The Soul Collectors (25 page)

Two men, mountains of pale flesh poured into black suits, blocked her path to the front door. They wore earpieces and she could see the outline of their Kevlar vests underneath their shirts.

‘You need to wait here, Miss McCormick,’ one of them said. ‘You too, Mr Cooper.’

Bright light poured through the glass front door leading into the warm lobby. From where she stood she could see the hard blue sky, cloudless, the sun bright and strong. She moved closer and then saw part of a black sedan parked a few feet away from the entrance, the driver’s-side window down, a Secret Service man seated behind the wheel, talking into his wrist mike.

One of the lobby’s Secret Service agents held up a hand and said, ‘Back up, Miss McCormick. We’ll tell you when it’s safe.’

She nodded and took a step back. Breathed deeply and smelled the coppery stench lining her nostrils. John Smith’s blood, his wife’s blood. Her fingernails and the callused parts of her palms and fingers were stained near-black and she saw John Smith’s face exploding into bone and hair and skin. Saw Mavis Smith, remembered the feel of the woman’s blood spurting out against her fingers – and then the enormity of it hit her, how she’d be forced to live her life going forward, under constant guard, her every movement scrutinized. Travelling from state to state, from safe house to safe house, switching names and identities, living on the run until this group was found. Until every one of its members was arrested or dead.

But how many were there?

The question swelled inside her as a fragment from her conversation with Casey rolled through her head and made her skin turn cold. These people were lurking somewhere beyond these walls, waiting. Watching and planning and sharpening their knives. Cleaning their guns.

Coop placed a hand on her shoulder and some of the cramping tension inside her chest and shoulders loosened. He led her to the far corner and they turned their backs to the agents so they could have some privacy.

He kept his hand on her shoulder when he leaned in close and said, ‘You okay?’

She nodded. Coop’s eyes searched her face. The green one was the most interesting. Flecked with tiny specks of gold you could see only when you stood this close. She felt his hand and she could smell him and thought, incredibly, under the circumstance:
So this is what it’s like to find your other half in this world.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Thanks again for coming.’

‘Anytime, Darbs.’ He grinned, picked something out of her hair and tossed it to the floor. ‘You could use a shower at some point. I’m just saying …’

‘How long can you stay?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s open-ended. Family emergency, I told my boss. He said to take my time. The Brits are good about holidays – that’s what they call vacations over there.’

‘Let me start at the beginning,’ Darby said.

50

Darby had finished explaining last night’s conversation with John Smith when word came down it was time to move.

The Secret Service agents escorted them to an oversized black van parked a few feet away from the main doors. They stayed close, holding their arms, and in the space of a few steps, she saw a scattering of Secret Service agents guarding the area. Saw them standing on street corners. Caught a flash of one with a pair of binoculars on the roof across the street, saw another standing guard near the side door of another black van. Casey was in there, clamping down on his fear as he watched a man hundreds of miles away searching the blood-splattered walls, floors and bodies for evidence, clues to help him find his wife and daughter before they joined the dead.

She stepped up inside the van, Coop moving right behind her, and saw Sergey sitting hunched forward at a small desk, phone pressed against his ear and his forehead resting on the heel of his palm as he listened to someone on the other end of the line.

The side door slammed shut and the van started rolling, slowly at first, then gaining speed. The warm interior, lit from the half-dozen computer screens, blinking lights and a small desk lamp next to Sergey, had that pleasant new-carpet smell.

This was no cheap five-and-dime surveillance rig. Looking around, she saw the new encryption packs developed by the CIA on the wall-mounted phone. The wall behind Sergey contained another desk, this one longer, with an array of forensic tools, each one bolted to the surface: dual-slide microscope, a scanning electron microscope and portable mass spectrometer. In the back, to her left, was a locked metal gun cabinet.

Darby checked her watch. It was coming up on 10:30 a.m.

Sergey rose halfway out of his seat and reached up to the wall to hang up the phone.

‘That was the woman you asked me to speak to, Virginia Cavanaugh,’ he said, plopping back down in his bolted chair. ‘You were right about the tunnels.’

Coop said, ‘Tunnels?’

She hadn’t told Coop about this part. She had run out of time when the Secret Service agents came for them.

Sergey turned to the computer monitor on the desk, grabbed an edge and swung it around to show them the screen holding an aerial satellite photograph – a close-up roof shot of the Rizzo family’s former Brookline home surrounded by dozens of trees in full autumn bloom. Darby got out of her seat and knelt, grabbing the edge of the desk for balance.

‘Here’s the Rizzo house,’ she said, and then traced her finger diagonally across the wooded area, stopping less than a quarter of a mile away, on the roof belonging to a sprawling three-floor mock-Tudor home. ‘This belongs to a woman named Virginia Cavanaugh, the Rizzo family’s old neighbour. An old Prohibition tunnel runs between the two houses.’

Coop said, ‘And you know this from, what, your old days as a bootlegger?’

‘When I worked Charlie Rizzo’s case, someone, a detective or patrolman, I forget which, told me the Rizzo and Cavanaugh houses were owned by some big Irish family who made all of their money in lumber. When the Great Depression hit, the money started to dry up, and this family had something on the order of twenty kids and grandchildren.’

‘Small family by Irish standards.’

‘True. So this small but enterprising Irish clan turned to the one known commodity available to them at the time. Hint: it’s not growing potatoes.’

‘Then I’d have to say bootlegging.’

‘Correct. Prohibition was in full swing, so they manufactured moonshine and beer in their basement and then rolled the big barrels across the tunnel to where the Cavanaugh home now sits. Now ask why.’

‘Why?’

Darby grinned slightly, enjoying the easy banter she had with him, missing it. For a moment it took the grief and severity of her previous conversation with Casey and Sergey and muted it.

She returned to her seat. ‘The Cavanaugh home used to be the site for this Irish family’s lumber company. They used the house as an office and sold their lumber there, so it was a perfect spot to pick up the illegal booze. Trucks pull into a lumberyard all the time, right? But in the driveway of a home, not so much.’

Coop raised his hand. ‘Question. How do you know this tunnel is still in service?’

Darby turned to Sergey.

‘Virginia Cavanaugh,’ Sergey said. ‘Woman’s in her eighties and told me her home – the aforementioned site of the lumberyard – has stayed in her family for the past three generations. They will it free and clear to the surviving family members, the only stipulation is that it can’t be sold.’

‘Clever,’ Coop said.

‘Cavanaugh told me her uncle took her through the tunnel once, you know, part of a history lesson or something,’ Sergey said. ‘As far as she knows, you can still walk through it, but you won’t know until you’re actually there.’

Darby said, ‘So she agreed to let us in.’

Sergey nodded.

‘What about the other part?’ she asked.

‘No problem there,’ Sergey said. ‘I think it gave the old bird a thrill, getting a call from the FBI to help assist an investigation. That plus I don’t think she’s real fond of her neighbours.’

‘What gave you that impression?’

‘She called them “chinks”.’

Coop said, ‘That’s one clue, sure.’

Darby leaned forward and with her eyes on Sergey said, ‘Tell me the rest of it. How Casey found this group.’

‘The short version is this,’ Sergey said. ‘When Casey was working as a profiler, he was sent to consult on a series of abductions that occurred in and around Los Angeles over a seven-year time period. This was back in ’81. Eleven victims, all kids. The youngest was six, the oldest twelve. They came from different backgrounds – poor parents, rich ones, middle class – and the racial backgrounds were different. Black, white, you name it. Each boy or girl was snatched somewhere outside their home, and each abduction was quick and clean, no witnesses.

‘Reviewing the cases, Jack discovered that each vic was the youngest family member. Eleven victims, many of whom had older siblings, and each vic was the youngest. What were the odds? That was the only unifying thread he found.’

The wall phone rang. Sergey took the call, listened for a moment then said ‘Okay’ and hung up.

‘On the ninth abduction,’ he said, ‘the one near Chino Hill Park, a witness saw a van pull up next to a kid riding his bike. Kid’s name was Mathew Zuckerman. He’s ten, pretty good-sized boy for his age, lots of weight, and the van pulls up to him and pauses just a moment and then speeds away, leaving the bike bouncing across the dirt road.’

‘So you’re talking two people,’ Darby said. ‘The driver and whoever was in the back of the van.’

‘At
least
two people. The boy wasn’t light, so you’d need at least two to pull and lift the kid from the bike that fast.’

‘And that’s when Casey came to the conclusion this was a group rather than a single serial killer.’

Sergey nodded. ‘That was his theory, yes. Now the detective who caught the Zuckerman case, he was this young guy probably looking to make a name for himself because he forced the forensic guys to collect and bag into evidence every piece of trash along the entire stretch of road. We’re talking about a good mile before you can turn. Thank God this guy was that thorough; otherwise he wouldn’t have found the empty syringe tube.

‘The state lab did a good job with the people and resources they had, and Jack convinced them to send everything to our lab, including the bike. We managed to lift a print off the tube and got lucky. The print, we later discovered, belonged to a ten-year-old boy named Francis Levin who disappeared on his way home from school in ’54.’

‘Wait,’ Darby said. ‘Your fingerprint database wasn’t operational until ’99. How did Levin’s prints get into the system?’

‘When Casey stopped working the original cases, a different task force took over before it was finally blended into CASMIRC. Any only or youngest child who was either abducted or who disappeared under mysterious circumstances – the task force made sure that hard copies of their prints were on file. When the IAFIS database went operational, the task force simply loaded and coded their prints.’

‘So you didn’t find out Levin was behind the abduction until ’99.’

‘Correct. We don’t have prints for every missing kid. We got lucky with Levin because the police had lifted prints from his bedroom after he was abducted.’

‘Was Levin one of the California abductions Casey investigated?’

Sergey shook his head. ‘Levin was born and raised in Oregon. Jack had Behavioral Sciences pull up every missing person case where the vic was either an only child or the youngest child in the family, and the entire West Coast lit up like a Christmas tree.’

‘How many kids?’

‘Eighty-six,’ Sergey said.

Coop mumbled, ‘Jesus.’

‘And that’s just the West Coast,’ Sergey said. ‘This group or cult – I still have no idea what to call them – they’ve been travelling across the country all this time, snatching the youngest child of families.’

‘How many?’ Darby asked again.

‘The last time I checked,’ Sergey said, ‘the number was just over three hundred.’

51

Darby’s gaze dropped from Sergey’s face to the tops of the man’s polished black Oxfords, her head dizzy with calculations.

Francis Levin disappears in ’54 and shows up in ’81 when he snatches this kid named Zuckerman and Levin’s prints are found on a syringe. That’s twenty-seven years. And now Casey is here and he’s saying the same group is responsible and that’s fifty-six years, they’ve been snatching kids for at least
fifty-six years.

Sergey was saying something to her.

‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’

‘I said the only thing we know with any degree of certainty is that they abduct the youngest child of the family. For example, Charlie Rizzo. We know he was the youngest member of his family, so when he was abducted, we made sure his prints were entered into the IAFIS system. Now, I’m not suggesting
all
of these missing kids who are the youngest family members can be attributed to this group, so that three hundred number could be lower.’

‘Or much, much larger,’ Darby said. ‘There’s collateral damage, the people they killed, like John Smith and his wife.’

And your wife
, she added to herself.

‘Yes,’ Sergey said, ‘you’re correct. But I’m focusing on just the missing children. The fact is we don’t know anything about this group. Who they are or what they do. Why they snatch the youngest kid from the family.’

Darby was thinking of what Charlie Rizzo had said to his father –
Tell her,
Daddy
. Tell her what you did
– and said: ‘The parents of these missing kids, you mean to tell me you found absolutely nothing in their backgrounds?’

‘Nothing that can tell us why their kids were taken, no.’

‘I find that hard to swallow.’

‘I do too. But, still, it remains that these could simply be random abductions. You’re more than welcome to take a look at the case files.’

‘What about bodies?’

‘Not one. Whatever happened to them, we don’t know. The cases are unsolved.’

‘Casey – Jack – told me he was called back when Darren Waters was found.’

‘You mean when he reappeared,’ Sergey said. ‘We asked Jack to come in and consult, since Waters was one of those cases that lit up on the West Coast – only child, snatched from home, etcetera. So we took Waters into custody, brought him to what we thought was a secured location –’