The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  “Come on,” Cait said. “You have to learn to do these things for yourself.”

  When trouble came, the McCandless family had always circled the wagons. That hadn’t changed, even if she and Leyla were the only McCandlesses left.

  The doorbell rang.

  Cait flinched, picking Leyla up and holding her close as she turned to look at the door. It took her a second or two to realize it must be Jordan and Sarah, and then another second to feel foolish.

  Even so, she flashed on the locked metal box on the floor of her closet, and the gun that lay within it, nestled atop her life insurance policy, her bank bonds, and Leyla’s birth certificate. An extra clip and a small box of ammunition rested in her sock drawer.

  Cait put Leyla on her right hip and held her away from the door.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “It’s us,” a male voice said.

  “Jordan?”

  “Yeah, Cait. It’s me.”

  The restatement—from “us” to “me”—felt personal and intimate, and a rush of gratitude went through her. He was a good man, and he had always cared for her. He had been her friend before in times when she had felt incapable of reaching out for one, and here he was again.

  But when she opened the door and saw the concern not just in Jordan’s eyes, but in Sarah’s as well, her heart began to break all over again. Cait had been forcing herself to be strong, to do without the support that friends might give her. Now she reached out and pulled Jordan to her, hugging him close with one arm even as she carried Leyla in the other.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “Of course,” he replied, his breath warm on her neck, his newly trimmed beard scraping her skin. She couldn’t suppress the delicious shiver that went through her.

  “When Lynette told me what was going on, I asked her for the assignment,” Jordan added.

  He seemed not to have noticed the reaction he’d gotten out of her, and that was good. Her life was confusing enough as it was without trying to examine her feelings about Jordan too closely just now.

  Cait stepped back, smiling at him. “I asked for you, too.”

  Jordan returned her sad smile, but then Cait turned to look at Sarah Lin. They had only worked together a few times, but Sarah had impressed her as friendly and smart and professional, much more open and human than some of the other reporters at Channel 7—especially sports asshole Mike Duffy.

  “Sarah,” Cait said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  The reporter stepped inside, smiled at Leyla, and then focused on Cait.

  “We’ll do everything we can. We’re going to help you catch these guys.”

  Cait faltered a bit, and she knew Sarah must have seen the doubt in her eyes. But the reporter probably didn’t know the whole story yet. She didn’t know about Sean.

  “More than anything, I just want the truth.”

  Still stiff from her flight, Rachael Voss stood in the second-floor corridor of the Comfort Inn in Bangor, trying to figure out how to knock on the door to Room 227 while carrying a cup of coffee in each hand. After a few seconds, she gave up and just kicked the door a few times. The café across the road brewed a decent cup, and the smell alone enticed her. She took a sip, and then kicked the door again.

  “Okay, okay!” came a voice from the other side.

  “I hope you have your pants on,” Voss said.

  Her partner opened the door, his hair mussed from the pillow, still half-asleep. “Funny.” But Josh didn’t look amused. His expression was grim, his eyes haunted from the discovery, only hours before, of the remains of the Kowaliks’ newborn daughter.

  Voss glanced at the worn gray gym shorts he must have just tugged on and smiled, trying to lift his spirits. “Those will do. I take it I interrupted nap time?”

  “Every cop in the state of Maine is out beating the bushes for this guy. If he’s still here, they’ll find him,” Josh said, with what she knew was false confidence. “I knew I wouldn’t be any good without some rest. It’s not like we got any last night. I figured I’d get a couple of hours’ sleep while you were in the air.”

  “Yeah,” Voss said. “Me, too. Slept on the plane.”

  She and Turcotte had come directly from the airport. On the plane, knowing that al-Din was still in the wind, every minute had seemed like an eternity.

  She handed Josh one of the coffees and moved past him into the room. He shut the door behind her and Voss crossed to the desk and slid into the chair. The bedspread had puddled on the floor at the foot of the bed and the sheets were in disarray.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be alone,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Josh picked up a discarded T-shirt emblazoned with a stylishly faded Batman logo. She wondered if this ensemble was a grown-up version of superhero pajamas.

  “I don’t know,” she said, sipping her coffee. “I thought maybe you’d be with Chang.”

  “Really?”

  Voss shrugged. “You’re not laughing. And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

  “Of course I’ve thought about it. Nala’s impressive. Smart. Smokin’ hot. But no, I’m not having sex with her. Especially not today.”

  Voss nodded, her smile vanishing. “No, I guess not.” She sipped her coffee. “So she’s ‘Nala’ now?”

  Josh sighed and looked at the clock. “Yeah.”

  Interesting. But now was not the time to discuss it. “Okay,” Voss said instead.

  A quiet moment passed, then she stood up, set her coffee on the desk, and slipped her arms around him. Whatever they might one day be—or never be—Josh was her best friend.

  “They finally named her,” he said. “The Kowaliks.”

  “They gave the baby a name? Now?”

  “They called her Grace.”

  Voss felt a sudden tightness in her chest. She exhaled, but it did not go away. “Are you gonna be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Josh stepped back from her, his expression hard. “Once we catch this guy, I’ll be right as rain.”

  “Good,” Voss said. “Go take a shower. You’ve got about twelve minutes before Turcotte and Nala get here.”

  “Here? As in, my room?” Josh said, looking around at the messy bed and the dirty clothes piled in the corner by the chair. “Why?”

  “Eleven minutes.”

  Josh picked up his coffee cup, took a long swig, then went into the bathroom. When she heard the shower sizzle on, she picked up the bedspread, and covered the bed. Then she sat down and ran through the case in her head, trying to figure out what they knew and comparing it to what they could only guess.

  Their research had turned up numerous other cases of presumed crib death that fit the m.o. of the murders of Michael and Neil Greenlaw. They had started linking the investigations together and had put in inquiries for copies of case files and evidence—which would take hours, if not days, to gather.

  When Josh came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, he looked much more awake. He hadn’t bothered to shave—the clock was ticking—but his eyes were alert and he’d run a brush through his hair.

  “I see you stayed for the show,” he said, trying for a levity neither of them believed.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t look.”

  Something went through his mind, then. She saw it reflected in his eyes but couldn’t decide if it was amusement or regret. Whatever it was, he chose not to give it voice, instead going over to dig clean clothes out of the suitcase, which lay open on the floor of the closet. Voss turned her back so he could dress.

  “All right,” he said after a minute. “You won’t be blinded.”

  He was still buttoning his shirt when Turcotte arrived alone. Josh answered the knock and let him in. Turcotte had dark circles under his eyes, but his suit and tie looked crisp enough to be just back from the dry cleaners. If anything, the gray-brown stubble on his head looked shorter, as though he had just buzzed it.
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br />   “Chang on the way?” Voss asked.

  “She’s on the phone with the Florida State Police, listening to a pretty detailed report with a net result of absolutely nothing. But she’ll be along. What’s on your mind?”

  Voss sipped her coffee, but it was down to cold dregs now, so she pushed the cup away. Turcotte would have to relay to Chang the conversation they were about to have.

  “That Rolling Stone article,” Voss said. “It might not be as crazy as it sounds.”

  “Either that,” Turcotte added, “or someone took it seriously.”

  “It’s always possible that whoever’s behind this never read the article and doesn’t know anything about the supposed history,” Voss said, “but it sure as hell feels like these killers came to the same conclusion.”

  “Maybe not,” Turcotte argued, frowning. “Maybe they just don’t like half-breeds.”

  Josh ran his hands through his hair. “Maybe you guys could take a step back and tell me how we got here? As of a few hours ago, the Herod Factor was just some lunatic conspiracy theory.”

  “The ‘crib murders’ are all over the news,” Voss explained. “The cases are spread out over five years, but they all have one thing in common. It isn’t just the Greenlaw twins and Grace Kowalik. Each of the victims had one biological parent who was either Iraqi, Afghani, or Iranian.”

  “Wait,” Josh said. “How do the Greenlaws fit in?”

  Turcotte narrowed his eyes. “The twins were adopted from Afghanistan. The paperwork said the mother claimed the father was a U.S. aid worker who had married her, and then abandoned her when his company pulled out of the country. She gave the kids up specifically to be adopted by Americans, so they would have the life she’d envisioned for them.”

  Josh threw up his hands. “I’m more confused than ever. What is this? Are these guys terrorists or serial killers? This has been going on for years and the point of terrorism is to let the world know. Otherwise … no terror.”

  Voss sat back in the chair. “That, I can’t help you with.”

  “So, we’ve got a serial killer murdering biracial children?” Josh asked.

  Turcotte shook his head. “The media won’t see it that way. Hate crimes. Someone’s killing the babies of our enemies.”

  “You said ‘one parent.’ In every case, the other parent is American?” Josh asked.

  “In every case,” Voss agreed. “But I don’t buy this Herod bullshit. The idea that children, just by existing, can alter the mood of nations … that’s just nuts. And maybe it’s not what this is about. Maybe Gharib al-Din and his buddies think of the babies as traitors. Obviously the spin will be that terrorists are killing their own, destroying any links between East and West, or something like that.”

  “None of it makes any sense,” Turcotte said.

  “There’s something else,” Voss replied. “I’ve been turning it over in my mind, and we need to talk about Norris. I’m not comfortable with the idea of Black Pine looking over our shoulders.”

  “Nothing I can do about it,” Turcotte said. “I’ve got orders from the assistant director.”

  “It’s possible I could help.”

  Turcotte eyed her suspiciously. “What do you have in mind?”

  A knock at the door made Voss jump. The three of them glanced at one another, then Josh went to open it. Agent Chang stood in the corridor, eyes lit up like a rabbit on speed.

  “They found al-Din,” Chang said.

  “What?” Turcotte asked. “Where?”

  “The baggage compartment of a plane from Bangor to Boston. He’s dead. Somebody cut his throat.”

  Detective Anne Monteforte sat at her desk, staring at a photograph of George and Jane Wadlow. In the picture, George wore a Red Sox T-shirt and his tool belt, while Jane held a screwdriver to his ear, nose crinkled and eyes narrowed as though she was trying to figure out how to fix him. It was a cute picture, from happier times. A picture today would have shown a very worried George tending to a Jane whose face was bruised and swollen, and whose confidence had suffered a terrible blow.

  In frustration, she pushed the picture away. They had nothing.

  The two events—the mystery vehicles watching the Wadlow house in the small hours of the morning and the attack in the Wadlows’ driveway—had to be related. So the case created two jobs for the Medford P.D. The first was to figure out who these guys were and the second was to make sure they weren’t coming back. The prevailing belief seemed to be that someone—sexual predators or human traffickers or someone who just wanted a damn baby—had spotted Jane out with Leyla at some point and had targeted her. Detective Jarman had suggested that, as an older woman, Jane might have seemed like she wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

  Surprise, assholes! Monteforte thought. Good for Jane.

  Thought it hadn’t really been good for Jane. Monteforte winced at the memory of the woman’s injuries. She wanted to find the bastards responsible and hoped to have the opportunity to give them a few bruises of their own.

  But as the day had progressed, Monteforte had begun to doubt the prevailing wisdom. If Jane and Cait’s stories about the cars working surveillance on Badger Road had been accurate, there had been a team prepping for the attempted abduction of Leyla McCandless. That didn’t sound like some pervert, kiddie pornographer, or baby black marketer. It sounded like someone who really wanted this child, which brought a slew of new questions to the table.

  Monteforte had questioned A-Train herself. The guy was an asshole, no doubt, and the video of Cait kicking his ass had gone viral on the Internet and continued to be shown on the news all day, making its way onto national newscasts. He was pissed off and embarrassed, but he had an alibi and Monteforte had believed his denials. The guy was a dimwit, incapable of convincingly pretending to be mystified by her questions.

  If it hadn’t been random, that left only two possibilities—a custody-related kidnapping perpetrated on behalf of baby Leyla’s Iraqi relatives, or something Monteforte and Jarman hadn’t even considered yet. Her instinct told her it was the latter, which pissed her off. Anne Monteforte was a smart woman and she didn’t like feeling clueless. There were pieces missing from the puzzle, and big ones.

  None of the neighbors had seen anything helpful. Several had noticed the cars parked on the street, but either paid them little attention or developed their own theories about the presence of the unfamiliar vehicles. One old woman had thought the car must belong to a private eye out to catch a cheating spouse; Monteforte figured she watched too much television. The neighbors on either side of the vacationing DiMarinos, in front of whose house the cars kept parking, had not noticed more than one vehicle and had independently assumed it belonged to some friend or relative, there to check up on the house.

  The supposedly untraceable license plate was a big question mark, but only if one assumed that Cait had written it down correctly. The woman had been a sergeant in the National Guard and spent more than two years in Iraq. She had been trained to pay attention, and her fight with A-Train showed that she was far more capable than the typical soldier. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t made a mistake about the plate number.

  They had started to run down similar plate numbers, with one digit off from the number Cait had provided. Monteforte shuffled through a stack of papers on her desk, looking at the information they had collected on the owners of the cars with those near-miss plates. Thus far she had found only one potential suspect among them, a guy named Marcus Freiberg, who had two restraining orders against him and a sexual assault charge that had been continued without a finding. The sex assault beef had resulted in him violating a T.R.O. from his ex-wife, so maybe there was more to that story than the paperwork revealed. In any case, most of his ugly behavior seemed related to the ex, so the possibility of a connection to the Wadlow/McCandless case seemed slim. But they had to be thorough.

  Nothing’s going to come of it, Monteforte thought. You’re not getting anywhere.

  The thought i
nfuriated her, but she couldn’t deny it. Unless they got a major break, this case would go cold. Whoever had put the Wadlows’ house under surveillance and then beaten Jane and tried to snatch the baby had left no trace behind. They were professionals, almost military in the execution of their crimes.

  “Jesus,” she sighed, and glanced at the clock, to find it ticking toward six p.m. Sunday afternoon was about to give way to Sunday night, and Monteforte just wanted to go home. Unless they caught a break, they had done all they could for today.

  With a shake of her head, she dropped the file on her desk and stood.

  As she did, Jarman came into the office, looking pissed off and more than a little scary. Her partner had a kind heart and a quiet wisdom, but he didn’t smile nearly often enough and could be intimidating to people who didn’t know him.

  “What is it?” Monteforte asked, even before he could open his mouth.

  “It’s money. It’s always money, isn’t it?” Jarman muttered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He sank into his desk chair and turned to her. “It’s August, and the damn weekend. We’re short-staffed and Hoffmeyer won’t approve overtime for anyone. I asked Tagliabue to drive past Cait McCandless’s place every hour or so—Parker’s off duty now—but he just told me Hoffmeyer’s asked him to sit on Wellington Station.”

  “So talk to Hoffmeyer,” Monteforte said.

  Jarman scowled. “I did. Where do you think I got the ‘short-staffed’ bullshit from?”

  “So you’re coming around to the idea that this might not have been random?”

  The question took the wind out of Jarman. He exhaled, settling into his chair, and then shrugged.

  “Just trying to keep an open mind. But something goddamn weird happened over there today, and the fact that neither of us has a clue makes me nervous.”

  With a deep sigh, Jarman stood up.

  “You going home?” Monteforte asked.

  Jarman nodded. “Just about to. Why? You want to get a drink? I sure as hell could use one.”