The Soul Collectors (18 page)

It was coming up on 1:00 p.m. She guzzled the last of her coffee, hoping it would sweep away the remaining cobwebs stubbornly clinging to the inside of her head. She had slept fitfully for the last six hours and wanted her head clear.

Standing, she picked up the cordless phone from the nightstand and carried it with her to the tall window – the air blowing through it was refreshingly cool, the sun warm on her face. She called Information and asked for Harvard’s Divinity School, and, as she waited for the operator to connect her, her gaze drifted to the boats anchored in the water, to the people no bigger than dots on the pier lined with bricked restaurants, apartments and the ultra-expensive Westin Hotel, which took up most of the area.

After drifting through the automated choices, she finally got a real person on the other end of the line, a secretary who seemed both patient and eager to assist a Harvard alumna. Darby explained what she was looking for, and the woman suggested a professor named Ronald Ross.

Professor Ross happened to be in his office. The man agreed to investigate the historical and religious significance of the Latin phrase
Et in Arcadia ego.

Her next call was to the Retired Boston Police Officers Association. The retired cop working the phone searched through his computer and gave her the information she needed on Stan Karakas: the former Boston Police detective had retired and moved to Darien, Connecticut. The man’s address and phone numbers were in the system.

Darby wrote the information down on a hotel pad. She thanked him, hung up and called the Boston Police Department’s main switchboard. The man who answered knew Darby and agreed to transfer her call to Jimmy Murphy’s cell phone.

‘Darby, my girl, I’d love to shoot the shit, but I’m about to hit the sack.’

‘Just a quick question about the party you broke up last night at the end of my street, the corner of Temple and Cambridge.’

‘The two guys in the Chevy Tahoe?’

‘That’s them. Who are they?’

‘Feds from the Boston office. York and Blue. I didn’t get their first names.’

‘They tell you what they were doing there?’

‘Surveillance – and doing a piss poor job, I might add. They weren’t at liberty to say
whom
they were watching, so after we confirmed they were, in fact, federal agents, we sent them on their way. Anything else?’

‘Sweet dreams, Jimmy. And thanks.’

Her lucky streak ended when she called Stan Karakas. His home number had been disconnected, and his cell phone was no longer in service.

For the next two hours, she worked the phone, giving her name and fake Boston police credentials to each person she spoke with, and by quarter past four she had hit a dead end. Stan Karakas was no longer among the living.

Karakas had moved around a lot during the last twenty-odd years. Connecticut, then Utah, Colorado, and finally Montana, where he had suffered a fatal heart attack at age sixty-nine, while fly-fishing. The news had been delivered to her by his widow, Nancy.

Karakas may have been the lead detective, but there were others who had put in a lot of man-hours. Darby remembered one, an Irish guy stuck with one of the most generic names on the planet: John Smith. She called back the Retired Boston Police Officers Association and found out that Smith had also retired but was still local, now living on the North Shore, in Nahant.

Darby called the man’s home number. As luck would have it, he answered. She introduced herself and asked if he was available to talk.

‘Sure,’ Smith said. ‘What’s this about, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Charlie Rizzo. I’d like to speak to you in person, if that’s possible.’ Cell phone transmissions were notoriously easy to pick up with scanning equipment readily available at stores like RadioShack.

‘I can meet you at your home within the hour,’ she said. ‘Are you free now, Mr Smith?’

‘All I’ve got now is free time. Sure, come on over. And call me Smitty, will ya? That’s what everyone called me growing up, and hearing it now makes me feel less like a useless 72-year-old fart, you know?’

Darby locked up and went to the parking garage to grab her bike, wondering if her new friends had managed to follow her here.

A thorough inspection revealed no new tracking devices.

Still, they had to be close. Whoever –
whatever
– these people were, they were highly organized. A small army, she suspected. After what had happened at the blast site, they had most likely regrouped and discussed tactics. They knew she had found the original tracking devices placed on her bike and leather jacket.

Driving down side- and one-way streets, sometimes circling back around, she didn’t spot any tails. Maybe they weren’t following her. Maybe they thought she would return to her condo and were there now, somewhere close by where they could watch and wait.

Or maybe they would wait for night to fall and, hidden by darkness, try to capture her again or simply come straight at her and wipe her off the playing board.

37

Darby figured John Smith had either hit the lottery or robbed a bank, because there was no way a retired cop could afford this massive old Victorian home. It was situated on a cliff and had a sweeping view of the ocean. The driveway held a Mercedes and a Lexus, and some serious money had been spent on the landscaping in the front. Lots of fresh autumn flowers – enough to open a small nursery.

The man who answered the door was shorter than her, roughly five foot six. He wore a grey V-neck cashmere sweater with jeans and a pair of scuffed penny loafers. With his slim build and thick blond hair parted on the side and threaded lightly with grey, John Smith could easily have passed for someone in his late forties or early fifties. But the craggy face and saddlebags under the bright blue eyes gave away every moment of his seventy-two years.

Smith ushered her through the bright foyer and into a kitchen the size of a basketball court. He pointed to the mugs sitting in front of a coffee maker and said, ‘Help yourself. Or do you want something a bit stiffer?’

‘Coffee’s fine.’

‘I’m going to have myself a little poke. Don’t think less of me.’ He winked a rheumy eye at her and filled a highball glass with Bushmills. ‘Let’s go outside so I can smoke.’

He put on an L. L. Bean barn jacket and with his highball glass in hand – he had poured himself a healthy shot over ice – he took her to a living room with windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and overlooked the ocean. He opened a sliding glass door to a balcony. It stretched around the side of the house. Darby glanced over the railing and saw a private stretch of rocky beach and, to her far right, a part of the backyard where four puppies with stubby legs and round bellies sat on the warm grass, eagerly awaiting the petite older woman standing in front of them with their food.

‘My third wife, Mavis,’ he said. ‘I thank the good Lord above for bringing her into my life.’

And her bank account
, Darby added privately. There was no way a cop’s pension could pay for a spread like this.

‘People always think I married her ’cause of her money.’ He turned to her, squinting in the last of the bright afternoon sun. In another hour or so it would be dark. ‘You thought the same thing, am I right?’

‘I don’t know of too many retired cops who have waterfront views.’

‘Look at you, being diplomatic.’ He smiled at her, flashing a mouth full of crooked teeth turned brown and yellow from a lifetime of smoking and drinking coffee. ‘Don’t blame you for thinking it. Everyone does. In her former life, Mavis used to be a paediatric surgeon. She never married and spent all her free time playing the stock market. She owns the house free and clear. We don’t hurt for money. I spend my time fishing and puttering around the house, and Mavis is a full-time foster mom for dogs, keeps them here until she can get them homes. What I got here?’ He made a sweeping gesture with his hands. ‘I consider this payback for all the shit I had to wade through.’

He held out a pack of Marlboros in a shaky hand. She politely declined and he pointed to a pair of weatherworn Adirondack chairs set up in the corner under a pale patch of sun.

Smith sat first, in the chair that faced the ocean. Darby moved her chair slightly so she could face him, but not enough to make him feel like this was an interrogation. She preferred watching people when speaking so she could watch their body language.

He wrapped his thin lips around a cigarette and plucked it from the pack. ‘After you called, I looked you up on that Internet thing everyone uses, what’s it called?’

‘Google.’

He snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it. Mavis had to show me, of course, since the whole computer thing has sort of passed me by. But I can use the mouse to click on things.’ He cupped a hand around the lighter, then sat back in his chair, inhaling smoke. ‘You’ve had quite a, ah,
colourful
career with Boston PD.’ A sly grin, and then he added, ‘You know what we used to call people like you?’

‘Trailblazers?’

‘Shit magnets.’

The words were said without malice, but she couldn’t tell if he was trying to bait her. She sensed he was building up to something, so she drank her black coffee and waited.

‘It’s an exclusive club,’ he said. ‘Yours truly is a charter member.’

He sipped his drink and made a hissing sound as the whiskey burned its way down his throat. ‘I remember you now. It’s the hair and green eyes. You came with the other lab rats to pick up Charlie’s bike. You want to know what I thought?’

‘I have a feeling you’ll tell me even if I say no.’

‘You’re right. I said to myself, “What the hell is a such a pretty girl doing working in this shit?”’

‘I like working in this shit.’

He chuckled softly. ‘That’s the other thing I remembered. You were really blunt. You were busting everyone’s balls on procedural stuff, didn’t care who you pissed off. The other lab rats you came with, they did their job and left. Not you. No, you stuck around and kept poking your nose into the case, asking us what we thought about this or that. You pissed the hell out of Karakas.’

Darby didn’t answer.

‘That surprise you?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Most homicide cops like to steer the boat without any interference.’

‘That, and they want the recognition. They want to be the ones to solve the case, get their promotion and names in the paper. Me?’ He shrugged, took another sip of his drink. ‘I couldn’t’ve cared less. Putting the damn thing to bed was what mattered, and I got that same sense from you. All you cared about was finding that kid and bringing him home, which is why I suspect you’re here.’

His gaze turned as sorrowful and rheumy as a bloodhound’s. Then she understood. Smith believed her request to meet face to face had to do with her delivering the news of having come across either the boy’s remains or some piece of evidence that would allow Smith mentally to put the case to bed. Homicide detectives didn’t grieve the same way the parents of a missing child did – there was no way they should – but there was a strong emotional connection to the victim that was impossible to ignore. If the vic was dead, the case closed, you got some sort of closure. If the persons who did it were behind bars, you got the added benefit of a measure of satisfaction – enough to put the case on some shelf to gather dust and, God-willing, fade.

But cases involving missing children, when weeks turned into months and then years, you always kept a mental door open and periodically revisited it to see if there was something you had overlooked. You did it because those cases ate at you day in and day out, and the only way to stop that was to close it. To nail the goddamn coffin shut.

Smith took another drag of his cigarette and tapped it with a finger to flick off the ash.

‘What happened to him?’ he asked, curls of smoke drifting through the hairy nostrils of his bulbous nose.

‘He was shot to death,’ Darby said. ‘I spoke with him before he died.’

38

Darby started with the phone call from Gary Trent. She summarized her conversations with the NH SWAT senior corporal inside the APC and the hostage negotiator, Billy Lee, inside the mobile command trailer. She went into great detail about the conversation she had with Charlie Rizzo inside the family’s new home in Dover and then described what had followed after the explosion: the dead SWAT team members and the man she had captured, the thing with the egg-white skin and the missing tongue and the Latin words tattooed on the base of his neck. She explained to Smith what the words meant.

She told Smith about the sarin gas, the listening devices found inside her condo and the feds watching her at the end of her street. She left out what had happened during the early morning hours at the blast site and then later, at the BU Biomedical Lab, with the men she was sure were Secret Service. Her decision didn’t have to do with trust; it was more to do with the fact that Smith looked like he was having a problem with everything she’d just told him.
Give him a moment to digest it
.

She waited for his questions. He had listened to her intently, and without interrupting. Now he lit another cigarette and stared thoughtfully at the small waves breaking across the shore below them.

Darby stared past his head, across the street at the nest of tall trees shedding their gold and red leaves. The puppies were still in the backyard, and she could hear their playful high-pitched barks and squeals behind the wind.

Smith leaned forward in his chair. He had smoked half of his cigarette. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. She waited.

‘That’s one hell of a story.’

‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘But that’s what happened.’

‘Now I know why you insisted on talking face to face. If you had told me this shit over the phone, I would’ve hung up on you.’

‘You read about it in the papers? I know the
Globe
covered it.’

‘I’m a
Herald
guy, and I only buy it for the sports page. I stopped following the news … Christ, it’s been years. First thing you learn as a cop is that almost everything that’s printed or said on the news is about two per cent truth. The other ninety-eight per cent is bullshit spin. You really think it’s him? Charlie, I mean?’