The Soul Collectors

40

Darby stood in the late John Smith's living room with her cold hands buried deep in her jeans pockets. She had glass shards in her hair. Blood was smeared on her clothes, and she caught its coppery reek under the pervasive odour of cordite. Her face and hands and joints throbbed. She had been cut but not too badly. The paramedic had used tweezers to remove the glass shards from her face, then cleaned her wounds and applied some sort of antibacterial ointment but no bandages. She stood in front of one of the two floor-to-ceiling windows that hadn't been blown out by the gunshots and she could see her reflection, the crisscrossed network of fine red cuts and scratches along the right side of her face.

The adrenalin rush had long since dissipated, leaving her with a familiar but still strange hollow feeling. Numb, as if her organs had been shot full of Novocain. Her mind kept replaying what had happened in slow motion. Here it came again, the first part, and again she didn't turn away from it.

Smith sitting to her right and getting to his feet and then, a split second later, his craggy face exploded. Skin and blood blew across her face and she thought exit wound. She hadn't heard the gunshot and her mind registered two facts at once: silencer and sniper. The exit wound — Smith's face — meant the contact shot had hit him in the back of the head. Meant the trajectory of the bullet had come from behind him, from somewhere across the street and from someplace high, like the trees or a roof. Meant that she had been followed here.

Darby was already on her feet, turning away and scrambling for the sliding glass door. She had to get inside the house, the only safe place to hide. She heard a panicked voice calling out from the backyard: 'Smitty? Smitty, are you okay?' Smith's wife, Mavis. Darby yelled gunshot over the wind as she ran, yelled at the woman to get inside the house.

The second shot took out one of the windows. Glass exploded across her face. Darby put her hand on the sliding glass door, threw it open and tumbled inside as the next shot took out the glass door. It hit the far wall. She had the phone in her hand and, standing near the kitchen, called 911. Told the operator shots were being fired, shouted for back-up and an ambulance, gave the address and dropped the phone. Unzipped her jacket and reached for her sidearm and saw Smith lying on his stomach, the severed arteries in his neck spraying blood in fine mists while the large, gaping wound pumped blood in great spurts on to the balcony floor as his dying body thrashed and thrashed. She turned away, stumbling blindly through the large maze of rooms, looking for the staircase that would lead her downstairs and into the backyard.

'Miss McCormick?'

The voice belonged to a black patrolman standing guard in front of the broken windows — A. DAVIS, his nameplate said. He was one of the squared-jawed first responding officers, an ebony-and-ivory pair who had immediately sectioned her off here, inside the living room. Davis had stayed with her while his partner radioed for homicide and back-up. She hadn't been allowed to assist in the search for the shooter. She knew he was long, long gone, but she wanted to go out there and find the spot, as well as the spent brass casings. She wanted to be useful, not stand here with her thumb up her ass, waiting to speak again to John Lu, the Nahant homicide detective who'd caught the case.

'You need to use the bathroom?' Davis asked. 'Maybe get you a glass of water?'

I want the bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey sitting on Smith's kitchen worktop.

'Water would be good,' she said.

'Stay right here, okay? Don't go wandering.'

She nodded and looked past the vacancy he left, at the two forensic techs from the state lab in Springfield taking detailed pictures of the former homicide detective. John Smith's headless body lay in a pool of cooling blood that had spread across the lit balcony floor and dripped over the sides. The techs had young faces and had good equipment and were doing a decent job of bracketing the shots.

The ocean wind blew against the house and whistled through the jagged holes left in the windows. When it died down, she could hear the murmured conversations as the techs spoke to each other. Heard the squawk of seagulls over the crackle of police radios and ringing cell phones.

The puppies were no longer barking. She assumed they'd been corralled somewhere away from the backyard crime scene.

'Dr McCormick.'

Not Davis; this voice belonged to the detective, Lu. She turned around and saw the thirty-something Asian guy holding a glass of water clinking with ice.

She took the glass and thanked him, noticing that he had called her doctor. She hadn't told the man she had a doctorate in criminal and abnormal psychology. Apparently Lu had made some phone calls. He probably knew her status with the Boston Police Department.

'Smith's wife?' she asked.

Lu shook his head.

'Too much blood loss,' he said. 'She died on the way to the hospital.'

The news didn't surprise her. Still, she had held out hope, and felt the loss at having it amputated twitch like a phantom limb.

After finding the stairs that led into the basement, she saw, through the windows, the backyard lit up by floodlights. Saw the frail woman with curly grey hair wearing a North Face parka lying sideways on the grass, screaming, her arthritic hands clutching the ripped meat of her bloody thigh. The puppies barked. They had gathered around the woman, four of them, maybe more, and they barked and licked her face and cuddled close to her body. And even in her excruciating pain, in fear and shock, Mavis Smith wanted to protect them. Tried to shoo them away towards the opened basement door underneath the balcony.

Darby found the light switch for the backyard lights and shut them off, knowing why the woman had been shot in the thigh: the sniper was using her as bait, trying to draw Darby out.

It worked. The woman screamed again. Darby tumbled against the grass fifteen feet away and ran. When she reached the edge of the backyard she turned and started firing blindly in the direction of the shots — the trees, the sniper had to be somewhere in those trees across the street, and she hoped the muzzle flashes would blind him momentarily. They had. With one hand she grabbed the parka's hood and kept firing as she dragged the screaming woman across the grass, kept firing until the magazine clicked empty. Darby locked the basement door and in the dim light stripped off the parka as the puppies barked outside, scratching their paws against the door, and the woman kept crying, 'I've got to call Paula, I've got to call Paula.'

Not two gunshot wounds but three. Mavis Smith had been shot in the chest, underneath her right breast. Darby used her belt as a tourniquet on the leg. Used a plastic garbage bag on the sucking chest wound, holding her fingers along three edges and keeping the fourth edge free so the chest could achieve its usual negative pressure state. She stayed with the woman, applying pressure as blood spurted through her fingers, urging the woman to stay calm. Mavis Smith whimpered 'Paula, I've got to call Paula' over and over again until the paramedics arrived.

Darby drank the water in one long, burning gulp, realizing her foolishness at having rushed blindly into the backyard. The sniper had had the advantage. He had been hidden somewhere in the trees and using a scope. She could have been shot. She could be lying dead on the ground right now while forensics took pictures of her body.

'How are the dogs?' she asked.

'Fine, not a scratch on them. We put them in the garage.'

'She kept talking about calling someone named Paula.'

'You told me that already.'

There was something off about Lu. Maybe the clothes had something to do with it. For some bizarre, unfathomable reason, the man had adopted the cartoonish attire seen in old American cop shows: a fedora and belted London Fog raincoat worn over a cheap navy-blue suit.

She held the empty glass by her side, wondering how Lu was going to play it. Only two choices: play it cool or come down on her hard.

'Any leads on the shooter?'

'We're canvassing the neighbourhood, speaking to people.' He sighed, then shook his head in frustration. 'So far, nobody's seen anyone heading into the woods carrying a sniper rifle.'

Darby stared at him. Did the man actually think someone would be carrying a fully assembled sniper rifle? Didn't he know that a sniper rifle was carried, disassembled, inside a small carrying pack that could be easily concealed underneath a jacket?

'What about spent brass?' she asked. 'You find any casings in the woods?'

'We found your shell casings all over the backyard.'

'I told you what happened. Three times.' There was no anger in her voice, just a calm, neutral matter-of-fact tone. 'What don't you understand?'

'You haven't explained who fired at you.'

'I don't know. I told you I didn't see him.'

'You said this person was using a rifle with a silencer and a scope.'

'That's right.'

'To know that, you must have seen him.'

'I'll tell it to you again,' she said. 'I didn't hear any of the shots. That means a silencer was used. To get off a headshot in this wind, to shoot Smith's wife twice in the leg, you'd need a scope. To tear Smith's head off his shoulders you'd need to use a high-powered rifle and ammo. I didn't see any muzzle flashes, so this person was using a flash suppressor, a common piece of equipment on a sniper rifle. All of these facts suggest a sniper. I didn't say anything about seeing the shooter.'

'You failed to mention that you're conducting an investigation.'

'That's because I'm not conducting one. I came here to speak to John Smith, catch up on old times. We worked together.'

'So I was told.'

Darby waited for the rest of it. She didn't take her eyes off Lu.

'I made some calls to Boston and spoke to a man named Leland Pratt. He told me that you no longer work for the Crime Services Unit — or the lab, for that matter. He asked me to relay a message to you.'

'Can I borrow a pen and a piece of paper? This sounds important.'

'Don't worry, it's short. He said don't bother coming to the lab to collect your things. They'll be mailed to you.'

'That's wonderful. Tell him thank you.'

A thin smile, and then Lu said, 'Mr Pratt indicated that you've involved yourself in an investigation. Care to tell me what it is?'

Darby thought of an old Ben Franklin epigram: One can keep a secret if two are dead. The only person who knew the real reason for her visit was John Smith and, possibly, his wife.

'I told you. Catching up.'

Lu popped a cherry LifeSaver on to his small, thin lips. 'An officer will escort you downtown. I'll speak to you later, when you're ready to tell me the truth.'

'The truth about what?'

'This investigation you're involved in, these people who followed you here and tried to kill you.'

Lu held his hand in the air and motioned to someone over her shoulder. She turned slightly and saw a patrolman, a big white dude who hadn't bought a new shirt to accommodate his expanding waistline and ample chins, walking towards her, cuffs in hand.

She turned back to Lu and, laughing, said, 'You can't be serious.'

'I am.'

'What's the charge?'

'You're carrying an illegal firearm.'

'I have a licence.'

'Not any more. Boston PD has since revoked it.'

'When?'

'Today. Mr Pratt told me.'

'This is the first I'm hearing about it.'

'You can discuss the matter with your attorney,' Lu said. 'You can make the call at the station, after you've been charged.'