The Soul Collectors (33 page)

Casey had a highball glass on his lap. He wasn’t drunk – not yet, his eyes were too clear when he looked up and focused on her – but he was well on his way. He had put a serious dent in the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table to his left. The bottle was more than half empty.

Casey picked up the remote and paused the video. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. She felt like telling the man how deeply sorry she felt about what was going on. No, he wouldn’t want that. Stick to business.

‘Did Sergey tell you about the tattoo I found on Mark Rizzo’s lip?’

He nodded.

‘I found another one tonight,’ she said. ‘On the chest of the former cop who worked on the Charlie Rizzo investigation.’

‘The cop from Nahant who got shot?’

She nodded. ‘John Smith.’

‘Interesting.’

Clearly – understandably – Casey’s attention was on the video. On his daughter. She decided not to fill him in yet on her conversation with the Harvard professor.

Darby took the empty chair. ‘Sergey told me this video was on the USB drive.’

‘Yep.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Just this. The USB drive is downstairs. The computer whiz kids are scraping through it right now, seeing if they can find some digital fingerprints or something. Another group is analysing the video frame by frame, trying different light sources to see if anything jumps out.’

He polished off the rest of his drink, the melting ice cubes rattling in the glass. He reached for the bottle, and Darby glanced at the image frozen on the screen: Sarah Casey pounding on the clear plastic, lips stretched back in a howl of pain and terror.

‘How much time does she have?’ he asked, pouring himself another drink.

‘That’s a question you’re much better suited to answer, isn’t it? You know these people –’

‘I meant her finger. How much time until a surgeon can reattach it?’

‘I’m not a surgeon.’

‘But you knew enough to send my daughter’s finger over to Mass General.’

‘Six, maybe eight hours.’

‘And if, by some miracle, my daughter was found right now?’

She didn’t see a point in sparing the man the truth. ‘I think the time has passed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The wound’s already been cauterized. The nerves need to be healthy in order to reattach the finger.’

Casey nodded, kept nodding, his face not registering any emotion.

‘Dr Izzo told me the same thing,’ he said after a moment. ‘He called me an hour ago, said the window of opportunity is now officially shut.’

She told herself to keep her voice gentle, and she did.

‘If you already know this, why did you ask me?’

‘To see if you’d bullshit me,’ he said.

‘So this was, what, a test?’

Casey didn’t answer. He swirled the booze around, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass, and looked around the cabin. ‘This plane’s an old Air Force One, one of two that’s been refitted to combat the war on terror. State-of-the-art technology on board. Had to fight the Bureau to let us use it. These people we’re after, they fall under the domestic terrorism label, don’t you think?’

She nodded, sensing he had a point to make. She crossed her legs and waited.

‘I look at all this technology and see the one thing it can’t do: understand or figure out a person’s motive,’ he said. ‘I’m not just talking about serial killers or this group who have my daughter and wife right now. I could be referring to anyone. Like the housewife who wakes up one day after thirty years of marriage and just decides to pack up and leave her husband and kids. You can never know what truly goes on in somebody’s mind. You learn that pretty fast when you work in the Monster Factory. That’s what they called Behavioral Sciences in the early days.’

Casey took a long sip. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She watched his face in the dim green glow of light coming from the TV screen.

‘Before I went to work there, I was a cop in Michigan. This one case, this guy calls 911 and says he murdered his family. My partner and I get the call, and when we get there the front door is cracked open and the second I step in I see the blood covering the walls and the floor. We go inside with our guns raised and find this guy sitting at his dining-room table eating dinner and reading the newspaper. He greeted us –
thanked
us for coming, and then tells us his family is in the basement.

‘He killed them one by one, starting with his wife in the morning. Picks up the youngest from nursery school, brings him inside and shoots him in the back of the head. Guy makes himself lunch and waits for the next one, the ten-year-old. He gets shot the moment he walks in the door, doesn’t even get a chance to take off his jacket. The thirteen-year-old has soccer, so the father goes and picks him up after practice, brings him home and shoots his son just as he’s going up the stairs. Guy didn’t tell us this. I found out after the fact, after we studied the splatter patterns and drag marks on the carpet.

‘I went into the basement myself. They’re all sitting there, the wife and her kids, they’re sitting on a couch watching a Disney movie in the VCR.
Bambi
. Guy said it was the family’s favourite movie. He went down every hour and a half to rewind the movie and play it again.’

‘He tell you why he killed his family?’

‘Nope. Guy died on death row without telling a soul.’

She sensed he had more to say, and waited.

A nearby plane took off, its engines vibrating through the cabin and her seat.

Casey said, ‘The first guy I caught, Tommy Barber? He broke into houses, bound, raped and tortured women and their families. Recorded everything too. Guy had quite the little home-movie collection. Tommy’s a quadriplegic now, serving a life sentence in Angola. I shot him in the spine.’

No sympathy in his tone, just matter-of-fact, as if he were narrating some instructional video.

‘Charlie Slavick,’ he said, looking up at her, his gaze level and cool, ‘put boys inside dog crates and tortured them. I beat him to death with a hammer.’

‘And Hamilton?’

‘He’s alive.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Did you plant evidence?’

‘I did.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then I went to work on how to kill him. And the only thing I regret is that I couldn’t do it.’

‘Maybe you’ll have a second chance when he’s released,’ she said.

Casey regarded her for a moment, wondering if she was being serious or glib.

‘I’m assuming Sergey told you I talked with your wife,’ Darby said.

‘He did. If we don’t find my wife and daughter, I’m going to go ahead with the press conference.’

‘Wait, you’re not seriously thinking of –’

‘No. No, of course not. Confessing on live TV and killing Waters isn’t going to save my family. If I knew it would for certain, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d turn the gun on myself if it would save them, but there’s no way these people are going to let Taylor and Sarah go. They won’t kill them – there’s no fun in that.’

His words came out sounding rote, and his face remained, as ever, expressionless.

‘They want me to suffer,’ Casey said. ‘They’ve already given my wife a transorbital lobotomy.’

Darby felt cold all over, sitting still as she watched Casey pick up the remote from his lap and point it at the screen.

67

He played the video from the beginning.

A black screen followed by a low hiss from the speakers. Then a male voice said: ‘Property of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, case number 489765, item number 86. This is a copy of the original video.’

On the TV screen Sarah Casey stumbled around her cell, her nine remaining fingers feeling their way through pitch-black darkness. The spiders, Darby noticed, weren’t visible on camera – not yet – but she could hear their soft thumping sounds as they bumped into the walls of their cage. Casey’s daughter had heard the sounds too. She paused every few seconds to glance up and listen carefully, alert to the danger waiting several feet above her head.

The camera lens didn’t waver.
Must be set up on a tripod
, Darby thought, switching her attention past Sarah Casey to the stone walls beyond the young girl’s clear cell. Ancient and craggy, they reminded Darby of the ones she had seen in historical churches in Paris – walls that had never seen sunlight, dusty and smooth. The colouring, though, was uneven. Splotches of black and lighter colours covered the walls.

Now the camera lens panned back and the spiders were visible to the viewer but not to Sarah Casey. She bumped into one of the smooth walls and screamed. Darby watched the grimy hand grip the lever for the bottom of the spider cage and the green glow of night vision disappeared, giving way to a steady bright spotlight shining from somewhere on top of the video camera.

Sarah Casey held her hand up to the sudden burst of light. Her cheeks were swollen and shiny with tears, her breathing so fast and sharp she seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. Her hand moved away from her face and, blinking, she saw whoever was standing behind the camera and screamed. She bumped into the back wall and heard the sounds above her head and looked up and saw what was up there and screamed again.

Now came the part Darby had already seen: the young girl pounding on the translucent barrier of her prison cell and screaming for her father. The girl sinking into a corner, wailing, her gaze darting between the spiders crawling above her head, the person holding the lever and the person or persons standing behind the video camera. A flapping sound came over the speakers and Sarah Casey turned to the camera. She blinked several times, wiping away the tears from her vision, and when her eyes focused they widened for a moment and she choked out a single word:

‘
Daddy
.’

Sarah Casey disappeared as the camera cut to a new shot, this one also in night vision but from a different angle, the lens pointed down at another person, a middle-aged and almost model-perfect woman with prominent cheekbones, long blonde hair and long legs strapped down to a crude-looking operating table. Darby saw leather straps biting into the woman’s ankles and wrists and thought about the abrasions she’d found on Mark Rizzo’s body and wondered if he had been strapped down to the same table.

‘My wife,’ Casey said in a dead voice. ‘Taylor.’

His wife’s shoes and socks had been removed but not her shorts or tank top. A thick leather strap had been placed across her forehead to keep her head steady. Her eyes, wide and frightened, searched vainly through the darkness.

Seconds passed and nothing happened. Darby looked at these walls and found them to be nearly identical to the ones she’d seen surrounding Sarah Casey’s cell – the same dry round stones, the same blotchy colouring, the same cracks and fissures in the mortar. Only here Darby found a black shadow to the far left. Maybe part of a doorway. Darby could see only the bottom quarter of it.

Then she saw a black-robed figure step over to the table. His head wasn’t visible and the woman didn’t seem to hear him, and she couldn’t see the man’s hand as it came up from underneath the table, the fingers gripping a long, slender metal instrument shaped like a nail.

Darby felt beads of sweat pop out along her hairline and from the corner of her eye she looked at Casey. The green light glowed across his weathered face, and his eyes were steady as they watched the screen, his lips parting not to speak but to take another drink.

The robed man on the screen moved to the top of the table. Taylor Casey didn’t see him. The camera zoomed in on her face and then she screamed and bucked against her restraints as the man’s thumb shoved back her upper eyelid.

Darby’s stomach dropped and she forced herself to watch but the screen went black. Then the woman’s screams exploded over the speakers.

She wasn’t aware that a phone was ringing until she saw Casey leaping out of his chair.

Darby rewound the DVD to the black spot she’d seen on the far left of the screen. She still couldn’t see anything, then rewound the DVD again, this time pausing on the black spot. She stood, feeling cold and more than a little shaken, and moved closer to the TV screen.

She couldn’t make out much, just the faint outlines of several shapes that could be nothing more than grainy marks left over from the DVD transfer.

‘Sergey wants to talk to us,’ Casey said. ‘He told me you think I should be removed from this case.’

Darby opened her mouth to speak but Casey cut her off.

‘I don’t blame you for thinking it,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I’m too close to this, obviously.’

‘If you find one or more of these people, what are you planning on doing?’

‘Arresting them, of course.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I plan on killing them,’ Darby said. ‘Every last one.’

68

Darby summarized her conversation with Ronald Ross as she followed Casey into another dimly lit room, this one an area of bunk beds that reminded her of an army barracks, only these beds unfolded from the walls and came with seatbelts. She trailed behind the man as he made his way down a set of stairs. Casey got off on the next floor and opened the door to a room lit by soft and elegant lighting.

The long cabin seemed as wide and as long as a football field and had both the look and feel of downtown Boston’s Harvard Club – dark wood panelling on the walls, worn brown leather club chairs and small mahogany tables. A well-worn oriental rug of deep burgundy, forest green and dark brown hues covered the entire floor. Despite being inside a plane, this space was as regal and luxurious as the Four Seasons’ banquet hall; only this space was being used to host the missing and the dead.

Darby gaped at all the young faces captured in black and white and colour – the faces of children, hundreds of them, each one staring at her from the photographs tacked to the wall-mounted corkboards that filled almost both sides of the plane.

The photographs had been arranged by year. To her right, a corkboard with a label at the top that read: ‘1945 to 1972?’ Filling almost every square inch of that space were old and fraying Polaroids and black and white pictures. Each child had a name. Each one had a question mark written next to it. These kids had been abducted from Washington. The next board, this one labelled ‘1973 to 1975’, had photographs of abducted and missing children from Oregon. The next one was dedicated to California. She read the years printed on the label: ‘1976 to 1981’.