The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  No, the men in their dark-windowed sedans had come after Leyla for some other reason, and there was only one connection she could think of that made any sense. Sean.

  Her brother was never able to speak plainly about the work he did for the government, but Cait knew he worked in intelligence, and she had the impression that his covert operations involved infiltrating terrorist organizations and training camps in the Middle East. If dark-suited men had come after Leyla in a car with untraceable plates—after watching Auntie Jane’s house and looking for an opening—Cait figured it had to be connected to Sean somehow.

  A strange unreality settled over her. The world looked different to her today. It even felt different on her skin. What would the police do now? If the canvass of the neighborhood turned up nothing, what would they do?

  Before leaving her aunt and uncle’s house, she’d retrieved her car charger from the trunk. Now, one hand on the wheel, she plugged in the phone to charge and called Channel 7, then asked to be transferred to Lynette’s office. As she waited on the line, she glanced at the dashboard clock. Noon had come and gone, and she realized Lynette had probably already left for the day. On the weekends, she usually only worked mornings.

  “Lynette Thompson.”

  “Good, you’re still there,” Cait said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Sorry. It’s Cait McCandless. Listen, you wanted me to save the A-Train story for you. But I’ve got something else now, and it can’t wait.”

  She told the story as quickly and succinctly as she could. Lynette stopped her only twice to ask questions—one about the untraceable license plate on the car out front and the other a more personal inquiry.

  “Do you have anyone who can come stay with you?”

  Was Lynette asking her if she had friends? The question troubled Cait, because she had no clear answer. Of all the kids she’d gone to school with, only a handful of those relationships had survived into adulthood. Of those, two lived out of state and one out of the country entirely. Miranda Russo had remained local, but had gotten married while Cait had been in Iraq, and they had seen each other only once since she’d come home—an awkward lunch in which Cait had realized that they didn’t really know each other anymore. Her best friend in high school had been a guy named Nick Pulaski; they had stayed in touch, but Nick had grown up to be an unreliable burnout who smoked far too much pot. There were only three people she still kept in touch with from her time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but those were e-mail and Christmas card relationships, far more about the time they’d spent together than the lives they now lived.

  Then there was Jordan, of course. These days he was probably her closest friend. And in any inventory of the people she might call when she was in trouble, she’d have to include Ronnie Mellace. She and Jordan and Ronnie had been inseparable during their stint together in Iraq. But it wasn’t like Ronnie lived down the street.

  “There are people I could call,” Cait told Lynette. “My aunt and uncle live here in Medford. But I’m fine.”

  Cait glanced in the rearview mirror at the police car, and then at Leyla’s car seat. She could see Leyla’s right hand, open and relaxed, and knew the baby had started to fall asleep.

  “If you come into the office—”

  “I don’t want to leave my daughter with anyone, Lynette. Not right now.”

  “How about if I send someone to you? We can do the piece at your place. Who do you want to interview you? Aaron’s off today, but you’re friendly with Sarah Lin, right?”

  “Yes. Sarah would be perfect. Do me a favor, though? Can you put Jordan on camera for this?”

  “I don’t think he’s still here,” Lynette said.

  “He’ll come in for it. I can call him myself, if you want.”

  “You’ve got enough to think about,” Lynette replied. “I’ll take care of it. We’ll run it on the six o’clock broadcast, but we’ll want to tease it at five. Does three o’clock work for you?”

  “As soon as they can get here,” Cait said.

  She turned into the driveway of the house on Boston Avenue where she rented the first-floor apartment. The bright green VW bug in the driveway belonged to David, the Tufts graduate student who lived upstairs.

  “Cait,” Lynette said.

  “Yes?”

  “I won’t try to tell you there isn’t exploitation in what we do—you know better—but you’re doing the right thing, publicizing it like this. We’ll tell the story, and if anyone saw anything useful, they’ll call in. Meantime, I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  “Thank you,” Cait said.

  They exchanged awkward good-byes and Cait ended the call. She killed the engine and sat in her car, listening to the engine ticking as it cooled. After several long seconds, she realized the car should not be so quiet, and she turned to find that Leyla had fallen asleep. Once again, her daughter’s schedule would be messed up all day.

  But she was safe, and beautiful, and alive.

  Josh pushed back from the computer and rubbed at his eyes. Gray afternoon light filtered through the window, yet it felt like midnight to him. He needed sleep, but he wasn’t going to get it anytime soon. The Maine State Police had given him and Chang more than enough space to work—a recently renovated room full of cubicles that hadn’t yet been reoccupied. They were pretty much on their own. It was nice to have the privacy, but with the gray skies and the light rain that had begun to fall outside, and the quiet inside, he had to keep himself alert with coffee and a constant reminder that there was a child out there in the hands of a stranger. The Kowaliks would be horrified if they could see him looking drowsy behind the computer.

  On the other hand, the search and the investigation continued at full speed. He and Chang didn’t know the territory, so—thus far—the FBI had been put into a management position. Down in Florida, Turcotte had been moving state and local police around like chessmen, searching for the two remaining suspects now that Gharib al-Din was apparently in Maine and Karim al-Jubouri was dead. In Maine, with Josh’s input, Chang was doing the same with state cops and FBI agents out of two separate New England bureau offices. They were questioning the hospital staff and checking surveillance cameras to see if they could track the vehicle that al-Din had used for his getaway.

  And they had nothing. How could all of these departments and agencies be focused on these guys and not come up with anything truly useful? Even what little had been in the Black Pine file that Norris had turned over to Turcotte had given them next to nothing. Al-Din had been born in Basra, had been a militant Sunni since emerging from the womb, and was considered a jihadist. Big fucking surprise. He had dropped off the radar three years before, after a bomb had exploded in the London Tube, killing six people. Black Pine had connected al-Din to the bombing, but the file provided no supporting evidence.

  And this was the FBI’s case, not his and Rachael’s.

  When the offer to work for Homeland Security had first come up, Josh had been dubious, and his partner even more so. They had witnessed interagency turf wars too many times to think anyone could make it all run smoothly.

  Then they had sat down with Theodora Wood, the director of the days-old InterAgency Cooperation Division of the Department of Homeland Security. African-American, forty-six years old, attractive and charismatic, but deadly serious about her job, Director Wood had convinced them both with one sentence: “You get to put an end to the pissing contests.”

  A noble cause. A hell of an opportunity. And a chance to put down roots in a community, though it would mean a lot of travel. But Josh knew now that one of the reasons Wood had hired them was that she trusted them not to exert the power of the agency unless all other alternatives had been exhausted. They had to wait for things to get completely screwed up before they could do anything to fix them. At first, Josh had been all right with that, but in practice it could become incredibly frustrating.

  Like now, for instance.

  They knew Ed Turc
otte. The man had the capacity to be a gargantuan asshole, but he knew his job and he did it well. His deployment of his own people and the various law enforcement grunts showed that. He was totally on top of this case. FBI researchers were cross-checking a picture of every suspected terrorist and militant jihadists they could find to try to turn up real names for al-Din’s surviving partners.

  But it still wasn’t how Josh would have done it. The first thing he would have done was throw Norris out. The guy had the best interests of his company, not his country, at heart.

  Arsenault, too. The lieutenant seemed like a decent guy, but SOCOM had no place on this case.

  The second thing he would have done was go back to the Greenlaw house and start over. They had to be missing something. Had the murders been revenge on Colonel Greenlaw? And if so, for what? Something he had done while in the service?

  And how did that connect to the baby al-Din had abducted in Maine? The article Turcotte’s people had turned up in Rolling Stone sounded like crazy talk. Certainly no one had taken it seriously at the time of its publication, despite Rolling Stone’s reputation. The FBI agent the magazine had interviewed—Nixon—had been fired shortly thereafter, according to Turcotte’s researcher, leaving the writer of the article without a reputable source. There had been no follow-up story.

  Still, he couldn’t discount the possibility that somehow the kids—the Greenlaw twins in Florida and the stolen infant in Bangor—really were the connection.

  Josh leaned farther back in the chair. The air conditioner hummed.

  The computer screen went dark as the screen saver kicked in. Josh closed his eyes and pictured the interior of the Greenlaw home. He wished he had the case materials in hand—crime-scene photos, floor plans, phone records, the contents of Greenlaw’s hard drive—but sometimes the answers weren’t to be found in the accumulated information. Chang was focused on the hunt for al-Din and the missing baby. She had FBI and state and local cops at her disposal, but Josh’s mind kept going back to the Greenlaw home. Something had been off in that house … something more than the murder of a family of four.

  The killers had taken a ladder out of the Greenlaws’ garage and used it to climb up to the twins’ second-story bedroom. They’d chosen an open window, obviously, so they would have known it was unlocked before they started climbing. They had cut the screen just enough to remove it and replaced it afterward to disguise their point of entry—

  But what would it matter, if they were murdering the entire family? Had they done that just to confuse the police? It seemed a strangely contemplative choice for the fury of revenge.

  Chang had gone to get them both some coffee, and to check in with the Bangor P.D. Josh could have just waited for her to come back, but his thoughts were moving fast now, so he got up to find her. He’d made it halfway across the room when the door swung open and Chang stepped in, a coffee in each hand.

  She smiled. “Wow. You missed me that much, huh?”

  Any other time, he would have welcomed the chance to flirt. Nala Chang was a very attractive woman, not to mention smart and competent, and the tired rasp in her voice was sexy. But he pushed such thoughts away. A family had been murdered. Children. That horror made any other concerns feel foolish.

  “At the Greenlaw house,” he said. “You were the first one in. Did you happen to take note of the state of the upstairs windows?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Which were open and closed, and which were locked and unlocked?”

  Chang let the question hang for a few seconds, maybe running through the crime scene in her mind.

  “Most of them were open, but even the ones that were closed were unlocked,” she said. “The first floor had been locked up tight for the night, but upstairs … no. They weren’t prepared for anyone trying to use a ladder to get in.”

  Josh frowned. He pictured the house in his mind. “The twins’ window faced the backyard.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there were three other points of entry at the back of the house. The guest room, the bathroom, and the parents’ bedroom. Do you remember if any of those windows were open?”

  “All but the guest room, I think. What’s on your mind, Josh? I can practically hear the gears turning in your head.”

  Josh exhaled, the grim weight of it bearing down on him. “There’s no way we’re finding this baby alive.”

  Chang shook her head, eyes full of hurt and anger. “Don’t you dare say that. Until we find her, you’ve got to keep her alive in your mind. Once you stop hoping, you start to give up on her, in your heart. And I won’t let you do that.”

  All the air seemed to have been sucked from the room, and the space between them felt charged with intimate electricity.

  “You’re right,” Josh said, admiring her fierceness, and wanting even more of it. But he had to focus on the job for now. “And I’m sorry. But we’re dealing with more than guesswork now. Follow me on this. Let’s say you’re al-Din and his buddy. The garage has a side door, okay, so you can get the ladder out without the noise of raising one of the main doors. Then you have to pick a point of entry. Obviously you go to the backyard to cut down on the chance anyone will spot you in the act. Now, there’s no way to tell from the ground which windows are unlocked unless they’re open, but you’ve got three possibilities. Bathroom, boys’ bedroom, parents’ bedroom. Which one are you going to pick?”

  “The room with nobody in it,” Chang said immediately. “Better chance of getting in without waking anybody up prematurely.”

  “Some bathrooms have windows much smaller than the others in the house. What about the Greenlaws’ house?”

  “A little smaller, maybe, but you could fit through.”

  “And if I’m remembering the layout of the property, the house is canted at a slight angle, right? The corner with Michael and Neil’s bedroom is closer to the street, not to mention that the neighboring house on that side is closer. So wouldn’t you say their window was more of a risk than either of the other two open ones?”

  “So why go through the boys’ window?” Chang asked. “Unless …”

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “Unless the boys were the target all along. They climb up the ladder, slit the screen, suffocate Michael and Neil, then put the screen back in place. If they’re quiet enough, they can go right out the front door, put the ladder back, in its place, and in the morning the parents will think they forgot to turn the dead bolt the night before, if they even notice in the midst of the screaming.”

  “God,” Chang whispered. “I knew something was off. It didn’t make sense to me that they would start with the children instead of the parents, who would be harder to subdue if they woke up. It would have made more sense to suffocate the parents—”

  “If the parents had been their target,” Josh said. “But if we’re right, then they never intended to kill Mr. and Mrs. Greenlaw at all. If they hadn’t woken up, the parents would still be alive. That’s why the suspects had to clear out of their apartment in Fort Myers on such short notice, leaving so much behind. They didn’t expect to have to blow town so fast.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it. But why?” Chang asked. “These guys are supposed to be terrorists, right? They’ve set up a cell in Fort Myers and obviously have some kind of operation in mind. But now they’re killing kids in Florida and stealing babies in Maine. To what end?”

  “Unless that is the operation,” Josh said, cold dread forming a block in the pit of his stomach. Could these lunatics actually believe in what the now-dead Agent Nixon had called the “Herod Factor”?

  He rushed back to the cubicle the state police had given him and tapped a key to clear his screen saver. He had already been logged on to the ViCAP database and now he maximized that window, bringing it up to fill the screen. He typed the keywords child, suffocation, screen, and the phrase point of entry.

  “Why would Gharib al-Din abduct an infant from the maternity ward?” Josh asked. “That’s what we’ve been asking
ourselves, right? But let’s narrow the focus. Why would he fly to Bangor from fucking Florida to do that?”

  “He had orders from someone,” Chang replied.

  Search results filled the screen of his laptop, all of them with case numbers, dates, and the first couple of sentences of the report. The third result down caught his eye and he double-clicked to open the file.

  “Columbus, Ohio,” he said, glancing up at her.

  “What about it?” Chang asked.

  “Isla Rostan, nine months old, suffocated in her crib,” he said, looking back down at the screen. “Investigators figured it was SIDS until small slits in the window screen were discovered, suggesting someone had entered the house. The baby was murdered, the killing made to look like just another tragedy.”

  Chang blanched. “Holy shit. It really is about the kids?”

  Josh stared at the screen. “We need to call Voss and Turcotte. Right now.”

  Cait sat in the plush burgundy chair in her living room, listening for any chirp or whimper from Leyla’s room, but the only sounds came from the breeze that flowed through the windows and the creak of floorboards in the upstairs apartment. Her second-floor neighbor seemed busy up there today, and she had decided he must be cleaning. Maybe he had a date coming over tonight, or maybe he had just gotten sick of living in a dirty apartment. Cait knew how he felt. She ought to be cleaning herself, but she knew that Leyla would wake up the second she started.

  Whoever answered Sean’s phone earlier had said she would get a call within twenty-four hours. The deadline was still far away, but she needed her brother more than ever, so she tried him again.

  As she listened to the ringing on the other end of the line, a cold feeling of dread crept over her. The ringing continued and she began to wish she had counted the rings from the outset. After a time, the call simply ended, with no answer and no voice mail picking up.