But he made it all the way to Sophie’s with no more than some honks, a few dirty looks, and two middle fingers directed at him. He swung into the driveway, slammed on the brakes beside a white van, and bolted from the car. He threw open the front door and was greeted by Sophie rolling toward him down the hallway.
“You made record time,” she said.
When Jason saw she was unharmed, relief washed over him in a wave that almost knocked him to his knees.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look—”
“Where’s Max?”
“Max?”
“Where is he, Sophie?”
“In here, Daddy.”
Jason slipped past Sophie’s chair, crossed the foyer, and looked into the living room, where he saw Max and Ian Cobb kneeling side by side at the coffee table, piecing together a puzzle.
“I like your friend,” Max said, smiling that gorgeous, sweetly innocent smile.
Jason wanted to scream. Was that a serial killer working on a puzzle with his precious son? Or was it just an average guy, a little socially awkward, a bit creepier than most, but otherwise not much different from everybody else?
Cobb held up a puzzle piece. “I think this one is part of the fire truck, Max. What do you think?”
“I don’t know . . .” He took the piece from Cobb and, after a couple of failed attempts, pressed it into place where it belonged. “You’re right,” he exclaimed, clapping his hands. “Good job, Ian.”
“Hey, you’re the one who made it fit. You did the hard part.”
“Ian, can I talk to you?” Jason said.
Cobb looked up. “Sure, come give us a hand. We’ve almost got the fire engine done.”
“Maybe in the kitchen?”
Cobb hesitated. “Okay, Jason.” To Max, he said, “Sorry, buddy. Your dad wants to talk to me. Can you handle the rest of this without me?”
Max frowned, then shot a reproachful look at Jason and said, “I guess so.”
“Great. I’ll check your progress before I leave.”
He picked up a coffee mug from an end table and walked past Jason, through the foyer, heading toward the kitchen. Sophie started to roll after him but Jason said, “Can we have a few minutes, Soph?”
She stopped. “Everything okay?”
“I just want to talk with him alone for a little bit,” he said quietly. “I want . . . to make sure he’s okay with the idea of doing the work even though he gave me all that money. Feels a little funny to me.”
“Maybe you should offer it back to him? You’d still have a hundred thousand dollars.”
He didn’t mention that he’d already done that, twice, and Cobb had refused both times.
“Exactly. That’s what I plan to do. He might be more likely to accept if it’s just the two of us.”
She nodded and rolled herself back into the living room. Jason heard Max say, “Help me with the police car, Mommy.”
When he entered the kitchen he found Cobb leaning against the counter, sipping his coffee. He didn’t look well. Even worse than he had at the Shark’s Tooth last night. Maybe he was just tired. He certainly had the appearance of a man who hadn’t slept a wink the night before.
“You wanted to talk?” he asked.
Jason did. The problem was, he had no idea what to say. He racked his mind for options.
Listen, it’s a little awkward, your working for me after everything that happened, so maybe we should call a different plumber.
Or . . .
I know what you are. Stay the hell away from my family.
Or . . .
Your secret is safe with me if you just keep your distance.
Or . . .
“How about I show you what’s wrong in the basement?” Cobb asked, interrupting his thoughts. “We can start with that.”
“Uh . . . sure.”
Cobb walked over to the door in the corner of the kitchen and started down the stairs. Jason followed, thinking he’d seen this in a dozen movies, the good guy following the killer into a dark basement. That usually didn’t end well for the good guy.
When they reached the bottom, Cobb started toward the furnace. As he walked, he began to whistle softly, very softly, and the hairs on the back of Jason’s neck stood up. He was about to head back up to the kitchen on some pretense when Cobb abruptly turned, stepped close to him, and said, “Yes, Jason.”
“Yes what?” Jason asked, backing up a step.
Cobb stepped close again, far inside Jason’s personal space, and said, “That’s the answer to the question you’ve been asking yourself. Yes, I’m Crackerjack.”
And before Jason could react, a knife was at his throat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Make a sound and I’ll push this knife right through your neck. Understand, Jason?”
Jason nodded, feeling the tip of the blade poke his skin as he did. Cobb wasn’t restraining him in any way. He wasn’t backed up against a wall. There wasn’t anything preventing him from jumping backward, out of striking range, and either running back up to the kitchen or attacking Cobb, who was a fair bit bigger than Jason but who had only one unbroken arm.
Nothing except the thought of his wife and child upstairs. The basement was chilly and damp, yet Jason was suddenly sweating.
“As you know,” Cobb said, “a knife isn’t really my weapon of choice, but I know how one works. You gonna stay calm?”
Jason nodded again, swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a charcoal briquette, and wondered if there was the slightest chance he’d be able to remain calm in this situation.
“I just wanna talk,” Cobb said, “and it’ll be a lot easier if I don’t have to watch your every move, wondering if you’re gonna try something stupid. And if you do, I’ll have to hurt you . . . and if I hurt you I’ll have to hurt your family next, and I’d rather not do any of that if I can avoid it. So I’m gonna tie you up, okay? There are some old kitchen chairs down here and some extension cords, so we should be in business.”
“I can’t let you tie me up. That’d be crazy.”
This whole scenario is crazy.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, Jason. If I wanted to do that, I could’ve done it days ago, right?”
If he let Cobb bind him to a chair, he’d be helpless. And his wife and son would be at Cobb’s mercy. No way.
“First of all,” Cobb said, “you gotta calm down. I’m not trying to insult you, but you’re breathing like a frightened bunny. Second: I get it. You’re worried about Sophie and Max. But think about it. I could’ve already hurt them, too, if I’d wanted. Before Sophie even called you. So sit down so we can chat for a bit without me having to watch your every muscle twitch.”
He was right. Jason had practically been panting. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Cobb was also right that he could have killed Jason back at the stable. And he could have murdered Sophie and Max before Jason even woke up that morning.
“Feeling better?” Cobb asked. “You look a little better.” Jason took another deep breath and nodded. “Good. Now, you see my logic here, right?” After a moment, Jason nodded again. “Terrific. Grab one of those chairs, would you?”
Jason pulled a dusty wooden chair from a corner, ignored the cobwebs clinging to it, and dragged it into the middle of the basement. He looked at Cobb, who nodded to the chair. Reluctantly, he sat. As Cobb put the knife—which Jason now saw had a nasty-looking, six-inch serrated blade—into his back pocket, Jason felt a rising sense of panic followed instantly by a nearly overwhelming urge to lunge off the chair, drive Cobb to the ground, and go for the knife. But he fought the urge, remembering the reasons he had agreed to allow Cobb to tie him up in the first place. In moments, Cobb had used the extension cords to tie his hands behind his back and each of his ankles to one of the chair’s legs.
“Just relax, Jason. We’ll do a lot better here if you try to forget that you’re tied up, that I have a knife, that I’ve killed a lot of people, and that your family is righ
t upstairs. All of that will only distract you, and I want you to hear me out. Can you try to do that?”
“I don’t have a choice anymore. Tell me again that you’re not going to hurt my family, Cobb.”
“It’s Cobb now? What happened to Ian?”
Jason said nothing. Behind his back, his hands were clenched into fists so tight he thought he could feel blood trickling from his palms.
“Well, I’m still gonna call you Jason, okay?” He smiled cordially. “By now you may be thinking there’s nothing actually wrong with your furnace and hot-water heater. But there is. Because I broke in here in the middle of the night and made sure of it. Nothing that can’t be fixed, though.”
The thought of Cobb sneaking around his house while his family slept nearby made Jason regret he’d let himself be tied up. He’d have gone after Cobb and not stopped fighting until one of them was dead, which probably would have been a bad idea, seeing as Cobb had killed something like sixteen people and Jason had killed only one.
Trying to remain outwardly calm, he said, “Sophie could have called any plumber in the area. How did you know she’d call you?”
“I didn’t, not for sure. And if she hadn’t, I’d have figured some other way to get your attention. But you told me last week that you don’t have a plumber you regularly use, and I figured mine would be the first name she thought of. Besides, she’d feel like she owed me, given my generosity when I gave you all that money on national television. By the way, I can tell you how to fix the furnace and water heater. It’s easy. Or you can call another plumber—I assume you won’t want me to do it—but let me tell you, if they want to charge you more than an hour’s labor, they’re ripping you off. And I wouldn’t put it past some plumbers. You have to be really careful who you let into your home, Jason. Some people just can’t be trusted.”
Jason shook his head but said nothing.
“You’d already figured out that I couldn’t be trusted, am I right? You started having suspicions about me, didn’t you?”
He shrugged.
“You were supposed to, you know. I wanted you to. That’s why I started whistling when we were walking on the Common after the TV interview. I knew you’d hear me.”
“The guy in Tewksbury . . . ,” Jason began to ask, though he knew the answer.
“Yeah, I killed him. I knew you’d get it. I mentioned enough times that I was working a big job out there. I figured a murder there—along with my whistling—would start your gears turning. I hung him in the playground to make sure it made the news, thinking you might remember—”
Jason cut in, “When we were walking through the park, you said something about grown men loitering around playgrounds where they didn’t belong . . . that they deserved to be strung up.”
Cobb smiled. “Very good. I hoped you’d remember that. In case you didn’t, though, I bashed his head in, too, so you’d know for sure it was me. By the way, I killed two other guys, too, just last night. Sunk them in a pond. Hey, did I ever thank you for that snow cone?”
Two more guys? Dear God.
Sophie’s voice drifted down from the top of the basement stairs. “Jason, Max wants to know if he can join you and his new best friend down there.”
Cobb smiled.
“No, Sophie,” Jason said quickly, hoping she didn’t notice the strain in his voice. “Don’t do that. Please.”
“Uh . . . okay.”
“We’ve got the furnace open,” Cobb called upstairs calmly. He winked at Jason. “It wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“Okay. I’ll go deliver the bad news.”
Tiny rivulets of sweat ran down Jason’s forehead. “Listen, Cobb, how about you untie me and we can take this outside?”
“You want me out of the house,” Cobb said. “I get it. I did it this way so you’d see the danger to your family. I needed you under control so we could talk. And that’s all we’re doing right now, right? Just talking.” He chuckled. “Boy, I bet you never thought you’d be tied up by a serial killer again, did you? What are the odds?”
Jason couldn’t come close to getting a read on the situation. Cobb didn’t seem to want to kill him. As he’d said, he could have done that days ago.
“Why didn’t you kill me at the stable?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“You seem kind of eager for me to kill you.”
“No, it’s just . . . I’m wondering why you haven’t, that’s all.”
“Because we’re in this together now, Jason. We’re a team.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“We’re a team?” Jason said. “What does that mean?”
Cobb saw the confusion on Jason’s face. And he understood it. He was dumping a lot on him right now. He needed to be patient. He needed Jason to understand.
“We killed Wallace Barton together, didn’t we?” Cobb said. “As a team. You see?”
“I don’t see anything here.”
Cobb had known this wouldn’t be easy.
“Just tell me what the hell you want from me,” Jason said.
Jason was getting a little bolder, Cobb noticed. “It’s a little soon for that, I think. That’s big-picture stuff. Bonus-round material. We’ll get there in a few minutes. Let’s stick to the qualifying round. You gotta have other questions. Like, maybe you’re wondering how I was using Barton’s stable without him knowing about it. Now, that’s a great question. With an answer I think you’ll find interesting. He actually did know about it.” He paused for effect. “The fact is . . . he and I were working together.”
“Working together?”
“Okay, okay, we killed people together. Is that better? Actually, I did the killing. That was my thing. He liked to watch. That was his thing.”
“You were both Crackerjack?”
“I guess you could look at it like that. I did the kidnapping and the killing. He just gave me a nice, secluded place to do my work. And he watched.”
He chose not to mention that sometimes—not every time, but now and then—when he had someone strapped to his table, when he was snapping a tibia or caving in a skull, he would look back at Wallace and see his brother Johnny there instead, in Wallace’s place . . . Johnny, plain as day, sitting there with a small, satisfied smile on his face, watching his big brother work. One minute, Johnny would be dead and gone, as he had been for the past three years, and the next, he’d be right there again, right beside Cobb.
“You get off on killing,” Jason said, “and Barton got off on watching.”
Poor Jason looked both horrified and stunned. Again, Cobb understood. This was a lot to take in. He gave Jason a few seconds to process it.
“I didn’t kill an innocent man,” Jason finally said. “I killed a murderer . . . or his accomplice anyway.” He thought for a moment. “But why, Cobb?”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“No, why do you do it?”
“Torture and kill people?”
“Yeah. Do you find it fun?” Jason asked, and he made no effort to hide the disgust in his voice. Yes, he was definitely growing bolder. “Is it arousing? What is it?”
Cobb thought for a moment. “You know what, Jason? This may surprise you, but I’m gonna tell you the truth. Something I’ve never told anyone. Not our victims. Not even Wallace. As for him, I have no idea why he did it. But I’ll tell you why I do. And here it is: for whatever reason . . . it’s the only thing that eases my pain.”
“It eases your pain?”
“Right. It’s the only thing. Believe me, I’ve tried others.”
“Your pain? Your pain? What about the pain you cause other people? Your victims and their families? Is your pain the only one that matters?”
“It’s the only one that matters to me. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. It started out as my brother’s pain, and when he died, it became mine.”
“Your brother’s pain?” Jason said. “What the . . . are you talking about physical pain?”
“Only a little,” Cobb said, “but the truth is, physical pain isn’t the worst kind.”
“Your victims might disagree.”
“It’s emotional pain that does the most damage, pain deeper inside you than your bones. When you hurt really, really far down, where your true self is—now that’s pain. When it’s bad enough, it’s way worse than anything I ever put anyone else through.”
“And it was your brother’s pain first?” Jason asked, and Cobb could see that he was having a hard time with this. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“Johnny suffered so much, carried it for so long, ever since he was a little boy—this . . . thing inside him. He had a name for it. His Inside Dark, he called it. And it was cruel as hell to him unless he gave it what it needed. Turns out it was even stronger than I could have imagined, too strong to just disappear when he died. It had to go somewhere, I guess, so it came to me. Now I carry it.”
Jason looked as though he were about to say something but changed his mind. He also looked scared and more than ever like he wished he were anywhere but in that basement. Cobb knew this concept was a difficult one to grasp. He thought back to how it had started, when Johnny was alive.
“See, Johnny had broken a lot of bones as a boy,” he said. “Walked with a really bad limp. Said he used to hurt all the time . . . except—and this part’s really important—except when he witnessed someone else’s pain. Somehow, for some reason, that pleased his inner darkness, which made Johnny feel better, too. I didn’t understand it then, of course, but he was my brother. I would’ve done anything for him. If watching people get hurt made him feel better, well, I was willing to hurt people for him. He would have liked to help me with that, but he couldn’t. He just wasn’t up to it physically. So I’d do what had to be done while he watched.”
“I don’t understand how seeing other people getting injured would make him feel better. That’s beyond crazy.”
Cobb had thought the same thing at first, that what Johnny had endured at the hands of their Uncle Joe while their parents looked the other way had broken his mind. Cobb didn’t care. Crazy or not, he’d do whatever his brother thought would help him. The thing was, it really did seem to help. After doing what they did, Johnny would stop complaining about the pain. His Inside Dark was satisfied, he’d say. And he’d be himself again, at least for a month or two. Then the pain would come back and he’d get depressed, and Cobb would know it was time. He’d know what his brother needed. And when they were done, Johnny would be smiling again. For a while, at least.
The Inside Dark Page 14
