The Dead Room

by Chris Mooney

  ‘You’re saying all of this was for a goddamn phone?’

  ‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’

  Pine didn’t answer. His eyes were red and puffy, his face pale.

  ‘A phone is a key piece of evidence,’ Darby said. ‘You’ve got logs of incoming and outgoing calls, maybe even an address book full of contacts. Who knows what we would’ve found? Night-vision man certainly thought it was important enough for me not to get my hands on it. He came out of his hiding spot to treat me to a stun grenade. Then he covered the woods with HC smoke canisters and gunfire to keep everyone back.’

  Pine looked at the evidence bag gripped in her hand. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘A blister pack for nicotine gum. The guy with the night vision is apparently concerned about his long-term health. You should be too. You’re looking a little unsteady on your feet.’

  ‘I haven’t run like that since… well, it’s been a long time.’

  ‘Let me help you to the ambulance.’

  ‘I can manage.’ Pine opened the gate to a carnival of blinking red, white and blue lights.

  ‘Artie, have the Feds come to see you?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About any ongoing case in Belham, surveillance, anything along those lines.’

  ‘No.’ Pine’s mouth parted and his brow crinkled with thought. ‘Wait, are you suggesting the Feds are involved with what happened here tonight?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s a possibility. The guys I saw hauling the body away? They wore suits. The guy with the night vision had a tactical vest with stun and smoke grenades, and he was carrying the kind of machine gun used by Hostage Rescue. He’s not a weekend warrior. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

  ‘That’s one hell of an assumption.’

  ‘Maybe. But he could easily have taken me down while I was back there – he had several opportunities before I reached the phone. And I think he deliberately shot at the tree above my head. He didn’t want to kill me, just wanted to pin me down until he got to the phone. You see the muddy footprints on the deck?’

  Pine nodded, dabbing his eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I talked to the patrol guys. They didn’t leave ’em.’

  ‘They’re also on the living-room carpet in front of the sliding glass door. I think someone ran across the backyard, tracked mud up the steps and then shot their way inside the house. I found two holes in the opposite wall. Who would want to shoot their way inside a house?’

  ‘The person who killed and tortured that woman.’

  ‘One person can’t subdue two people and then ransack an entire house, especially one this size. We’re talking two people at the very least – and they sure as hell wouldn’t have shot their way in. They had to find a way to get inside quietly, without being detected. They needed time to subdue the mother and son, and they needed time to search the house. Shooting your way inside isn’t quiet or subtle. It’s more in line with a rescue attempt, don’t you think?’

  Pine thought it over, rubbing his tongue along his bottom teeth.

  ‘All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t put it past the Feds,’ Darby said. ‘We should look at every possible angle.’

  ‘I’ll dig around.’

  So will I, Darby thought.

  8

  Darby used one of the clean towels she kept in the back of the crime scene vehicle to wipe the mud from her face, arms and hands. The muggy night air smelled of car exhaust and her clothes reeked of cordite.

  Everywhere she looked she saw faces lit up by revolving emergency lights. Faces behind TV cameras, faces behind cameras exploding with bright flashes. Voices spoke behind the crackle of police radios and the rapid machine-gun click of camera shutters snapping. The sounds grated on her already scorched nerves. Too close. Too much commotion, too much goddamn noise and too many people crowding the streets. She wanted to send everyone away. She wanted a cold shower and a stiff drink. She wanted some time alone to quiet her mind before heading back inside the house.

  That wasn’t going to happen. It was time to make a careful study of the house.

  Darby wiped the last of the mud from her boots. She threw the towel on the front floor of the Explorer and changed into a clean bunny suit. From the hatchback she grabbed the new Canon digital SLR camera, which created a digital negative – a raw file that couldn’t be doctored in any way. She walked across the front lawn tucking her wet hair underneath her hood. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She hoped the Wonder Twins arrived before the rain. She’d have to send them directly into the woods. She couldn’t wait.

  She put on a pair of latex gloves, stepped inside the foyer and studied the walls. No bullet holes. She checked the dining room and kitchen. No bullet holes.

  Coop looked up from his clipboard.

  ‘I’ll be upstairs,’ she said.

  He nodded and went back to making notes. He made no attempt to follow. They had worked together for so long he knew she preferred to go through a crime scene alone first so she could think. She couldn’t do that with someone looking over her shoulder, taking notes and constantly asking questions.

  Darby stood alone on the first-floor landing. Cool air rushed down on her from an overhead vent. Her damp clothes clung to her skin. She couldn’t stop sweating.

  Five doorways, each door opened, the lights turned on. Clothes had been tossed into the hall. Bathroom items were scattered across the blond oak hardwood flooring in front of her – a tube of hair gel, hairspray, tampons and pills.

  Looking into the bathroom, she saw a medicine cabinet, its doors open, the shelves wiped clean. Mouthwash, shampoo and pill bottles lined the bathtub. Each bottle had been emptied and searched. Two prescription bottles were floating inside the toilet.

  They were looking for something small. A key maybe.

  Across the hall was a small, carpeted room used as a home office. Shades drawn, desk overturned and closet shelves emptied. Every inch had been methodically searched.

  Had the house been broken into before the mother and son arrived? Then, frustrated at failing to find whatever it was they needed, had they started to torture the mother for information?

  Fingers pulled back, broken.

  Tell me where it is.

  Fingers cut off one by one.

  Tell me where it is.

  Did she tell? Did she know anything? Darby moved to the two rooms at the end of the hall.

  The first, long and airy, contained only a sewing machine and a chair. Shades covered the windows.

  The mattress in the second room had been pulled from the bed, cut with a knife and searched. No shades covering the windows; she could see members of the Photography Unit still taking pictures of the back gate. Clothes on the floor, the kind a male teenager would wear – Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and jeans, athletic shorts, sneakers and flip-flops. She found an empty red duffel bag with a shoulder strap, the kind used for travelling, lying underneath an overturned nightstand.

  Darby took pictures, then moved down the hall and stepped into the master bedroom, surprised to find it neat and orderly. A big-screen plasma TV hung on the wall across from a king-sized sleigh bed. The twin cherry-stained chests-of-drawers hadn’t been overturned or searched; the drawers were still intact. Like all the rooms with windows facing the street, the shades had been drawn.

  The only item in here that had been disturbed was a suitcase sitting on top of a leather footstool. Clothes inside, a few tossed against a leather club chair set up in the corner.

  Had the search been interrupted? Had someone been standing here when the gunshots went off?

  Darby found a small piece of blue latex caught on a zipper’s metal teeth. In her mind’s eye she saw the dead man from the woods, latex gloves covering his hands.

  Did you touch this suitcase?

  She pictured him standing here, his gloved fingers searching through each pocket when the first gunshot rang out. She saw him reaching under his suit jacket for his sidearm and then rushing for the stairs, heading dow
nstairs into the kitchen and seeing… what? What did you see?

  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?’

  ‘I’ll be thirteen next March.’

  Twelve, Darby thought. Someone had tied a twelve-year-old boy down to a kitchen chair seated across from his mother.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’
/>   ‘I strained a muscle or something, and the doctor gave me this sling,’ John said. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘You can ask me anything you want.’

  ‘The person who shot your father, did they catch him?’

  ‘Yes, they did. He’s in jail.’

  The boy looked at the gun clipped to her belt. ‘Are you a cop?’

  ‘I’m a special investigator for the Criminal Services Unit. I help victims of violent crimes. Can you tell me about the people who taped you down to the kitchen chair?’

  ‘How’d you –’ His lips clamped shut.

  ‘The skin along your wrists and your cheeks,’ Darby said. ‘Those are marks left from duct tape.’

  He turned his head to the window. He blinked several times, his eyes growing wet.

  Darby placed a hand on his knee. The boy shuddered.

  ‘I’m here to help. You can trust me.’

  He didn’t answer. From outside the room came a steady beep-beep-beep from some piece of machinery and the murmured voices of Pine and the patrolman. The talking stopped. Darby wondered if they were standing near the door, trying to listen.

  ‘But how do I know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That I can trust you,’ he said.

  ‘You asked for my father.’

  ‘And you said he’s dead.’

  ‘I’m his daughter.’

  ‘So you say.’

  Darby reached into her pocket. She removed the creased photo from her wallet and placed it on his lap.

  ‘This is a picture of my father,’ she said.

  He picked up the photo of her father dressed in his patrolman’s uniform. A gap-toothed six-year-old girl with emerald-green eyes and long auburn pigtails sat on his lap.

  ‘Is this you?’

  Darby nodded. ‘Do you recognize him?’