The Collective (27 page)

Detective Bill Jarman pulled his dented Saturn into the traffic at Powder House Circle with the same sort of aggressive daring that he imagined must fill the hearts of the fools who ran with the bulls at Pamplona. The traffic circle seemed to breed contempt in place of caution, filled day and night with drivers who seemed to approach the task as if it were a joust. And Jarman had never been one to back down from a challenge.

The worst of the various dings and scrapes on the Saturn had been earned in battle right there in Powder House Circle, courtesy of an attractive Tufts University history professor who’d nearly torn off his rear bumper with her pretentious purple PT Cruiser. But all he cared about was that the car ran, and pieces didn’t fall off while he was driving.

Tonight, he managed to make it through the vehicular sparring in the circle without incident, heading up Boston Avenue. The university rose up to the left and he could see the peaks of its dorms and oldest academic buildings at the top of the hill. On the right were blocks of neatly kept older
homes, most of which had long since been converted into apartment housing for Tufts students.

He drove slowly and with the windows open, letting the warm night air eddy around inside the car. The air-conditioning worked, though poorly, but he preferred fresh air whenever possible. His police radio crackled, keeping up a constant low muttering, but he had music on as well, a station called “The River,” which played a little bit of everything.

Young guys, every one of them king of the world, laughed and taunted one another as they walked along the sidewalks with gorgeous girls of every conceivable shape and shade. Jarman wondered if girls had been that beautiful when he was in college, or if he had just come to see them with the eyes of age.

Like Cait McCandless. Now, there was a beautiful girl
.

He mused on this almost wistfully. His interest in Cait had nothing inappropriate about it, except that he had taught himself to put some distance between himself and the people his job brought him into contact with every day. Most of them started out as suspects, victims, or witnesses, and if they weren’t at first, they often became one of the three during the course of an investigation.

But he liked Cait McCandless. It didn’t hurt that she was so damn cute, but mostly he respected her. She had served her country and fallen in love. She had a baby she obviously adored. And she could kick the shit out of a three-hundred-pound football goon without breaking a sweat. Jarman flat-out admired her.

None of that would have been enough to get him to do a personal drive-by, however. If she called and asked him, maybe, but to volunteer? No, there was more to this detour than his admiration for the former sergeant. Jarman did not like mysteries.

Thoughts kept trying to surface in his mind, but he pushed them away because they were simply absurd. The license plate number she had given them had to be wrong or fake; it wasn’t difficult to make a fake plate, though it wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny. But a third possibility existed, which was that the plate was off the books for a reason, which meant … what? Secret government assholery?

That made no sense. Federal agents would not beat up a middle-aged woman in her driveway and try to steal a seven-month-old baby. But
someone
had attacked Jane Wadlow.

Cait McCandless and her baby might not be in any danger at all. But driving by every couple of hours for a day or two was the least they ought to be doing. It would take such little effort. No time at all, really.

Hoffmeyer obviously disagreed. He had canceled all drive-bys on Cait’s apartment. Either he thought there was no danger—and maybe he was right—or protecting people in trouble simply wasn’t as important to him as the bottom line.

Monteforte had been right to suggest he take a drive past the house. He was off duty now, and his time was his own.

So he watched the numbers going by as he drove past the houses on Boston Avenue. In the dark some of them were difficult to make out, but he slowed as he came to Cait McCandless’s block. A car drew up behind him, tailgating for a few seconds before the driver honked his horn. Jarman stuck his hand out the window and flipped the guy the bird, prompting the driver to gun his engine and swerve around him, speeding ahead toward a light that turned from yellow to red. Another night, he might have been tempted to put the bubble on top of his car and pull the guy over, put a scare into him.

Instead he pulled over to the curb across from Cait’s apartment and killed his headlights. He was in a No Parking zone, but he wouldn’t be there long. He let the engine idle as he studied the front of the house. There were two cars in the driveway and one of them belonged to Cait. The windows on the second story were dark, but the first floor was lit up, and after several minutes he saw a brunette woman move across what he thought must be the living room. He didn’t see Cait, but nothing seemed out of order.

Killing the engine, he climbed from the car. If nobody else would be checking up on her, it wouldn’t hurt to do more than just drive past the house, so he walked up and down the street a block in either direction, studying parked cars. If whoever had beaten Jane Wadlow really had been after Cait’s baby, he wanted to be certain they didn’t come back. At last,
finding nothing suspicious, he returned to his own car, climbed in, and sat watching the house.

Jarman had been parked at the curb for nearly ten minutes when his stomach started to rumble. Much as he wanted to keep an eye on Cait, he knew he couldn’t stay out there all night, and he hadn’t eaten much of anything since breakfast.

He started up the battered Saturn and put it in gear. On Boston Avenue, on the other side of the hill, was a little joint called Sparky’s that had the most extraordinary selection of chicken wing flavors he had ever encountered. Jarman stopped there at least a couple times a month and had been working up the courage to try their peanut butter and jelly wings.

The clock on the dash read 8:23. He’d hit Sparky’s, put a little food in his belly, then make another swing by to check on Cait before heading home.

Voss had just gotten off an airplane, and now she was flying again. The small charter plane carried her and Josh southward, with Turcotte and Chang along for the ride. The FBI had plenty of pull, but it had been her Homeland Security contacts who had arranged this ride on such short notice.

Short notice? More like immediately
.

If they’d driven, the trip would’ve taken four hours. Too damn long when there was a crime scene waiting. So instead they were flying, and she sat belted into her seat, wishing desperately for a margarita, a beach chair, and a beach to put it on. Ever since this case began, it had been getting uglier and uglier, and now she couldn’t help letting her mind drift back to the days when she and Josh were working ocean interdiction cases for the FBI, headquartered on the island of St. Croix.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

Voss nodded. “Sure. Some days, I just miss the Caribbean.”

Josh smiled. “I know what you mean. But let’s not forget how our last case there turned out.”

Voss shivered. “You have to remind me?”

“There are all kinds of monsters, I guess.”

She thought about Gharib al-Din and nodded grimly.

“We’ve got to catch one of these fuckers alive, or we’re never going to solve this thing,” she said. “Al-Din doesn’t do us any good as a corpse.”

“Sure he does,” Josh said, eyes narrowed. “He saves the government the trouble of putting him on trial and the taxpayers the cost of keeping him in prison. Hell, he might have saved me the trouble of shooting him.”

Voss glanced at him. She didn’t think Josh would have killed al-Din, even after the atrocities the man had committed. They both knew where the line lay and, so far, neither of them had stepped over it. Though if there had ever been a case that tempted Voss to mete out some private justice, this was it. But being tempted and committing murder were two different things.

At the front of the small charter, Turcotte and Chang were leaning into the aisle, talking quietly. Voss glanced at Josh, noticing not for the first time the way his gaze strayed toward Chang. A tiny, selfish alarm went off in her chest, but she pushed it away. No matter what she felt for Josh, they were partners first, friends second, and lovers not at all.

“She’s on your mind, huh?” Voss asked instead.

Josh glanced at her, frowning as if he were about to deny it. Then he softened.

“I like her, but it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s thanks to her, I think, that Turcotte’s been playing nice with us.”

“Yeah?” Voss asked, intrigued.

“She doesn’t think he sees how capable she is, but he does. I got the feeling she thought sending her to Bangor—away from the hub of the investigation—was kind of a blow-off.”

“Are you serious? He would never have put her in charge of something like that—a child abduction—if he didn’t have faith in her,” Voss said.

“I agree,” Josh said, with a thin smile. “I guess they just have to learn to trust each other.”

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, but she could sense there was something else on his mind … something that troubled him.

“What’s buzzing around your brain? I can see something’s eating at you.”

“It could be nothing,” he said with a small shrug, “but earlier today I got a report about an attempted child abduction just outside Boston. I called the local P.D. The witness descriptions said there were two guys, one white and one black. Non-Arabic.”

Voss felt a strange tugging in her chest. “So you figured it wasn’t related to our case.”

“Right. We’ve been assuming that because these four guys are Arabic, if there are others in their cell, then they must be, too. But we don’t
know
that.”

“We don’t even know if there’s more to their cell than the four guys we’re already aware of, and two of them are dead,” Voss reminded him.

“I know,” Josh said. “But now we’re headed to Boston. If this DOA is al-Din, then someone killed him in Boston today. And the attempted abduction, not far from Boston, was this morning. At the very least, I think it warrants a closer look.”

“Agreed,” Voss said. “These guys are ghosts. Two of them are dead, but we haven’t been able to come up with shit so far on the other two. Whatever their goals are, we’re too in the dark to make any assumptions about what is and isn’t connected.”

Voss agreed with Josh’s initial instinct, that the cases were unrelated. But if he had started second-guessing his gut, then she would gladly follow along. Instinct had kept them both alive more than once.

“We’ll check it out as soon as we’re done at the airport,” she said. “If it’s that close to Boston, we’ll be over there and back before Turcotte even knows we’re gone.”

Josh frowned, patting his pockets as if just remembering
something. “Actually, I think I’ve got the investigating detective’s cell phone number written down.”

“Even better,” Voss said. “We’ll be on the ground shortly. You can give him a call, maybe save us a trip.”

Cait set the phone down, feeling a little better for the first time all day. The horror had not receded at all, but the strange fog of surreality that had enveloped her did seem to have abated somewhat. She grieved for Sean, she worried that whoever had tried to take Leyla might return, and she fought a rising tide of panic that seemed ready to drown her at any moment—but she no longer felt alone, and for that she was grateful.

She came out of the kitchen to find Miranda standing by the bricked-up fireplace, holding the framed photograph of Nizam that usually sat on the mantel. A pang of grief touched Cait, but it was so familiar—always there, like an extra chamber in her heart—that it had become a part of her. Nizam had loved her, and she had felt a love and passion for him that astonished her. He’d somehow managed to be an ordinary man and a remarkable person, both at the same time.

Every night, when she closed her eyes, Nizam waited for her on the edges of sleep, as though he still wanted to protect her. She had always pretended to be amused by that—the taxi driver who wanted to keep the soldier safe—but it had also made her love him so hard that it hurt.