Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Sergey was saying something to her.

'I'm sorry, can you repeat that?'

'I said the only thing we know with any degree of certainty is that they abduct the youngest child of the family. For example, Charlie Rizzo. We know he was the youngest member of his family, so when he was abducted, we made sure his prints were entered into the IAFIS system. Now, I'm not suggesting all of these missing kids who are the youngest family members can be attributed to this group, so that three hundred number could be lower.'

'Or much, much larger,' Darby said. 'There's collateral damage, the people they killed, like John Smith and his wife.'

And your wife, she added to herself.

'Yes,' Sergey said, 'you're correct. But I'm focusing on just the missing children. The fact is we don't know anything about this group. Who they are or what they do. Why they snatch the youngest kid from the family.'

Darby was thinking of what Charlie Rizzo had said to his father — Tell her, Daddy. Tell her what you did — and said: 'The parents of these missing kids, you mean to tell me you found absolutely nothing in their backgrounds?'

'Nothing that can tell us why their kids were taken, no.'

'I find that hard to swallow.'

'I do too. But, still, it remains that these could simply be random abductions. You're more than welcome to take a look at the case files.'

'What about bodies?'

'Not one. Whatever happened to them, we don't know. The cases are unsolved.'

'Casey — Jack — told me he was called back when Darren Waters was found.'

'You mean when he reappeared,' Sergey said. 'We asked Jack to come in and consult, since Waters was one of those cases that lit up on the West Coast — only child, snatched from home, etcetera. So we took Waters into custody, brought him to what we thought was a secured location — '

'Where this group somehow managed to find him.'

'Yes.'

'How?'

'Followed would be my guess.'

'How, though?'

'You don't think they knew this guy escaped?' Then, as if reading her mind, he said, 'I see. No, I don't think it was an inside job. Nevada police, they didn't know who Waters was, so they ran his prints, and we had all of those coded. Techs operating the IAFIS computers didn't have security access for that particular code, and neither did the guy who ran the department at the time. So the prints got bounced upstairs, and that's when I got called. And if you think I had something to do with my son's abduction, you're wrong. These bastards tried to kill me when Jack and I had Waters at the safe house.'

He pulled up a trouser leg. A chunk of his calf muscle was gone, as if a shark had got hold of it and ripped the flesh free.

'Hollow point,' Sergey said. 'Shattered my tibia and the exit wound blew out most of my calf muscle. Almost bled to death. I don't walk with a limp any more, but I can't run, and anytime it rains or snows, the leg throbs like a mad bastard.'

He let go of the fabric. 'We investigated the inside angle and couldn't find anything.'

'How secure is your fingerprint database?'

'Very secure,' he said. 'We checked into that. No break-ins.'

'Ever had one?'

'If we did, I don't know about it.'

'And Darren Waters was never able to shed any light on these people or how he escaped?'

Sergey shook his head. 'He can't speak or write. Well, he can write now, but on a first-grade level.'

'Jack mentioned something happened to Waters but didn't tell me specifics.'

'This group gave Waters a transorbital lobotomy — a rather crude one. You familiar with the procedure?'

Darby nodded, wishing she didn't know the details about the barbaric operation popularized in the US by Dr Walter Freeman, who, through the mid fifties, had used the 'ice pick' procedure on thousands of schizophrenic inmates and, later, on depressed housewives and 'unruly' children. The patient was given 'electroconvulsive therapy' — shocked with electricity until unconscious — and then an ice pick was inserted into the upper eyelid. A hammer tapped the tip past the nasal cavity bone and into the brain's frontal lobe, where the pick severed neural pathways. Some patients survived, but a good majority died or were left with severe disabilities. And almost every one had been reduced to a childlike state devoid of any personality.

'Darren Waters,' Sergey said, 'is severely handicapped — mentally and physically. He lives in a constant state of fear. He's medicated most of the time.'

'With what?'

'Thorazine.'

'Why? He a danger to other patients?'

'Sometimes,' Sergey said. 'Mostly the poor son of a bitch screams about the monsters coming through the walls to eat him.'

A voice echoed over a speaker: 'Arrival in five minutes.'

Sergey gripped the armrests. 'We better get you dressed and ready.'

The van came to a stop a few minutes later. Sergey opened the back doors and Darby saw a cracked parking lot; a dumpster and trees that shook in the wind were on its edges. He shut the doors just as quickly to give her some privacy to get dressed.

Coop had stayed behind. He sat hunched forward on the bench with his elbows resting on his knees and rubbing his hands. He stared at his fingers.

She had stripped down into her Hanes bra and boy shorts when he said, 'You ever get tired of it?'

Darby slipped into the pair of black trousers Sergey had laid out for her. 'Tired of what?'

'Rushing in where angels fear to tread.'

She put on a long-sleeved Nomex shirt to keep in her body heat. Tucked it into her trousers and, smiling, said, 'Someone's got to do it.'

Coop didn't return the smile. 'Why you, though?'

She shrugged, tying her hair behind her head. 'Because I'm good at it.'

'At violence.'

'At doing what's right,' she said. 'What's eating at you? You pissed at me for bringing you into this?'

'Par for the course.'

'So what's eating you?'

He didn't answer. She worked a black polypropylene thermal balaclava over her head.

'Charlie,' she said.

Coop looked up at her.

'He wanted to expose these people,' she said. 'You heard what Sergey said about all those missing kids?'

He nodded, like he agreed with the point but not the method.

Darby tossed him her key ring. 'Tell Sergey to go and search my place for the listening devices. And tell him to take my machine and listen to the voicemail where I'm talking to one of these people from the Rizzo house, the one I tied to the tree who later escaped. He'll know what I'm talking about.'

'Sure. Anything else?'

'Yeah, one last thing. The other night, at the blast site, one of these… things cut itself inside the basement. I collected a blood sample. It's in a Band-Aid box in my bike trunk… What's wrong now?'

'I'm worried about you, Darby. At some point, your lucky streak is going to run out, and when it does, I don't want to be there to see what's left.' Darby opened the back doors and Coop's parting words drifted away in the bright, warm sunlight flooding the back parking lot behind a police station.

Virginia Cavanaugh, a thin-boned, grey-haired woman who could have passed as a Catholic school nun — severe-looking and dressed in bland cashmere sweater, blue polyester slacks and black orthopedic shoes with Velcro straps — stood next to her sensible tan-coloured Buick LeSabre, the trunk already popped open. Darby looked at the woman and saw a home with plastic-covered furniture, bed sheets folded in tight hospital corners.

Sergey had already explained to the woman what she needed to do. Cavanaugh didn't ask any questions because there wasn't any need. Her part was simple. All she had to do was drive back to the house, go back to watching the TV or reading or whatever she did to pass her days.