The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

  “That’s what I figured.”

  He looked at his watch. There wasn’t much more for him to do here at the moment. If he headed back to the unit soon and banged out the day’s paperwork, he could probably be home in time for dinner in front of Jeopardy! with Bonnie. She was terrible at Jeopardy!, and he suspected that she only watched it because he liked to, but he could live with that.

  “If I learn anything else,” Eleanor said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Thanks,” he said, though he doubted she would learn much else. He wasn’t sure it even mattered. The victims were dead. Wallace Barton was dead. Once they had identified the remains and notified next of kin, the rest was mostly paperwork and administrative tasks. Case nearly closed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Elaine Connors apparently didn’t like to waste time. The news stops for no man, she had told Jason when she’d called a little while ago on her way to Boston, and for a woman trying to make it in the news game, it won’t even slow down. Her interview with Ian Cobb and Jason was just two hours away now, scheduled for 10:00 a.m. It wouldn’t be broadcast live; Connors said they would tape it while another camera unit traveled around and shot video to supplement what was already available on the web. Then they would beam all the footage back to New York, where editing and tech wizards would turn it into a segment for the live taping of tonight’s episode of The Real Scoop. Connors, of course, would be on her way back to the Big Apple by early afternoon, well in time for tonight’s broadcast.

  As Jason was getting dressed, Sophie phoned to wish him luck. She hadn’t called for something so light and breezy in a long time. Usually it was to tell him that Max wasn’t feeling well so he’d have to cancel his visit with Jason, or to inform him that some bill was past due.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of wearing that black-and-white checked shirt you should have thrown out last millennium,” she said.

  He was wearing it at that moment, along with a pair of tan khakis that were a little loose in the waist, given the weight he’d lost this week. “Of course not.”

  “Good. Wear the burgundy shirt and Hermès tie we bought you in Chicago. Now, how about your pants? Anything but your tan khakis. Still have those gray pants?”

  “Already have them on.”

  “Perfect.” They said nothing for a moment before she added, “Well, good luck, Jason.”

  While Jason was eating breakfast a few minutes later, Ben called to add his own good-luck wishes. A little while later, as Jason was nearing the Taj Boston, the ritzy downtown hotel where the interview would take place, Howard called to do the same and to tell him that he had decided to hold an auction early next week for publishers.

  “You really think the story will stay that hot?” Jason asked.

  “With this television appearance, and maybe another few I’ll set up for you, it will. And don’t forget, Crackerjack was already a big story before you ended him. Killing a man almost every month for nearly a year, including a rich-kid rock-star wannabe? Painting their faces? And then you and the other guy not only escape, but you kill the bad guy? And you’re a crime writer, no less? That’s big stuff, Jason.”

  Howard reminded him that he should get to work on the book, and Jason said that he already had. He ended the call as he pulled up in front of the hotel, which sat at the end of fashionable Newbury Street. He turned his dented Camry over to a valet, a little self-consciously, and headed through the brass revolving door and into the glamorous hotel . . .

  . . . to meet the beautiful, famous Elaine Connors . . .

  . . . who would interview him for a national newsmagazine program.

  Incredible.

  And soon he would see Ian Cobb again, with whom he shared a unique bond. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel when they came face-to-face again. It had been only a few days since Jason had seen him, since their escape, but it felt like much longer. So much had happened. And Jason hadn’t been in a clear frame of mind at the time. He didn’t remember Cobb well at all. To him, the man was a voice on the other side of a wall, a body on top of the pile as they fought for their lives, and a face on the TV news. Jason was interested in meeting him under more normal circumstances—if one could call being interviewed for a national network show normal.

  He climbed half a dozen black-and-white marble stairs, crossed an elegant lobby, and pressed the elevator call button. When he reached the proper floor, he was met by a young woman holding a clipboard. She introduced herself as Karen, a production assistant, as she ushered him into an elegant suite, tastefully decorated in pale yellow and white. Three luxurious armchairs, upholstered in a rich gold-and-white floral pattern, were arranged in front of a fireplace. Three cameras on tripods faced the chairs from different angles.

  “This is where the interview will take place,” Karen said.

  Jason stepped over to one of several windows that looked out over the city. The skyline was impressive under a clear, blue, spectacular midmorning sky. And below, right across the street, lay the beautiful Boston Public Garden.

  She politely gave him a moment to take in the view, then said, “If you’ll come this way, Mr. Swike.”

  “Jason,” he said as they retraced their steps to a room they had passed when first entering the suite. Karen nudged open the door to a bedroom that had been temporarily converted to a makeup room. A man sat with his back to the door while another, tall and slender, stood before him, appraising him, dabbing at the man’s face here and there with a tiny makeup sponge.

  Karen directed Jason to a plush chair against a wall, where he sat. He looked at Ian Cobb’s profile as the makeup person worked on him.

  “Andy will be with you as soon as he finishes with Mr. Cobb,” Karen said. “In the meantime, can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?”

  “Water, please.”

  She smiled and left.

  “Still thirsty, huh?” Cobb asked, without turning his head.

  “Can’t seem to drink enough.”

  Karen returned with a cold bottle of Dasani. Seriously? It had to be Dasani? Jason set the bottle, unopened, on an end table beside him.

  Andy declared Cobb camera-ready and politely asked the men to switch places. They stood and, for a moment, regarded each other.

  Cobb was bigger than Jason had remembered—a few inches taller than Jason and probably thirty pounds heavier—but otherwise looked like he had in the television news stories Jason had seen. He didn’t seem to feel the same way about Jason, though, as he frowned and said, “I thought you were a redhead.”

  “Strawberry blond. Looks redder sometimes. In the right light or when it’s wet.”

  “Or sweaty, maybe.”

  “Uh . . . I guess.”

  “That’s how I remembered you. A redhead. But it’s still red, right? Strawberry blond is kind of red, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Cobb nodded again, his frown slowly disappearing. It was an odd moment, on the verge of becoming an uncomfortable one, before he gave a small smile and said, “Good to see you again.”

  “Yeah, you, too.” Jason smiled back and everything seemed normal enough now. He nodded toward the cast on Cobb’s arm. “You doing okay?”

  “Not that big a deal. A broken arm. A few ribs. I’m okay.”

  Andy cleared his throat discreetly and Jason slipped into the chair so the makeup man could get to work.

  “Well,” Jason said to Cobb, “I hope you don’t shrug it all off so easily during the interview. Elaine Connors is probably hoping for more drama than that. After all, it’s for prime time.”

  “I know.” Cobb shifted uneasily in his chair. He couldn’t look more uncomfortable if he were sitting on a thumbtack.

  “You ready for this, Ian?”

  “Not really. I don’t like all the attention.”

  “Me, either,” Jason said, knowing that it wasn’t true. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to do interviews one day that weren’t about his escape from a serial killer
but, rather, were about his latest in a string of bestselling novels. He wanted to see his name in movie credits. Based on the novel by Jason Swike.

  “If you don’t want attention,” Jason said, “why are you doing this interview?”

  “Because you are.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. We’re a team.”

  “A . . . team?”

  “Well, on this we were. That’s what I mean. We did . . . what we did . . . together. It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t give our story as a team.”

  For a moment, Jason wondered if Cobb had heard about the book deal, and the potential movie based on the book, and was annoyed that Jason was planning to tell their story alone. He hoped not.

  Karen’s voice came from the doorway behind Jason. “Ms. Connors will be here in five minutes. We’ll start taping in fifteen.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  To Jason, Elaine Connors looked nearly like he had expected, as he’d seen her countless times on The Real Scoop, except for the tiny lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, beneath her makeup, that weren’t visible on television. But she was undeniably attractive, her beauty likely enhanced by her fame. And she seemed to have developed the ability, probably through years of practice, to slip on a smile that seemed friendly and disarming and entirely genuine. There was a reason, after all, that audiences had eaten her up on The Real Scoop for more than a decade.

  They were seated in their chairs, Jason and Cobb side by side and Connors across from them. Technicians checked the cameras and adjusted the lighting. Karen approached and said, “We’ll start in two minutes, Elaine, if you think you’re ready.”

  Connors nodded and looked at Jason and Cobb. “How are you feeling? Not nervous, I hope.”

  “A little, I guess,” Cobb said.

  “I’m okay,” Jason said.

  “Well, you have nothing to worry about,” Connors said. “I’ll take care of you. Just try to relax, forget about the cameras, and let’s have a good conversation.” She graced them with a thousand-watt, million-dollar smile. “Ready to go?”

  She started by asking them general questions about their lives, alternating between them. Jason discussed his childhood a little, then his marriage to Sophie and their life with Max. Connors didn’t press about their current familial situation; perhaps someone’s research had convinced her not to. She didn’t broach the subject of Max’s Down syndrome, though Jason would have been fine if she had, but he was thankful she didn’t mention his blood disease. And she touched only briefly and very gently on the car accident that had tossed their lives into a shredder.

  As the interview progressed, Jason heard some of Ian Cobb’s life story, and it certainly hadn’t been a fairy tale. Three years ago his brother John had died in an automobile accident. In a terrible coincidence, five years before that his parents and youngest brother had also been in a car crash, one that killed his mother and brother and left his father in a vegetative state from which he hadn’t emerged.

  Holy hell, Jason thought. He knew all too well the devastation a car crash could visit on a family, but to suffer two of them . . .

  Mercifully, Connors spent little time on that part of Cobb’s life, moving quickly on to present day. Cobb said he owned and operated a plumbing business, which his father had started and which he had shared with his brother John until the latter’s death.

  “I’d like to talk about Wallace Barton a bit now, if that’s all right,” Connors said.

  Over the next half hour, she skillfully guided them through their respective stories. The last thing both men remembered was walking through virtually empty parking lots, late at night. Then . . . they woke up in Barton’s stable. No, they hadn’t known Barton before that, didn’t recall ever meeting or even seeing him.

  “We’ll add some stuff in here about Barton,” she said in a voice that was slightly less formal, less like that of a newscaster. Turning her “camera voice” back on, she said, “Jason, you were taken by Barton before Ian was. What was it like to wake up in an unfamiliar place, in a run-down stable, no less . . . and you were chained to the wall, weren’t you?”

  She paused, waiting for him to answer. And here’s where things got tricky, because he could remember very little of his ordeal in that stable. But if he broadcast that to the world, what editor in his right mind would pay him to write a book about it? And so much was riding on a book deal—the possibility of jump-starting a career that, only a week ago, had seemed permanently stalled; a movie deal or two; and, of course, the money being dangled in front of him and all the good it could do for his family.

  “Jason?” Connors said.

  He was now acutely aware of the presence of the cameras, and the heat of the lights on his face, and everyone looking at him, waiting for him to say something . . . anything.

  “Are you okay, Jason?” Connors asked. “Do you need to take a minute?”

  If he answered honestly, he could lose it all. And given that he’d quit his job yesterday, he’d be worse off than before this all started. No book deal. No movie deals. No money, not even the modest biweekly paycheck from Barker, unless he crawled back to the agency.

  “Maybe we should take five, everyone,” Connors said, and Jason thought he detected a hint of frustration, the first time she had projected anything but friendliness and professionalism.

  Sophie’s face floated into his mind. More specifically, her eyes, the way they looked at him when she first saw him after his escape, and when she told him he was a hero, and above all, the look in them when he told her that their financial problems were behind them, that she and Max would have all that they needed, that they would be able to afford the $200,000-per-year miracle drug that was Max’s best hope for a long and reasonably healthy life.

  Then Max’s sweet face replaced Sophie’s.

  What if he stretched the truth, embellished a bit—no more than he had to, just enough to get the job done? He didn’t have to worry about being caught in a lie. The only person who could contradict his version of much of what his time in that stable had been like was Wallace Barton, and he was dead. Would it be so wrong to lie a little? When he had a wife in a wheelchair and a son with expensive medical needs? He didn’t think so. And even if it was wrong, he thought he could live with it.

  “Sorry, everyone,” he finally said. “I zoned out for a second. I’m okay, though. No need for a break.”

  “Are you sure?” Connors asked, looking relieved.

  “Positive. Let’s keep going. Won’t happen again.”

  Connors smiled, and the tension that had begun to settle on the room like a winter blanket lifted.

  Jason was ready to lie.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “What was the question again?” Jason asked.

  Connors smiled. “What was it like to wake up in that stable? Chained to a wall?”

  “Right. Got it. Okay . . .”

  He tried to remember his confusion, anger, fear, and desperation. He did his best to paint a vivid and emotional picture for the camera. And when he couldn’t remember—which was often—he added a few brushstrokes from his imagination, filling in the empty white spaces with what he thought sounded plausible and, when he could manage it, dramatic.

  No, he didn’t know right away that he’d been taken by Crackerjack, but he figured it out soon enough. Correct, he was given no food and only a single bottle of water a day. Yes, Elaine, it was lonely and frightening.

  When she had wrung from him what she could, she covered similar ground with Cobb, though this part of the interview took much less time, given that his stay in the stable was far shorter than Jason’s. While he seemed to be doing his best to answer, he was clearly uncomfortable on camera and his responses tended to be brief and without much detail or color, so Connors seemed happy when they were able to move on.

  Finally, she turned to the meat of the interview. Up until now, they’d been noshing on hors d’oeuvres. It was time for the main course. She d
irected her first questions at Cobb, who was the only one of them unfortunate enough to find his way onto Crackerjack’s table. He described, in far less vivid detail than Connors probably would have liked, how he had woken up on a hard wooden table, his wrists and ankles bound to the table’s legs. Above him stood a man in a black mask.

  “That must have been terrifying,” Connors said.

  Cobb looked at her as though she were an idiot for stating something so obvious but had the good sense to reply simply, “It was.”

  Ignoring the look, Connors said, “Did he say anything to you?’

  “No.”

  “Is that when he painted your face?”

  “The butterflies? No, that was already done. Must have painted them before, while I was knocked out.”

  “I see. And what happened next?”

  “Well, he picked up a wooden mallet, looked pretty heavy . . . There was a table there with a few tools on it, hammers, mallets . . . blunt, heavy things like that . . .” He trailed off.

  “And then?” she prompted.

  He shrugged. “Then he raised the mallet and brought it down on my arm.” He raised his broken arm a little for the camera.

  “That must have been painful.”

  He threw her that look again but said only, “Sure was. I think I screamed. I must have, right?”

  Connors looked at Jason. “Did you hear any screaming?”

  That part, he remembered. “I did. It sounded . . . terrible. But Ian, what about . . .”

  “What?” Cobb asked.

  “What about . . . the whistling?”

  “Whistling?” Connors said, and she leaned forward slightly, eagerly, probably sensing something new here, virgin snow not yet trod upon by the media’s first responders.

  Cobb nodded, as if he’d just remembered it. “Right. Before he hit me he started whistling an old tune. That baseball song. I’m not sure exactly what it’s called.”

  “‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’” Jason said. It was another thing he was able to remember. He doubted he’d ever forget it.