The Soul Collectors (3 page)

‘P226,’ Darby said, strapping the sidearm against her right thigh.

‘Nice choice, but our guy’s probably going to have you dump it. You’re going to need a backup piece and someplace to hide it. I’d sug—’

‘I’ve already got it covered.’ She rolled up her jean cuff and showed him the weapon tucked beneath the lip of her boot – a compact SIG Sauer P230 in an ankle holster.

She slipped on the tactical vest, zippered it up and found, strapped to the right front, a black piece of metal shaped like a baton. It had a trigger.

‘What’s this?’

‘Netgun launcher,’ Trent said. ‘Two rounds, though you only need one. Wraps the person in a web. It’s electrified, gives the person a slight jolt. And it’s made of this sticky shit, so there’s no way you can tear it off. I’m not a big fan of the non-lethal gadgets, but this one shows a lot of promise.’

Darby started transferring the extra clips of ammo from her duffel bag. ‘What’s the plan? You going to drive the APC up to the house?’

‘Our boy Charlie requested it. I’m going to park it right in front so he can’t miss it.’

‘I want you to keep your men in here until I give the order to breach.’

‘He asked for us, remember?’

‘Understood. But if you want me to go in there and talk to him, I’ll be the one giving the orders.’

That hit a nerve. Trent’s gaze narrowed in his stony face. She knew the senior corporal was about to launch into a lecture about how this was a tactical operation and, as such,
he
would be the one calling the shots.

‘I don’t know anything about this guy’s mental state,’ she said. ‘For all I know, he’s a schizophrenic. If he sees your men standing around the house, armed, it might set him off. He might start shooting.’

‘All the more reason why my men should be positioned in and around the house.’

‘I can handle him. And I’m going to get him to walk out of there alive. If we carry him out in a body bag, we won’t know why he’s holding the family hostage.’

‘And if I say no?’

‘Then you can go in and try talking to him.’

Darby removed her SIG, clicked off the safety and jacked a round into the chamber. She slid her weapon back into the holster, clipped the strap and leaned back against the wall, waiting for Trent’s answer.

The APC came to a jarring stop.

Darby didn’t move. Nobody did, everyone waiting for Trent to speak.

Finally, he did.

‘Nobody moves or takes a shot until McCormick gives the word.’

Darby thought she caught a look of admiration flash across his eyes before he turned to his men. ‘Everyone clear?’

Nods all around.

Now it was her turn to address the group.

‘If I say “blue”, that’s the signal to breach the house. If I use “red”, have one of the snipers take Charlie down. Any questions?’

There were none.

Darby opened the back doors to a rush of cold air and flashing blue and white police lights.

4

Darby stepped into a crowded police blockade. She didn’t see any homes or streetlights, just a long, double-wide road paved through densely packed woods that seemed to stretch for miles in every direction. Country living at its finest. A city girl, she could never understand why anyone would choose to live in such an isolated setting.

The air crackled with police radios. She followed Trent, weaving her way through the blue-uniformed bodies and plainclothes detectives, almost every one of them talking on a cell phone. A strong breeze rattled the tree limbs and shed autumn leaves that had already started to turn – deep orange, yellow and red colours that danced in the wind and were lit up as they blew across the road by all the flashing police lights.

‘Press here?’ she asked Trent.

‘Not yet. When they arrive – and God knows they will – they won’t get close. We’ve got patrols on every street. The whole area is sealed off.’

But not the air
, Darby thought. Once word got out – and she was sure it had – there’d be more than one news copter hovering close to the Rizzo home.

The command post, a plain white vinyl-sided mobile trailer, was parked to the side of the road between the two police blockades. Trent walked up a set of collapsible metal stairs and held the door open for her.

Inside, she found a good amount of space, all of it strategically designed and organized. The shelving carried almost every type of conceivable surveillance equipment: a microwave receiver for the trailer’s roof camera, tactical audio kits and a stereo accelerometer that could be used to pick up voices through windows, walls and floors. The warm, stale air smelled of coffee and it triggered memories of long nights she’d spent at the lab, dry-eyed and desperate, fighting to stay awake while combing through notes, files and evidence with the hope of finding something that had been overlooked, something that would break a case wide open. It reminded her of that adrenalin-fueled feeling of racing against the clock. Of desperation.

It also reminded her of Coop. How deeply she missed him and how badly she wanted him standing here beside her. Now he was living in London and working for a firm that specialized in fingerprint technology, his area of expertise. Instead of going through crime scenes with her, he was now a consultant for Britain’s Identity and Passport Service, a government branch that was currently attempting to create a fingerprint system that could be integrated with the world’s largest biometric fingerprint database, IAFIS, owned and maintained by the American FBI.

The man she assumed was the hostage negotiator sat in front of a workstation set up on the wall behind the driver. Trent quickly introduced Billy Lee, a slight man with angular features. She had Lee pegged as being somewhere north of fifty. Dressed in a sharp charcoal-grey suit and tie, his grey hair combed and carefully parted, he looked more like someone accustomed to sitting on a board of directors. When she shook his hand and felt his dry palm, she had the feeling that Lee shared the same attributes as Gary Trent – precise and certain with his words, an alpha male accustomed to playing all forms of mental chess – and winning. That desperate feeling drizzling through her chest didn’t evaporate, but it did ease back a bit.

‘What’s the latest?’ Trent asked, pulling a seat out from another workstation.

‘Still quiet,’ Lee said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be calling any moment.’

‘You don’t want to call him, tell him we’re here?’

Lee shook his head. ‘I have something he wants now,’ he said, pointing to Darby. ‘I’ll wait for him to call me.’

She turned her attention to a flat-screen computer monitor showing five bodies glowing with bursts of white, orange, yellow and red. One body appeared to be sitting in a chair; three were on the floor, one lying sideways. The fifth paced the room. Charlie.

The monitor next to it showed three different angles of the house, courtesy of a multiplexer unit that allowed the command post to view four cameras simultaneously. Trent had set up three remote-controlled cameras around the perimeter of the house – front, side and back – to give him real-time feeds. A date and running time was on each screen. Each video, she noticed, was being fed into a separate DVR to record every second.

‘Nice resolution,’ Darby said.

‘Cameras are using a 24 para-digital lens,’ Trent said. ‘We can rotate them 360 degrees, and we got infrared capabilities in case –’

A phone rang.

Trent scooped up a pair of headphones from his desk. Lee calmly picked up a pair with an attached mike as he swivelled around in his chair and faced the monitor set up on the desk.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ Lee said brightly, as if he were speaking to a personal friend. ‘Dr McCormick just arrived. She’s here with me right now. Would you like to speak to her?’

Darby couldn’t hear Charlie’s response, but she could read the words filling the screen. Voice-recognition software had converted his speech to text:

‘I want to speak to her inside the house. Alone.’

Lee glanced up at Darby. She nodded.

‘Okay, Charlie,’ Lee said. ‘Dr McCormick has agreed to come inside and meet with you. Alone. I delivered on my promise; now you need to deliver on yours. Release your family.’

Charlie’s response appeared on the screen:

‘She needs to see them first.’

Lee’s brow creased in thought, but he didn’t seem rattled or concerned.

‘You gave me your word,’ the hostage negotiator said, his tone sounding neither confrontational nor impatient. ‘You need to show the police that you’re willing to cooperate – that you have no intention of harming your family.’

Charlie responded: ‘I told you I won’t harm them. I gave you my word on that.’

‘I know you’re agitated,’ Lee said. ‘And I sympathize with your frustration at having to wait for Dr McCormick to arrive. But she had to come all the way from Boston. We ordered a private helicopter to get her up here as quickly as possible. I delivered on my promise, and now you have to deliver on yours. You don’t want me to look bad in front of my boss, do you?’

Lee spoke in a relaxed way, his tone amazingly empathetic, as though he was connecting with a long-lost relative.

‘I need Dr McCormick to bear witness,’ Charlie responded.

Lee said, ‘To what?’

No response.

Darby glanced to the screen holding the heat signatures. The man pretending to be Charlie Rizzo appeared to be holding something against the ear of one of the hostages. A phone? A gun?

She sidled up to Trent and whispered, ‘What’s he saying?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘We didn’t install a mike in the house. I was going to have one of my men install a parabolic while you were in there talking to him so we –’

‘Keep your men back until I give the order.’ She moved back to Lee, reading the words scrolling across the computer screen.

‘Please,’ Charlie responded. ‘We’re running out of time.’

‘That’s the fifth time you’ve mention that,’ Lee said. ‘Please tell me what you mean so I can help you, Charlie. Everyone here wants to help you through this. We don’t –’

Lee stopped talking to listen to Charlie.

Darby watched the computer screen. ‘I’ll tell her. Dr McCormick. Alone,’ Charlie had responded. ‘Have her go through the front door. No escorts, no tricks. And remember to park the bulletproof van or car or whatever it is you brought – I want it waiting for me near the front of the house. After Dr McCormick has heard what I have to say, she’ll arrest me and bring me out. You have my word on that. Do what I ask, and I’ll release everyone as promised. But if you don’t do what I ask – if you try to trick me – then I’ll kill my family and then myself. I can’t survive the wheel again.’

‘Tell me about the whee—’

CALL TERMINATED
flashed across the screen.

Lee took off the headphones.

‘What’s the wheel?’ Darby asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Lee said. ‘You?’

She shook her head.

Lee rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Charlie has placed a call to me every five minutes inquiring about your arrival. Each time his voice has vacillated between agitation and panic. When I was on the phone with him just now and confirmed that you were, in fact, here, he sounded relieved, even … well, hopeful.’

‘Has he given you any indication as to why he asked for me?’

‘No. I’ve asked, and each time he’s refused to answer – and he stubbornly refuses to talk about the person he shot and dumped in front of the house. Any time I broach either subject, his voice changes. I can tell you this much: he’s afraid.’

‘Do you think he’s suffering from a schizophrenic disorder?’

‘That was my original thought, but he’s not showing any signs beyond his delusion that he’s really Charles Rizzo. His speech is coherent. He doesn’t stop midsentence and start jumbling together meaningless words. His thoughts are organized and he can follow a conversation.’

That didn’t mean he wasn’t schizophrenic. There were varying degrees, varying symptoms. She wouldn’t know until she spent time with him.

Lee said, ‘Do you know the first rule of hostage negotiation?’

‘Form a bond.’

‘Yes. That’s your primary goal. Always remember that. When you go in there, let him think he’s Charles Rizzo. Don’t fight him on it. Listen to his grievances. If he believes you really
do
care about his pain, cause, whatever, he’ll be more receptive to releasing the hostages, which is our goal. Remember to always be working on that bond. We’ll be listening in and speaking to you over an earpiece. That’s all I have.’ Lee glanced to Trent.

‘The APC will take you in,’ Trent said.

‘And SWAT won’t move in until I give the order?’ Darby said.

‘Until you give the order,’ Trent repeated. ‘You have my word on that. But at the first sign of trouble, I’m ordering my men to breach.’

The APC had built-in ladders on both sides of the back doors to allow a sniper quick access to the roof. She didn’t want to ride inside or in the back. She had all of her equipment, and the fresh, cold air was keeping her head clear.

Darby extended one of the ladder’s rungs, climbed up and knocked on the side of the APC. The driver looked in his rear-view mirror, saw her standing on the back, then put a hand out of the window and waved.

The engine came to life, rumbling, and the APC started crawling towards the house.

5

Darby mulled over the cryptic conversation she had just heard between the hostage negotiator and the man calling himself Charlie Rizzo.
I need Dr McCormick to see them first
, Charlie had said.
I need her to bear witness
.

Bear witness to what? Killing the family? And what the hell did he mean when he said he couldn’t survive the wheel again?

Another police blockade had been set up on the far end of the street. She spotted three cruisers, their flashing blue and whites lighting up every inch of the neighbourhood, a place far different from, and light years beyond, the Rizzos’ former Brookline address with its multimillion-dollar McMansions and professionally landscaped lawns and gardens, high-end BMWs and Mercedes parked in two- and three-car garages. A real-estate agent would call these three New Hampshire homes – the only ones here on this long stretch of woodlands – either ‘cosy’ or ‘fixer-uppers’. No garages, just driveways with small, dependable economy cars. Living here in the Granite State gave you plenty of land and privacy. The houses were spaced far apart from each other, and each one looked like it had been dropped in the middle of the woods. No streetlights either.