The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  “Maybe they have. Maybe it just hasn’t made it to print yet.”

  “And maybe they haven’t. Maybe it really is Holly.”

  “A scheme like this still won’t get him freed,” she said, tapping her fingers on the age-advanced printout. “We never charged him with the abductions of any of those girls. He wasn’t convicted of anything that involved them. You had him for two clear-cut crimes — the murder of Clinton Travers and the attempted abduction of Nicole Ballard. Not Tynon or the others.”

  I held my tongue for a moment, staying calm. “If that’s Holly in the film, we have to find out what happened to her. You know that the same as I do; if it is, she’s been gone seven years and we all just assumed she was dead. We could be sitting on a seven-year fuck-up and... Jesus. Maybe Williams sold her into the kiddie porno trade and she’s been underground ever since, and someone had this in his collection and thought we should see it without incriminating himself. Or maybe she simply ran away from home and this is just a home movie she made last year with her boyfriend that somehow found its way back to me. Doesn’t matter — we need to know. So do her family. If it’s not her, it’s not her. So be it.”

  “Okay. I’ll pass the film on for image analysis and we’ll see what, if anything, turns up. But I’m going to tell you now that it’ll just go into the regular work queue. I’m not going to ask for it to be prioritized.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mostly because I don’t believe it to be genuine. The odds of her being alive after all this time are very low even if we did make a mistake. Partly because I don’t think we’re likely to learn too much from it in any case. And even if it did turn out to be genuine, Tynon’s been alive for seven years after she disappeared and so I see no reason to suppose she’s going to be killed now.”

  “What?”

  “There’ll be plenty of other, more recent, cases where the need for analysis is far more urgent, Alex. You know that. They have to be given priority. Williams isn’t the only serial abductor or murderer in the world. This case doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This film will be examined, but it may take a while. In the meantime…”

  “Can you imagine the media frenzy that’ll result if this turns out to be real and we screwed up all that time ago? You can’t let this slide.”

  “In the meantime…”

  “Unless you don’t want anyone to think we botched the original investigation in case any of the shit sticks to you.”

  “In the meantime,” she said again, “I suggest you ask Williams for everything he can tell you about Tynon and determine whether there’s any chance she might still be alive.”

  I wasn't happy about it, but equally I knew I had no real choice but to accept her answers for the time being. What other options were there? “OK,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.” She sighed and the fight drained out of her.

  “It’s OK. It’s your call. Not mine.”

  “It is, but I shouldn’t be snapping like that. Blame it on the stress or something. Are you free later on, by the way? I just thought that if you were, there’s a new French place I’d like to try and I did say I’d take you out.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “How’s eight o’clock sound?”

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  I left Downes’ office with a copy of the age-advanced photo and a head trying to concoct quicker solutions than those likely to emerge from the Bureau. At least, that part of it that wasn’t dwelling on the unpleasant idea that Williams might be innocent of the crimes I’d assumed he’d committed since we first met.

  That part of it that wasn’t thinking of where those assumptions had taken me, and what might have been.

  And what was.

  15.

  Dinner with Tanya Downes was a slightly uncomfortable affair, despite the pleasant surroundings of the French restaurant near the Common. Like going to the funeral of a distant acquaintance, seeing all the other mourners and realizing they had a lot more invested in this than you.

  Over warm goat’s cheese salad, she told me how she was hoping to make SAC before too long, if she could get a couple of major cases under her belt and build a name for herself. Then keep climbing the ladder, maybe become the first ever black woman to make director of the Bureau. I nodded in all the right places and chased pine nuts around my plate with a fork.

  Over grilled swordfish with herb-laced polenta, she told me about her father, an accountant who’d died from lung cancer a couple of years previously. She told me how she hadn’t seen her mother in years, since her parents divorced. I kept nodding and briefly mentioned that my parents were both dead. I avoided going into details and concentrated on the last of the fish.

  Over caramel cranberry tart she told me how she’d always avoided settling down, raising a family, that sort of thing, to concentrate on the job, because she didn’t feel confident about managing both. I told her I’d been the same. She asked me how I was now. I told her it was still the same, but that the reasons had changed. She didn’t seem to know if I was joking or not.

  By the time we said goodnight, I was pretty sure I should never have agreed to the whole thing in the first place. I wasn’t interested, so why say yes? Because what else would I have done tonight? Hell.

  Next morning, I surprised Rob by going into the office. Nothing seemed to have changed much. A few more ‘in’ tray items had become ‘outs’. A few new ones had replaced them. My desk was still a mess. “What’s up, Alex?” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you back here for another few days to a week yet. I haven’t heard anything about you breaking that Williams guy.”

  “I found out yesterday that one of his victims could still be alive,” I said, dropping into a chair.

  Rob fell silent for a moment. Blinked once, twice. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “I wish I was.” As I said it, I wondered why. Would I really have preferred it if Holly had been killed all those years ago? Would that have been better than finding her alive now, after years of God-knows-what, and exposing my mistakes for what they were? Mercy for years of suffering, or a sense of guilt on my part?

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”

  “Who is it? Which girl?”

  “Holly Tynon,” I said.

  “So what happened to her? Where is she now?” Rob threw up his hands. “I mean, how the hell is she still alive?”

  “By the looks of things, she’s being held by someone else.”

  “After all this time?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So Williams was working with someone,” he said. “Must’ve been.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or at least passing girls on to someone else.”

  “Yeah. We screwed up.”

  “You didn’t have enough to get him on the murders anyway. That part of the investigation wasn’t getting much anyway.”

  “It was still our clusterfuck. No way we should be finding out about a surviving victim from a murder investigation that’s seven goddamn years old. And what that girl must’ve been through…”

  He shook his head. “Christ, Alex. I don’t know what to say to all this. Hell, is it even possible? Like you said, it’s been seven years.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first case like this, but it’d certainly be a rarity. So yeah, it’s possible.”

  “How likely is it that he knows what happened to her?”

  “Cody?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shrugged. “That, I don’t know. He hasn’t suggested anything like that before, so… I don’t know. I can’t even be sure that she really is still alive. I need to borrow Sophie to find out for certain.”

  Sophie Donehan, our college student part-time intern, glanced up from where she was sipping coffee and pretending to read something on her monitor like she wasn’t listening to everything we’d just said. We sometimes found ill-at-ease male students hanging around in t
he foyer downstairs, waiting to pick her up out of work. Rob made a point of terrorizing them. He had that sense of humor. She should have been doing an internship with the city police department or a similar body to help her studies, but she claimed to prefer the private sector. Her marks didn’t seem to have suffered.

  “I don’t know what you’d all do without me,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes were wide, though, and I guessed deep down she was pretty shocked by what she’d heard. “What do you need, Alex?”

  “Your photographer friend.”

  “Brandon?”

  “Yeah. How good is he with digital pictures, do you think?”

  “Taking or processing?”

  “Processing. Someone else already took these.”

  Sophie shrugged. “I know he does a lot of photo manipulation, so I guess he must know his stuff.”

  “Do you think he’d be willing to do some analysis work for me? Clean up images, sharpen them. Look for details that might have been missed. That sort of thing.”

  “I doubt he’ll object,” she said. “But is this, like, something the FBI should be doing? I mean, I don’t know what it is you want, but if you’re working with the Feds, and you’ve got something that needs looking at, shouldn’t you give it to them?”

  “Sophie…”

  “I’m not saying you wouldn’t, or that you haven’t. I just wouldn’t want anyone to kick down the door to Brandon’s apartment and arrest him for withholding evidence or something.”

  “Sophie,” I said again with a smile, “the FBI are already working on it as well, but this could do with being finished as soon as possible and I doubt they’re going to get results soon. It’s just image manipulation from a video clip I’ve already given them. That’s all.”

  “Okay. Are you going to pay him?”

  “Sure.” Rob coughed loudly in the background, but I ignored him. “This might take a bit of effort. And the subject matter isn’t great.”

  “This would be the could-be-alive-but-still-captive girl you were talking about,” she said very matter-of-factly. “How bad is it?”

  “Nothing gruesome. No blood.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s wrong with it then?”

  “It’s got some violence in it, and there’s what must’ve come after. But it’s more the fact that it could be genuine that’s unsettling. Of course, it might just be an S&M film that someone’s using for a joke.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask him.” She checked her watch. “I think he’s in a lecture right now. I’ll call him when he gets out. Is there anything specific you want?”

  I shook my head. “Anything that can be sharpened, magnified, picked out of the darkness. Any little detail at all. Tell him I can always meet up with him to go over what he can find out.”

  “No problem.” She changed the subject. “How’s it going at the jail?”

  “Ask me again after today. So far I’ve heard a lot of things I’d rather have missed and not much of any use. How Cody’ll react when I ask him about this film, I don’t know.”

  “Well, there isn’t much I can do with that apart from wishing you good luck. Talking to these people is much more your department than mine, Alex. Out of reach of us mere students. All I can do is offer moral support.”

  “Don’t knock it, I need it.”

  There were no protestors outside MCI-Ashworth, and for that I was glad. All the way there I’d been thinking about the person who’d emailed me the file and I’d found myself checking the rear-view mirror more than once. The last thing I would have wanted after that would be to be met by a pack of strangers, all staring at me.

  I had to be given special dispensation by the prison administration to take my laptop into the visiting room. I spent half an hour explaining the reasons why and waiting for them to check with the Bureau that I wasn't about to try smuggling anything to Cody.

  When I made it inside at last, Williams was slumped in his chair. He looked sick and tired, worse than yesterday, and gave me a long, washed-out stare before dropping his gaze to the table again. One claw-like hand draped around the drip stand by his side, which was rattling almost imperceptibly as his arm shook. His skin was pale and stretched paper-thin.

  “Morning, Cody,” I said, sitting down.

  “Agent Rourke.”

  “Have you had a chance to look at that map yet? Any details for me?”

  He sniffed and dropped the map in front of me. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I think I know how I got to some places. Maybe.”

  “I came out here for ‘maybe’? You’d be lucky to get me to answer my phone in the morning for ‘maybe’, much less come out to a dump like this to talk to someone like you. I need more than ‘maybe’, Cody. Or maybe I should give up on these little conversations and go home, and maybe you can go back to rotting inside.” I didn’t know if I meant ‘in prison’ or if I was referring to the cancer. Sentiment was the same either way.

  “Maybe’s all I’ve got, Agent Rourke. Take it or leave it. Maybe you need it more than I do.”

  I let that slide.

  “How about you?” Cody continued. “You been doing any thinking, Agent Rourke? Just maybe?”

  “I have, but not about what you’re talking about. I want you to tell me about Holly Tynon again.”

  This seemed to confuse him. “What about her? You want to know if I can tell you more about where I buried her?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Good. I already told you: ‘maybe’.”

  “You grabbed her while she was walking home.”

  “Right.”

  “You took her, what, back to that cabin of yours?”

  He paused. A guarded look for a brief moment. “Yeah.”

  “You kept her there for a few days.”

  “Uh-huh.” He still looked nervous.

  “Then you killed her, stuffed her body in a gym bag and buried her in some woods in a state park.”

  “Like I said.”

  “And you’re sure about that,” I said. “You’re not confusing her with one of the others? Not just making this up, telling me what you think I want to hear?”

  “Took that bitch, killed her, buried her in a bag.”

  “So maybe you can tell me who this is?” I opened the laptop, turned it round to face him. “Because she looks to me like Holly Tynon, years older. I could be wrong, of course. But I want to know for certain what you did with her when you abducted her. No fucking maybes with this, Cody.”

  Williams stayed perfectly still for a moment, watching the video play itself out. Slowly, ever so slowly, his mouth cracked into a smile. A wolfish look broke over his cracked lips.

  “Well now,” he said. “That does make things interesting. Where’d you get it?”

  “Turned up in my email yesterday. What did you do with the girl, Cody?”

  He chuckled fondly, or so it seemed. “Someone’s been watching the news. That’s real nice.”

  “Who is it in that film?”

  “What makes you think I’d know?” Carried on thinking, staring at the screen. The question was absentminded, softly-spoken.

  “You’re the only one who can say for sure what happened to Holly, Cody.”

  “Well, if that did happen to be her on this recording, and ‘maybe’ it is,” he said, looking up from the laptop, “then I certainly ain’t the only one. Maybe I never knew at all.”

  “Credit me with some sense. Even if all you did was pass her on to someone else, we both know it was you that abducted her in the first place. So stop dicking around and tell me, is that her in the video?”

  “And if it was, you and your FBI buddies’d have to go find her, right? I guess that would be pretty fucking tough. Not much to go on in that film. Can’t even see the guy she’s with. Shame. She don’t look good.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And if you know it’s her, you’d know who she’d be with and where we’d find them. Can we skip the fucking around, Cody? What do you want in exc
hange for the information?”

  Williams shook his head, stifled a cough. “Wrong question. I’m dead, one way or another. There’s nothing that’s gonna stop that, and so there ain’t much anyone can give me that would really matter. Not that them dickwads I’ve seen outside would know that. Nah, the only question you should be asking is what you’re willing to do to find that girl.”

  “No, the question I need an answer to before we go any further is whether that’s Holly or not, and whether I’ve got any reason to listen to your bullshit on this.”

  “Okay, Agent Rourke, I’ll give you this one for free. She’s changed, but I’d guess that was her. Surprised she lasted this long. I’ll level with you, Agent Rourke.”

  “Yeah?”

  “First off, I just wanted to fuck with you one last time. Y’know, give you the runaround, mess you around, fuck up your chances of finding them girls and make you look like a failure.”

  “Nice.”

  “It’s all I’ve got left to me. I’d go happy to my grave knowing how the papers would be calling you a failure and shit. That’d be great.”

  “I love you too, Cody.”

  “But this,” he said, ignoring me and pointing at the laptop. “This changes everything. I never expected this.”

  “So where is she? Who did you give her to?”

  “Well now, that ain’t going to be free.” Williams smiled, blowing a blast of fetid air over his crooked teeth. “How badly would you want to find her? How much can you sacrifice for her, eh? I’ve got nothing to lose here — I’m a dead man anyway. But what about you?”

  I folded my arms. “What do you want, Cody?”

  “I want you to tell your other Feds that I was set up. I want you to admit that you framed me for killing Clinton Travers.”

  I said nothing, just sat still, kept staring at him.

  “It’s your choice,” Williams said. “Nice easy one. You get to decide which is worth more to you — your career, or that girl’s life.”

  16.

  “So what’s Williams playing at?” Rob said. “What does he want out of all this?”