The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

“Do you have any enemies, anyone with any reason to want to do this to you or to your property?” he said once he’d finished typing.

  “You mean anyone I could put a name to, anything like that? No, not recently.”

  “No one you’ve encountered through work? You’re a private detective, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but I can’t think of anyone specific we’ve worked on recently who would’ve gone as far as torching my home.”

  “How about from your FBI days?”

  “I can’t remember any arsonists. I suppose anything’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.” I shrugged. “Someone’s got a grudge against me, that’s for sure. And there’s a bunch of people who I suppose might have had something to do with this — old friends of a guy called Cody Williams, say, or the people trying to get him released from jail who’ve hassled me in the past few weeks. But I can’t think of anyone I know for sure would be a good make for a suspect.”

  Connell looked at me. “Oh, you’re the Cody Williams guy. Yeah, I saw that on the news, along with those idiots outside prison. Why didn’t you mention it before?”

  “I’ve worked unpopular cases plenty of times. And the kind of dipshits who call you up to hurl abuse at you are usually restricted to phoning because they’re not the sort to go any further — cowardice or fear of getting caught keeps them at a distance. None of the ones who called threatened to kill me, not from what I remember.”

  “Well, we’ll have a check on your phone records to see if we can find them and question them, just in case. What about these friends of Williams you mentioned — anyone in particular?”

  “No one obvious I can think of. He didn’t have many friends.”

  Maybe that was all it’d turn out to be, I reminded myself later as I lay on the scratchy sheets at the Jefferson Lodge. Some wacko tried to torch my place in revenge for me hassling an ‘innocent man’. Another decided to send me snippets from the home porno collection he’d tried hawking to half of California that happened to feature a girl who looked a lot like Holly Tynon. Cody latched onto the idea and tried to use it for leverage against me.

  A whole lot of coincidence. Believe that and I’d have to watch for people trying to sell me bridges.

  Another morning of cold and bitter rain. I picked up some grapes on the way to Beth Israel to check on Rob, not because he liked grapes, but because I knew he’d appreciate the humor in the tradition. I also left a message at the office so everyone knew what had happened and not to expect either of us in for the time being.

  Rob was awake when I reached his room. His eyes looking a little red and raw, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. And he was off the oxygen. Teresa was by his side, nursing a cup of coffee. From what I heard of their conversation when I came in, he’d be going home in an hour or so.

  “Hey, Alex,” he said. “Some night, huh?”

  “You could say that. I brought something to keep your strength up.” I dropped the grapes on the table next to him.

  “I was hoping for an apple Danish and a cappuccino.”

  “Hope all you like. This place must have a cafe. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I’ve smoked the whole of Cuba. But not bad, considering. Next time we’re messing around with a burning building, I’ll leave you to it. Your lungs take it a whole lot better than mine.”

  Teresa laughed. “You’d do it too, you chickenshit son of a bitch.”

  “I thought the injured hero was supposed to be treated with great sympathy and have every need pandered to.” Rob rolled his eyes. “I’m hurt. I don’t have to take that sort of thing. Ask him what he was doing in there.”

  I sat down on a spare chair and helped myself to a grape. “I see I needn’t have worried. I was trying to examine the scene, see if they were after anything. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t know they’d tossed the place.” A lie, but I was getting good at those. “Quit whining, you’re fine.”

  “Yeah, it’s nothing. I’ll be back at work tomorrow. How bad’s the damage to your apartment?”

  “I don’t know yet. I picked up the car from the lot on the way to the hotel last night, but the place was sealed off. The cops said the fire wasn’t too bad, so I might be lucky. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some spare clothes and stuff there later today. It’ll all reek of smoke, but hey.”

  “No chance they’ve caught who did it yet?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I suppose one of the neighbors might have seen something, but the cops aren’t likely to say much about it unless it leads somewhere.” I shrugged again. “I called work earlier, by the way. The kids know the situation and they can fill in any clients who get in touch. I said there was nothing to worry about.”

  “Real stupid you’d have looked if you got here to find there’d been complications and I’d died in the night,” he said, grinning. Teresa pursed her lips but kept quiet. “Anyway, I’m fine. They can hold the fort. I figure you want to keep on Holly Tynon.”

  “Yeah, if that’s okay with you.”

  Rob nodded. “Sure. Just be careful, Alex. Whether they meant to or not, whoever you’re looking for could’ve killed you last night. They’re not fucking around any more.”

  34.

  The place smelled like morning at Scout camp. Old smoke, damp firewood, traces of whatever food was on the fire the night before. Except that now those odors came from the drapes, the work surfaces, and the ceiling tiles in what remained of my kitchen. The acrid hit of burnt plastic. The wet dog undertone of carbonized wood. A complex mix of subtle flavors from food cooked off in the heat.

  The detective from the Fire Investigation Unit adjusted his hard hat and said, “The inspector said the structural damage is repairable. Place should be fine with a bit of work.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Must be weird, seeing it like this.”

  I nudged at the soot sludge by my feet. “I guess. But it’s only a place. It’s not like the family farm where I was born and raised has just gone up in smoke along with everything I own.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. He headed for the front room. “People take it all sorts of different ways. Knew a guy once drowned himself in the Charles River when his family’s home went up. I never did understand why — while they’d lost almost everything, they were staying with friends, and a big cheque from the insurance company showed up a couple of days later. People are strange.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, speaking of worldly possessions, let’s do what we came here for and see if anything’s missing.”

  The room looked like a crime scene and, I supposed, was. It didn’t feel like mine any more, like I was seeing it from a distance or looking at a photograph of the real thing.

  Papers — notes from the Williams file, other stuff I’d found out on the search for his accomplice — were scattered on the carpet, the boxes that had once held them upended on the couch. Shelves of CDs, books, and even a couple of stray house plants were strewn across the floor by the TV. My computer screen was face-down beneath the desk, with a further drift of CDs on and around it. A couple of them were snapped and I saw traces of chemical fuming where the cops presumably looked for finger or shoe prints on the broken plastic.

  “So,” the detective said, “does it look like there’s anything missing here? Valuables, personal items?”

  I scanned the debris. “I don’t think so. Not valuables, anyway. I don’t know if anything’s been taken from the files I had.”

  “Well, take a look through them once we’ve gone over the rest of the apartment. It might be that it was thieves and they found what they were looking for elsewhere.”

  He didn’t sound convinced by his own suggestion. I wasn't either. We checked the rest of the place anyway. The bedroom seemed to have been briefly searched by the intruder, but even though I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that there was something different, even allowing for the place being ransacked, there was nothing obvious missing. Even my gun was still in the drawer
where I’d left it. If it had been regular thieves, they’d been looking for something pretty obscure.

  Back in the front room I picked through the papers on the floor, rebuilding the files, checking their contents. Most of the original material seemed to be intact, if a little crumpled.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing missing that I can see.”

  “Nothing at all?” He looked baffled.

  “Not that I’ve noticed. If anything’s gone, it’s minor stuff.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing missing or different?”

  “Apart from my kitchen being a burned-out wreck and the apartment looking like a bomb site? No, I can’t see anything that’s changed.”

  And that was it. Next day I went to Worcester, alone, to call on Brian Tucker, the first of Williams’ old regulars who’d not been checked during the original investigation. Back in the day, he’d had a couple of visits from Cody and then switched to taking his car to Pete’s body shop directly. I wasn't hopeful of finding anything, but I had to try.

  Tucker lived in a fairly sizable house set above and some way back from the road. A pair of old elms overlooked the drive and cast a thin shadow on the sidewalk. Tucker’s 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass sat at the top of the driveway and looked newly-washed. I parked by the curb and headed up to his house.

  “Cody Williams?” Tucker said. “That guy off the news?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was the guy who used to fix my car? Seriously? Christ, I never knew it was him.”

  Through the door behind him, the walls were cream. He had a polished pine staircase. A couple of framed art prints in the hallway. The place smelled of air freshener and something cooking in the kitchen.

  “I’ve never even heard Pete talk about it,” Tucker said. His eyes were wide. “Not in all the time I’ve known him. Not any of his other regulars either. We’ve chatted about plenty of things over the years, but never that.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head. “No, never. It’s not the kind of thing you’d ever forget. I mean, the things that guy did...”

  “It’s a strange world, Mr Tucker. You never think you’d meet these people, but someone has to at some time.”

  “I suppose so. But still… I’m sorry, Mr Rourke, but I don’t think I’ll be much help to you. I just don’t know anything about him, certainly not after all this time.”

  He smiled ruefully. Tucker was maybe five eight, well-built without being too stocky, a few years older than me. He’d have been a fit for the guy in the footage, but then so would a lot of people. I seriously doubted he’d have been able to keep Holly here, in a neighborhood like this, and do those things to her without someone hearing or seeing something. If it was him, he had to have a second property somewhere.

  “Well, thanks anyway, Mr Tucker. If you do remember anything, my number’s on my card.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Next stop was an old farmhouse near Ayer in northern Massachusetts, home to Ben Joyce. A few straggly trees lined the dirt track running up the hill. Apart from that, it was empty pasture all around. The main building lurked just below the ridge line, grey stone with a battered wooden barn next to it. In between the two, I saw a burgundy station wagon. Either he’d gotten rid of the ’65 Impala he’d owned back when Cody worked for Drill Hall Collectors’ Autos, or it was in the barn.

  Joyce was peering at me through the window by the door as I climbed out of the car. He had a thin, gaunt face with wide, staring eyes. A flash of grey-white hair above them as he pulled away from the glass. I walked up and knocked on the door.

  For a moment I wondered if he was going to act like he was out and ignore me. Then I heard a board creak inside the house and the door opened a fraction, just wide enough to admit his grizzled face. Stale, unheated air drifted past him.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Mr Joyce? I’m a private detective. I was hoping you could give me a couple of minutes of your time to answer a few questions.”

  “Is this about Martha?”

  I raised an eyebrow, tried to stay open, friendly. “Who’s Martha?”

  “My ex-wife. This isn’t about her court case?”

  I continued to look politely blank.

  “Her drugs bust? You got some questions about it?” He wiped his nose. “Can’t help you. I haven’t spoken to her in months. Only found out about the arrest ‘cos her goddamn lawyer tried asking me for bail money. Told him she could go fuck herself.”

  “No, it’s not about that, Mr Joyce. It goes back a lot further than that. I understand you used to own a ‘65 Impala.”

  “Yeah, but I sold it, what, five or six years ago now,” he said. He still hadn’t opened the door any further. “It was the divorce. I needed the money to pay my attorney’s bills afterwards. Goddamn wife.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Never had the money to buy another one. So whatever happened to that car, it wasn’t my fault.”

  I tried a smile. “When you owned the Impala, though, you had a number of repairs and replacements carried out by someone from Drill Hall Collectors’ Autos.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Do you remember the guy who worked on your car?”

  Joyce went blank for a while, thinking. I watched his face carefully, watching for a lie. “Young kinda guy?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Don’t recall much about him, to be honest. Saw him a few times, but I can’t even remember his name.” It sounded like the truth. “We never talked about much. Just the car, that was about it. He might’ve asked about my job, maybe. But I ain’t sure.”

  Wasted journey. “Did he ever say anything about any friends, places he liked to visit, anything like that?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Well, thanks anyway. Before I go, could I ask a favor? Kinda long time on the road, and I was wondering if I could use your bathroom.”

  Joyce looked me up and down for a moment, eyeballing me suspiciously. “Sure,” he said, and hauled open the door. The hallway beyond was covered in threadbare lilac carpet and lined with dusty prints of watercolor landscapes. It was also plastered — no bare wood panelling here. “First door on the right, under the stairs.”

  I drove away from Joyce’s farmhouse knowing that he wasn’t the one. The house was wrong, his build was wrong. He was cranky, but that was no crime.

  I was back in my hotel room in Boston when I got a text message and the day started looking like it might not have been a total bust after all: Mr rourke. Have info 4 u. Come 2 house. Must talk. Urgent. –brian t

  I tried calling Tucker back but got no answer at all, so I had no clue what was so urgent or so secret that he couldn’t have told me before I left his place earlier. And equally I had no choice but to head back to Worcester to find out. Cutting through traffic on the myriad of feeder roads leading to the main highway, I spotted a silver Crown Victoria that seemed to be mirroring my moves. I sped up, he sped up. I made a couple of experimental turns, he followed. The roads were busy and there were a lot of people heading for the I-90 the same way I was, but everything about this car screamed ‘tail’.

  The last intersection before the interstate, I hung a right and almost immediately turned again, this time into a strip mall parking lot. The Crown Vic followed and pulled up just shy of the lot entrance.

  When I got out and strode back towards it, the driver gunned the engine and roars off down the street. I didn’t get a look at him.

  It was obvious I’d been heading for the highway, so I figured he might try watching for me on the I-90. I avoided it and took minor routes as far as Natick. There, I pulled into a gas station within sight of the I-90 off-ramp and tried once more to call Tucker. The phone rang, but again there was no answer. I left him a message anyway, telling him I was on my way. Paid for gas and a fresh pack of cigarettes, then I hit the road again. The whole meeting thing was worrying me. Tucker’s silence, the sudden change in his tune. Whoever that wa
s in the Crown Vic. I was glad I had my Colt with me. If this was someone’s idea of a trap, I was damned sure I wasn't going to be caught easily.

  Worcester was a web of lights in the blackness. The traffic in the city centre thinned and faded as I turned east, away from the loop the highway cut through the heart of the sprawling town. No sign of the Crown Vic putting in a repeat appearance.

  Tucker’s street was quiet. Lights were on in most of the houses, but mine was the only vehicle on the road. A glow came from the lamp on Tucker’s porch, and the same from one of the ground floor windows. There was no sign of movement as I climbed out of the car. Above me, the bare trees rasped in the wind.

  The first sign that something was wrong came as I approached the front door. It was hanging maybe a half inch ajar. I wanted to reach for my gun, but this wasn’t my house and you didn’t walk in someplace you didn’t own, weapon out, unless you knew you’d need it. Instead, I slipped up to the door and listened hard.

  “You’ve got to help me, Doctor. You’ve got to get me out of this place!”

  “But Michael, we are helping you. You belong here. Don’t you remember?”

  “I’m not crazy! For God’s sake, man!”

  “You murdered your wife, Michael.”

  The TV. No other sounds. I nudged the door open further and called into the house. “Mr Tucker?”

  No answer. I pushed it in all the way. The bulb was dead in the hallway, but light spilled from the doorway into the front room.

  “You can’t keep me here! I don’t belong! I don’t!”

  “I’m sorry, Michael.”

  “I DIDN’T KILL HER! I couldn’t. Could I?”

  Brian Tucker lay on the carpet in a pool of blood. The beige walls of the lounge were spattered with crimson here and there, and there was a bloody handprint on the corner of the coffee table. No longer shiny in the light. No longer fresh. I checked quickly for a pulse, but Tucker was long gone and cold. A couple of stab wounds in his back, and I guessed more to his front.

  I had time to mutter “Jesus fucking Christ” before something hard hit me in the back of the neck like a cartoon anvil dropped from a rooftop and the floor crashed up to meet me.