Darby straightened, water dripping down her face as she listened to a young woman crying and pleading for help.
Darby grabbed the hanging towel and quickly dried her face. A final check in the mirror and then she moved out, heading down the aisle on her far left.
The young voice screamed a single word:
'Daddy.'
Jack Casey sat in the gloom, his back to her and his attention focused on a flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall across from his chair. The film playing on the screen had been recorded by a video camera equipped with night vision; his daughter, Sarah, was bathed in a green ambient glow of light. She wore the same clothes as those in the photographs – jeans and a white tee smeared with her blood – and she stood shaking and crying behind some sort of prison cube made of Lucite or Plexiglas.
She wasn't in danger of suffocating – several holes had been drilled through the walls for air – but she was in danger of being bitten by the dozens of eight-legged creatures crawling above her.
The spiders moved and scattered across a separate rectangular cube mounted against the ceiling. The people who had captured her had installed a sliding bottom, one operated by a lever situated outside the young girl's clear cell. A scarred, grimy hand clutched the lever. With a flick of the wrist, the ceiling – well out of the girl's reach – would disappear and drop the venomous spiders down on her.
Darby's mind filled with images of Mark Rizzo's body. Saw the necrotic bite on the man's forearm caused by a Brown Recluse. She saw at least one on the screen, and another one that Perkins had identified as a Tunnel Web. Their bite is extremely painful, Dr Perkins had said. Their venom carries atraxotoxin, which disrupts neurotransmitters. The victim experiences muscle twitching, severe nausea and vomiting.
Sarah Casey pounded on the clear plastic, screaming at her father. Her right little finger was gone, severed above the knuckle. There's going to be no way to attach it, Darby thought, approaching the empty chair next to the profiler. Too much time had passed, for one, and, given the blackened stump on the swollen right hand, she suspected, with a nauseating intensity, that the wound had been crudely cauterized with something like a blowtorch to stem the bleeding. If it had, the nerves had already been damaged.
Casey had a highball glass on his lap. He wasn't drunk – not yet, his eyes were too clear when he looked up and focused on her – but he was well on his way. He had put a serious dent in the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table to his left. The bottle was more than half empty.
Casey picked up the remote and paused the video. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. She felt like telling the man how deeply sorry she felt about what was going on. No, he wouldn't want that. Stick to business.
'Did Sergey tell you about the tattoo I found on Mark Rizzo's lip?'
He nodded.
'I found another one tonight,' she said. 'On the chest of the former cop who worked on the Charlie Rizzo investigation.'
'The cop from Nahant who got shot?'
She nodded. 'John Smith.'
'Interesting.'
Clearly – understandably – Casey's attention was on the video. On his daughter. She decided not to fill him in yet on her conversation with the Harvard professor.
Darby took the empty chair. 'Sergey told me this video was on the USB drive.'
'Yep.'
'Anything else?'
'Just this. The USB drive is downstairs. The computer whiz kids are scraping through it right now, seeing if they can find some digital fingerprints or something. Another group is analysing the video frame by frame, trying different light sources to see if anything jumps out.'
He polished off the rest of his drink, the melting ice cubes rattling in the glass. He reached for the bottle, and Darby glanced at the image frozen on the screen: Sarah Casey pounding on the clear plastic, lips stretched back in a howl of pain and terror.
'How much time does she have?' he asked, pouring himself another drink.
'That's a question you're much better suited to answer, isn't it? You know these people -'
'I meant her finger. How much time until a surgeon can reattach it?'
'I'm not a surgeon.'
'But you knew enough to send my daughter's finger over to Mass General.'
'Six, maybe eight hours.'
'And if, by some miracle, my daughter was found right now?'
She didn't see a point in sparing the man the truth. 'I think the time has passed.'
'Why's that?'
'The wound's already been cauterized. The nerves need to be healthy in order to reattach the finger.'
Casey nodded, kept nodding, his face not registering any emotion.
'Dr Izzo told me the same thing,' he said after a moment. 'He called me an hour ago, said the window of opportunity is now officially shut.'
She told herself to keep her voice gentle, and she did.
'If you already know this, why did you ask me?'
'To see if you'd bullshit me,' he said.
'So this was, what, a test?'
Casey didn't answer. He swirled the booze around, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass, and looked around the cabin. 'This plane's an old Air Force One, one of two that's been refitted to combat the war on terror. State-of-the-art technology on board. Had to fight the Bureau to let us use it. These people we're after, they fall under the domestic terrorism label, don't you think?'
She nodded, sensing he had a point to make. She crossed her legs and waited.
'I look at all this technology and see the one thing it can't do: understand or figure out a person's motive,' he said. 'I'm not just talking about serial killers or this group who have my daughter and wife right now. I could be referring to anyone. Like the housewife who wakes up one day after thirty years of marriage and just decides to pack up and leave her husband and kids. You can never know what truly goes on in somebody's mind. You learn that pretty fast when you work in the Monster Factory. That's what they called Behavioral Sciences in the early days.'
Casey took a long sip. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She watched his face in the dim green glow of light coming from the TV screen.
'Before I went to work there, I was a cop in Michigan. This one case, this guy calls 911 and says he murdered his family. My partner and I get the call, and when we get there the front door is cracked open and the second I step in I see the blood covering the walls and the floor. We go inside with our guns raised and find this guy sitting at his dining-room table eating dinner and reading the newspaper. He greeted us – thanked us for coming, and then tells us his family is in the basement.
'He killed them one by one, starting with his wife in the morning. Picks up the youngest from nursery school, brings him inside and shoots him in the back of the head. Guy makes himself lunch and waits for the next one, the ten-year-old. He gets shot the moment he walks in the door, doesn't even get a chance to take off his jacket. The thirteen-year-old has soccer, so the father goes and picks him up after practice, brings him home and shoots his son just as he's going up the stairs. Guy didn't tell us this. I found out after the fact, after we studied the splatter patterns and drag marks on the carpet.
'I went into the basement myself. They're all sitting there, the wife and her kids, they're sitting on a couch watching a Disney movie in the VCR. Bambi. Guy said it was the family's favourite movie. He went down every hour and a half to rewind the movie and play it again.'
'He tell you why he killed his family?'
'Nope. Guy died on death row without telling a soul.'
She sensed he had more to say, and waited.
A nearby plane took off, its engines vibrating through the cabin and her seat.
Casey said, 'The first guy I caught, Tommy Barber? He broke into houses, bound, raped and tortured women and their families. Recorded everything too. Guy had quite the little home-movie collection. Tommy's a quadriplegic now, serving a life sentence in Angola. I shot him in the spine.'
No sympathy in his tone, just matter-of-fact, as if he were narrating some instructional video.
'Charlie Slavick,' he said, looking up at her, his gaze level and cool, 'put boys inside dog crates and tortured them. I beat him to death with a hammer.'
'And Hamilton?'
'He's alive.'
'I know,' she said. 'Did you plant evidence?'
'I did.'
'And then what?'
'Then I went to work on how to kill him. And the only thing I regret is that I couldn't do it.'
'Maybe you'll have a second chance when he's released,' she said.
Casey regarded her for a moment, wondering if she was being serious or glib.
'I'm assuming Sergey told you I talked with your wife,' Darby said.
'He did. If we don't find my wife and daughter, I'm going to go ahead with the press conference.'
'Wait, you're not seriously thinking of -'
'No. No, of course not. Confessing on live TV and killing Waters isn't going to save my family. If I knew it would for certain, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd turn the gun on myself if it would save them, but there's no way these people are going to let Taylor and Sarah go. They won't kill them – there's no fun in that.'
His words came out sounding rote, and his face remained, as ever, expressionless.
'They want me to suffer,' Casey said. 'They've already given my wife a transorbital lobotomy.'
Darby felt cold all over, sitting still as she watched Casey pick up the remote from his lap and point it at the screen.