The Dead Room dm-3

by Chris Mooney

  Coop nodded. ‘He told me to get my ass in the back seat. Being the good boy I am, guess what I did?’

  ‘I think you got your ass in the back seat.’

  ‘You’re pretty good at this.’

  ‘I’ve known you a long time,’ she said, keeping her voice low, hoping it would bring Coop’s down a notch and remove that jittery hitch in it. ‘I know you’re –’

  ‘You don’t know me, Darby.’ He drained the rest of his glass and placed it back on the steam trunk. ‘You think you know me because we’ve spent so much time together. But unless you’ve got an ability to read minds, see thoughts from moment to moment any time you want, you can never really know another person. That’s why I don’t see the point in getting married. You could go to bed every night with your wife, give her the ole high-hard one and your heart is swelling with love for her – I’m talking about that once-ina-lifetime love you see in movies, the kind people rarely experience in their lives. The type where it hurts to breathe, right? And for all you know your significant other is fantasizing you’re George Clooney or the pool boy or whoever while you’re on top of her. And the thing is, no matter how much you love the hell out of someone, you can never really know that person. Not in the way you know and trust yourself.’

  ‘I think I’ve earned your trust over the years.’

  ‘You have,’ Coop said. ‘You definitely have. That’s why I’m going to tell you the best part of the story, the part where Special Agent King takes me into Kevin Reynolds’s basement.’

  56

  Darby shifted in her seat. The jumpy, nervous hitch she had heard in Coop’s voice had disappeared. Now his tone was stripped of emotion, like Michelle Baxter’s, and for some reason it triggered the memory of looking through the tiny window built into the ICU hospital door and seeing the flat-line on her father’s heart monitor after her mother decided to pull him off life support.

  ‘Special Agent King pulls up in front of Reynolds’s house and tells me to get out of the car,’ Coop said. ‘I’m panicking, thinking, oh shit, this guy knows about what I saw and he’s here to bust Reynolds and Sullivan. King doesn’t ring the doorbell or knock, just opens the door, grabs me by the arm and drags me across the kitchen and into the basement. That was the first sign I had that something was seriously wrong.’

  Coop stared at his hand as he rubbed the back of Olivia’s head. ‘I’m standing in the basement with King behind me and there’s Mr Sullivan sitting in a kitchen chair cracking peanut shells in his hands and shooting me this look that says I’m in serious trouble. ’Course I already know that since he’s got this young girl tied to a chair with duct tape and there’s a big hole in the dirt floor right behind her.’

  Darby looked at the front door, wanting to run for it and get as far away as she could from whatever Coop was about to tell her.

  ‘You want to hear the rest of it, Darby?’

  No, I don’t.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said in a low voice. His eyes were too big and his mouth was quivering. ‘There’s still time to close Pandora’s box. You can walk out of here with your conscience free and clear.’

  ‘Maybe you should talk to a lawyer.’

  ‘I’m not talking to a lawyer, Darby, I’m talking to you. You want to know the rest of it or not?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘This girl, her hands, arms and clothes are caked in dirt because Mr Sullivan made her dig her grave in the basement with her bare hands. She’s got duct tape over her mouth. She’s shaking and crying, I’m crying because now the Fed’s pressing a gun against the side of my head – I can feel the muzzle digging into my skin as Mr Sullivan tells me about how I’ve got this real important decision to make. Life changing, he says. One of us, he tells us, is going into that hole.’

  Darby’s skin grew cold. Coop stared up at the ceiling, at the fast-moving shadows made by the rainwater running down the living-room windows.

  ‘Mr Sullivan turns to me and says, “Who do you think should be put in there, Coops? This young lady right here, who decided to go to the Feds and tell them about my hotel parties, or you? Word on the street is you’re thinking about going to the cops when you promised me and your old man you were going to keep your mouth shut, keep our business right here in the neighbourhood? ”

  ‘That’s when I realized my parish priest must’ve told Mr Sullivan about my confession. I didn’t tell anyone. Not my friends, not my parents or my sisters. I was afraid of it getting back to Mr Sullivan and here I was stupid enough to believe I could trust Father Humphrey with the whole seal of confession thing.’

  Darby gripped the edge of the cushion. ‘This girl in the basement, did she know Kendra Sheppard or Michelle Baxter?’

  ‘I’m sure she did, but I never got a chance to talk to her. I’m bawling, telling Mr Sullivan I didn’t tell anyone, and he just stares at me cracking peanut shells like he’s at a ball game. He keeps asking me the same question. Who do I think should go into that hole? Either I make a decision, he says, or he’s going to make the decision for me. Guess what decision I made, Darby?’

  Her stomach hitched. Bile rose in her throat. She had to swallow several times before she could speak.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Coop said, his eyes growing wet. ‘I’m ashamed to say I didn’t bother to ask. It was probably better that way, since Mr Sullivan made me put a plastic bag over her head.’

  Darby felt her midsection disappear.

  ‘Of course, being the wonderful Robin Hood figure he was, Mr Sullivan yanked off the tape from her mouth so I could talk to her. You know, in case I wanted to say sorry before I suffocated her to death.’

  Coop’s dry, hoarse voice cracked over the words.

  ‘She tried talking to me, I know she did, but I don’t remember a word because the entire time I was holding that plastic shopping bag over her head I was thinking about my mother, how it would destroy her and my sisters if I was the one who ended up in that hole. If I was the one who disappeared. That was Mr Sullivan’s specialty. I had heard stories, but now I was seeing it up close and in person.’

  Tears spilled down his cheeks and his face crumbled. ‘She didn’t even put up a fight, Darby. It was like… like she had resigned herself to it.’

  Darby couldn’t move and all the while a voice inside her kept wishing that she could hit some magic rewind button on time, go back to her office and forget about coming here.

  Coop wiped his eyes. ‘After it was over, he made me put her body in the grave. I was burying her and not really feeling anything, I was in shock. But I was thinking about how I was going to hell. Mr Sullivan, he was all happy, kept telling me how proud he was. After she was buried he stuffed a wad of cash in my pocket. Two hundred bucks. That’s how much her life was worth. He told me I was working for him now, and my new job was to keep an eye out on the streets, report back to him if I heard or saw anything in the neighbourhood.

  ‘First, though, he said, I had to pay the piper. And if I didn’t, he was going to pick up the phone and call one of his boys on the force, tell him about what had just happened here and give ’em this plastic bag with my prints all over it. And this Fed was going to back him up, say how I’d been working for Mr Sullivan and he’d seen me going into the house with this girl and heard screaming. And once I was in jail, Mr Sullivan said he was going to pay my mother a special visit.’

  His name isn’t Frank Sullivan, Coop. His real name is Ben Masters and he was a Federal agent who’d been planted inside the mob and I don’t think he died and I don’t know how he, King, Alan and the other two Federal agents placed on that boat managed to fake his death. All I know is that as every minute passes, this thing just keeps getting deeper and deeper, and I keep wondering when – or if – I’m going to reach the bottom.

  Ezekiel kept whispering to her:

  I didn’t call you to help me; I called to warn you about these so-called Federal agents. I have no idea if they’re still
working for the FBI… You know what they did to your father; you saw what happened to Kendra… Don’t think you can expose these people. You can’t trust anyone.

  Coop moved his niece so her tiny head rested underneath his chin. ‘Mr Sullivan took me upstairs to what I guessed was Kevin’s mother’s or sister’s room – the sun is shining through these real lacy curtains, and there were all these religious pictures of Jesus and Mary and the pope hanging on the walls. And there was Father Humphrey sitting on the edge of the bed with his collar off and a glass of whiskey in his hand. The door locked behind me – they conveniently locked on the outside so I couldn’t get out – and Father Humphrey kept smiling at me as he patted the spot next to him on the bed. Want to know what he did?’

  ‘No,’ she said, strangling on the word.

  ‘Good, ’cause I don’t want to rehash the gory details. And I’d hate to see you blush.’

  ‘Coop –’

  ‘I found the plastic bag, by the way. That’s why I was in such a rush to get inside the house. I found the bag inside that box full of bones.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘I threw it away.’

  Darby stared at the carpet. She felt numb all over.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you left out that little detail when speaking to the commissioner,’ he said. ‘I don’t want her to come looking for me. I already have them watching me.’

  ‘Who? Who’s watching you?’

  ‘Why, the League of Extraordinary Dead Federal Agents. They’re roaming around Charlestown.’

  ‘Do you know their names?’

  ‘No, but I know their faces. They’re probably watching the house right now.’

  ‘That woman you… met in the basement.’

  ‘I don’t know her name. And I’m proud to say that, being the stand-up guy I am, I never bothered to find out. Feel free to use your psych degree to draw your own conclusions. Just don’t share them with me.’

  ‘Ezekiel told me Kendra Sheppard was working with my father to help bring down Sullivan.’

  ‘And look how well that turned out.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘I knew Sullivan had a thing for her, kept her close. I found out about it after the prostitution bust.’

  ‘And the other remains in the basement?’

  ‘No idea. I’ve got a favour to ask.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take a long vacation until this blows over. Fake a heart attack. Buy a plane ticket and go somewhere, just do something. You need to get as far away from this as you can.’

  ‘It’s a little too late for that.’

  Coop stood up and placed his sleeping niece on the sofa.

  ‘You remember how my old man died?’

  ‘Hit-and-run,’ she said. Someone had run him over after he stumbled out of a bar in Lynn.

  ‘What I didn’t tell you was the phone call I got after we buried him. That Federal agent who’d brought me to Reynolds’s house, Special Agent King? He called me at home and told me to keep my mouth shut or I’d be burying my mother next to my old man. That’s why Jackie and I decided to stick around in Charlestown. We wanted to keep an eye on my mother. Thank God she moved to Florida at the beginning of the year.’

  ‘Kendra Sheppard taped conversations with these –’

  ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I don’t need anything else floating around my head, and whatever it is, it’s not going to make a shit’s worth of difference now anyway. You can’t take these guys down. They’re like vampires. They came here, what, twenty something years ago, and turned Charlestown into Salem’s Lot. Now they’re back, and if you think you can kill them, you’re wrong. You put one down and there’ll be another one to take his place. They’re –’

  Darby heard the screech of car tyres.

  Coop scooped up the Glock and ran for the front door.

  57

  Darby jumped to her feet, hand reaching for her sidearm. Coop, leaning against the wall near the foot of the stairs, peered through a window overlooking the front street.

  His body relaxed. He let out a long sigh.

  ‘It’s Jackie.’ He tucked the nine in the back waistband of his jeans, covered it with his tank and threw back the deadbolt.

  He ran to the sofa and picked up his niece. ‘Stay here.’

  Darby stood wobbly on her feet and watched as Coop ran barefoot through the rain pounding the streets and parked cars. He opened the back door of the car and placed the baby in the child seat.

  Jackie rolled down the window. Darby could tell that the woman had been crying.

  She looked around the street as Coop talked to his sister. Lots of parked cars. She couldn’t see anyone behind the windows.

  Coop ran back inside the house. He didn’t shut the door and Jackie didn’t drive away. The woman’s face was pale, frightened.

  ‘She wants me to go with her,’ he said, picking up his sneakers. Water dripped down his face. ‘She thinks she’s seen some guys watching her house.’

  ‘I’ll call some people, have them guard her until –’

  ‘Until what? Don’t tell me you think this is going to blow over.’

  ‘The commissioner’s head of Anti-Corruption has taken over the case, this guy named Warner. He can –’

  ‘No police. I don’t want them involved – I don’t want anyone involved. Guys like King don’t work in a vacuum, Darby. They always have help.’

  ‘Warner knows I came over here to speak to you.’

  ‘Tell him you couldn’t find me.’

  ‘He’ll come looking for you.’

  ‘Let him come looking. Better yet, buy me some time. Tell him I called you and promised to speak to you later, say, around eight. I’ll already be at the airport.’

  ‘And what if they go looking for you there?’

  ‘Then I’ll figure out a way to handle it.’

  ‘Stay here, Coop. We can figure out a way –’

  ‘I’m not staying here. I can’t. I need to do this. I can’t risk having anything happen to Jackie or my mother.’

  ‘Your mother’s in Florida.’

  ‘Not for long,’ he said. He straightened, gripped her lightly by the shoulders. ‘Please let me do this my way, okay?’

  ‘What can I do to help?’

  ‘Lock up my place before you go.’

  ‘I will as long as you keep your mobile phone on and promise to pick up when I call.’

  ‘I promise. Make sure you do the same. I’ll call you later, after I get Jackie squared away.’

  Coop stepped into the rain. She wanted to go to him but her feet felt nailed to the floor.

  He turned and rushed back to her. Grabbed her gently by the face and then leaned forward and kissed her hard on the lips. She kissed him back, just as hard, not wanting to let go.

  He let her go. He swallowed back tears.

  ‘I’d stay here if it would make a difference, I swear to God I would, Darby. But these guys are slick. They never go to jail. They always have inside help. How the hell do you think they managed to slip a bomb inside the house and on the Explorer?’

  ‘I’ve got to see this through, Coop. I can’t walk away.’

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then swallowed. ‘Take care of yourself, Darb. Be careful.’

  ‘You too.’

  Darby watched him get inside the passenger seat.

  Get out, she wanted to say. Come back.

  The Honda tore down the street and disappeared. She shut the door and turned back to the empty house, water dripping down her face and back.

  Bono had stopped singing. Her eyes roamed across the boxes, the pictures still hanging on the walls, the dishes still piled in the kitchen sink. She stood there and took in the room, wanting to preserve it in her mind, wanting to try to hold some piece of him, knowing, right then, that this was it. Coop was leaving. He wasn’t coming back.

  Darby locked the front door and checked all the downstairs windows. She took the sta
irs to the first floor, reminding herself to go into the basement and double-check the hatch doors to make sure they were locked.

  She was heading back downstairs when her phone rang.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ Randy Scott said. ‘Mark fumed the inside of the binoculars and found a print – a damn good one. It rang the cherries in the database, but here’s where it gets weird. The print belongs to another dead person, only this guy’s named Daniel Russo from Wellesley.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He died in some sort of home invasion five years ago. The database doesn’t give all the details. I have a case number but I don’t have access to our computer system – I don’t have the authorization. I know you do.’

  ‘Is Warner still there?’

  ‘No, he’s gone. They’re all gone, as a matter of fact.’

  He’s probably still with the computer guy, she thought. ‘I’m on my way back to the lab. I’ll see you in a few.’

  Darby hung up and dialled Warner’s number.

  ‘Warner.’

  ‘It’s Darby. I’ve –’

  ‘Your computer guy still hasn’t broken through the password protection. The commissioner is here, and she wants to know if you spoke to –’

  ‘Listen to me for a moment.’ Darby moved across the living room, heading for the basement door to lock down the bulkhead. ‘I’ve come across some information regarding the binoculars we found in the woods. A fingerprint. It –’

  A shadow moved in the corner of her eye. She turned to the dark hall and caught sight of the butt end of a shotgun as it slammed against the side of her head.

  58

  ‘It was one of those wrong place, wrong time kind of things,’ Father Humphrey said.

  Jamie’s eyes fluttered open. He was still lying on her bed, still holding the glass against his stomach and staring up at the ceiling. The bottle of Johnnie Walker, she noticed, was almost empty. How long have I been out?

  ‘Danny was doing this home extension for a… mutual friend, I guess you could say. This gentleman was looking to fix up a house rather quickly, turn it around and put it back on the market – he’s an absolute genius when it comes to property, this man. He’s made a fortune. I knew Danny was struggling to get his business off the ground so I gave him Danny’s name.