The Soul Collectors (19 page)

‘I don’t have the benefit of DNA or a fingerprint, so the rational part of me says no.’

Smith nodded, and took a long drag off his cigarette.

‘My gut says the man I met was Charlie,’ she said. ‘The eyes were the right colour, and he was missing two nipples. He made it a point of showing them to me.’

He nodded again, more to himself than her.

‘All this time …’ He ran a big hand over his face, staring out at the darkening sky. ‘If what you’re saying is true, all this time that kid was alive and …’ He took in a deep breath and cocked his head to her. ‘You said his body was scarred.’

She nodded.

‘He tell you from what?’

‘No, but I think it was from being whipped.’ She had thought about it on and off during the past week. The lattice pattern seemed right. ‘It’s only a guess. I forgot to mention he’d been turned into a eunuch.’

Smith glared at her, wide-eyed.

‘Castrated,’ she said.

‘I know what it means, I just … you’re
sure
?’

‘Positive.’

He ran a big hand over his face. Then shook his head as if snapping out of a trance.

‘This business with the face mask, what’s that all about?’

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Charlie didn’t say anything about it. Does it mean anything to you?’

‘First time I’ve ever heard about such a thing. Must have some sort of religious significance.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘The tattoos on that guy’s neck, the one with the missing tongue? You said they were Latin, right?’

‘According to what I read on the Internet. I don’t know their significance, so I sent them over to a Harvard professor to decipher their meaning.’

‘You Catholic?’

‘Irish Catholic.’

‘My condolences.’ He chuckled softly. ‘They used to speak Latin during church services years and years ago, way before you were born – before I was born, probably. Makes me think you’re dealing with some sort of religious cult.’

She nodded. The thought had occurred to her too.

‘What did the army tell you?’

‘They didn’t tell me anything. Neither did the feds. I’m shut out from the investigation. My guess is that this thing is bigger than someone using nerve gas to kill a bunch of cops.’

‘I’m not sure how I can help you here.’

‘Tell me about Mark Rizzo.’

‘He … Shit, you’re talking about, what, twelve years ago? Truth be told, I don’t want to revisit it. Don’t look at me like that, you know what I’m talking about. You worked a missing person’s case before, that Traveler creep, the one who came for you when you was a little girl and ended up snatching your friend.’

Darby nodded.

‘So you know how that shit can linger if you don’t find a way to turn it off. Because if you don’t, you end up dragging it around like a ball and chain for the rest of your life. I can’t really help you here. You’d be better off reading my case notes.’

‘I don’t have access to them.’

‘You’ve lost me. You’re not working with that CSU group?’

‘No. It’s been permanently disbanded. And, as of this morning, I’m no longer an employee at the crime lab. I’m looking into this on my own.’

‘I hope to Christ you’re not trying to recruit me. Because the answer’s no. Besides, I wouldn’t be of any use to you. And I don’t have them. Copies, I mean. Some homicide guys, they make copies of the cases they didn’t get to solve before they go into retirement. They think they’ll revisit one or two, you know, break it open or something. Not me. When I left, I shut the door behind me.’

‘Was Mark Rizzo ever a suspect?’

Smith didn’t pause to consider the question; he shook his head.

‘Never,’ he added.

‘But you looked into him.’

‘Of course we did. Him
and
his wife. It’s the first thing you do when a kid is abducted or goes missing, because nine times out of ten the parents or a relative is involved. So, yeah, we looked into the parents, but they both had strong alibis. The mother was at home, the father working at the office. Everything checked out.’

‘How far did you dig?’

‘Well, if I’m to believe what you say, that the father was involved in his son’s abduction, then I’d have to admit we didn’t dig far enough.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Like I said, his alibi checked out. Marriage was solid.’

‘Was he married before?’

‘No. First marriage for both of them. He was a tax guy … I remember some incident involving one of his clients, guy pissed off about having to pay too much money to the government and thought Rizzo had bungled his tax return. So this guy, he went back to Rizzo’s office and goes after him with a baseball bat. Police were called, so there was a report. We looked into it, thinking this guy harboured a grudge all these years and
maybe
decided to get even with Rizzo by snatching the kid. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I remember it came up empty.’

‘Was Rizzo born here?’

He thought about it as he took another sip of his drink.

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘I don’t remember him having a Boston accent.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything. I know plenty of people who don’t – people who’ve lived here their whole lives. Like you. You don’t have one, and you grew up in Belham, right?’

Darby nodded. ‘Where’d you hear that?’

‘Didn’t hear it, I read it. Online.’

‘What about Mark Rizzo’s extended family? Any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. He was an only child. His parents died when he was seventeen. Some sort of car crash. I don’t remember where or when.’

‘Who raised him?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest. I can’t even say I asked him the question. I don’t know if the guy had any uncles or aunts either. And his wife, Judith? I don’t remember anything about her except that she was a die-hard Catholic. Kept a pair of rosary beads in her hands at all times. That’s the only thing that sticks out.’

He shrugged, showed her his empty hands. ‘I don’t know what else to tell you. The guy was as clean as a whistle – at least that’s how he looked at the time.’

‘Did the feds get involved in the case?’

Smith took another healthy slug of whiskey. ‘They usually do with missing kids.’

‘Only if they believe someone’s been transported over state lines.’

‘News got out fast that Charlie Rizzo had been abducted – that was the way it looked since we found his abandoned bike – and that’s when the calls started coming. You know the ones I’m talking about. “I have Charlie and if you want to see him again put unmarked bills in a brown-paper bag on such and such a day.” “I have Charlie and he’s in a lot of pain.” Shit like that. One call came in from someplace in the Midwest – Wisconsin, I think – and that’s when the feds got involved. They helped us run down all the leads. They had the manpower and the resources.

‘Almost every call came from a payphone, and they were all cranks. None of ’em knew specifics about the kid or how and where he was abducted. But we had to run them down. We got a shitload more when the Rizzos went to the press – you know, try to appeal to the kidnapper. Like I said, they were all cranks. Can I ask you a personal question?’

‘Go for it.’

‘You married?’

‘No.’

‘Kids?’

‘Don’t have the maternal drive. That, and the fact that I’m forty now, I’m pretty sure the factory’s shut down.’

‘You serious with anyone?’

Darby opened her mouth, then shut it, unsure of how to answer the question.
Yes, I’m in love with a guy I’ve known for fifteen years. There’s always been an attraction between us, but I never acted on it because I didn’t want the friendship to change. And just when I realized I couldn’t ignore this attraction any more, he relocated to London. I haven’t been over there to visit him because I’m afraid nothing more will come of it or, even worse, it will end our friendship, and, as much as I love him, I can’t bear to lose that.

‘There’s someone in my life,’ she said. ‘Someone serious.’

‘Good. Spend as much time with him as you can. Get married and have babies. If you can’t have them, be like Angelina Jolie and adopt a whole Rainbow Coalition or whatever. That’s the shit that matters. That’s what haunts you at my age, all the opportunities you ignored because of the job, because the job don’t mean anything in the end.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘Your choice. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go spend some time with my wife. At my age, I don’t have much time left.’

Smith got to his feet, his knees cracking. She was staring at the wrinkles on his face, about to get up, when his head exploded.

39

It was the worst pain he had ever experienced.

They shoved him down on the chair and Mark Rizzo felt the metal spikes stab through his flesh and muscle, shattering bones. He screamed and they strapped his wrists and ankles to keep him pinned and he kept screaming until his throat was raw. As bad as the pain was – and it was excruciating, never ending waves riding up his spine like bullets and tearing through the soft meat of his brain – he dug his fingernails into the wood and willed himself to keep still, because if he moved the razor-sharp spikes would move and they would tear and shred and break.

He sat there for hours, days, he didn’t know. He had a clear memory of the two big men coming back into the room, the ones with the alabaster skin and ghoul faces, and in the flickering candlelight he could see that they weren’t wearing any clothes or shoes and that their genitals were missing. They moved off to the sides, near the walls, and as he lost sight of them the Archon loomed into view and spoke in a whisper: ‘What is your name?’ And Mark heard another voice, this one in his head, and it was screaming
Don’t give it to them: if you do they’ll kill you, don’t say it
, and he had hesitated, thinking over the pain, and the two ghouls with the scarred faces and bodies raised their whips.

The first strap hit him and he thrashed around on the chair and his voice came back and he howled, the sound loud enough to pulverize stone. They kept whipping him, the straps tearing out strips of flesh, and then one of them raked something hard across his shins and he vomited until his stomach was stripped and then, through the mercy of God, he passed out.

Delirious and drifting in and out of consciousness, he would sometimes open his eyes and see nothing but the awful darkness and wonder if the whips had blinded him. Now he opened them again and through his pain-soaked haze he could see candlelight flickering across a grey-stoned ceiling. They had removed him from the chair and placed him on his back on something cold and hard and wet.

The pain came back, roaring through his body, and his limbs shook and he felt straps biting into his wrists and ankles, his throat. His head bobbed slightly to the left and he saw a dark leather strap pinning the wrist of his broken hand against the edge of a long metal table. Blood –
his
blood – covered his naked body and pooled across the table’s stainless-steel surface. He heard a dripping sound on the floor as he bled out and he wept, thinking,
I’m going to die
.

The Archon’s voice echoed over the cold and dusty stones: ‘What is your name?’

Mark Rizzo shut his eye, weeping. They were going to kill him and it didn’t matter if he said his real name or not because they –

A bolt of electricity slammed through his head and across his limbs, his vision exploding in white, and he couldn’t see anything and his body bucked against the leather straps binding him to the table.

Then he fell back to the table and the pain was swept under a tingling numbness that fluttered back and forth across his limbs.

‘Electroshock therapy,’ the voice said. ‘That was fifteen seconds. The next time it will be thirty.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘What is your name?’

He didn’t answer and the electricity came again. When it was over, he couldn’t move, felt his heart sputtering. Leaking.

‘
Thomas
,’ he screamed. ‘
My name is Thomas!
’

‘Thomas what?’

‘Thomas Howland.’

‘Where were you born?’

‘Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother’s name was Janice and she died of breast cancer and I went to live with my father, Duncan. His name was Duncan but everyone called him Chris. He was a painter. Painted houses.’

‘You told me you prayed for him to die.’

‘I told a priest.’

‘And God. God was there with you in the confessional, Thomas. I heard your prayers, and I killed your father. I caused his ladder to fall, and I let him die. To punish him for what he did to you. And when you were living in a foster home, being abused, I heard your prayers and I sent an angel to bring you to a new family, to a mother and father who were kind to you. And how did you repay my kindness? You shot my family. You killed my angels while they slept and then you fled like a coward.’

His mind was spinning, flashing back to all those times he’d been inside the truck with his stepfather, a man named Ernest. Those long drives to other states and the hours spent in the truck waiting until Ernie gave the nod and then he would get out and approach the young boy or girl, use the speech he’d been given to lure them into the truck. Riding in the truck and trying hard not to cry because he knew the boy or girl sitting wedged between the two of them would disappear into thin air and then the time would come to move on to another state, move on to the next boy or girl, more states, more victims, always more victims.

‘I’m not a murderer,’ he said.

‘You were a liberator,’ the Archon said. ‘My angel. I gave you the mark.’

He felt it rise up in him, the decades-old guilt over what he’d done. He had told no one, but his guilt had turned into the ulcers, high blood pressure and heart palpitations that eventually led to his first heart attack. The drinking that wouldn’t take away the ghosts but reduced their voices to whispers.

‘It took me a long, long time to find you the first time,’ the voice said softly. ‘Imprisoned in this body, I had to use man-made methods. And when I finally found you, in my kindness I gave you a chance to save your soul. I was willing to release your son, and what did you do?’