The Soul Collectors (28 page)

The big black Lincoln Navigator drove them to Boston in a wail of sirens and flashing lights. Coop sat next to her, silent, the two of them protected by bulletproof glass, and they watched the cars parting in front of them, trying to manoeuvre to the shoulder to give the Lincoln room to move.

She didn’t tell him about the call, not yet, wanting a moment to process it. And for some reason her thoughts kept sliding back to John Smith. She’d seen him stand up and then his face had been blown apart. Saw it again. A post-traumatic reaction? Maybe. But there was something … off about it. Something that didn’t quite gel. She closed her eyes and tried to chase it through the waves of exhaustion, but lost sight of it completely when the vehicle came to a hard stop that made her buck against her seatbelt.

Through the tinted window and through the darkness outside she could see the familiar rectangular brick building sitting on the corner of Albany Street. Keats waited until he got the all-clear signal, then he drove to the front, stopping in front of a pair of Secret Service agents. They opened the door for her, and then Keats and another agent – one of the big linebackers she’d seen at the BU Biomedical Lab – quickly ushered her and Coop through the building’s twin tinted-glass doors and into the lobby of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Medical Examiner. They stayed by their sides as Darby walked with Coop through the long, bland institutional corridors lit up by fluorescent lights.

Two other Secret Service agents had been posted outside the autopsy suite, along with a federal agent who had a big black rolling suitcase parked next to him.

An agent with a crooked nose busted from too many fights stepped forward. ‘Dr Ellis asked me to tell you to make sure you wear the Nomax gloves and the hoods with the face shield.’

Darby thanked the man, then headed into the locker room with Coop. She started pulling the gear they needed from the shelves. Keats, she saw, stood outside the door.

‘I’m going to need to pick up some clothes,’ he said, stripping out of his suit jacket. ‘The only thing I packed was my passport.’

‘I’ll take care of it. You can stay with me.’

They dressed quickly and quietly. She headed to the door and saw him smiling.

‘Feels like old times, doesn’t it?’

She nodded and kissed him once, lightly, on the lips. ‘Thanks again for coming. It means a lot. And I’m sorry I dragged you into this.’

‘If the roles were reversed, would you have done the same thing for me?’

‘In a heartbeat.’

‘Then save the Irish Catholic guilt for something else,’ Coop said, opening the door and moving across the hall to the autopsy suite.

57

Darby followed Coop into the room and found the pair of stainless-steel gurneys empty, the metal surfaces glinting underneath the bright lights. Nobody in here except for her and Coop – and the spiders.

They sat inside sealed specimen jars, on the long metal shelves that were mounted above the sinks. At least a dozen jars, each one containing a single spider. Most of them were big, some the size of a man’s fist. A handful lay still at the bottom of their jars while the others were busy exploring, fluttering their long, hairy legs against the smooth glass.

But there was one that dwarfed the others, the massive, pale, ugly, alien-looking spider/scorpion hybrid with overdeveloped fangs and legs so ridiculously long it had to be placed in a small fish tank – the same face-hugging thing that had jumped at her and that she’d seen on the face inside the closet at the Rizzo home. It scampered around like it was on fire, its legs, with their spiked, needle-like hair, furiously digging through the inches of sand at the bottom of the tank. Two bricks had been placed on the tank cover.

Coop leaned in close and said, ‘That thing looks like a vagina with legs.’

‘I’ll make sure I introduce the two of you.’

The spider/scorpion hybrid thing started smacking its hairy, oversized pincers together, making that skin-crawling, high-pitched hissing sound she’d heard in the bedroom:
Bweeeeeeeeep!

She heard footsteps clicking across the floor behind her and turned to see an older man with a black pompadour shiny with something like Brylcreem. The clothes hanging on his reedy frame – white shirt, chinos and a tie – were all wrinkled and gave him a slovenly appearance, as if he’d plucked them from the bottom of his laundry basket.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ their new companion said, gawking at the creepy thing hissing in the tank. ‘I’ve
never
come across one of these Solpugids before.’

‘Sol what?’

‘
Sol-pu-gid
. That’s their proper name, but they’re also referred to as Wind Scorpions, Sun Spiders or Camel Spiders. You can tell it’s a Solpugid by its long body with its tactile hairs – and the enormous mouth pincers. I think this lovely lady might be a new species. I’ve got my fingers crossed.’

She didn’t like the way he beamed with excitement, like a kid who had discovered a treasure trove of Christmas presents hidden underneath the tree skirt. And the loving way he spoke about this thing, in the sort of tone reserved for the discovery of a soul mate, convinced her this guy was off his rocker. No wedding ring on his finger. What a surprise.

She knew almost everyone who worked in this building and had never seen him before.

‘I’m sorry, and you are?’

‘Nigel Perkins, from the University of Massachusetts,’ he said, extending a hand. Darby shook it. ‘I specialize in arachnids. Special Agent Martynovich sent me to identify the specimens.’

Darby nodded, impressed. Sergey had not only found someone incredibly quickly but had also got the man to hop to. Apparently FBI credentials opened a lot of doors. Fast.

‘Mr Perkins, if you’re going to attend the examination, you need to get dressed.’

The man looked perplexed.

Darby pointed to her uniform and said, ‘You need to wear one of these. There’s a locker room across the hall. You’ll find everything you need in there.’

Coop, a clipboard gripped in his gloved hand, stepped up next to her as Perkins hustled out of the room.

‘Who do you think is creepier?’ Coop asked. ‘Perkins or your friend in the fish tank?’

‘I’d say they’re equal.’

The freezer door opened. Two men dressed head to toe in white coveralls, face shields and thick blue gloves wheeled a bloated corpse into the autopsy room. The person manning the bottom end of the gurney was Jack Casey. She couldn’t see his face but his size gave him away. He had wedged his body into a pair of coveralls that looked like they were about to split.

When the second man turned and started backing up the gurney next to the autopsy table, she got a good, clear look at a pair of wild and busy white Andy Rooney-type eyebrows. Dr Samuel Ellis, the new head of the medical examiner’s office. His face was a mottled red, the sure sign he’d just had a heated argument. Probably with Casey. The former profiler’s face, she saw, also looked flushed. She wondered what the argument had been about – probably turf-war bullshit, she thought. The body should have been waiting for them on the autopsy table. Ellis, bland and dour, had probably put it in the freezer and scheduled it for sometime tomorrow. The man placed a lot of importance on proper procedure, and he was
very
protective about who he let into his autopsy rooms – and, make no mistake, he considered everything inside this building as
his
.

The two men transferred the body to the autopsy table. Darby found her kit, the bright orange toolbox she kept in the bottom of her closet, sitting on a worktop, waiting. She opened it and took the items she needed from the top shelf – the forensic light, the long tweezers and a handful of glassine bags she used for trace evidence.

Perkins came back into the room, his gloved fingers fumbling with the face shield, trying to attach it to his suit. With a heavy and theatrical sigh, Ellis darted around Casey to give Perkins a hand.

Casey paid no attention. He seemed to have dissociated himself from everyone in the room. When she reached across the body and handed the bags to Coop, the former profiler’s cold blue eyes remained fixed on the body, studying it not with a sense of loss or revulsion but of opportunity.

Darby moved to the top of the table to begin her examination.

58

The body’s swollen, decimated face was a mess of purple and red contusions and gnawed-off sections of flesh, some so deep she could see bone. She doubted an ordinary spider could do this kind of damage, but that screaming thing locked in the fish tank didn’t seem like any run-of-the-mill arachnid. She was willing to bet its enormous finger-sized pincers could snap a stick in half.

She turned to Perkins, who stood anxiously by her side. He looked a little white in the face, his skin already beaded with sweat.

‘Your first time seeing a dead body, Dr Perkins?’

He nodded, kept nodding.

‘If you think you’re going to be sick, either step outside or, if you don’t think you can make it, use one of the trashcans.’

‘And,’ Coop added, ‘don’t forget to pull off your face shield. You don’t want any blowback.’

Using her tweezers, she pointed to a section of gnawed flesh on the victim’s face and said to Perkins: ‘That Camel Spider, can it cause this kind of damage?’

‘If the man was dead, then yes,’ Perkins replied. ‘They do have to eat.’

‘Do these spiders generally attack people?’

‘Camel Spiders? No. Oh no. That’s a misconception. They’re solitary, nocturnal creatures. They don’t like direct light, as you can see by the way it’s squirming and screaming inside the tank. They prefer darkness and shadows.’

‘One of them jumped at me.’

‘Well, yes, they can do that when they’re trying to hide. They’re not aggressive – or venomous. A Camel Spider could
not
have killed this man. Now this mark right here –’ Perkins leaned over the body and pointed a gloved finger at a black ulcerous blister oozing with pus. The wound covered most of the victim’s right forearm. ‘This is definitely a spider bite. Given the extensive tissue damage, the colour and size of the blister, I’d say this one is the culprit.’

From the shelf Perkins grabbed a specimen jar holding a furry brown spider with a body the size of a deck of playing cards. Its long, needle-like legs tapped against the glass. Darby noticed a violin-shaped mark on its cylindrical-shaped back.

‘This is a Brown Recluse,’ Perkins said. ‘Very poisonous. It injects haemotoxin, which produces the distinctive wound you’re seeing here on this man’s arm. The ulcerous opening on the man’s forearm occurs within twenty-four hours after the initial bite.’

Darby felt sweat gathering under her coveralls. ‘Is the bite fatal?’

‘A single bite? No.’ Perkins, thankfully, placed the jar back on the shelf. ‘The haemotoxin kills the cells and tissues at the bite and slowly spreads. That being said, the bite, if left untreated, can lead to fever and vomiting and, in rare cases, coma and death. That occurs within two or three days. Now, granted, I’m not a medical doctor, so I can’t tell you when this man died. But I can tell you he was bitten multiple times by several different venomous spiders.’

Perkins traced a gloved finger above a series of red and purple welts of various sizes that started at the victim’s shoulder and ran across his chest, legs and pubic area. One appeared to have bitten him on a testicle. It was black, swollen to the size of a grapefruit. She found several more bites on the soles of the man’s feet.

Perkins said, ‘Almost all of the spiders in these specimen jars are what you would classify as poisonous or deadly. I was surprised to find a pair of Tunnel Web Spiders – the Sydney species. Sydney as in Sydney, Australia. Their bite is
extremely
painful, and their venom carries atraxotoxin, which disrupts neurotransmitters. The victim experiences muscle twitching, severe nausea and vomiting.’

‘Are they common in the US?’

‘No, absolutely not.’

So someone smuggled them in here
, she thought, and made a note on her clipboard for Sergey to check customs logs, see if anyone was caught trying to bring venomous spiders into the country.

‘These spiders,’ Perkins said, ‘live in dry, hot climates. They wouldn’t survive long in this cold.’

‘In the house where I found them the heat had been cranked up to 95 degrees.’

‘The one at the far end is a Black House Spider. Not toxic, but the bite causes deep pain and plenty of sweating and vomiting. Not only are those babies very quick on their feet, they’re highly aggressive. If you disturb them, they go on the defensive. Dr Ellis, when you run your toxicology reports, I’m sure you’ll find several different kinds of venom inside this man’s system, as I said.’

‘Enough to kill him?’

‘Oh, yes, most definitely. And it would have been a
horrible
death. Once, while I was in El Salvador, I was bitten on the hand when trying to collect the Pink-Bellied Spider. Not only was the pain incredible, I couldn’t stop vomiting – and this after I was administered an anti-toxin. Whoever did this used these lovely creatures to inflict an unbelievable amount of pain and suffering.’

Darby switched on her forensic light and, moving closer, started examining the face for trace evidence. The eyes had been eaten, and deep inside one of the hollow sockets of rotted and frozen meat she discovered a small black spider with a body the size of a pencil eraser.

She gripped it with the tweezers, watched the legs struggling in the air, seeking purchase. Coop had a jar ready. She dropped the spider in it, and after he closed the lid he handed the jar to Perkins.

‘That’s a Black Widow,’ Perkins said. ‘There could be more in the eye sockets, the ear and nasal cavities. They’re tiny, as you can see, and they’re very good at hiding. Be very careful if you find one – if you find any spider, for that matter. Dr Ellis placed the body in the refrigeration unit or whatever you call it, and I can tell you spiders don’t care for the cold, puts them in an aggressive mood.’

‘Excuse me.’ Ellis’s voice. ‘I’d like to remind everyone here that I
strenuously
object to conducting this examination now, as we don’t have the appropriate anti-venom on hand. Mr Casey assured me that vials are being collected and will be flown here and hand-delivered, courtesy of our federal tax dollars, so if one of you should happen to get bitten, the federal government will be assuming the liability. Do I have that right, Mr Casey?’