Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Two other Secret Service agents had been posted outside the autopsy suite, along with a federal agent who had a big black rolling suitcase parked next to him.

An agent with a crooked nose busted from too many fights stepped forward. 'Dr Ellis asked me to tell you to make sure you wear the Nomax gloves and the hoods with the face shield.'

Darby thanked the man, then headed into the locker room with Coop. She started pulling the gear they needed from the shelves. Keats, she saw, stood outside the door.

'I'm going to need to pick up some clothes,' he said, stripping out of his suit jacket. 'The only thing I packed was my passport.'

'I'll take care of it. You can stay with me.'

They dressed quickly and quietly. She headed to the door and saw him smiling.

'Feels like old times, doesn't it?'

She nodded and kissed him once, lightly, on the lips. 'Thanks again for coming. It means a lot. And I'm sorry I dragged you into this.'

'If the roles were reversed, would you have done the same thing for me?'

'In a heartbeat.'

'Then save the Irish Catholic guilt for something else,' Coop said, opening the door and moving across the hall to the autopsy suite.

Darby followed Coop into the room and found the pair of stainless-steel gurneys empty, the metal surfaces glinting underneath the bright lights. Nobody in here except for her and Coop — and the spiders.

They sat inside sealed specimen jars, on the long metal shelves that were mounted above the sinks. At least a dozen jars, each one containing a single spider. Most of them were big, some the size of a man's fist. A handful lay still at the bottom of their jars while the others were busy exploring, fluttering their long, hairy legs against the smooth glass.

But there was one that dwarfed the others, the massive, pale, ugly, alien-looking spider/scorpion hybrid with overdeveloped fangs and legs so ridiculously long it had to be placed in a small fish tank — the same face-hugging thing that had jumped at her and that she'd seen on the face inside the closet at the Rizzo home. It scampered around like it was on fire, its legs, with their spiked, needle-like hair, furiously digging through the inches of sand at the bottom of the tank. Two bricks had been placed on the tank cover.

Coop leaned in close and said, 'That thing looks like a vagina with legs.'

'I'll make sure I introduce the two of you.'

The spider/scorpion hybrid thing started smacking its hairy, oversized pincers together, making that skin-crawling, high-pitched hissing sound she'd heard in the bedroom: Bweeeeeeeeep!

She heard footsteps clicking across the floor behind her and turned to see an older man with a black pompadour shiny with something like Brylcreem. The clothes hanging on his reedy frame — white shirt, chinos and a tie — were all wrinkled and gave him a slovenly appearance, as if he'd plucked them from the bottom of his laundry basket.

'Beautiful, isn't she?' their new companion said, gawking at the creepy thing hissing in the tank. 'I've never come across one of these Solpugids before.'

'Sol what?'

'Sol-pu-gid. That's their proper name, but they're also referred to as Wind Scorpions, Sun Spiders or Camel Spiders. You can tell it's a Solpugid by its long body with its tactile hairs — and the enormous mouth pincers. I think this lovely lady might be a new species. I've got my fingers crossed.'

She didn't like the way he beamed with excitement, like a kid who had discovered a treasure trove of Christmas presents hidden underneath the tree skirt. And the loving way he spoke about this thing, in the sort of tone reserved for the discovery of a soul mate, convinced her this guy was off his rocker. No wedding ring on his finger. What a surprise.

She knew almost everyone who worked in this building and had never seen him before.

'I'm sorry, and you are?'

'Nigel Perkins, from the University of Massachusetts,' he said, extending a hand. Darby shook it. 'I specialize in arachnids. Special Agent Martynovich sent me to identify the specimens.'

Darby nodded, impressed. Sergey had not only found someone incredibly quickly but had also got the man to hop to. Apparently FBI credentials opened a lot of doors. Fast.

'Mr Perkins, if you're going to attend the examination, you need to get dressed.'

The man looked perplexed.

Darby pointed to her uniform and said, 'You need to wear one of these. There's a locker room across the hall. You'll find everything you need in there.'

Coop, a clipboard gripped in his gloved hand, stepped up next to her as Perkins hustled out of the room.

'Who do you think is creepier?' Coop asked. 'Perkins or your friend in the fish tank?'

'I'd say they're equal.'

The freezer door opened. Two men dressed head to toe in white coveralls, face shields and thick blue gloves wheeled a bloated corpse into the autopsy room. The person manning the bottom end of the gurney was Jack Casey. She couldn't see his face but his size gave him away. He had wedged his body into a pair of coveralls that looked like they were about to split.

When the second man turned and started backing up the gurney next to the autopsy table, she got a good, clear look at a pair of wild and busy white Andy Rooney-type eyebrows. Dr Samuel Ellis, the new head of the medical examiner's office. His face was a mottled red, the sure sign he'd just had a heated argument. Probably with Casey. The former profiler's face, she saw, also looked flushed. She wondered what the argument had been about — probably turf-war bullshit, she thought. The body should have been waiting for them on the autopsy table. Ellis, bland and dour, had probably put it in the freezer and scheduled it for sometime tomorrow. The man placed a lot of importance on proper procedure, and he was very protective about who he let into his autopsy rooms — and, make no mistake, he considered everything inside this building as his.

The two men transferred the body to the autopsy table. Darby found her kit, the bright orange toolbox she kept in the bottom of her closet, sitting on a worktop, waiting. She opened it and took the items she needed from the top shelf — the forensic light, the long tweezers and a handful of glassine bags she used for trace evidence.

Perkins came back into the room, his gloved fingers fumbling with the face shield, trying to attach it to his suit. With a heavy and theatrical sigh, Ellis darted around Casey to give Perkins a hand.

Casey paid no attention. He seemed to have dissociated himself from everyone in the room. When she reached across the body and handed the bags to Coop, the former profiler's cold blue eyes remained fixed on the body, studying it not with a sense of loss or revulsion but of opportunity.

Darby moved to the top of the table to begin her examination.

The body's swollen, decimated face was a mess of purple and red contusions and gnawed-off sections of flesh, some so deep she could see bone. She doubted an ordinary spider could do this kind of damage, but that screaming thing locked in the fish tank didn't seem like any run-of-the-mill arachnid. She was willing to bet its enormous finger-sized pincers could snap a stick in half.

She turned to Perkins, who stood anxiously by her side. He looked a little white in the face, his skin already beaded with sweat.

'Your first time seeing a dead body, Dr Perkins?'

He nodded, kept nodding.

'If you think you're going to be sick, either step outside or, if you don't think you can make it, use one of the trashcans.'

'And,' Coop added, 'don't forget to pull off your face shield. You don't want any blowback.'

Using her tweezers, she pointed to a section of gnawed flesh on the victim's face and said to Perkins: 'That Camel Spider, can it cause this kind of damage?'