“Huh,” Pilcher said. “You’ve thought a lot about it.”
“I’ve thought a lot about it. Yeah.”
“What else?”
Derek turned to look at him. “Give us fifty million bucks in a Swiss bank account or else. Or, here Syria, fifty million in a numbered account. Nice doing business with you.”
“Greed,” Pilcher said with a nod. He seemed comfortable with greed.
“Then there’s Basic Terrorism 101.”
“Being?”
“The point of terrorism is to terrorize. Most people agree that the anthrax letters weren’t very effective at killing people, but psychologically they were just terrific. Even bin Laden’s lunatics could understand that. Their airplanes killed about 3500 people, but hell, they shut down U.S. air traffic for a day and turned New York City upside-down. The economic fallout lasted for years. Of course, this bug’s too dangerous for traditional terrorism.”
“Think they know that?” Pilcher turned off the main road down a two-lane highway. The houses, which all seemed large, were on five and ten-acre lots, isolated from each other by distance and copses of trees. Pines and hard woods, ash, oak and maple. Green leaves still untouched by the oncoming fall.
Derek glanced at his watch again. He felt the panic rat gnawing. He wondered what he was missing, what he should be doing. “It’s not my biggest concern,” Derek said. “We almost there yet?”
“Almost. Just over the hill if the map’s any good. What’s your biggest concern?”
“A suicide group. What is technically known as the Apocalyptic Terrorist.”
Pilcher stared at him, then readjusted his steering as the Taurus began to drift over the yellow line. “Like al-Qaeda.”
“No,” Derek said. “I was thinking Aum Shinrykyo, the Japanese suicide cult that let sarin gas out on the Tokyo subway. I hope that’s not what we’re dealing with here, a group of suicidal nuts who want to bring about the end of the world.”
Pilcher didn’t comment. Once over the hill he pulled the car into a long paved driveway. There were already a handful of cars — more sedans that seemed to scream Federal Government and two local police cars, lights flashing. Derek and Pilcher climbed out and displayed their ID to the approaching cops.
Above them, two helicopters did a mid-air dance, circling, circling. Derek figured the choppers had probably followed them from U.S. Immuno. Pilcher looked around. “Pretty isolated spot.”
“Uh-huh.” Derek gestured for Pilcher to open the trunk. He rummaged through his backpack and came up with a disposable camera, a cellular phone, a notepad and pen, and a 9mm semi-automatic in a belt clip. He attached the phone and gun to his belt and said, “Ready?”
Pilcher looked thoughtfully at him. “Suicidal maniacs?”
Derek said, “Hope we get a ransom call soon,” and strode toward the sprawling two-story colonial.
It happened in the family room at the rear of the house. The front of the house where Derek and Aaron Pilcher entered was a formal sitting room with plush crushed velvet furniture and crystal lamps. Very formal. Derek had the sense the room was rarely if ever used. He stopped to examine a large formal family photograph on one wall. A man, Mike Scully; his wife, an attractive woman about forty years old or so with blond hair; two kids, a boy and a girl. With a shake of his head he followed Pilcher.
The kitchen was roomy with oak cabinets, shiny appliances and a blue tile-topped serving island. It was teeming with FBI Evidence Recovery Team members. It looked, based on a dining room table set for four, minus two chairs, that dinner preparation had been interrupted.
Derek cautiously sniffed. Pilcher said, “Something burned.”
“Spaghetti sauce, I think.”
One of the ERTs, a short stocky woman with dark hair and red plastic-framed glasses, said, “Water in the pot boiled off and the pasta burned; sauce just simmered into a lump. Garlic bread in the oven got turned into briquettes. The rest of the smell…” She made a gesture past them. “Go on in. But I may never eat Italian again.”
Even more ERTs were in the family room, a cozy, low-ceilinged space with a fireplace, sliding glass doors overlooking a redwood deck, a big-screen TV and a sofa, love seat and lounge chair. A comfortable room, one that looked well-used. A nice place for the family to sprawl out and watch TV, catch a movie, eat popcorn.
In the center of the room were the two missing oak dining room chairs. In one, a man sat, tied with rope and duct tape. Liz had been right, Derek thought. Scully had been about his size. Slightly over six feet, athletic but not bulky. He had brown hair cut short and a lean, handsome face. His throat had been slit and his gray ARMY sweatshirt and blue jeans were crusted with dried blood.
Sitting tied and taped to the second chair so they were facing each other was the woman. Unlike her husband, she was nude, her legs splayed obscenely. Like her husband, her throat had been cut, but for her it had probably been a relief.
Her breasts and face and pubic region had been burned with what had probably been a match or cigarette lighter. There had been mutilations — a little finger, one ear, a nipple. Her left eye appeared to have been carved out.
Derek drew in a ragged breath and felt acid rise up into his throat. He took deep breaths to regain control, biting back the bile.
One of the ERTs, a grizzly-sized bald guy in his fifties said, “If you’re gonna barf, use the john. I already processed it. You wouldn’t be the first one in there today.”
Derek shook his head, turned to Pilcher. “Kids?”
“Upstairs,” the bald guy said. “Throats slit… Bastards.”
Derek took it in, eyes wide, trying to process it analytically, to keep his emotions in check. Finally, “They told him what they’d do to her if he didn’t answer their questions. And they used the burns probably to soften him up, make him believe them. And they did it anyway, cut her, to make him tell more. To confirm.”
“Or he didn’t tell them because…“ Pilcher hesitated. “…he knew what they wanted. He knew what was at stake.”
“They got what they wanted,” Derek said. “They might have threatened to do this to the kids as confirmation. He spilled. Who wouldn’t have?”
They did it because they liked it, he thought. Berzerkers.
They lapsed into silence. The techs took photos, vacuumed for trace evidence, dusted for fingerprints. From upstairs they could hear similar activity.
Derek pointed to a doorway. “What’s in there?”
“Kelly’s just started in there. Give her a few minutes to finish the trace collection.”
Pilcher went off to discuss things with the original agents sent to the house. Derek found the stairs and checked out the second floor — four bedrooms, a bathroom off the master suite, another bathroom off the hall.
He found the children in one of the bedrooms. A boy of about seven and a girl about nine or ten. Blindfolds over their eyes, hands and feet duct-taped. Gaping slashes at the throat. Both lying together on a bed with a Star Wars comforter, posters of dinosaurs, jets, Harry Potter and spaceships on the wall.
Derek wondered if they had heard their mother’s torture downstairs or if they had been killed before. But he knew the answer.
They had saved the children for last just in case Scully had needed more persuading. Scully would have seen what they were doing to his wife and known where it was heading. But maybe, just maybe, he had prayed, they would spare the children if he kept cooperating.
Derek no longer felt nauseous. He felt murderous. A coldness was settling in that brought with it an awful kind of clarity. It pushed him into a world of black and white, good and evil, where there was very little faith in the goodness of human beings or hope for humanity. This, he knew, was how it was all over the world. The world was filled with people who could do this to other people without a blink of an eye. Monsters. Devils. Evil incarnate. The case was no longer an abstraction, no longer about the theft of something no one had ever seen. It was now about the unnecessary cold-blooded murder of two children and their parents.