The Soul Collectors

51

Darby's gaze dropped from Sergey's face to the tops of the man's polished black Oxfords, her head dizzy with calculations.

Francis Levin disappears in '54 and shows up in '81 when he snatches this kid named Zuckerman and Levin's prints are found on a syringe. That's twenty-seven years. And now Casey is here and he's saying the same group is responsible and that's fifty-six years, they've been snatching kids for at least fifty-six years.

Sergey was saying something to her.

'I'm sorry, can you repeat that?'

'I said the only thing we know with any degree of certainty is that they abduct the youngest child of the family. For example, Charlie Rizzo. We know he was the youngest member of his family, so when he was abducted, we made sure his prints were entered into the IAFIS system. Now, I'm not suggesting all of these missing kids who are the youngest family members can be attributed to this group, so that three hundred number could be lower.'

'Or much, much larger,' Darby said. 'There's collateral damage, the people they killed, like John Smith and his wife.'

And your wife, she added to herself.

'Yes,' Sergey said, 'you're correct. But I'm focusing on just the missing children. The fact is we don't know anything about this group. Who they are or what they do. Why they snatch the youngest kid from the family.'

Darby was thinking of what Charlie Rizzo had said to his father — Tell her, Daddy. Tell her what you did — and said: 'The parents of these missing kids, you mean to tell me you found absolutely nothing in their backgrounds?'

'Nothing that can tell us why their kids were taken, no.'

'I find that hard to swallow.'

'I do too. But, still, it remains that these could simply be random abductions. You're more than welcome to take a look at the case files.'

'What about bodies?'

'Not one. Whatever happened to them, we don't know. The cases are unsolved.'

'Casey — Jack — told me he was called back when Darren Waters was found.'

'You mean when he reappeared,' Sergey said. 'We asked Jack to come in and consult, since Waters was one of those cases that lit up on the West Coast — only child, snatched from home, etcetera. So we took Waters into custody, brought him to what we thought was a secured location — '

'Where this group somehow managed to find him.'

'Yes.'

'How?'

'Followed would be my guess.'

'How, though?'

'You don't think they knew this guy escaped?' Then, as if reading her mind, he said, 'I see. No, I don't think it was an inside job. Nevada police, they didn't know who Waters was, so they ran his prints, and we had all of those coded. Techs operating the IAFIS computers didn't have security access for that particular code, and neither did the guy who ran the department at the time. So the prints got bounced upstairs, and that's when I got called. And if you think I had something to do with my son's abduction, you're wrong. These bastards tried to kill me when Jack and I had Waters at the safe house.'

He pulled up a trouser leg. A chunk of his calf muscle was gone, as if a shark had got hold of it and ripped the flesh free.

'Hollow point,' Sergey said. 'Shattered my tibia and the exit wound blew out most of my calf muscle. Almost bled to death. I don't walk with a limp any more, but I can't run, and anytime it rains or snows, the leg throbs like a mad bastard.'

He let go of the fabric. 'We investigated the inside angle and couldn't find anything.'

'How secure is your fingerprint database?'

'Very secure,' he said. 'We checked into that. No break-ins.'

'Ever had one?'

'If we did, I don't know about it.'

'And Darren Waters was never able to shed any light on these people or how he escaped?'

Sergey shook his head. 'He can't speak or write. Well, he can write now, but on a first-grade level.'

'Jack mentioned something happened to Waters but didn't tell me specifics.'

'This group gave Waters a transorbital lobotomy — a rather crude one. You familiar with the procedure?'

Darby nodded, wishing she didn't know the details about the barbaric operation popularized in the US by Dr Walter Freeman, who, through the mid fifties, had used the 'ice pick' procedure on thousands of schizophrenic inmates and, later, on depressed housewives and 'unruly' children. The patient was given 'electroconvulsive therapy' — shocked with electricity until unconscious — and then an ice pick was inserted into the upper eyelid. A hammer tapped the tip past the nasal cavity bone and into the brain's frontal lobe, where the pick severed neural pathways. Some patients survived, but a good majority died or were left with severe disabilities. And almost every one had been reduced to a childlike state devoid of any personality.

'Darren Waters,' Sergey said, 'is severely handicapped — mentally and physically. He lives in a constant state of fear. He's medicated most of the time.'

'With what?'

'Thorazine.'

'Why? He a danger to other patients?'

'Sometimes,' Sergey said. 'Mostly the poor son of a bitch screams about the monsters coming through the walls to eat him.'

A voice echoed over a speaker: 'Arrival in five minutes.'

Sergey gripped the armrests. 'We better get you dressed and ready.'