Coop was standing next to her now. Traveler was lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving.

Banville was heading back.

‘What’s going on?’ Darby said.

‘It’s a dead body bound to a chair,’ Banville said. That’s what’s going on.’

‘What? The grenade couldn’t have killed him.’

‘He’s been dead for several hours,’ Banville said. ‘Someone strangled him.’

‘Then what’s with all that equipment?’

Banville didn’t answer. He had stepped back inside the van, the wall phone already pressed against his ear.

‘It’s got to be him,’ the FBI tech said behind her. ‘The listening devices are being picked up in that van. Look, there’s an L32 receiver in there.’

‘Maybe he’s using the equipment to transmit the signal somewhere else,’ his partner said.

The commotion and noise, and the sight of eight SWAT team members hovering around the van had drawn the neighbors out of their homes. They stood on the front steps, many of them standing in the rain, wanting to know what was going on.

‘Let’s secure the scene,’ Darby told Coop.

Standing across the street was a girl no older than eight. She was dressed in a yellow rain slicker and held her mother’s hand. The girl looked scared, on the verge of tears. Darby was watching her when the van exploded and blew the girl and her mother off the ground.

Chapter 44

An evacuation siren blared over the hospital speakers. Daniel Boyle pushed his way through the crowds of civilians, doctors and nurses running in all directions, people bumping into each other, some falling, everyone scrambling to find an exit, to get away from the dust and smoke filling the hallways.

The ICU waiting room was empty. The ICU doors were opened. Nobody was guarding Rachel’s room. The two cops responsible for watching her had either been called away or had decided to leave.

Boyle ran down the hallway. The ICU nurses had left their post. He was alone. He looked through the window to Rachel Swanson’s room. She was sleeping.

Boyle pushed open the door with his arm, careful about not leaving any fingerprints.

Hand already inside his breast pocket, he came back with the hypodermic. He clamped the plastic cap between his teeth, exposing the needle, his thumb drawing the plunger higher as he moved to the bed.

Boyle wished he could wake her up, wished he could watch Rachel scream one final time before she started convulsing.

The needle pierced the IV tube. Boyle pushed the air through the line.

A quick wipe of the line using his jacket cuff and he was moving back to the door. Hurry.

Cap back on the needle, the hypodermic tucked back inside his pocket. Hurry.

Out the door and walking swiftly down the hallway, nobody watching –

One of the hospital’s security staff was standing next to the nurse’s station. The man was dressed in a dark raincoat and wore an earpiece and a lapel mike. He was looking around the space, searching for the wounded when he spotted Boyle.

Boyle ran to him. ‘Everyone’s gone,’ he said. ‘It’s all clear.’

An alarm sounded from behind the front desk.

The security man turned to look at the monitors. ‘What’s going on?’

Boyle pretended to study the numbers on the monitor. ‘One of the patients has gone into cardiac arrest,’ Boyle said. ‘I’ll take care of it. Make sure everyone gets to the stairwells.’

‘You sure I can’t help you?’

‘No, get going. I can take it from here.’

The security man didn’t move.

Very calmly, as if reaching for a pen, Boyle slipped his hand inside his white coat and undid the snap for the shoulder holster. He’d drop the rent-a-cop if he had to. Drop him first and then run for the stairwell.

No need. The security man had left. Boyle watched him leave, then turned the corner and headed for the bathroom. He grabbed his backpack from the trash and made his way toward a cop directing people into the stairwell. Boyle blended into the crowd of civilians and hospital staff.

The morning was filled with rain and sirens. He jogged down Cambridge Street and took the stairs for the T station.

Yesterday, on his way home from Belham, he purchased an electronic T pass at South Station. He swiped the pass through the magnetic card reader, leaving no fingerprints, and stood with the rest of the people watching the chaos below them. Smoke drifted from the crumbled ruins of the delivery garage. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars were coming from all directions. Shards of glass and pieces of brick and concrete covered Cambridge Street. Some of the store windows, Boyle saw, had been blown apart by the blast.

When the train pulled up, Boyle grabbed a window seat, took out his BlackBerry and typed a message to Richard: ‘Done.’

To pass the time, Boyle thought about what he would do to Carol Cranmore once she stepped outside her room. Sooner or later, she would come out for her food. They all did.

But he couldn’t wait forever, not now. The preparations for leaving were already made. He would have to kill them all soon – tonight, maybe.

Chapter 45

The right side of Darby’s face throbbed as she helped Coop lift another wounded SWAT officer onto the stretcher. The officer was unconscious but breathing.

They carefully made their way over the wet debris, heading as fast as they could through the rain and smoke, toward the far end of the street where the wounded lay scattered on the ground. Dozens of them were being treated by the EMTs and doctors rushed in from Belham Hospital. The dead ones lay still under blue tarps weighed down by rocks.

Darby eased the officer onto a gurney. She was about to head back out when she spotted Evan Manning kneeling on the ground, lifting up a blue sheet to examine the face of one of the dead. She pushed her way through the crowds of medical staff shouting orders over the wail of the approaching sirens, the screaming and the crying.

She grabbed Evan by the arm. ‘Did you find Traveler?’

‘Not yet.’ He seemed genuinely surprised to see her. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘I was knocked down by the blast.’

‘What?’

‘It’s too loud here. Come this way.’

Darby led him across the street and into the woods. The leaves protected them from the rain. It was quieter in here but not by much.

‘I tried calling you on your cell,’ Evan said, wiping the water away from his face.

‘I’m pretty sure I broke it when I fell. What’s going on with Traveler?’

‘All the roads are blocked off, but so far, we haven’t found him.’

‘In order to have set off the bomb, he’d have to be close by, wouldn’t he? We need to make sure the cops at the roadblocks are checking everyone they see. He could still be somewhere around here – he could be walking away right now.’

‘We’re checking everyone. Listen, I’ve got to leave. I’m going to be tied up in Boston. It doesn’t look good.’

‘What’s going on in Boston?’

‘There was an explosion inside your building. I don’t know all the details yet.’

Suddenly Darby had to sit down. There was no place to sit. She leaned back against a tree and filled her lungs deep, the ground shaky beneath her feet.

‘Two of our mobile forensic units will be here early tomorrow morning – one here, one at the blast site in Boston,’ Evan said. ‘We can run the investigation from there. I need to get going. I’ll call you later. Where can I reach you?’

She wrote down her mother’s home number on the back of a business card and handed it to him.

‘Your face is swelling up,’ Evan said. ‘You should put some ice on it.’

Darby stepped out of the woods and stared at the wounded and the dead. Four bodies – no, five – were under the blue tarps. An EMT was pulling another tarp over the body of another SWAT officer.

She turned away and looked in the direction of where the van had been. Now it was a smoldering black crater. The body of the man she had seen inside the van hadn’t been found. Pieces of him were scattered among the debris. They’d be lucky if they ever identified him.