The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  We were nursing bottles of beer in a desperately trendy bar called ‘Aqua’. Busy, but not full. The crowd was mostly identikit student types, indistinct in the spotlit gloom. Sugary spirit smell hung in the air. The music was just soft enough to hold a conversation. The choice of venue for a quiet evening drink came down to the place being within walking distance of both our homes, not its aesthetic qualities.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Alex. You’ve been talking to the guy for long enough to have some kind of handle on him. Do you think he was always planning for the business with that video? What’s the son of a bitch’s angle?”

  I swigged from the bottle. “To start with, before he’d seen the video, this was all supposed to be a big joke for Cody. One last chance to get at me by lying about what he did with the missing bodies. Dredging everything up again.”

  “He’d bother with that?”

  “That’s what he told me, and I’ve got no reason to doubt him. Not on this, anyway.”

  “And then what?”

  “He wasn’t expecting to see this video, or that it’d get sent to me out of the blue. But he sure as hell knew what it was about as soon as he saw it.”

  “You’re so sure he was lying to you before, that the Tynon girl is really alive?”

  “Yeah.” I thought back to the look on his face, each little twitch, each flash of his eyes. “Yeah, he was lying through his teeth, and he was enjoying it. That video changed his whole ballgame. Now he’s got a far bigger carrot to offer me, and still nothing to lose at all.”

  “The guy is dying.”

  “Yeah, and that puts him in a pretty unique bargaining position.”

  Rob watched a couple of girls taking their pool shots at the table at the far end of the bar. “So do you think you’ll be able to get him to talk now? Figure the guy won’t want to rat out whoever he gave the girl to, but none of them ever do.”

  “And he doesn’t want to either. I don’t know how to get to him, though.” Another swig. Concealing the half-truth behind the easy movement. Bury it, hide it.

  “Do you think he could give you this guy, even if you do break him? It’s been a long time for him.”

  “Yeah, I think he knows exactly where Holly is.”

  “But he won’t tell you.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  One girl sunk the last ball and her partner began racking them up for a second game. “What’s going on between you and Williams, Alex?” Rob said, gesturing at me with his beer bottle.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. We’ve been friends for a long time. It’s pretty obvious the guy has a major problem with you, and it’s obvious he thinks he’s got something to gain by talking to you.”

  “I told you, one last joke at my expense. I’m the guy who put him away.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Which would explain a lot, but that’s a pretty major fixation. Way beyond what anyone would normally show, even a backwoods psycho like him. What’s he got against you, Alex?”

  I finished the rest of my beer and gestured for another round from the barman. “Williams was put away for killing Clinton Travers. He thinks I framed him for the murder.”

  “Did you?” Rob didn’t hesitate.

  17.

  Hartford, CT. 1998.

  It was a murky, unpleasant evening. An early nightfall and driving rain, and I was watching myself drive from Massachusetts to Hartford. That’s what it felt like: like I was detached, floating somewhere behind my own head. My hands were white on the steering wheel, and I knew that down there my mind, my other mind, was full of Naomi Carson and the leer on Clinton Travers’ face the last time I’d seen him.

  When I reached his house, I walked up the path in the rain, knocked twice on Travers’ door. More aware of my own actions, but still not wholly there. Still not sure exactly what I was planning to do.

  When Travers answered my knock, it was obvious he wasn’t sure what I was going to do either. We headed inside. I confronted him, told him I knew what he’d done to Naomi and that he was finished. He laughed in my face. Taunted me. Aiming for a harassment lawsuit, maybe; I didn’t know.

  I also didn’t know who threw the first punch, but I found myself laying into him. I was wearing gloves, but the blows still hurt my fists. Hurt him more. He got away from me, dived for a cupboard, came out with a gun in his hands. It hadn’t been there during the search; he must’ve picked it up since.

  I didn’t slow down. Grabbed him. Grabbed the pistol. He sprawled against the wall while I pointed his own gun at him.

  Travers brushed the blood coming from his bruised mouth with the back of his hand and said, clear as a bell, “What’re you going to do, Feebie? You can’t shoot me. You’re already in so much shit for this — you’re fucking toast, man.”

  My mind was blank as my finger tightened on the trigger. His eyes went wide, and then I felt the gun buck in my hand, saw the bullet punch a hole in his skull.

  Mechanically, still blank, I checked to make sure I’d left nothing at the house that could identify me, then left, back out into the rain, back to the car. Taking the gun with me.

  I was crossing the state line into Massachusetts when the reality of what had happened hit home, I snapped back to full awareness, and I started to think of what the hell I was going to do.

  18.

  Boston, MA. 2004.

  “Did you frame Williams?” Rob said again.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did.”

  19.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex.” Rob started to say something else, then stopped himself.

  “In my years with the Bureau, that was the one time I stepped over the line, Rob. And don’t tell me you’ve never had the same temptation, because we all do at some point.”

  “We don’t all act on them though, Alex. Jesus.”

  I took another mouthful from the bottle. The beer was cold and bitter. “I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it happened. And once you’ve crossed that line, you can’t take it all back.” Placed it back on the table. “I just did what I had to do.”

  Rob looked at me for a long while, measuring and reassessing me. Probably thinking back through all we’d done over the years. Judging me anew.

  “If we’d been able to build a case against either of them, I would never have snapped,” I said, trying to explain. “But we couldn’t, and I had one guy I knew was abducting and murdering little girls and another who was raping women right under our noses, including one of our own team, for fuck’s sake.”

  Rob kept staring at me and I knew he was playing me, the same way I’d played dozens of people in interrogations down the years. But I still couldn’t help myself. “You get caught up in these things,” I said. “I didn’t think we were going to be able to stop them, and if we did, how many more people would be attacked and killed in the meantime? I already knew they were both guilty as hell, and I still do.”

  Another swig of beer. “Fuck, Rob, you should hear the way Williams talks about those girls. He’s probably the nastiest piece of work I’ve ever had to deal with. I’m glad he’s inside and that he hasn’t had the chance to kill anyone else.”

  “Jesus,” he said again, this time to himself.

  “Have you ever seen a dead child, Rob? In person. Right there in front of you.”

  He shook his head. “No. Dead adults, sure.”

  “It’s not the same as a kid. You’ve got someone who’s never done a damn thing to anyone because they haven’t lived long enough. You’re looking at someone whose future, all those dreams of theirs and their family’s, will never come to be. It’s not just a person who’s been killed — it’s a person who’s never really been given the chance to live. It’s not the same at all. And when you’ve seen one you can imagine the others…”

  Rob stayed silent for a moment, then ordered us both another drink. “How’d you do it?”

  “I went to confront Travers and he pulled a gun on me. We fo
ught, I grabbed it off him. I shot him with it. I hadn’t gone there to kill him; it just happened that way.”

  “How’d you get Williams?”

  “When Williams was arrested for trying to abduct Nicole Ballard, I knew we’d get a warrant to search his house, so I made sure I had the gun with me when we went round there. I ‘found’ it under some old blankets in his closet. I already knew that odds were he didn’t have an alibi — Williams never did anything with other people outside work. The defense tried to argue that he had no motive to kill Travers, but even they couldn’t argue with the ballistics.”

  Rob raised an eyebrow. “That was enough?”

  “You don’t have to prove motive, Rob. The guy was a known scumbag already on the way to an attempted child abduction conviction and he had no excuse for how the gun came to be there. Except that ‘the cops put it there’.”

  “And everyone claims that.” His voice was oddly quiet.

  “Right. No one believes that story. Least not with just a public defender like he had.”

  “So at the trial you put forward the theory that he shot Travers so he couldn’t steal his limelight after Travers’ name was leaked to the media,” Rob said. "His attorney didn’t pull that to pieces in court?"

  I shrugged. “I got the impression he thought as little of Williams as I did. He made some effort to discredit the idea, but there’s enough accepted history of murder as a form of attention-seeking that he didn’t manage to sink it. The other theory we had for the prosecution was that Williams may have gone there to suggest to Travers that they team up, but that they’d argued and fought.”

  “Thank Christ you didn’t have to rely on that one.”

  “Yeah. But like I said, you don’t have to prove motive. It’s all in the physical evidence.”

  Rob shook his head. “Shit, Alex. I don’t know what to say. It’s no wonder he’s pissed at you.”

  “Trust me, I know that. I’ve carried the knowledge of what I did for seven years now. Damned near broke me completely.”

  “And he wants you to give it up in return for telling you the truth about what he did with those girls. Shit,” he said again. “What’re you going to do?”

  Holly Tynon’s mother looked up at me with her blank, cold eyes and told me her daughter was dead. Clinton Travers opened his mouth, blood trickling from his nose, and started to say something as I squeeze the trigger.

  I swallowed the rest of the beer and ordered another, still feeling nothing. “I’m going to hope something turns up on the analysis of the footage that can tell me where it was shot…”

  “You’re not going to confess?”

  “… Failing that, I’m going to hope whoever sent me the first sequence sends me more…”

  “So you’re not going to confess?”

  “… And I’m going to do anything else I can to trace its origin and find out what Williams really did with those girls.”

  “But you’re not going to do what he wants?”

  The eyes of a missing thirteen-year-old girl stared out at me from under the lank hair of a grown woman caught on grainy video. With it came the feeling of cold isolation and the sense of fate lost and locked away: the prison cell awaiting me if I did what Williams asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

  20.

  I spent an uncomfortable few hours at the jail next day trying to persuade Williams to talk to me. But he stuck to his guns and wouldn’t do anything more than drop vague hints that he knew what had happened to Holly, and maybe the others too. So I gave up with him and drove back to Boston to see what we could find in the footage.

  Grey clouds deepened to murky ocean blue-black as daylight faded over Laurel Street, and run-off sluicing from the guttering high above hammered against Sophie’s umbrella, falling around me in sheets. I was about to push the bell again when the intercom crackled into life.

  “Brandon? It’s Alex and Sophie.”

  “Hi,” the voice said, muffled and distorted. “Come on in.”

  The lock buzzed and we pushed through into an empty cream-colored hallway that smelled of plastic and damp. Past the stairwell and elevator was a row of numbered doors, one of which swung open as I rubbed the rain from my hair and Sophie shook out her umbrella.

  Brandon was a lanky kid somewhere over six foot tall, with another inch of sharply spiked black hair on top. He was wearing pale blue sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt with the slogan ‘Don’t Blame Me — I Voted For Kodos’ alongside a picture of the alien from The Simpsons on it.

  “Hey,” he said with a half-wave. “Sorry — wasn’t expecting you guys just yet. Halfway through eating dinner.”

  “Sorry,” Sophie said. “We tried to beat the rain by leaving early.”

  “Heh. Looks like that didn’t work out. It’s like God's taking a piss out there.”

  “That water you've got outside the front door did a fair bit of this,” I said as I passed into his apartment. “That’s got to be a real pain in the ass for you living here, walking through that every time there’s a shower.”

  “Broken guttering. I’ve been on to the manager about it, but he hasn’t fixed it yet.” Brandon let the door close, then led us through to the front room of the cramped studio apartment. “Sorry about the mess.”

  It wasn’t so bad. The bed was unmade and he had some stuff scattered around, but I could still see most of the carpet and nothing seemed to have evolved into a new life form or scuttled under the furniture at the sound of our approach. One wall was dominated by electronics — a stereo, stacks of CDs, a computer on with its screen powered-down, half a dozen peripheral devices and, tucked amid the bundle of papers on the desk, the edge of a laptop slipcase. A track from the Goldberg Variations played through the speakers, slow and eerie.

  Brandon scooped up a plate bearing a half-eaten pizza from the bed and sat in front of the computer. He gestured at the only other two chairs in the room and said, “Have a seat. Where’s this video you want me to look at?”

  I handed him a CD. “It’s the only file on there.”

  “What do you need?” He slotted it into the drive.

  “Anything you can pick out, detail-wise. The lighting’s bad, so there may be things you can find by brightening the background. Anything that’s distinctive, or anything that was buried by noise. Or anything that would suggest this film is actually a commercial release that someone’s using as a hoax.” The drive hummed into life as the computer read the disk. “And you’re okay with the content?”

  “Worse things get posted online every day. To borrow a quote: ‘I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white’.” Brandon shrugged and smiled. “Course I don’t generally try pulling it to pieces to see what I can find. But I still doubt there’s anything in it that’s worse than stuff I’ve already seen.”

  He copied the movie file onto his hard drive and opened up three different programs, scattering them around his desktop to work with each simultaneously. “By the way,” he said as he clicked ‘play’, “aren’t the Feds supposed to be doing this?”

  “They are. But I’d like to see the results first-hand, and it never hurts to get a second opinion. There’s not even any guarantee they’ll tell me what they find. They’re not under any obligation.”

  On screen, the camera slowly moved towards the girl hanging from the roof beam. She thrashed and bucked in total silence.

  “Standard MPEG-1 compression,” Brandon said, eyes fixed in front of him. “Doesn’t seem to be anything weird in its encoding. No sound at all. Either the recording was made on a camera with no sound pick-up — which seems unlikely, unless it was set to mute — or the entire audio layer was stripped out afterwards. In any case, it ain’t there.”

  “Is there any particular reason why they’d do that?”

  “No audio makes the file size smaller. If you wanted to stick this on the net, that’d make it easier to watch and download, saves bandwidth. It happens — porno samples, funny or nasty video clip
s on sites with a lot of traffic. There’s less reason to do that if it’s just one copy for email to you, unless they were worried about making it too large and having it bounce from your inbox.”

  “So it might be existing footage that some joker’s just pulled off the net?”

  “Could be,” Brandon said, clicking on one of his subsidiary programs. It started saving frames from the footage every few seconds, capturing each in a separate still image. “But if I didn’t want to be identified, I wouldn’t want any risk of my voice appearing on video. No names, nothing to give it away. Besides, I don’t recognize anything about this footage. Most of the ‘classic’ clips do the rounds of the big compilation sites. If someone’s grabbed it online, they found it somewhere obscure.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And she’s not a pro porn actress, that’s for sure.”

  “You know that many of them?”

  He shrugged. “Not my bag, this kind of thing, but we live in the internet age, you know what I mean.”

  The woman started crying, and the camera moved away, past the halogen lamp and into the darkness. Brandon checked the still images piling up in the window on the right of his screen.

  “I don’t know how much detail we’ll be able to pull out of these,” he said. “The footage is heavily compressed. You can see the edges of the blocks it’s broken up into quite clearly in some of these. Mosquitoes too.”

  “Which are?”

  “Speckling, distortion, a kind of blurring where you have very sharp edges between light and dark areas. Common problem.”

  “If anything had been changed digitally — like her face, for instance — could you tell from differences in that kind of distortion?”

  Brandon nodded. “Sure. I’ll resample some of these stills. Any changes in tone, color or level of distortion from anything that’s been spliced in should stick out pretty clearly.”