The Collective (31 page)

“My issue’s tight spaces,” Agent Coogan said. “Can we get the hell out of here?”

Voss and Josh glanced at Turcotte. Unless they played their trump card, it was his case.

Turcotte nodded. “Absolutely. Nothing to see anyway.”

Coogan made a beeline for the exit, stepping onto the platform that had been pushed up against the aircraft and hurrying down the stairs. Josh and Voss followed, with Turcotte and Aria Fernandez bringing up the rear.

On the tarmac, Nala Chang strode toward them accompanied by a pair of Boston police officers. Amongst the muddle of Massport, FBI, Massachusetts State Police, and Boston P.D. personnel were Lieutenant Arsenault from SOCOM and Norris from Black Pine. They had corralled a local detective and Josh didn’t like the huddle the three men seemed to be in. Turcotte held the reins on this case; they shouldn’t be speaking out of school to anyone without the FBI’s go-ahead.

Don’t jump to conclusions
, he told himself. Easier said than done, though, considering how much Norris got under his skin. Arsenault seemed like a straight shooter, though.
Maybe they’re just talking about the dead terrorist in the baggage compartment
.

“Cozy little tête-à-tête,” Voss muttered as she joined him on the tarmac.

Josh nodded.

Turcotte headed straight for Chang. Josh and Voss held back, letting Coogan and Aria pass them.
Troubleshooter
had many meanings, but for now they were just helpful observers.

“What’ve you got?” Turcotte asked.

Chang glanced momentarily at Josh and one corner of his mouth lifted in a smile of greeting. Nala Chang seemed a formidable woman and, unlike so many he had encountered
over the years, her sense of justice did not appear to have been corrupted or compromised by her experiences in the field. That was a rare commodity.

“Preliminary report from the medical examiner’s office—” Chang began.

Coogan scoffed. “The body’s only been there a couple of hours. No way the autopsy’s done.”

“As I said, preliminary,” Chang said. “I pressed for something, and what the M.E. gave me is this: bruising shows the guy took a beating, ligature marks on the throat and neck indicate strangulation, but the neck was broken as well. Someone murdered Gharib al-Din with their bare hands.”

“You made a positive ID?” Voss asked.

“Oh, it’s al-Din. He’d altered his appearance recently. Haircut, shave … and the swelling and bruising doesn’t help with an ID. But it’s him.”

Coogan puffed up like a rooster. “I told you it was your guy. What, you think my eyes don’t work the same as yours?”

Josh opened his mouth to say something, but a glance from Turcotte silenced him.

“Agent Coogan, you made the right call, no question. But this isn’t your first case. You know how it works. If we’re going to put it into our files that our guy is permanently off the board, we need to verify that ourselves. You’d do the same.”

Coogan grunted but didn’t seem mollified. Turcotte clearly didn’t give a shit.

“All right,” Voss said. “We’ve viewed the scene. You’ve got a confirmed visual ID. Anything more from the witnesses?”

Before they had even arrived, Aria had gathered all of the airport and airline staff who had been in the area from the time the plane taxied in until the discovery of the corpse. Only about a third of the passengers had still been at baggage claim when the corpse had been discovered. They’d been interviewed by Massport and the Boston P.D., but the others had already scattered to the winds. The short flight meant most of the people on board were traveling only with carry-on luggage. For the last few hours, the Boston cops had been following up with the rest of the passengers.

“There are still three passengers unaccounted for,” Chang
reported, dark eyes grim. “But unless one of them turns out to be our killer, we’ve got nothing new. A couple of them saw a mysterious white-haired man coming out from under the plane seconds after it rolled up to the gate. Statements don’t vary much from the half-dozen employees who saw the same thing. Other than the hair and general height, weight, and race, it’s all vague.”

Josh noticed Norris edging closer to them, listening in. He wanted to tell the guy to back off, but if Turcotte wasn’t going to stop him, it wasn’t Josh’s place to speak up. Chang went on, but the substance of her report had already been delivered. The white-haired man might have been an employee, but the rest of the staff on the ground didn’t think so. It seemed likely that he’d come from the plane’s baggage compartment, which meant that unless some unknown third person had been in that compartment—highly unlikely—the white-haired guy was the prime suspect in al-Din’s murder.

Josh would have liked to pin a medal on him.

Norris’s phone must have vibrated or beeped because he unclipped it from his belt and glanced down at what was apparently a text message. A ripple of disgust passed across his features before he composed himself and started keying a reply.

“… should only be a few hours before we can pin down the last three people on the passenger manifest,” Chang was saying, “but they’re all female, so Mr. White Hair is not among them.”

“Which means he had to have been in baggage with al-Din,” Turcotte said.

“A short flight. I assume it doesn’t hit extreme altitudes, or they would have suffocated,” Voss noted, turning to Aria.

Turcotte’s cell phone tweeted, but he ignored it, waiting for an answer.

“Agent Turcotte,” Norris said, drawing their attention. “You’re going to want to answer that.”

Turcotte narrowed his gaze as the implication of this sunk in. As usual, it seemed Norris knew something they did not. Josh hated the guy, hated that Black Pine operated outside of the government’s protocols, and he knew he wasn’t alone.

“Ed?” Voss prompted.

Turcotte plucked up his phone and thumbed
TALK
, pressed it to his ear. “I’m listening.”

His expression darkened then he shot Norris another withering glance. Moments later he ended the call, but he kept the phone clutched in his hand like he held a set of brass knuckles and had every intention of using them. Turcotte studied the people gathered around him and obviously came to a decision.

“Ms. Fernandez, I think we’ve got what we need. You can take it from here.”

Aria blinked in surprise. “Of course.”

“Wait, what?” Coogan said, flushing pink. “My office called you in as a courtesy, Agent Turcotte. You don’t have the authority to turn my case over to anyone. We’ve got a dead terrorist and a murder suspect at large—”

“Coogan,” Josh snapped.

His tone brought the other agent up short. Coogan looked like he might take a swing at Josh, but then he glanced sheepishly at Aria and the Boston cops, apparently realizing how out of line he was, talking like that in front of non-Bureau personnel. Arsenault and Norris were one thing—they were part of the federal investigation, at least the way Coogan must have seen it—but locals were another thing entirely.

Maybe there was an apology coming, but Turcotte didn’t wait for it. He spun on his heel and headed for the cluster of vehicles that had been driven onto the tarmac, several of which had been arranged for them in advance. Chang fell immediately into step beside him, followed by Arsenault and Norris.

“After you,” Voss said, gesturing to Coogan.

Lips pressed together in a tight line, he hurried to catch up to Turcotte, and Josh and Voss followed. Rachael looked like she wanted to kick Coogan’s ass, and Josh couldn’t blame her. When they were out of earshot of the local and airport police, Voss finally spoke up.

“You going to tell us what’s going on, Ed?”

Turcotte didn’t slow down. He reached the cars and a young agent from Coogan’s team sat behind the wheel of
the first one. The guy started the car, engine purring. As Turcotte opened the front passenger door, he turned to look at them.

“More than a dozen people were killed a short time ago at a house in … what was it? Medford.”

Josh stared at him. “Caitlin McCandless lives in Medford. We were heading there right after this.”

Turcotte nodded, standing inside the open door. “It’s her residence.”

“Son of a bitch,” Voss muttered.

“A Medford detective is among the dead,” Turcotte went on. “One civilian, female. The rest are apparently pretty evenly divided between what looks like two teams of professional hitters, half of them obviously of Middle Eastern descent, including, we think, al-Din’s two buddies from Fort Myers.”

Josh exhaled. “Holy shit.”

Arsenault shot a dark look at Norris. “Is that what you meant when you told Agent Turcotte he would want to answer that call? You knew about this?”

Norris shrugged. “Not the details. A text I received from the home office.”

Coogan stared at him. “How does that work? You know this shit before the Bureau?”

Josh began to adjust his opinion of Coogan. Right then, he could have kissed the guy. It was the question he wanted to ask, but they were all supposed to be playing nice with Black Pine.

“Not before the FBI,” Norris replied coolly, almost smugly. “Just before Agent Turcotte.”

“Maybe there’s something you don’t know,” Turcotte said, glancing from Norris to Arsenault. “The woman the local police think was the target—this Caitlin McCandless—apparently escaped with her infant daughter in a car driven by a man with white hair.”

“What the hell is this, now?” Nala Chang muttered, her eyes lighting up.

“If we’re lucky, maybe the answer we’ve been looking for,” Voss said.

They broke, hurrying to climb into three separate vehicles—Josh
and Voss together, Chang and Coogan getting into the backseat behind Turcotte, and Arsenault riding with Norris in a silver Lexus that clearly did not come from the FBI’s motor pool—and Josh thought about Turcotte’s words.
Maybe there’s something you don’t know
.

Norris had not seemed fazed by the revelation at all.

Cait’s only comfort was the gun. When Lynch had pulled into a Burger King parking lot so she could change Leyla’s diaper, she had taken it into the backseat and never let it get more than a few inches from her reach. Lynch had watched without comment, but the tension inside the Cadillac had a language of its own. Whoever the guys back at the house had been, they’d all wanted Leyla, and for the moment the only difference between them and Lynch was that he seemed content to get the mother along with the child.

Now the Caddy shot through the tunnel underneath Boston, overhead lights flashing over the windshield, flickering in the darkness inside the car. Cait held the gun across her lap as if she were in charge, like Lynch was her hostage, and he still made no comment. She glanced over her shoulder, relieved to see a fringe of Leyla’s hair leaning out past the edge of the rear-facing car seat. Amazingly, and wonderfully, the baby had fallen back to sleep. After changing her diaper, Cait had strapped her into the car seat so conveniently supplied by Lynch, but she’d had to adjust the buckles. Along with the Cheerios and stains on the seat, that had made her feel better. This was somebody else’s car seat, not something Lynch had bought just to carry Leyla McCandless.

Cait wrinkled her nose. When she’d been holding Leyla, the baby’s diaper had already been leaking and Cait had a urine stain drying on her shirt. She wished for something
else to wear, but right now baby pee was the least of her problems.

Lynch clicked on his right turn signal and slid the Caddy over for the exit onto the Massachusetts Turnpike.

“It’s time, don’t you think?” Cait said.

“Time for what?” Lynch replied as he guided the Caddy up the ramp and out of the tunnel, heading west.

“Time for you to tell me what makes you different from the men I killed tonight.”

“At gunpoint?” Lynch kept both hands on the wheel, his own gun reloaded and stashed back in a holster he’d slid under his seat.

“I’m not pointing it at you.”

“But you will if you have to.”

Cait had no idea what to make of the guy. “Yes,” she said. “If it means protecting my daughter.”

She could see Lynch’s jaw working, like he was chewing on the gristle of long-nurtured hate. He nodded slowly, then cut his gaze toward her.

“Good. The dead sons of bitches back there on your lawn make it clear you’re willing to pull the trigger on your enemies, but you’re gonna have to do a lot of thinking about who your friends are from now on.”

“And you’re one of them?”

The engine purred. Cars swept by in the fast lane but Lynch ignored them, keeping the speedometer pinned at sixty miles per hour, neither fast enough or slow enough to draw attention. In the glow from the dashboard, his silver hair made him look almost ghostly.

“No. I’m not your friend,” he said at last. “But I could be. And I’m definitely Leyla’s friend, whether you want me to be or not.”

Cait lifted the gun from her lap, shifting to take aim. “Explain that.”

“You won’t shoot me while I’m driving. We’d all die.”

“I can take the wheel.”

Lynch risked another glance at her. He let out a long breath. “I’m honestly not trying to speak in riddles—”