Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Good luck, she thought, grinning. Darby closed her eyes and settled in for a long night.

Nahant PD's complimentary continental breakfast came early, at 6:00 a.m., served on a cardboard tray. Darby looked over the selection: soggy white toast, a mealy apple and powdered scrambled eggs, all of it wrapped under cellophane beaded with steam. She had settled on the apple when Detective Lu appeared.

His fedora and belted raincoat were gone, but he wore another cheap suit, this one black and made of some polyester-rayon blend designed to resist wrinkling and repel stains. The white shirt beneath it, though, was wrinkled. Was it the same shirt he had worn yesterday? Maybe. He had worn that atrocious-looking pink and purple striped tie yesterday, no question.

Lu, his hands deep in his pockets, jingled his keys and spare change as he stared at her through the bars. His eyes were bright and alert. Focused.

'Ready to play ball?'

'Sure,' she said between mouthfuls. 'You want to be the pitcher or catcher?'

'I was thinking of bringing you on as a consultant.'

'For what?'

'This case you're involved in.'

'You should loosen your tie. It's cutting off the oxygen to your brain, making you delusional.'

'I'm trying to help you here.'

'No you're not,' she said, tossing the remains of the apple into the toilet. 'You're here to make a last-ditch effort to find out what's going on because the case is about to be yanked from you, and you've just seen your lottery ticket go up in flames.'

A panicked anger flashed behind Lu's eyes.

'Who was it?' she asked. 'Feds or Secret Service?'

Lu said, 'What's the federal government's interest in what happened to John Smith?'

Darby grinned, letting him hang on the hook for a moment.

'Don't know,' she said. 'Maybe you should ask the feds or whoever's here.'

'The state of Massachusetts takes its gun laws very seriously,' Lu said.

'I'll take my chances in front of the judge.'

'I don't think the judge is going to look too kindly on the fact that you used hollow-point ammunition. Judges take that sort of illegal ammo very seriously, as I'm sure you know. But I'm willing to drop the charges if — '

'Talk to my lawyer.'

'The feds will use you. You're a fool if you think they're going to allow you into their investigation.'

'You're right. They won't. But that doesn't change the fact that you're an asshole.'

Lu stiffened.

'We're done talking,' she said. 'Let me know when my lawyer arrives.'

Lu didn't move away from her cell. He stood there, red-faced and dejected, running through his options and trying to calculate his next move while knowing, deep down, he had lost.

A moment later, he turned and motioned for one of the guards. A patrolman came and unlocked her cell.

Lu slipped a LifeSaver past his lips. 'Your lawyer is here.'

Darby grabbed her jacket and followed Lu out of the holding pen and into a maze of busy cubicles. Phones were ringing everywhere, but the people seated at the desks or standing in doorways — even the ones huddling near the row of coffee-makers on the far side of the warm room — had stopped whatever they had been doing or saying to look at her. Some took quick glances while others stared.

'In here,' Lu said, holding open a grey-painted door.

Darby stepped inside the boxy conference room and came to a full stop when she saw who was seated at the table.

Her lawyer, Martin Freedman, was a squat, round man with a hawk-shaped nose, bald on top and uncombed tufts of salt-and-pepper hair feathered over small ears. Every time Darby met the man at his downtown Boston office, Freedman would have his liver-spotted hands resting on top of the battered brown leather portfolio he'd carried with him since law school. Freedman would always smile, flashing his capped teeth, and she could usually smell his cologne and spot a few stray dandruff flakes on the shoulders of his finely tailored suit jacket.

The man sitting at the table was tall and extremely fit and wore a black suit and dark blue shirt without a tie. He bore a striking resemblance to the insanely good-looking quarterback for the New England Patriots; but, unlike Tom Brady, this man had thick dirty-blond hair and the most interesting eyes she had ever seen: one a dark green, the other blue.

Her old partner, Jackson Cooper, rose unsteadily, his eyes widening with shock. At first she was confused, then she realized how she looked: face cut up from glass and wounds crusted with blood; her jeans and the front of her shirt and jacket matted and smeared with dried blood that had turned black and crusty. Blood and skin and hair and probably brain matter from John Smith's exit wound; blood from working on the man's wife as she bled out.

'Good morning, Dr McCormick,' Coop said. 'I take it those wounds I'm seeing aren't a result of your stay here.'

'No, they're not.'

Coop turned to Lu, who was still standing in the doorway. 'You can leave now, detective.'

The door shut with a soft click. Coop looked at her, worried.

'Since you're standing upright, I'm going to assume you're okay — physically, at least.' He had lowered his voice and was speaking quickly. 'You can tell me what happened later. Grab a seat. We don't have much time.'

'How did you find me?'

'Leland.'

'He called you?'

He shook his head. He had plunked back down in his chair.

'When you called and left me that voicemail, the number for the lab was on my Caller-ID,' he said, working a thick elastic band off a battered manila folder. 'So I assumed you'd been reinstated and went back to the lab and bumped into Leland. Fortunately, he came in early today. Unfortunately, he told me about what happened to you last night here in Nahant. We'll talk about that later, after you've spoken to your lawyer.'

'Is he here?'

Coop nodded. 'Right now he's talking to Lu and the sergeant,' he said. 'I ran into him in the lobby, told him who I was and why I was here, and he told Lu I was his legal assistant. We've got ten minutes. Sit down, will you? They've probably posted a guy outside to try and listen in.'

She pulled out the chair as Coop flipped through the messy stack of papers. Three months ago, those same hands had held her as the rain drummed against the walkway outside the front door of his home. He had pressed his lips against hers, hungry, as if he needed to steal something from her before he left; her heart was still beating in her throat when he pulled away. She saw him smile and she smiled back and then he said he had to go. Later, over the phone, he had told her he was never coming back.

But here he was sitting in front of her, the first time she'd seen him since he had left three months ago, and the adrenalin-filled joy surging through her body was slowly drowning in a piercing sadness, Darby knowing he hadn't flown halfway around the world and tracked her down to say hello.

'Take a look at this,' he said, slapping a sheet of paper on the table. The sound snapped her back to the windowless, hot room with its dingy white walls. His breath was stale and his eyes weary and bloodshot from the red-eye flight.

Darby looked at the sheet of paper and saw a laser-printed picture — a headshot of the smug army prick she'd met at the BU Lab, the one who forced her to sign the legal forms, Billy Fitzgerald. He wasn't dressed in combat fatigues or military gear, just a suit and a tie.

'You know him?' he asked.

Darby nodded, about to tell Coop when she realized they were pressed for time. 'I'll fill you in later. Who is he?'

'Special Agent Sergey Martynovich. He's a profiler for CASMIRC.'

She tried to chase the full title through a layer of hazy thoughts and came up empty.