Текст книги "The Skin Collector"

Автор книги: Jeffery Deaver

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

CHAPTER 66

The TV news was frantic but ambiguous.

A terrorist attack on the water supply in New York, improvised explosive devices …

Harriet and Matthew Stanton sat on the couch in the suite at their hotel. Their son, Joshua, was beside them in a chair, fiddling. One of those bracelets the kids wore nowadays, even boys. Colored rubber. Not normal. Gay. Matthew tried to frown his son to stillness but Joshua kept his eyes on the TV. He sipped water from a bottle; the family had brought gallons with them. For obvious reasons. He asked questions that his parents didn’t have the answers to.

‘But how could they know? Why isn’t Billy calling? Where’s the, you know, poison?’

‘Shut up.’

The simple minded commentators on the media (the liberal cabal and  the conservative in this case) were offering nonsense: ‘There are several types of bombs and some are calculated to do more damage than others .’ ‘A terrorist could have access to a number of types of explosives .’ ‘The psychology of a bomber is complicated; basically, they have a need to destroy .’ ‘As we know from the recent hurricane, water in the subways can cause serious problems .’

But that was all they could say because apparently the city wasn’t releasing any real information.

More troubling, Matthew was thinking, was what Josh was stewing over. Why hadn’t  they heard from Billy? The last word from him: After they’d reported that the city had shut down the valves, he was going to start drilling. The botulinum was ready to go. He’d have the toxin in the water supply within a half hour.

The talking heads kept droning on about bombs and floods … which would be like some teenager’s pimple, when the true attack would be a cancer. Poison to destroy the poisoned city.

The stations kept repeating the canned purée of info over and over again.

But no word of people getting sick. Nobody retching to death. No word yet about panic.

Stealing the thought from her husband, Harriet asked, ‘He couldn’t’ve gotten the poison on him, could he?’

Of course he could. In which case he’d die an unpleasant if brief death. But he’d be a martyr to the cause of the American Families First Council, strike a blow for the true values of this country and, not incidentally, solidify Matthew Stanton’s role in the underground militia movement.

‘I’m worried,’ Harriet whispered.

Joshua looked her way and played with his homosexual bracelet even more. At least he’d fathered children, Matthew reflected. A miracle, that was.

He ignored both wife and son. It seemed inconceivable that the authorities had figured out the plot. The elaborate scheme – crafted and refined over months – had been as detailed as a blueprint for a John Deere tractor. They’d executed it exactly as planned, each step at precisely the right moment. Down to the second.

And thinking of time: Now it passed like a glacier. Whenever a new anchor appeared, a new man in the street began talking into an obscene microphone, Matthew hoped for more information. But he heard the same old story, recycled. No news of thousands of people dying in horrific ways dribbling from the predatory journalists’ lips.

‘Joshua?’ he asked his son. ‘Call again.’

‘Yessir.’ The young man fumbled the phone, dropped it and looked up, apologizing with a fierce blush.

‘That’s your prepaid?’ Matthew asked sternly.

‘Yessir.’

No testy retorts from Josh, ever. Billy was respectful but he had a backbone. Joshua was a slug. Matthew waved a dismissing hand to the boy, who rose and stepped away from the noise of the TV.

‘Water Tunnel Number Three is the largest construction project in the history of the City. It was begun–’

‘Father?’ Joshua said, nodding at the phone. ‘Still no answer.’

Outside the windows, sirens made up the soundtrack of the bleak afternoon. All three in the room fell silent, as if plunged into icy water.

Then an anchor girl was speaking crisply: ‘… have an announcement from City Hall about the terrorist plot … Investigators are now reporting that it was not a bombing that the terrorists had planned. Their goal was to introduce poison into the New York City drinking water. This attempt failed, the police commissioner has said, and the water is completely safe. There’s a massive effort under way to find and arrest the individuals responsible. We’re going to our national security correspondent, Andrew Landers, to learn more about the domestic terrorism movement. Good afternoon, Andrew–’

Matthew shut the TV off. He slipped a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue. ‘Okay, that’s it. We leave. Now.’

‘What happened, Father?’ Joshua asked.

As if I know.

Harriet was demanding, ‘What happened to Billy?’

Matthew Stanton waved her quiet. ‘Your phones. All of them. Batteries out.’ He popped the back off his while Harriet and Joshua did the same. They threw them into what the Modification Commandments called a burn bag, even though you didn’t really burn it. You pitched it into a Dumpster some distance from your hotel. ‘Now. Go pack. But only the essentials.’

Harriet was saying again, ‘But Billy–?’

‘I told you to pack, woman.’ He wanted to hit her. But there was no time for corrections at this point. Besides, corrections with Harriet didn’t always go as planned. ‘Billy can take care of himself. The story didn’t say he was captured. It just said they’ve uncovered a plot. Now. Move.’

Five minutes later Matthew had filled his suitcase and was zipping up his computer bag.

Harriet was wheeling her luggage behind her into the living room. Her face was a grim mask, nearly as unsettling as the latex one Billy had showed them, the one he’d been wearing when he attacked his victims.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked, fuming.

The answer was the police, the answer was Lincoln Rhyme.

Billy had described him as the man who anticipated everything.

‘I want to find out what happened,’ she raged.

‘Later. Let’s go,’ Matthew snapped. Why was it God’s will that he ended up with a woman who spoke her mind? Would she never learn? Why had he stopped with the belt? Bad mistake.

Well, they’d escape, they’d regroup, go underground once more. Deep underground. Matthew bellowed, ‘Joshua, are you packed?’

‘Yessir.’ Matthew’s son twitched into the room. His sandy hair was askew and his face was streaked with tears.

Matthew growled, ‘You. You act like a man. Understand me?’

‘Yessir.’

Matthew reached into his computer bag, shoved aside the Bible and extracted two pistols, 9mm Smith & Wessons (he wouldn’t think of buying a foreign weapon, of course). He handed one to Josh, who seemed to relax when he took hold of it. The boy was comfortable with weapons; they seemed to offer a familiarity that soothed. At least there was that about him. Guns, of course, weren’t a woman’s way and so Matthew didn’t offer one to Harriet.

He said to his son, ‘Keep it hidden. And don’t use it unless I use mine. Look for my cue.’

‘Yessir.’

The weapons were merely a precaution. Lincoln Rhyme had stopped the plan but there was nothing that would lead back to Matthew and Harriet. The Commandments had taken care to insulate them. It was like what Billy had explained: the two zones in a tattoo parlor, hot and cold. They should never meet.

Well, they’d be in their car and out of the city in thirty minutes.

He surveyed the hotel suite. They had not brought much with them – two suitcases each. Billy and Joshua had moved all the heavier equipment and supplies ahead of time.

‘Let’s go.’

‘A prayer?’ Joshua offered.

‘No fucking time,’ Matthew snapped.

Clutching and wheeling their satchels, the three of them stepped into the corridor.

The good news about using a hotel as a safe house for an operation of this sort was that you didn’t have to sweep it down afterward, Billy’s Commandments had reported – the hotel politely and conveniently supplied a staff of folks to do that for you, disgusting illegals though they undoubtedly were.

Ironically, though, having had that thought, Matthew noted that the two women on the cleaning staff near the elevators, chatting beside their carts, were of the white race.

God bless them.

With Joshua behind them, the husband and wife walked down the corridor. ‘What we’ll do is head north,’ Matthew explained in a whisper. ‘I’ve studied the map. We’ll avoid the tunnels.’

‘Roadblocks?’

‘What would they be looking for?’ Matthew snapped, pushing the elevator button. ‘They don’t know us, don’t know anything about us.’

Though this turned out not to be the case.

As Matthew stabbed impatiently at the elevator button, which refused to illuminate, the two God Bless Them They’re White maids reached into their baskets, pulled out machine guns and pointed them at the family.

One, a pretty blonde, screamed, ‘Police! Down! Down on the floor! If we don’t see your hands at all times, we will fire.’

Josh began to cry. Harriet and Matthew exchanged glances.

‘On the ground!’

‘Now!’

Other officers were moving in from the doors. More guns, more screaming.

My Lord, they were loud.

After a moment, Matthew lay down.

Harriet, though, seemed to be debating.

What the hell is she doing? Matthew wondered. ‘Lie down, woman!’

The officers were screaming at her to do the same.

She looked at him with cold eyes.

He raged, ‘I command you to lie down!’

She was going to get shot. Four muzzles were pointed her way, four fingers were curled around triggers.

With a look of disgust, she lowered herself to the carpet, dropping her purse. Matthew lifted an eyebrow when he noted a gun fall out. He wasn’t sure what disappointed him the most – that she had been carrying a gun without his permission, or that she’d bought a Glock, an okay weapon, but one that had been made in a foreign country.

CHAPTER 67

Mention the word ‘terrorism’ and many Americans, perhaps most, think of radicalized Islamists targeting the country for its shady self indulgent values and support of Israel.

Lincoln Rhyme knew, though, that those fringe Muslims were a very small portion of the people who had ideological gripes with the United States and were willing to express those views violently. And most terrorists were white, Christian card carrying citizens.

The history of domestic terrorism is long. The Haymarket bombing occurred in Chicago in 1886. The Los Angeles Times  offices were blown up by union radicals in 1910. San Francisco was rocked by the Preparedness Day bombing, protesting proposed involvement in World War One. And a horse drawn wagon bomb outside J.P. Morgan bank killed dozens and injured hundreds in 1920. As the years went by, the political and social divisiveness that motivated these acts and others continued undiminished. In fact, the terrorist movements grew, thanks to the Internet, where like minded haters could gather and scheme in relative anonymity.

The technology of destruction improved too, allowing people like the Unabomber to terrorize schools and academics and to evade detection for years, and with relative ease. Timothy McVeigh manufactured a fertilizer bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Presently, Rhyme knew there were about two dozen active domestic terror groups being monitored by the FBI and local authorities, ranging from the Army of God (anti abortion), to Aryan Nations (white, nationalist neo Nazis), to the Phineas Priesthood (anti gay, anti interracial marriage, anti Semitic and anti taxation, among others), to small one off, disorganized cells of strident crazies called by police ‘garage bands’.

Authorities also kept a watchful eye on another category of potential terror: private militias, of which there’s at least one in every state of the union, with a total membership of more than fifty thousand.

These groups were more or less independent but were joined by common views: that the federal government is too intrusive and a threat to individual freedom, lower or no taxes, fundamentalist Christianity, an isolationist stance when it comes to foreign policy, distrust of Wall Street and globalization. While not many militias put it in their bylaws, they also embrace certain de facto policies like racism, nationalism, anti immigration, misogyny and anti Semitism, anti abortion and anti LGBT.

A particular problem with the militias is that, by definition, they’re paramilitary groups; they believe fervently in the second amendment (‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed ’). Which meant that they were usually armed to the teeth. Admittedly some militias aren’t terrorist organizations and claim their weapons are only for hunting and self defense. Others, such as Matthew Stanton’s American Families First Council, obviously felt otherwise.

Why New York City should be a particularly juicy target Rhyme had never figured out (the militias, curiously, pretty much left Washington, DC alone). Maybe it was the other trappings of the Big Apple that appealed: gays, a large non Anglo population, home of the liberal media, the headquarters of so many multinational companies. And maybe they felt the Rockettes and Annie  carried thinly veiled socialist propaganda.

If Rhyme totaled the number of perps he’d been up against over the years, he supposed he’d rank anti social personality disorder doers first (that is, psychos) and domestic terrorists second, far more numerous than foreign plotters or organized crime perps.

Like the couple he was about to speak to: Matthew and Harriet Stanton.

Rhyme was now on the tenth floor of the Stantons’ hotel, along with officers of the NYPD Emergency Service operation. ESU had cleared the building and found no other co conspirators. Rhyme and Sachs hadn’t expected any. The hotel records indicated that only the Stantons and their son were staying here. Clearly there was one other perp – the deceased Unsub 11 5 – but there was no evidence of anyone else in New York. After Rhyme and Sachs had determined that the Stantons had been involved in the terror attack they and Bo Haumann had put together a tactical op to nail them.

The hotel manager had arranged for the elevators to bypass the tenth floor and had moved his staff elsewhere while the police evacuated the floor’s legitimate guests. Then woman ESU officers donned cleaning jackets, tossed their MP 7s into laundry carts and hung around the elevator until the family showed up.

Surprise …

Not a shot fired.

The Bomb Squad had cleared the room – no booby traps; in fact not much of anything left. The terrorists had traveled light. Sachs was presently running the scene there.

Lincoln Rhyme was now scrolling through his iPad, reading reports sent to him over the past half hour from the FBI based in St Louis, the closest field office to the Southern Illinois home of the Stantons and the AFFC. The group had been on the Bureau’s and the Illinois State Police’s radar – members were suspected in attacks on gays and minorities and of other hate crimes but nothing could ever be proven. Mostly, it was felt, they were bluster.

Surprise.

The authorities in the Midwest had already arrested three others within the AFFC for possession of explosives and machine guns without federal licenses. And the search there continued.

No longer in her crime scene coveralls, Amelia Sachs joined him.

‘Anything left behind?’ He looked at the milk crate she carried. It was filled with a half dozen paper and plastic bags.

‘Not much. Lot of bottled water.’

Rhyme grunted a laugh. ‘Let’s see if our friends’ll be willing to have a tête à tête.’ A nod toward a linen room, where the Stantons were being held until the FBI showed up; the feds were taking point on this one.

They walked and wheeled into the room, where the prisoners sat handcuffed and shackled. The parents and son – their only child, Rhyme had learned – gazed back with a hesitant resolution. They were flanked by three NYPD officers.

If the Stantons were curious as to how Rhyme had figured out they were the associates of the unsub and that this was their hotel, they didn’t express any desire to learn the answer. And that answer was almost embarrassingly mundane, involving no subtle analysis of the evidence whatsoever. Unsub 11 5’s backpack, recovered beside his body near the water main pipe, contained a notebook called The Modification , a detailed list of steps in the plot to get poison into the New York drinking water. Inside that was a slip of paper with the address of the hotel. They knew the Stantons were staying there; Harriet had told Sachs this fact. So the couple and the unsub knew each other. The ‘attack’ at the hospital wasn’t that at all. The unsub had probably gone there to visit his ailing colleague, Matthew Stanton, in the hospital’s cardiac care ward.

On reflection, there were  clues they’d discovered that might have led to the conclusion that the Stantons were connected. For instance, the writing on the bag at the Belvedere holding the implants said No. 3 , suggesting that the attack on Braden Alexander was the third one. But if the assault on Harriet Stanton had been legitimate, the bag notation would have read No. 4 .

Similarly, they’d found trace evidence of Harriet’s cosmetics in places where the unsub had been. Yes, he’d grabbed her in the hospital and there might have been some transfer of the substance, but it would have been minimal. More likely he’d picked the trace up by spending time in her company. Also, Rhyme recalled the back and forth of the bootied footprints at the crime scenes; that suggested that an accomplice had brought the lights and batteries in after the tattoo killings. A check with the hotel here revealed that the Stantons had been accompanied by their son, Josh, a young, muscular man who could easily have carted the heavy equipment in after his cousin had finished his lethal inking.

But sometimes fate short circuits.

A slip of damn paper with an address – found in the perp’s possession.

‘You know your rights?’ Sachs asked.

The officer behind Harriet Stanton nodded.

His long face pale and with a matte texture, Matthew Stanton said, ‘We don’t recognize any rights. The government has no authority to grant us anything.’

‘Then,’ Rhyme countered, ‘you won’t have any problem talking to us.’ He thought this logic was impeccable. ‘The only thing we need at this point is the ID of your colleague. The one with the poison.’

Harriet’s face brightened. ‘So he got away.’

Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. ‘Got away?’ Rhyme asked.

‘No, he didn’t escape,’ Sachs told the Stantons. ‘But he didn’t have any ID on him and his fingerprints came back negative. We’re hoping you’ll cooperate and–’

Her smile vanished. ‘But then you arrested him?’

‘I thought you knew. He’s dead. He was killed by the stream of water after he drilled the hole. Because the pressure was never shut off.’

Absolute silence descended. It was shattered only a few seconds later when Harriet Stanton began to scream uncontrollably.

CHAPTER 68

‘It’s over,’ Pam Willoughby said, practically leaping into Seth McGuinn’s arms.

He was at the front door of her apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. He stumbled back, laughing. They kissed long. The sky finally was clear and the incisive sunlight, ruddy from the afternoon angle, poured onto the façade of the building. The temperature, though, was even colder than in the past few days, when sleet pelted from the gray sky.

They stepped inside the hallway and then walked into her apartment on the first floor, to the right. Even a glance at the basement stairs, at the bottom of which Seth had nearly been killed, didn’t dampen her joy.

She was buoyant. Her shoulders were no longer knots, her belly no longer tight as a spring. The ordeal was over. She could return home, at last, without worries that that terrible man who’d attacked Seth would come back. According to Lincoln Rhyme’s message, the unsub was dead and his colleagues had been arrested.

Pam had noted immediately that Amelia wasn’t the one delivering the news.

Fine with her. She was still angry and wasn’t sure she could ever wholly forgive Amelia for trying to break up her relationship with her soul mate.

In the living room Seth pulled off his jacket and they dropped onto the couch. He cradled her head and pulled her close.

‘You want anything?’ she asked. ‘Coffee? I’ve got some champagne or, I don’t know, bubbly wine. I’ve had it for a year. It’s probably still good.’

‘Sure, coffee, tea. Anything warm.’ But before she rose Seth took her by the arm and studied her carefully, looking her over with a face of both relief and concern. ‘You all right?’

‘I am. How about you ? You’re the one who was going to get a tattoo from that crazy guy.’

Seth shrugged.

She could see he was troubled. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like to be pinned down like that, knowing you were about to be killed. And killed so painfully. The news reported that the poisons the killer had used were picked because of their agonizing symptoms. At least he didn’t seem to blame her for the attack any longer. She’d been cut deeply to see him pulling away afterward. Walking away from her, not looking back … that was almost more than she could stand.

But he’d forgiven her. That was all in the past.

Pam walked into the kitchen and put water on to boil, readied the drip coffee maker.

He called, ‘And what exactly did  happen? You talk to Lincoln?’

‘Oh.’ She stepped into the doorway. Her face was grave and she brushed her static clinging hair from her face, twined it into a rope and let it fall on her back. ‘It was terrible. That guy? Who attacked you? He wasn’t a psycho at all. He’d come here to poison the water supply in New York.’

‘Shit! That  was it? I heard something about water.’

‘One of those militia groups, like my mother was in.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Lincoln thought that the killer was obsessed with the Bone Collector. But, get this, it wasn’t that at all; he was interested in the attack my mother planned here years ago. He was trying to figure out how Lincoln and Amelia would conduct an investigation. Oh, he wasn’t very happy he missed that. Lincoln, I mean. He gets pretty mad when he makes mistakes.’

The kettle whistled and Pam ducked back into the kitchen and poured the boiling water into the cone. The crisp sound was comforting. She fixed his the way he liked it – two sugars and one dash of half and half. She drank hers black.

Pam brought the cups out and sat beside him. Their knees touched.

Seth asked, ‘Who were they exactly?’

She tried to recall. ‘They were with, what was it called? The American Family Council. Something like that. Doesn’t sound like a militia.’ Pam laughed. ‘Maybe they had a public relations team work on their image.’

Seth smiled. ‘You ever hear of them when you and your mom were hiding out in Larchwood?’

‘Don’t think so. Lincoln said the people doing this were from Southern Illinois. It wasn’t far away from where my mother and I were. And I remember my mother and stepfather would meet with people from the other militias sometimes but I never paid any attention. I hated them all. Hated them so much.’ Her voice faded.

‘But the tattoo guy, the killer, he’s dead and the others got arrested.’

‘Right. A husband and wife and their son. They still don’t know who the guy in the tunnel was, who was killed. The tattoo artist.’

‘You’re still not talking to Amelia?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’

‘For now.’

‘For a long  time,’ Pam said firmly.

‘She doesn’t like me.’

‘No! That’s not it. She’s just protective. She thinks I’m this fragile doll. I don’t know. Jesus.’

Seth put down the coffee. ‘Okay if we talk about something serious?’

‘Sure, I guess.’

All right, what was this?

He laughed. ‘Relax. I’ve decided we need to hit the road sooner. Right away.’

‘Really? But I don’t have my passport yet.’

‘I was thinking we could stick to the US for a while.’

‘Oh. Well, I just thought we were going to see India. Then Paris and Prague and Hong Kong.’

‘We will. Just not now.’

She considered this but then looked at his intense brown eyes, staring into hers. And she said, ‘Okay. Sure, baby. Wherever you are, that’s where I want to be.’

‘I love you,’ Seth whispered. He kissed her hard and she kissed back, embracing.

Pam sat forward, sipped coffee. ‘Munchies? I could use something. A pizza?’

‘Sure.’

She rose and walked into the kitchen again, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pizza and set it on the counter.

And sagged against the wall, feeling her gut churn, heart rate pound.

Thinking: How the hell did Seth know about Larchwood? She desperately thought back to their time together. No, I never mentioned it. I’m sure.

You need to tell Seth everything about your time underground.

No, I don’t.

Think, think …

‘Need a hand?’ his voice called.

‘Nope.’ She made noise, ripping the pizza box open, banging the oven door down.

This can’t be happening. There’s no way he could be involved with those people.

Impossible.

But Pam’s instincts, honed by years of survival, took over. She eased to the landline phone and picked it up. Held it to her ear.

Hit nine. Then one.

‘Making a call?’

Seth stood in the doorway of the kitchen.

Keeping a smile on her face, she turned, forcing herself to move slowly. ‘You know, we were talking about Amelia. I was just thinking. Maybe I will apologize. I think that’d be a good idea, don’t you? I mean, wouldn’t you, if you were in my place?’

‘Really?’ he asked. Not smiling. ‘You were calling Amelia?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Put the phone down, Pam.’

‘I …’ Her voice faded as his steely dark eyes bored into hers. The same shade of brown. Her thumb hovered over the one button on the phone. Before she could hit it Seth stepped forward and pulled the phone from her hand, hung it up.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered.

But Seth said nothing. He took her firmly by the arm, pulling her back to the couch.