by Chris Mooney
'Alpha-One, all teams report ready to go,' Hartwig said. 'We're in position and standing by, over.'
'Acknowledged, Alpha-Two. Prepare to engage.'
'Copy, Alpha-One.'
Darby felt the surveillance van pull away from the curb, stop and turn around. Hartwig locked up the periscope and crouched next to his partner near the van's back doors. Clipped to their belts were stun grenades – also known as flashbangs because of their blinding flash and deafening blast. An explosive entry had been authorized.
Darby watched the black van on the monitor. It still hadn't moved.
Hartwig turned to her and said, 'The two of you are to stay in here until the area is secured, understood?'
The van slowed down.
Hartwig gave the signal to his partner. The van's back doors swung open.
The two SWAT officers jumped out into the light rain, leaving the back doors open. Darby moved out of her seat to get a better view.
SWAT officers were already positioned at the back of the Ford van, their gloved hands on the door – here came another SWAT officer running out from the woods, bringing up his pistol, targeting the driver's side window.
Hartwig gave the hand signal. A SWAT officer yanked on the door handle and the van's back doors open.
Hartwig tossed the flashbang grenade inside, and before Darby shut her eyes, she saw a man in a dark jacket sitting in front of a table holding some type of equipment full of small, blinking lights.
The grenade exploded in blinding light, the blast deafening. Hartwig came around and brought up his weapon, his laser scope targeted on the person's back. He was still sitting in front of the table. He hadn't moved, and his hands were hidden inside his jacket pockets.
'HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD, DO IT NOW, PUT THEM UP AND DON'T MOVE.'
Traveler didn't move.
Darby felt the van come to a sharp and sudden stop. Banville was out of his seat, moving past her. Hartwig rushed into the back of Traveler's van.
'GET YOUR HANDS UP IN THE AIR RIGHT NOW. DO IT.'
Hartwig threw Traveler to the floor.
Darby stepped outside, legs shaking from the time spent sitting. She wanted to be in there with the SWAT officer, wanted to see Traveler's face and look into his eyes when he said Carol's name.
Hartwig stepped out of the van, shaking his head. He said something to Banville.
Coop was standing next to her now. Traveler was lying on the floor. He wasn't moving.
Banville was heading back.
'What's going on?' Darby said.
'It's a dead body bound to a chair,' Banville said. That's what's going on.'
'What? The grenade couldn't have killed him.'
'He's been dead for several hours,' Banville said. 'Someone strangled him.'
'Then what's with all that equipment?'
Banville didn't answer. He had stepped back inside the van, the wall phone already pressed against his ear.
'It's got to be him,' the FBI tech said behind her. 'The listening devices are being picked up in that van. Look, there's an L32 receiver in there.'
'Maybe he's using the equipment to transmit the signal somewhere else,' his partner said.
The commotion and noise, and the sight of eight SWAT team members hovering around the van had drawn the neighbors out of their homes. They stood on the front steps, many of them standing in the rain, wanting to know what was going on.
'Let's secure the scene,' Darby told Coop.
Standing across the street was a girl no older than eight. She was dressed in a yellow rain slicker and held her mother's hand. The girl looked scared, on the verge of tears. Darby was watching her when the van exploded and blew the girl and her mother off the ground.
Chapter 44
An evacuation siren blared over the hospital speakers. Daniel Boyle pushed his way through the crowds of civilians, doctors and nurses running in all directions, people bumping into each other, some falling, everyone scrambling to find an exit, to get away from the dust and smoke filling the hallways.
The ICU waiting room was empty. The ICU doors were opened. Nobody was guarding Rachel's room. The two cops responsible for watching her had either been called away or had decided to leave.
Boyle ran down the hallway. The ICU nurses had left their post. He was alone. He looked through the window to Rachel Swanson's room. She was sleeping.
Boyle pushed open the door with his arm, careful about not leaving any fingerprints.
Hand already inside his breast pocket, he came back with the hypodermic. He clamped the plastic cap between his teeth, exposing the needle, his thumb drawing the plunger higher as he moved to the bed.
Boyle wished he could wake her up, wished he could watch Rachel scream one final time before she started convulsing.
The needle pierced the IV tube. Boyle pushed the air through the line.
A quick wipe of the line using his jacket cuff and he was moving back to the door. Hurry.
Cap back on the needle, the hypodermic tucked back inside his pocket. Hurry.
Out the door and walking swiftly down the hallway, nobody watching -
One of the hospital's security staff was standing next to the nurse's station. The man was dressed in a dark raincoat and wore an earpiece and a lapel mike. He was looking around the space, searching for the wounded when he spotted Boyle.
Boyle ran to him. 'Everyone's gone,' he said. 'It's all clear.'
An alarm sounded from behind the front desk.
The security man turned to look at the monitors. 'What's going on?'
Boyle pretended to study the numbers on the monitor. 'One of the patients has gone into cardiac arrest,' Boyle said. 'I'll take care of it. Make sure everyone gets to the stairwells.'
'You sure I can't help you?'
'No, get going. I can take it from here.'
The security man didn't move.
Very calmly, as if reaching for a pen, Boyle slipped his hand inside his white coat and undid the snap for the shoulder holster. He'd drop the rent-a-cop if he had to. Drop him first and then run for the stairwell.
No need. The security man had left. Boyle watched him leave, then turned the corner and headed for the bathroom. He grabbed his backpack from the trash and made his way toward a cop directing people into the stairwell. Boyle blended into the crowd of civilians and hospital staff.
The morning was filled with rain and sirens. He jogged down Cambridge Street and took the stairs for the T station.
Yesterday, on his way home from Belham, he purchased an electronic T pass at South Station. He swiped the pass through the magnetic card reader, leaving no fingerprints, and stood with the rest of the people watching the chaos below them. Smoke drifted from the crumbled ruins of the delivery garage. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars were coming from all directions. Shards of glass and pieces of brick and concrete covered Cambridge Street. Some of the store windows, Boyle saw, had been blown apart by the blast.
When the train pulled up, Boyle grabbed a window seat, took out his BlackBerry and typed a message to Richard: 'Done.'
To pass the time, Boyle thought about what he would do to Carol Cranmore once she stepped outside her room. Sooner or later, she would come out for her food. They all did.
But he couldn't wait forever, not now. The preparations for leaving were already made. He would have to kill them all soon – tonight, maybe.
Chapter 45
The right side of Darby's face throbbed as she helped Coop lift another wounded SWAT officer onto the stretcher. The officer was unconscious but breathing.
They carefully made their way over the wet debris, heading as fast as they could through the rain and smoke, toward the far end of the street where the wounded lay scattered on the ground. Dozens of them were being treated by the EMTs and doctors rushed in from Belham Hospital. The dead ones lay still under blue tarps weighed down by rocks.
Darby eased the officer onto a gurney. She was about to head back out when she spotted Evan
Manning kneeling on the ground, lifting up a blue sheet to examine the face of one of the dead. She pushed her way through the crowds of medical staff shouting orders over the wail of the approaching sirens, the screaming and the crying.
She grabbed Evan by the arm. 'Did you find Traveler?'
'Not yet.' He seemed genuinely surprised to see her. 'What happened to your face?'
'I was knocked down by the blast.'
'What?'
'It's too loud here. Come this way.'
Darby led him across the street and into the woods. The leaves protected them from the rain. It was quieter in here but not by much.
'I tried calling you on your cell,' Evan said, wiping the water away from his face.
'I'm pretty sure I broke it when I fell. What's going on with Traveler?'
'All the roads are blocked off, but so far, we haven't found him.'
'In order to have set off the bomb, he'd have to be close by, wouldn't he? We need to make sure the cops at the roadblocks are checking everyone they see. He could still be somewhere around here – he could be walking away right now.'
'We're checking everyone. Listen, I've got to leave. I'm going to be tied up in Boston. It doesn't look good.'
'What's going on in Boston?'
'There was an explosion inside your building. I don't know all the details yet.'
Suddenly Darby had to sit down. There was no place to sit. She leaned back against a tree and filled her lungs deep, the ground shaky beneath her feet.
'Two of our mobile forensic units will be here early tomorrow morning – one here, one at the blast site in Boston,' Evan said. 'We can run the investigation from there. I need to get going. I'll call you later. Where can I reach you?'
She wrote down her mother's home number on the back of a business card and handed it to him.
'Your face is swelling up,' Evan said. 'You should put some ice on it.'
Darby stepped out of the woods and stared at the wounded and the dead. Four bodies – no, five – were under the blue tarps. An EMT was pulling another tarp over the body of another SWAT officer.
She turned away and looked in the direction of where the van had been. Now it was a smoldering black crater. The body of the man she had seen inside the van hadn't been found. Pieces of him were scattered among the debris. They'd be lucky if they ever identified him.
A firefighter dropped his hose. He yelled something she couldn't hear and then all four firefighters were running to the bloodied hand fighting its way out of the rubble.
That could have been me, Darby thought. If I had been standing any closer to the van, I might be trapped or dead.
Coop was heading back with another stretcher – this one holding a young woman. Her limp arms hung over the sides of the stretcher and bumped against the rubble as her lifeless eyes stared up at the dark gray sky, the rain washing away soot and blood from her face.
Chapter 46
By quarter to three, all the survivors had been found and moved. Firemen were still crawling around the blast site; two were standing by with hoses. ATF agents and members of the Boston Bomb Squad, dressed in coveralls and boots, sifted through the debris.
The man in charge of the blast site was Kyle Romano, a former Marine explosives expert and a fifteen-year veteran of the Boston Bomb Squad. He was a big, burly man with a dark red buzz cut and a face scarred by acne.
Romano had to shout over the steady rotor-thump of the news chopper hovering in the sky directly above them.
'It's definitely dynamite,' Romano said. 'You can tell by the way the metal's pitted. We also found pieces of a timer and what appears to be a metal footlocker. Given what you and everyone else told me, once those van doors opened, I'd say it sent a signal to the timer. You know the rest. Now I got a question for you.'
Romano scratched his nose. His face was covered in soot and ashes. 'I was talking to Banville, and he told me this guy you're after kidnaps young women.'
'That's right.'
'This has the markings of a terrorist attack. You pull something like he did today, it's guaranteed to draw attention. This guy you're after, everything about him suggests he doesn't want to be found.'
'I think he's feeling desperate,' Darby said.
'That's the same thing the profiler told me – Manning was his name. Evan Manning.'
'What else did he tell you?'
'Not much. He was talking about the teenage girl that's missing.' Romano shook his head, sighing. 'Poor girl's as good as dead.'
'He said that?'
'Not in so many words.' Romano took a long pull from his water bottle. That's all I know right now.'
'Can I help with something?'
'Yes, you could point me to the piece of metal with the vehicle's VIN number on it. It's buried somewhere in this goddamn mess.'
'I can help with the sifting,' Darby said.
'We've got ATF here to help. Bomb cases are different from the ones you work on – no offense. I've got to clamp down on the scene. Too many people walking around here. Thanks again for your help.'
The vehicle, its windows shattered from the blast, was part of the crime scene. Bomb techs were searching it for scraps of evidence. Darby couldn't drive it.
Darby couldn't find Coop. She'd have to walk home.
The press was everywhere. She walked past them, numb, and headed down a street only to realize it was closed off to allow investigators to sift through the debris.
When she stopped walking, she was standing near East Dunstable Road. There was Porter Avenue. Down the road was St. Pius. Half a mile up the road was the Hill. Sitting high above it was Buzzy's.
The pay phone she had used over two decades ago to make the call was still in the same spot, replaced by a new Verizon model with a bright yellow receiver. Darby wanted to call Leland to see what had happened at the lab. She checked her pockets. All she had was dollar bills. She went inside Buzzy's to get change.
The store was empty except for the teenage girl standing behind the counter. She was watching a news report about the bombing at Mass General on a small color TV set up on top of a mini-refrigerator.
'Could you turn that up?' Darby asked.
'Sure.'
The reporter, who was live at the scene, didn't have much information but he had plenty of visual footage of the bomb that had exploded inside the delivery garage at Mass General. As he talked about eyewitnesses who had described hearing a large, thunderous booming sound, the camera kept playing various footage of the destruction. Darby saw the streets lined with debris and overturned taxis and ambulances. The front half of Mass General, which was made entirely of glass, had been blown apart. When she saw the smoking crater, her first thought was a fertilizer bomb. A fertilizer bomb, if packaged correctly, could have caused the amount of destruction she was seeing on the TV.
Dozens of wounded people were being moved to Beth Israel Hospital. Mass General patients were in the process of being evacuated to other area hospitals. There was no information on how many people had been killed.
'Were you there?'
Darby glanced away from the TV. The teenage girl was talking to her. She wore too much eyeliner and her face looked as though it had fallen inside a tackle box. Her nose was pierced, as were her bottom lip and tongue. Almost every available space on her ears was covered with pierced earrings.
'Were you at the bomb site?' the teenager asked. 'Your clothes are, like, all dirty and ripped and stuff. And you've got blood on you.'
'I was here in Belham.'
'Oh my God, that must have been sooo freaky. Did you see any dead bodies?'
'I need some change for the pay phone.'
Darby plunked her quarters down into the slot and dialed Leland's cell phone. When his voice mail picked up, she tried his home number. His wife answered.
'Sandy, this is Darby. Is Leland there?'
'Just a moment.'
Darby swallowed. When Leland came on the line, she explained what had happened in Belham. Leland
listened without interrupting.
'Erin called me while I was stuck in traffic,' Leland said after she finished talking. 'She said a FedEx package came into the lab early this morning. They brought it downstairs to X-ray and found what looked like a body stuffed inside the box, so they rushed it upstairs. The return address was Carol Cranmore's.'
'Didn't they test it for explosives?'
'I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say they saw the body and decided to rush it upstairs. I'm in the process of pulling the security tapes from the garage and the lobby.
'I was talking to Erin when the package blew up,' Leland said. 'I don't think she made it. Pappy was out in a junkyard in Saugus collecting paint samples when the bomb went off. The blast took out the lab, the evidence lockers… it's all gone.'
Darby wanted to ask about any other survivors but couldn't get the words out.
'I'm afraid I have more bad news,' Leland said. 'The hospital called looking for you a few minutes ago. Rachel Swanson went into cardiac arrest. They couldn't revive her. They're going to do her autopsy this afternoon.'
'He killed her.'
'Rachel Swanson was sick, Darby. The sepsis -'
'Traveler needed to get to her. She was the key to finding him, and the only way he could do it was to create a diversion. What better diversion than bombing the hospital. The explosion creates a sense of panic – people start thinking it's a terrorist attack and run for cover. Nobody's paying any attention. Traveler moved in and killed her. Get someone over there and seal off the room – and pull the ICU security tapes.'
'I already tried. ATF won't allow access,' Leland said. 'I just got off the phone with Wendy Swanson, Rachel's mother. Someone at the New Hampshire lab must have called her. She called us, wanting to know what hospital her daughter was in. I had to tell the woman her daughter was dead.'
'Do you have her number? I want to talk to her about Rachel.'
'That's Banville's job.'
'Banville's going to be tied up at the bomb site here in Belham. I want to talk to the mother to see if I can find out anything about Rachel, maybe figure out why she was selected. She might know something that can help us find Carol.'