The Collective (3 page)

The backhand he’d given her in return had knocked her to the ground. When she got up, her nose and mouth were bloodied, but she hadn’t stopped screaming at him. Even now, after four more hard knocks, the curses still flowed. Though her voice was shrill and her Caribbean-island accent made the words difficult to follow, it seemed clear her husband thought she had been screwing someone behind his back—someone who must still be inside Jillian’s.

Cait had never seen such a twisted dance in all her life. The wife would scream denials and counteraccusations at him, sobbing with tears and fury, not even bothering to wipe the blood from her lips and chin. He would threaten her, tell her to shut up, and when she told him to fuck off—the same words every time, only louder and with more blood flying with each new utterance—A-Train would belt her.

When she tried to hurt him, clawing at his face, he hit her with a closed fist. The meaty slap of impact echoed off the pavement as she went down to her knees and stayed there, quiet for the first time.

“Get up on your feet and go to the goddamn car right fucking
now,” A-Train told her, his voice not so loud now, though it still carried along the street.

Music thumped inside Jillian’s. Lights flashed in the windows. People coming in and out of the party had stopped on the sidewalk by the front doors to watch, the same way they slowed down to check out a car accident. But this bit of wreckage was still in progress and nobody was doing a thing about it.

“Duffy, come on! This is nuts,” Cait said, breaking a silence that had lasted longer than she could forgive herself for.

Mike Duffy, the new sports guy at Channel 7, had been running behind, pissed that he’d be the last to the party, but as Jordan had taken the camera out of the van, A-Train had come out of Jillian’s and started in on his wife.

Cait had watched the whole thing through the open window of the van, face flushed with unspent adrenaline, hands gripping on the steering wheel though the engine wasn’t running. On the sidewalk, Jordan had the camera rolling, getting the whole thing on video.

“Are we just gonna sit here?” she asked, addressing him through the open passenger’s side window.

Jordan glanced at her, but only for a second. “You knew the rules when you took the gig, Cait. We spread the news, we don’t make it.”

Cait narrowed her eyes. During the Iraq War, Jordan and their friend Ronnie had watched her back, and she’d looked out for them as well. All three of them had made it home, and Jordan had been the one to hook her up with this job at Channel 7. It wasn’t much—driving a van—but it was a hell of a lot better than being an unemployed single mother. She owed him for that, and she did know the rules, but it went against everything she believed in to do nothing.

She popped open the door.

“Caitlin,” Duffy snapped, pushing past Jordan and leaning in through the window. “Do not interfere.”

Cait glared at him across the front seat of the van. “Duffy, goddammit—”

“Jordan’s right. We don’t make the news, Caitlin,” he said, chiding her.

He’d been making that mistake a lot, treating her like some whiny teenage girl just because she was cute and petite and had a button nose and a heart-shaped face and he probably wanted to bang her. But Cait McCandless had spent most of her twenty-six years making people regret underestimating her.

“No one is going to help her. Jordan, come on,” Cait urged, still sitting in the driver’s seat with her door halfway open.

Jordan looked uncomfortable. He’d been a soldier, and he was a gentleman. His instinct would have been to take on A-Train himself, but he had tried to make a clean break between Iraq and the civilian world. The job had rules, and though she could see him struggling, Cait knew he wanted to follow them.

“Duffy called the cops. They’ll be here soon. There’s nothing we can do. Let the proper authorities handle it.”

Cait felt bile rising in the back of her throat. She didn’t know what made her feel like puking more—the citizens out there in front of Jillian’s watching like it was some kind of sidewalk performance, or the fact that she had already watched a two-hundred-fifty-pound football player strike his wife half a dozen times and still sat behind the wheel. She knew the rules of the job. They reported the news, they didn’t make it. They weren’t supposed to interfere. But there had to be exceptions.

“Fuck it,” she whispered, and climbed out of the van.

“Cait?” Duffy said.

She ignored him. Instead, she focused on A-Train and his wife and the weird tableau they made in the yellow glow thrown by the lights just inside the parking garage. The woman had stopped screaming and even her crying had softened so it couldn’t be heard above the dull thump of music from the club. A-Train stood over his wife expectantly, waiting for her to do as he’d told her, rage simmering.

Cait started toward them.

Duffy grabbed her wrist just the way A-Train had grabbed his wife’s. But she spun on the sportscaster and shot him a look that made him let go.

As she turned back toward the garage, she saw A-Train
reach down and grab his wife’s thin wrist, hauling the woman to her feet. Cait saw the spark of violence reignite in the air between them even before the woman lashed out. This time, Mrs. A-Train got the son of a bitch good, clawing furrows in the left side of his face.

A-Train roared in pain and caught her free hand so that he now held them both in his big fists. Then he must have squeezed, for she screamed, and Cait knew there would be broken bones.

She ran, cursing the silent watchers who had taken out cell phones and cameras to record the ugliness for later Internet posting, aware that she and Duffy and Jordan were no better.

Cait didn’t shout at him to stop. The guy had gone critical; there’d be no turning back for him now. Maybe he’d carry his wife to the car and drive her to the hospital or maybe he would cave her face in with his fist in the next fifteen seconds. There was no margin for hesitation.

A-Train heard her coming, turned to look, and for just a second his rage faltered at the absurdity of this waif trying to interfere. Then he sneered and raised his fist, ready to belt his wife again just to prove there wasn’t a damn thing Cait could do about it.

She snapped a side kick at the back of his leg, buckling his knee, and the bastard went down hard, smacking his head on the pavement. As he scrambled to get up, she danced in close and shot her hand down, fingers straight, jabbing his windpipe hard enough to hurt but not crush. Wheezing raggedly, A-Train reached for his throat. Cait waited. She’d chosen the angle of her initial kick carefully. The only reason she hadn’t broken his knee was because she knew Jordan still had the camera rolling, and that was why she hesitated now.

But then he lunged for her, faltering a little on the injured leg as he came up. She took his arm, twisted, and used his own momentum to send him sprawling again before she waded in and stomped on his right wrist, hearing the bone crunch. Served him right.

A-Train started to rise again and she thought she would have to drop-kick him in the head, but then the sirens that had been growing in the distance blossomed into blaring, urgent
life, and two police cars skidded into the intersection that separated Jillian’s from the garage.

“Bitch,” A-Train mouthed over the wail of sirens.

His wife huddled on the ground ten feet away, cradling her broken hands in her lap, staring at them in shock. Blue lights flashed across her face. Would she thank Cait for getting involved?
Probably not, but somebody had to
.

As the police rushed them all, Duffy ran over to explain. Several of the bystanders, suddenly finding their voices now that the bloody spectacle had ended, shouted to the cops in Cait’s defense.

“Girl’s a hero, man!” a fit, well-dressed young guy yelled. “She kicked his ass.”

It made Cait sick to hear the word. Heroes didn’t watch from the sidelines while head cases beat up their wives in public. She hated herself for how long she’d waited, but all she had been able to think about was what would become of her baby daughter, Leyla, if she ended up in the hospital.

And then she had thought about what kind of world she wanted Leyla to grow up in. And what kind of woman she wanted to raise her daughter to become.

A-Train was lucky she’d only broken his hand.

Rachael Voss dreamed about retiring someplace like Fort Myers, Florida—provided she didn’t catch a bullet first. She drove the rented Mercedes along a gently twisting road, seashells crunching under the tires. Even this late at night it was still too damn hot, but she had the windows cranked down anyway. Air-conditioning gave her more of a headache than the heat of Florida in August.

Her partner, Josh Hart, sat in the passenger seat swirling the remnants of his iced coffee around in a plastic cup. Music
played low on the radio—the volume and station both still set to whatever they’d been when she and Josh had picked up the rental at the airport—but otherwise they traveled mostly in silence, only the breeze coming through the windows for company.

During the day, Josh would have bitched about the open windows and Voss would have surrendered and put on the A/C. They’d been partners for more than three years, first with the FBI and now as part of Homeland Security’s new watchdog task force, the InterAgency Cooperation Division. The ICD consisted of one director, two assistant directors, and fourteen interagency case coordinators, Voss and Josh among them.

Delicious aromas steamed off of the vegetation, mingling with the ocean scent of the Gulf of Mexico, not far off. They rounded a corner and the road turned to pavement. The headlights picked out twisted tree limbs and the tall, thin trunks of palm trees, whose bark always reminded Voss of mummy wrappings. She slowed as she drove over a speed bump. A spotlighted sign announced they were entering Manatee Village, which made Voss roll her eyes. Manatees were the ugliest, laziest creatures in the ocean, the couch potatoes of the sea. They weren’t cute like seals or sea lions—just big, fat things that lolled in the water like the cows they were named for, but without the benefit of providing milk or cheeseburgers.

“Who lives out here?” Josh asked.

“Good question,” Voss said.

But the exchange had been rhetorical. They both knew who lived in Manatee Village—a development of faux-adobe-looking single-family homes with inground swimming pools and lanais that let the bugs in but kept the alligators out. Old people who retired to Florida lived in condo and townhouse developments, and people born and raised in Fort Myers couldn’t afford homes like this. The last time Voss had been through the city’s downtown, she’d been left with the impression of a place teetering between resurgence and total collapse, and neither fate seemed more or less likely than the other.

No, the people in Manatee Village weren’t from here. They
were young professionals, mostly with families, who had moved to Florida for the sake of their jobs, working with startup companies when the economy had been surging and now hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

As they drove through Manatee Village, half of the pastel faux-dobe homes had either
FOR SALE
or
FORECLOSURE
signs in front.

Blue lights flashed ghost shadows against the houses at the corner of Periwinkle Lane. Voss turned right and let the Mercedes roll toward the riot of vehicles jammed up and down the block. Nearest were the news vans—only two for now, but in the days to come there would be many more.

“I’m surprised nobody’s sent a helicopter yet,” Josh said.

Voss guided the rental car between the vans. “I’m not. It’s Fort Myers. Besides, it’s dark out. If someone’s going to pay for a chopper, it’ll be tomorrow when the sun’s up. They’ll probably dangle Nancy Grace from a bungee cord with a microphone and let her prey on the neighbors.”

“Stop. You’re scaring me.”

Neither of them smiled at the joke. When there were dead children involved, nothing was funny.

Just past the news vans, the road had been blocked by a pair of Fort Myers police cars parked nose to nose, each manned by a single uniformed officer. As Voss and Josh rolled up in the Mercedes, the cop on the left stood at attention, chin high, and strode over to them, rolling his shoulders like a boxer about to deliver the final blow.

“I’m sorry, ma’am—” the young cop began.

Voss flashed her ID. “Homeland Security. Let us through, please.”

The kid managed to keep his composure long enough to take a closer look at her ID, then nodded in deference. “Yes, ma’am.”

He stepped back onto the sidewalk even as he waved to the other cop to let them through. The man—a slightly older version of the tanned, fit kid who’d stopped them—jumped into his cruiser and backed it into a driveway to let them pass.

Voss almost expected Josh to make some innuendo-laden
comment about the young cop’s obedience, but he remained silent, staring straight ahead. She was glad. He might actually have made her laugh, and it wasn’t a night for laughter.

She guided the Mercedes past another Fort Myers police cruiser, then a couple of Florida State Police cars, and finally parked at the back of a cluster of unmarked sedans. The center of attention was 23 Periwinkle Lane, which looked indistinguishable from the other homes in the development. A brightly colored
FOR SALE
sign had been planted on the lawn, and Voss felt a pang of sorrow. The murdered family would never have another home.