Darby pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the faceless man who had touched this suitcase. Snapshots of what had happened in the woods – stun grenades exploding with light; the man with the night-vision goggles; two men hauling a body up the incline to the waiting car. The dead man wore a suit and latex gloves. White shirt covered in blood. Someone had shot him.
You were inside the house, weren’t you? And I know you didn’t come here alone. You had to have brought at least one other person to help you search a house this size. Was this person shot and dragged away?
Did you help subdue the woman and her son? Did you tie them up and go back to searching the rooms while your partner tortured her? Or did you help? Were you standing in the kitchen when you heard the gunshots and exploding glass? I think you were, my man. If you had been upstairs when you heard the gunshots, you would’ve had time to draw your weapon. You would have come downstairs firing. I would have found evidence of gunshots.
I think you were caught by surprise. I think you were in the kitchen when someone shot you in the chest. I think you didn’t have time to pull your weapon.
Darby opened her eyes, wondering what had happened to the dead man’s partner. Was there another body lying somewhere in the woods? Or had the man with the night vision and his crew already carried away a second body?
She felt confident that the night-vision man and his two suited partners hadn’t been inside the woods at the time of the shooting. If they had been there, watching, they would have been long gone by the time the first responding officers arrived.
A trail of blood ran across the living-room carpet, down the porch steps and across the grass. A bloody handprint was smeared on the gate. She pictured the man running through the dark woods. Was he trying to find the incline leading up to the street? Did he have a car parked somewhere on the road?
She hadn’t found any vehicles parked along the shoulder.
And the men from the woods, someone had to have summoned them. She thought about the phone lying on the ground and pictured the man in the white shirt bleeding from his chest as he made the call. Did he drop the phone as he searched for a place to hide and wait? Why hadn’t he reached the road? Had he passed out from blood loss along the way?
Darby wondered if he had dropped anything else inside the woods.
Why didn’t your partner or partners inside the house help you? What happened?
Darby heard car doors slamming shut. She pulled back the shade and saw the lab’s second crime scene vehicle parked against the kerb. Two men, a Mutt and Jeff combo if ever there was one, paced the pavement near the bonnet. Randy Scott, thin and impeccably neat with black hair greying around the temples, stood a foot taller than his stocky partner, Mark Alves. She had hired the duo from the San Francisco Crime Laboratory, where they had gained a reputation for uncovering crucial, overlooked evidence on a number of high-profile cases. If something else had been dropped in the woods, they would find it.
Someone knocked on the bedroom door. She turned and saw Coop.
‘The Wonder Twins have arrived,’ she said.
‘I know. Randy called to let me know he was here.’
‘I’ll go speak to them.’
‘I’ll do it. You need to go to St Joseph’s Hospital in Belham. I just got off the phone with operations. A Belham patrolman called looking for you. The kid says he wants to speak to a Belham cop named Thomas McCormick. Isn’t that –’
‘Yes,’ Darby said, blood beating in her eardrums. ‘That’s my father.’
9
Darby stood with Pine and a Belham patrolman around the corner from the nurses’ station, next to a trolley holding discarded cafeteria trays. The odours of sour milk and steamed vegetables were a welcome relief from Pine’s cigar stench.
The patrolman’s name was Richard Rodman. His thick grey hair, carefully combed and parted, did not match his youthful face. Darby thought he looked like a budding politician stuffed inside a cop’s blue uniform. He held a white-paper mailer spotted with blood from the teenager’s bloody T-shirt. The emergency room physician had cut the shirt off the teenager and then had the good sense to transfer it to a paper bag. Plastic bags broke down DNA. Not all doctors knew this.
‘I was sitting on a chair outside his room when he opened the door and asked if I knew a Belham cop named Thomas McCormick,’ Rodman said. ‘I said no, I didn’t, and the kid said everyone called McCormick Big Red. Kid said he needed to talk to McCormick but wouldn’t tell me why.’
Rodman looked at Darby. ‘I remembered seeing you on TV last year when you caught that whack-job, what’s his name, the guy who shot women in the head, put Virgin Mary statues in their pockets and dumped them in the river.’
‘Walter Smith,’ Darby said.
Rodman snapped his fingers. ‘That’s the guy. What happened to him?’
‘He’s in a mental institution. He’ll be spending the rest of his life there.’
‘God bless us all. The news story I saw did this profile on you and I remembered something about you growing up in Belham and your old man being a cop. So I went to the nurses’ station, used a computer to do a Google search, then called operations and here we are.’
‘Did you tell the boy that Thomas McCormick is dead?’
‘No. I figured it might be better if you tell him. You know, use that as your way in.’
‘Has anyone come to see him?’
Rodman shook his head. ‘No phone calls either.’
‘I think it’s better if I see him alone.’
‘I’m fine with that. The less, the better, I say. The kid’s really shook up.’
Darby turned to Pine.
‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Pine said.
Darby pushed herself off the wall and grabbed the small digital tape recorder from her back pocket. ‘Where is he?’
‘Straight down the hall,’ Rodman said.
Darby opened the door. The teenager had turned off the lights in his room. In the dim light coming from the window next to his bed, she could see that someone had worked him over good. The left side of his face was swollen, the eye nearly shut.
He sat up in bed, a blanket covering his legs. His bandaged arm, perched in a sling, rested against his bare chest, tanned from the sun. Tall and lean, he had barely any muscle tone.
‘Hello, John. My name is Darby McCormick. I understand you wanted to see my father.’
‘Where is he?’
His voice was raw. And young.
‘May I come in?’
He considered the question for a moment. His blond hair was cut short, his forehead damp with sweat. All-American good-looks. The ER doctor had used butterfly sutures on the split skin.
Finally, he nodded.
She shut the door and sat on the end of the bed. The skin along his wrists and eyes was red. Patches of missing hair above the ears. She could see that he had been crying.
‘Where’s your father?’ he asked again.
‘He’s dead.’
The boy swallowed. His eyes went wide, as if a door had just been slammed shut in his face.
‘What happened to him?’
‘My father was a patrolman and pulled over a car,’ Darby said. ‘The person behind the wheel was a schizophrenic recently released from prison. My father approached the vehicle and for some reason this person shot him.’
‘And he died?’
‘My father managed to radio for help, but by the time he was rushed to the hospital he had lost too much blood. He was already brain dead. My mother made the decision to pull him off life support, and he died.’
‘When?’
‘Before you were born,’ Darby said. ‘How old are you?’