The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  Eventually, and picking my words carefully, I said, “Okay. Williams and I have had some productive informal conversations. So far he seems to be co-operating and I hope that he’ll be able to shed light on what happened to those girls. I expect that anything I learn will be passed on to the families and others by the FBI in due course. I can’t comment on what he may or may not have said so far. That’s for the FBI to do, not me.”

  “You said ‘informal’. Does this mean he’s not being questioned in any official legal capacity?”

  “That’s right. I’m not in law enforcement any more and he isn’t being formally interviewed. I’m the only one speaking to him and our conversations are not being recorded in any way, as per his request. None of what he says is admissible evidence and as far as I’m aware there will not be any further court cases arising from what he tells me.”

  “And how does it feel to be back on one of your old cases?”

  “No comment on that,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Is that it?”

  “I think so. Thanks a lot, Mr Rourke. I appreciate your time. I’ll let you know through your office if we get anything back on this.”

  “Sure.”

  I hung up and headed into the kitchen. Got a glass of water. I held it for a long time, staring at my reflection in the window. Didn’t much recognize the man staring back at me. By the time I drank any of it, it was warm. The glass of the guy in the window was dark. When he drank, the liquid took on a reddish hue. I left and he watched me go.

  With nothing better to do but watch figments of my own imagination in the dark, I opened up the case files Tanya Downes gave me and started by checking what he’d already told me against what we knew from both the original investigation and the later discovery of the three sets of remains, trying to judge whether he was being straight with me. Most of it seemed OK, but I hit a sour note in the scene report for the discovery of Kerry Abblit’s remains. Only a small one, possibly the result of failing memory or his illness, but equally something he might have invented for kicks. Williams told me he’d wrapped Kerry’s body in an old beige sheet for burial. Forensics had found no sign of a sheet, and the only fibre evidence was a small number of what might have been dark carpet threads, all synthetic. No match to any of the materials known from his house or van; all of those had been checked. He said he’d parked up some place quiet to have his fun and then kept her alive for a couple of days. I wondered if he’d held her at the old lake house he said he’d left Katelyn at, and why he hadn’t mentioned the place before. If the fibers had come from there, or if there was more to it than that. If he’d started feeding me bull, and if this was going to continue or not. If I’d find the others, or get nothing.

  11.

  On the way to MCI-Ashworth the next morning, neck cricked and teeth on edge where I’d slept badly, I picked up a copy of the Herald. Buried a couple of pages into the interior was a more or less word-for-word repeat of what I’d told Holden the previous evening, alongside some refresher case background and a mention of the ongoing protests. Not a bad piece, and I found I didn’t care if the FBI disagreed.

  In the visiting room, Williams was waiting and he didn’t look well. A wheeled drip stand next to him was hooked into a vein on the back of his hand. His eyes were hooded and red and I guessed he’d slept very little. Every so often he rubbed at his mouth and smacked his lips as if he was thirsty.

  “Rough night?” I said, trying not to let it show that I thought he deserved it. Williams knew it anyway, and I felt no sympathy towards him at all, but I still felt the pull of the automatic social mechanism that enforced a certain degree of civility towards a dying man. I hated myself for it.

  Williams shrugged his slumped shoulders. “Guess I’m getting used to them by now. Who’d you want to hear about today? That Providence girl’s next, right?”

  “Yeah, she is. But first I want to go back to Kerry Abblit for a moment,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “You said you had her for a couple of days before she died.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you take her to the same place as Katelyn Sellars? That house by the lake?”

  He thought for a moment before shaking his head and blinking twice. “Yeah. Yeah, the house. Why?”

  “What’s the floor of the house like?”

  “What the fuck's that got to do with anything?”

  “When they found her body there was no sign of the sheet you say you wrapped her in. But there were carpet fibers, and they weren’t from your van or your house. I’m trying to understand where they came from.”

  Another pause. “Yeah, the house had carpet in it, I guess.”

  “Guess?”

  “Yeah.” Williams must have known I wasn't convinced, as he continued, “Or I might have got that confused with one of the others. There was a lot of them and it was a long time ago, y’know? Shit, I don’t remember half the things I did last week, especially not now. And they were worth dick once they were dead. Why'd I care?”

  I leaned forwards, rested my hands on the table. “So how can I be sure that what you tell me in here is correct?”

  “You don’t forget that stuff, what happens before they die,” he snapped back. “But anyways, I guess you’ll just have to trust me and we’ll see what we can do, okay? Now you want to talk about that Providence girl or do I go back to bed?”

  I sighed, gave him a moment to cool down, then said, “Sure. Tell me about Holly Tynon.”

  “I picked her especially,” Williams said. “Knew what I wanted to get, kind of girl I was looking for. Been driving around for a while, no luck. But then I saw her coming up that driveway. I got around the block double-quick, managed to head her off at the corner. I didn’t have time to set anything up, so I just stopped with a street map leaning on the wheel, opened my door and asked her over for directions. Hauled her in and shut the door fast, just as she started making noise and fighting. She soon shut the fuck up when she saw the knife. Made that little bitch blow me while I was driving along, since she was up there with me.”

  He cracked a leer at the memory, eyes going wide and black for a moment. Breath laced with the rotting scent of dying body chemistry, the ammonia smell of failing organs, the acid bite of a system in collapse, washed past his cracked lips.

  “Why’d you bother ditching her wallet?”

  “I had to stop so I could get her all tied up safe in the back of the van. I figured since there was a park right there, I might as well get rid of anything that was obviously hers while I had the chance. No sense doing it when I got home. People would know where she ended up. Better they just knew where she’d come from. Little mistakes always get you caught, my daddy used to say. And I thought it might throw you off the trail a bit. Y’know, not being sure where she was headed. Waste a bit of your time.”

  I didn't believe his dad ever said anything of the sort. His dad had known him well before he became the monster, not after. “What then?”

  “Same as usual. Kept her until she wasn’t any fun any more. Then I got rid of her.” A smile flickered across his face for a moment. Then his features sagged back into their usual state of hollow semi-collapse. “I had to break her legs and shit to fit her in a bag. I didn’t want to be too obvious that time — I nearly got found out by someone driving by when I was taking the body of that other girl out of the van — so I stuffed her in a gym bag.”

  “Where?”

  “Woods, some way down the road from Worcester. I wrapped her up in tarpaulin and buried her well off the nearest trail.” He caught my expression. “Rutland State Park, I think. Or Moore.”

  His mouth twitched a couple of times, but he stayed quiet and seemed to have finished.

  “Again, could you be more specific?” I said.

  “You got that map? I can help out with the other one while I’m at it.”

  I unfolded the map and laid it on the table with a pencil. Williams gazed at it for an etern
ity, and only the occasional movement of his head showed that he hadn’t slipped into a trance or fallen asleep.

  Eventually, he marked two small circles on it and looked back up. “There you go.”

  The map was a decent scale, but even so, each circle must have covered half a square mile of ground, and I told him so. “Can’t you narrow those down? Those areas will take forever to search.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Never looked for a body myself.”

  “You must be able to remember the route you took to get to the burial sites.”

  Williams shrugged. “Some of it, yeah. The rest, I’d probably have to see them again to know for sure.” He jiggled his drip line. “And that ain’t so easy now. It’s not going to get any easier either.”

  “So think harder.”

  “I’ll try to. Of course, there’s still a few things unresolved between us and they’re causing me some distraction right now. You have anything you’d like to get off your chest, just to clear the air, you feel free.” He waited for me to speak, but I said nothing. I wasn’t about to give the leering son of a bitch the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me. “Otherwise, you leave me this map and I’ll keep on thinking through this afternoon and tonight and I’ll see what I can do. Best hope it doesn’t take too long — I can’t have that much time left.”

  When I left, the first few regular prison visitors were already waiting in Outer Control, all of them women. A couple of them looked at me strangely, perhaps trying to figure out what I was doing there. And since I was beginning to wonder the same thing myself, I couldn’t offer them any answers.

  I called Tanya Downes to fill her in on developments once I was out in my car. “He’s given me rough locations for two of the bodies,” I said. “I’m trying to persuade him to be more specific, but it looks like he might drag his heels here.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. It might be that he wants a chance to walk over the scenes himself, pick them out by hand.”

  “A ‘last breath of free air’ thing?”

  “Something like that.” I watched the tiny knot of protesters in the distance. This morning’s fresh news coverage had sparked a mini-revival in their numbers. “Or he’s angling for another concession that he’s going to spring on me sometime in the next couple of days.”

  “Well, let me know if he asks for anything more. He’ll die there in Ashworth, and nothing is going to stop that. That will not change, Alex. But if all he wants is a more comfortable cell or better food, something of that nature, we might be willing to play ball. Don’t tell him that, though. His help should come for free if possible.”

  “Sure.”

  Her tone shifted. “Changing the subject, I’ve been wondering if you’d like to go out for dinner some time.”

  “Uhm…” The question caught me completely off-guard, left me reaching for an excuse to say no and coming up short in the time I had before it’d become clear I was lying just to avoid it. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Uhm… when?”

  “I’m free for most of this week. I’ll give you a call.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a piece of hate mail waiting at home, mixed in with the usual junk and bills. I threw it in the trash without bothering to read it. I wasn't in the mood to deal with other people’s anger. They thought they were doing right, but they knew jack. I could relate, but I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted, just now, to be reminded of better, simpler times.

  It took almost an hour to dig out the trio of old photos of myself that I wanted to see again, slightly faded prints of me as a newly-graduated field agent. Young and fresh-faced. Crisp suit. Proud grin. I could still remember how I’d felt when they were taken, but the memory was a little dim now, fogged by the passing years and how far I’d come, the places the journey had took me to, the things I’d had to do.

  I’d thought I was doing right, but I hadn’t known a goddamn thing.

  12.

  Hartford, CT. 1997.

  Early Saturday morning, and the cold, clear day outside smelled like frost. My nerves were tingling slightly. Two blue-and-whites accompanied Naomi’s plain sedan across town to Travers’ place. Flashes streaked against the passing buildings from the single blue bubble strobe on our roof, the ‘Kojak light’ most unmarked cars carried.

  “What’s on the warrant?” I asked.

  “We can search his house, car, and person looking for anything pertinent to the investigation. This includes clothing, weapons, and personal effects, so we can look just about anywhere for what we need, given how easy all that kind of stuff is to hide. We haven't been able to get a warrant for a DNA sample, though.”

  “No?”

  “The judge said the evidence against him so far was too thin to allow it. But if there’s anything physical there, we should be okay to take it.”

  “It’s not like we’ve got any DNA to compare it to, I guess.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” she said.

  We cruised through nearly empty streets. A smattering of people out early, but not many. My breath misted the window.

  “How likely is it that Travers is going to give us trouble?”

  “Not very. He’s pretty much a career criminal so he should know the drill by now. My main worry is that he’ll see us coming and try ditching evidence. Hopefully he’ll still be in bed when we arrive.”

  I nodded. Unconsciously checked my gun in its shoulder rig. “Let’s hope so.”

  We pulled up outside an ugly brick apartment building in a row of identical structures. Dwellings on all four stories, the highest of them firmly embedded in the slope of the roof. Drapes mostly still shut. Half a dozen steps up to the front door, a second set leading down to the basement apartment. The scent of stale steam from a heating vent somewhere nearby.

  “Travers is on the first floor,” Naomi said.

  Through the front entrance and up the cheap carpet-tiled stairs inside, trailing in the wake of four uniformed cops. By the time I reached Travers’ door it had already been forced open and Naomi had started giving him orders in the hallway.

  “Mr Travers, I’m Detective Naomi Carson with Hartford PD and this is Special Agent Alex Rourke from the FBI. I have here a warrant to search these premises as well as your vehicle and personal effects. Your co-operation would be appreciated. Hopefully, this won’t take any longer than it needs to.”

  Travers ran his eyes over the paper in Naomi’s hand. He was a tough, beefy-looking guy with a mop of untidy black hair and a couple of tattoos on his right arm. Faded grey T-shirt and boxers. “Car keys are on the table in the living room. Car’s parked out back.” He moved to the side to allow the cops past and looked me up and down. “Never met a Feebie before,” he said. “Guess I must’ve done something special to have you guys after me.”

  I didn’t grace him with a reply, just pushed through and into the apartment proper, leaving one of the uniforms to babysit him. The place was gloomy and untidy. Curtains closed, heating on. Overly warm and with an acrid, musty smell that stuck in the back of my throat. A small kitchen off to the left with a smattering of dirty crockery. Ahead was the front room with a collection of ratty furniture, a TV, a coffee table covered in junk, and a couple of stacks of videos in one corner and shelves littered with magazines and a half dozen or so paperbacks in the other. Well-used ashtrays, an empty beer can, coffee mugs. The magazines were mostly old porno titles with names like Red Hot Cheerleaders and Down ‘N Dirty Amateurs. They looked well-thumbed.

  A pair of doors leading off the front room opened onto an equally untidy bedroom covered in discarded clothes and a cramped bathroom. Amongst the clutter on the bedroom floor I could see a pair of heavy brown suede shoes. A puffy dark blue jacket was hanging from the back of a chair. I pointed them out to Naomi wordlessly and continued to look around the apartment as the police team slowly began to sift through its contents. Out one of the back windows, I could see down into the parking lot at the rear where two more cops had just started
searching his grey Toyota Camry.

  Travers never seemed to lose his cool throughout the search, treating the whole thing with laid-back contempt and speaking as little as possible. Once we’d gone over the front room, he sat down and watched TV, doing his best to look like he was ignoring us until we were finished.

  We left with his shoes, jacket, several pairs of pants, and three hunting knives, all in plastic bags. We hadn’t found the ski mask or the blindfold and I knew, as I was sure Naomi did too, that unless we were very lucky, we didn’t have enough to arrest him. Unless we could find something that tied Travers or his clothing to one of the victims or the scenes, it’s all circumstantial.

  As the last cop filed out, I gave the place the eyeball one final time, then made for the door. Travers showed me out. “So long, Mr Feebie,” he said as I stepped into the hallway. He leaned closer and smiled, dropping his voice slightly. “It's kinda fun when you get to see the cops looking in all the wrong places. For their bad guys, I mean. You ever wonder if this sort of thing just encourages people? You know, when they know you’re not getting it right?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “That’s got to be a first.”

  “I’m thinking, what if, like, this guy you’re after might have heard about all this here, and be thinking that he can get away with it now, if you ain’t found nothing. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Hell, if he could see you guys he might get tempted by that pretty detective of yours. She's real cute. Doubt she'd want to go out for a drink or something? Heh.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You could ask.”

  “Could, but won't. Goodbye, Mr Travers.”

  He closed the door and left me outside to digest his words. The suggestion — unprovable and inadmissible — that we’d got the right guy, we just hadn’t found the evidence. And that he knew we couldn’t take him down. Or it might just have been an ex-con’s joke at the expense of law enforcement, a sly ‘fuck you’ to his old enemies.