away the tears from her vision, and when her eyes focused they widened for a moment and she choked out a single word:
'Daddy.'
Sarah Casey disappeared as the camera cut to a new shot, this one also in night vision but from a different angle, the lens pointed down at another person, a middle-aged and almost model-perfect woman with prominent cheekbones, long blonde hair and long legs strapped down to a crude-looking operating table. Darby saw leather straps biting into the woman's ankles and wrists and thought about the abrasions she'd found on Mark Rizzo's body and wondered if he had been strapped down to the same table.
'My wife,' Casey said in a dead voice. 'Taylor.'
His wife's shoes and socks had been removed but not her shorts or tank top. A thick leather strap had been placed across her forehead to keep her head steady. Her eyes, wide and frightened, searched vainly through the darkness.
Seconds passed and nothing happened. Darby looked at these walls and found them to be nearly identical to the ones she'd seen surrounding Sarah Casey's cell — the same dry round stones, the same blotchy colouring, the same cracks and fissures in the mortar. Only here Darby found a black shadow to the far left. Maybe part of a doorway. Darby could see only the bottom quarter of it.
Then she saw a black-robed figure step over to the table. His head wasn't visible and the woman didn't seem to hear him, and she couldn't see the man's hand as it came up from underneath the table, the fingers gripping a long, slender metal instrument shaped like a nail.
Darby felt beads of sweat pop out along her hairline and from the corner of her eye she looked at Casey. The green light glowed across his weathered face, and his eyes were steady as they watched the screen, his lips parting not to speak but to take another drink.
The robed man on the screen moved to the top of the table. Taylor Casey didn't see him. The camera zoomed in on her face and then she screamed and bucked against her restraints as the man's thumb shoved back her upper eyelid.
Darby's stomach dropped and she forced herself to watch but the screen went black. Then the woman's screams exploded over the speakers.
She wasn't aware that a phone was ringing until she saw Casey leaping out of his chair.
Darby rewound the DVD to the black spot she'd seen on the far left of the screen. She still couldn't see anything, then rewound the DVD again, this time pausing on the black spot. She stood, feeling cold and more than a little shaken, and moved closer to the TV screen.
She couldn't make out much, just the faint outlines of several shapes that could be nothing more than grainy marks left over from the DVD transfer.
'Sergey wants to talk to us,' Casey said. 'He told me you think I should be removed from this case.'
Darby opened her mouth to speak but Casey cut her off.
'I don't blame you for thinking it,' he said. 'You're right. I'm too close to this, obviously.'
'If you find one or more of these people, what are you planning on doing?'
'Arresting them, of course.'
'That's too bad.'
'Why's that?'
'Because I plan on killing them,' Darby said. 'Every last one.'
68
Darby summarized her conversation with Ronald Ross as she followed Casey into another dimly lit room, this one an area of bunk beds that reminded her of an army barracks, only these beds unfolded from the walls and came with seatbelts. She trailed behind the man as he made his way down a set of stairs. Casey got off on the next floor and opened the door to a room lit by soft and elegant lighting.
The long cabin seemed as wide and as long as a football field and had both the look and feel of downtown Boston's Harvard Club — dark wood panelling on the walls, worn brown leather club chairs and small mahogany tables. A well-worn oriental rug of deep burgundy, forest green and dark brown hues covered the entire floor. Despite being inside a plane, this space was as regal and luxurious as the Four Seasons' banquet hall; only this space was being used to host the missing and the dead.
Darby gaped at all the young faces captured in black and white and colour — the faces of children, hundreds of them, each one staring at her from the photographs tacked to the wall-mounted corkboards that filled almost both sides of the plane.
The photographs had been arranged by year. To her right, a corkboard with a label at the top that read: '1945 to 1972?' Filling almost every square inch of that space were old and fraying Polaroids and black and white pictures. Each child had a name. Each one had a question mark written next to it. These kids had been abducted from Washington. The next board, this one labelled '1973 to 1975', had photographs of abducted and missing children from Oregon. The next one was dedicated to California. She read the years printed on the label: '1976 to 1981'.
The time Casey got involved, she thought. Then, on the heels of it, came another one: Washington, then Oregon and California. The West Coast.
She swung her head around to her left, to the area near the door, and saw two tall and wide corkboards filled with colour photographs of more recent victims — 2009 and 2010.
She moved forward, slowly, taking in the photographs of more missing children from the previous years and thinking, It's like the Traveler case all over again, hundreds and hundreds of photographs of missing victims spanning decades.
But Traveler had predominately hunted women. Teenagers, women in their twenties and thirties — there had even been a handful in their late forties or early fifties. The women, she had discovered later, hadn't been carefully selected; they were victims of opportunity, snatched from the streets while walking to their home or car, and each one had been killed inside Traveler's underground dungeon of horrors.
But these bulletin boards and these pictures contained pictures of young children — both boys and girls from different races and backgrounds. What had Sergey told her? In each case Casey had discovered the abducted child was the youngest member of the family. There was a careful selection process at work here, a singular reason that united all of the hundreds of gap-toothed smiling kids staring at her in this grisly shrine.
She counted the pictures underneath the boards labelled 2009 and 2010. Three victims — two boys and one girl — abducted from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont.
In 2007 and 2008, eleven kids had been snatched from Tennessee and North and South Carolina. Before that, from 2004 to 2006, this group had focused on Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama.
Something itched in the back of her mind, something about the states, how they -
They surround each other, she thought. New Hampshire and Vermont bordered Massachusetts. In the 2007 and 2008 abductions… she could see the map of the US in her mind's eye now, the states drilled into her memory courtesy of the nuns at St Stephens School. Tennessee… the right-hand portion of the state bordered both North and South Carolina. Same with the abduction cases from 2004 to 2006: Alabama was the central state, bordering Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia. This group (another difference between the Traveler case: there was a group of people at work here, not a pair of serial killers), this group worked in a tight cluster.
She turned to Casey, saw that he wasn't standing next to her. He was behind her, his hand gripping a doorknob.
'Clusters,' she called out to him. 'They work in a tight cluster of states.'
'I know.'
'So the state that borders all the others must work as their base of operations.'
'That's the theory,' he said, motioning for her to hurry along.
She whisked past him, through the open door, and stepped into a private conference room decorated with the
