The Secret Friend

by Unknown

  ‘Can you find him?’

  ‘Karim can’t access the Shriners database. I plan on doing that myself later this evening. I suspect I’ll find Walter in the next few days. In the interim, you may want to give some significant thought as to what you asked during our initial conversation.’

  ‘I haven’t changed my mind.’

  ‘After I hang up, I want you to call Detective Bryson and tell him about the DVD you received in the mail. Tell him what you saw, and please make sure to give him the mailer.’

  ‘Your name is on it.’

  ‘Along with my fingerprints,’ Fletcher said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The police already know I’m here. I want them to think I’m acting independently.’

  ‘Won’t the FBI find out?’

  ‘By the time their task force arrives, I’ll be gone.’

  A black Mustang tore its way up the winding road.

  ‘I’ll contact you shortly,’ Fletcher said. ‘If you change your mind, you know how to reach me.’

  Darby McCormick stepped out of the car and showed her ID to the two security guards standing outside their truck. Apparently she had called ahead to let them know of her arrival.

  The young woman was, by all indications, bright and fearless; but would she keep pushing until she found the truth? It was time to find out.

  49

  Darby paced outside the room where she had found the photograph and statue. The two undercover Boston detectives who escorted her were somewhere in the dark, watching.

  She pushed the button for the backlight for her watch. It was almost nine and Malcolm Fletcher still hadn’t called.

  The ancient building groaned around her. Down the hall, wind blew through a window, the sound like a high-pitched scream.

  Darby felt the hospital’s presence as though it was a living, breathing entity like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. She didn’t believe in ghosts but she knew there were places in this world that were haunted, where men had performed unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence against each other, where the cries of the damned lingered for eternity. As she waited, she wondered about the possible secrets waiting for her inside these walls.

  Her phone rang. She grabbed it, heard silence on the other end of the line. Then she realized her phone was set to vibrate.

  The ringing was coming from inside the patient room.

  Darby had already mounted the tactical light on her SIG. She turned it on and found a cell phone lying on the floor behind the steel door.

  ‘Step out of the room and turn to your left,’ Malcolm Fletcher said. ‘At the end of the hallway, you’ll see a stairwell.’

  Darby saw the stairs. They led only one way: down.

  ‘Don’t worry about the stairs or the landings,’ Fletcher said. ‘They’re secure.’

  Darby moved the beam of her tactical light around the cold, empty rooms. ‘What happened to Jennifer Sanders?’

  ‘Ask her yourself,’ Fletcher said. ‘She’s waiting for you downstairs.’

  ‘I know you’re in here. I know you’re watching me right now.’

  Fletcher didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m alone,’ Darby said. ‘Show yourself. We’ll go downstairs together.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to endure this journey alone.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me your agenda.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to know the truth.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘Telling you the truth doesn’t carry the same impact as discovering it for yourself.’

  ‘Tell me where you found the statue.’

  ‘The historian Ian Kershaw said the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’s time for you to choose. You need to make your decision now.’

  Darby looked back to the stairs, thinking of Emma Hale and Judith Chen. She thought about Hannah Givens. She wondered if the answer to Jennifer Sanders’ disappearance was, in fact, waiting somewhere below her.

  She thought of Jennifer’s mother clutching the crucifix tucked underneath the cellophane wrapper of her cigarettes and took the first step.

  Descending into the awful dark, Darby was aware of her physical senses – the hollow feeling in her legs; the sweat collecting underneath her arms and hardhat; the way her footsteps echoed and thumped along with the rapid beating of her heart.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Nervous,’ Darby said. ‘Scared.’

  ‘Are you claustrophobic?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘You’ll see in a moment.’

  Darby reached the bottom floor. She saw the steel door marked ‘ward 8’. She hadn’t searched this area over the weekend because it was locked. Reed had said the area was too unstable and refused to let anyone through, forcing the search teams to find alternate routes.

  A padlock was lying on the floor. The lock had been sawed off.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Open the door,’ Fletcher said.

  The corridors went straight ahead, to her left and right. They were narrow and pitch black and in the thin beam of her flashlight they seemed to stretch for miles.

  ‘Your destination is straight ahead,’ Fletcher said. ‘When you reach the end of the corridor, turn left and travel halfway down the next hallway until you see a maintenance door.’

  Exposed pipes ran along the walls, near the ceiling. Almost every door was shut. The floors were frozen with ice. Darby heard a humming sound and then realized it was her blood pounding against her ear drums.

  The cold darkness pressing against her, she made her way down the main corridor, the ice slippery beneath her boots. She remembered a line from Dante, how hell wasn’t burning with fire but rather a place where Satan was frozen in a lake of ice.

  Darby turned left into another maze of corridors. On a wall of chipped white and blue paint was faded lettering with arrows pointing to the different locations inside the hospital. The frigid air smelled of dank pipes and mildew. She moved into the corridor, listening for sound and watching for movement.

  Ten minutes later, she found the door marked ‘MAINTENANCE’.

  ‘I found the door,’ Darby said.

  Malcolm Fletcher didn’t answer.

  ‘Hello?’

  No answer.

  Darby checked the phone. The signal had dropped. She was too far underground.

  She placed the phone on the floor. Leaning against the door, she pressed down on the handle with her elbow and pushed it open.

  50

  The maintenance room was empty.

  Darby tucked the phone in her pocket. The room was a closet and held nothing but rusted shelves. The middle and bottom shelves were empty, but the top shelf held rusted tools, metal pails and old bags of cement. Under the centre bottom shelf and lying against the wall was a large metal ventilation grille, the kind used to heat and cool large buildings.

  Darby got down on one knee and shined the thin beam of light against the grate. Beyond it was a vent about thirty feet long; it curved off to the left. Standing at the end of the vent was a small statue of the Virgin Mary.

  There was no way Malcolm Fletcher had crawled through the vent. The man was too big, too wide to fit through this narrow space.

  Are you claustrophobic? Fletcher had asked.

  Was Fletcher waiting for her on the other side? Or had he led her here to find something?

  Darby checked her phone. No signal. She could backtrack, locate a signal and call Bryson; or she could crawl through the vent now.

  She saw the Blessed Mother’s sorrowful expression in the beam of her flashlight. Darby removed the tactical light and holstered her SIG. She rolled her flashlight across the vent, then got down on her stomach and crawled inside.

  Malcolm Fletcher waded through the knee-deep snow on the western part of Sinclair’s campus. His Jaguar was strategically parked behind a grouping of dumpsters, safely out of view – at least
for the moment.

  His years of living on the run had taught him the importance of carrying only minimal possessions. A small suitcase held his clothes. His briefcase held the more important items – surveillance gear, listening devices, and GPS units. The false passports were practically worthless. Since 9-11, Interpol had stepped up its restrictions at airports.

  Fletcher popped the trunk. He tucked his FBI badge and supporting credentials in his suit jacket pocket. He had already procured a new sidearm, a 9mm Glock, courtesy of a Roxbury gang-banger who suddenly became very eager to unload his illegal firearm after his wrist and nose were broken. Fletcher took the other items he needed and shut the trunk.

  A laptop sat on the front seat. The padded cone of the headphone pressed against one ear, he typed on the laptop to activate the remote transmitters he had strategically placed inside the lower level. He heard the sound of a young woman’s laboured breathing and the clang of metal. Darby McCormick was crawling through the heating vent.

  So close, he thought, grinning.

  Malcolm Fletcher started the car. Cecil’s soft, haunting piano music played over the speakers as he drove away.

  Tim Bryson sat in the cramped passenger seat of a Honda Civic parked at a Mobil gas station on Route One. His partner, Cliff Watts, stood outside, smoking.

  Bryson had picked the location in case he needed to move to the hospital. If there was a problem, he could be at the front doors in less than three minutes.

  For the past hour he had talked to Bill Jordan. His men had reported that Fletcher had left a cell phone inside the patient rooms. He had called Darby on this phone, so there was no way to listen in on the conversation.

  The two undercover detectives watched Darby descend the stairs. Several minutes later they followed and found the sawed-off padlock on the floor.

  Beyond the door was a maze of corridors. The last report was that they still hadn’t found her.

  Another troubling note: the panic button with its GPS unit was no longer transmitting. Jordan had lost her signal.

  Darby was too far underground, Jordan said. He had sent her a text message asking her to check in but she still hadn’t responded. Given her location, it was possible that she hadn’t received the message. Jordan still couldn’t hail either of his men.

  Bryson’s phone rang.

  ‘Still no word from Darby,’ Jordan said.

  ‘Give her some time.’

  ‘I don’t like her wandering down there alone without knowing what’s going on. We should move some more people inside.’

  ‘And if Fletcher is watching, he’ll see them and bolt.’

  ‘Or he could be inside the basement with her,’ Jordan said. ‘We’ve already mapped out the terrain. The building plans are shit – half the passages are either sealed off with rubble or locked. The place is a goddamn maze, but we managed to find a way to the basement level. I can have them there in half an hour – Wait, hold on.’

  Bryson heard mumbling. Then Jordan was back on the line: ‘A black Jaguar just pulled out of the western part of the campus and it’s moving fast. It was parked behind some dumpsters. The driver will be at your location in under a minute.’

  ‘You just discovered this now?’

  ‘We had to do this on the fly, Tim. This place is massive – we couldn’t see that part of the campus from our location. You think it’s your boy?’

  ‘Last time he was here, he was driving a Jag. Who else could it be?’ Bryson leaned forward in his seat, thinking fast. ‘I won’t be able to block off the main road by myself. How soon can you get someone here?’

  ‘Lang’s on his way. He should be there –’

  ‘Shit, he’s here.’ Bryson watched the black Jag pull onto the highway. He banged on the window, got Watts’ attention and motioned him inside the car. ‘I’m going to follow. How many men can you spare?’

  ‘The second van’s already on its way. Call Lang, coordinate everything through him. He’s got you on his GPS so he won’t lose you.’

  Watts started the car.

  ‘Move inside the hospital,’ Bryson said to Jordan. ‘Pull Darby out of there.’

  51

  The heating vent was narrow and smelled of rust and decay. Darby crawled forward on her stomach. She reached the flashlight and rolled it ahead of her, feeling like the John McClane character Bruce Willis had played in the first Die Hard movie.

  When she reached the statue, she placed it into an evidence bag and tucked it into her coat pocket. She picked up the flashlight.

  The vent curved to the left. The second part was only ten feet long and led out to a floor covered in dust and rubble.

  Turning onto her side, Darby edged her way around the corner, boots banging against the metal, and got stuck. Panic gripped her as she imagined being trapped here. Why in the name of God am I doing this?

  Darby took in deep breaths, forcing herself to relax. She got her footing and pushed herself into the second vent, hearing her coat rip. Turning back onto her stomach, she crawled forward and pushed herself onto a floor covered with rubble.

  A hole was in the ceiling and, beyond it, walls stretching up into the darkness. Sections of the floors above her were missing. She wondered what had caused such a massive amount of damage.

  The door to the room was closed. Moving the beam of her light around the wooden shelves, most of which were still intact, she saw clear plastic vials full of water and cardboard boxes full of rosary beads and stacks of books. Darby wiped away the dust from the spines; bibles and hymn books.

  Darby gripped the door, surprised to find it opened without effort.

  She didn’t know what she had expected to find but she hadn’t expected this – an old chapel holding a dozen wooden pews covered in dust and debris. Some of the pews had been crushed from where the ceiling had caved in, and she saw a steel beam resting through what was probably a confessional.

  To her left, dozens of footprints led down an aisle. At the end, inside an alcove, was a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary sitting on a bench, her son, Jesus, sprawled across her lap. The Blessed Mother was dressed in flowing white and blue robes, her facial expression frozen in eternal sorrow as she looked down at bloody holes in her dead son’s feet and palms from the nails that had pinned him to the crucifix.

  The Virgin Mary was clean – no dust, no grime.

  Moving the beam of her light around the statue, Darby spotted rags and a bucket of water holding a sponge.

  She carefully made her way to the centre aisle, not wanting to disturb the footprints. They appeared to be recent. The marks belonged to a boot or sneaker.

  When she reached the centre aisle, Darby saw another set of footprints which were distinctly different. These shoeprints bore a strong resemblance to the one she had found on the floor inside Emma Hale’s spare bedroom.

  A woman cried out for help.

  Heart leaping high in her chest, Darby swung around and in the beam of light saw an altar covered in debris. The wooden pulpit was crushed. A large statue of Jesus hanging on the cross lay on the floor in pieces.

  There was no one here. She hadn’t imagined the sound, she was sure of it.

  Darby made her way to the aisle on the far right. No footprints. She moved down the aisle and heard a woman screaming, the sound faint, coming from the altar.

  Darby ducked under the beam. Jesus’ head, crowned in bloody thorns, lay on the floor, his sorrowful eyes staring at her as she moved up the altar steps. The woman’s painful cries grew louder.

  A broken door was behind the altar. Darby slipped inside as a man moaned, the sound mixed with the woman’s pleading, begging for the pain to stop.

  The adjoining room was not much bigger than the maintenance closet and held dusty shelves stacked with the same bibles and hymn books. The ceiling was intact.

  On the floor was a cardboard box full of small plastic statues of the Virgin Mary – the same statues she had found sewn inside Emma Hale and Judith Chen’s pockets. The same statue
Malcolm Fletcher had left inside the vent and on the windowsill of the room.

  Shoeprints stopped in front of a brick wall. At the bottom was a large, wide hole. The dust and dirt on the floor had been disturbed, as though someone had recently stood here.

  A man laughed. Darby knelt on the floor, away from the footprints, and shined the beam of her flashlight inside another room. Lying against the debris was a skeletal set of remains.

  52

  Jonathan Hale stared at his daughter’s pictures, searing Emma’s face into his mind’s eye, wanting to preserve every angle to keep her from fading.

  But she would fade. The mind, he knew, was the most cunning prison, a ruthless warden. It would take these memories of Emma and, like Susan, blur them over time while torturing him with this singular, inescapable fact: he had taken each of these moments for granted.

  His girls, the two most important people in what he had come to realize was a completely insignificant, hollow life, smiled at him. Husband and father. Now he was a widower, the father to a dead child.

  Daddy.

  Hale, drunk and numb, looked up and saw Emma sitting in the leather armchair. Her hair wasn’t wet and mangled with twigs; it was neatly combed, thick and beautiful. Her face was alive, full of colour.

  ‘Hey, baby. How are you doing?’

  Mom and I are fine now.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  We’re worried about you.

  Hale’s eyes were hot and wet. ‘I miss you so much.’

  We miss you too.

  ‘I’m sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry.’

  You didn’t do anything wrong, Dad.

  Hale buried his face in his hands and cried. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  You already know what to do.

  ‘I can’t.’

  God answered your prayers. He sent someone to help you.

  Yes, he had prayed to God for the truth, and the messenger was like a creature spawned from the Catechism books from his childhood – a man with strange black eyes holding terrible secrets, a man who had killed two federal agents and God only knew who else; a man who had given him the name and face of his daughter’s killer.