The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  Sophie was in the kitchenette, nursing a mug of coffee. “Hey, Alex,” she said. “I had a look at the recording while I was waiting. It’s much worse than the first one, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is. I hope that’s as bad as they get. And I hope we find the guy soon.”

  Brandon handed me a drink and sat down in front of the computer. “I don’t know how much help this is going to be,” he said. “Same as the last one, there’s not much.”

  “Show me what you’ve got.”

  “Sure. Look, I’m sorry it took me a while longer to work this time.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “Had a bunch of other stuff to deal with. Boyfriend trouble, a break-up to get through.”

  “Really, it’s no problem. Just glad for the help.”

  Shots of Holly caught in freeze frame filled the screen. Stills grabbed from the footage. Mouth open, mid-scream. Body straining against the restraints as the blows rained down on her. Some had been magnified, some recolored or retouched, all in an attempt to bring out smaller details.

  “The coding is exactly the same as the first segment,” Brandon said. “And again, the audio has been stripped out. But it’s not from the same recording as the first one.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The resolution’s different. And the color balances have changed as well. While it could be that he altered settings on the camera to adjust for different lighting when he moved rooms, I doubt it. More likely this is a separate recording.”

  “And you’re certain it’s another room?”

  He nodded. “From the direction the floorboards run, and from changes in the floor-to-ceiling height. And like I said, there's the lighting as well — probably more than one source, and at lower intensity than in the first segment.”

  “That’s interesting, but it doesn’t tell us much,” Sophie said.

  Brandon shrugged. “No, true enough. But it’s a little more detail. I’ve also been able to estimate your guy at around five-seven to six foot tall. And he has short hair. Well, I suppose it could be long, but if so it’s tied back. And he doesn’t wear glasses.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

  “Remember what I said about the light sources being different?” He switched pictures. “Look at this. When he changes position, you can see a faint shadow on the wall behind the bed.”

  He was right. Image-enhanced, magnified and with the light levels changed to accentuate the darker patch, there was a clear shadow of the guy. Blocky in the low resolution, but distinct. Medium build at a guess, and I agreed with Brandon about the hair.

  Sophie frowned. “Won’t the distance from the lamp to the guy make a difference to the size of the shadow? How can you tell how big he is?”

  “I showed it to one of my old roommates. You can also see the two posts at the foot of the bed in the shadow. Beds come in pretty standard sizes, so you can guess how far apart they are in reality and compare that to how far apart they are in the shadow. Then you know how big the guy is in perspective compared to his shadow. It’s rough, but sounded pretty sensible to me.”

  “Nice work,” I said. “Damn nice work.”

  Brandon grinned a little sheepishly. “Apparently, the light is probably around nine feet from the foot of the bed. So the room’s at least fifteen feet across. Of course, if it’s a wall light that’s casting the shadow, the room’s exactly fifteen feet across.” He shrugged. “Again, not very useful until you’re actually standing in it and then, hey, you got everything you need anyway, but you wanted to know as much as possible.”

  “Well, at least if I find the place and fancy doing a home makeover while I’m there I’ll know what amount of carpet to bring with me. Does the guy have any other identifying features you could find?”

  “Nothing,” Brandon said. “His hand’s in shot a few times, but I couldn’t get any detail out of it that we didn’t already know. Nothing distinctive there that I could see at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “You’re not going to be able to get the guy from this video. Sorry.”

  28.

  The ugly weather that had plagued Massachusetts all fall was in full force as Rob and I drove south to catch up with Williams’ old associates. Oily black clouds lashed everything beneath them with iron-hard needles of water. The incessant hammering on the roof of the car was like ball bearings shaking in a steel drum. Mid-morning, and like the rest of the traffic we’d had to turn our headlights on just to be seen in the downpour. It didn’t look like easing, either.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have stayed in the office this morning?” I said.

  “Look at it this way, if something comes in around town it’ll be someone else who has to handle it. Let them get soaked.”

  “We might not come out of the arrangement any better looking at this.”

  “Hell, we’ll be in a car half the time. Might even get coffee off one of these people.” He ran his hand through his hair. “And if it’s still like this by tonight, you can give me a ride home and I won’t have to walk it. This way’s a damn sight better all round.”

  “If you say so.”

  “As it is I’m gonna have to check the attic space when I get in. Pretty sure we’ve got a leak somewhere on the roof.”

  An eighteen-wheeler roared past, heading back to Boston, and the windshield temporarily fogged over with a million flecks of grit-laced spray.

  “Teresa’s on at me to talk to the neighbors about it. She reckons it might have happened when they were doing some work up there last month. Not that it makes any difference.” He smiled grimly. “Hey, maybe we’ll get lucky. One of these guys might have become a roofer and we could persuade him to fix it for me while we’re here. You think they do calls to Boston?”

  “Threaten to set Teresa on them and they’d come out to New York.”

  “Point.”

  The smaller towns we’ve passed through, empty and locked away behind the curtain of rain, began to merge with the outskirts of Fall River as the highway crossed the dull grey expanse of Taunton River. Before long, we were passing through the town’s New England mix of old and new buildings and Rob was checking the street map in front of him.

  Waiting at a stoplight, I glanced down the road to the right and, through the streaks of water on the glass, saw a guy in workman’s overalls bundling a young girl into the back of a white van. I yanked the window down as quickly as possible, ready to jump out of the car. The man was loading decorating materials — paint, tools and some sort of tarp — into his van. Nothing more.

  “What is it?” Rob said as I wound the window up again.

  “Nothing. Thought I recognized someone, that’s all.”

  “Light’s green, Alex.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I slipped into gear and pulled away, glancing at the van as we crossed the intersection. The workman had closed the rear doors and was scurrying around to clamber in out of the wet.

  Drill Hall Collectors’ Autos was an old building of crumbling brick bordered on two sides by a concrete forecourt spattered black here and there with old oil stains. An engraved slab of pitted marble halfway to the roof read ‘Drill Hall — 1914’ without giving any clue as to who it had been a drill hall for, or when it had ceased to serve its original purpose. A couple of ribbon windows so covered in grime that they appeared an opaque yellow looked out on the street. The trunk of an aging brown Mercedes protruded from the huge warehouse-style main doors, half-concealed by tattered foot-wide strips of industrial plastic, there to keep the worst of the weather out.

  We parked on the forecourt. Inside the body shop, an old guy with scruffy white hair and a bristling mustache, wearing dark blue overalls smeared in oil and engine grease, was swigging coffee and chatting with another man, who I took to be the owner of the car. Maybe a few years older than me, short brown hair, in a thick fleece coat and sturdy boots. The hood had been popped and both of them were staring into its recesses as they chatt
ed.

  The car owner saw us enter and said, “Well, I’d better get going, Pete. My ride home should be here soon and I might as well pick up some groceries before that.”

  “Sure thing, Jim,” the old man said. “I’ll give you a call when it’s ready. All depends on whether it needs a new gasket or not.”

  “No problem. Take it easy.” With one further glance at the two of us, the owner stepped through the plastic strips and out into the rain.

  Pete waved us over and got a refill from the battered coffee machine in the corner of one of the workbenches. “What can I do for you guys?” he said.

  “Mr Marshall? My name’s Alex Rourke and this Robin Garrett. I was wondering if we could talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “I know who you are, Mr Rourke. I recognized you from the TV news. So I guess you want to talk to me about Cody Williams.”

  “That’s right, yeah.”

  Pete nodded. “Figures. You guys want coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  He looked over at the machine, then yelled into the small office in the far corner of the room, “Hey Joey! Wash a couple of cups and bring them out here, would ya.”

  A moment later, a lanky young guy emerged with a couple of coffee mugs still dripping with tap water.

  “So what do you want to know?” Pete said once his employee had vanished into the office again. “Been years since it all happened, but once you know what the guy working for you did, the whole thing sticks in your mind.”

  “We’ve read over your original statement back from the time of Cody’s arrest,” I said. “But there’s some questions that were never asked back then, or if they were, they were only touched on briefly. Can you remember who Cody would have been friends with?”

  Pete puffed out his cheeks. I sipped my coffee. Not bad. “Well,” he said, “I don’t remember him having much in the way of friends. I suppose you could count me and the other people who worked here back then. Bob Hawkins, Mark Hine and Leila Alford. Now it’s mostly just Joey, although Leila still does twenty hours a week. Haven’t seen either of the other two in years, though.”

  I looked across at Rob, who nodded. We’d already got those names on our list. “How about people who would have visited here regularly — neighbors, suppliers, people like that? Anyone who would have known him from that kind of contact.”

  “Well, we’ve got a bunch of different suppliers. I don’t remember any of their people being especially friendly with Cody. In fact, I doubt he would have been here half the times they showed up, not if he was out on a delivery.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Rob scribbling in his notebook. “What about regular customers?” I said. “The people he would have seen more than once on deliveries and repairs.”

  “Well, that’s the thing — if the job’s done right, the car’s fixed and he wouldn’t see the same customer again, not for a long time. He only worked here for just over a year, and I’d be surprised if he saw any of them more than twice. I suppose if there’d been one particular problem car — which does happen now and then — he might have done a bunch of call-outs for it. I’ll check for you.”

  Pete headed into the office and I heard the metallic rattling of a filing cabinet drawer opening.

  “I’m not hopeful,” Rob said, keeping his voice low. “If there’d been anyone obvious, I think old Pete would’ve remembered straight off.”

  “We might get lucky.”

  “We might, but don’t bet the farm on it. Could be Pete himself.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “His build’s wrong. He’s not the guy in the video.”

  I finished my coffee as the old man returned from the tiny office with a large, heavily worn and clearly well-thumbed ledger-style notebook in one hand. He shook his head as he flipped it open and started running his finger down the entries inside.

  “This is the work book that covers most of the time Cody was here,” he said. “As far as I can see, I don’t think there was anyone he dealt with more than once or twice. We had… uh… let’s see, a 1967 ‘Cuda needed four visits to get it fixed properly, but Mark handled that. Apart from that, I can’t see any repeat addresses worth noting. We had a bunch of regulars in for servicing, minor repairs, but like I said, I doubt Cody would even have been here for a few of them.”

  He handed the book to me. The writing inside was cramped and spidery, and faded with time, but it was readable. “You can borrow that if you want,” he said. “I don’t have much need for it unless someone wants to audit me and check a real long way back.”

  I handed him a business card. “Thanks, Mr Marshall. Give me a call if you need it for anything and we’ll get it back to you.”

  “Any time. If that son of a bitch did do all them things, least I can do is help you guys with whatever you need.”

  Back in the car, Rob said, “So where now?”

  “Hine was the one that moved to...”

  “San Diego, if the background check was right.”

  “Okay, so no point worrying about him at the moment. And as he’s moved cross-country, I wouldn’t make him for Cody’s accomplice anyway. Shifting Holly quietly... I don’t see it. Let’s try the other two co-workers, then take a look at Cody’s house, and his neighbors. Hopefully, some of them lived there back when he did.”

  Bob Hawkins was out when we called on him, and while Leila Alford was pleasant and open with us, she couldn’t add anything, just confirmed what Pete had told us.

  Williams’ old house looked even worse now than it had when I first saw it all those years ago. The boxy front yard was full of yellowing weeds running almost to waist height. One of the front windows was boarded up. A handful of roof tiles stuck out of the gutter where they’d slid off the pitch. A weather-beaten sign for ‘Rainbow Realty’ proclaimed that the place was for sale, but I doubt it was attracting many buyers.

  “Was it always this nice?” Rob said.

  “No, not always. It doesn’t have Cody Williams inside it any more, and that’s a serious improvement. Let’s talk to the neighbors.”

  “You don’t want to go poking around in there? I know how much you like run-down buildings.”

  I smiled faintly. “Yeah, but this one was picked over inch-by-inch by the crime scene team back when we arrested him. If there was any evidence there they missed, it’s probably been destroyed by whoever’s lived here for the past seven years.”

  All the first neighbor could tell us was that he moved in long after Williams went to jail, and that Cody’s house had been bought by an elderly couple who lived there until they died a year ago.

  The neighbor on the other side of the property was a little more helpful. “Yeah, I lived here back then,” he said. “Used to work for a printing company not far from here. Retired now, of course.”

  “Do you remember much about Cody Williams? What was he like as a neighbor?”

  The old man scratched his head. “Well, I didn’t see much of him. Kept himself to himself, and with the two of us working I hardly saw him.”

  “Did anyone ever visit him?”

  “No, no. Never saw anyone, not that stayed anyway. But he was always going out, though. Must’ve had somewhere to go, because he’d always be heading off in his truck not long after he’d come back from work. And at weekends. Now I wonder, of course. Knowing what he was doing. Probably spent all that time looking for those poor kids to take.”

  I glanced at Rob. “And you never knew where he went? He didn’t say anything at all, not even in passing?”

  “No, no. And I didn’t see any reason to pry. Man may have been going to tap-dancing lessons for all I knew.”

  We thanked him and made our excuses. On the way back to the car, I said, “Either he was meeting with someone or he had somewhere else he used to go on a regular basis.”

  “How about where he stashed the girls? Didn’t he say something about a place by Lake Stevenson?”

  “Could be. But from the way he described it, there was
n’t anything there he had to prepare in advance. Why spend all that time in an empty hut? No,” I said, “my money would be on his accomplice, and stalking the girls. Find out what the other guy likes, and then try to track one down for him.”

  “It still doesn’t bring us any closer to finding him, though.”

  “True. Let’s try some of Williams’ customers.”

  The few we’d been able to trace and who were in when we called weren’t able to add anything to our knowledge of events. Some didn’t remember Williams at all, and those that did only recalled him in terms of the time they met a murderer, a story to be told to drinking buddies and spouses, the details long since warped by years of internal Chinese whispers. None of them felt like a good make for Williams’ partner, and I didn’t get the impression that any of them were lying. There were still a few names left on the list, but I wasn't optimistic.

  When I dropped Rob off at his house back in Boston, he leaned in through the open car door and said, “So where do you want to go from here, Alex? Start with the original investigators tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I reckon so. When I get home, I’ll go over the work book we got from the body shop just in case there’s anything interesting there. But failing that, yeah, let’s try the cops.”

  “Hope one of them has something we can go on, because otherwise we’re damn short on leads.”

  “Yeah, I know. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “Sure. Goodnight, Alex.”

  An hour going over the work book back home, and I had a couple of names and addresses scribbled down. The first was a guy Cody visited twice to carry out small repairs and replacements. After that, the customer switched to coming down to the shop himself, and carried on doing so for a few years after Cody’s arrest. The second client looked to have moved house during Cody’s tenure, so his address changed for the last two of four separate visits Cody made to his home. I guessed this change in details is why no one noticed him before. He didn’t seem to have used Drill Hall Collectors’ Autos since the arrest, either.

  I was skimming the book again just in case I’d missed anything when the phone rang.