The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  'You know him?' he asked.

  Darby nodded, about to tell Coop when she realized they were pressed for time. 'I'll fill you in later. Who is he?'

  'Special Agent Sergey Martynovich. He's a profiler for CASMIRC.'

  She tried to chase the full title through a layer of hazy thoughts and came up empty.

  'Sorry, but what's that again?'

  'Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center,' Coop said, flipping through the papers. 'They deal strictly in crime involving kids — abductions and disappearances, homicide and serial murder. Federal unit, works under NCAVC.'

  Another federal-created acronym, but at least one she knew: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, founded at the FBI Academy and managed by its Behavioral Science Unit.

  Then Coop produced another laser-printed picture, this one of a man dressed in jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt standing on a sunny road with rolling fields behind him. He wore a shoulder holster but she didn't see a badge. He appeared to be scowling directly at the camera, looking downright pissed.

  Her first thought was of a middle-aged Clint Eastwood: square-jawed; glowering and squinting under the sun; thick brown hair swept back from a high forehead. The man in the picture, though, was paler and packed much more muscle than the iconic movie star. This man had long, meaty arms and rock-hard biceps swollen with veins. Either he deliberately wore his T-shirt too tight to show off the definition in his upper chest and shoulders or he was simply just too big to fit into normal clothing. And he was tall — at least he seemed that way in the photo.

  Coop said, 'Have you seen this guy?'

  She shook her head. 'No, just Sergey what's-his-name. Who's this?'

  'Jack Casey.'

  'The former profiler?'

  He nodded. 'Worked with the rock stars of Behavioral Sciences when it first started — Ressler, Douglas, you name it. I'd say Casey's a rock star himself, given what I've read about the guy in the past twelve hours. He worked a lot of high-profile cases but there are two that really stand out.'

  'Miles Hamilton must be one.'

  'Bingo. Did you know that Baltimore's favourite serial killer is about to get a new trial?'

  'Something to do with the FBI lab botching evidence.'

  'Not botched,' Coop said. 'Planted.'

  'By who? Casey?'

  'He worked the Hamilton case. That's public knowledge. What's also public knowledge is that Hamilton killed Casey's wife and the unborn child she was carrying.'

  'Right. He tied Casey to a chair so he could watch,' she said, more to herself than to Coop. The Hamilton case had made national headlines, and the information was coming back to her in spurts, the first of which was the oddly fascinating fact that Miles Hamilton, the only child of a former Baltimore senator, was just a few weeks shy of nineteen when he killed Casey's wife. And just as oddly fascinating was the fact that Hamilton hadn't killed Casey. The serial murderer had left Casey tied to a chair while his pregnant wife bled out, then hopped in his car and drove to the airport. Police caught Hamilton as he was getting off a plane, on his way to his connecting flight to Paris, with a fake passport and a receipt showing the money he had wired from his father's vast bank accounts.

  On the heels of those facts came another titbit she remembered about Casey, this one much more recent. Not that long ago the man had lived and worked here in the state of Massachusetts, on the North Shore, as Marblehead's chief of police. The reason she remembered this fact was that Casey had worked a particular case that had also made national headlines. A serial killer someone in the local press had dubbed 'The Sandman' was murdering families in their sleep. Only he deliberately left one family member alive each time. What had garnered the national attention was the Sandman's methodology: he waited until the police were gathered inside and around the house, then detonated a bomb.

  Coop said, 'Casey retired after Hamilton was arrested. He spent a few years wandering around and then — '

  'He came here,' Darby finished for him. 'The Sandman case, back in '99. You and I had just started working at the lab after it happened.'

  'Right, but the thing is, Casey didn't work it alone. Rumour is he had someone helping him. Another former profiler.'

  'Who?'

  'Malcolm Fletcher.'

  A brief silence followed the name.

  Darby shifted in her chair. 'Does Fletcher have something to do with what's going on with me?'

  'You'd have to ask the feds. Fletcher's prints weren't on those sheets you gave me, but Casey's were. And this guy Sergey's. They both came back as a ten-point match.'

  Coop hadn't jumped on a plane and flown all the way here to tell her that the feds and a retired profiler were involved in what happened to the Rizzo family. He could have emailed the pictures and told her all of this over the phone.

  'What's the rest of it?'

  'I'm consulting with IPS — Britain's Identity and Passport Service office. They're testing integration across the pond with IAFIS. The feds gave us access to their data, so your FedEx package comes along and I'm thinking, "Let's use a real-live demonstration, see if it actually works." So I processed the prints and fed them into the IPS database. Nothing comes back on our end, so it searches IAFIS and I get word of matching prints. I saw the time stamp. It's 2:00 p.m. my time. Keep that in mind.

  'Now, unbeknownst to yours truly, my boss is inside his office speaking to the head of Behavioral Sciences. Here's what's interesting: the fed called my boss an hour before the prints came back, and he's grilling my boss about them, wanting to know where they came from, etcetera, etcetera.'

  'The prints were coded.'

  'Exactly.'

  Darby nodded, not at all surprised. The feds ran and owned the national fingerprint database, and sometimes they put secret alerts on certain prints stored within the system. Case in point: Jack Casey. If an unknown set of prints that matched Casey's were to be fed into IAFIS, the FBI's head honchos would be the first to know, allowing the task force assigned to capture him to mobilize their people and equipment without alerting the inquiring law enforcement agency.

  'My boss hangs up the phone,' Coop said, 'and, naturally, he comes looking for me. Needless to say, he's quite pissed at having one of his consultants feed a set of unauthorized prints into IAFIS without his consent.'

  'I'm sorry, Coop, I didn't mean — '

  He grabbed her hand. 'It's fine. I'm fine. I told him I wanted to try a real-live test, with real prints recovered from real evidence. I got a tongue lashing and that's it. Besides, if these prints hadn't been coded, my boss would have been none the wiser, and you wouldn't be in this mess.'

  He let go of her hand.

  Darby clutched it back. 'Thank you.'

  He winked at her and said, 'Now this third print I found, it doesn't belong to Casey or to any other fed. This one's connected to an old case, a kid — '

  The door swung wide open.

  'Named Darren Waters,' Coop said. 'He's been missing for thirty-four years.'

  44

  The door banged against the wall with enough force to leave a mark. Darby didn't flinch. She sat still, her blood cooling.

  Jack Casey was much older than the man she'd just seen in the pictures; he'd gone from the young Clint Eastwood to the older but still good-looking and still intimidating Clint: face weathered and wrinkled from too many years spent toiling in the sun; grey hair cut short and receding a bit around the temples. Casey was the same height as Coop, somewhere in the neighbourhood of six five, and, despite his age, the former profiler packed an amazing amount of solid muscle. The man looked as if he could lift a small car without breaking a sweat.

  'You,' Casey said, pointing to Coop. 'Get out.'

  Darby said, 'He stays, Mr Casey. Or should I call you Special Agent Casey?'

  The man's gaze narrowed, surprised either that she knew his name or that she had the audacity to go up against his orders. Casey made his way to her, slowly, and when he reached her chair,
he stared down at her, scowling. Unlike Army Boy Billy Fitzgerald, aka Special Agent Sergey Martynovich, the Secret Service agents and other men she'd met who had tried to intimidate her with their tough-guy glares, Casey was the real deal. He was struggling to maintain his composure.

  Good, she thought. That gave her a tactical advantage. Angry people didn't think clearly. They made mistakes. They spilled secrets and painted themselves into corners.

  'McCormick, right?'

  'That's me.'

  Casey put one hand on her chair arm. The other gripped the edge of the desk. He had big hands. Tanned, but rough and callused. A carpenter, maybe. Some sort of trade.

  His brown leather jacket was unzipped, and when he leaned into her, she caught a glimpse of the shoulder holster. If he was back working with the feds, he certainly wasn't dressing like one: jeans, a black T-shirt and work boots.

  'Listen to me carefully, sweetheart.' His voice trembled, struggling to speak clearly over his mounting rage. 'There are two federal agents posted outside this room. You are going to go with them. You are going to sit down with them and answer every one of their questions. If you give them any lip this time, if you so much as accidentally rub up against one, I am personally going to jam an obstruction of justice charge so far up your ass that you won't see daylight again.'

  Darby sighed.

  'It's a good threat. Honestly, it is.' Her voice was calm, a fact that irritated Casey. His crimson-coloured face, growing darker by the second, looked like it was going to explode off his shoulders. 'One small problem, though. You're going to have to put me in front of a judge, and you and I both know you don't want a judge or anyone else to know about this secret little investigation you're running — especially now, given your negligence.'

  'My what?'

  'Your negligence. Your people neglected to tell me that this cult or whoever they are would be following my every move. Your people neglected to tell me that they would try to capture or kill me. If I had known the danger, I wouldn't have gone to see John Smith. The man and his wife might still be alive.'

  Casey swallowed, his eyes growing dangerously bright.

  'And then there's the issue of those army documents I was forced to sign,' she said. 'You had one of your agents impersonate a US Army officer, and he forced me to sign — under duress, I might add — those forged documents.'

  'Serious accusations. Going to be tough to prove.'

  'I have in my possession a portion of the original documentation.'

  Surprise flashed across Casey's face; his eyes widened, just a bit, before he caught himself.

  'Three fingerprints were recovered,' she said. 'Yours and ones that belong to Special Agent Sergey Martynovich, the man who impersonated a US Army officer at the BU Biomedical Lab. The third print, though, was the most interesting one. A missing boy named Darren Waters, who's been missing for — ' She turned to Coop. 'How many years was it again? Thirty-four years?'

  'Thirty-four,' Coop said.

  Darby whistled.

  She looked back at Casey. 'How in God's name did a missing boy's fingerprints — a boy who has been missing thirty-four years — how did his fingerprints manage to get on those forged army forms?'

  Casey didn't answer. Some of the heat, though, had left his glare.

  'You'd better come up with an answer,' she said. 'Judges don't care for the silent treatment. And they don't look too kindly on federal agents who kick someone to the kerb to use as bait. The people I met at the Rizzo house? They followed me to the blast site.'

  Casey tried to hide his confusion. 'When was this?'

  Darby tapped the heel of her palm against her forehead. 'That's right, I forgot. You don't know about that because those two bozos you had parked at the end of my street, the ones in the Chevy Tahoe, York and Blue, they blew their cover. Too bad. If they hadn't, they could have followed me to New Hampshire. Maybe then you'd have in custody at least one of the six men I met there.'

  Casey looked like he was going to make a move to grab her. Snap her in half like a dry branch, toss the broken pieces aside and then go after Coop, who was still seated and staring down at the table, a hand covering his mouth, she knew, to hide his grin. For reasons she never understood, he always got a kick out of it when she was on the verge of blowing a gasket.

  'Doesn't matter,' she said. 'We'll discuss this in front of a judge.'

  Darby sprang to her feet. The sudden movement caught Casey off guard; he stumbled back.

  'See you at the courthouse.'

  She moved past him, to the door. Had her hand on the knob and was turning it when Casey said: 'Those agents were sent there to protect you.'

  Darby swung around and saw Casey standing with his back to her, his hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets.

  'Who are these people?'

  Casey didn't answer. Just arched his back and stared up at the ceiling.

  'You can answer my questions now, or we can do it in front of a judge,' she said. 'A judge is going to ask you why I needed to be protected, and that's going to create all sorts of problems for you, the first of which is explaining that story you manufactured about the Rizzo home exploding from a meth lab. I was there, as you already know, and I saw the dynamite. I'll start there, then walk the judge through everything that's happened, ending with how I almost got my head blown off last night at a former cop's — '

  'Enough,' Casey said, holding up a hand. 'Enough,' he said again, this time in a softer, tired voice. 'You've made your point.'

  He turned around and faced her. Blew out a long stream of air. 'Fine,' Casey said. 'We'll talk, but we'll do it alone.'

  Coop stood, knowing full well she'd fill him in later. He collected his papers. 'I'll wait for you outside, Miss McCormick.'

  Her focus never left Casey. The man's gaze was still pinned on her but he wasn't looking at her. His attention had drifted inward.

  The door shut.

  'Let's hear it,' Darby said.

  45

  'Start with the people I met at the Rizzo house,' Darby said.

  Casey sat on the edge of the desk. 'I should mention that everything we talk about right now is confidential.'

  'I assumed it was.'

  'Glad to hear it. Because if any of this information gets leaked, after the Bureau is done with you, I'm going to use every favour I've accumulated over the years to bury you. I don't take too kindly to being blackmailed.'

  Darby laughed. 'That's what you're calling this?'

  'You've put me in a position where I have no choice but to talk to you. It's the only way I can get you off my back. You've already done enough damage — '

  'Stop right there.' Darby felt her anger ride up her spine like a bullet and she stormed over to him and got in his face.

  She stared straight into those piercing blue eyes expecting to find something cold and hard. She was taken aback by what she found: a sad weariness, a man who appeared to want nothing more than to go home, lock the doors, unplug the phone and bury himself in his bed.

  'Let's get one thing clear right now,' she said. 'I didn't ask to be put in this situation. The New Hampshire SWAT team commander called me. I went into the house and talked to Charlie Rizzo — and it was him, there's no question in my mind. I risked my life, and you and your people kept me locked inside that goddamn quarantine chamber when you knew full well I was no longer a health risk.'

  'That was done to keep you protected.'

  'Bullshit. You needed time to bury the story about what really happened up north.'

  Casey crossed his arms over his chest. 'What do you think the public's reaction would have been if news got out about an attack using nerve gas?'

  'A terrorist attack,' she said.

  'Exactly. It would have been like 9/11 all over again. Every news outlet from across the country would have been camped out in New Hampshire to report around the clock on an attack on American soil using nerve gas. You were an investigator. You know what it's like trying to work a case while reporter
s are trying to crawl up your ass. So I came up with the meth lab scenario. Very plausible, happens all the time.'

  'How'd you get the locals to sign off on it? Did you have your people pose as army officers? Have them sign forged documents and threaten them with the Patriot Act?'

  'Using sarin gas is an act of domestic terrorism,' he said. 'That was our way in. We had to take over the investigation in order to keep your name out of the papers.'

  Bullshit, she thought. There was more to it than that.

  'From day one,' he said, 'my goal was to keep you safe.'

  'But these people somehow still managed to find me.'

  'Yes, I know.'

  My phone. She had left her iPhone in the lap of the thing with the egg-white skin. All of her information was stored inside that phone. Everything. They must have found it when they cut him loose from the tree.

  'When did you plant those listening devices inside my condo?'

  Casey looked genuinely surprised. 'You found bugs in your home?'

  'Only one, as far as I know,' she said. 'On my kitchen phone. Sloppy job, so it was easy to spot.'

  'We didn't do it. I'd like to take a look at that, with your permission.'

  'Tell me why you used me as bait.'

  'I wasn't using you as bait.'

  'Then why would you send me out there without telling me about these people? That they would be watching me?'

  'We kept your name out of this. We thought there was no way for them to find you. The mobile command trailer? The tapes were still there and we pulled them.'

  'And the body in the ambulance?'

  'Gone,' he said. 'They shot the EMTs. I put people on you as a precaution.'

  'Federal agents or Secret Service?'

  'Both.'

  'When were you going to tell me?'

  He didn't answer.

  'How long?' she said.

  'How long what?'

  'How long were you going to have people watch me?'