The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

  The image cut to a twentysomething woman in a light pullover. Earbuds hung around her neck.

  “When I first saw him hanging there, I wanted to run away. But then I thought he might need help, you know, if he was still alive. So I got closer and saw that his eyes were open. But his face was purple. He was definitely dead. He was hanging there, and there was blood all down his face, and he had a . . . dent in his head or something. Like he’d smashed his head before hanging himself.”

  The woman on-screen was replaced by a well-coiffed reporter. This footage was shot at night, a bright light shining on the man’s face and throwing illumination onto the now-empty playground behind him.

  “For now, the authorities are withholding the victim’s identity. Reporting live from Tewksbury, Massachusetts, I’m Christopher Rollins, Fox News.”

  Jason sat up.

  A man with his head caved in.

  In Tewksbury.

  Where Cobb had visited a plumbing job yesterday.

  Is it possible that . . .

  He told himself to slow the hell down. This couldn’t be the first murder ever committed in Tewksbury.

  But Cobb just happened to be there yesterday.

  Okay, sure, Cobb was there, but so were tens of thousands of other people. And Cobb has a broken arm, for God’s sake.

  Something Ben had said a few hours ago floated to the surface of his mind. It was something Jason had also read in numerous books while doing research for the villain in his first novel . . .

  Most serial killers don’t stop killing until they’re in prison or dead.

  If Cobb is Crackerjack . . . he’s going to kill again. He’s going to kill again, because that’s what serial killers do.

  Was he somewhere in the dark night even now, hunting again? Hell, was he watching Jason’s apartment at that very moment? But no, why would he come after Jason now? He’d already had Jason as a captive; he could have killed him then, if that was what he wanted. But if Cobb really was Crackerjack, then . . .

  He thought of the families of all the victims, who might have found some small measure of peace upon hearing of Wallace Barton’s death, a peace that would be shattered when they learned that the murderer of their loved ones still lived and breathed.

  In his savings account sat $200,000 given to him by a grieving father, money he’d have no choice but to return.

  He thought of the book deal and the movie deals and how nothing had been agreed upon yet, no contracts signed so far, and likely wouldn’t be if he hadn’t actually killed Crackerjack. After all, no one wanted to pay him for the story of his escape. No, it was his escape plus his killing of the bad guy that people wanted to hear.

  He thought about what it would mean to his family if all those financial opportunities disappeared. No potentially lifesaving miracle drug for Max. No customized van for Sophie. No financially secure future.

  He thought of the way Sophie had looked at him since all of this began, since he had come home a hero. He didn’t want her to stop looking at him that way. But how could she not? He wasn’t the hero the media had made him out to be. And he wasn’t his family’s savior. He was the same man he’d been two weeks ago, only now he was unemployed. He was the same man he’d been the night of their car accident. To her, he was still whatever she believed him to be on that rain-slicked road.

  But he was more than that, too, because he was also a liar. A self-aggrandizing, glory-seeking liar who had gone on national television and told a tall tale about his life-and-death, hand-to-hand battle with a serial killer . . . a story that, now that he thought of it, had conveniently been fed to him—in dramatically embellished form—by Ian Cobb, who just might be the killer himself. He didn’t remember tackling Barton to the ground, the two of them fighting for the hammer. He remembered only Cobb and Barton landing on him, and Barton lying there while Cobb thrashed around above him and screamed for Jason to hit him with the hammer . . . which he did. He killed Wallace Barton. Who maybe . . . and this thought occurred to him only at that moment . . . was nothing more than another of Crackerjack’s victims. Like Jason was. But what if . . .

  He tried to remember whether Barton had actually moved when he was on top of Jason. Had he been conscious? Maybe he was already dead, he thought with faint hope. Maybe Cobb had already killed him. Or maybe not. Maybe . . .

  Maybe Jason had killed an innocent man.

  What if I didn’t end the reign of a serial killer? What if I murdered a man who may have been just another victim himself . . . and gave a twisted serial killer the perfect opportunity to ditch the public persona that had drawn so much attention over the past year so he could start all over again if he wanted?

  And of course he’ll want to. It’s what serial killers do.

  “What do I do?” he asked the empty room.

  Call the cops. Call Detective Briggs and tell him . . .

  Uh . . .

  Tell him that Ian Cobb is Crackerjack because a man was strangled and bludgeoned in Tewksbury, where Cobb has been working lately . . . along with nearly thirty thousand other people? Also, he whistles a whole lot like Crackerjack, whom I heard when I was drugged and practically delirious from lack of food or water. And forget about his broken bones. Cobb is a bit socially awkward, so he must be a killer. Oh, and all that stuff I said on TV and when you interviewed me about how I fought Barton to the death . . . well, I might have been exaggerating a little. He might actually have been barely conscious when I killed him Or, I don’t know, already dead.

  Would Briggs believe him?

  Was Jason even certain about all of this? Was he positive? Positive enough to confess to lying in his statement to the police?

  He thought there was a chance he might be right. That, somehow, despite his broken bones, Ian Cobb actually might be Crackerjack. But the evidence sure seemed to indicate that he was wrong. Sure, the Tewksbury victim’s head was bashed in, but that wasn’t an uncommon way to kill someone. And there was no face paint. And the body wasn’t found in a remote dumpster or ditch; it was hanging from a set of monkey bars in a playground for all to see. None of that sounded like Crackerjack’s handiwork.

  He had to give it more thought. It was late. He was tired and not thinking clearly. If things looked the same to him in the morning, he’d call Briggs. If the worst-case scenario turned out to be true, if Cobb was really Crackerjack and had truly murdered someone that day, it wasn’t likely he’d kill someone else before morning. Crackerjack went weeks, sometimes more than a month, between kills, so why would he suddenly decide to kill two people in one night? Jason had a few hours at least to work it through a bit more and decide whether he was right to be suspicious, or whether he was being ridiculously paranoid.

  He closed his eyes to think better. He thought hard for as long as he could. It had been a long day, though, and in a little while he fell asleep. And he dreamed . . .

  Of driving through the rain along a dark stretch of road . . . Sophie asleep beside him, her head resting against the passenger window . . . A man appearing in his headlights, walking on the shoulder of the road . . . the car swerving . . . Sophie awake now and screaming . . . the shrieking and rending of metal . . . and the night suddenly blacker than black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ian Cobb sat on a small rocky outcropping at the edge of Black Joe’s Pond, a small body of murky water in the Steer Swamp Conservation Area at the eastern end of Marblehead. The pond was named for “Black Joe” Brown, a freed slave, Revolutionary War veteran, and wealthy tavern owner whose drinking hole was the liveliest spot in town in the late eighteenth century. Fortunately for Cobb, the pond bearing his name centuries later was quiet, especially after 2:30 a.m. It was mostly surrounded by woods, and though there were houses in the area, none was close to Cobb’s location.

  The water rippled and shimmered in the moonlight. It was a peaceful sight, but Cobb was feeling far from at peace. He turned to the man sitting next to him.

  “You’ve confirmed it,” h
e said. “This isn’t going to work for me.”

  The man said nothing.

  “I hoped I was wrong. I tried this by myself earlier today . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Well, yesterday now, I guess . . . and it didn’t work. I hoped you and your friend could help, that having company would help. But it hasn’t.”

  The man remained silent.

  “It’s not your fault. Or your buddy’s. You guys did your part. It’s me. Other people do it by themselves all the time. But for me, it’s just not going to work.”

  The man beside Cobb grunted into the duct tape secured tightly across his mouth. Tears ran from his eyes, mixing with the blood that dripped down his cheeks from where Cobb had sliced away his eyelids.

  “Sorry I lied to you.”

  Before Cobb had let the men—gagged and bound with duct tape at the wrists—out of the back of his van, he had promised not to hurt them if they followed him through the woods. He’d pointed out that if he had wanted to cause them harm, he could have done so while they were unconscious in the vehicle. They had believed him—or, at the very least, acted with blind and desperate faith that he was telling the truth—and Cobb was spared the effort of having to carry them one by one through the trees to the lake.

  He looked at his watch again: 2:40 a.m.

  “It’s getting late. I have to get a move on here, Isaac. I still have to sink the two of you in the water. And I’m thinking now that I may have to go break into someone’s house before morning. But that’s not your concern.”

  The man grunted again, loudly, and struggled in vain against the silver tape wrapped tightly around his wrists, and around his ankles now, too. His eyes looked wide in his panic but Cobb figured the effect was enhanced by his lack of eyelids.

  “Calm down. I’ll make this quick. Even quicker than I did with your friend.”

  Cobb glanced at the body of the other man lying on the rock not far away, his head resting bonelessly to the side, his neck broken. He still had his eyelids, though.

  “I usually take more time with this kind of thing, but . . . well, like I said, this is just a no-go for me. Now, I just want to get it over with.”

  He stood, stepped over to the dead man, grabbed him by his feet, and dragged him into the water, a task made more difficult by the burlap sack filled with rocks that Cobb had tied around the body’s waist. He pulled the corpse behind him as he walked out until he was chin-deep in the pond, ignoring the muck beneath his feet and the algae clinging to him, then let the rocks take the man to the bottom. Cobb knew this pond, knew how murky its water was. No one would find the bodies for a good while.

  Back at the water’s edge again, he found Isaac trying to roll away. A waste of energy. How far did he think he’d get? Cobb grabbed his ankles and dragged him, burlap bag of rocks and all, toward the pond. When water ran over the man’s feet, he began to thrash.

  “I’m not gonna drown you,” Cobb said. “I’ve heard that’s a horrible way to go. I’m gonna strangle you. I don’t think that’ll be as bad as drowning, but I obviously can’t promise that.”

  Despite what he’d said about not being into it tonight, what he was itching to do was break every bone in Isaac’s body, then crush his skull. But he couldn’t. One bashed head in Massachusetts this week was enough, unless he wanted the world to wonder whether that Crackerjack was truly dead.

  Eventually, he supposed, he would come up with some new signature to add to the bodies of the people he would kill, instead of bone breaking and face painting, something interesting and different. But for now, a simple strangulation would have to do.

  He glanced again at his watch, which fortunately was water resistant.

  “Man, I have to get a move on. Sorry about your eyelids, by the way. If you’d just kept your eyes open and watched me kill your friend like I said to, I wouldn’t have had to do that. But I had to know, you understand? And now I do. It doesn’t work for me by myself, and forcing someone to watch doesn’t help, either.”

  He put his hands around the man’s neck, thankful that the cast on his right arm didn’t extend to his hand and affect his grip, and dug his thumbs into the windpipe. As he began to squeeze, he congratulated himself for his foresight in always keeping a spare set of clothes in his van. He didn’t want to spend the next few hours soaking wet from dragging bodies into a pond, and he still had things to do before he could call it a night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jason awoke to an insistent, annoyingly cheerful chiming. As he fumbled for his cell phone, he realized that he’d slept on the sofa. A moment later, on the phone’s third ring, he remembered what he had been thinking about when he’d fallen asleep.

  Should he call the police? Did he know enough? Was he certain enough? Either way, was he ready to give up everything? Everything?

  The phone rang again and he found it down between the sofa cushions. He glanced at the display as he answered.

  “Hi, Sophie.”

  “Jason . . . did I wake you? It’s after ten.”

  “No . . . well, yeah. Late night for me. I was working on the new book,” he lied.

  “Oh, sorry. Can we talk for a minute, though?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “It looks like we need a new furnace. And a new hot-water heater.”

  In his mind, he sighed. We used to mean Sophie, Max, and Jason. Now it meant Sophie, Max, and Janice.

  “Mom’s helping out as much as she can, as you know,” Sophie went on, “but . . . well, we’re looking at almost seven thousand dollars and she doesn’t have that kind of money right now. I hate to ask . . .”

  Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Jason said, “No problem, Soph. Of course I’ll pay for the furnace and the water heater. Anything for you and Max. But are you sure you need new ones? I don’t mind paying for them, but are they definitely necessary?”

  “I brought in a plumber this morning. He’s still here and he assures me they’re necessary.”

  Faint alarm bells began to ring, and Jason felt that if he weren’t so tired, he’d know why.

  “What made you call a plumber in the first place?”

  “No hot water this morning. Then we realized there was no heat, either.”

  He stood and stifled a yawn.

  “So I called Ian Cobb.”

  Jason was wide awake now.

  Sophie continued. “In the interview he said he’s a plumber, and I knew from the news that he lives here on the North Shore. So I called him.”

  “Sophie, listen to me—”

  “I figured we owed it to him to give him the job if he wanted it, right? After he gave us—well, after he gave you—all that money.”

  “Sophie, I don’t want to scare—”

  “Is that Jason?” It was Cobb’s voice coming over the phone. Fainter than Sophie’s. In the background. “Sorry to interrupt, but I overheard you. Is that you, Jason?” he called.

  Jason felt as though he might crush the phone in his hand. “Is he right there, Sophie? Right now?”

  “He just came into the kitchen.”

  “Is Max there, too?”

  “He’s in the living room. Why?”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Max?”

  “No, Cobb. Can you put him on?”

  “Sure.”

  A moment later, Cobb said, “Good morning, Jason.”

  He hesitated, unsure what to say. Should he tell Cobb that he’d better not harm Sophie or Max? Was he ready to accuse the man of being a murderer? Wouldn’t it be stupid to do so while Cobb was in the house with his family and Jason was across town? Besides, was he even close to certain about that?

  “Hey, Ian. So . . . we need a new furnace and hot-water heater, huh?”

  “Sorry to say. I feel bad about it, too. It’s not cheap and your wife seems so nice. She doesn’t deserve this. Max is nice, too. He doesn’t deserve this, either. Like you told me, he’s a great kid.”

  Jason held his phone in the crook of his neck and dressed quic
kly in the same clothes he’d worn last night, which he’d left in a pile on a chair in the corner.

  “Listen, Ian. I’m on my way over. Don’t do anything until I get there, okay?”

  A pause. “You don’t trust me, Jason?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t trust that you need a new furnace and hot-water heater? After what we went through together? After I gave you that money? You think I’d try to sell you something you don’t need?”

  Damn if the man didn’t sound sincere, as though Jason had truly hurt his feelings.

  “No, no, it’s not that. I just want to discuss options. Maybe we should put in a bigger furnace . . . or one of those tankless water heaters.”

  Cobb was silent a moment. “Okay, see you when you get here. Want to talk to Sophie again?”

  “Yeah.”

  He grabbed his keys and was out the door as Sophie returned to the line.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He wanted to warn her but what would he say? He was far from sure that Cobb was a killer. Besides, if he warned Sophie and she did something to spook Cobb, who knew what the man might do?

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Stay away from . . .”

  “From what?”

  “The furnace. Stay away from it. Might be dangerous. Why don’t you go sit with Max until I get there?”

  “I couldn’t leave Ian alone here in the kitchen. That would be rude. I’ll see you soon.”

  The line went dead as Jason slipped behind the wheel of his Camry, fired up the engine, and punched the gas. Despite the cool midmorning air, sweat streamed from his every pore.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Jason blew through a red light and two stop signs on his way to Sophie’s house. He decided that if a cop saw him and threw on the lights and siren, he wouldn’t even slow down until he got there. Once he’d seen that Sophie and Max were safe, the cop could arrest him if he wanted.