Chris Mooney - The Missing

No need. The security man had left. Boyle watched him leave, then turned the corner and headed for the bathroom. He grabbed his backpack from the trash and made his way toward a cop directing people into the stairwell. Boyle blended into the crowd of civilians and hospital staff.

The morning was filled with rain and sirens. He jogged down Cambridge Street and took the stairs for the T station.

Yesterday, on his way home from Belham, he purchased an electronic T pass at South Station. He swiped the pass through the magnetic card reader, leaving no fingerprints, and stood with the rest of the people watching the chaos below them. Smoke drifted from the crumbled ruins of the delivery garage. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars were coming from all directions. Shards of glass and pieces of brick and concrete covered Cambridge Street. Some of the store windows, Boyle saw, had been blown apart by the blast.

When the train pulled up, Boyle grabbed a window seat, took out his BlackBerry and typed a message to Richard: 'Done.'

To pass the time, Boyle thought about what he would do to Carol Cranmore once she stepped outside her room. Sooner or later, she would come out for her food. They all did.

But he couldn't wait forever, not now. The preparations for leaving were already made. He would have to kill them all soon – tonight, maybe.

The right side of Darby's face throbbed as she helped Coop lift another wounded SWAT officer onto the stretcher. The officer was unconscious but breathing.

They carefully made their way over the wet debris, heading as fast as they could through the rain and smoke, toward the far end of the street where the wounded lay scattered on the ground. Dozens of them were being treated by the EMTs and doctors rushed in from Belham Hospital. The dead ones lay still under blue tarps weighed down by rocks.

Darby eased the officer onto a gurney. She was about to head back out when she spotted Evan Manning kneeling on the ground, lifting up a blue sheet to examine the face of one of the dead. She pushed her way through the crowds of medical staff shouting orders over the wail of the approaching sirens, the screaming and the crying.

She grabbed Evan by the arm. 'Did you find Traveler?'

'Not yet.' He seemed genuinely surprised to see her. 'What happened to your face?'

'I was knocked down by the blast.'

'What?'

'It's too loud here. Come this way.'

Darby led him across the street and into the woods. The leaves protected them from the rain. It was quieter in here but not by much.

'I tried calling you on your cell,' Evan said, wiping the water away from his face.

'I'm pretty sure I broke it when I fell. What's going on with Traveler?'

'All the roads are blocked off, but so far, we haven't found him.'

'In order to have set off the bomb, he'd have to be close by, wouldn't he? We need to make sure the cops at the roadblocks are checking everyone they see. He could still be somewhere around here – he could be walking away right now.'

'We're checking everyone. Listen, I've got to leave. I'm going to be tied up in Boston. It doesn't look good.'

'What's going on in Boston?'

'There was an explosion inside your building. I don't know all the details yet.'

Suddenly Darby had to sit down. There was no place to sit. She leaned back against a tree and filled her lungs deep, the ground shaky beneath her feet.

'Two of our mobile forensic units will be here early tomorrow morning – one here, one at the blast site in Boston,' Evan said. 'We can run the investigation from there. I need to get going. I'll call you later. Where can I reach you?'

She wrote down her mother's home number on the back of a business card and handed it to him.

'Your face is swelling up,' Evan said. 'You should put some ice on it.'

Darby stepped out of the woods and stared at the wounded and the dead. Four bodies – no, five – were under the blue tarps. An EMT was pulling another tarp over the body of another SWAT officer.

She turned away and looked in the direction of where the van had been. Now it was a smoldering black crater. The body of the man she had seen inside the van hadn't been found. Pieces of him were scattered among the debris. They'd be lucky if they ever identified him.

A firefighter dropped his hose. He yelled something she couldn't hear and then all four firefighters were running to the bloodied hand fighting its way out of the rubble.

That could have been me, Darby thought. If I had been standing any closer to the van, I might be trapped or dead.

Coop was heading back with another stretcher – this one holding a young woman. Her limp arms hung over the sides of the stretcher and bumped against the rubble as her lifeless eyes stared up at the dark gray sky, the rain washing away soot and blood from her face.

By quarter to three, all the survivors had been found and moved. Firemen were still crawling around the blast site; two were standing by with hoses. ATF agents and members of the Boston Bomb Squad, dressed in coveralls and boots, sifted through the debris.

The man in charge of the blast site was Kyle Romano, a former Marine explosives expert and a fifteen-year veteran of the Boston Bomb Squad. He was a big, burly man with a dark red buzz cut and a face scarred by acne.

Romano had to shout over the steady rotor-thump of the news chopper hovering in the sky directly above them.

'It's definitely dynamite,' Romano said. 'You can tell by the way the metal's pitted. We also found pieces of a timer and what appears to be a metal footlocker. Given what you and everyone else told me, once those van doors opened, I'd say it sent a signal to the timer. You know the rest. Now I got a question for you.'

Romano scratched his nose. His face was covered in soot and ashes. 'I was talking to Banville, and he told me this guy you're after kidnaps young women.'

'That's right.'

'This has the markings of a terrorist attack. You pull something like he did today, it's guaranteed to draw attention. This guy you're after, everything about him suggests he doesn't want to be found.'

'I think he's feeling desperate,' Darby said.

'That's the same thing the profiler told me – Manning was his name. Evan Manning.'

'What else did he tell you?'

'Not much. He was talking about the teenage girl that's missing.' Romano shook his head, sighing. 'Poor girl's as good as dead.'

'He said that?'

'Not in so many words.' Romano took a long pull from his water bottle. That's all I know right now.'

'Can I help with something?'

'Yes, you could point me to the piece of metal with the vehicle's VIN number on it. It's buried somewhere in this goddamn mess.'

'I can help with the sifting,' Darby said.

'We've got ATF here to help. Bomb cases are different from the ones you work on – no offense. I've got to clamp down on the scene. Too many people walking around here. Thanks again for your help.'

The vehicle, its windows shattered from the blast, was part of the crime scene. Bomb techs were searching it for scraps of evidence. Darby couldn't drive it.

Darby couldn't find Coop. She'd have to walk home.

The press was everywhere. She walked past them, numb, and headed down a street only to realize it was closed off to allow investigators to sift through the debris.

When she stopped walking, she was standing near East Dunstable Road. There was Porter Avenue. Down the road was St. Pius. Half a mile up the road was the Hill. Sitting high above it was Buzzy's.

The pay phone she had used over two decades ago to make the call was still in the same spot, replaced by a new Verizon model with a bright yellow receiver. Darby wanted to call Leland to see what had happened at the lab. She checked her pockets. All she had was dollar bills. She went inside Buzzy's to get change.