The Collective (34 page)

He hung his head. “Fuck me.”

He’d done enough sitting and waiting. It might already have cost Sean’s little sister her life. And Cait had a baby, too. He’d practically forgotten about that. Sean’s niece.

Jaw tight, knowing he might be throwing away his job, not to mention putting himself in danger, he scanned his contacts list until he found the one he needed, and then he made the call.

It rang a long time. Just when he had begun to think he would have to leave a voice mail, the ringing ceased.

“It’s late.”

“Yeah,” Herc agreed. “Let’s just hope it’s not
too
late. We need to meet.”

“This line is safe,” Terry Stanovitch said.

Herc frowned. Stupid thing for a CIA man to say.

“No line is safe.”

Detective Anne Monteforte set down the telephone in Cait McCandless’s apartment and stared at it for a second before turning away. She stuffed the handkerchief she’d used to pick it up into her pocket and once again surveyed the living room. Crime-scene techs were digging bullets out of holes in the wall. Photographers were documenting every angle, every blood spatter, every corpse’s profile. Damn, there were a lot of corpses.

Whenever doubt swam up into her head that Cait might be responsible for all, or even some, of this bloodshed, she remembered the video of the petite woman taking down A-Train. Nobody fought like that unless they had been specially trained.
The National Guard taught hand-to-hand combat, but not to the extent of Cait McCandless’s skill.

The stink of blood and cordite filled her nostrils. She thought about pulling the handkerchief out again but knew she had to just stomach it. In addition to the crime-scene guys, a pair of uniformed officers were still in the house, not to mention all the cops milling about outside. Making detective had been hard enough. Every guy who ever took the exam thought they should have gotten the job instead, that she’d only been promoted because of her gender. Jarman had always kept after her about it, reminding her that she couldn’t afford to look weak.

Monteforte swallowed hard. Her partner was dead, and she couldn’t afford to cry.

A cop popped his head into the room. “The Wadlows are gone, Detective. Sacco took them home.”

Monteforte nodded. “Good. Make sure he stays with them. They’re going to want to come back at some point, but it’s a bad idea for them to be here. This thing is going to haunt them every second until they know what’s happened to their niece and her baby.”

“You got it,” the cop said before retreating.

She walked back to where two of the crime-scene guys were zipping a young woman into a body bag. Monteforte had found a small clutch bag on the coffee table with her ID in it—Miranda Russo. Given the wineglasses, she had been a friend of Cait’s. The rest of these people, at least from what Monteforte could tell, had come to the party armed. They’d sprayed bullets all over the damn place. But Miranda Russo had just been keeping a friend company.

“What was up with the phone call?” one of the techs asked.

Monteforte glanced at him. “Why? You a detective now?”

The flinch was barely noticeable, but she saw it. She’d stung him. Tomorrow she’d care. Tomorrow, when she had to start training herself to think and speak of her partner only in the past tense.

“I don’t know. Someone looking for Cait McCandless,” she said, hoping her tone sounded less bitchy.

“Join the club, huh?”

“Yeah,” Monteforte said.

It looked like a great many people were looking for Cait McCandless.

Monteforte tried to make sense of the weekend’s events, to see how it had all come to this, and simply could not. There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing.

Glancing around, she satisfied herself that the rest was best left to the techs—at least for now—then went through the kitchen and out the back door, shoes crunching on broken glass. Lights had been set up on the back and side lawn and other officers and techs were working out there. Boston P.D. had loaned them some of their people and more were still arriving. As far as Monteforte knew, nothing like this had ever happened in Medford. Shit, it looked like the OK Corral. They’d had a major gang war spill out of Boston a few years earlier and a gunfight had gone down behind Meadow Glen Mall. Three dead, seven other gunshot wounds. That had been
West Side Story
in comparison.

And these weren’t gang members. Two of the dead Arab-looking guys had already been ID’d as wanted terrorists, thanks to a federal BOLO for the pair of them. The men and women in tailored suits had the look of Feds or professional hitters.

Mystified, grieving, and wishing more than anything that she had not left it up to Jarman to swing by and look in on Cait McCandless, she glanced at the police and emergency vehicles that lined the street. Dark sedans were pulling up, officers moving the barricade out of the way to let them pass.

Monteforte frowned and moved in that direction. Then she saw the shimmering black bag that now lay, waiting to be carted away, where they had found Detective Jarman’s corpse. Her stomach did a flip and her knees went weak and she nearly threw up right there on the grass.

Instead she went to her knees beside him, put out a hand, and whispered, almost like she thought his ghost could hear, “Help me, Bill. Where is she? Is the baby all right? What is all this?”

A minute or two passed while she knelt there with him, wanting to will him back to life, wishing so hard that he
could be there to talk it out. He would have seen something she had not; he always did.

“Detective Monteforte?” a man’s voice said. She did not look up, but he kept talking. “I’m sorry to intrude, Detective. I understand you must be grieving, and I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Monteforte steeled herself, plastered on an emotionless mask, and turned even as she rose to greet him. The man wore a blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a red tie, but he wore them like a uniform. Half an inch closer with the razor and he’d be bald. His expression was intense though his sympathy seemed real enough, his demeanor professional but his eyes kind.

He flipped open a wallet to show his FBI identification. The entourage trailing him didn’t bother.

“Supervisory Special Agent Ed Turcotte,” he said. He glanced down at the body bag, his eyes gleaming with the glow of the work lights. “Once you get us up to speed, take the time you need to mourn your partner. We’ll take it from here.”

Monteforte’s nostrils flared. She felt her lips peel back in a wide smile, but she made sure there was nothing friendly about it.

“Like hell you will.”

Blue lights swept across darkened houses and flitted like ghosts through night-blackened trees. The crackle of static and voices came in bursts from a hundred radios clipped to the belts of cops and paramedics. Emergency vehicles crowded Boston Avenue, while other dark, nondescript vehicles prowled among them. Neighbors came out onto their front stoops only to be ushered back inside by uniformed police officers.

The whole street had been locked down tight. A reporter and cameraman scuffled with a pair of state troopers after scurrying across darkened yards trying to get to the scene. The susurrus of voices and static and car doors slamming became drowned out by the helicopter rotors high above, as local stations worked to get the story.

Rachael Voss took it all in. She sipped at her coffee and let her gaze wander a bit before focusing again on Detective Monteforte. It had been a long night, but Voss didn’t really want or need the coffee. She only drank it so Monteforte wouldn’t feel alone. Nothing made a law enforcement officer squirm more than having to answer the kinds of questions they would normally have been asking someone else. Voss knew this. Coffee wouldn’t really make it better, but somehow it did make them sisters-in-arms.

“Had you been partners long?” Voss asked, breaking the silence between them.

The pain in the Monteforte’s eyes sharpened a moment, then she cleared her throat.

“Three years. Long enough. He wasn’t the kind of cop people want to see movies about, but he was the kind that people need. If someone broke into your house, stole the ring your mother left you, Bill would lose sleep over getting it back. If some girl reported her boyfriend for beating the crap out of her and then refused to testify—so many of them do—Bill would haunt them both.”

After a moment’s pause, they sipped at their coffees. Nothing Voss could say would leaven the detective’s grief, and she respected that. Sometimes when people tried to help, tried to diminish someone else’s pain or trauma, it was more about their own uneasiness at their inability to make the sufferer feel better.

“You know that Agent Turcotte was just trying to take the weight of this off you,” Voss said.

Monteforte had seemed to be relaxing in her company but now the detective stiffened. “Bullshit. He wanted me out of the way.”

Voss nodded. “That’s part of it, sure. But he’s also a halfway decent guy. Not that I’m his cheering section. We’ve butted heads plenty in the past and he’s one of the most territorial guys I’ve encountered. I’ve seen him at his best and worst, though, and I can tell you he wouldn’t know how to pretend to be sympathetic.”

Monteforte leaned more heavily against her own car, a burgundy Honda Accord, and glanced at the people crawling
all over the McCandless woman’s yard like ants at a picnic. Voss knew what Monteforte saw—federal agents replacing local police, taking over her case. Hers and Bill Jarman’s.

“You don’t answer to Turcotte, do you?” Monteforte asked.

“No.”

“So what are you doing here? Besides babysitting me.”

“For now, just observing.”

Monteforte shot her a curious look. “And then? When you’re done observing?”

Before Voss could even consider her answer, she spotted Nala Chang and Ben Coogan striding across the lawn toward them. Voss slid off the squad car whose hood she’d been sitting on, spilling a bit of her coffee, and met them on the sidewalk.

“How many?” Voss asked.

Neither of the FBI agents had to ask what she meant.

“Three men of Middle Eastern origin, two of them al-Din’s associates from the Fort Myers case. Seven others, not including Detective Jarman and the Russo woman,” Chang replied.

“Twelve,” Voss said. “Twelve people dead. Jesus.”

Coogan glanced apologetically at Monteforte and cleared his throat. “One of Detective Monteforte’s colleagues—an Officer Tagliabue—got something from a neighbor we hadn’t heard yet. In addition to Ms. McCandless and our white-haired guy, a third person fled the scene.”

Voss and Monteforte both perked up.

“Spit it out.”

“Black male, forties, bald, driving a dark green or blue Lexus, limping. Blood spatter was found on the sidewalk where the car was apparently parked. Looks like he caught a bullet, but we don’t know who shot him.”

Monteforte nodded grimly. “Cait.”

“Could’ve been the old guy who picked her up—” Chang started.

“Guy ran one of the shooters down with his car,” Coogan added, interrupting. “Obviously he wouldn’t stop at pulling a trigger.”

Monteforte pushed off of her car and approached them.
“Any idea at all who these bastards were? I mean, okay, I get it, two of them were known terrorists, right? And you’re figuring the third Arab-looking guy was on their side. I’m not going to argue profiling when two of these guys were already on your list. But who are the other guys? ’Cause if I read the scene right, it looks to me like one of them killed my partner, and they’re too well dressed to be organized crime muscle. They look more like—”

Chang thrust out a hand. “Special Agent Nala Chang, Detective. I’m part of SSA Turcotte’s squad. This is Special Agent Ben Coogan, out of the Bureau’s Boston field office. I’m not sure if you’ve met.…”

“No. We haven’t.” Monteforte narrowed her eyes in suspicion but shook Chang’s hand, and then Coogan’s.

“I know this is a difficult time for you,” Chang went on, “but I hoped you would tell us what you can about Caitlin McCandless. I spoke with several of the uniformed officers and I understand she’s become something of a celebrity in the Boston area this weekend. We’d seen some of the news reports ourselves, even before all of this.”

Voss listened, first only half paying attention, as Monteforte began to unspool the tale of Cait McCandless’s run-in with an abusive football player. But when the detective related the story of the attempted abduction of McCandless’s baby, Voss weighed every detail.

“Have you confirmed her story regarding the baby’s father?” Voss asked, when Monteforte took a breath. “Talked to anyone in her National Guard unit?”

Monteforte frowned. “No. Why would I have done that? We had no reason to think she had been anything other than truthful. Hell, why would she lie?”

Voss gestured toward the house. “You’ve got suspected terrorists dead on the lawn over there, Detective. There’s obviously more to the case than you assumed.”

Monteforte exhaled. “I get it. But that was then, and this is now. If it helps, we spoke extensively to her aunt and uncle. You’ll talk to them yourselves, I’m sure. They certainly back up Cait’s version of things. I had no reason to doubt the baby
was half-Iraqi.” Voss could see puzzle pieces clicking into place behind Monteforte’s eyes. “Your dead terrorists … you think they were here for the baby?”