Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Sergey rubbed his face.

'Okay,' he said, through his fingers. 'Okay, let's say these people have some underground place where they're hiding. That Taylor and Sarah Casey are there. We take off right now for Connecticut and then drive to the woods, it's still going to be dark. How do you suggest we search the woods?'

'Call your Connecticut field office and ask them to get us a helicopter with thermal-imaging equipment that can penetrate the ground.'

'And if they hear a helicopter, panic and decide to cut their losses and start shooting?'

'It's a risk. I realize that. But the circumstances don't change whether we leave now or in the morning.'

'And if something happens here — '

'You have people — trained people — who can handle the situation,' Darby said. 'If something happens while we're in the air, we can always turn around. But if there's a chance that Sarah or Taylor Casey or any other victim is somewhere out there in those woods, we need to act on it. Now.'

Sergey drummed his fingers against the pad of paper.

Casey, stoic through the whole discussion, cleared his throat.

'I agree with Darby,' he said, sounding surprisingly calm. 'We need to go.'

Finally, Sergey stood and called the pilot. Casey kept his gaze focused on the table, his face a waxy pallor under the bright lights.

It was time to hold the examinations in the conference room. They talked briefly about how to go about doing it. Darby didn't need to retrieve her kit because Sergey brought her the forensic lights she needed.

Casey unbuttoned his shirt. He caught the surprised look on her face and said, 'Never assume.'

Both Casey and Sergey were clean. As the plane's engines warmed up, Casey came back with the Secret Service agents. There were seven on board, including Keats. Casey asked each man to come inside the conference room alone. Darby examined Keats first, while Casey and Sergey stood near the door, their palms resting on their guns, ready to pull them if she gave them the signal.

Keats was clean. He was told what was going on, then opened the door and invited his men in. He told them to submit their weapons and they did so without complaint, handing them across the table to Casey. Then Keats told his men to strip out of their shirts. They did, and they all passed.

An announcement came over the speakers to prepare for takeoff. Darby buckled in and waited impatiently for half an hour until the big Boeing levelled off to cruising altitude.

Casey collected the groups and Darby did the exams, checking upper and lower lips, checking necks and chests. The only tattoos she found were those belonging to two embarrassed women — 'tramp stamps', as they were called, a butterfly and some Indian design located on their lower backs, right above the waistband of their trousers.

Casey escorted her upstairs to cockpit. The two pilots passed. Next he took her to the lower deck. Deep in the belly of the plane a small army of federal agents worked in a mobile lab, hunting for evidence underneath the bright overhead lights. They were huddled around white worktops and workstations, studying computer monitors and printouts. They scurried around each other, grabbing phones and pens and laptops, their faces anxious and sweating and tired from lack of sleep and surviving on adrenalin.

She followed Casey across a clear path that divided two distinct areas packed with banks of desks and workstations, leading to half a dozen or so doors. Casey opened the middle one. A guy somewhere in his thirties but with grey hair and a liquorice-coloured scar on his chin sat wedged behind a tiny white desk, the only furniture in the immaculately neat and windowless space. He swivelled the computer screen around so they could see it.

An autopsy room. Eight male bodies drained of blood and stiff with rigor lay on stainless-steel gurneys, their white skin covered with frost from their time spent in the meat locker. Sergey had told her they'd been shot in the back of the head, and she saw the same exit wounds on each forehead and face. Today's date and a running time in bold white filled the bottom-right-hand part of the screen.

Casey punched a button on a speakerphone. 'Drake, it's Jack. Can you hear me?'

'Yeah. We're ready. I've got Hein here with me, manning the camera.'

'Go ahead, let's see what you've got.'

Someone picked up the camera — Hein — moved to the middle of the room and stopped next to a gurney holding an older male with fine grey chest hair and packing a considerable amount of weight around the midsection. His torso had been washed and Darby could hear water dribbling into a sink.

She looked at the star-shaped exit wound. A crater now stood where the man's left eye had been, the resulting trauma taking out his nose and shredding most of his upper lip.

'It's a mess,' Drake said over the speakers, 'but we managed to find it.'

Darby watched as the man's gloved fingers pushed the ragged strips of flesh together. Now came the black light and she saw the tattoo, the same as the one on Rizzo and Smith.

Drake said, 'His name is Richard Govornale. Forty-six, been with the Secret Service for fifteen years. Immaculate record, from what I was told. Secret Service has investigators here right now, but they've pretty much shut us out.'

'Sergey's talking with their lead guy, Baxter.'

Drake said, 'I took apart the outside A/C units and found a cyanide canister, a remote-controlled thing operated by a cell phone. Canister's empty. They pumped in enough cyanide to make them pass out and then came in and started shooting. Never seen anything like this in my life. What the hell is going on, Jack?' Casey handed her off to two young guys who looked like they had just graduated college seconds ago, their bright and eager faces ready to tackle anything the world threw at them. Their names were Louis and Gerrad, and they worked for the FBI's Video Enhancement Unit. They had hunkered down in one of the other white rooms, this one just as cramped but designed with an L-shaped worktop so the two men could be side by side, talk and compare notes.

The tall, bony one, Louis, handed her an envelope and said, 'The pictures you wanted.'

'I want to take a look at something specific on the video,' she said. 'There's a black spot behind the surgical table, what could — '

'Right, right, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'll show you.'

Gerrad said he was going to the galley for coffee. Just as well. There wasn't room for three people in there. Darby took a seat and, looking at the computer monitor, saw a close-up, frozen frame of Sarah Casey's face.

Louis's hands flew across the keyboard. Windows menus popped on the screen and disappeared as Louis worked the mouse, pausing every moment or so to hit a key or type in a command. The video whooshed by and then stopped on the spot where she'd seen the blackened area.

Now Louis enlarged it. He pressed a series of buttons and applied what she guessed was some sort of light filter. The blackness disappeared and she saw an archway made of human skulls, their hollowed sockets looking down on Jack Casey's daughter.

Darby leaned forward. 'I can't make out what's beyond the archway.'

'Just give me a minute… There.' He got out of his chair to give her a better view.

A wall constructed of legs and arm bones stacked on top of each other, like logs. She could make out the curved ends of tibias, more skulls, hundreds and hundreds of bones, maybe thousands.

Louis said, 'You have any idea what that place is?'

'Some sort of ossuary would be my guess.'

'A what?'

'A place that holds the bones of the dead. Can you print out a copy of this?'

'Already did. It's in the package I gave you.'

'What else did you find?'