The Dead Room Read online

  ‘You always hang out in men’s locker rooms?’ Darby asked, unbuttoning her flak jacket.

  Coop didn’t look up from the magazine. ‘Your instructor, GI Joe, told me to wait here. Fortunately I found this on the floor to keep me entertained. Did you drop it?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Some sort of home invasion in your old hometown, Belham. Marshall Street. Woman and a teenage boy tied up to kitchen chairs. Woman’s dead, kid’s at the hospital.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Amy Hallcox. I don’t know the boy’s name.’

  Darby didn’t know the family but she had grown up less than two miles away from Marshall Street. She remembered the neighbourhood as an area of big old New England-style Colonial homes with ample land and wooded backdrops with trails leading to Salmon Brook Pond. Doctors and lawyers had once lived there. It was – at least when she was growing up – considered one of Belham’s safer places to live.

  Darby sat on a bench and began unlacing her boots. ‘Who’s the lead?’

  ‘Guy named Pine.’

  ‘Artie Pine?’

  ‘That’s the man in charge.’ Coop looked up and stared at her, one eye blue, the other a deep green. ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘Artie started off as a patrolman along with my father. Then he became a detective and was shipped off to… Boston, I think.’

  ‘Christ, you stink.’

  ‘I’ve been living outside in this heat for three days.’

  ‘Most women I know spend their vacation relaxing on a beach – take Samantha, for example.’

  Darby tossed her boots into the locker. ‘Who’s Samantha?’

  ‘Samantha James, Miss September.’ He held up the centrefold. ‘After spending her day rescuing puppies and kittens from kill shelters in her hometown of San Diego, she unwinds at the beach with a beer and a good book. I bet she enjoys reading the fine literary novels of Jane Austen.’

  Darby laughed. ‘How do you know about Jane Austen?’

  ‘This woman I’m dating, Cheryl? She’s really into Jane Austen.’

  ‘Every woman is.’

  ‘No, I mean she’s really into it. We do a little, ah, role-playing, and she makes me dress up in a suit and pretend to be this Darcy guy from that awful Pride and Prejudice movie.’

  Darby smiled, thinking about Colin Firth as Mr Darcy.

  ‘You’ve got that same dreamy look Cheryl gets,’ Coop said. ‘What am I missing?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. Go back to your picture book.’

  Darby stood and tossed her balled-up socks into the hamper.

  ‘Nice shot. How are things going with the yuppie investment banker?’

  ‘Tim and I are no longer seeing each other,’ she said, working the wet T-shirt over her head.

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Typical excuses. I’m really into my career. I’m not ready to commit. I’m –’

  ‘Gay.’

  ‘It’s just as well.’

  ‘That you found out he’s gay?’

  ‘He’s not gay, you dink. Tim’s a nice guy, but we really didn’t click. Check this out.’ Darby grabbed her belt buckle with one hand and removed a compact knife. ‘There’s also a razor wire, compartments to hide things and –’

  ‘I can’t wait until you get married. Your wedding list’s going to be real interesting.’

  ‘No need to buy this. I get to take the belt home with me.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Coop said, his gaze dropping back down to the magazine.

  Darby slid out of her trousers and stood in front of him dressed in a black jogging bra and a pair of training shorts. She didn’t feel self-conscious. Coop had seen her plenty of times dressed like this. They worked out together at the gym and often went running through the Public Garden after work.

  And for the past two weeks she had refused to use the women’s locker room. She’d dressed here, in this quiet corner, while men stood in the other aisles. They sat and walked naked to the showers. These alpha men had barely given her a glance or nod. Any sexual energy they’d had at the start had quickly been channelled into surviving ‘The Yellow Brick Road’ and whatever other physical tortures Haug threw at them.

  She slung a clean towel over her shoulder and carried the ball of sweaty clothes over to the hamper near the sink. She undid the rubber band holding her hair together and caught her reflection in the mirror. Her gaze shifted to a thin but hard white scar peeking out from the greasepaint above her fake cheekbone. The implant had replaced the bone shattered by Traveler’s axe.

  Darby wet the towel and began to scrub the greasepaint from her face. Coop stared at her. Their eyes locked in the mirror.

  ‘Nice six pack,’ he said.

  Darby looked at the sink, felt her throat close up. Not from the compliment but from this awkward feeling she’d been experiencing lately – the way Coop’s voice hung inside her chest at the end of the day. Sometimes she caught herself thinking about him when she was alone in her condo. Coop was the closest thing she had to family – the only thing, really, since her mother had died. Darby wondered if this newfound feeling she had for him had something to do with the fact he was being headhunted for a new job. Coop had been approached by a London forensics company that was making new technological advances with fingerprints – his area of expertise.

  ‘What’s the latest from London?’ she asked.

  ‘They increased their offer.’

  ‘Are you going to accept?’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Say you’ll miss me.’

  ‘Everyone will miss you.’

  ‘You especially, though. I’ll leave and you’ll lock yourself inside that fancy Beacon Hill condo of yours and listen to John Mayer while drowning your sorrows in Irish whiskey.’

  ‘Don’t every say that again.’

  ‘That you’re going to miss me?’

  ‘No, that I listen to John Mayer.’ Darby grabbed a clean towel from her locker. ‘I need to take a quick shower. Give me five minutes.’

  ‘Take your time, Dirty Harry.’

  4

  Darby wanted to get a handle on the crime scene before she reached Belham. She called Artie Pine half a dozen times while driving out of Boston and each time she got his voicemail. On the last call she left a message.

  WBZ, Boston’s twenty-four-hour all-news radio station, had the ‘breaking story’. The twenty-second prerecorded audio spot, courtesy of an on-scene reporter, offered up only vague details: ‘A Belham woman and her son were victims in what police are calling a botched home invasion. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and the son is listed in critical condition at a Boston hospital. Belham police won’t release the names of the victims, but a source close to the investigation called it “grisly and horrific, the worst I’ve ever seen”.’

  The story ended and switched to the local weather report. More rain and more oppressive humidity. People were running their air-conditioners day and night, putting a drain on the state’s electric grid. A spokesman told people to expect more blackouts.

  Half an hour later Darby pulled the crime scene vehicle, a navy-blue Ford Explorer, on to Marshall Street. Residents crowded the pavements around the cul-de-sac, flashing blue and white lights flickering on their faces as they stared across the roofs of three cruisers parked at the end of a driveway leading up to a massive white Colonial home with a wraparound farmer’s porch and an attached three-car garage. Only the middle door was open.

  An antique-style lantern light was mounted on each side of the home’s front door. The same lights had been installed on the garage. A wooden fence at least seven feet high separated the driveway and a basketball court from the backyard.

  The driveway had been taped off. Darby parked against the kerb, got out and lifted her kit out of the back. All the shades had been drawn on windows facing the street.

  Coop moved across the trimmed front lawn, lugging his
kit. Michael Banville from the Photography Unit, a big bear of a man who had a permanent case of five o’clock shadow, stood on the porch near the front door, dressed head to toe in a heavy-duty white Tyvek coverall.

  Darby turned on her flashlight and made her way to the edge of the lawn to examine the driveway. Bloody footprints gleamed in the bright beam of light. She placed evidence cones next to one.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Banville called from the porch. ‘The EMTs left them on the driveway, the walkway and the front steps.’

  Must be a hell of a lot of blood in there, Darby thought. She placed her kit on the grass and, watching where she stepped, made her way to the garage.

  No cars inside, just mountain bikes and a John Deere ride-on mower. Dark stains on the floor. Motor oil, she thought, until she moved the beam of her light and saw bloody footprints. A single set made by a narrow shoe – a sneaker or running shoe, judging by the shape of the tread marks.

  In the back of the garage she found blood smeared against a set of wooden steps leading up to a door.

  ‘When the queen shows up,’ a man said from behind the fence, ‘are we supposed to bow down and kiss her ass?’

  ‘When you get a good look at her you’ll want to do more than kiss her ass,’ a different male voice replied. ‘You’ll want to bury your face between her thighs and not come up for air. You ever see her up close?’

  ‘I’ve seen her on the news a few times,’ the first man said. ‘Looks like that English actress that always makes my pecker stand up at full attention and bark – the one from those Underworld movies, Christ, what’s her name?’

  ‘Kate Beckinsale.’

  A snap of fingers. ‘That’s the one,’ the first man said. ‘The McCormick broad is the spitting image of her but has that nice dark red hair. Wouldn’t mind running my fingers through that while she’s on her knees giving me a blow-e.’

  Laughter all around.

  Darby shrugged off the comments. She had learned early on that a good majority of men viewed women as nothing more than sexual objects – receptacles solely designed to satisfy a biological urge and nothing more. Pump em and dump em was the phrase she’d overheard around the station, when her male counterparts thought she was safely out of earshot.

  ‘Listen up, boyos.’

  Artie Pine’s voice sounding older, deeper and raspy – a voice ragged from too many cigars, too many late nights and booze. Hearing it brought her back to the long Saturday afternoon barbecues her father had thrown every other weekend right up until he was shot a few months shy of her thirteenth birthday. Pine, a big bowling ball with feet, would sit in a lawn chair and smoke what her father called ‘fives-and-tens’ – cheap dime-store cigars rolled into thin wrappers the size of a pencil, the odour so bitter and pungent it scared away the mosquitoes after the sun went down. Pine would sit in the chair all day, smoking and drinking and telling stories to an audience that always ended with wild eruptions of knee-slapping laughter. He’d ask kids to fetch him another beer from the cooler and always gave them a folded dollar bill.

  ‘That’s Big Red’s little girl you’re talking about,’ Pine said. ‘When she gets here, make sure you show her the proper respect.’

  Darby shut off the flashlight. She made her way back to the front and saw bright camera lights from far across the street. Belham police had corralled the small media crowd behind sawhorses.

  Coop stood on the porch talking to Banville. Darby examined the bloody footwear impressions on the blue-stone walkway. Two different sets of footprints. They matched the ones on the driveway.

  She joined them and said, ‘The footprints on the walkway and driveway are different from the single set I found inside the garage.’

  ‘I’ll get to work on it,’ Banville said, picking up his camera equipment. ‘I’ve already photographed the foyer and kitchen. Before you two head in, you’re going to need to change into one of these fabulous bunny suits.’

  ‘Awesome,’ Coop said. ‘It’s not like I’m sweating my balls off already.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Banville said. ‘The front windows facing the street? The shades and blinds were drawn when I got here. The windows facing the backyard, and the sliding glass door in the living room – none of those shades were drawn. That’s what we call a clue, Coop.’

  ‘Good to know.’

  Darby grabbed the suits from the hatchback. They slipped into them while flashbulbs popped over her shoulder. She put on a pair of clear glasses, walked back up the lawn and eased open the front door.

  The foyer looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. All the pictures had been removed from the walls and smashed. An old wooden secretarial desk lay on its side, its drawers pulled out. Papers, family pictures and shards of glass covered nearly every inch of the tiled floor. Bloody footprints stretched across the foyer and back into the kitchen. Broken plates and glasses covered the brown-granite worktops. The cupboards – at least the ones she could see – had been opened, each shelf emptied.

  Darby looked at Coop. ‘Did Pine tell you about this?’

  Coop shook his head. ‘If he had, I would’ve called the Wonder Twins and asked them to meet us here. We can’t process this by ourselves – not unless we want to be working around the clock for the next week.’

  Darby unzipped her suit, took out her phone and dialled the Operations Department in order to request the services of Mark Alves and Randy Scott. The dining room, she saw, was right off the foyer. What looked like a china cabinet and sideboard had been overturned. All the drawers had been pulled out, the contents dumped on an oriental rug covered with shattered glass.

  ‘Let’s go through the dining room,’ she said after hanging up. ‘Looks like the easiest route.’

  Carefully navigating her way through the dining room, she smelled cordite and, lurking underneath it, blood – a strong, coppery odour that always made her eyes water.

  An archway led into the kitchen; to her left was the living room, where she went first. A flat-screen TV and console had been thrown against the floor. Muddy footprints on the beige carpet led away from a sliding glass door of shattered glass. She spotted a few of the same muddy prints on a redwood-stained deck and wondered if one of the responding officers had left them.

  When she reached the archway, she turned the corner.

  Darby saw the woman’s fingers first. The ones still attached had been broken backwards and were now splayed at odd angles. Thick duct tape bound the woman’s wrists and forearms to the armrests of a kitchen chair. More tape, strips and strips of it, had pinned her ankles against the chair legs. Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear, the cut so deep it had nearly decapitated her. Her eyes were taped shut and her severed fingers – three of them – had been stuffed inside her mouth.

  ‘Jesus,’ Coop said behind her.

  Darby broke out in a cold sweat despite the A/C. Pools of blood had collected underneath the chair and stretched like fingers across the white tiles. A second chair covered with cut strips of duct tape lay sideways. One of the cut strips fluttered from the cold air rushing through a vent.

  Bloody footprints covered the floor. Two bright red trails of blood stretched across the floor and down the hall leading to the door for the garage. A black handbag lay on its side, its contents scattered across the tiles.

  Every inch of the long, wide kitchen had been ransacked. Every drawer had been pulled out. The refrigerator door hung open; the shelves had been wiped clean. The oven and dishwasher doors were open; the grills had been pulled out. The kitchen island had been unbolted and overturned. The bloody footwear impressions in the hall led back and forth. Someone had made several trips between the garage and kitchen.

  Coop swiped the back of his arm across his forehead, his face as white as a sheet.

  ‘Go outside and get some air,’ Darby said, making her way to the living room. ‘I’ll go talk to Pine.’

  Darby’s gaze swept across the bare white walls covered with an arterial spray of blood. She f
orced her attention back to the chairs and wondered if they had been arranged so that the woman faced her son.

  5

  The living room had a high cathedral ceiling and two spinning fans. Someone had taken a knife to the black leather sectional sofa and two matching armchairs. The cut fabric had been pulled aside, exposing springs and wood. Each cushion had been gutted. White cotton filling and foam covered the overturned furniture and smashed pictures in a fine blanket, like snow.

  Drops of blood on the beige carpet. Drip lines and smears on the shards of glass shaped like shark’s teeth sticking out from the bottom and sides of the door that led to the redwood-stained deck.

  Darby found the switch for the backyard lights.

  She looked again at the muddy footprints that lined the redwood-stained deck and stairs. The handrail to her right had a bloody smear running down it as though someone had gripped it.

  Darby pulled the handle of the sliding door. Locked. She found a security bar placed along the bottom railing to prevent intrusion. The only way to get through the door was to break the glass.

  There was plenty of glass on the carpet but very little on the deck. She looked at the other side of the living room. On the bare white walls, two holes in the plaster – the kind left by bullets.

  Someone had stood on the deck and fired at the door; that explained the glass blowback on the carpet. Then the shooter had moved inside the house and… what? Tied up the victims? No. Someone had reported hearing gunshots. A single shooter couldn’t have fired, moved inside, subdued two victims and tortured the woman. Too much time.

  For the next twenty minutes Darby searched the living room for a spent shell casing. She didn’t find one. She checked the kitchen floor. No luck. Had the shooter taken the time to pick up the brass?

  She removed the security bar, unlocked the sliding glass door and stepped on to the deck. The shades on the back windows hadn’t been drawn. No reason to, as there were no homes back here, just a big backyard with an in-ground pool and shed and, beyond the fence, the woods leading to Salmon Brook Pond.