The Dead Room (4 page)

7

An hour later Darby walked to the corner of the backyard where Pine stood running water from a hose over his face. He had breathed in too much smoke. She could hear his laboured wheezing over the water splashing against the flagstone walkway. He didn’t care about getting wet. His clothes were already soaked and covered in mud.

Coop was also in the backyard. He stood alongside Michael Banville, watching the photographer taking bracketed shots of the back gate. There was no reason for Coop to be out here supervising photography. Darby knew the real reason: he was pretending to be busy so he could keep an eye on her.

Both Coop and the photographer wore protective goggles and breathing masks. Grey and white clouds of smoke drifted through the woods and into the backyard. On her way out, she had found a grenade still hissing smoke. The grenades had a slow burn rate. It would be at least another hour before anyone could go back inside the woods.

By some miracle of God none of the officers had disturbed the bloody handprint during their mad rush into the woods. The same couldn’t be said for the blood she’d found on the grass. The evidence markers had been trampled.

Only one patrolman had been seriously injured in the skirmish. A stun grenade had exploded near his head.

‘Christ, this shit stings,’ Pine said. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘Hexachloroethane. It’s a chemical used in smoke grenades. Keep flushing out your eyes.’

‘My lungs feel like they’re on fire.’

‘You should get to one of the ambulances for some oxygen.’

‘In a minute.’ Pine rubbed his eyes under the running water. ‘Something exploded in front of me. There was this bright light and then I couldn’t see.’

‘That was a stun grenade. It causes momentary blindness.’

‘How do you know so much about this shit?’

‘SWAT training.’

Pine drank from the hose, wincing as he swallowed.

‘The guy you saw, the one wearing those night-vision glasses?’

‘Goggles,’ Darby said.

‘Whatever. You get a good look at him?’

‘No. I just saw a flash before he ducked behind the tree. Black clothing and black gloves, a tactical vest holding grenades.’

‘Any way you can trace them?’

‘The stun grenades explode on impact. If we find enough fragments, we might be able to locate a serial or model number. As for the smoke grenades, we can give the numbers to the manufacturer and see where they were sold. Maybe they were stolen from a munitions locker at a police station or an army base.’

‘You don’t sound too confident.’

‘You can buy them on the black market. Go to any gun show in the South and you can have your pick. A lot of weekend-warrior types collect them. We’ll run the numbers but most likely it’s going to lead to a dead end. The guy with the night vision is too smart to leave us something to trace.’

‘How do you know this guy is smart and not some sort of Rambo douche bag?’

‘He came prepared.’

‘For what? A shootout in the woods?’

‘He came prepared for a fight. Artie, what time did the 911 call come through?’

‘Ten twenty.’

‘And how long before the first responding officers arrived?’

‘Ten thirty-three. There was a unit in the area.’

‘Did the officers search the woods?’

Pine shook his head under the running water. ‘I was the only one who went back there.’

‘What time was that?’

He thought about it for a moment.

‘I’d say around quarter past eleven, give or take.’

‘So we’re talking almost an hour between the 911 call and the time you entered the woods,’ Darby said. ‘If those men had been back there watching the house, they would’ve had plenty of time to haul away the body.’

‘But you saw it.’

‘He had a lot of blood on his shirt. If this person got shot with one of the Magnum rounds, you’re talking a massive amount of blood loss in a short amount of time. He could have bled out while running through the woods.’

‘And somehow his buddies found him.’

‘Which leads me to believe he placed a call before he passed out,’ Darby said.

Pine dropped the hose. He shut off the tap and reached inside his pocket.

‘You thinking these guys arrived the same time you did?’ he asked, mopping his face with a handkerchief.

‘They were in the woods when we were talking by the back gate. I think they were waiting for us to leave before they started to haul the body. If they’d started moving around, they would have made too much noise. We would have heard them.’

‘When I went through the woods, I didn’t see a body back there. There was
no one
back there.’

‘Maybe the guy with the bloody shirt found a place to hide. I don’t think the others were there when you were. The guy with the night vision? He was carrying what I’m sure is a compact HK MP6. It definitely was a sub-machine gun. And I know I saw a scope. If he had been back there when you were, he could’ve taken you down with a single shot to the head. He planned to come out of hiding, find the phone and leave. Nobody would’ve heard a thing.’

‘You’re saying all of this was for a goddamn phone?’

‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’

Pine didn’t answer. His eyes were red and puffy, his face pale.

‘A phone is a key piece of evidence,’ Darby said. ‘You’ve got logs of incoming and outgoing calls, maybe even an address book full of contacts. Who knows what we would’ve found? Night-vision man certainly thought it was important enough for me not to get my hands on it. He came out of his hiding spot to treat me to a stun grenade. Then he covered the woods with HC smoke canisters and gunfire to keep everyone back.’

Pine looked at the evidence bag gripped in her hand. ‘What did you find?’

‘A blister pack for nicotine gum. The guy with the night vision is apparently concerned about his long-term health. You should be too. You’re looking a little unsteady on your feet.’

‘I haven’t run like that since… well, it’s been a long time.’

‘Let me help you to the ambulance.’

‘I can manage.’ Pine opened the gate to a carnival of blinking red, white and blue lights.

‘Artie, have the Feds come to see you?’

‘About what?’

‘About any ongoing case in Belham, surveillance, anything along those lines.’

‘No.’ Pine’s mouth parted and his brow crinkled with thought. ‘Wait, are you suggesting the Feds are involved with what happened here tonight?’

‘I’m saying it’s a possibility. The guys I saw hauling the body away? They wore suits. The guy with the night vision had a tactical vest with stun and smoke grenades, and he was carrying the kind of machine gun used by Hostage Rescue. He’s not a weekend warrior. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

‘That’s one hell of an assumption.’

‘Maybe. But he could easily have taken me down while I was back there – he had several opportunities before I reached the phone. And I think he deliberately shot at the tree above my head. He didn’t want to kill me, just wanted to pin me down until he got to the phone. You see the muddy footprints on the deck?’

Pine nodded, dabbing his eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I talked to the patrol guys. They didn’t leave ’em.’

‘They’re also on the living-room carpet in front of the sliding glass door. I think someone ran across the backyard, tracked mud up the steps and then shot their way
inside
the house. I found two holes in the opposite wall. Who would want to shoot their way inside a house?’

‘The person who killed and tortured that woman.’

‘One person can’t subdue two people and then ransack an entire house, especially one this size. We’re talking two people at the very least – and they sure as hell wouldn’t have shot their way in. They had to find a way to get inside quietly, without being detected. They needed time to subdue the mother and son, and they needed time to search the house. Shooting your way inside isn’t quiet or subtle. It’s more in line with a rescue attempt, don’t you think?’

Pine thought it over, rubbing his tongue along his bottom teeth.

‘All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t put it past the Feds,’ Darby said. ‘We should look at every possible angle.’

‘I’ll dig around.’

So will I
, Darby thought.

8

Darby used one of the clean towels she kept in the back of the crime scene vehicle to wipe the mud from her face, arms and hands. The muggy night air smelled of car exhaust and her clothes reeked of cordite.

Everywhere she looked she saw faces lit up by revolving emergency lights. Faces behind TV cameras, faces behind cameras exploding with bright flashes. Voices spoke behind the crackle of police radios and the rapid machine-gun click of camera shutters snapping. The sounds grated on her already scorched nerves. Too close. Too much commotion, too much goddamn noise and too many people crowding the streets. She wanted to send everyone away. She wanted a cold shower and a stiff drink. She wanted some time alone to quiet her mind before heading back inside the house.

That wasn’t going to happen. It was time to make a careful study of the house.

Darby wiped the last of the mud from her boots. She threw the towel on the front floor of the Explorer and changed into a clean bunny suit. From the hatchback she grabbed the new Canon digital SLR camera, which created a digital negative – a raw file that couldn’t be doctored in any way. She walked across the front lawn tucking her wet hair underneath her hood. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She hoped the Wonder Twins arrived before the rain. She’d have to send them directly into the woods. She couldn’t wait.

She put on a pair of latex gloves, stepped inside the foyer and studied the walls. No bullet holes. She checked the dining room and kitchen. No bullet holes.

Coop looked up from his clipboard.

‘I’ll be upstairs,’ she said.

He nodded and went back to making notes. He made no attempt to follow. They had worked together for so long he knew she preferred to go through a crime scene alone first so she could think. She couldn’t do that with someone looking over her shoulder, taking notes and constantly asking questions.

Darby stood alone on the first-floor landing. Cool air rushed down on her from an overhead vent. Her damp clothes clung to her skin. She couldn’t stop sweating.

Five doorways, each door opened, the lights turned on. Clothes had been tossed into the hall. Bathroom items were scattered across the blond oak hardwood flooring in front of her – a tube of hair gel, hairspray, tampons and pills.

Looking into the bathroom, she saw a medicine cabinet, its doors open, the shelves wiped clean. Mouthwash, shampoo and pill bottles lined the bathtub. Each bottle had been emptied and searched. Two prescription bottles were floating inside the toilet.

They were looking for something small. A key maybe.

Across the hall was a small, carpeted room used as a home office. Shades drawn, desk overturned and closet shelves emptied. Every inch had been methodically searched.

Had the house been broken into before the mother and son arrived? Then, frustrated at failing to find whatever it was they needed, had they started to torture the mother for information?

Fingers pulled back, broken.

Tell me where it is
.

Fingers cut off one by one.

Tell me where it is.

Did she tell? Did she know anything? Darby moved to the two rooms at the end of the hall.

The first, long and airy, contained only a sewing machine and a chair. Shades covered the windows.

The mattress in the second room had been pulled from the bed, cut with a knife and searched. No shades covering the windows; she could see members of the Photography Unit still taking pictures of the back gate. Clothes on the floor, the kind a male teenager would wear – Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and jeans, athletic shorts, sneakers and flip-flops. She found an empty red duffel bag with a shoulder strap, the kind used for travelling, lying underneath an overturned nightstand.

Darby took pictures, then moved down the hall and stepped into the master bedroom, surprised to find it neat and orderly. A big-screen plasma TV hung on the wall across from a king-sized sleigh bed. The twin cherry-stained chests-of-drawers hadn’t been overturned or searched; the drawers were still intact. Like all the rooms with windows facing the street, the shades had been drawn.

The only item in here that had been disturbed was a suitcase sitting on top of a leather footstool. Clothes inside, a few tossed against a leather club chair set up in the corner.

Had the search been interrupted? Had someone been standing here when the gunshots went off?

Darby found a small piece of blue latex caught on a zipper’s metal teeth. In her mind’s eye she saw the dead man from the woods, latex gloves covering his hands.

Did you touch this suitcase?

She pictured him standing here, his gloved fingers searching through each pocket when the first gunshot rang out. She saw him reaching under his suit jacket for his sidearm and then rushing for the stairs, heading downstairs into the kitchen and seeing… what?
What did you see?

Darby pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the faceless man who had touched this suitcase. Snapshots of what had happened in the woods – stun grenades exploding with light; the man with the night-vision goggles; two men hauling a body up the incline to the waiting car. The dead man wore a suit and latex gloves. White shirt covered in blood. Someone had shot him.

You were inside the house, weren’t you? And I know you didn’t come here alone. You had to have brought at least one other person to help you search a house this size. Was this person shot and dragged away?

Did you help subdue the woman and her son? Did you tie them up and go back to searching the rooms while your partner tortured her? Or did you help? Were you standing in the kitchen when you heard the gunshots and exploding glass? I think you were, my man. If you had been upstairs when you heard the gunshots, you would’ve had time to draw your weapon. You would have come downstairs firing. I would have found evidence of gunshots.

I think you were caught by surprise. I think you were in the kitchen when someone shot you in the chest. I think you didn’t have time to pull your weapon.

Darby opened her eyes, wondering what had happened to the dead man’s partner. Was there another body lying somewhere in the woods? Or had the man with the night vision and his crew already carried away a second body?

She felt confident that the night-vision man and his two suited partners hadn’t been inside the woods at the time of the shooting. If they had been there, watching, they would have been long gone by the time the first responding officers arrived.

A trail of blood ran across the living-room carpet, down the porch steps and across the grass. A bloody handprint was smeared on the gate. She pictured the man running through the dark woods. Was he trying to find the incline leading up to the street? Did he have a car parked somewhere on the road?

She hadn’t found any vehicles parked along the shoulder.

And the men from the woods, someone had to have summoned them. She thought about the phone lying on the ground and pictured the man in the white shirt bleeding from his chest as he made the call. Did he drop the phone as he searched for a place to hide and wait? Why hadn’t he reached the road? Had he passed out from blood loss along the way?

Darby wondered if he had dropped anything else inside the woods.

Why didn’t your partner or partners inside the house help you? What happened?

Darby heard car doors slamming shut. She pulled back the shade and saw the lab’s second crime scene vehicle parked against the kerb. Two men, a Mutt and Jeff combo if ever there was one, paced the pavement near the bonnet. Randy Scott, thin and impeccably neat with black hair greying around the temples, stood a foot taller than his stocky partner, Mark Alves. She had hired the duo from the San Francisco Crime Laboratory, where they had gained a reputation for uncovering crucial, overlooked evidence on a number of high-profile cases. If something else had been dropped in the woods, they would find it.

Someone knocked on the bedroom door. She turned and saw Coop.

‘The Wonder Twins have arrived,’ she said.

‘I know. Randy called to let me know he was here.’

‘I’ll go speak to them.’

‘I’ll do it. You need to go to St Joseph’s Hospital in Belham. I just got off the phone with operations. A Belham patrolman called looking for you. The kid says he wants to speak to a Belham cop named Thomas McCormick. Isn’t that –’

‘Yes,’ Darby said, blood beating in her eardrums. ‘That’s my father.’