by Unknown
Lead officers with high-powered search beams on their weapons go in first. Behind them come their armed cover and then the Extrication Squad.
At the first sight of flames, the ranks part and the guys with extinguishers lay down a blanket of foam.
Seconds later, when the gas boiler explodes, the heartbeats of the ESU team barely jump. It’s something they’d been expecting.
Clouds of foam instantaneously smother the flames. There’s no sign of panic. Howie Baumguard steps aside and calmly lets the experts do their work. He’s seen the ESU magicians pull people out of mangled metal in multiple car crashes, bomb explosions and building collapses. They’re the best. They’ve worked everywhere from the Oklahoma bombing to the hurricane in New Orleans. If anyone can get Jack and Lu out of this mess alive, it’s them.
‘Get some portable light in here!’ someone shouts.
Through the flashlight, dust and plaster spins in the brick-coated red mist as expert eyes roam over the rubble.
Less than two yards from the door is a pyramid of timber and breeze block.
‘More foam!’ an officer shouts as a fire flares again near the doorway.
At the top of the basement stairs stands Bernie, the one specialist member of ESU that Howie doesn’t want to see deployed.
Bernie is a bloodhound.
And Bernie’s expertise is cadaver recovery.
Orsetta has taken two bullets in the muscle of her right shoulder and is bleeding badly. The fall knocked her unconscious. Now, as she comes round, she is too disorientated to move. In the movies, hero cops get shot and then simply carry on running as if they’ve suffered a bee sting. In real life, things are different. Most shootings blow you off your feet and you stay down until paramedics scrape you up and take you away. Orsetta struggles even to sit upright.
‘Are you okay?’ asks McLeod, both hands still around the pistol, now pointing at the ground.
Orsetta nods. For a moment she is unable even to find her voice.
‘He’s dead. I think he’s dead.’ McLeod waves his gun towards the body sprawled against the tomb.
Orsetta forces herself to stand up by sliding her back against the wall.
Finally she manages to talk, her voice croaky but calm. ‘I’m a police officer… Please give me the gun.’ Rather awkwardly, she pulls her ID card from her back pocket. ‘Hand it to me very carefully,’ she adds.
McLeod is an expert shot. He’s killed deer, rabbits and all manner of birds, but he’s never shot a human being before. Now his hands are shaking as badly as if he were mixing a cocktail. He takes hold of the pistol by its barrel and hands it to Orsetta. The policewoman checks it and then levels it at Spider’s crumpled body.
She’s taking no chances. One twitch from the motherfucking son of a bitch and she’ll empty the rest of the magazine into him.
‘Further back,’ she says to McLeod, ‘there is a woman on the ground, please go and help her. I will watch him.’
‘Sure, yeah, sure,’ says McLeod nervously. He heads around the tomb and immediately recognizes the collapsed body as Nancy King.
Orsetta hears voices and footsteps behind her, coming from the entrance to the catacomb. She realizes that her hearing has been affected by the gunfire. She feels her head start to spin and her sense of balance slip away.
Through the fog she makes out that the voices are speaking Italian. We’re safe, she tells herself.
The crackle of a police radio echoes through the catacombs and then beams from several flashlights illuminate the blackness. Someone tells her that everything is going to be all right. A hand reassuringly touches her and fingers gently prise the gun from her grasp. In the glare of a flashlight she sees McLeod start to remove tape from Nancy King’s hands.
Then her mind goes slack and she allows herself to collapse.
It takes them twenty minutes to find Jack and Lu’s bodies in the rubble of the building.
‘Over here!’ shouts ESU veteran Wayne Harvey. ‘They’re beneath this fall.’ The blast has brought down parts of the ceiling and water is flooding in from ruptured pipes that have been ripped from the walls. The electricity is out and bright beams and helmet lights cross each other as people scramble towards Harvey. A dozen hands claw at the heap of bricks, wood and breeze blocks.
‘I see someone!’ he shouts, looking down on Lu Zagalsky’s bloodied, naked and unconscious body.
The bondage table has taken most of the force of the blast, the slab of heavy oak not cracking and only the legs of the table finally buckling from the weight of the ceiling fall.
Howie Baumguard tears the table away and sees Jack’s twisted torso lying protectively across the girl.
‘Oxygen and stretchers!’ shouts Harvey, taking off a glove to feel for a pulse on Lu’s neck. He glances at his watch. ‘She’s alive, but only just. Get her covered up and outta here, quick as you can.’
‘It’s okay, buddy, we’ve got you,’ says Howie, kneeling in the wreckage next to Jack, pawing away hunks of concrete as if they were unwanted cushions on his sofa. ‘We’ll have you out of this shit in no time.’
Jack is barely conscious and still too shocked and dazed to speak.
‘Fuck, man! That’s bad!’ says Howie, suddenly spotting his friend’s injured hand. ‘Paramedic! We need someone over here, quick, fucking quick!’
‘On my way!’ replies a calm voice from somewhere off in the darkness. A beam of helmet light flashes in Howie’s eyes, blinding him for a second, then the distinctive west coast voice of Pat O’Brien is next to him. ‘I see him. Stand back and let me get in there.’
Howie steps aside and stumbles, his ankle twisting on the unseen jags of bricks and blocks.
‘He’s bleeding like fuckery,’ he says, pointing. ‘Look at his hand, his right hand.’
O’Brien aims the light down, takes one look and knows instantly what to do. He slips a rucksack off his shoulder, snaps on latex gloves and quickly blots the wound with an antiseptic pad so he can see the ‘three S’s’: the size, shape and severity of the cut.
‘Your buddy’s right, you’ve got a main bleed here, my friend,’ says O’Brien, turning Jack’s hand in his own, wondering how much blood the guy might have lost. Another quick dip in the medi-sac produces a tourniquet, sterile spray and suture kit. The gash is still pumping and is filled with grit and dust. He sluices it with the sterile spray, picks out what fragments he can with his little finger and then dives in with the needle and thread. His ESU training didn’t stretch to needlepoint, but if ever the Mother’s Circle hold a battlefield category, O’Brien’s odds-on favourite to win it.
Jack’s eyes are fixed on the girl as they lift her on to a stretcher and attach a drip to her arm. He recalls the nightmare he’d had at the Holiday Inn, when he’d dreamt of saving her and how the room had been full with medics and cops, just like this. He digs deeper into the vaults of his memory and pulls out footage from the other nightmares, images of a black room, an autopsy scene, the water pipes and the blood on the floor. Like the shrink had said, for years his subconscious hadn’t rested, it had still been puzzling over the crime scene, processing the psychological profiles, still trying to force him to forget about mundane distractions and return to the case.
‘Get me a backboard over here and some lifters!’ shouts O’Brien across the room.
‘He okay?’ asks Howie, hovering a few feet away.
‘Should be,’ says O’Brien.
‘I’m fine,’ manages Jack, his voice raw and full of dust.
O’Brien shines his light in Jack’s eyes, pulls the lids wide and checks the state of dilation. ‘Yeah, you’re going to be okay. You’ve lost a bucket of blood, but then you’re a big guy, so you’ve got some to spare.’
Jack lifts his undamaged hand and motions Howie to lean close to him. ‘Look, I know this place is all fucked up, but get them to preserve what they can. Anything. Get Forensics in here as quickly as possible. This is it; this is the place where he cut up some of his victims. I’ve seen th
is hell-hole in my nightmares; make sure we get something out of it.’ Howie looks around at the wreckage. It’s as bad as a Beirut bombsite, but he knows CSU will find something; no offender can ever get rid of everything.
O’Brien pulls Howie to one side as his colleagues arrive and slip the backboard into place and start manoeuvring Jack on to it. ‘He needs some shots. Tetanus, the full works,’ he says to the lifting team. ‘Keep an eye on the bleed, I’ve only tacked the deeper cuts across the fingers, they’ll be able to open them up in the hospital and do a proper clean.’
The lifters nod, heave Jack up to waist height on the creaking backboard and head for the door. Lu Zagalsky’s now up top, covered by blankets and an ESU coat, being rushed to a waiting helicopter on the nearby golf course. Paramedics have managed to get an intravenous hydration drip into a vein and the word among the crew is that she’s got a good chance of making it, though it’s likely to be another twenty-four hours before medics know whether she’ll be left with any permanent disabilities such as renal failure.
Jack’s fully conscious by the time they get him outside. He squints at the sunlight and slowly sucks in the fresh air. He sees Howie emerging from the blackness and waves a hand again for him to come closer. ‘Nancy, Zack, are they…’ His voice chokes on him.
Howie finishes the sentence. ‘They’re okay, they’re both absolutely fine.’
Jack swallows and feels the leaden fear sink to the pit of his stomach. ‘And BRK?’
‘Dead as the dodo. I don’t know all the details, but some saintly soul shot him into oblivion.’
‘A pity,’ says Jack.
‘Pity?’ queries Howie, frowning.
‘Yeah, a big pity. I wanted the pleasure of seeing him rot on Death Row for half a decade. Then I wanted front-row seats and a popcorn combo while I watched the fucker fry.’
Orsetta can barely stand unaided, but still manages to kick Spider’s bullet-riddled corpse before paramedics shuttle her, Nancy and Zack into a helicopter waiting to airlift them to a hospital in Siena.
Once they’re in the air, the medics clamp off Orsetta’s shoulder bleed and give Nancy pure oxygen to help her get over the effects of the Lidocaine. Within a few minutes she’s clear-headed enough to understand that Jack is alive. The Tuscan countryside rolls surreally beneath the low-flying copter and she spends the whole journey holding Zack tight to her, neither of them speaking. Her brain is still struggling to make sense of everything that has happened, but one thing she is certain of is that the biggest challenge ahead is going to be helping her son to put today’s trauma behind him. The copter banks and she feels queasy as they come into land. She is desperate to hear her husband’s voice and learn exactly what state he is in. And when she’s sure he is okay, absolutely okay, then she’s also desperate to remind him that today is Sunday the eighth of July. Their wedding anniversary.
But she knows all the teasing will have to wait. For now, she doesn’t even have a phone. It still lies in the blood-soaked darkness of the catacombs next to the dead body of America’s most feared serial killer.
EPILOGUE
Three months later
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany
For the first time in the three and a half years that they’ve been here, La Casa Strada is free of tourists and strangers. That’s not to say that all its rooms aren’t fully occupied.
The celebration party was Nancy’s idea. And everyone is agreed that it is a very fine one.
It is still warm enough to take drinks on the terrace overlooking the historic, undulating beauty of the Val D’Orcia, and several guests stand together finding peace and beauty in the views they’re blessed with. Massimo, Orsetta, Benito and Roberto have travelled up from Rome, and they stand huddled in a group, babbling Italian at machine-gun speed as waitresses serve them the finest wines that Tuscany can offer. Terry McLeod has been invited back, and this time he hasn’t needed to cheat or lie his way into the action.
Nancy glances at the one area that still gives her discomfort. As soon as the forensic teams had gone from her garden, she’d brought in Mr Capello, his team of landscapers and their equipment. She had the entrance to the catacombs sealed up with enough ready-mixed concrete to cover Manhattan, but the blocked-up catacombs still give her the shivers. Her eyes fall on her son Zack, riding his trike across the terrace, making sure he never leaves her sight. Since the incident he’s been quieter than his parents had ever known and he still insists on sleeping in their bed every night. But he’s on the mend and in bright sunshine, playing noisily, a smile returns to his face.
Her home is a crime scene no more. And she never wants to be reminded that it once was.
Nancy leaves Jack’s arm for a moment to check in the kitchen on how long dinner is going to be. Paolo is preparing a special six-course feast, ending with Jack’s favourite Zabaoine. The aroma of roasting pork drifts in the early autumnal air, sharpening the appetites of the waiting guests.
Howie has repeatedly declined the local wines, and instead has drunk everyone’s quota of Bud. He’s come alone, but lives in hope that he and Carrie might get back together in time for Christmas.
FBI Field Office Director Joe Marsh cleared his diary and crossed the Atlantic to be here. Jack awkwardly holds out his left hand as they greet each other in a corner on the sunlit terrace. His right hand is still heavily strapped and is going to need physiotherapy to repair the nerve damage caused by the knife wound.
‘Still hurting?’ asks Marsh as they get chatting.
‘Some,’ says Jack, slowly wriggling the end of his fingers. ‘But not as much as my pride.’
Marsh looks at him quizzically. ‘Meaning?’ ‘Well, to tell the truth, I’m still blaming myself for not reading BRK’s strategy. If I had done, then I would have saved us all a lot of grief.’ He looks up to make sure Nancy isn’t nearby; he’s been given strict instructions not to talk about the case. ‘BRK staged the Kearney incident because he hadn’t killed for a while and he feared that we had forgotten him. By picking the twentieth anniversary of when Sarah’s body was found, he was fairly certain we’d put it down to him, but just to make sure, he wrote my name on the package containing her skull.’ Jack pauses while Marsh takes a drink from a tray offered by a passing waitress. ‘BRK gambled that the incident would reactivate the FBI investigation and put him back centre stage. Just as he gambled that if he killed in Livorno, it would be close enough for the Italians to come and try to persuade me to stop sitting around playing at hotels and get involved in the police case.’ Jack nods towards the group of Italian detectives. ‘Orsetta was right, I was the elephant in the room, I just couldn’t see it.’
Marsh frowns. ‘You were an elephant?’
Jack smiles. ‘Yeah, I was the link between the US, Italy, Sarah Kearney, BRK and the Barbuggiani girl, only I couldn’t see it. For years people had been telling me to stop taking the BRK case personally, so I guess I had.’
Marsh agrees and takes a sip of his white wine. ‘Whereas, in hindsight, we know that this last affair was personal. BRK was intent on getting you back to New York, to kill you in his father’s old house, and at the same time to attack your unprotected family.’
‘Yeah, that’s about it. He had us all chasing around in America, while the big show was about to go down in Italy.’ Jack grimaces as he thinks how close the serial killer had come to adding to his death toll. ‘And let’s not forget that this sick fuck would have enjoyed planning all that. He would have fantasized for years about carrying out these killings, and I guess Sarah’s anniversary gave him the nudge to try to push fantasy into reality.’
‘Almost ready,’ shouts Nancy, her eyes fixed disapprovingly on Jack and Marsh.
Carlo quietly makes his way over to his boss and whispers discreetly in her ear, in the way that only the best of matred’s can manage. She nods and instructs her waitresses to top up everyone’s glasses.
All heads turn.
Down the patio, walking gingerly with the aid of crutches, comes Ludmila Zagalsky. Her face reveals the widest and happiest of smiles.
Half a step behind her walks a tall young Chechen man with a kindly smile and a steadying hand.
As the applause dies down, Joe Marsh checks that he can’t be overheard and then puts his hand on his host’s shoulder. ‘Jack, I’ll give this to you straight, I need you back on the team. We’ve got a case over in the States that we really could do with your help on.’
