Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

The spider jumped into the air with a frightening speed and as she leaped back she felt it land on her vest with a considerable thump. She moved to swat it away with a quivering hand but the spider had already bounced off her chest. Darby stared after it, cold dripping through her limbs like pieces of ice as she watched it scurry underneath the bed to hide.

If Jack Casey had seen the pictures, his face didn't show it. Darby thought the man's face didn't show much of anything, just a perfect stillness as if his flesh had been replaced by concrete.

He sat at the long dining-room table with Sergey and another man, a fed, who wore a pair of headphones and studied a small laptop hooked up to a white cordless phone. It had been removed from the kitchen wall and brought in the room.

They had shut off the heat and opened the windows, but everyone was still sweating.

Sergey checked his watch. Ten minutes till one. Darby knew the time because she could see the stove's digital clock from the archway where she stood.

She heard the front door opened and then shut softly.

Coop came into the kitchen. 'We need to talk about the spiders,' he whispered.

Darby nodded, knowing that the bedroom was infected, that the pair of Boston medical technicians had dressed head to toe in biohazard gear to collect the spiders from the body before hauling it away. One of the spiders was a deadly Black Widow. She knew because she had collected it from the body, had seen the distinctive red hourglass on its tiny, black-rounded belly before dropping it inside a collection jar.

Coop said, 'Leland isn't going to let his people into the autopsy room with those things still crawling around on him.'

'I know. That's why we're going to do it.'

'Do what?'

'Examine the body.'

'Why us?'

'The FBI's lab people are tied up in Florida, so I offered to examine the body.'

Coop's face drained of colour.

'Don't like spiders?' she asked with a grin.

He didn't have a chance to answer. The house phone was ringing.

Darby moved back to the archway and saw Sergey picking up his headphones. Casey looked at the phone but didn't pick it up. It rang three times before the man seated in front of the laptop gave Casey a hand signal.

'Hello… Yes, this is Jack Casey.'

Casey didn't speak, just listened, his face as unreadable as stone. Darby watched him as she counted off the time in her head.

Twelve seconds later, he pulled the phone away from his ear.

Silence. Sergey's face was ashen. The other man stared at his computer screen. Casey placed the cordless phone back on the table as if it were made of delicate crystal and then stood, knees cracking. Darby followed him with her eyes until he disappeared somewhere inside the living room. Sergey got to his feet as the front door opened, a Secret Service agent saying something about moving back.

Darby pulled out the seat next to the only man left, a fleshy white guy with a shaved head that looked shiny under the chandelier's bright lights.

'Couldn't get the trace,' the guy said, shaking his head. 'Wasn't on long enough.'

'You heard what was said?'

The man licked his lips, nodding. 'His daughter was on the phone. Crying. She told her father that she'd left a gift for him in the upstairs bedroom, something that he had to see.' 'I'll meet you in town,' Sergey said to her after he came back inside the house. 'I've got to make some phone calls first, to our Boston office. They're going to send over an ERT — Evidence Response Team — to process the bedroom.'

'Call Boston PD,' Darby said. 'You can use their lab.'

'It's a thought.'

'This group, have they ever done something like this before? Contact you and leave a body with evidence for you to find?'

'No, this is a first. And that bothers me. They're planning something.'

'While psychologically torturing Casey.'

Sergey nodded, but his eyes had grown distant.

'The pictures upstairs…' Darby said.

'It's Jack's daughter.'

'Has he seen them?'

He nodded.

'How old?'

'Twelve,' he said, glancing at his watch.

'Where's Casey?'

'On his way to the morgue. He wanted to be there — wants to keep busy.'

'I need to stop by my house first and grab my forensic kit.'

'It's already at the morgue. I'll have someone drive you.'

Sergey had half turned to walk away when she said, 'About the spiders: we need to get them identified so we can have the appropriate anti-venom on hand in case one of us gets bitten here or at the morgue. It's a liability issue, and the guy who runs the place, Ellis, he's got a permanent hard-on when it comes to anything that's a liability.'

A long tired sigh and he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

'Okay,' he said. 'I'll head in and handle it.'

Darby went back to the kitchen. She stripped out of her thick white coveralls and gloves, balled everything together and stuffed it in a biohazard bag.

Casey's Secret Service agent, the Southern guy she knew only as Neal Keats, stood at the front door.

He read the question on her face and said, 'Mr Casey wants me on you now.'

'And your name?'

He smiled. 'Why, Neal Keats.'

'You used your real name as cover? What if I called the BU Biomedical Lab and asked to speak to you?'

'They would have forwarded your call to my cell phone. Mr Cooper's already in the car, the black Lincoln Navigator parked at the kerb. I'll escort you.' He moved his right hand close to his mouth and spoke into the wrist mike. 'Bringing out PIA.'

Darby said, 'PIA?'

'Pain in the Ass. Fitting, don't you think?'

Keats had opened the door, about to bring her out, when her cell phone rang. The Caller-ID listed the incoming number as 'unknown'.

'McCormick.'

'I see that Mr Casey has left,' said a garbled male voice on the other end of the line. 'Since you've become quite cosy with him, Dr McCormick, I'm going to elect you to be the messenger.'

She looked up and down at the handful of cars she could see parked along the street.

'And you are?'

'Listen carefully. I have someone who wants to speak to you.'

Darby didn't interrupt the hysterical woman on the other end of the line.

When the call ended, Darby took in several deep breaths to calm her racing heart.

The big black Lincoln Navigator drove them to Boston in a wail of sirens and flashing lights. Coop sat next to her, silent, the two of them protected by bulletproof glass, and they watched the cars parting in front of them, trying to manoeuvre to the shoulder to give the Lincoln room to move.

She didn't tell him about the call, not yet, wanting a moment to process it. And for some reason her thoughts kept sliding back to John Smith. She'd seen him stand up and then his face had been blown apart. Saw it again. A post-traumatic reaction? Maybe. But there was something… off about it. Something that didn't quite gel. She closed her eyes and tried to chase it through the waves of exhaustion, but lost sight of it completely when the vehicle came to a hard stop that made her buck against her seatbelt.

Through the tinted window and through the darkness outside she could see the familiar rectangular brick building sitting on the corner of Albany Street. Keats waited until he got the all-clear signal, then he drove to the front, stopping in front of a pair of Secret Service agents. They opened the door for her, and then Keats and another agent — one of the big linebackers she'd seen at the BU Biomedical Lab — quickly ushered her and Coop through the building's twin tinted-glass doors and into the lobby of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Medical Examiner. They stayed by their sides as Darby walked with Coop through the long, bland institutional corridors lit up by fluorescent lights.