The Soul Collectors (29 page)

‘You do.’

‘Are you sure? Did I leave anything out?’

‘Evidence that we collect will be sealed and given to a courier to be brought back to our lab.’

Darby thought of the man she’d seen standing next to the suitcase.

‘Anything else?’ Ellis prompted.

‘Yes. Thank you, again, for assisting us.’

Casey’s voice had that odd, detached tone again, as if he had departed his body and left someone else to pull the puppet strings.

Then, to Darby, he said: ‘See the puncture wounds running along the sides of the back?’

‘Yes.’ Bright and red, they oozed blood.

‘They cover the victim’s entire back, legs and buttocks.’

Darby looked up and across the body. ‘Any ideas?’

‘No,’ Casey said, ‘but the puncture wounds all look the same, and there’s … there’s an order to them, as if he had been forced to sit on something sharp.’

‘What about the welts on the front of the torso?’

‘Whip marks,’ Casey said. ‘Most of the wounds are pretty fresh, so this couldn’t have been done too long ago. The marks along the wrists and ankles are consistent with restraints, probably leather. Whatever they did to him, they had him strapped down.’

Using the tweezers, Darby parted the hairs on the man’s head. Her other hand held the forensic light. She moved it over the scalp, searching for evidence and, now, spiders. She immediately found a series of tiny welts.

‘Spider bites,’ Perkins said.

Darby kept searching, wondering if the spiders had been dumped on the victim to ensure immediate bites – or if he had simply been locked inside the closet with them crawling around in the dark. Both thoughts were equally disturbing.

Perkins seized the upper part of her arm, his gloved fingers digging into the meat of her bicep with a strength that surprised her.

‘
Stay still.
’

She did, and out of the corner of her eye watched as Perkins’s hand came back from underneath her right forearm, clutching a black spider the size of a matchbook. Squat, black and incredibly hairy, it squirmed in the air, its oversized fangs exposed.

‘An Australian Recluse,’ Perkins said, carrying it to a specimen jar. ‘Very fast and very poisonous.’

Darby blinked the sweat away from her eyes and then quickly gathered herself. Coop stood across from her, on the other side of the table. She looked at him and said, ‘We’ll need close-ups of the wounds on the scalp.’

He nodded and grabbed the camera. She pointed to the first wound, which was a few inches beyond the hairline, then moved away to give him some room. It would take him a minute or two to set up the shot. She used the time to take a quick look around for any more stray creepy-crawlers.

There were none on the table – at least none that she could see. She checked behind the victim’s head and, failing to find any, searched the ear canals with a new and brighter flashlight. Clean. Same with the man’s nasal cavity. Nothing in there except a forest of fine black nasal hairs.

Now the mouth. Fortunately it hung open, frozen in place by rigor. She had to break the jaw to get a better look.

The victim’s mouth, throat and the soft smooth pink cheek lining had multiple abrasions and contusions. She dipped her tweezers inside the mouth and prodded around the victim’s tongue for stray spiders. She inserted her tweezers down the throat and hit something hard.

Coop said, ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. Someone hand me the forceps.’

Ellis said, ‘I should be the one who –’

‘Sam, just give me the damn forceps.’

She needed a brighter light. She reached up and grabbed the plastic arm belonging to one of the autopsy lights. She turned it on and pivoted the circular dish with its intense, bright light near the face. It took her a moment to find the right angle to illuminate every inch inside the victim’s mouth. Something was definitely lodged in the throat.

Ellis slapped the forceps against her waiting palm to make sure she knew he wasn’t pleased at playing lab assistant. She caught the grin on Coop’s face before turning her attention back to her work.

Grabbing the object was easy. The forceps had found purchase immediately, but dislodging the thing in question from the throat was another matter. Whatever it was, it had been shoved a good way down the victim’s oesophagus. It took a few minutes of delicate, almost surgical manoeuvring before she could move the item into the intensely bright light. A USB drive and a small, severed finger, bound together with a red elastic hair-band.

59

The finger belonged to a woman. The long fingernail had chipped red polish on it.

Sarah Casey had worn the same red nail polish, the same red elastic hair-band, in the pictures tacked to the bedroom closet. The blood on her T-shirt had come from the severed finger and she hadn’t been screaming in fear in those pictures; she had been screaming in pain.

Darby placed the finger and USB drive on the dish Coop had waiting.

‘I want to get this printed,’ the former profiler said, his voice trembling.

Coop said, ‘I’ll do it.’

Casey moved away from the table and she said to Coop, ‘The second you’re done printing that finger, put it on ice and then have one of the feds or Secret Service take it over to Mass General to give to Dr Izzo.’

‘That the guy who fixed Dale Brown’s finger?’

‘That’s him. Izzo managed to reattach it because we put it on ice.’

Coop darted away. Darby looked at Ellis and said, ‘I need two buccal swabs, the ones with the brushes.’

‘They’re in the same place they always are,’ he said, pointing across the room.

‘I know. I need you to get them for me.’

Ellis gave another theatrical sigh as he moved to get the packets. He came back a moment later, ripped open one and handed her a long plastic rod with a tiny white scrub brush on the end. She stuck the brush inside the victim’s mouth, scrubbed the frozen cheek lining, then removed it and placed the brush inside the sterile plastic cylinder Ellis had pinched between his fingers.

The first sample she could use for PCR-ready DNA identification. The second buccal swab she could save in case further DNA identification was needed.

The samples collected, she grabbed the kits she needed to collect fingernail scrapings. Ellis assisted without any further bitching and moaning. He had even got into the spirit of things by picking up Coop’s clipboard and making notes.

Darby turned off the bright autopsy light. Switching to a forensic light with a green filter, she searched the victim’s mouth for trace evidence, finding a small fibre – possibly a rug fibre, judging by its size and shape. She dropped it into the glassine envelope Ellis had waiting.

There was more. A single blond hair, which was sadly missing its DNA-packed root bulb. A black speck that could have been a piece of leather, stuck behind the back-right molar. She prised it out carefully with the tweezers.

Dr Ellis leaned over the body. ‘Is that a bumblebee?’

‘It’s definitely a bee,’ she said, ‘but not an ordinary one.’

‘And you know this how?’

‘It doesn’t have the usual yellow or red bands. The body is entirely black and the eyes are abnormally large. Dr Perkins, hand me one of those specimen jars on the shelf across from you … No, the next shelf, the bottom one. Thank you.’

She dropped the bee into a specimen jar, and then she ran her forensic light back and forth inside the victim’s mouth, searching the crevices between the lip and gum line, and caught a faint glow from the corner of her eye.

Darby turned, blinking and moving the hand holding the flashlight. The glow had vanished.

Something
was
there. She had seen
something
on the soft lining behind the man’s lip.

Darby moved away from the body, grabbed the UV forensic light and turned back to the victim’s mouth, examining the smooth cavity between the teeth and cheek. Nothing glowed. She turned the light slowly, trying different angles and then different light sources. She had seen something, she knew she hadn’t –

There, on the soft area behind the bottom lip, the labial sulcus: a bright fluorescent glowing shape now visible to the naked eye. She fumbled around for the best angle and distance, and then had to steady her head in order to see it fully:

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ellis leaning in for a closer look.

‘What in God’s name is that?’ he asked.

‘Looks like some sort of symbol. Where’s Coop?’

‘He’s in here. Hold on.’

Darby didn’t know what the symbol meant, but knew it had been tattooed into the skin using some sort of ink invisible to the naked eye. She thought about the stamps used at nightclubs, amusement parks and some kids-themed restaurants. A hand was stamped with a fluorescent but invisible ink as the person entered. Then, if they had to exit the place and come back in, the person placed their hand underneath a black light, which illuminated the stamp and let the business know the person had already paid the entrance fee. That ink washed off and eventually faded. The ink on the lip had been tattooed into the skin. In a hidden area.

Coop stepped up on the other side of the table and leaned in across the body for a closer look. She showed it to him and then they talked about the best way to photograph it.

‘We don’t have that kind of equipment here,’ he said.

‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter to six.’

‘Call Ops, have them page ID.’

He used the wall phone in the autopsy suite to call Operations. Boston lab techs, as well as those who worked for ID, the separate section that dealt with forensic photography, had to live within a certain radius of Boston so they could report to a crime scene or the lab within an hour.

Dr Perkins calmly asked her to step aside. She did and watched the man use a pair of long tweezers to grab a small brown spider trying to crawl its way out of the victim’s mouth.

60

Coop helped her to photograph the front torso and to diagram the wounds, searching each one for trace evidence. Darby kept stealing glances at the vic’s mouth to see if anything else had decided to crawl out.

They found a lot of fibres on the wounds and body, a lot of dirt. On the vic’s shoulder she found a dried white blob; it appeared to be candle wax. They collected blood samples and made detailed diagrams of each wound, noting its location, length and size.

‘I need to make a quick phone call,’ she said.

Standing in the back, she took off her face shield, picked up the phone and called the direct number the Harvard professor had given her.

‘Professor Ross, this is Darby McCormick. We spoke earlier.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. The Latin phrase.’ The man sounded as though he was fighting a cold. ‘I’ve made some notes for you.’

‘I was told it’s a reference to someone who once enjoyed the pleasures of life and has now been transformed in death.’

‘That would be a correct interpretation, as some believe the phrase was spoken by Death, a reminder for one to enjoy the pleasures of earth. Other scholars believe
Et in Arcadia ego
is an anagram for another Latin phrase that means “Begone, I keep God’s Secrets.” I don’t know how much information you need. I don’t want to bury you in it.’

‘I want to send you a symbol I found, see if it ties into this phrase in any way. Would you be willing to take a look?’

‘Of course,’ he said, sounding positively delighted.

‘Do you have a fax machine?’

He gave her the number. She wrote it down on a piece of paper and took it with her down the hall to Ellis’s office. Inside, she removed a sheet of paper from his printer tray, drew the symbol and faxed it to the Harvard professor with a note saying to call her immediately if he knew anything.

Stepping back inside the autopsy suite, she saw that ID had arrived. She didn’t recognize the faces of the two men behind the face shields. Coop showed them the tattoo and then left the table to give them room to work.

Darby followed him to the corner. Her eyes felt dry and gritty, like sandpaper, and her head had begun to feel thick and sluggish from lack of sleep. She thought of the photographs of Sarah Casey, of the young girl’s severed finger, and that helped to keep the haze at bay.

‘Where’s Casey?’ she asked.

‘He left with the fingerprint card.’

‘Where?’

‘To Ellis’s office, I think.’

‘I was just there. I didn’t see him.’

‘That guy that was standing outside, the one with the suitcase? He has a fingerprint transmitter. And he’s a courier. That bee you found? I saw Casey hand it off to him.’

‘That was, what, two hours ago?’

‘That finger belongs to Casey’s daughter, doesn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ she said.

‘I saw the wound. Up close. Judging from the marks, I’d say it was snipped off with something like a bolt cutter.’

Jesus
. ‘What about the USB drive?’

‘He took that too.’

‘
Before
it was fingerprinted?’

‘Casey said that other guy was going to take care of that.’ He held up an apologetic hand. ‘Hey, don’t give me that look. His show, his rules – remember?’

She did. She did remember, and she was going to have to have a discussion with Sergey about the former profiler. Jack Casey was a force of nature, a genuine cult of personality; she had the enormous reverence with which Sergey and the others treated the man – maybe out of simple respect, maybe because of his background as a profiler and his service to the Bureau. But he had an emotional stake in this case now, and he needed to be removed – not from the case but from calling the shots.

And there was something else at work, something that she couldn’t quite identify. Something that reminded her of rotting floorboards found in a derelict house. Something
unsafe
. And the others had sensed it too. She had noticed how none of them stood too close to him.

ID had finished with the pictures. They agreed to go back to the lab and print out copies. Darby asked them for duplicates. After they left, she used a desk phone to call Sergey. She told him about the tattooed symbol and explained why she had called in ID to take the pictures. She didn’t have to tell him what she had found inside the victim’s throat; Casey had already called him. He said he’d meet them at the lab shortly and then abruptly hung up.