The Soul Collectors

23

Darby stood on the cobblestone sidewalk, a few steps away from one of the antique-lantern streetlights that lined both sides of her one-way street, and twirled her key ring around a finger while pretending to stare after the Lincoln, as if she were shocked at being dumped out here.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched a vehicle parked at the end of the street where Temple met Cambridge. An SUV. From where she stood she could see only the front half. It looked like a Chevy Tahoe, dark blue or black. The windows were dark, possibly tinted. It was parked against the kerb directly in front of the sandwich shop that catered to the college crowd. She couldn't see the fire hydrant but she knew it was there.

During the day, sometimes a car would pull up against the kerb and someone would run inside to pick up an order. The store was closed now, and no one in their right mind who lived in Beacon Hill would park in that spot, because they'd be towed and have to shell out two hundred bucks to get their car back from the impound lot.

That parking spot, however, offered an excellent, clear view of Temple Street. Her building, one in a long row of a dozen hundred-year-old townhouses, all of them built of ageing brick, sat right in the middle of the street. If someone was sitting behind the wheel, he or she could watch her comings and goings, make sure she kept good on her promise to behave herself.

It was also possible someone had simply parked there for a few minutes, praying like hell they wouldn't get towed.

The wind blew against her back and Darby felt the cold on the cobblestone sidewalk biting the soles of her bare feet. After being cooped up for so long, she didn't want to remove herself from the crisp autumn air filling her lungs, but she had been standing out here long enough. And the few stragglers moving up and down the street were staring and keeping their distance. With her bloodied scrubs, her bandaged and bruised arms, her bare feet and messy hair, she knew she looked like some sort of escaped mental patient.

Darby turned and moved up the front steps. It was time to get to work on finding Mark Rizzo. And when she found him, the man was going to explain what he had done to his son. The lobby was empty, but there was a party in full swing in the ground-floor unit. Loud music she didn't recognize throbbed and college kids laughed behind the closed door. The person who owned the place, the biggest condo in the four-unit building, lived in Chicago and rented the space for an ungodly monthly sum to well-to-do parents thinking Beacon Hill was a safer place for their college-bound kids than Allston or Brighton or somewhere else near downtown Boston.

Jogging up the long, winding staircase, Darby thought about the FBI. If the feds were, in fact, watching her, it was equally possible they had bugged her home, maybe even going so far as to install pinhole cameras. She wouldn't put it past them. And they could do it all without a warrant. The Patriot Act provided all sorts of wonderful legal loopholes.

After disengaging the alarm for her condo, she dumped her mail on the kitchen worktop, went to the bathroom and shut the door. She stripped down and then turned on the water to take a long and blissfully private (hopefully) hot shower.

Standing underneath the running water, she thought about what to do with the folded sheets now sitting on the floor inside her hospital scrubs.

Processing the papers for prints was a no-brainer. Spray the sheets with Ninhydrin, maybe boost it with heat for better clarity, then transfer the latent prints to a fingerprint card for processing.

The problem was the fingerprint database. To access IAFIS, you had to enter your name and password. She hadn't stepped foot inside the Boston Police Department since her forced suspension, and she wondered if Leland or some other higher power, maybe even the acting police commissioner himself, had blocked her access to the lab as well as to IAFIS and the other databases she used.

There was only one way to find out.

Darby changed into jeans, a white tank top and one of her favourite items of clothing: a pair of dark brown leather harness boots. She grabbed a check flannel shirt from her closet, put it on and buttoned it up on her way to the kitchen. Her hair, still slightly damp, spilled over her shoulders.

The kitchen window and the three windows along the wall in the large space that served as her dining and living room overlooked Temple Street. She grabbed a bottle of Midleton Irish whiskey and a glass, poured herself a healthy shot, leaned the small of her back against the worktop and looked out of one of the middle windows.

The SUV was still parked at the end of the street.

Her phone sat at the end of the worktop, near the window. The red message light was blinking. She walked over to it and inspected it with her eyes, not her hands, just in case she was being watched. She sipped her drink, staring.

The phone had been plugged into the bottom outlet, not the top. And she found flecks of yellow paint on her white worktop. The flecks must have come lose when the wall plate was removed. The painters she had hired had done a sloppy job.

So had the person who had removed the wall plate. The feds should have hired someone more professional.

She wondered if it had been a last-minute rush job. Maybe that was the reason why the two GI Joes had zigzagged all over the place. They had been ordered to buy the techs working inside her place some time to finish.

Darby picked up her mail and carried it with her to the living room. She plopped down on the couch, then leaned back against the leather cushion and propped the heels of her boots on the edge of the old wood steamer trunk that served as her coffee table. She sat there, sipping her drink, thinking about the listening device installed in her kitchen wall jack. There were probably more. Two bugs, maybe three, would've done the trick. Her two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit was just under a thousand square feet.

She already had a federal tap on her phone, thanks to her run-in a few years back with a man named Malcolm Fletcher, a former FBI profiler who currently held the number-three slot on their Most Wanted List. Because of her limited involvement with him — and the fact that she was one of a handful of people who'd seen the man face to face and lived to tell about the experience — the tap on her phone was a permanent one, in case he decided to contact her. He hadn't, so far.

If the feds weren't behind it, there was one logical option left: the men who had ambushed the Rizzo home had found out her name and where she lived, broken into her house, managed to disengage her alarm system and installed one or more listening devices. Disengaging an alarm system was a pain in the ass, but someone with the right technical background and equipment could do it. You could buy the necessary tools and devices on the Internet. The same held true for listening devices. There were thousands of websites selling state-of-the-art stuff, all of it perfectly legal.

She could unscrew the kitchen wall plate and examine the listening device. It would take only a moment to see if it was something the feds used.

No, not yet. She wanted some more time to think, to see if there was a way she could use this to her advantage.

If the feds had bugged her home, and if they were parked at the end of her street and watching her building right now, that meant they were using her as bait. That was the reason why they had released her. They were using her to lure one or more of the men she'd encountered at the Rizzo home out of hiding.

She wondered too if her computer had been bugged to monitor her email.

The phone rang. She let the machine pick it up.

'Darby, this is Leland.'

The familiar WASPy voice, cold and dry, belonged to her former boss, Leland Pratt.

'I'm pleased to inform you that you've been reinstated at the lab,' he said. 'Unfortunately, you've been reduced a pay grade, which means you'll have to take a cut in salary. Report to me tomorrow morning at eight o'clock and we'll go over the particulars before we meet with the acting police commissioner.'

Click and he hung up.

Well, there it was. After months of deliberation, the bureaucrats had finally come to a decision: they were going to dump her back at the lab, with a pay cut. You're officially persona non grata, McCormick. When you come in tomorrow morning, remember to smile when you get down on your knees to kiss our asses. Oh, and don't forget to thank us in between each smooth for not giving you the boot.

Interesting that the job offer came on the same day she'd been released from quarantine.

She polished off her drink, imagining the look of righteous indignation on Leland's face when she told him and the acting police commissioner where they could stick their job offer.

Darby pulled out the nearly empty liner bag from the trashcan and glanced out of the window. The SUV was still there.

Moving to the bathroom, she grabbed the scrubs and folded sheets of paper and dumped them into the bag. From her office she collected the cord holding her laminated ID/keycard for the lab, and from the hall closet her leather racer jacket. Then, carrying the bag with her, she left the condo.