Chris Mooney - The Dead Room

Coop put his arm around the back of her chair and leaned forward for a closer view. She could feel his arm touching her and was suddenly pierced by the thought of his moving away – not to another state but to another country.

'R… E… and what looks like an S,' he said.

She took a deep breath, trying to wash away the sinking feeling in her stomach. 'There's a company called Reynolds Engineering Systems that's one of the leading developers of microstamping. They're based in Washington, I think. Or Virginia.'

He turned to her. Their faces were inches apart.

'How do you know all of this stuff?'

'I do a lot of reading.' She turned to the keyboard to print off more copies.

'You need a hobby.'

'This is my hobby. Have you seen the Wonder Twins?'

'They're in Exam Room 2 working on the binoculars.'

'What binoculars?'

'Randy found a small pair of binoculars in the woods.'

Darby wondered if one of the men she had seen last night had accidently dropped them.

She stood up. 'I'll get on the horn and see what I can find out about this microstamp.'

'Wait.' Coop grabbed her wrist as she stood. 'When you were examining Amy Hallcox's body, did you see a tattoo?'

'She had one above her left breast. A small heart.'

'Did it have a black arrow through it?'

It did. 'How did you know that?'

'I need the fingerprint card for Amy Hallcox.'

'It's on the bench near the Kelvin probe.'

He walked across the room, grabbed the bag containing the Amy Hallcox fingerprint card and disappeared around the corner. Darby followed.

Coop stood at the last bench, his favourite spot, a small corner suite arranged around a grouping of windows that offered strong sunlight. Not today. The sky was black and heavy rain continued to pelt the windows.

He already had a fingerprint card set up on the bench. He slid Amy Hallcox's card from the bag and examined it with a fingerprint magnifier. By the time she stepped up next to him, he had pushed the magnifier to the side.

'It's a match,' he said, more to himself than to her.

'A match to what?'

He slid a fingerprint card yellowed by age across the bench. She looked at the name typed at the top: KENDRA L. SHEPPARD. White female. No age or other information was listed.

'Who's Kendra Sheppard?'

'She was… she was from Charlestown,' he said. 'Got busted a couple of times for prostitution. When you and I went inside the house and I saw her, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. That I was imagining it.'

She remembered Coop standing in the dining room wiping his sweaty forehead, his face as white as a sheet.

'When you were outside talking to Pine, I took a closer look at Amy Hallcox's face,' he said. 'Kendra had a small mole on her cheek – I told her she looked like a blonde version of Cindy Crawford. And Kendra also had a scar underneath her bottom lip. She got that when she was eighteen. We came out of Jimmy DeCarlo's house and she fell down drunk on a piece of glass. I had to take her to the hospital for stitches.'

He grinned at the memory, then took a deep breath and said, 'Even then I still didn't believe it, so when I got back to the lab, I pulled Kendra's prints. I wanted to make sure before I said anything to you.'

'And there's no question?'

'None. Amy Hallcox is Kendra Sheppard.'

Coop crossed his arms over his chest, muscles rippling underneath the tight polo shirt, and focused on some private thought. 'All this time, I thought she was dead. Now I find her two decades later tied down to her chair with her throat cut and…' He shook his head as if trying to clear away the images. 'It's just weird, you know?'

Darby nodded and placed the fingerprint card back on the bench. 'Why did Kendra change her name?'

'I only knew her as Kendra,' he said. 'At one point in time, she was my girlfriend – my first serious girlfriend, I guess you could say.'

Darby leaned the small of her back against a lab bench and grabbed the edges.

'She wasn't a bad kid,' Coop said, his eyes on Kendra Sheppard's fingerprint card. 'Not the brightest bulb, especially when it came to the realities of living in Charlestown – she had no common sense or street smarts.'

Coop lived in Charlestown and knew everyone – not a hard thing to do when you lived in a place that was just one square mile. He and his three older sisters had grown up in the small historic neighbourhood, the site of one of the first battles of the American Revolution – Bunker Hill – and later, during the 1980s, a hotbed of Irish mafia activity. Coop was thirteen when his father had been killed in an unsolved hit-and-run – the same age Darby had been when her father was murdered. That common wound had cemented their friendship during the early days at the crime lab.

'Kendra had a good heart,' he said, 'and, Christ, she was wild. Loved to party, loved to booze it up and do blow. I was willing to overlook the coke because she was so goddamn attractive. But when I found out about her getting busted for prostitution, I couldn't handle it and broke up with her. Not a good time in my life.'

'Why did you think Kendra was dead?'

He blinked as if waking up from a dream. 'What's that?'

'You said, "All this time, I thought she was dead." '

'Her parents were murdered. They were shot to death while they were sleeping.'

That matched what Sean had told her.

'When did this happen?'

'April of '83,' Coop said. 'I remember it because I had just gotten my licence. I know Kendra wasn't home when they were murdered because the police were looking for her. I don't know where she was. By that time we weren't speaking. She didn't go to the wake or funeral, she just… vanished, so I assumed the worst.'

'She have any family in Charlestown?'

'An aunt and uncle. Heather and Mark Base. They don't live there any more. After the murder, they packed up and moved somewhere in the Midwest, I think.'

'Sean told me his grandparents were killed.'

'Sean?'

'That's John Hallcox's real name.' She hadn't had a chance to talk with Coop about her interview with the boy – or this morning's encounter with the brown van. After speaking to the Belham patrolmen who'd arrived on the scene, she'd driven back to Boston to work on Amy Hallcox's body before the autopsy.

'Sean told me his grandparents were murdered but said his mother wouldn't tell him how they died – or where they lived,' Darby said. 'He had just started talking about what had happened inside the house when he shut off the tape recorder and told me his real name was Sean. That's when the guy posing as a Fed came in with this shit about the mother being a fugitive and -'

'Wait, the guy wasn't an actual Fed?'

'No, but he sure as hell looked and acted the part – had the ID, badge. Pine said he saw the Federal warrant and it looked legit. I didn't find out he wasn't the real deal until this morning.'

'Jesus.' Coop propped up his elbows on the bench and massaged his forehead with the heels of his palms.

'I should have suspected something after he disappeared from the hospital,' she said. 'I thought he left to call an early-morning meeting for damage control – you know how the Feds are, protect their image at all costs.'

'So Amy Hallcox wasn't a fugitive.'

'No. I checked NCIC, it was all bullshit. This guy was after the kid.'

'Why?'

'I don't know yet.'

Coop looked at her. 'He must have known something. Why else would a twelve-year-old be carrying a gun?'

'I agree. I don't know who this guy is, but he's probably working with the guys I saw following me this morning.' She told him about the brown van and what Ted Castonguay had found in the pictures and the hospital videotape. 'What's going on with the fingerprints you lifted from the house?'