8. The Key
The streets between PD headquarters and the FBI field office were empty of tourists and filled with cops. Every kind of cop, from the boys in blue to the border patrol to masked and goggled desert warriors trucked in by the DHS. They were preparing for the evening tide of George Floyd protestors. There were miniature tanks in the park and camera drones in the air. Helicopters clattered overhead. Agent Katz held her badge high as we ran the gauntlet.
We had coffee in the FBI cafeteria. Taped lines on the floor separated the tables, most of which were empty. The windows thrummed to the thudding of the choppers.
I looked at Katz across my espresso. She looked at me across her cappuccino.
“I’m Jewish,” she said.
Of course, my insinuation during the Lohman interview that Katz had been a childhood victim of a Catholic priest.
“Should I apologize?” I asked.
She made a one-handed gesture that conveyed dismissal and concession at the same time. “Actually, I’m impressed. I don’t know what you got from him, but you got something. That’s way better than I did, or the cops, or the senior special agent here. A lesson for me about interviewing.”
That was generous of her. I shrugged. “I’ve fewer rules to follow.”
“I get the shtick with the outfit now. You’re a natural performer.” She tilted her head, inspecting me frankly. “You’ve got the looks, too. Kind of a cross between Tom Baker—the Doctor Who actor—and—”
I knew that series. British, not one many Americans watched. My eyebrows went up. “Wasn’t he from before you were born?”
Katz grinned. “Still, he’s my favorite.”
Well, well. We had something in common.
She continued, “A cross between him and … maybe Oscar Wilde? Or the actor who played him.”
Suddenly the comparison had switched from goofy bohemian time lord to a louche genius who’d turned decadence into an art form. Not a transition I liked. “I’m sure you mean Patrick Swayze,” I murmured.
She snorted a laugh. “Psychology, acting, dramatic looks—I bet they don’t hurt getting rich clients for that private practice of yours.”
My eyebrows beetled together and my mouth froze open for an awkward moment, like that lawyer’s had. Sharp as a bloody tack, Katz was. The two-inch long kind. Clearly, I’d got ahead of myself. One tube of eyedrops did not a friendship make. Maybe it revealed her real opinion of my manipulation of Lohman. If so, I knew, deep down, there was justice in it. Once I’d developed the knack of persuasion, the line between myself and the charlatans I took on blurred.
“Hmm,” I said, straightening my face.
“It was clever the way you led him.”
“He led me. I just read enough conspiracy theories to channel them convincingly. Comes with the job.”
“Same here, but I never tried inventing one. What I can’t figure is how you got him onto that triple cross, whatever it is.”
I flipped a hand. “Luck. Intuition. There’s usually something you could think of as a key—some token of club membership. I just fished for it. And it might be rubbish.”
Katz sucked the foam from the top of her coffee, stared into the pale liquid that remained, then drank a slug. Her eyes were bright when they met mine. “Let’s go find out.”
On Katz’s floor, the distant thudding of helicopter rotors was the loudest noise.
She had a visitor’s seat in a room filled with cubicles. Each had a sleek black work station, a big computer monitor, and a phone with too many buttons. Glass-walled offices with oak-veneered furniture and pictures of White men in stiff poses occupied the windowed sides of the room. Only a few of the desks were in use.
“The Bureau’s pandemic policy is that we can work some shifts from home,” said Katz, interpreting my glance.
At first sight, the portable computer perched on Katz’s desk looked antiquated, but it wasn’t old; it was a custom job. The thing was nearly an inch thick, like a slender attaché case. Must have been a beast to carry. There was a logo impressed into the brushed steel case: a stylized image of a knight on horseback spearing a bat-winged thing. Saint George slaying the dragon.
Before the computer would let her use it, Katz had to show it her face, murmur her name and badge number, and type a pass phrase with the lid part-way down so it could watch her hands move.
She glanced at me with a half-smile and half-closed eyes. “Creepy or sexy, take your pick.”
Like she’d read my mind.
“It’ll watch you, too,” she added.
I kept my voice low. “Does that make us a threesome?”
She grinned.
Katz seemed more at ease with me today—if not exactly friendly. Of course, now we had two things in common: Tom Baker and being shot at by the same guy.
I borrowed a rolling chair from an unoccupied desk.
“Lohman’s computer is still with the Baltimore PD,” said Katz. She tapped on her overweight laptop. “But I have a copy of the contents in this. It also connects remotely to the Pythia servers.” She plugged her slab into the monitor, then launched a web browser. Some tabs opened automatically: TheDonald, Infowars, Birchbox, Parler, 4chan, 8kun, 11dan, BetterDead. Violet, black, yellow, neon pink. Tiny underlined links, garbled text, crude jokes, politicians and pornography cascaded down the screen.
She scrolled through one of the message boards. “Lohman’s computer recorded activity logs, and we got records from his service provider, so we know which message boards he accessed in the few days before he drove to Philadelphia. We’ve some idea which parts of each site he studied longest, and any pictures he clicked on to enlarge. Pythia reconstructs the timeline.”
As she moved down the board’s endless page, a scrolling blue strip with dates and times floated on one side. It wasn’t part of the website, but something the software was adding. The screen name ‘Anonymous’ was common, but some contributors had given themselves handles like zog110, clakia1314, and screwthemall1488. I recognized the numerology of hate: the numbers proclaimed allegiance to antisemitic and white supremacist gangs and creeds. Some names sported colored halos. I asked about them.
“Those belong to people Pythia has unmasked,” said Katz. “They’re the ones with Federal records or open trace warrants.” She moved her mouse cursor over a highlighted name. The mugshot of a bearded man appeared, along with a summary of his rap sheet. Transporting unregistered guns, stalking, assault.
“Let’s start with Lohman’s last posting, then go backwards,” I suggested.
She switched to the BetterDead site. “I’ve stared at this stuff till it goes blurry, but I wasn’t looking for a triple cross.”
A crudely doctored picture of a scowling Donald Trump in a MAGA hat and ‘White Power’ tee, brandishing a rifle, his knee on the neck of a prostrate Black man. Two women fighting over toilet paper in a Walmart store. A spew of invective against Muslims. Rats scavenging in a Covid morgue.
Katz scrolled backwards. It was already going blurry for me. With a frisson of envy and regret, I stuck a pair of glasses on my nose.
Low8883: Chicano filth! Pedomex shits! Better dead.
That one had a glowing blue border. Attached to the message was a photo collage of three men: an old priest in golden vestments and two younger men. The creator had placed a row of overlapping, inverted ‘V’ symbols along the bottom. I knew the symbol—a white-supremacist sign of support for a Mexican border wall. The old priest looked vaguely familiar. I glanced at Katz.
“That’s Lohman’s last posting. The two men on the left are Marcial Marciel—the Legion of Christ pederast—and another priest who fled to Mexico after abusing boys in the US.”
I nodded, recalling Marciel’s name. He was a Mexican priest and Vatican favorite who’d operated a pedophile ring within the cult-like order he’d founded.
Katz looked at me. “The third man in the composite is Father Torres. Lohman got it from the parish website—Torres with some choir boys.”
Judging by the spew of vulgar replies that followed, it had been a popular posting. But Lohman wouldn’t have known that. As the supportive messages streamed in, he’d been on his way to Philadelphia to kill an American priest with a Spanish name.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see if something else here set him off.”
“I’ll skip to the pictures. You have to post a picture or video to start a discussion thread on this site.”
She scrolled backwards, quicker now, so that it really was a blur. The blue bar floating at the side counted backwards in time by minutes and hours, like one of those interactive museum displays that lets you zoom through Earth’s history, counting the years by millions. She paused for an instant at each picture, then moved on so quickly I barely got an impression. She must have a limber visual cortex.
“There!” She’d stopped in a swamp of homophobia. She retraced her virtual steps to an anodyne picture that had no comments at all. ‘Anonymous’ had posted it a couple of days before Lohman shot Father Torres. The blue bar beside it glowed purple.
“This was a weak flag for Pythia—hence the highlighting. But I didn’t get what Pythia saw in it.” She clicked on the picture. It swelled to fill the browser window.
It was a painting of several subjects, brightly colored, with a swirly texture like a van Gogh. The composition: disturbing, unsettling, every subject distorted. Expressionist—the modernist art style that emphasized evoking emotion—was what came to mind.
And the subjects? A tree hung with small coffins and human skulls. Peering from behind it, a gothic horror that might be a wolf or a spider, or both combined. A knight wearing a motorcycle helmet knelt stiffly while being touched on the shoulder by the sword of a smaller knight in armor—a girl with straight, dark hair in a bowl cut. From her back sprouted wings. A military angel.
The last subject was the same winged girl-knight, also with sword drawn. She stared out of the picture with huge, grave eyes. The hand without the sword pointed at me, like Uncle Sam’s in that iconic recruiting poster. She was pointing with two fingers, as though pretending to shoot. The other fingers curled around the stem of something that extended below her outstretched hand—a cross with three bars.
Lohman’s triple cross.