The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  “Alex,” Tanya Downes said, “I thought you should hear this from me.”

  “What?”

  “Cody Williams died a half hour ago.”

  29.

  On a cold, dreary morning, under gray skies heavy with promised rain, I stood on the turf by the side of a pauper’s grave, looking down at the simple wooden casket in front of me. The priest droned through a by-the-numbers eulogy, then followed it with the standard blessing for tradition’s sake. I was the lone mourner present, and the priest had never met his charge. Like the men lowering Cody Williams into the ground, he knew him only through the news, if at all.

  I wasn't even sure why I was there. I’d hated Cody, I was glad he’d spent the final years of his life in jail, and I was happy he was dead. But like or not, he’d been a part of my life, and he was gone. He had no family, no friends, no one who wanted to mark his passing apart from the FBI agent who’d framed him for murder because he couldn’t think of another way of stopping him. Not even the media were here — now he was dead, Cody was history. His burial meant nothing.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the priest said, and nodded at one of the guys on burial duty. “All yours, Terry.”

  The gravedigger glanced briefly at me, then began to shovel dirt into the hole. I looked down at the grave and wished Cody hadn’t held out on me until the end, wished he’d given up his accomplice, told me where to find Holly. My confession was no longer called for and my secret was safe for the time being. But how much suffering would Holly have been spared if I’d talked to him in those last hours? If I’d given him what he wanted?

  The world was a better place without him, but I couldn’t help thinking Cody might have gone a way to redeeming himself if he’d wanted to.

  “Goodbye, you batshit-crazy son of a bitch,” I said to empty air.

  As I picked my way between the burial markers, a thin, reedy drizzle began to fall like fog with gravity. If anyone watched me go, I didn’t care. Let them watch.

  “Is that Alex Rourke?” The voice was deep, the accent heavily Californian. A radio was playing in the background, tinny pop leaking over the receiver. “This is Nathan Sheffield from Hot Steel Productions in LA. You sent me some stills of a girl you were looking for.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “You might be in luck. I think I remember this one. Have you got the video these pics came from? Could you email it to me? I’ll know for sure if I can see the film.” He read off an address.

  “No problem.” I juggled the phone, pinning it between ear and shoulder, as I found the file and sent it to the guy. “Shouldn’t take too long,” I said.

  A minute or so later, he said, “Uh-huh. Got it.” Another couple of minutes passed. “Yeah, yeah. This is the one I’m thinking of. Knew it looked familiar.”

  “You must have a good memory,” I said, genuinely surprised.

  “It helps in the trade. I don’t want to end up paying for a scene I already own the rights to, and it’s always handy to know who the upcoming talent is.” I heard him tapping on a keyboard. “Let’s see, it would’ve been about six months ago, I think. Some guy out east sent me a CD with samples of his films, wanted to know if I’d be interest in buying his stuff for distribution.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Yes and no. There’s regular performers and smaller-scale operators whose work my company distributes, but I know most of them in person. But occasionally we get amateur submissions, mostly people looking to make a quick buck from their private home videos of them and their wives or girlfriends.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We don’t often take them — they’re usually too poor quality. This is more specialist stuff, but the roughly-filmed look works for some BDSM scenes.”

  “BDSM? I know S&M, but I’ve never heard of that one.”

  “Very similar. ‘Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism’. Not something I sell a lot of, but there’s a steady market for it. All net-based for me, not worth bundling onto DVD, as it’s not something I specialize in. Anyway, this guy sent me the samples he had and I decided to offer him a deal — standard amateur rate, nothing major. But I said before that I’d need to have all the paperwork straight to meet my USC 2257 requirements.”

  “Uh…”

  “Never heard of it?”

  “Not really my field.”

  Sheffield chuckled, deep and low. “No kidding. It’s a federal requirement for proof of identity and legal age, things like that, which I’d need to keep records of.”

  “Okay. Paperwork to stop people using underage girls in their films.”

  “That’s right.” He seemed to want to explain himself a little. “I run a strictly legitimate business, Mr Rourke. It’s an industry like any other, and everyone I work with has to follow the rules to the letter. No exceptions. I’m a professional.”

  “I never thought otherwise,” I said. “What did the guy give you for your records?”

  “Nothing. I never heard back from him. I figured either he couldn’t give me the documentation, or he got a better offer from someone else, or he had second thoughts about the whole thing. It happens.”

  “Or he wasn’t on the level with what he was offering.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t suppose his face was anywhere in the sample material he sent?”

  “No, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t. From what I remember, everything was the same kind of POV shot used in the film you sent me. No way of telling who’s behind the camera.”

  “You don’t still have the CD he sent you?”

  “Again, sorry, I don’t. It’s policy never to hang on to anything from an unverified source. The last thing I need is to find out some girl in a video someone’s sent me is underage and end up in court myself for possessing child pornography. That CD will have been thrown out long ago,” Sheffield said. “Aha, here it is. Contact information. You got a pen?”

  “Yeah. What’ve you got?”

  “No phone number. Postal address is a PO Box in Berwick, Massachusetts.” He rattled off the details, such as they were.

  “What name did the guy give you?”

  “Richard Goddard, according to this. Whether it was his real name or not, I couldn’t say. He claimed the girl’s name was Violet, but those are almost always fake.”

  “I thought the guys who made porn all went for pseudonyms like ‘Max Woody’.”

  He laughed loudly. “Yeah, some do, Mr Rourke. It’s kinda silly, but some parts of our market expect it. Not every male performer or producer does, though. It’s much more common with the girls.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The puns are even worse for them.”

  “Do you still have his email address?”

  “Sure. It’s goddardproductions@hotmail.com.”

  I knew I couldn’t ask the Hotmail administrators for the user information on that account, not without a warrant. Said, “No actual email from the guy, though.”

  “That’s right. He sent his stuff by post. That must just have been with his details. Shame, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had a problem with nuisance email a couple of months ago. Someone feeding me all this shit about the evils of sleaze, threats, all kinda sad. Turned out to be a woman somewhere in the Midwest. But to find where to send the nasty ‘stop doing this or we’ll take you to court’ letter, we had to find out who it was.”

  “You traced her?”

  “Yeah, got an expert in to help us out. Turns out the email’s header includes a number which corresponds to the place it was sent from. Like, for this Goddard guy, it could show where he was accessing Hotmail from. You just check who owns the number online.”

  “Like a reverse phone number lookup.”

  “Yeah,” Sheffield said. “Just like that. We were lucky with out moralist freak — she was with a small company which helped identify her when we explained that she was harassing us.”

  �
�Did she stop?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “I hear she wrote a pretty rude letter to our lawyers, but that was the last we heard of her.”

  “And I’d need a message from Goddard to try the same thing on him.”

  “That’s right. If I had one myself I’d pass it on to you, help you find the guy.”

  I smiled. “That’s okay. If he gets in touch with you again, or you get any similar footage from a similar source, could you call me, Mr Sheffield? I’d appreciate that.”

  “Nath,” he said. “And yeah, that’s no problem at all. Glad to be a help. Good luck, Mr Rourke.”

  Berwick Post Office was a blocky modern building with plate glass framed in blue steel running most of the way along its frontage, presumably there to give passers-by a good look inside and leave them with the impression that the US Postal Service could be trusted with their packages. It also afforded me a far better view of the interior than I’d normally have expected on a surveillance job. From the tables outside a coffee shop across the street I could see the three rows of locker-like boxes on the right-hand side. They were separate from the main section of the building, and it was easy to distinguish between those come to check their boxes and customers on other business. I had direct line of sight to PO Box 14, the address used by the would-be porn peddler. I had no idea whether it was still in use by the same guy; all I could do was watch and hope. I perched across the street each day with a newspaper or a paperback, and hoped he checked the box fairly regularly. Closing time meant the freedom to leave my position. A cheap motel room, take-out or bar food, trashy cable TV, warm beer.

  I did this for three days, and the staff were starting to get slightly uncomfortable with the stranger who’d taken up residence at one of their tables, all day, every day. One waitress struck up light conversation whenever she passed and the place was quiet. Her name was Chantel and she was a dropout from U-Mass who was trying to become a graphic designer. My name was Andy Hames and I was a writer waiting for inspiration. It was the best excuse I could come up with at the time. I hoped she hadn’t seen any of the news reports on Williams or my trips to the jail. If she knew I was bullshitting, she didn’t show it.

  During this time I watched dozens of people entering and leaving the post office. Men, women. All ages, all types. Box 14 remained unopened. Then, just when I was thinking I’d have to get a laptop from somewhere to keep up my pretense, my prayers were answered and my hopes dashed at the same time.

  Light traffic in the mid-morning sunshine and another uneventful day. Chantel was doing her rounds and my brief conversation with her, and the boredom of three blank days spent staring at the far side of the street, distracted me more than it should have. By the time my eyes and attention had wandered back to the post office, there was someone standing by the open door to Box 14.

  30.

  A man, height and build about average ordinary. Dark, puffy jacket, baseball cap pulled down low. Sunglasses.

  Three days’ worth of caffeine jolted through my system and I nearly vaulted out of my chair in surprise. I just about held back the urge; I didn’t want to draw attention to myself before I knew who this guy was and where he’d come from. Nevertheless, I sat bolt upright, one hand clenched on the arm of my chair, as I watched him leaf through a few pieces of accumulated mail before closing the box again.

  There were a good ten or eleven cars in the bays in front of the post office. No way to tell which was his. My own was round the corner. Close, but I didn’t know, now, if it was close enough.

  The guy walked out through the sliding doors and back into the sun, keeping his face shaded by his cap. I guessed he was somewhere into his fifties, which fitted with what I knew, senior enough to order Cody around back when they were snatching girls. Apart from that I couldn’t make out any more about him. I held my coffee up at mouth level, hoping this’d disguise the fact that I was staring at him.

  He unlocked a dark blue station wagon, fairly old, and opened the door. Glanced up as he was about to drop inside, and saw me. That momentary pause as I felt the eyes behind the sunglasses meet mine, that hesitation in his movements as everything tensed up.

  Fight or flight.

  I dropped a twenty on the table for Chantel and snapped out of my seat.

  He vanished into the station wagon and started the engine with a roar. I ran for my car as he whipped out of the bay in reverse and hit the gas. As it passed me I caught a flash of blonde hair, a glimpse of a woman’s face from the passenger seat. Eyes glinted once in the sun, the same eyes, the same face as in the footage.

  Holly’s eyes, Holly’s face.

  She looked at me in surprise and for a second everything else slowed and froze, the world closing to a tunnel between the two of us. She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something and then everything rushed back inwards and the station wagon accelerated away.

  I tried to get the plate, but it was impossible while running and I only got the first couple of numbers before it grew too small to see.

  By the time I reached my car and pulled away in pursuit, I guessed he had maybe a mile on me. But he was heading west out of town, and the main highway didn’t have many turns between here and the state line. He was heading into upstate New York, almost certainly.

  Unless it was just a trick to lead me away from his real home, of course.

  I burned up the highway. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Flashed past regular traffic like the Devil was after me. The roadside faded to a green-brown blur and my eyes strained from reaching towards the horizon. Despair slowly set in as the miles rolled past and I couldn’t find him. Took a turning somewhere, hid the car back in town while he was out of sight, I didn’t know. But he wasn’t out here. I’d lost him.

  And Holly.

  All the time I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and talking to Chantel, watching the guy inside the post office, she’d been in a car across the street. At any point I could’ve saved her just by walking over and getting her out.

  She’d been there, right in front of me, and I’d done nothing. It might all have been over.

  But it wasn’t, and maybe she was in even more danger now the guy knew how close I’d come to him, and all I could do was go back to Boston knowing I’d blown my main lead.

  It was probably too late, and he’d probably be long gone, but I wanted to do something, anything, that felt like I was still tight on Goddard’s tail before I went back to fruitlessly tracing anyone involved in the Williams case with Rob.

  I fired up my computer and thought for a moment. What to send the guy to elicit a response from him? I didn’t know if a ruse might work, and if so, what sort, or if he’d respond better to another nasty shock to match seeing me in Berwick. In the end, I tried both. First, I set myself up with a free email account and sent him a message claiming to be from a newly-established porn producer interested in his material. Then I opened my regular personal email and started typing.

  From: Alex Rourke

  To: goddardproductions@hotmail.com

  Subject: Holly Tynon

  Message:

  I’m coming for you.

  31.

  The first couple of cops from Providence PD who’d been involved with the search for Holly we tried were no use. One had quit the force to settle auto accident claims for an insurance firm. One had made detective. Neither remembered anything.

  The next name on our list was the one I knew best. I hadn’t seen Detective Frank Hall since I washed my hands of Cody Williams. His home was a basement apartment in downtown Providence, well away from the city’s commercial and college districts. The building was a three-story brick structure that I guessed had last been renovated the best part of thirty years ago. The gutter lining the path to the front door was full of old cigarette butts, and a broken pram lay overturned on the straggly front lawn. Past the unlocked door, we followed cracked linoleum steps down into a narrow, fetid corridor splashed yellow by the overhead lamps.
The air smelled of old cooking and other people’s sweat.

  I could hear a TV playing from behind the door to apartment B when we went to knock. “Are you sure this is the place?” Rob said, hand poised over the woodwork.

  “I think so. Only one way to find out.”

  It took a while for Frank to answer the door, and when he did I wasn't even a hundred percent sure it was him. His hair was gone apart from straggly tufts that formed a rough belt starting just above his ears and running around the back of his head. His nose looked to have been broken and re-set slightly out of joint somewhere down the years since I’d last seen him, and his skin was blotchy and dry. He was wearing a grubby white T-shirt and a ragged black jogging top, both of them with holes at the armpits, and a pair of scuffed shorts. He was thin, worn-out.

  But the most striking thing about him was the smell. The sickly-sweet reek of cheap alcohol surrounded him like an invisible fog, made worse when he opened his mouth to say, in a voice gone scratchy and broken, “Yeah? Do I know you?”

  Rob looked to me for some indication of how to proceed. In all honesty, I wasn't entirely sure myself. “Hi, Frank,” I said. “Alex Rourke. Haven’t seen you in years.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Holly Tynon? The girl abducted not far from here.”

  Something stirred in his yellowing eyeballs. “Yeah, Rourke. Fed, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, I remember. C’mon in.”

  He left the door open and we followed him into a poky studio apartment lit by a naked bulb in the centre of the main room with the assistance of a couple of windows looking into the trash-spattered concrete trench that surrounded the building. A portable TV was showing a game show in one corner of the room, faced by a single sagging brown armchair. A matching couch squatted beneath the windows, half-covered by old newspaper and dirty laundry.