'Where?'
'Don't worry, he's safe.' Keats nodded towards the locker-room door. 'You should go on and get dressed. We'll take you and Mr Cooper to your hotel. You look like you could use a shower.'
Coop came into the locker room a moment later. She had dressed first, told him she'd wait for him in the hall, and when she opened the door she saw Sergey heading her way, his phone pressed against an ear and heels smacking against the polished floor.
61
Sergey's hair had been blown silly by the wind and his face had a thin veil of oily perspiration that made his olive skin look both pale and damp underneath the light. Darby saw fresh coffee stains dotting his white shirt and pinkish tie, probably from trying to guzzle a cup during the bumpy car ride here.
'Prints came back,' he said just as he reached her. 'Vic is Mark Rizzo. Boston PD had logged his prints into the system, along with those of his wife and the twin girls.'
'Standard procedure when a child disappears or is abducted,' Darby said, aware of the weary sadness seeping through her. It was now official. Mark Rizzo was dead. 'We have them on-hand for comparison purposes when we examine evidence. What about the finger? Is it…'
'Yeah. It's Sarah Casey's.'
Darby nodded, as if confirming it herself. She had suspected this, of course, when she'd seen the chipped red fingernail polish. Now it was confirmed. The severed finger that had been stuffed down the vic's throat — Mark Rizzo's throat — belonged to Jack Casey's daughter.
She recalled a part of her first conversation with Casey, back inside the Nahant PD: They won't kill me. Not yet, he had said. They're going to send me a message first. She thought, His daughter's severed finger.
Sergey spoke slowly: 'Jack had his daughter printed as part of one of those child-safety programmes they do in the schools. This was a few years ago. After what happened to my son, I convinced him to load her prints and DNA into our system in the event these people ever targeted her.'
'Did ID call you about the pictures?'
He nodded. 'I just sent someone over there to collect them.'
'I need to speak to Casey.'
'He's on the plane.'
'Where's he going?'
'Nowhere.' Sergey answered the question before she could ask it. 'It's our plane, the one we sent to Florida. It touched back down at Logan.'
'You brought your forensic people back?'
'Not all of them. I left a few at the safe house.' Sergey moved the hair out of his eyes. 'We had eight agents down there — four inside the house, the other four doing a perimeter watch, okay? The ones outside, we think were taken out from a distance. Silenced weapons, nobody heard a thing. The four we had inside the house, all headshots, and not one of them had pulled his weapon. I watched the video feed on the way over here. Way the bodies were found? It was like they had fallen asleep and then someone came up and shot them.'
'Nerve agent?'
'Don't know anything yet. If they used it, I don't know how they managed to get it inside the house. Maybe the outside A/C units. Put the gas in there.'
Coop came out of the door, shrugging into his suit jacket.
Darby said, 'I was told Casey took the USB drive?'
Sergey nodded. 'It's on the plane. We processed it for prints before we let Jack look at it.'
'What's on it?'
'A video. That's all he'd tell me. He hasn't let anyone watch it yet.'
'We need to talk about Casey,' Darby said, 'his involvement.'
Sergey waved a hand, cutting her off. 'I know where you're going with this, and, yes, I agree. He's been emotionally compromised, and he can't be the one calling the shots. You won't get any grief from him. That being said, I want to — he wants to stick close to this. You can't blame him.'
'I want to see the video.'
'You will. Later. First, we need to get you two settled.'
Sergey pointed to a pair of agents hovering a few feet away. 'These men will take you to the hotel. Shower, get something to eat, take a few hours to unwind. Don't argue, you need some time away from this so you can look at it fresh, okay?' He glanced at his watch. 'Let's make it ten. No, eleven. Give you some time to unwind before the meeting. Go and grab some sleep, decompress.'
Sergey turned to leave.
'Hold up,' Darby said. 'I talked to Jack's wife.'
He spun around on his heels, nearly tripping. 'When?'
'After you left, one of them called my cell phone and put her on the line. She told me Jack has to hold a press conference. They want him to — '
'A press conference? For what reason.'
'Do you know who Budd Dwyer was?'
Sergey shook his head, showed her his empty hands.
'Budd Dwyer,' Darby said, 'was a politician from Pennsylvania accused of receiving bribes. Day before his sentencing, he calls a press conference. Has three of his staff members up there with him, and he hands each of them an envelope — letter to his wife, one for the governor and an organ donor card — and when he's done he places the barrel of a.357 Magnum in his mouth and blows his head off.'
'They want Casey to commit suicide on national TV?' Sergey said.
'First they want him to shoot Darren Waters.'
'And if he doesn't commit murder and suicide, then what?'
'His wife said these people were going to mail her and their daughter to us,' Darby said. 'In pieces.' The Secret Service agents led them to a different SUV, this one a Ford Expedition. Keats took the wheel and his partner had a cryptic conversation over a phone hooked into a big box mounted in the console.
'I need to pick up some clothes from my condo,' Darby said.
'I'll call and check,' Keats said.
His partner made the call, hanging up less than a minute later.
'You're cleared,' he said.
'Cleared?' Darby repeated. 'Cleared of what?'
'ERT found a cyanide gas canister mounted underneath your bed. Remote-controlled device.'
'When was it set to go off?'
'Didn't have a timer on it, just a cell phone. You call and it lets out the gas. Pretty sophisticated construction too, from what we were told.'
Darby sank back in her seat, her jaw snapping shut.
Cyanide gas. Also known as Zyklon B when it was used in Hitler's gas chambers and in the gas wagons that rounded up gypsies and homosexuals and killed them on the spot. And now these people that no one knew, these people who belonged to a group that didn't have a name — they had wanted to turn her bedroom into a gas chamber. If she had gone back home instead of calling Coop's friend for that room at the Custom House…
But you didn't.
No. No, she hadn't. But it got her thinking back to what Coop had said about her lucky streak having to end at some point because that's what lucky streaks did. They always did.
Coop was leaning forward in his seat and Keats was saying, 'No need to go to a store. We've already purchased some clothing for you.'
'I hope you didn't buy me tighty-whities,' Coop said. 'I'm a boxer man.'
