The Dead Room

no helmet or smoke grenades. No hostage situation either. Play it safe. Be patient.

Plenty of room to the right side of the door. Hide there. Wait for it to swing open and then come out from behind it.

She waited.

Two minutes passed.

Four minutes.

Six.

Crouching low, she threw the door open and backed away.

No gunshots.

She turned with the shotgun, ready to fire, saw nothing but a short, narrow corridor covered in shadows.

She moved down the corridor and when it ended she again crouched low against the wall. Heard the slow, steady purr of a car engine.

She spun around the corner with the shotgun. Another corridor. Dim light at the far end. She moved silently across the floor breathing in the hot, musty air. She paused at the corner. Waited. Listened for movement underneath the steady rain drumming on the roof and what sounded like a car engine idling.

Darby turned another corner and looked down the ghost ring sights at the calm face of Boston Police Commissioner Christina Chadzynski.

62

Chadzynski sat in front of a small laptop set up on an old desk. In the light coming from the computer screen Darby could see the pair of headphones wrapped around the woman’s ears. The woman had a pleasant, almost angelic look on her face.

Darby heard a door slam shut, followed by the sound of a car driving away.

The corridor was maybe twenty feet long. She moved down it and heard a phone ring. A small square of light came to life on the desk. Chadzynski took off her headphones, letting them rest on her neck, and reached for the phone, which lay next to a shotgun. Both hands were covered with latex gloves.

‘Freeze,’ Darby said, and switched on the tactical light.

Chadzynski’s face lit up with surprise. Then it disappeared, swept back underneath her cool composure.

‘Hands on your head,’ Darby said. ‘Nice and slow.’

Chadzynski took off the headphones and placed them on the desk. She didn’t stand.

Darby stood in front of her. Chadzynski leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. Dust floated in the light coming from the computer screen.

‘Who else is here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chadzynski said. No nervous hitch in her voice. She was in complete control of her emotions. ‘I arrived only a few minutes ago. You’d have to ask Mr King. Since I don’t see him, I’m left to assume he’s dead.’

‘You assume correctly. Place your hands on your head.’

‘I have a way out of this for you.’

‘Shut up.’

‘My car is right out front. We can leave together. If you play your cards right, you’ll come out of this looking like a hero. I can help you towards that end. I recommend –’

Darby swung the butt stock and raked it across the side of the woman’s head.

The force knocked the commissioner off her chair.

Darby fitted the shotgun’s strap over her shoulder and switched to Pine’s Glock. Then she took out her phone and pressed a few of its keys.

‘There’s no one here but the two of us now,’ Chadzynski said from the floor. ‘It will be my word against yours. And I can assure you I’ll win. I suggest you take me up on my original offer. If you don’t, you’ll never hold up under the scrutiny. The evidence is already stacked against you.’

Darby placed the phone on the desk. ‘What evidence?’

‘Recognize the computer? It’s yours.’

Darby glanced quickly at the laptop, a white Apple iMac. She owned one. On the screen, she saw the audio files from Kendra Sheppard’s flash drive. ‘You broke the password.’

‘And we copied the files on to your home computer,’ Chadzynski said. ‘Paperwork has been filed to show you checked Kendra Sheppard’s flash drive out of evidence – Anti-Corruption has it in their hands right now. Since the flash drive is now gone, Internal Affairs will have no choice but to assume you destroyed it. I can, however, make it all disappear with one phone call.’

‘You’ve got all the angles figured out, don’t you? Know how to make evidence disappear, have people plant bombs inside a house and on my crime scene –’

‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life in jail? We have enough evidence to show you deliberately tampered with these cases. How you deliberately destroyed evidence to protect your father. The boxes of evidence and murder book pertaining to your father? The ones that are supposed to be in storage? They’re currently in a safe location with paperwork that leads back to you. The way the story will go down is that you came across evidence that showed your father was working for Frank Sullivan. He’ll be known as a corrupt cop – as will you. I don’t think you want that.’

‘I know about your trip to Reynolds Engineering Systems. You went there last year with Lieutenant Warner. That round we found inside the Belham house, the rounds we found in Kevin Reynolds’s basement? They came from a batch of test ammo that mysteriously disappeared on the day you and Warner were there. The company was kind enough to send me the list.’

Chadzynski scrambled up into a sitting position, eyes blinking. Her small hand with its perfectly manicured fingers and big, sparking diamonds trembled as she touched the side of her face. The butt stock had split the skin above her cheek.

The woman wobbled, stunned and confused. She placed a hand on the floor for balance.

‘Did you steal the ammo and the Glock eighteen?’ Darby asked. ‘Or did you have your pet do it?’

Chadzynski gripped the edge of the desk and slowly got to her feet.

‘I’m guessing you let Warner do it,’ Darby said. ‘You knew that kind of ammo would be next to impossible to trace because it doesn’t exist on the market. He was inside the Belham house, wasn’t he? He was there when they killed Kendra Sheppard.’

‘I can assure you he wasn’t.’

‘Then why did he kill Special Agent Alan?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Then who did?’

‘You already know.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘Russo,’ Chadzynski said.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Not the wife. The wife is still alive and, coincidentally, living in the same house. She confessed to killing Ben Masters and the Federal agent, Alan.’

Darby thought back to that moment inside the lab with Randy Scott and Mark Alves. The footprints recovered from the deck steps matched the footprints found in the woods near the binoculars – a woman’s size nine sneaker. A woman had been watching from the woods.

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s still living in Wellesley,’ Chadzynski said.

‘Where is she right now?’

Chadzynski wouldn’t answer.