The Soul Collectors

43

Her lawyer, Martin Freedman, was a squat, round man with a hawk-shaped nose, bald on top and uncombed tufts of salt-and-pepper hair feathered over small ears. Every time Darby met the man at his downtown Boston office, Freedman would have his liver-spotted hands resting on top of the battered brown leather portfolio he'd carried with him since law school. Freedman would always smile, flashing his capped teeth, and she could usually smell his cologne and spot a few stray dandruff flakes on the shoulders of his finely tailored suit jacket.

The man sitting at the table was tall and extremely fit and wore a black suit and dark blue shirt without a tie. He bore a striking resemblance to the insanely good-looking quarterback for the New England Patriots; but, unlike Tom Brady, this man had thick dirty-blond hair and the most interesting eyes she had ever seen: one a dark green, the other blue.

Her old partner, Jackson Cooper, rose unsteadily, his eyes widening with shock. At first she was confused, then she realized how she looked: face cut up from glass and wounds crusted with blood; her jeans and the front of her shirt and jacket matted and smeared with dried blood that had turned black and crusty. Blood and skin and hair and probably brain matter from John Smith's exit wound; blood from working on the man's wife as she bled out.

'Good morning, Dr McCormick,' Coop said. 'I take it those wounds I'm seeing aren't a result of your stay here.'

'No, they're not.'

Coop turned to Lu, who was still standing in the doorway. 'You can leave now, detective.'

The door shut with a soft click. Coop looked at her, worried.

'Since you're standing upright, I'm going to assume you're okay — physically, at least.' He had lowered his voice and was speaking quickly. 'You can tell me what happened later. Grab a seat. We don't have much time.'

'How did you find me?'

'Leland.'

'He called you?'

He shook his head. He had plunked back down in his chair.

'When you called and left me that voicemail, the number for the lab was on my Caller-ID,' he said, working a thick elastic band off a battered manila folder. 'So I assumed you'd been reinstated and went back to the lab and bumped into Leland. Fortunately, he came in early today. Unfortunately, he told me about what happened to you last night here in Nahant. We'll talk about that later, after you've spoken to your lawyer.'

'Is he here?'

Coop nodded. 'Right now he's talking to Lu and the sergeant,' he said. 'I ran into him in the lobby, told him who I was and why I was here, and he told Lu I was his legal assistant. We've got ten minutes. Sit down, will you? They've probably posted a guy outside to try and listen in.'

She pulled out the chair as Coop flipped through the messy stack of papers. Three months ago, those same hands had held her as the rain drummed against the walkway outside the front door of his home. He had pressed his lips against hers, hungry, as if he needed to steal something from her before he left; her heart was still beating in her throat when he pulled away. She saw him smile and she smiled back and then he said he had to go. Later, over the phone, he had told her he was never coming back.

But here he was sitting in front of her, the first time she'd seen him since he had left three months ago, and the adrenalin-filled joy surging through her body was slowly drowning in a piercing sadness, Darby knowing he hadn't flown halfway around the world and tracked her down to say hello.

'Take a look at this,' he said, slapping a sheet of paper on the table. The sound snapped her back to the windowless, hot room with its dingy white walls. His breath was stale and his eyes weary and bloodshot from the red-eye flight.

Darby looked at the sheet of paper and saw a laser-printed picture — a headshot of the smug army prick she'd met at the BU Lab, the one who forced her to sign the legal forms, Billy Fitzgerald. He wasn't dressed in combat fatigues or military gear, just a suit and a tie.

'You know him?' he asked.

Darby nodded, about to tell Coop when she realized they were pressed for time. 'I'll fill you in later. Who is he?'

'Special Agent Sergey Martynovich. He's a profiler for CASMIRC.'

She tried to chase the full title through a layer of hazy thoughts and came up empty.

'Sorry, but what's that again?'

'Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center,' Coop said, flipping through the papers. 'They deal strictly in crime involving kids — abductions and disappearances, homicide and serial murder. Federal unit, works under NCAVC.'

Another federal-created acronym, but at least one she knew: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, founded at the FBI Academy and managed by its Behavioral Science Unit.

Then Coop produced another laser-printed picture, this one of a man dressed in jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt standing on a sunny road with rolling fields behind him. He wore a shoulder holster but she didn't see a badge. He appeared to be scowling directly at the camera, looking downright pissed.

Her first thought was of a middle-aged Clint Eastwood: square-jawed; glowering and squinting under the sun; thick brown hair swept back from a high forehead. The man in the picture, though, was paler and packed much more muscle than the iconic movie star. This man had long, meaty arms and rock-hard biceps swollen with veins. Either he deliberately wore his T-shirt too tight to show off the definition in his upper chest and shoulders or he was simply just too big to fit into normal clothing. And he was tall — at least he seemed that way in the photo.

Coop said, 'Have you seen this guy?'

She shook her head. 'No, just Sergey what's-his-name. Who's this?'

'Jack Casey.'

'The former profiler?'

He nodded. 'Worked with the rock stars of Behavioral Sciences when it first started — Ressler, Douglas, you name it. I'd say Casey's a rock star himself, given what I've read about the guy in the past twelve hours. He worked a lot of high-profile cases but there are two that really stand out.'

'Miles Hamilton must be one.'

'Bingo. Did you know that Baltimore's favourite serial killer is about to get a new trial?'

'Something to do with the FBI lab botching evidence.'

'Not botched,' Coop said. 'Planted.'

'By who? Casey?'

'He worked the Hamilton case. That's public knowledge. What's also public knowledge is that Hamilton killed Casey's wife and the unborn child she was carrying.'

'Right. He tied Casey to a chair so he could watch,' she said, more to herself than to Coop. The Hamilton case had made national headlines, and the information was coming back to her in spurts, the first of which was the oddly fascinating fact that Miles Hamilton, the only child of a former Baltimore senator, was just a few weeks shy of nineteen when he killed Casey's wife. And just as oddly fascinating was the fact that Hamilton hadn't killed Casey. The serial murderer had left Casey tied to a chair while his pregnant wife bled out, then hopped in his car and drove to the airport. Police caught Hamilton as he was getting off a plane, on his way to his connecting flight to Paris, with a fake passport and a receipt showing the money he had wired from his father's vast bank accounts.

On the heels of those facts came another titbit she remembered about Casey, this one much more recent. Not that long ago the man had lived and worked here in the state of Massachusetts, on the North Shore, as Marblehead's chief of police. The reason she remembered this fact was that Casey had worked a particular case that had also made national headlines. A serial killer someone in the local press had dubbed 'The Sandman' was murdering families in their sleep. Only he deliberately left one family member alive each time. What had garnered the national attention was the Sandman's methodology: he waited until the police were gathered inside and around the house, then detonated a bomb.

Coop said, 'Casey retired after Hamilton was arrested. He spent a few years wandering around and then — '

'He came here,' Darby finished for him. 'The Sandman case, back in '99. You and I had just started working at the lab after it happened.'

'Right, but the thing is, Casey didn't work it alone. Rumour is he had someone helping him. Another former profiler.'

'Who?'

'Malcolm Fletcher.'

A brief silence followed the name.

Darby shifted in her chair. 'Does Fletcher have something to do with what's going on with me?'

'You'd have to ask the feds. Fletcher's prints weren't on those sheets you gave me, but Casey's were. And this guy Sergey's. They both came back as a ten-point match.'

Coop hadn't jumped on a plane and flown all the way here to tell her that the feds and a retired profiler were involved in what happened to the Rizzo family. He could have emailed the pictures and told her all of this over the phone.

'What's the rest of it?'

'I'm consulting with IPS — Britain's Identity and Passport Service office. They're testing integration across the pond with IAFIS. The feds gave us access to their data, so your FedEx package comes along and I'm thinking, "Let's use a real-live demonstration, see if it actually works." So I processed the prints and fed them into the IPS database. Nothing comes back on our end, so it searches IAFIS and I get word of matching prints. I saw the time stamp. It's 2:00 p.m. my time. Keep that in mind.

'Now, unbeknownst to yours truly, my boss is inside his office speaking to the head of Behavioral Sciences. Here's what's interesting: the fed called my boss an hour before the prints came back, and he's grilling my boss about them, wanting to know where they came from, etcetera, etcetera.'

'The prints were coded.'

'Exactly.'

Darby nodded, not at all surprised. The feds ran and owned the national fingerprint database, and sometimes they put secret alerts on certain prints stored within the system. Case in point: Jack Casey. If an unknown set of prints that matched Casey's were to be fed into IAFIS, the FBI's head honchos would be the first to know, allowing the task force assigned to capture him to mobilize their people and equipment without alerting the inquiring law enforcement agency.

'My boss hangs up the phone,' Coop said, 'and, naturally, he comes looking for me. Needless to say, he's quite pissed at having one of his consultants feed a set of unauthorized prints into IAFIS without his consent.'

'I'm sorry, Coop, I didn't mean — '

He grabbed her hand. 'It's fine. I'm fine. I told him I wanted to try a real-live test, with real prints recovered from real evidence. I got a tongue lashing and that's it. Besides, if these prints hadn't been coded, my boss would have been none the wiser, and you wouldn't be in this mess.'

He let go of her hand.

Darby clutched it back. 'Thank you.'

He winked at her and said, 'Now this third print I found, it doesn't belong to Casey or to any other fed. This one's connected to an old case, a kid — '

The door swung wide open.

'Named Darren Waters,' Coop said. 'He's been missing for thirty-four years.'