Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(65)

Scully Residence

11:43 P.M.

The house was still and even the crickets outside had fallen silent.

Sleep seemed impossible. Dana lit the special incense Sunlight had given her and tried meditating, but failed. She tried yoga, and failed at that, too. Finally she crawled into bed and lay staring at the ceiling, trying to force her brain to shift from emotional reaction to logical analysis. There was a line from a Sherlock Holmes story she’d read once that really seemed to fit, and she spoke it aloud so that the sound of the words would reinforce the truth of the observation. It was from the short novel The Sign of Four.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Absolutely, she thought. But what is the truth?

She tried to recatalog the facts as she knew them, updating a mental file as detached and precise as Uncle Frank’s case files.

Point One: There have been six deaths of teenagers in Craiger, Maryland.

Point Two: All those deaths appear to have happened because of car accidents.

Point Three: None of the victims had been drinking.

Point Four: Five of them had something in their blood called 5-HT2A receptor agonists. Since Uncle Frank did not yet have the toxicology results for Todd Harris, Dana didn’t know if he also had that stuff in his blood, but it was likely.

Point Five: She was having dreams about the death of Maisie Bell. Was she really some kind of psychic sensitive as Corinda and Sunlight seemed to think she was? If so, why her?

Point Six: Corinda and Sunlight both told her that her “gifts” could be fine-tuned. Was that true? If so, was that a good thing for her or bad? Could she live with even more visions in her head? She doubted it. Even the thought made her want to throw up.

Point Seven: Sunlight and Corinda both said that the killer was somehow projecting an image of a dark angel to hide his true identity. So who was he?

Point Eight: Maisie said something about a Red Age. What was a Red Age? Was she mixed up in a religious cult? The wounds seemed to shout that as the truth, but how to find out for sure?

Point Nine: The angel was male.

Dana thought about that. He was male in her dreams, and he was male in the parts of the visions viewed by Corinda and Sunlight. Did that mean he actually was male? Or was she imposing that on the angel because of the degree of violence? Could a woman have committed those crimes? Maybe. A strong woman. Alternately, could the angel be a “them” rather than a “him”? Could there be more than one person doing this? Not separately, but working together. It wasn’t out of the question. After all, she saw a documentary once about two guys who worked together to commit murders back in the 1920s. Leopold and Loeb. That same special talked about other pairs of murderers. She fished for the names. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the child murderers from England in the sixties. And Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a killing spree in the fifties. So, sure, it was possible. Did she believe that was what was happening here? Maybe, but the argument was one of pure practicality. Arranging the car crashes and making sure the victims’ injuries were in keeping with an accident seemed like something that would take planning, muscle, and effort. Could a single person keep doing that? Especially in such a short period of time? Dana found it hard to believe.

Point Ten: Corinda said that the killer was someone Dana knew. What did that mean? Was it someone she’d met casually? Someone at school? Someone from another place here in Craiger? Since moving here, she’d met a lot of people, from the mailman to the teachers at school, but did any of them strike her as being a murderous psychopath?

No, she thought. Not one.

She continued listing points, but soon she found that they were becoming thin, with her forcing logic on pure supposition—something her dad once said was a poor way to manage strategic thinking.

So, without more facts to consider, she asked herself questions, even though she knew they did not yet have answers. Asking the questions was important, though; her gut told her as much. Those questions would give her a direction, give her focus.

Question: Why would someone want to kill them?

Question: What did the victims have in common besides being teenagers here in Craiger?

Question: Was this all drug-related?

Question: If this was a cult, was it a religious cult? (Was the Red Age some kind of religious reference? To the crucifix or to the blood of martyrs?)

Question: Who was the angel?

The incense was every bit as calming as Sunlight had promised. Soothing, making her feel safe and drowsy. She hovered on the edge of sleep.

Question: Am I just losing my mind?

“No,” she said, saying it out loud so that it, too, would be real. “No. I’m not imagining it. This is happening. This is real. The truth is out there. I’m going to find it.”

She believed that, but at the same time she knew she had to make a decision about how to react, and about what to believe. The psychic stuff was scary and weird and confusing, and maybe it was true. She certainly couldn’t dismiss it out of hand, because too many of the things from her visions showed up in the case files. So, okay, ESP was real.

“So what?” she asked the night. There was nowhere to go with that stuff. She could not prove anything that she’d seen.

Dana thought about that for a long time. She did not want to be the girl who had visions. No way. Not now and not ever. Nothing that was as scary and disturbing as those visions could be the right thing for her.