out of his pocket, scrawled something on it, and shoved it towards me. I looked down at the napkin. On it Fraley had written the same letters that had been carved into the foreheads of Bjorn Beck and Norman Brockwell-“ah Satan.”
“What about it?” I said.
“Write it out,” Fraley said. “Backwards.”
Four hours later, after I’d drafted yet another warrant application and gotten it signed by Judge Rogers, Fraley and I climbed the front porch steps of a small frame house in what was known as the Red Row section of Johnson City. It was a poor neighborhood in the southeast part of the city that bordered a massive “environmental center,” what used to be called a landfill and before that a dump. A small sign on the front door informed visitors, “A Christian Lives Here.” Underneath the sentence, in ink, someone had printed, very neatly, “And a Witch.”
I winced when I saw the woman who opened the door. She was tall and looked to be around sixty years old, although the information we had on her put her age at forty-seven. The skin on her face was sagging and had the faded yellow look of an old newspaper. Her unruly hair was a peculiar shade of red, and her eyes were covered by opaque glasses so thick that she appeared to be wearing goggles. She was wearing a full-length flowered robe that made her body shapeless.
“Marie Davis?” I heard Fraley say.
“Yes.”
Fraley produced an ID and introduced us. Four more agents stood at the bottom of the porch, waiting.
“We have a warrant to search your home,” Fraley said, “and we need to speak to you about Natasha.”
She sighed, muttered something under her breath, and moved away from the door.
Fraley motioned to the other agents to walk around the house, and he and I walked in. She led us to the kitchen table and motioned for us to sit down. As she walked to the counter and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray, I looked around. The tiny den was a Christian shrine. An oversized King James Bible nearly covered the coffee table in front of the couch, and there were angels on every shelf, atop the television, and in every nook and cranny in the room. There were wooden angels, ceramic angels, plastic angels, brass angels, all different sizes. They gave the room the tacky look of a roadside flea market.
A large crucifix, at least three feet in length, dominated the paneled wall opposite the front door. On the wall to my left was a print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. But it was the large print on the far wall that caught my attention. It depicted an eyeball atop a pyramid. The all-seeing eye of providence.
“Is she dead?” Marie sat down across from Fraley. The way she said it sounded almost hopeful. I watched her light a cigarette. Her teeth were the same color as her skin and as unruly as her hair.
“No, ma’am,” Fraley said. “She’s fine. She’s down at my office. We picked her up last night at a motel in Johnson City.”
Marie stared off towards the living room for a long moment. She looked like she’d gone into a coma without closing her eyes.
“Ms. Davis, are you all right?” Fraley said.
Smoke rose up in a spiral from the end of her cigarette. She had the slow mannerisms and defeated look of an addict. The house was dirty and poorly lit. The carpet in the den was stained and matted. The linoleum floor beneath my feet was sticky, and a sour, musty odor hung in the air. The sound of dogs barking and snarling suddenly came reverberating through the house from the backyard.
“Jesus!” Fraley said as he rose from the table. “Are they loose?”
“They’re penned up,” Marie said, “and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain in my home.”
Fraley stepped through the kitchen to a back door and opened it. The other two agents walked in, both looking a little pale.
“Dobermans,” I heard one of them mutter. “I hate Dobermans. My neighbor had one when I was a kid and it damned near killed me.”
“What can you tell us about Natasha?” Fraley said after he returned to his seat at the table.
Her expression turned hard and she looked away. “I got nothing to say about Natasha,” she said.
“Can you at least tell me why you won’t talk to us about her?” Fraley said.
She blew out a lungful of smoke and turned back towards Fraley. The hand that held her cigarette had started to tremble.
“I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said.
“What about your other daughter?” Fraley said. “What can you tell us about Alisha?”
“Can’t say nothing about her either.”
“Why not?” Fraley said. “Why won’t you tell us anything about your daughters?”
“I’m gonna go in and sit in my chair,” she said. “Y’all got no idea what you’re up against.”
She got up from the table and began to walk stiffly towards the den. When she reached the recliner, she sat down and picked up a remote control from the arm of the chair. She pointed it at the television and flipped it on. A televangelist wearing a bushy gray toupee was pointing back at her from his pulpit, warning her about the wages of sin.
“Ms. Davis,” Fraley said, following her into the room. “This warrant says we can search your home, but you could make things easier on both of us. Do you know if there’s an ice pick anywhere in the house?”
She responded by turning the volume up on the television.
“Fine,” Fraley said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He snatched the remote out of her hand and turned the television off. “Where’s Natasha’s room?” he said.
“Right down the hall,” Marie said. “I don’t never go in there myself.”
“Go check it out,” Fraley said to me. “You guys go ahead and get started.”
I walked through the den and into the dim hallway. About ten feet down the hall on the left was a door, painted black. I reached for the doorknob, but hesitated, not wanting to go in the room alone. I could hear commotion coming from the kitchen as the agents began their search. I walked back to the edge of the den and waited for Fraley.
“What’s wrong?” he said as he pushed past me into the hallway. “Scared of the dark?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason I feel like I’m about to walk through the gates of hell, and I think I’d like some company.”
Fraley turned the knob and opened the door. It was pitch-black inside the room. Fraley started feeling along the wall for a light switch, found it, and flipped it on.
I stepped inside and looked around. The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell, with a closet that ran the length of the wall to my right. At first glance, it looked like nothing special. I thought we’d find candles and pentagrams and inverted crosses. Instead, the room was just dirty, with clothing strewn all over the place.
A mirror over a small dresser caught my eye. I stepped towards it. Scrawled on the mirror in what looked like blood were the words “ah Satan.” Beneath it was the phrase, “Hell is for children.”
There was a stack of books on a table by the bed. Fraley picked up the book on the top, looked at the cover, then dropped it as though it burned him.
“What is it?” I said.
“The Satanic Bible,” he said. Fraley picked up another book and showed it to me, Helter Skelter. A third was The Art of Black Magic. “What kind of freak reads this shit?”
“Did you see the print hanging in the den?” I said. “The one with the eye?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Do you know what that symbol is?”
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s on the back of paper currency. It represents the all-seeing eye of providence. It may not mean anything, but all of our victims were shot or stabbed in the eye. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“We’ll take it with us, along with the books and the mirror,” Fraley said. “Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Three hours later, Fraley and I stood inside a room in the TBI office that was used to monitor interrogations.
