The Dead Room

7

An hour later Darby walked to the corner of the backyard where Pine stood running water from a hose over his face. He had breathed in too much smoke. She could hear his laboured wheezing over the water splashing against the flagstone walkway. He didn’t care about getting wet. His clothes were already soaked and covered in mud.

Coop was also in the backyard. He stood alongside Michael Banville, watching the photographer taking bracketed shots of the back gate. There was no reason for Coop to be out here supervising photography. Darby knew the real reason: he was pretending to be busy so he could keep an eye on her.

Both Coop and the photographer wore protective goggles and breathing masks. Grey and white clouds of smoke drifted through the woods and into the backyard. On her way out, she had found a grenade still hissing smoke. The grenades had a slow burn rate. It would be at least another hour before anyone could go back inside the woods.

By some miracle of God none of the officers had disturbed the bloody handprint during their mad rush into the woods. The same couldn’t be said for the blood she’d found on the grass. The evidence markers had been trampled.

Only one patrolman had been seriously injured in the skirmish. A stun grenade had exploded near his head.

‘Christ, this shit stings,’ Pine said. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘Hexachloroethane. It’s a chemical used in smoke grenades. Keep flushing out your eyes.’

‘My lungs feel like they’re on fire.’

‘You should get to one of the ambulances for some oxygen.’

‘In a minute.’ Pine rubbed his eyes under the running water. ‘Something exploded in front of me. There was this bright light and then I couldn’t see.’

‘That was a stun grenade. It causes momentary blindness.’

‘How do you know so much about this shit?’

‘SWAT training.’

Pine drank from the hose, wincing as he swallowed.

‘The guy you saw, the one wearing those night-vision glasses?’

‘Goggles,’ Darby said.

‘Whatever. You get a good look at him?’

‘No. I just saw a flash before he ducked behind the tree. Black clothing and black gloves, a tactical vest holding grenades.’

‘Any way you can trace them?’

‘The stun grenades explode on impact. If we find enough fragments, we might be able to locate a serial or model number. As for the smoke grenades, we can give the numbers to the manufacturer and see where they were sold. Maybe they were stolen from a munitions locker at a police station or an army base.’

‘You don’t sound too confident.’

‘You can buy them on the black market. Go to any gun show in the South and you can have your pick. A lot of weekend-warrior types collect them. We’ll run the numbers but most likely it’s going to lead to a dead end. The guy with the night vision is too smart to leave us something to trace.’

‘How do you know this guy is smart and not some sort of Rambo douche bag?’

‘He came prepared.’

‘For what? A shootout in the woods?’

‘He came prepared for a fight. Artie, what time did the 911 call come through?’

‘Ten twenty.’

‘And how long before the first responding officers arrived?’

‘Ten thirty-three. There was a unit in the area.’

‘Did the officers search the woods?’

Pine shook his head under the running water. ‘I was the only one who went back there.’

‘What time was that?’

He thought about it for a moment.

‘I’d say around quarter past eleven, give or take.’

‘So we’re talking almost an hour between the 911 call and the time you entered the woods,’ Darby said. ‘If those men had been back there watching the house, they would’ve had plenty of time to haul away the body.’

‘But you saw it.’

‘He had a lot of blood on his shirt. If this person got shot with one of the Magnum rounds, you’re talking a massive amount of blood loss in a short amount of time. He could have bled out while running through the woods.’

‘And somehow his buddies found him.’

‘Which leads me to believe he placed a call before he passed out,’ Darby said.

Pine dropped the hose. He shut off the tap and reached inside his pocket.

‘You thinking these guys arrived the same time you did?’ he asked, mopping his face with a handkerchief.

‘They were in the woods when we were talking by the back gate. I think they were waiting for us to leave before they started to haul the body. If they’d started moving around, they would have made too much noise. We would have heard them.’

‘When I went through the woods, I didn’t see a body back there. There was no one back there.’

‘Maybe the guy with the bloody shirt found a place to hide. I don’t think the others were there when you were. The guy with the night vision? He was carrying what I’m sure is a compact HK MP6. It definitely was a sub-machine gun. And I know I saw a scope. If he had been back there when you were, he could’ve taken you down with a single shot to the head. He planned to come out of hiding, find the phone and leave. Nobody would’ve heard a thing.’

‘You’re saying all of this was for a goddamn phone?’

‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’

Pine didn’t answer. His eyes were red and puffy, his face pale.

‘A phone is a key piece of evidence,’ Darby said. ‘You’ve got logs of incoming and outgoing calls, maybe even an address book full of contacts. Who knows what we would’ve found? Night-vision man certainly thought it was important enough for me not to get my hands on it. He came out of his hiding spot to treat me to a stun grenade. Then he covered the woods with HC smoke canisters and gunfire to keep everyone back.’

Pine looked at the evidence bag gripped in her hand. ‘What did you find?’

‘A blister pack for nicotine gum. The guy with the night vision is apparently concerned about his long-term health. You should be too. You’re looking a little unsteady on your feet.’

‘I haven’t run like that since… well, it’s been a long time.’

‘Let me help you to the ambulance.’

‘I can manage.’ Pine opened the gate to a carnival of blinking red, white and blue lights.

‘Artie, have the Feds come to see you?’

‘About what?’

‘About any ongoing case in Belham, surveillance, anything along those lines.’

‘No.’ Pine’s mouth parted and his brow crinkled with thought. ‘Wait, are you suggesting the Feds are involved with what happened here tonight?’

‘I’m saying it’s a possibility. The guys I saw hauling the body away? They wore suits. The guy with the night vision had a tactical vest with stun and smoke grenades, and he was carrying the kind of machine gun used by Hostage Rescue. He’s not a weekend warrior. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

‘That’s one hell of an assumption.’

‘Maybe. But he could easily have taken me down while I was back there – he had several opportunities before I reached the phone. And I think he deliberately shot at the tree above my head. He didn’t want to kill me, just wanted to pin me down until he got to the phone. You see the muddy footprints on the deck?’

Pine nodded, dabbing his eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I talked to the patrol guys. They didn’t leave ’em.’

‘They’re also on the living-room carpet in front of the sliding glass door. I think someone ran across the backyard, tracked mud up the steps and then shot their way inside the house. I found two holes in the opposite wall. Who would want to shoot their way inside a house?’

‘The person who killed and tortured that woman.’

‘One person can’t subdue two people and then ransack an entire house, especially one this size. We’re talking two people at the very least – and they sure as hell wouldn’t have shot their way in. They had to find a way to get inside quietly, without being detected. They needed time to subdue the mother and son, and they needed time to search the house. Shooting your way inside isn’t quiet or subtle. It’s more in line with a rescue attempt, don’t you think?’

Pine thought it over, rubbing his tongue along his bottom teeth.

‘All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t put it past the Feds,’ Darby said. ‘We should look at every possible angle.’

‘I’ll dig around.’

So will I, Darby thought.