The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  The floor held my attention, though. Aside from a few well-worn paths — from bed, to chair, to kitchen, to bathroom — the place was carpeted with empty Colt 45 cans. There must have been hundreds of them. Here and there — mostly by the bed and chair — there were fresh cans in opened crates or six-packs.

  “Drink?” Frank said, dropping into his armchair.

  “Thanks, no,” Rob said, staring at the detritus. “Too early for me.”

  “Fair ‘nuff. Have a seat. So, how you been, Alex?”

  I joined Rob in trying to find a clear perch on the couch. Neither of us wanted to move anything if possible, just in case something worse lurked beneath. “I’m fine, Frank. Not in the FBI any more these days.”

  “Same here — quit the department.”

  “Yeah?” I said, trying not to make it sound like that was obvious from his surroundings. Trying to find a polite way of asking him what the hell had happened. He’d been a good cop last time we’d met. A decent man. The slide seemed to have been long and spectacular. “What made you quit?”

  “My wife, Tricia, left me.” He took a swig from the opened can next to his chair. Blinked once or twice, like he was trying not to cry. “Got a phone call at work one day, saying she was gone. Packed her stuff. Said she’d met someone else. Totally, well, y’know, floored me.” Another swig, a lopsided nod in our direction, but he didn’t meet our eyes. “I mean, I had work and all, and sometimes something would hit you, like the one we worked on about the girl. But never often, and I always treated Tricia right. Treated her real well. I loved that woman. I dunno. Came out of the blue. Divorce didn’t seem to matter much when that came around — pretty insignificant next to her leaving. And I, I dunno, I didn’t cope well.” He raised the beer can to illustrate his point, looked almost apologetic. “I haven’t coped well since.”

  “That’s rough, man,” Rob said. “Always happens when you least expect it. I know — I’ve been there.” Which I knew was bullshit, but he said it like he meant it, and Frank didn’t seem to pick up on the lie.

  “Thought about finishing it all, y’know? Bunch of times. Not like I’ve got much left. But I never tried it.” He sniffed and drained the rest of his beer. “She still sends me Christmas cards. Can you believe that? No idea where she is now.” He trailed off into silence, lost in thought or trying to force his emotions back down into the comforting morass of old alcohol and empty memory.

  “Frank, how much do you remember about Holly Tynon, and what we did when we were trying to find her?”

  “Plenty, sure.”

  “Do you remember anything or anyone strange — at the time or since then — connected with the case in any way? Something you might have noticed at the time, but which didn’t seem important back then?”

  He scratched his face with grimy nails. “Shit, Alex. I mean, it was all pretty strange. Thing like that makes people act crazy. Had people keep volunteering to search and stuff. Had people saying all kinds of things, like they’d seen her, or they knew where she was, and it was all bullshit. Didn’t deal with them myself, but I know we even had a few whackjobs saying they’d taken her, or they wanted to, or they were going to take more. Crazy stuff. It all got checked, I think, ‘cos you’ve got to, but they were nothing but freaks. More of them when the guy went to trial. Saying we should kill him for what he did, or that we were lyin’ bastards who’d got the wrong man. More crazy shit.” He shook his head. “Poor fucking girl.”

  “Did any of those people stand out, do you remember, Frank?” I said. “Any who seemed to be more knowledgeable than the others, or more vocal in what they were asking? Or any that were just plain creepier than the rest?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t deal with them, not myself. Just heard the stories from the others. Only time I saw any of them was outside the courthouse, and there was only a few of them. One guy gave me a flower.”

  “A flower?”

  “Yeah. Think he was nuts. Or strung out on something. Said something about God. Some religious vengeance kick. ‘God loves those who send sinners down to Hell’, or something. I don’t remember too clearly.” He sniffed again. “Was gonna say it’s sad when people get that way. But I guess that sounds kinda stupid coming from a mess like me.”

  I shrugged in a way I hope looked friendly. “True, though. Was he the only one you remember?”

  “Yeah. The rest would be in the files, I guess, from when we checked them out. But I don’t know if any of them were anything much. Apart from that, can’t think of anything else from that case. Poor fucking girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Poor fucking girl.” His head drooped a little and I guessed his mind was back wandering the fuzzy halls of remembrance again. I didn’t think we’d get much more from him. I glanced at Rob and stood to leave.

  “Well, thanks, Frank. I appreciate your help. We’d best be going.”

  “‘S okay,” he said, and clambered unsteadily out of his chair. “Whatever. Good to see you again. Old times.”

  “Yeah.” He showed us to the front door. “Take care of yourself, Frank.”

  “Sure,” he said, without any conviction at all. “You too.”

  We headed back down the stale corridor towards the stairs, watched most of the way by the shell of a man behind us. Out in the open air and away from the cloying atmosphere of the basement I puffed out my cheeks and said, “I don’t believe that.”

  “He certainly wasn’t what I expected. He a friend of yours back then?”

  “No. I knew him from the Tynon case, and he seemed like a good cop — handled the family with a lot of sensitivity, knew the job, and didn’t play the jurisdiction game once with us. A real professional.”

  I looked at the broken remains of the pram as we passed by. In the near distance, a group of four or five kids were taking it in turns to push each other down the road in a shopping cart. “He came up to see me during the trial. He wasn’t testifying or anything — as we couldn’t pin any of the abductions on Williams, we couldn’t use evidence from those cases — but he showed up on the day I started my testimony just to wish me luck and say that everyone from his department was rooting for us. I appreciated that.”

  “It’s a nice gesture.”

  “Yeah. He seemed pretty solid, plenty of confidence in himself. I can’t understand how he got like he is now.” I thought for a moment about what I’d just said. “Well, maybe I can understand it a little, just from my own situation. I know how hard it is to lose something that means so much to you. But even so...”

  Rob nodded and stayed quiet.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in the office, going through the mess of old interviews and statements from the case records. Every nutjob the cops had had to check out sounded like exactly that — nutjobs. There was nothing to suggest any of them actually knew a thing about the abductions. A few of them they never managed to trace, but none of them mentioned any true details that hadn’t been in the press, and most were plainly just totally wacko. One guy claimed to have already snatched a dozen girls and needed Holly to make his ‘perfect thirteen’ with which he could summon Satan to earth. Probably felt pretty damn stupid when the next girl went missing.

  “Nothing,” Rob said, closing the last of his stack. “Not a damn thing. The amount of crazy makes you weep for humanity.”

  I glanced out the windows at the darkened sky stained orange by the street lights. “It’s late. Let’s head for home.”

  “Fair enough. Drop me at your place. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  Boston was cloaked in damp blackness. Haloes surrounded every light, circles of hazy neon hovering against the night, angelic moths to each and every flame. Plenty of traffic, as always, but it was quiet, muted somehow.

  I swung into my resident’s parking space and killed the engine. Checked I had everything, and climbed out of the car. The air outside was cold and sharp.

  “Are you still going to be working with me tomorrow?” I said as Rob adjusted
his coat and plunged his hands into his pockets, out of the chill. “I didn’t notice what had come in at the office.”

  “Yeah, I should be. It still looked pretty quiet to me. Are you planning on trying to talk to Williams’ repeat customers?”

  “Next on the list, yeah, unless anything else comes up.”

  “Worth a try, isn’t it? Might get lucky — one of them could be the guy we’re looking for and we can go home heroes of the hour.”

  In my mind I heard journalists asking me why we didn’t find Holly seven years before, why we’d abandoned the search for her. I heard them asking why we’d been so sure Cody was the guy who’d taken her. I pictured the look on her parents’ faces as their daughter was returned to them, in God only knew what kind of mental state, seven years too late.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, anyway, see you tomorrow.” He stopped then, looking at my apartment. “Alex, your door’s open.”

  True enough, the door was hanging a couple of inches ajar. The lock looked bent out of shape. There was a dim glow coming from a couple of the windows. Unsteady, moving. Orange.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Rob said.

  Fire.

  32.

  I didn’t answer him, just ran up to the busted door. I could smell smoke through the gap, but I couldn’t feel any heat.

  “You’re not seriously going in there?”

  “Call 911,” I said, “tell them there was a break-in as well as a fire, so it looks like arson, and get the neighbors out of the building just in case.”

  Rob looked like he was considering arguing, but he didn’t try to stop me as I pushed through into the hallway. Smoke hung like thick fog up around the ceiling, but the air wasn’t too bad lower down. It was getting worse, though.

  The door to the front room was open, and I saw my notes and papers scattered on the floor. Anything that could have been opened, anything that could have been thrown around, had been. Nothing obvious stolen — the TV and stereo were still present, and although the monitor had been knocked over, my computer hadn’t moved. Nevertheless, the place had been trashed.

  I didn’t even try the kitchen — I could hear the hungry roar of flames in there from the hall and the smoke was at its thickest and blackest where it crept past the doorframe. The only extinguisher I owned was in there. Life was funny like that.

  I pulled the bottom of my shirt up, over my mouth and nose, and headed deeper into my home, hoping the gas wasn’t going to blow or the ceiling about to collapse. Into the bedroom, which had been tossed like the front room. I grabbed a couple of sentimental things I didn’t want to lose — a bunch of photos, a broken necklace — and stuffed them into my pockets. Then I got the hell away. By the time I returned to the hallway, my eyes were streaming and the smoke was too thick to see far. Up ahead, I heard uncontrollable coughing. Rob was leaning against the wall and looked ready to collapse.

  I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him outside, trying not to breathe in. When we reached the open air — fresh, clean, lovely open air — he started to breathe more easily, but it was pretty obvious he had lungs full of smoke.

  “Thought… you’d got… trapped…” he managed to gasp, laid out on the grass. “Went… in…”

  “Thanks, Rob. You’re an idiot, but you’re a friend. I was in the bedroom. The air was better there.” My throat felt like I’d inhaled ground glass and my eyes were still watering.

  He tried to answer, but gave up in favor of remaining conscious. I tried to make him as comfortable as possible, but apart from that there wasn’t much I could do. I checked to make sure the apartment’s gas had been killed at the meter and that the neighbors were all aware and out of the building. They gathered in the parking lot and on the grass. A few asked me about Rob.

  The magnitude, the reality of what had happened — or what might have happened — started to sink in while I waited for the ambulance and the fire department to show up. I’d been shot at before. I’d been punched. On the arrest of one fugitive while I was with the Atlanta field office I was even deliberately hit by a moving car. But my home had always been safe.

  Until now.

  The fire department arrived just ahead of the paramedics. I gave them a quick rundown on events, and they hauled ass inside the building to deal with the flames. Rob was stretchered away. The paramedics didn’t seem too worried by his condition; they had him on oxygen for smoke inhalation, nothing more. I called Teresa and let her know everything that happened before riding with Rob to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre.

  The ambulance blasted through the city streets, rattling with every crack in the concrete, every resurfaced crosswalk. The paramedic in the back offered me oxygen as well, but I didn’t feel too bad. I thought of the email I’d sent, trying to draw out Goddard. I saw flames gutting my home. I saw myself, lonely and exposed. And guilty. The haloes around the lights outside looked like hazy, burning eyes.

  33.

  “Your husband should be fine, Mrs Garrett,” the young-looking doctor in spotless whites said to Teresa. Rob had been away for tests and examination somewhere in the depths of the hospital for nearly an hour now, and I was keeping Teresa company in the waiting area. She looked tired and drawn, still wrapped tightly in a winter coat. Normally she was a bundle of energy with a sharp wit and a sharper tongue. Not now. “We’ll need to keep him here for observation, but there should be no lasting effects. He just needs oxygen and rest.”

  “When can I see him?”

  Her voice was strong and steady, but there was pleading in her eyes. I’d known Teresa for years, and I’d never seen her like this. But then I’d never seen anything happen to Rob before.

  “In theory, right now, I think. But he’ll probably be unconscious until the morning at least, so you might want to get some sleep.” He smiled. “Best not to stay up all night, only to nod off the moment he wakes up tomorrow. I’ll go find out what room he’s likely to be put in, and I’ll see what we can do to make it comfortable. You might have to make do with a couple of chairs and a blanket, though.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said. “That’s really good of you.”

  She watched him walk through the double swing doors, then turned to me and said, “Who did it, Alex? Who nearly killed my husband?”

  “I’m not sure, Teresa.”

  “You can guess, though.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I can. Cody Williams’ friend, the one who’s been holding Holly Tynon for the past seven years. At a guess, he wants me either scared or out of the way.”

  “You get him, Alex. You make sure he never does anything like this again. Eight years I’ve been married to Robin, and I’ve never had any reason to worry about him.” She lowered her eyes, looked away. “He could’ve been killed tonight, Alex. You both could. When you called me, I didn’t know what to think. I was so afraid it was… that you were trying not to worry me, that it was worse than you were saying.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know, I know. I just… you get him, okay, Alex? I never want to worry like that again.”

  The doctor waved Teresa in through the doors and she followed him out, hand brushing my shoulder in farewell as she went. I stood there for a moment, thinking about what she’d said. As I turned towards the hospital’s main entrance, a cop in a suit, badge hanging from his top pocket, made his way through the doors and headed in my direction.

  “Alex Rourke?” he said. “I’m Detective Jack Connell with Boston PD. We need to take a statement from you, to find out exactly what happened and what you saw at your apartment. Are you feeling up to that?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Feels like I’ve chain-smoked a couple of cartons of French cigarettes, but that’s the worst of it.”

  “In that case, if you could come with me to the station, that’d be appreciated. You want a lift or have you got a car?”

  “No, it’s back home.”

  Outside. The night smelled of snow and th
e long slide into winter. Further down the vehicle bay, beneath the harsh lights of the apron roof and the red and white glare of an ambulance’s emergency strobes, a team of paramedics rushed a gurney from the back of their vehicle and ran towards the doors to ER. A bag of plasma rattled above the body strapped to its surface. A neck brace and a shock of scruffy black hair. I caught a brief glimpse of the guy’s bloody face beneath the oxygen mask and he looked like Clinton Travers.

  “The Fire Department put out the blaze pretty quickly,” Connell said as we drove through the near-deserted streets. “The last I heard, they didn’t think the damage was too serious. If the structure’s still sound, you might be able to move back in once it’s been repaired. You got a place to stay tonight?”

  My attention snapped back from the streetlit blackness beyond the glass. I was tired, fatigue dropping onto my shoulders like lead snowfall. “I hadn’t thought about it. Should probably sort something out.”

  “You got any friends or family you could go to for a couple of days?”

  “No. Not this time of night, anyway.”

  Connell nodded. “There’s a Yellow Pages at the station. Make a call to a motel or something when we get there, find somewhere with a room.”

  “Thanks.”

  The D-4 District Station was a modern brick building, three stories, solid and well-built. An odd arched portico on one corner of the street gave the entryway a church-like appearance. It mirrored the towering form of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross opposite, illuminated by spots in the ground at its feet. The lights in most of the station windows were still on, the cold blue-white of fluorescents unfiltered by blinds or curtains.

  Down a short, echoing tiled corridor to an open-plan squad room. Connell found a copy of the Yellow Pages and got me a coffee while I got a hotel room for the night. Then I told him what he needed to know about me, and everything Rob and I had found when we reached my apartment. The place turned over. The busted lock.