Read Online The Devil's Only Friend by Dan Wells - Free Book Online

your name?” I asked. “Why Boy Dog, instead of … anything else in the entire world? Everybody has a reason.”
    What did Mary Gardner do that she didn’t have to do?

 
    4
    I caught Agent Ostler in the lobby of the building where we rented an office. “Children are weak.”
    She looked at me a moment. “Is this something you need to talk to Dr. Trujillo about?”
    “No,” I said, “it’s about Mary Gardner. She targets children because they’re weak. She needs somebody weak.”
    “She kills the terminally ill; they’re all weak.”
    “But children are weaker,” I said. “Not just physically, but their immune systems. They haven’t been exposed to as many diseases as adults, so they haven’t built up the antibodies to fight them off. Children recover from disease more quickly because they’re resilient, but they’re also far more likely to get sick in the first place. That’s how she does it.”
    Ostler started walking again, forcing me to hurry to catch up. “Are you suggesting that she’s the one putting these children in the hospital in the first place? That would mean contacting them months or even years before they die; we have no evidence for that kind of behavior.”
    “That’s not what I’m saying at all,” I said, following her into the elevator. “I’m saying we have it backwards. We thought she was taking something from the children, whether it was their health or their healing power or whatever, which is why she gets healthy and they die. But why does it have to be so complicated? How do you take ‘healing power’ from someone? It doesn’t make sense.”
    “None of it makes sense,” said Ostler. “They’re supernatural creatures who don’t follow any rules.”
    “But they do,” I said. “They always do, whether we understand those rules or not. And the simpler answer is always the best. Mary Gardner isn’t stealing some kind of healing power, she’s targeting already-sick children and giving them her own illnesses.”
    Ostler turned to me, paying real attention for the first time that morning. “That would mean…”
    “It explains everything,” I said. The elevator stopped on our floor, and we stepped into the hall. Potash was already there, telling the same thing to Kelly, but they stopped to listen to me. “It explains why she targets kids,” I continued, “because it’s easier to give them her sickness. It explains why the deaths all appear to be natural causes—because they are natural causes, just like any other disease. It explains why they die on such a weird schedule—because she’s not the one killing them. She’s just giving them a disease and then that kills them.”
    “But the timing is too close—the correlation between her health and their deaths is too close to be random,” said Ostler. “There might be a variance of a few days, but that doesn’t account for some of the seven-week gaps we’ve seen in the timeline.”
    “This theory explains that, too,” I said. “The Withered are defined by what they lack, and we know from Brooke that Mary Gardner lacks health. We thought she had to steal it from other people, but then why steal health from sick children? That’s like … eating gum off the bottom of a table: it might help a little, but it’s the most inefficient way of getting the job done. Our problem is we didn’t think it through: if she doesn’t have any health, what is she going to do? Think about it. What’s going to happen to her all the time ?”
    Ostler closed her eyes, in an expression that said she felt as stupid as I did when I finally figured it out. “She’s going to get sick.”
    “Exactly,” I said. “We were so worried about the gun in those photos, we didn’t pay attention to the real clue: she’s wearing a paper face mask in almost all of them, even at home. If she has no health of her own she’s going to get sick all the time. She wears a face mask and slathers herself in hand sanitizer and does every