The Dead Room (11 page)

21

Darby sat in the back of the hot taxi as it fought its way through the heavy traffic on Mass. Avenue. She had Artie on the phone. The pounding rain and car horns made it difficult to hear.

She pressed her palm against her other ear to try to block out the noise. ‘Say that again.’

‘I said I’m on my way back from Vermont. I just finished going through Amy Hallcox’s place. Can you hear me?’

‘I can hear you.’

‘Someone tossed it. It’s a small house and she doesn’t have a lot of stuff – there’s barely any furniture in there. Got in touch with the landlord and the guy said she’s been living there for about a year, pays on time, no problems. She had about two months to go on the lease but I get the feeling she might’ve been planning to move again. She’s got a bunch of empty boxes stored in one of the rooms. As for why it was tossed and what they were looking for, right now your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Anybody see anything?’

‘No. The house is real isolated – the closest neighbour is a mile away, so these guys took their time. We asked around but nobody knows the Hallcox woman or her kid. Based upon what you told me last night, I’m figuring he knows something.

‘I got your message about the kid’s condition and the hospital tapes,’ Pine said. ‘What did you find?’

‘I dropped them off at the Photography Unit before I went to the ME’s office. I’m headed back to the lab right now. I have someone running down the plate number for the van. I haven’t heard anything yet.’

‘What about evidence on the woman’s body – did you find anything?’

‘Some fibres and hairs stuck to the duct tape and clothes. She didn’t have anything in her pockets. I’ll get to work on the clothes today.’

‘Amy Hallcox’s missing Honda is bothering me.’

‘That’s been nagging at me too. I’m thinking the shooter took it.’

‘You said the kid didn’t mention anything about hearing a shooter.’

‘He didn’t have a chance to tell me. Artie, someone shot their way inside that house. And we know, based upon what the boy
did
tell me, that there were two men inside – the guy in the Celtics gear and the guy in the suit. I’m thinking the shooter took down the suit first, then dragged the second guy to the Honda. The drag marks lead down the kitchen hall and stop inside the garage. And there’s only one set of the bloody footprints on the garage floor.’

‘Why drag away a dead body?’

‘How do we know the Celtics guy was dead? Maybe the shooter wanted him alive.’

‘Then why not take this person
before
he entered the house?’

‘I don’t know yet. But we do know that someone ran up the back deck stairs and tracked mud into the living room. Those footprints lead up the steps but not down. I’m thinking the shooter was watching from the woods.’

‘So now we’re talking about an entirely separate person – a third party that wasn’t part of what went down in the house or that Rambo group we met in the woods?’

‘Yes. And I also think the shooter cut the kid loose.’

‘Why? What’s the reason?’

‘I don’t know. If that son of a bitch hadn’t –’

‘I saw the guy’s badge and ID. They were the real deal. So was the paperwork.’

‘I’m not blaming you, Artie, I’m just pissed off. He played us and cost the Hallcox kid his life. I just wish I knew what the hell he wanted with him.’

‘Have you seen any sign of Phillips or whoever he is?’

‘No. ’

‘What about the others?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What about the prints taken from the house? Any luck there?’

‘The lab techs got back about an hour ago. They’ve just started working.’

The taxi came to a sudden stop against the pavement.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Darby said. ‘I’ll call you as soon as I know something.’

She ran through the rain clutching a clear plastic bag. It held brown-paper bags of evidence to keep them from getting wet. She was soaked by the time she reached the front doors of One Schroeder Plaza. She had to go through the maddening check-in process before she could reach the lab.

She logged in the evidence, then went to her office to check messages. She had one. Nicholas Garcia, the homicide detective liaison to CSU, asked her to call him back. She had asked him to run the brown van’s plates.

Garcia answered on the first ring and got right to it.

‘They’re phantom plates,’ he said. ‘They don’t exist.’

‘So how did they get the plates?’

‘Probably through a contact at the DMV. It’s not as impossible as it sounds. You pay someone on the inside to get the plate and then they erase any way to trace them.’

‘Can you look into it for me?’

‘I wouldn’t pass up such an exciting opportunity.’ Garcia chuckled. ‘Don’t pin your hopes on finding anything. I’ve been down this road before.’

Darby was walking down the corridor to talk to Coop when her mobile rang. Ted Castonguay, the head of the photography unit, had finished reviewing the tapes and digital pictures and wanted to speak with her inside his office.

She found the former college wrestler seated at a desk in a quiet but cluttered corner. His shoulder and back muscles looked like rocks moving underneath cloth as he worked the mouse.

She grabbed a chair and wheeled it over to him, looking at the flat-screen monitor holding a black-and-white video still of the hospital’s elevator. The time-stamp recorded on the videotape read ‘August 15, 2009. 1.03 a.m.’.

Castonguay knew she was harried and frantic. He didn’t waste time with pleasantries.

‘This is the time you entered the hospital,’ he said, clicking the mouse.

The security video started. The camera was pointed down at the white corridor. She could see part of the nurses’ station.

The elevator doors opened and she saw herself and Pine walk out and move down the corridor until they disappeared. A moment later they reappeared with Patrolman White, and the three huddled around the corner from the nurses’ station and began talking.

Click
and the video started fast-forwarding.

‘Eighteen minutes elapsed from the time you stepped off the elevator to the time you went to talk to the Hallcox boy,’ Castonguay said. ‘The Fed appears just under twenty-two minutes later.’

Twenty-two minutes.
He must have followed me from
Belham
. She watched the images fast-forwarding across the monitor and thought about the TV cameraman she’d seen watching the house this morning. If he had been there last night, mixed among the other reporters, he would have seen her getting inside Pine’s Lincoln Town Car.

Castonguay started playing the video at its normal speed. She looked at the digital timestamp on the bottom-right-hand corner: 1.23 a.m.

‘Here’s where it gets interesting,’ Castonguay said. ‘Watch the elevator.’

She did. When it opened, the video started to fill with static. She couldn’t see the person who got out of the elevator – she couldn’t see anything.

The static grew stronger and then images disappeared.

The screen went dark.

‘That’s it,’ Castonguay said, and swivelled around in his chair to face her. ‘I checked the tapes for the other cameras. There’s nothing else, just static and then they all go dark.’

‘Any idea what caused it?’

‘For all the cameras to shut down like that, you’re talking some sort of HERF – a High Energy Radio Frequency weapon – or maybe a directed magnetic pulse. Could even be a microwave pulse. The two people talking to you in the video, they were standing in the corridor while you were talking to the vic. Did they say anything about being burned?’

‘They didn’t say anything to me.’

‘I doubt it’s microwave anyway. Those devices aren’t easy to conceal. Let me ask you this, then: did they report feeling nauseous or dizzy? Any vision problems?’

‘Not that I know of, but when I saw them standing in the doorway of the room, they were both struggling to catch their breath – like they had just finished running a marathon.’

‘Breathing difficulties are one of the symptoms of close exposure to electromagnetic or HERF exposure.’

‘My understanding is that to use a HERF weapon, you have to have a parabolic reflector and aim it at a target.’

‘Yes, you’re correct. And I should mention that to build one of
those
devices, you can find the materials you need in any electronics store. They’re somewhat big and bulky. Not easy to conceal. I was thinking along the lines of the smaller devices I’ve seen over the past year – the ones the size of, say, a paperback book or a pack of cigarettes that use a high-energy radio frequency. These smaller devices act more like a grenade – they have a certain blast radius. The smaller the device, the smaller the blast radius. You hit a button, flood an area with HERF and cook the electronic circuits in the area. That’s the only thing I can think of that would have caused this kind of damage so quickly. I’d be interested to see if the security cameras or any other nearby equipment was damaged last night.’

‘I’ll call and ask,’ Darby said. ‘These HERF grenades – can you build them?’

‘Not to my knowledge. I know the army uses them. They’re part of their non-lethal weapons tactics programme.’

‘What about the CIA or the FBI?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ Castonguay turned to the keyboard. ‘Now I want you to look at the pictures you took.’

22

‘I just need a moment to tinker with the file,’ Castonguay said.

Darby went to her office to use the phone. She called St Joseph’s and asked to be connected to the nurses’ station on the fourth floor. A new rotation had started. After identifying herself to three different people she finally found one left over from the day shift.

When she came out of her office, Castonguay had a top-down picture of the cameraman loaded on the screen. The TV camera was mounted on his shoulder. Sunglasses covered his eyes and he wore headphones and a baseball cap. She could see blond hair covering the tip of an ear. The man posing as Special Agent Phillips had had black hair and darker skin.

‘It looks like your HERF theory was correct,’ Darby said, sitting down. ‘I just got off the phone with one of the day nurses at the hospital. When she came in this morning, they were replacing the security cameras on her floor, and the computers and phones at the nurses’ station were down. Some of the medical equipment in the rooms near the elevator had stopped working. They thought it was an electrical surge.’

Castonguay nodded, his attention focused on the monitor. He typed with one finger while the other hand worked the mouse, shifting the picture until the TV camera came into a sharper focus.

‘What do you know about televisions cameras?’ he asked.

‘Not much. I try to avoid them whenever possible.’

‘Lucky for you I know a lot about them. What we have here is called an ENG camera – an Electronic News Gathering video-recording camera. It looks like the real deal except for this.’

Using the mouse, he drew a circle around the handle mounted on top of the camera. Then he moved the chair away from his desk and said, ‘Take a look.’

Darby stood up and moved closer to the screen. Next to the handle and mounted on top of the camera was a small device that resembled a black laser pointer. The end pointed at the house had a small but noticeably bright red light. She saw wires running from the end of the device that fed directly into the camera.

She turned her head to Castonguay. ‘Is this a laser mike?’

‘That’s exactly what it is. You direct the laser to a surface that can vibrate – like glass. The laser picks up pressure waves caused by noises in the room.’

‘I used one during a SWAT surveillance exercise.’

‘And that’s what your cameraman was doing. He was conducting surveillance on the house, trying to listen in on your conversations. The camera looks genuine – has a Sony camera head and a Betacam SP dock. It blended in perfectly with the other TV cameras.’

‘How complicated is it to install a laser mike in a camera?’

‘It’s extremely complicated. I’m even willing to say it can’t be done. This ENG camera was custom-built to conduct surveillance. Whoever you’re dealing with has access to some very high-tech toys.’

He loaded another picture on to the monitor, a shot she had taken of the bald man opening the driver’s door. The cameraman was running around to the back of the van.

Castonguay cropped the front windscreen, then went to work on enhancing it. A moment later she saw someone sitting in the passenger seat. She could see only his hands resting on dark-coloured trousers, a blue tie worn with a white shirt.

Sitting on the dashboard was a device that resembled a police scanner.

‘I’ve tried enhancing the picture from different angles,’ Castonguay said, ‘but I can’t get a lock on his face. But see this shadow here?’ He pointed to the area between the two front seats. ‘This may or may not be part of a leg and an arm. I’ll need more time to enhance it.

‘That’s all I have. I’ll have printouts of the pictures to show you in another hour or so. Just do me one favour. When you get your hands on this camera, you’re to let me know immediately. I’m dying to play with it.’

‘You got it.’

Three men were interested in Amy Hallcox and her son – the black-haired man who had posed as a Fed, the cameraman and the bald driver. Had they been the men she’d seen in the woods last night?

She thought back to the picture of what might be another person sitting in the back of the van. A fourth man. Were there more? How many people were following her?

Darby opened the door of the fingerprint suite. Coop, wearing safety glasses and blue latex gloves, was hunched over a lab bench examining a bullet. He had already tried dusting it for prints.

She saw the bullet’s pitted nose and knew what it was: a hollow-point round. The same ammo had killed her father.

‘It’s a nine-millimetre Parabellum round,’ Coop said. ‘I found it in the kitchen, underneath an overturned sideboard. Someone must have dropped it.’

‘Any prints?’

He shook his head.

‘We could fume it with cyanoacrylate,’ she said. ‘If the Super Glue finds a print, we can try using different luminescent stains, then enhance it in the VMD unit.’ Vacuum Metal Deposition, she knew from experience, yielded better-looking latent prints.

‘I’m going to try something else first.’ Coop picked up the shell casing with a pair of tweezers and placed it on a circular metal dish that sat underneath a probe.

Darby looked over his shoulder. Her jaw dropped.

‘Is that a scanning Kelvin probe?’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I haven’t seen you this excited since the last time U2 came through Boston.’

She placed the bag holding Amy Hallcox’s fingerprint card on the bench beside them, dimly aware that the usual humour was absent from his voice. Her attention was on the probe. She had read about it but had never seen a real-life demonstration of one.

‘How did you get your hands on it?’

‘This unit is courtesy of my new friends in London,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and turn on that monitor.’

She did and then pulled out a chair and watched Coop adjust the controls of a small device resembling a futuristic microscope. Human sweat dried fairly quickly. What lingered was a mix of organic and inorganic compounds. Was Coop suggesting that these compounds and chemicals could be detected by this probe?

‘What sort of developer are you going to use?’

‘You don’t need to use a chemical or a powder.’

‘Then how are you going to find a latent print?’

‘The beauty of this new technology, Darb, is that once you touch metal with your bare fingers, the inorganic salts from your skin corrode the shell casing – you “brand” your print on to the metal. You can’t wipe it away.’

‘What if a shell was fired? The heat would destroy the organic compounds left behind – amino acids, glucose, peptides and lactic acid.’

‘Doesn’t matter. The probe can retrieve prints from fired shells, even detonated bomb fragments, where temperatures can reach as high as five hundred degrees Celsius. The Kelvin probe uses voltage to examine the surfaces where a fingerprint may have been deposited.’

‘So what you’re suggesting is that no matter what, you can’t wipe away a fingerprint.’

‘Exactly.’ He pressed a button on a small box attached to the probe. ‘Watch the monitor.’

Darby saw a magnified image of the bullet on the screen. ‘Looks like you’ve got something.’

Coop studied the faint, spidery lines of a partial latent fingerprint on the monitor.

‘I’m going to have to create what’s called a voltage map,’ he said. ‘It’s a three-dimensional rendering of the latent print. It will take a couple of hours. How’d the autopsy go?’

‘They’re doing it right now.’ Darby’s attention had shifted back to the hollow point lying on the dish.

‘Did you examine the body?’

She nodded, then said, ‘Would a scanning electron microscope destroy or alter the fingerprint in any way?’

‘No.’

‘Then before you do the voltage map, I want to borrow the bullet for a moment and take a closer look at the cartridge’s headstamp. It doesn’t look right.’

Coop, using tweezers, picked up the bullet for a closer look.

‘I don’t see anything unusual.’

She pointed to the round metal base. ‘The spark plug looks smaller than normal, don’t you think?’

He shrugged, then pushed his chair away from the table. ‘Go for it.’