The Soul Collectors

27

Darby dialled the number, listening to the strange transcontinental double-ring for a phone on the other side of the world. Four of those double-rings and then Coop's voicemail message played.

'Coop, it's me. I need a favour. A big favour, actually. I'm going to FedEx you a set of papers. I need you to process them for prints — and here's the important part — I need you to figure out a way to feed them into IAFIS. I can't do it here — long story — but I'm hoping you can. Last time we talked, you mentioned that the feds had provided access to IAFIS's biometric data to test out the system on your end. Maybe you can use this as test data, I don't know. Call me and we'll talk. I lost my cell phone, so call me at home.'

She thought about adding I miss you and, instead, said, 'Charlie Rizzo, that kid from Brookline who disappeared a decade ago? I met him, Coop. He's been alive all this time, and I need to find out why. What happened to him.'

Darby hung up then grabbed the mouse and clicked the icon for the date and time. A clock and calendar opened: today was the 18th. She had been called to New Hampshire on the night of the 9th. She'd been locked up in that quarantine chamber for nine days. Nine days without showing any symptoms and they had kept her locked up and drugged.

Why?

She clicked on the Internet Explorer icon, relieved to discover she could access the web. At least they hadn't blocked that out.

She headed over to Google news. In the search box she typed 'Mark Rizzo' and 'New Hampshire'. A lot of links came back. She started with the first and most recent one, and it brought her to the website for New Hampshire's Portsmouth Herald. The article was only a couple of paragraphs long. She read through it quickly, then went back to the main page and clicked on the link for the Boston Globe. Read that article and then read two more before stopping. Each newspaper was spouting the bullshit about Mark Rizzo and his family being killed in a drug deal gone bad.

Deborah Collier, a special agent from the FBI's Boston office and acting spokesman for the Durham and Portsmouth police departments, had told reporters that Mark Rizzo, an accountant who had recently been laid off from a local NH firm, had turned to the lucrative world of methamphetamine manufacturing. Forensic agents from both the FBI and ATF reported finding traces of the highly addictive street drug on several debris samples recovered from the explosion. Special Agent Collier said that the remains of a fifth person recovered from the blast site had been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to Alex Scala, a 43-year-old meth user and distributor known to the FBI. Collier didn't have much information about Scala other than that the man's last known residence was in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

The explosion that caused the deaths of seven New Hampshire SWAT agents and five police officers, all unnamed, had been attributed to the release of phosphine, a deadly gas that can be emitted during methamphetamine production. Several local residents, all unnamed, had been treated at hospital and subsequently released.

None of the articles mentioned the 911 call placed by a man claiming to be Charlie Rizzo (although the Boston Globe article had briefly mentioned the boy's abduction in 1984, when the family lived in Brookline, Massachusetts). No mention of the unidentified man Charlie had shot and dumped in the bushes. No mention of the ambulance that had gone missing. And the coup de grace: not a single mention of the army's interest or involvement in the case.

With no new information released about the explosion, New England reporters had turned to churning out stories about 'the new and explosive growth' of homemade meth labs that were popping up all across the country in houses, apartments and mobile homes.

It was a great spin job — a brilliant spin job. The FBI spokesman had cleverly explained the explosion. Stories about methamphetamine were everywhere these days. The drug was cheap and easy to manufacture, provided the person knew what he was doing. More often than not, the labs were assembled by some meth-head who didn't have the first clue as to how to properly store highly unstable chemicals like anhydrous ammonia. If that didn't explode, they'd spill or mishandle some other volatile chemical and boom, the police had to wait for the deadly phosphine gas to dissipate before heading out to search for body parts.

The spin job had worked. The Rizzo story had been confined to New Hampshire and neighbouring Massachusetts. The surrounding states had their own problems to report about, along with terrifying the public with article after article on the swine flu pandemic that, if the quoted experts were to be believed, would turn the entire country into the same kind of apocalyptic landscape Stephen King had written about in The Stand.

Darby imagined Special Agent Collier and her PR cohorts standing inside her office. Imagined lots of backslapping and self-congratulations for launching yet another successful spin that had pulled the wool over the public's eyes. She probably corked a bottle of champagne for this one.

Why had the truth been swept under the rug? Was it because sarin gas had been used? If that titbit of information had been made known, New Hampshire hotels would be doing brisk business trying to accommodate the swelling numbers of media outlets coming in from across the country to get the inside scoop on a chemical attack on US soil — the first, Darby suspected.

The real inside scoop, though, wasn't the sarin gas but what had happened inside the Rizzo home. Imagine if that story broke. Ladies and gentlemen, we've received confirmation that the Rizzo family was held hostage by a man claiming to be their son, Charles, who disappeared without a trace twelve years ago. The only person who lived to see these horrific events transpire is Dr Darby McCormick, a former investigator for Boston's Criminal Services Unit.

Which, Darby suspected, was the reason why she'd been locked inside the quarantine chamber; the feds needed some time to work their spin job and feed it to the media. Nine days later, after she put up a fight, they agreed to release their only eyewitness, provided she signed a thick stack of legal forms that prevented her from speaking to anyone. She was the wild card, the only one who could derail the spin campaign.

And Charlie's 911 call, what had become of it? All 911 calls were recorded and copies were often made public. Not Charlie's. The feds must have confiscated it. The audio and video recordings from inside the mobile command centre — had those too been confiscated? She'd have to find someone in New Hampshire who would be willing to speak to her off the record.

Heading back to Google, she typed in the tattooed words she'd seen on that thing's neck. The phrase Et in Arcadia ego came back with pages and pages of hits. Most of the info underneath the links referred to a pair of paintings by a French classical artist named Nicolas Poussin. She clicked on one and found that the Frenchman, born in 1594, had created two highly influential pastoral landscapes in which shepherds come upon a tomb. The more famous of the two versions hung in the Louvre in Paris. According to several scholars, the tomb housed God.

Darby was more interested in the meaning of the actual words. There were more links, more pages and pages of information, some of it quite detailed.

She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes until the last FedEx pickup of the night. She shut down her computer and grabbed one of the flat FedEx mailers on her way out the door.