a pause as Spence looked over what was presumably quite a database. “She was involved in a lot of guru cult-related shit, ran some sites that drained pension money from little old ladies looking to contact the dead, that type of thing. One of her last ports of call before she disappeared was The Order of the Golden Dawn. That’s Anton LaVey’s group, right?”

“Aleister Crowley, actually.”

“And there were a few other groups she’d been associated with over the years but I can’t even say some of the names.” He spelled them out to me and I wrote them down. About half of them I’d never heard of. That was pretty sad when you think about it. If I was going to be the future ruler of hell, I should probably know my constituents, right?

Nothing suspicious had come back on Thom Berger. Not even a traffic ticket. Damn.

“And Rebecca Coledale?”

“Apparently she’s from Lancaster, one of the Amish towns, Elizabethtown to be exact, according to her college records.”

“Are there any pictures of Rebecca from back in Elizabethtown?”

“None. She didn’t have any pictures taken until she needed a student ID. Now that’s odd.”

“Not really if she comes from an Amish community. They think pictures are a sign of pride and bringing attention to oneself.”

“And you live with these people now?”

I laughed at that. “Anything else on Rebecca Coledale?”

“Nothing. No police records. I guess they raise ‘em right in the Amish towns.”

“How about the pic?”

“It’s a younger Billie Berger. But you knew that, right?”

“I have one more thing for you. Check your email in about two minutes.”

I snapped a pic of the caption in the paper of Thom and Rebecca standing together and sent that too onto Spencer’s email. I didn’t include any part of the article. Then I waited.

About five minutes later he came back on the line. “So basically you’re telling me you found the missing Billie Berger girl and she’s all grown up.”

“Nope,” I said. “
That’s
Rebecca Coledale.”

While I drove Josh down to see his sister at the county lockup, I told him what I knew about Billie Berger and Rebecca Coledale.

“You think Billie came back under an assumed name?” he asked.

“Not an assumed name. Rebecca Coledale was a real person, from an old Amish order in Elizabethtown, but I think she’s dead now. I even called Elizabethtown and got the community elder. He said they remember Rebecca, but she ran away to Philadelphia in her early teens. She never wrote her family or let them know where she was. Of course, by then she’d been excommunicated so no one really cared.”

Josh sat back in his seat and looked very pale. “You think Billie
killed
Rebecca Coledale and took her name?” He sounded appalled.

I nodded as I piloted the ship-like Dodge down The Strip. There was another reason I loved her. She was huge and virtually indestructible. Almost nothing short of an SUV was willing to cut me off. While I maneuvered around all the weekend traffic, I told Josh what I believed: that all of this was tied into Brittany’s murder. I asked him what he knew about the Bergers, but it wasn’t much. He said Vivian could tell me more about Billie than he could. The two girls used to play in the woods behind the Berger house during the summer. He only knew that Thom and his first wife Carrie had fought a lot, sometimes in front of the children. Carrie often became hysterical, but he didn’t know why. He said Billie ran away from home when she was thirteen years old and no one ever heard from her again.

“Billie and Rebecca were the same age, then,” I said. “They may have looked alike too.”

“Isn’t that kind of hard to do today, with fingerprints and all?” Josh asked.

I shook my head. “Difficult but not impossible. Rebecca Coledale came from a very strict order. They don’t take pictures or keep very good birth records in the old orders. Rebecca was a runaway too, and maybe the two of them met up. Maybe they got to be good friends. Then Billie saw an opportunity, a way to become someone different, someone with no rap sheet or record.” I gave Josh a smoke before going on. I thought he might need it.

I told him that Billie likely studied nursing as Rebecca Coledale, and when she was ready, returned just in time to take care of the comatose Carrie Berger, her own mother. I didn’t add that it was likely, with the occult connections she had formed down in Philadelphia, that Billie/Rebecca might have even caused the accident that ended her mother’s life. There was probably a link there, but I didn’t know how deeply I wanted to involve Josh in the supernatural end of things. I liked Josh. A lot. Friends don’t let friends drive the supernatural highway. Instead, I said, “Billie may have even killed Carrie Berger. It wouldn’t take much to end a coma patient’s life, especially if you’re a trained nurse.”

“Billie put her own mother in the grave and herself in Thom’s marriage bed.” He shivered, violently. “You know this is freaky even for Blackwater, and I’ve seen some pretty freaky shit in this town.”

“Blackwater was established at a crossroads. It’s inclined to freaky shit.”

“So tell me about Billie.”

“
That
gets freakier.”

“If Billie ran away, why come back? Why do all this elaborate shit?”

“You said the Bergers argued.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Maybe Thom was abusing the girl. Maybe that’s why Carrie got hysterical.”

“So Billie comes back? She marries her own father? That doesn’t make sense. Aren’t you supposed to run
away
from abuse?”

I thought about what Vivian had said about Mr. McCarty. “Not everyone does. It’s called Stockholm syndrome. The abused develops such a strong bond with her abuser that she’ll do anything to be with him again.”

“So how come Thom never noticed he’s dicking his own daughter? I mean, that’s something you’d realize, wouldn’t you?”

“Would you? Her hair’s different. She’s ten years older. A lot of people in Blackwater look alike.” I shrugged. “Or maybe Thom knows and just doesn’t give a damn.”

“You don’t think much of people, do you?” Josh said.

I thought about that. I wondered if he was right.

Josh let me off the hook. “Assuming what you say is true, what about Cassie? Do you think Billie killed her own daughter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Reason being?”

That was the one little thing I still hadn’t quite figured out just yet. “The girl was disabled by Tay-Sachs syndrome. She required almost round-the-clock care from her parents. Maybe Billie was tired of caring for her. Or maybe she was afraid Thom Berger would turn his affection on Cassie in time.”

Josh made a face. “Jesus, Nick. If I keep hanging with you I’m going to wind up suspecting everyone of something.”

“Everyone’s guilty of something.”

“Even you?”

“Even me.”

“You said Brittany’s murder is tied into this.” Josh leaned back in his seat and his face went rock hard. “Do you think Billie killed Brittany too?”

“It’s a theory,” I said, recalling the discussion in the Dollar General between the cashier and her customer. “Billie needed to deflect any possible investigation away from her. What better way than to stage a gruesome small-town murder? It’s sensational. It’s already pushed the Berger ordeal to the back pages. Another few weeks and no one will even remember Cassie Berger is still missing.”

“But why Brittany? Why involve Vivian?”

“Billie knew Vivian as a child. Maybe she kept track of your sister over the years, all that stuff with Mitchell. It’s easier to pin a bad crime on someone with a rap sheet and a bad reputation than someone who’s squeaky clean.”

Josh looked at me then, his face touched with hostility. “Viv doesn’t have a bad reputation,” he snapped. “She’s just had a rough time growing up. My parents didn’t make it easy on her, being adopted and all.”

Me and my big mouth. “I don’t mean she’s a bad person, Josh, just that she’s been in trouble. I’ve been in trouble too. It makes a great big target out of you.”

He was silent a long moment as he got his temper back under control. I had finally hit his hot button—Vivian. Ironically, that was my hot button too. “Can any of this stuff actually get Vivian off?” he asked.

“It can if I can prove that Rebecca’s lying about her identity and killed her daughter.”

“How do we do that?”

I scratched my chin. “I’m working on that.”

Once we arrived at the Bucks County Jail I saw Josh inside, but stayed in the waiting area and pawed through a beaten copy of
Field and Stream Magazine
. I felt that Josh deserved some private time to talk to his sister. It’s what I would have wanted.

I looked around. The walls were painted a depressing shade of high school green and were covered in cheerless yellow posters about spousal abuse. I watched families pass me on their way to visiting incarcerated loved ones. I saw those same loved ones being escorted in or out of rooms, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits. One young punk shambled by, his hands in cuffs and a correctional officer on each arm, but he managed to make me the sign of the horns as he turned his back.

I don’t know why some people just look at me and figure I’m
that guy
. I don’t look especially evil. At least, I hope not. I glanced up at the security mirror in one corner and picked at my awry hair, which made me look a little like a bargain-basement Jareth wannabe from
Labyrinth
. Jesus. Did that mean the Devil looked like a gay rocker fairy from the 1980’s? My dad was going to have a conniption fit.