Page 27 of Mastermind

“His pattern?”

“Frogs eat flies, hop around, keep wet. All my killers had patterns. That’s how I caught them. After the fact, it seemed obvious. Joe Vik owned a lot of businesses. One of them was a towing company. Sometimes he’d take stranded-motorist calls and kill the motorists. What’s Heywood’s pattern?”

“He loves spectacle. He loves things that look supernatural. He wants people to think they’ve seen a miracle.”

“But this wasn’t a miracle. This was a bunch of EMPs.”

“You weren’t there. We called it the Void. It looked like Manhattan got sucked into a black hole. It’s—I still can’t quite process it . . .”

“But you can explain it. Does Heywood like people explaining what he did after the fact?”

“God, no. He tried to kill me for that,” she replies.

“Interesting. So he likes to create supernatural-appearing phenomena and hates it when someone explains it?”

“I’d say that’s the short form. Are you sure your paths never crossed?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Blackwood thinks it over. “Putting suspicion on you doesn’t make sense. Maybe his real plan is to do something that still hasn’t happened yet.”

“Interesting. If not disappearing New York, then what?”

“What if it’s something else going on in the world? And New York was a distraction?”

“Possibly. Is there something else weird going on in the world I should know about, Agent Blackwood?”

She reaches into her bag and pulls out a second set of folders. “Quite a lot, actually. And call me Jessica.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE WEIRD FILE

“I used to get all the weird stuff,” says Jessica.

“Like The X-Files,” I reply.

“Yeah, but not as cool. Sometimes it was agents who had problems they couldn’t solve. Mostly it was people who heard my name and wanted me to tell them why their house creaked or that the light they saw in the sky was a UFO.”

“And?”

“People are nuts. There was too much to deal with. And people hated being told they were mistaken. I had a grad student send me death threats because I told him the mysterious light in a photo he took in an Egyptian temple was the streak of an LED made by camera shake.

“I thought I was doing him a favor. Turns out he thought I was denying that he was Anubis reincarnated. They put him in a mental hospital for a few days. I stopped responding after that,” she says with a sigh.

“Very understandable. I got cases, too. Sometimes real ones. That was the problem. By ignoring them I knew that might mean a killer was getting away. I couldn’t handle it.”

“When you’re a cop, they teach you that you have to put away the gun and the badge at the end of the day.”

“I’ve heard that. How did that advice work for you?” I ask.

“Ask my therapist.”

“And how does that work?” I find it hard to imagine her opening up and being vulnerable to anyone like that, and I’m surprised when she answers my question.

“It gives me outlook. I can stand back and analyze things a little more. I can see my own patterns. You ever tried it?”

“My mom forced me to see one when I was a kid, after my dad died. He didn’t know how to handle my personality. It wasn’t very productive.”