The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  Don’t judge yet, I told myself. We could get lucky with the clothes.

  In the car, I told Naomi, “We need to keep him under surveillance. Twenty-four hours a day. Constant watch. When he makes a mistake, I don’t want us to miss it.”

  We didn’t get lucky with the clothes. There were no traces from any of the victims or the crime scenes, even on the shoes. They’d all been cleaned regularly. The surveillance fared no better. Travers seemed to anticipate that everything he did would be watched and made a point of doing very little. He didn’t even break the speed limit or park somewhere he shouldn’t have — nothing even remotely illegal.

  And then someone leaked his name to the press, and Clinton Travers was splashed all over the papers as the suspect questioned over the case. The whole thing turned into a goddamn mess, with the department chasing its tail trying to find out who leaked it without giving the media even more to chew on.

  Travers seemed to enjoy it. His shopping habits seemed designed to provoke the cops. He checked out the knives in a couple of specialist hunters' places. He restocked on condoms. He even went looking for ski masks at sporting goods stores.

  But he did nothing. At all.

  The rapes stopped completely. The papers eventually put forward a number of wild theories, none of which seemed likely. To me, it was obvious that Travers was our guy and that he was smart enough not to risk being caught. Every day that passed, the investigation dried up a little more and I grew more frustrated at the waiting game we were being forced to play.

  After a month of that, I was recalled to Quantico and my regular duties. Naomi and I went out for a last drink and she finally made good on her promise to take me to The Slaughterhouse, even though we didn’t have anything to celebrate.

  After that, she sent me occasional updates, but in reality everyone was simply waiting for Travers to make the next move. There were no other suspects. No one even close to being such a good fit. Surveillance continued for a good while, and he did nothing. Neither the police brass nor my own superiors were especially pleased with the lack of a break, but I thought both understood why we were stymied. We’d stopped the attacks, but we couldn’t nail the guy behind them. Not yet.

  By the time the end of September rolled around and thirteen-year-old Marie Austen vanished from the streets of Taunton, Clinton Travers was nothing more than a nasty, nagging sore at the back of my mind. Something rancid, the knowledge that a prize son of a bitch was walking around free, that surfaced late at night when I tried to sleep. Cody Williams, a man whose guilt I was equally sure of — although I had very little actual concrete information on him — was a far more immediate concern. We’d still been unable to pin anything on him for sure and with the number of missing kids standing at six, I was getting more and more desperate to stop him before we lost any more. The local press was screaming for a successful end to the case, and the Bureau’s hierarchy and cops from the three involved states were only slightly less vocal. I could barely face phone conversations with the victims’ parents any more, keeping them informed of our progress, such as it is.

  Marie Austen was a bright, pretty young girl from a nice family. That's all I could remember about her, apart from the photo in her file. Too many victims and I found the details started to blur, to become one. Fading to interchangeable names, faces. ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,’ as Stalin is supposed to have said. Right sentiment, but maybe the wrong scale, Joe.

  Marie was now lying buried in an unmarked grave somewhere, a broken testament to her abductor’s perversion, and I hadn’t managed to do anything to stop it happening. That I was starting to grow numb about these deaths only added to the sense of defeat.

  The phone call I received from Detective Sergeant Ed Frost from Hartford PD a few days after Marie’s abduction was, then, an even worse kick in the teeth than it would have been otherwise.

  “Agent Rourke, I know you’re busy with other things, but I figured you’d want to know, seeing as you worked on this case with us.”

  “Know what?”

  “Naomi Carson was attacked last night. She’s, well... she’s not in a good way. We’re doing everything we can, though. It looks like the same guy, so right now we’re combing the scene, and she’s given us what information she could. It’s not much different to the other attacks, but we’re going to go over every goddamn thing we can if it means we’ll get something that’ll give us Travers.”

  “What about the surveillance on the guy? What the fuck happened to that?”

  “Agent Rourke.” He paused, sounded uncomfortable, almost apologetic. “It’s been six months. We had to stop the watch on Travers.”

  “Had to? What, you got a bunch of other multiple goddamn rapists to worry about?”

  “The department couldn’t justify keeping it going without results. Naomi had done some occasional checks on him, but that was it.”

  I could barely hear myself over the pounding of the blood surging through my arteries. “That surveillance kept him from doing anything. That’s a goddamn result. Even if we couldn’t arrest the guy, at least it stopped him attacking anyone else.”

  “Look, I agree with you. I wish we could’ve kept it going, but we don’t have that level of resources. No one does.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I wish to God we had maintained it, given what’s happened to Detective Carson. That asshole won’t get away with it. No goddamn way. After the wait we gave him, he might be cracking.”

  “Some chance.”

  “It’s true. He left a note for us. Hopefully he’s starting to get cocky, and that means he’ll make mistakes. We’re going to get the son of a bitch.”

  I had real trouble stopping my teeth grinding together with rage. “What did the note say?”

  “It’s hand-written. Says: ‘She was real cute, wasn’t she? Thanks for the introduction.’”

  Travers.

  13.

  Boston, MA. 2004.

  When I downloaded my emails that evening, one message stood out from the rest. ‘ATTN: Ex-Special Agent Rourke – Case Information’ was its subject line. The message came with a sizable attachment, and it looked like it had been run through an anonymizer.

  Return-Path: unknown@unknown.com

  Delivered-To: alex@r-garrett-assoc.com

  Received: from unknown by mail.r-garrett-assoc.com with SMTP

  Message-ID: none

  From: unknown@unknown.com

  To: alex@r-garrett-assoc.com

  Subject: ATTN: Ex-Special Agent Rourke – Case Information

  Message:

  I hope the attachment interests you.

  << h_t_seg2.mpg >>

  The file was an MPEG, a movie segment. As far as I was aware, there was no way of embedding a virus or other nasty in such a file. I double-clicked on the title. I figured it was probably another piece of random craziness from one of Williams’ supporters. Probably showing what’d happen to me if I didn’t leave him alone. I got ready to hit the delete key.

  But I never pushed it.

  The footage opened suddenly. No fade-in, no sense of an introduction. The cut was abrupt. A dark-walled room lit by a halogen bulb held in a professional lighting stand to the right of picture. I saw the edge of what looked like a window on the left; just a sliver, but enough to see the light leaking through the pane. The frame, like the walls, was bare wood, dark in color. The room was devoid of decoration. No pictures on the walls, no carpeting over the boards. It didn’t look as though it was regularly occupied.

  In the middle of the shot, maybe six feet from the window, was an iron-framed bed with a faded pale blue striped mattress on it, wedged against the far wall. No bedclothes. The frame had started to flake, losing lose some of its black paint to show grey beneath, stark in the halogen’s glare.

  A naked woman hung by her wrists from a roof beam running across the room. Steel handcuffs ran from one hand to the other, looping through an eyelet of metal cable lashed
around the beam. I could see that her pale skin had rubbed red and raw. Late teens or early twenties, at a guess. Thin, unhealthily so. Tousled blonde hair hanging down to below her shoulder blades. She swung round as the cable twisted. Her head was thrown back and she thrashed against her bonds.

  As the camera slowly moved forwards, the woman rotated fully to face the lens. All the time, she continued to struggle and kick, and now I could see that her mouth was open and there must have been no sound with the footage because she was plainly screaming.

  She saw the cameraman, drew breath, and started yelling even harder. As her eyes widened and she paused momentarily in her struggles, I got a mental flash of a photo on a mantelpiece eight years before. A girl’s face pinned like a butterfly under glass. There was a resemblance I couldn’t deny, with an immediacy that only strengthened the connection in my mind. It shouldn’t have been possible though.

  The woman in the footage was Holly Tynon.

  There were red welts, hard to say how fresh, in places on her skin. Most were only small, finger-sized smudges, but there were a couple of longer, thinner lines. Maybe a dozen marks in total, although with the picture quality and the lighting it was hard to say for sure.

  No question who was responsible for them, though. The camera moved in so close that the only parts of Holly — if it was Holly, and I still couldn’t quite believe it — in shot were her abdomen and upper thighs. The cameraman’s hand, reasonably strong but not huge or brutish, hairy forearm, no watch or tattoos, reached forward and roughly squeezed her bare buttock hard. Pinched the skin roughly, then slapped her and sent her spinning again. She kicked and bucked against this treatment, and the camera shook suddenly, lurching forwards and to one side. It whipped back up in time to catch the man’s fist slamming into Holly’s gut. Her body quivered once, twice — winded and coughing, I guessed — and she stopped fighting.

  For a few moments, the camera held position, the man unmoving. He briefly panned up to Holly’s face. It was partially obscured by clumps of blonde hair, her eyes pinched shut, features hard to make out for sure. She seemed to be crying. Then the camera pulled away, keeping her in frame for as long as possible, until it lost her as the man moves past the halogen lamp.

  The sudden drop in light plunged the picture into blotchy shadow. I could see what might have been the edge of something like a table, light glinting on metal.

  A sense of movement, then we swung back quickly to Holly, stark white in the glare. She was looking up at the bonds holding her again, but was otherwise limp. Her head turned a little in the direction of the cameraman and her expression started to change.

  The footage ended as abruptly as it had begun. The counter at the bottom of my movie player read two minutes twenty-three seconds.

  14.

  I burned the file onto CD alongside the original email. No sense risking losing it if the power failed or the operating system wiped out. Then I played the footage again, pausing it at the moment the woman first seemed to see the cameraman. Probably the best shot there was of her face. I dug the picture of Holly out of the FBI file and held it up to the screen, side by side with the frozen features of the woman hanging from the beam. The low-res pixellated video image wasn’t as clear as I’d have liked. But I still saw the resemblance, even through the years that had passed between the two. The shape of her nose. The eyes and the eyebrows arched above them. I could see it, but I didn’t know if anyone else would. Her parents, maybe, but there was no way I’d ever show them the footage.

  I dialed Tanya’s number at the Boston field office and let it ring through to her voicemail. “Agent Downes, this is Alex Rourke. It’s, ah, nearly 9 PM. I’ve just received something that could be of major importance to the Williams case, but it’s going to need some kind of confirmation or analysis by the image lab. Please give me a call as soon as you get this message. Thanks.”

  Hung up and tried not to think of the possibilities. That it could be there was a chance more of the missing girls were alive somewhere. That Cody Williams might have been innocent. That I might have got the wrong man. Or that this was all just a highly unpleasant joke designed to make me think that way.

  When I eventually went to sleep, my dreams were full of strange images. Holly Tynon stared at me with Clinton Travers’ eyes while Cody beat her with the butt of an old 9mm pistol until she died with her face a bloody pulp. Then he turned the gun on himself, laughing hysterically as he pulled the trigger.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Agent Downes said when I told her about the email the next morning. “Have you got any idea where it came from?”

  “None. Anonymized message, blank sender information. No IP. It could’ve come from anywhere.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  “Bring it in,” she said. “I’ll take a look at it and we can decide where to go from there. If it looks like a fake, though, I’ll treat it as such.”

  “Sure.”

  Downes’ office was on the second floor of the FBI’s building in Boston. The Bureau occupied a chunk of the vast Center Plaza office complex in the city’s heart. A sweeping, curved building of white stone surrounded by a flat expanse of brick broken here and there by ornamental flowerbeds. Inside it was just like every other Bureau office everywhere, bland cubicle chic broken up only here and there by little individual touches — a photo frame, a postcard, a fluffy mascot stuck to the top of a computer screen. The latter, a lime green frog about the size of a grape, regarded me mournfully as I stood behind Downes while the video clip played.

  When it was finished, Downes did the same thing I had and compared a frozen still from the film with the photo of Holly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not convinced at all about this.”

  “Looks like the same person to me.”

  “It could be any blonde woman in that film.”

  “There’s a strong similarity there,” I said.

  “I’m not as sure as you.”

  “Look at the eyes.”

  She shook her head. “I suspect someone’s simply noticed that one of the snippets in their personal porno collection looks a little like one of the girls we’re looking for and has sent it to you as a sick joke. It’s not like the papers haven’t been full of this case.”

  “Could we do an age advancement on Holly’s photo for better comparison? That shouldn’t take long.”

  “Sure. We’d probably better.”

  She led me up one floor and along a maze of corridors interspersed with more open office space to a cubicle where a bespectacled woman in her forties was working on a report.

  “Janice,” Downes said. “Have you got a few minutes spare? I need a quick favor.”

  “What is it?” Janice glanced at me briefly, then back at Downes.

  “I need an age advancement done. It's a single photo which shouldn’t need very much detailed adjustment. Not yet, at least.”

  “Give me the photo.”

  Janice scanned Holly’s picture and brought it up on the screen. “How much advancement do you need?”

  “Seven years,” I said. “She’s thirteen in that photo.”

  “Keeping the same relative body size? Any significant weight gain or loss expected?”

  “No.”

  I watched as the face on the screen morphed, flowing like mercury, shifting and pooling into a new, older shape.

  “Hair?”

  “Longer. Down to shoulder length. Worn loose.”

  More changes on screen. Janice looked back at me. “There. Done.”

  The printer spooled off a hardcopy of the image. Looking at it, thinking back to the face on the film, I was even more sure that it was Holly in the footage. The thought shook me hard, reflecting as it did past mistakes and misjudgments that I wouldn’t easily live with if it were true.

  “I still don’t know, Alex,” Downes said, staring at the picture as we walked back through the corridors. “I don’t know at all.
”

  “It’s her.”

  “You might be looking too hard for something that’s not there.”

  “It’s her.”

  We returned to her office and she brought up the frozen still from the footage and compared the two directly. “The quality of this film is so low that I think it could be anyone there and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. And the chances of it really being the Tynon girl… well, you know just how unlikely it is that a child kidnap victim could possibly be alive after all this time.”

  “It still needs analyzing. We might be able to sharpen up the image to get a better look at the girl. Maybe even learn a few things about where it was shot.” I frowned. “And besides, even if the chances are small, you’ve got to follow this up.”

  “We got the guy, Alex. You know it and I know it. Once Cody was behind bars, there were no more disappearances. Three of his victims have already been found dead and he’s started to give you the locations of the remainder. Has he ever given you any reason to think some of the girls were kept alive?”

  I stayed quiet.

  “Exactly,” Downes said. “Even he hasn’t floated the possibility. I still say this is most likely to be the work of one of his supporters who saw the news reports and decided to try to make it look like he’s innocent. They dug around for an old piece of obscure pornography with a blonde woman who’d roughly fit Holly’s adult appearance and sent it to you to throw you. That’s all.”

  “If that was the case, why not send copies to the newspapers, along with a letter saying what it’s supposed to be? If they want Williams freed, they’d need media exposure for something like this.”