The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  Williams picked at one of his ragged fingernails. “Sure. Ain’t no good doing all this if you’ve got no privacy. There’s a house near Lake Stevenson. People I used to know sometimes used it for fishing or getting drunk. Abandoned for ages, and I guess none of them had been back there in years. So the place was ideal. I took her there. Kept her there for a while, a couple of days.”

  “Could you mark it on a map if I gave you one?”

  Williams shrugged, thought for a moment, looking down at his hands. “Maybe. Might take a while for me to figure out what’s what. Leave a map with me and maybe I can find it.”

  “After you’d kept her there for a few days, then what?”

  “She was in a bad way by then and I had a load of work on, y’know? I had a lot of deliveries and things to do. She was just a nuisance, pretty fucked up by that time. So I strangled her, right there on the floor.” There was no emotion in his voice at all. He might as well have been reading a weather report. He really didn't care, didn't feel a thing. The only hint of anything deeper came after a brief pause, when he added, “It was strange, seeing her lying there. She’d looked so perfect, walking down the street. Didn’t seem like the same girl.”

  Katelyn Sellars was in the Girl Scouts. She had a crush on a guy in the grade above her called Jack. She had dreams of becoming a fashion designer and moving to Europe.

  “You dumped her body?”

  “Yeah.”

  I frowned. “Where?”

  “Took her out and buried her not far from the shore, maybe a mile from that first girl.”

  “You don’t remember more exactly than that?”

  Williams shrugged. “Hey, she was a piece of meat.”

  “If this shit is all you’ve got to tell me, Cody, then as far as I’m concerned we’re finished here.”

  “Easy, Agent Rourke. I’m thinking about it. You’ve just got to give me time to remember back to these things. Bring that map tomorrow, that should help. It ain’t easy, especially not now.” He coughed, something wet rasping at the back of his throat. I was certain he was only doing it for effect. “But all this talking about old times is making it clearer, and that’s helping some.”

  I remained unconvinced that he was telling the truth. “Really?”

  “Yeah. We should talk more. How about we talk about Clinton Travers while I’m trying to remember what I did with them girls? You could tell me all about him, and maybe while I’m listening and thinking back something’ll shake loose.”

  The room darkened, the air becoming thick and cloying, as Cody’s intentions became clearer. We had our shared past and the ties that bound us, and now he was pulling them anew. I wondered how far he’d go with this.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “We can stick to the girls and nothing else. I’ll have the map with me tomorrow. Between then and now, you think hard. If I don’t get some clear answers from you soon, these conversations will be over for good.”

  I stood and made for the door. Behind me, I heard him give a satisfied little sigh. “Oh, come on, Agent Rourke,” he whispered just loud enough to hear. “Let’s talk about what happened to Travers.”

  I didn’t look back.

  09.

  Hartford, CT. 1997.

  March, four months before Holly Tynon failed to come home, and I was in Hartford trying to find a rapist who’d committed a string of attacks with alarming frequency and regularity. The cops had decided they needed help, and they’d turned to the Bureau. Technically, it should have been the Behavioral Analysis Unit’s baby. But while they’d done a large chunk of the initial analysis work, they were too busy with other cases to provide operational support for the investigation and suspect interviews, so it had been passed to me.

  “I was jogging. Before breakfast. Just like I always do,” the woman said. Thin lipped, fighting to concentrate and stay focused. Her red eyes and creased brow above showed just how much emotional strain she was under talking to us. Her hands clasped around the coffee cup played and fiddled with each other incessantly.

  Naomi Carson, the detective with Hartford PD heading the investigation, gave her a warm, understanding smile and said, “You were near the river?”

  “I like to run there,” the woman, whose name was Mary, said. She was the rapist’s ninth, most recent victim. The only one he’d snatched in daylight so far. “I always go jogging there. Unless it’s raining. Or I’ve got to hurry to get to work.”

  “So you jogged from your home…”

  “I jogged from home and I’d almost got as far as the river. I was by that… that row of stores on Henry Street. That one that sells all the chocolates and things. And then I felt a… his hand… I…”

  “It’s okay, Mary,” Naomi said softly. “He grabbed you?”

  She sniffed. “From behind me. I didn’t hear him. He had his hand over my mouth… and he dragged me back… He had a knife. He held it by my neck. There’s an alleyway behind the stores. He dragged me back there…”

  “And that’s where he attacked you.”

  “He put something over my eyes. Like… like a bag or a blindfold. I thought he was going to kill me. I thought I was going to die. He kept saying I was a… a… bitch. All while he was… And then, then he left. When he’d finished.”

  Naomi nodded. “What happened when he left?”

  “He took the thing he had over my eyes and said he’d kill me if I looked. He… said he knew where I lived. Then he ran back down the alley behind me. I think he had a car somewhere. Maybe. I… I heard one start up not long after.”

  “Did you get a look at the man?” I asked, calm and gentle. “Do you remember anything about his appearance?”

  “I… I did, not very much — he was running away — but I did.” Mary gulped. “He had a black ski mask. Like a bank robber. And he had a dark blue jacket, and dark jeans, I think. And I saw his shoes. They were like work boots or something. The ones with the thick soles. I saw them as he was running.”

  “Was he wearing gloves at all?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sorry, yes. He had gloves.”

  “How tall was he?”

  “Tall. Taller than me… six foot, maybe? And he was big. He was a big man.”

  Naomi smiled. “That’s really good, Mary. That’s a massive help to us. Do you remember anything else about him?”

  “I… I don’t know.” Mary thought for a moment. “Yes, I saw his hair. Sticking out underneath his ski mask. It was dark, black or brown. Yes, dark. But… no, that’s it. I can’t think of anything more.”

  “That’s okay, Mary,” I told her. “You’ve given us a lot to go on. Thank you.”

  She looked at me. “Will… will you catch him?”

  I smiled. “You’ve got the whole of Hartford PD and the FBI looking for this guy. We’re going to catch him, Mary. He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

  Months later, I’d hear an echo of those words in the promise I made to Martha Tynon.

  Nine women raped, at a rate averaging one attack per week. Same MO each time. A hand clamped over the victim’s mouth. She was forced at knifepoint to a nearby sheltered spot. The rapist blindfolded the victim, possibly using the sort of eye-mask used by people to help them sleep, before he made any move around from behind them. He said hardly anything throughout, except to call his victims “bitch” or “whore”. The attacks were short and brutal. He raped them, often beating or slapping them about the face and head, then left with a final warning that he knew who they were and where they lived. Hartford was normally a fairly quiet city and the whole place was on edge. The crimes had been front page news since well before local law enforcement requested our help. The media coverage didn’t seem to have bothered the attacker. Every week longer the investigation took us meant another woman was likely to be raped.

  After duty hours, I sat with Naomi Carson in a bar down the road from police headquarters. All-red interior, comfortable seats, more mirrors on the walls than most regular establishments
. I didn’t know its actual name, but Naomi told me everyone called it ‘the Bordello’.

  “Do they serve you at the table, or do you have to ask for a private room?” I asked.

  It was a lousy joke, but it had been a hard day and she laughed anyway. She was a couple of years younger than me, doing well to have got her shield already. Short blonde hair, no jewelry. She’d been calm and clear in every interview we’d done. I liked her.

  “It could be worse,” she said as the drinks arrived. “There’s a bar not far from here called The Slaughterhouse.”

  “Nice. An old meat warehouse or something?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. No one knows why it’s called that, but it is. That’s the way it’s been for as long as anyone can remember.”

  “You’ll have to show me it sometime. It’ll be nice to have some place to celebrate when we nail this son of a bitch.”

  “If we do,” Naomi said.

  “If?”

  “So far, he’s picked on lone women, all but one after dark. Approached from behind very quietly, never lets them get a look at him until they’re in post-attack shock.”

  “Except for the first one.”

  “Yeah, except then. But she only got a tiny glimpse when he slapped her face during the assault. Back before he started using the blindfold.”

  “True. And she didn’t give much to go on.”

  “Let’s see if I remember it right: ‘A broad-shouldered white guy wearing a ski mask. Uneven teeth. Stubble just visible on his top lip. Too dark to say what color his eyes were. Tall, probably. Breath that stank of alcohol.’ That’s hardly a big deal. We could pull in every alcoholic in town with that description.” She gestured around the bar, although the place was practically empty. “He uses a condom and we’ve found no pubic hair or other readily traceable evidence. Zip at the scenes, apart from four condom wrappers with no prints.”

  “It’s not much.”

  “Alex, this guy could move out of town tomorrow and we’d never find him and never know who he was.”

  “It’s not much yet. All we need is one break, one lead on one suspect. You know how these things work.”

  “Nine victims down, and we’ve got nothing to go on.”

  I had to agree. When I’d come to Hartford, the BAU had just finished its report on the rapist. What they’d given the cops was sketchy as hell, even more so than what the BAU normally produced, and I guessed that might have influenced their decision to pass on the fieldwork. They’d suggested looking for a white male, mid-twenties to early forties. Physique and dress suggested a manual laborer or former manual laborer. Quite possibly with a history of violent crime, given his lack of nerves and the effort he made to avoid leaving usable evidence behind. Probably lived alone, as the timing of his attacks would have aroused the suspicions of a spouse or loved one. Some kind of recent personal trauma that triggered the first attack, most likely involving a woman — a divorce or relationship break-up, for instance. The first rape had seemed less planned than the later ones — no blindfold, for instance. He’d probably lived in Hartford for some time, was very familiar with the city.

  Nothing, in fact, that the cops here hadn’t already known for themselves.

  We had a quiet couple of drinks in the Bordello, let talk turn to other things outside work. Small stuff. Time filler. Then Naomi apologized and said she had to go.

  “I’ve got to get ready for a gig.”

  “A gig?”

  “Yeah. As in ‘musical performance’.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously?”

  “I’ve played violin since I was in high school. There’s a few of us play as a kind of folk-blues band. Only local, bars and such.”

  “No shit. I’m a blues fan myself.”

  “You should come along,” she said. “The Glasshouse, starting at nine. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  I smiled and watched her leave.

  The next day, one of the investigative team managed to identify a car caught on security camera a couple of blocks from Mary’s attack. There was very little traffic at that time of the morning, so we homed in on it as a workable lead. The car belonged to an ex-con called Clinton Travers. Travers had a couple of convictions for assault with a deadly weapon — a knife — and assault and battery, unarmed. A third conviction for armed robbery had been overturned on appeal and he’d been implicated in a number of other crimes. He’d finished his parole nearly a year before and was last known to be working in a machine shop and living with his a woman called Angelina Lewis. Even better, his build and features all matched what we knew about the rapist.

  Once we’d found Angelina, now sharing an apartment with a friend and presumably no longer involved with Travers, Naomi and I went to speak to her. Almost the first thing she said was: “Is this about them rapes?”

  For a second, I was convinced we’d got him. That she had concrete information we could use on Travers.

  “Why would you say that, Ms Lewis?” Naomi asked.

  “Clint’s got a record, I know that. I figured you’d be looking at anyone with a record as a suspect. He’s a violent son of a bitch, I know that for sure.”

  I cursed inwardly and tried not to let it show while Angelina told us all about her ex-boyfriend.

  “I walked out on him about a week after New Year. Told him I was fed up with him and that Macy was waiting in the car for me outside, that she’d call the cops if he did anything.”

  “He was violent towards you?” Naomi said.

  “Yeah, sometimes he’d knock me around. If he had a bad day or he thought I’d been too friendly with someone else.”

  “Why’d you stick with him?”

  “He could be nice the rest of the time. I think he really cared for me, in his way. And he always apologized and shit afterwards, like it was going to be the last time.”

  “But it never was?”

  “I guess not. Never is with guys like him. But I felt sorry for him, some ways. Hard to get a decent break when you’re an ex-con. But it got too much in the end.”

  “How did he take it when you told him you were leaving him?”

  She frowned. “Strange. First off he started shouting, asking if there was another guy. Bunched his fists like he was going to hit me, but didn’t. I just yelled back that it was him that was the problem and it wasn’t anything to do with anyone else. So he shouted some more, called me a fucking bitch and stuff. But then, when I was about to walk out, he just started crying. Burst into tears. Begged me not to go. But I did, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “When was this, Angelina?” I asked.

  “January twelfth.”

  The night of the first rape. As soon as we were done talking to her, we applied for a search warrant for the home of Clinton Travers.

  10.

  Boston, MA. 2004.

  Once I’d made it back to my apartment from MCI-Ashworth, I slumped into a chair and called Agent Downes. My landline’s voicemail was showing a half dozen messages waiting, but I ignored them for now.

  “Williams has started talking,” I told her once we’d finished with the formalities. “He says he buried Katelyn Sellars on Horseneck Beach about a mile from Kerry Abblit. I’m going to take him a map tomorrow to see if he can pinpoint where exactly.”

  “That’s great, Alex. How reliable do you think he is?”

  I thought for a moment, back to the last words he said to me before I left. “I think he’s willing to tell the truth.”

  “But?”

  “But he likes playing little games. So as long as I can keep him on track, I’ll hopefully be able to get everything you need out of him.”

  “Have those people outside the prison given you any trouble?”

  “No, not really. Harmless idiots, most of them. Some nasty messages on my phone and in my email, but nothing much else.”

  “Good. Don’t let them get to you, Alex. We all want you to do well. The SAC even had Deputy Director Woods on the phone yest
erday to find out what progress we were making.”

  “The publicity machine’s in full swing, then.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” she said. “We’ll all come out of this looking good if we get a result.”

  “If Williams really does play ball. If he’s just jerking me around, we might still end up with nothing. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t.” She sighed quietly. “I’d better go. Keep me posted.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Goodbye, Agent Downes.”

  “Tanya. Goodbye, Alex.”

  I’d barely hung up when the phone started ringing again. I considered ignoring it, but as there was a chance it was something important and not a pro-Williams head-case I picked up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr Rourke? I’m sorry to call you at home like this, but I’ve not had much luck with your office.” A man’s voice. Deepish and a little nasal. No one I knew.

  “Who is this?”

  “Will Holden. I’m a journalist with the Boston Herald. You probably won’t remember, but I covered the original disappearances as well as the trial.”

  “Sorry, Mr Holden. Nothing to say.”

  He dived in fast before I could put the phone down. “That’s what your partner’s been telling me.”

  “Remind me to thank him for doing so.”

  “Look, just give me a minute for a couple of quick questions and then I can stop bothering you. If you’re lucky, the other papers will pick up what you tell me for their own coverage and they won’t have to hassle you to do it.”

  “I can’t give you any details.”

  “You don’t need to,” Holden said. “Be vague—”

  “I’m good at vague.”

  “—Is Cody Williams co-operating with the questioning? How confident are you that he’ll help? How it feels to be back on the case, that sort of thing.”

  For a moment, I thought about the protesters gathered outside Ashworth. About the anonymous voices calling to tell me I was going to hell, that I was hounding an innocent man, that I was a hero. I thought about fielding questions at the scenes of the abductions, outside family homes, on the steps of the courthouse. I remembered how it all felt, all of it.