The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  Darby drank the water in one long, burning gulp, realizing her foolishness at having rushed blindly into the backyard. The sniper had had the advantage. He had been hidden somewhere in the trees and using a scope. She could have been shot. She could be lying dead on the ground right now while forensics took pictures of her body.

  'How are the dogs?' she asked.

  'Fine, not a scratch on them. We put them in the garage.'

  'She kept talking about calling someone named Paula.'

  'You told me that already.'

  There was something off about Lu. Maybe the clothes had something to do with it. For some bizarre, unfathomable reason, the man had adopted the cartoonish attire seen in old American cop shows: a fedora and belted London Fog raincoat worn over a cheap navy-blue suit.

  She held the empty glass by her side, wondering how Lu was going to play it. Only two choices: play it cool or come down on her hard.

  'Any leads on the shooter?'

  'We're canvassing the neighbourhood, speaking to people.' He sighed, then shook his head in frustration. 'So far, nobody's seen anyone heading into the woods carrying a sniper rifle.'

  Darby stared at him. Did the man actually think someone would be carrying a fully assembled sniper rifle? Didn't he know that a sniper rifle was carried, disassembled, inside a small carrying pack that could be easily concealed underneath a jacket?

  'What about spent brass?' she asked. 'You find any casings in the woods?'

  'We found your shell casings all over the backyard.'

  'I told you what happened. Three times.' There was no anger in her voice, just a calm, neutral matter-of-fact tone. 'What don't you understand?'

  'You haven't explained who fired at you.'

  'I don't know. I told you I didn't see him.'

  'You said this person was using a rifle with a silencer and a scope.'

  'That's right.'

  'To know that, you must have seen him.'

  'I'll tell it to you again,' she said. 'I didn't hear any of the shots. That means a silencer was used. To get off a headshot in this wind, to shoot Smith's wife twice in the leg, you'd need a scope. To tear Smith's head off his shoulders you'd need to use a high-powered rifle and ammo. I didn't see any muzzle flashes, so this person was using a flash suppressor, a common piece of equipment on a sniper rifle. All of these facts suggest a sniper. I didn't say anything about seeing the shooter.'

  'You failed to mention that you're conducting an investigation.'

  'That's because I'm not conducting one. I came here to speak to John Smith, catch up on old times. We worked together.'

  'So I was told.'

  Darby waited for the rest of it. She didn't take her eyes off Lu.

  'I made some calls to Boston and spoke to a man named Leland Pratt. He told me that you no longer work for the Crime Services Unit — or the lab, for that matter. He asked me to relay a message to you.'

  'Can I borrow a pen and a piece of paper? This sounds important.'

  'Don't worry, it's short. He said don't bother coming to the lab to collect your things. They'll be mailed to you.'

  'That's wonderful. Tell him thank you.'

  A thin smile, and then Lu said, 'Mr Pratt indicated that you've involved yourself in an investigation. Care to tell me what it is?'

  Darby thought of an old Ben Franklin epigram: One can keep a secret if two are dead. The only person who knew the real reason for her visit was John Smith and, possibly, his wife.

  'I told you. Catching up.'

  Lu popped a cherry LifeSaver on to his small, thin lips. 'An officer will escort you downtown. I'll speak to you later, when you're ready to tell me the truth.'

  'The truth about what?'

  'This investigation you're involved in, these people who followed you here and tried to kill you.'

  Lu held his hand in the air and motioned to someone over her shoulder. She turned slightly and saw a patrolman, a big white dude who hadn't bought a new shirt to accommodate his expanding waistline and ample chins, walking towards her, cuffs in hand.

  She turned back to Lu and, laughing, said, 'You can't be serious.'

  'I am.'

  'What's the charge?'

  'You're carrying an illegal firearm.'

  'I have a licence.'

  'Not any more. Boston PD has since revoked it.'

  'When?'

  'Today. Mr Pratt told me.'

  'This is the first I'm hearing about it.'

  'You can discuss the matter with your attorney,' Lu said. 'You can make the call at the station, after you've been charged.'

  41

  Darby rode in the back of the squad car with her hands cuffed behind her back. She used the quiet time to think.

  Leland had told Lu she was involving herself in an investigation, so the question was: had Leland been told the truth about what had really happened to the Rizzo family? The feds had locked down that information, yes, but there was also the matter of her job offer from Leland on the same day she'd been released from the quarantine chamber. She didn't think it was a coincidence. She was willing to bet the feds had called the acting Boston police commissioner and put some pressure on him to get her back on the job until the investigation was over. Then the Boston PD could do whatever it wanted with her.

  If Leland knew the real story about Charlie Rizzo and his family, he wouldn't have shared it with anyone. Leland knew how to keep his mouth shut. He was a good bureaucratic soldier, maybe one of the best.

  When she reached the station, she surrendered her cell phone, wallet, belt, keys and gun holster. She had already given her sidearm to one of the forensic techs for bullet analysis. Standard procedure. Her items were dropped into a bag and she signed the inventory form.

  After a thorough search, she was booked and fingerprinted. A patrolman escorted her to an interrogation room that smelled of BO and stale coffee. One of the overhead fluorescent lights hummed and flickered on and off.

  The pudgy detective who came in had delicate fingers and an emerald pinkie ring. His brown hair, threaded with grey and white, had side-swept bangs that left little doubt he had punched a one-way express ticket to Gayville.

  After he removed her handcuffs, he cuffed her to an O-ring in the centre of the table.

  'You're joking,' she said.

  The detective left the room without answering.

  The scuffed desk had plenty of reading material: JIMMY MC WAS HERE!!!! TINA HERBERT LIKES BIG DONKEY DICK UP HER POOP-SHOOT. BOBBY K BLOWS HORSES. Someone had managed to write down all the lyrics to Van Halen's 'Running with the Devil'.

  A clock hung on the wall: 9:20 p.m. She rested the uncut side of her face on her forearm and tried to get some sleep.

  Sometime later, she heard the door open. She propped up her head and checked the clock: 10:33 p.m.

  A new detective, this one a white guy with a big, pie-shaped face, dropped a pad of paper on the other side of the desk. He had bushy black hair and a thick moustache straight out of a seventies porn movie. Or maybe she was thinking this way given the high-grade erotica she'd just read on the desk.

  'My name is Detective Steve Kenyon.'

  Steve Kenyon, she thought. Not a bad porn name. Steven Cannon would be better — or Cannon Kenyon, the Thunder from Down Under.

  He sat down, the chair straining under his considerable weight, and slipped a gold pen from his shirt pocket.

  'You ready to talk?'

  'Can't. I could go to jail. I signed forms.'

  'Forms? What forms?'

  'Legal forms. Had the United States Army insignia stamped on it. In gold.'

  Up-and-coming seventies porn star Steve Kenyon looked confused.

  'Call Sergeant-Major Glick,' she said. 'He's in charge of the BU Biomedical Facility.'

  He rubbed his bushy moustache.

  'That's in Boston,' she said.

  'I know where BU is.'

  'Good. Go and call him. I should warn you, he's a tough guy to get a hold of, so if he's unavailabl
e, ask for a man named Billy Fitzgerald. He's supposedly their number two guy, but I don't believe it.'

  'We're not calling anyone.'

  'I can't answer any questions until you bring Glick or Fitzgerald here. I need their permission.'

  'You need to play ball with us.'

  'And you need to come up with a better tough-guy routine. Try using a deeper voice. That'll really make my ovaries quake in fear.'

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. 'I heard you were a pisser.'

  'You have questions, and I want to answer them. I really do. But I can't for legal reasons. Bring in Glick or Fitzgerald or anyone else from the place, and we'll answer your questions together, make it one big party here in Nahant.'

  'I think you need some time to cool down.'

  'You really should make that call.'

  He stood.

  'Speaking of which,' Darby said, 'I'd like my statutory phone call now. I'd like to speak to my lawyer.' The holding cell was the size of a closet and held two bunk beds bolted to the wall. The opposite corner had a stainless-steel toilet built into a sink cabinet, one of those oh-so-clever advancements to save space in jail cells. It smelled of Lysol and urine.

  Darby folded her jacket and, using it as a pillow, lay down on the bottom bunk.

  She had spoken to her lawyer. He said not to worry; he could get the weapons charge dropped. But he couldn't do it until the morning, when he could get in front of a judge, so she was looking at spending the night in the Nahant Inn. Lu would be forced to let her go tomorrow — unless he manufactured some other charge. She wouldn't put it past him.

  The weapons charge was a bullshit move. Lu had played it because he wanted in on the investigation. He had sniffed around and found a possible opportunity to advance himself, get transferred to someplace more exciting; with a better-paid job, he could stop buying used police costumes at the discount stores.

  So now she had to play a mental version of the duelling gunslingers. She imagined Lu standing across from her on a gritty road in some dusty mining gown plucked straight out of a John Wayne Western. No need for guns on this ponderosa: the weapon used here was sheer stubbornness; it was a battle of wills to see who would buckle first. She wondered how much experience the man had with the most intractable people on the planet, the species known as 'Irish Catholic'.

  Good luck, she thought, grinning. Darby closed her eyes and settled in for a long night.

  42

  Nahant PD's complimentary continental breakfast came early, at 6:00 a.m., served on a cardboard tray. Darby looked over the selection: soggy white toast, a mealy apple and powdered scrambled eggs, all of it wrapped under cellophane beaded with steam. She had settled on the apple when Detective Lu appeared.

  His fedora and belted raincoat were gone, but he wore another cheap suit, this one black and made of some polyester-rayon blend designed to resist wrinkling and repel stains. The white shirt beneath it, though, was wrinkled. Was it the same shirt he had worn yesterday? Maybe. He had worn that atrocious-looking pink and purple striped tie yesterday, no question.

  Lu, his hands deep in his pockets, jingled his keys and spare change as he stared at her through the bars. His eyes were bright and alert. Focused.

  'Ready to play ball?'

  'Sure,' she said between mouthfuls. 'You want to be the pitcher or catcher?'

  'I was thinking of bringing you on as a consultant.'

  'For what?'

  'This case you're involved in.'

  'You should loosen your tie. It's cutting off the oxygen to your brain, making you delusional.'

  'I'm trying to help you here.'

  'No you're not,' she said, tossing the remains of the apple into the toilet. 'You're here to make a last-ditch effort to find out what's going on because the case is about to be yanked from you, and you've just seen your lottery ticket go up in flames.'

  A panicked anger flashed behind Lu's eyes.

  'Who was it?' she asked. 'Feds or Secret Service?'

  Lu said, 'What's the federal government's interest in what happened to John Smith?'

  Darby grinned, letting him hang on the hook for a moment.

  'Don't know,' she said. 'Maybe you should ask the feds or whoever's here.'

  'The state of Massachusetts takes its gun laws very seriously,' Lu said.

  'I'll take my chances in front of the judge.'

  'I don't think the judge is going to look too kindly on the fact that you used hollow-point ammunition. Judges take that sort of illegal ammo very seriously, as I'm sure you know. But I'm willing to drop the charges if — '

  'Talk to my lawyer.'

  'The feds will use you. You're a fool if you think they're going to allow you into their investigation.'

  'You're right. They won't. But that doesn't change the fact that you're an asshole.'

  Lu stiffened.

  'We're done talking,' she said. 'Let me know when my lawyer arrives.'

  Lu didn't move away from her cell. He stood there, red-faced and dejected, running through his options and trying to calculate his next move while knowing, deep down, he had lost.

  A moment later, he turned and motioned for one of the guards. A patrolman came and unlocked her cell.

  Lu slipped a LifeSaver past his lips. 'Your lawyer is here.'

  Darby grabbed her jacket and followed Lu out of the holding pen and into a maze of busy cubicles. Phones were ringing everywhere, but the people seated at the desks or standing in doorways — even the ones huddling near the row of coffee-makers on the far side of the warm room — had stopped whatever they had been doing or saying to look at her. Some took quick glances while others stared.

  'In here,' Lu said, holding open a grey-painted door.

  Darby stepped inside the boxy conference room and came to a full stop when she saw who was seated at the table.

  43

  Her lawyer, Martin Freedman, was a squat, round man with a hawk-shaped nose, bald on top and uncombed tufts of salt-and-pepper hair feathered over small ears. Every time Darby met the man at his downtown Boston office, Freedman would have his liver-spotted hands resting on top of the battered brown leather portfolio he'd carried with him since law school. Freedman would always smile, flashing his capped teeth, and she could usually smell his cologne and spot a few stray dandruff flakes on the shoulders of his finely tailored suit jacket.

  The man sitting at the table was tall and extremely fit and wore a black suit and dark blue shirt without a tie. He bore a striking resemblance to the insanely good-looking quarterback for the New England Patriots; but, unlike Tom Brady, this man had thick dirty-blond hair and the most interesting eyes she had ever seen: one a dark green, the other blue.

  Her old partner, Jackson Cooper, rose unsteadily, his eyes widening with shock. At first she was confused, then she realized how she looked: face cut up from glass and wounds crusted with blood; her jeans and the front of her shirt and jacket matted and smeared with dried blood that had turned black and crusty. Blood and skin and hair and probably brain matter from John Smith's exit wound; blood from working on the man's wife as she bled out.

  'Good morning, Dr McCormick,' Coop said. 'I take it those wounds I'm seeing aren't a result of your stay here.'

  'No, they're not.'

  Coop turned to Lu, who was still standing in the doorway. 'You can leave now, detective.'

  The door shut with a soft click. Coop looked at her, worried.

  'Since you're standing upright, I'm going to assume you're okay — physically, at least.' He had lowered his voice and was speaking quickly. 'You can tell me what happened later. Grab a seat. We don't have much time.'

  'How did you find me?'

  'Leland.'

  'He called you?'

  He shook his head. He had plunked back down in his chair.

  'When you called and left me that voicemail, the number for the lab was on my Caller-ID,' he said, working a thick elastic band off a battered manila folder. 'So I assumed y
ou'd been reinstated and went back to the lab and bumped into Leland. Fortunately, he came in early today. Unfortunately, he told me about what happened to you last night here in Nahant. We'll talk about that later, after you've spoken to your lawyer.'

  'Is he here?'

  Coop nodded. 'Right now he's talking to Lu and the sergeant,' he said. 'I ran into him in the lobby, told him who I was and why I was here, and he told Lu I was his legal assistant. We've got ten minutes. Sit down, will you? They've probably posted a guy outside to try and listen in.'

  She pulled out the chair as Coop flipped through the messy stack of papers. Three months ago, those same hands had held her as the rain drummed against the walkway outside the front door of his home. He had pressed his lips against hers, hungry, as if he needed to steal something from her before he left; her heart was still beating in her throat when he pulled away. She saw him smile and she smiled back and then he said he had to go. Later, over the phone, he had told her he was never coming back.

  But here he was sitting in front of her, the first time she'd seen him since he had left three months ago, and the adrenalin-filled joy surging through her body was slowly drowning in a piercing sadness, Darby knowing he hadn't flown halfway around the world and tracked her down to say hello.

  'Take a look at this,' he said, slapping a sheet of paper on the table. The sound snapped her back to the windowless, hot room with its dingy white walls. His breath was stale and his eyes weary and bloodshot from the red-eye flight.

  Darby looked at the sheet of paper and saw a laser-printed picture — a headshot of the smug army prick she'd met at the BU Lab, the one who forced her to sign the legal forms, Billy Fitzgerald. He wasn't dressed in combat fatigues or military gear, just a suit and a tie.