The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  Tick tock. The sound inside her head now and itching her skull. One final place left to search: the hall past the basement door. She moved down it, saw that it led to a small bathroom and a garage door.

  Tick tock. It was too goddamn hot in here. She decided to leave the garage alone for now and made her way quietly back to the dining room, to the thermostat. She pressed the up button. The temperature didn't go any higher. It had been set at maximum.

  Tick tock. She was sweating and something wasn't right.

  Why the hell…

  Tick.

  … had the temperature…

  Tock.

  … been set so high?

  Tick.

  Thump.

  Bweeeeeeep.

  The sounds were coming from upstairs.

  54

  Darby had her gun raised, pointed up at the first-floor hall of beige-coloured walls. Lots of sunlight up there — the bedroom doors must be open, she thought, and she saw at least one opened door past the banister of decorative white spools. It was a bathroom. She shifted her stance and caught sight of a blue shower curtain hanging on a metal rod.

  She made her way around the lower railing, noticing that the thick burgundy runner was the same as the one in the Rizzos' Dover house. Then she stood in the foyer waiting for the sounds she'd heard to repeat — the soft thump of something solid bumping into a wall or floor. Like a body. A body shifting around in a hiding spot.

  But that other sound, that nasal squeal… her mind tried to identify it, this foreign sound, and came back empty-handed.

  The first-floor layout came back to her: the bedroom Mark Rizzo had used as a home office was to the right of the top step. Across from that was the master bedroom, and at the opposite end of the hall, two more bedrooms. The twins had used the one on the left, the bigger of the two.

  Darby took the first step, aware of her shadow against the wall, aware of the blind corners waiting for her up there. Another step and Coop's parting words about her luck having to run out at some point came back to her, and the warm feelings his presence had created vanished, swept away by the tide of adrenalin washing through her pounding heart, while her mind was racing, trying to identify that goddamn sound, where was it coming from and what the hell was it?

  She turned the corner and saw the last part of the stairs. Saw no one, just more beige walls and two opened doors. She moved up the steps quietly, listening, then swung into the doorway on her immediate right, Mark Rizzo's old home office. The blue-striped wallpaper that had covered the walls was gone now, replaced with bright blue paint. A nursery. A half-assembled crib in the corner, the instructions and other parts waiting to be installed lying on a dark throw rug.

  The monitor strapped to her arm didn't flicker once.

  Moving inside the master bedroom, she found the bed made and folded laundry sitting on top of a long bureau waiting to be put away. The master bath was empty, the big jacuzzi still there, clean, just like everything she'd seen downstairs. Everything up here clean and tidy, no sign of a struggle, and the air felt just as hot, if not hotter. The thermostat on the wall just outside the bathroom doorway also read 95 degrees.

  Bweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.

  Scattering sounds followed, both noises coming from the other end of the hall.

  Darby moved out of the master bedroom with her gun raised and checked the next bathroom and found it empty. After a quick glance over the banister to look into the foyer — clear — she moved against the far wall and looked into the bedroom where Charlie Rizzo had once lived. Instead of Star Wars bed sheets and Darth Vader posters hanging on the scratched white walls, she found a room painted a deep yellow, almost gold in the sunlight. Across from the end of a bed covered with a purple comforter was the closet door, painted white now and covered with Polaroid-type snapshots of a frightened young woman.

  Darby looked away, her gaze dropping to the fingers of blood that had soaked the carpet near the bottom of the closet door. She turned away from the images and swivelled around the doorway of the other bedroom, found bunk beds with tangled sheets and more Lego pieces scattered across a tan carpet. Curtains covered the windows and she heard the wind slapping against the house and shaking the panes of glass as she moved inside to check the closet. The twin doors were already open, the tiny walk-in area holding children's clothes.

  Three quick steps and she moved across the hall and stepped into the gold-coloured bedroom with her gun raised and got a closer look at the pictures.

  Eight or so had been tacked to the wood, and each one featured the same young woman with lightly tanned skin and long blonde hair tied behind her head with a red elastic band. A teenager, Darby guessed, looking at the terror on the young girl's face — Jack Casey's daughter. Had to be Sarah Casey. Darby saw the resemblance in the face, the same blue eyes and the same angular nose with the small bump on the tip.

  Here was a close-up photograph of duct-tape wrapped around the girl's wrists. Darby saw chipped red nail polish on the long, slender fingers, and she looked up at another picture, this one a snapshot of the teenager's frozen scream. One snapshot showed the tape around her mouth and another showed blood smeared across a white T-shirt, the fabric strained as if being pulled.

  Scattering sounds from behind the door, like dry twigs scraping across wood.

  She gripped the doorknob knowing that whatever waited for her behind it was dead. Casey had told her this group would send a message and as she turned the knob she prayed to God the man was right, that she'd wasn't about to find his daughter's body.

  Darby threw open the door as she stepped back, raising her gun.

  A nude body covered with bloody red welts and missing patches of skin sat on the floor of the closet, underneath bright and colourful clothing draped across hangers. Not a woman, not Casey's daughter. Male, one with wild, curly black hair matted with dried blood and sweat. Darby looked at the face, expecting to see Mark Rizzo, and found it covered by some alien-looking spider the size of a dinner plate. It reminded her of the face-huggers from the Alien movies. This thing had a long, pale, cylindrical body, and its eight spiked legs were gripping the man's swollen and bloody cheeks while a pair of big red mandibles or pincers or whatever the Christ they were called were busy feasting on the few remaining scraps of soft meat left in the eye sockets. And it had inserted its backside into the gaping mess of the lips and was pumping away as if it was laying eggs.

  Darby backed away, bile shooting up her throat, and saw more spiders — Tarantulas and smaller, quicker ones — crawling across the body and into the darker recesses of the closet. Another one of those big, pale, ugly things sat on a shoe rack, its oily black eyes staring at her. Then it let out that awful alien scream, like it was going on the attack.

  The spider jumped into the air with a frightening speed and as she leaped back she felt it land on her vest with a considerable thump. She moved to swat it away with a quivering hand but the spider had already bounced off her chest. Darby stared after it, cold dripping through her limbs like pieces of ice as she watched it scurry underneath the bed to hide.

  55

  If Jack Casey had seen the pictures, his face didn't show it. Darby thought the man's face didn't show much of anything, just a perfect stillness as if his flesh had been replaced by concrete.

  He sat at the long dining-room table with Sergey and another man, a fed, who wore a pair of headphones and studied a small laptop hooked up to a white cordless phone. It had been removed from the kitchen wall and brought in the room.

  They had shut off the heat and opened the windows, but everyone was still sweating.

  Sergey checked his watch. Ten minutes till one. Darby knew the time because she could see the stove's digital clock from the archway where she stood.

  She heard the front door opened and then shut softly.

  Coop came into the kitchen. 'We need to talk about the spiders,' he whispered.

  Darby nodded, knowing that the bedroom was infected, that the pair of Bost
on medical technicians had dressed head to toe in biohazard gear to collect the spiders from the body before hauling it away. One of the spiders was a deadly Black Widow. She knew because she had collected it from the body, had seen the distinctive red hourglass on its tiny, black-rounded belly before dropping it inside a collection jar.

  Coop said, 'Leland isn't going to let his people into the autopsy room with those things still crawling around on him.'

  'I know. That's why we're going to do it.'

  'Do what?'

  'Examine the body.'

  'Why us?'

  'The FBI's lab people are tied up in Florida, so I offered to examine the body.'

  Coop's face drained of colour.

  'Don't like spiders?' she asked with a grin.

  He didn't have a chance to answer. The house phone was ringing.

  Darby moved back to the archway and saw Sergey picking up his headphones. Casey looked at the phone but didn't pick it up. It rang three times before the man seated in front of the laptop gave Casey a hand signal.

  'Hello… Yes, this is Jack Casey.'

  Casey didn't speak, just listened, his face as unreadable as stone. Darby watched him as she counted off the time in her head.

  Twelve seconds later, he pulled the phone away from his ear.

  Silence. Sergey's face was ashen. The other man stared at his computer screen. Casey placed the cordless phone back on the table as if it were made of delicate crystal and then stood, knees cracking. Darby followed him with her eyes until he disappeared somewhere inside the living room. Sergey got to his feet as the front door opened, a Secret Service agent saying something about moving back.

  Darby pulled out the seat next to the only man left, a fleshy white guy with a shaved head that looked shiny under the chandelier's bright lights.

  'Couldn't get the trace,' the guy said, shaking his head. 'Wasn't on long enough.'

  'You heard what was said?'

  The man licked his lips, nodding. 'His daughter was on the phone. Crying. She told her father that she'd left a gift for him in the upstairs bedroom, something that he had to see.' 'I'll meet you in town,' Sergey said to her after he came back inside the house. 'I've got to make some phone calls first, to our Boston office. They're going to send over an ERT — Evidence Response Team — to process the bedroom.'

  'Call Boston PD,' Darby said. 'You can use their lab.'

  'It's a thought.'

  'This group, have they ever done something like this before? Contact you and leave a body with evidence for you to find?'

  'No, this is a first. And that bothers me. They're planning something.'

  'While psychologically torturing Casey.'

  Sergey nodded, but his eyes had grown distant.

  'The pictures upstairs…' Darby said.

  'It's Jack's daughter.'

  'Has he seen them?'

  He nodded.

  'How old?'

  'Twelve,' he said, glancing at his watch.

  'Where's Casey?'

  'On his way to the morgue. He wanted to be there — wants to keep busy.'

  'I need to stop by my house first and grab my forensic kit.'

  'It's already at the morgue. I'll have someone drive you.'

  Sergey had half turned to walk away when she said, 'About the spiders: we need to get them identified so we can have the appropriate anti-venom on hand in case one of us gets bitten here or at the morgue. It's a liability issue, and the guy who runs the place, Ellis, he's got a permanent hard-on when it comes to anything that's a liability.'

  A long tired sigh and he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  'Okay,' he said. 'I'll head in and handle it.'

  Darby went back to the kitchen. She stripped out of her thick white coveralls and gloves, balled everything together and stuffed it in a biohazard bag.

  Casey's Secret Service agent, the Southern guy she knew only as Neal Keats, stood at the front door.

  He read the question on her face and said, 'Mr Casey wants me on you now.'

  'And your name?'

  He smiled. 'Why, Neal Keats.'

  'You used your real name as cover? What if I called the BU Biomedical Lab and asked to speak to you?'

  'They would have forwarded your call to my cell phone. Mr Cooper's already in the car, the black Lincoln Navigator parked at the kerb. I'll escort you.' He moved his right hand close to his mouth and spoke into the wrist mike. 'Bringing out PIA.'

  Darby said, 'PIA?'

  'Pain in the Ass. Fitting, don't you think?'

  Keats had opened the door, about to bring her out, when her cell phone rang. The Caller-ID listed the incoming number as 'unknown'.

  'McCormick.'

  'I see that Mr Casey has left,' said a garbled male voice on the other end of the line. 'Since you've become quite cosy with him, Dr McCormick, I'm going to elect you to be the messenger.'

  She looked up and down at the handful of cars she could see parked along the street.

  'And you are?'

  'Listen carefully. I have someone who wants to speak to you.'

  Darby didn't interrupt the hysterical woman on the other end of the line.

  When the call ended, Darby took in several deep breaths to calm her racing heart.

  56

  The big black Lincoln Navigator drove them to Boston in a wail of sirens and flashing lights. Coop sat next to her, silent, the two of them protected by bulletproof glass, and they watched the cars parting in front of them, trying to manoeuvre to the shoulder to give the Lincoln room to move.

  She didn't tell him about the call, not yet, wanting a moment to process it. And for some reason her thoughts kept sliding back to John Smith. She'd seen him stand up and then his face had been blown apart. Saw it again. A post-traumatic reaction? Maybe. But there was something… off about it. Something that didn't quite gel. She closed her eyes and tried to chase it through the waves of exhaustion, but lost sight of it completely when the vehicle came to a hard stop that made her buck against her seatbelt.

  Through the tinted window and through the darkness outside she could see the familiar rectangular brick building sitting on the corner of Albany Street. Keats waited until he got the all-clear signal, then he drove to the front, stopping in front of a pair of Secret Service agents. They opened the door for her, and then Keats and another agent — one of the big linebackers she'd seen at the BU Biomedical Lab — quickly ushered her and Coop through the building's twin tinted-glass doors and into the lobby of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Medical Examiner. They stayed by their sides as Darby walked with Coop through the long, bland institutional corridors lit up by fluorescent lights.

  Two other Secret Service agents had been posted outside the autopsy suite, along with a federal agent who had a big black rolling suitcase parked next to him.

  An agent with a crooked nose busted from too many fights stepped forward. 'Dr Ellis asked me to tell you to make sure you wear the Nomax gloves and the hoods with the face shield.'

  Darby thanked the man, then headed into the locker room with Coop. She started pulling the gear they needed from the shelves. Keats, she saw, stood outside the door.

  'I'm going to need to pick up some clothes,' he said, stripping out of his suit jacket. 'The only thing I packed was my passport.'

  'I'll take care of it. You can stay with me.'

  They dressed quickly and quietly. She headed to the door and saw him smiling.

  'Feels like old times, doesn't it?'

  She nodded and kissed him once, lightly, on the lips. 'Thanks again for coming. It means a lot. And I'm sorry I dragged you into this.'

  'If the roles were reversed, would you have done the same thing for me?'

  'In a heartbeat.'

  'Then save the Irish Catholic guilt for something else,' Coop said, opening the door and moving across the hall to the autopsy suite.

  57

  Darby followed Coop into the room and found the pair of stainless-steel gurneys e
mpty, the metal surfaces glinting underneath the bright lights. Nobody in here except for her and Coop — and the spiders.

  They sat inside sealed specimen jars, on the long metal shelves that were mounted above the sinks. At least a dozen jars, each one containing a single spider. Most of them were big, some the size of a man's fist. A handful lay still at the bottom of their jars while the others were busy exploring, fluttering their long, hairy legs against the smooth glass.

  But there was one that dwarfed the others, the massive, pale, ugly, alien-looking spider/scorpion hybrid with overdeveloped fangs and legs so ridiculously long it had to be placed in a small fish tank — the same face-hugging thing that had jumped at her and that she'd seen on the face inside the closet at the Rizzo home. It scampered around like it was on fire, its legs, with their spiked, needle-like hair, furiously digging through the inches of sand at the bottom of the tank. Two bricks had been placed on the tank cover.

  Coop leaned in close and said, 'That thing looks like a vagina with legs.'

  'I'll make sure I introduce the two of you.'

  The spider/scorpion hybrid thing started smacking its hairy, oversized pincers together, making that skin-crawling, high-pitched hissing sound she'd heard in the bedroom: Bweeeeeeeeep!

  She heard footsteps clicking across the floor behind her and turned to see an older man with a black pompadour shiny with something like Brylcreem. The clothes hanging on his reedy frame — white shirt, chinos and a tie — were all wrinkled and gave him a slovenly appearance, as if he'd plucked them from the bottom of his laundry basket.

  'Beautiful, isn't she?' their new companion said, gawking at the creepy thing hissing in the tank. 'I've never come across one of these Solpugids before.'

  'Sol what?'

  'Sol-pu-gid. That's their proper name, but they're also referred to as Wind Scorpions, Sun Spiders or Camel Spiders. You can tell it's a Solpugid by its long body with its tactile hairs — and the enormous mouth pincers. I think this lovely lady might be a new species. I've got my fingers crossed.'