The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

Howe’s sigh was a bit overly dramatic, in Cobb’s opinion.

  “Ian, when I was last there, your father looked like he had lost some weight. I’m not sure he’s getting—”

  “Is he suffering?” Cobb asked, knowing he’d get the same frustrating answer as always.

  “I don’t know.”

  Just once, can’t you tell me that he is suffering? And horribly?

  “We’re doing everything we can for him, aren’t we, Doctor?” Ian asked. “We give him medicine and nutrients. We watch for infections and pneumonia. We adjust his position to prevent blood clots and cut down on bedsores, and when he gets sores anyway, we treat them. He gets massage and light physical therapy. I can’t imagine what else we could be doing for him. He’s getting the best care money can buy, isn’t he?”

  After another sigh, followed by a long pause, Dr. Howe said, “Ian, let me put it this way . . . would you want to live the way your father’s living?”

  “I’m not my father.”

  “He could survive for several more years like this, for God’s sake. Years.”

  “Terrific.”

  Still another exaggerated sigh. “If he were my own loved one, I would—”

  “But he’s not. He’s my father, not yours. You make the decisions about his medical care, Dr. Howe. How to keep him alive. But whether we let him die? That’s my call. And I say he lives. For as long as medical science and the expertise of you and the nurses I pay good money for make possible. I want him to outlive us all.”

  He ended the call quickly so he wouldn’t have to listen to another of the man’s theatrical sighs.

  “We may have to find you a new doctor, Dad. This one’s getting pushy.”

  Whoosh, whir, click, whoosh.

  “You know what? I’m getting that creative feeling again. It’s been a few days, hasn’t it? I’ll be right back.”

  He left the room, grabbed what he needed from the top shelf of the hall closet, and returned to his father’s bedside.

  “Even if I never paint another victim’s face,” he said as he set up his paints and brushes on his father’s nightstand, “it would be a shame to let my talent go to waste. Besides, I think it might be therapeutic for me. If you’d rather I didn’t, though, just say the word.”

  He waited through a long moment of silence but for the sound of machine-assisted breathing.

  “Fantastic. So what’ll it be tonight? A clown? Wait, I made you a clown last week. No . . . that was the week before. You were a puppy last week. What are you feeling like tonight? Oh, I know. This is perfect. How about a zombie?”

  He opened a jar of light moss-green paint, picked up his largest brush, and got to work. Fifteen minutes later the old man looked far more like one of the undead than Arthur Cobb. How appropriate, Ian thought. He reminded himself to get up a little earlier in the morning to scrub his father’s face clean, as always. He wondered, as he often did, how Carolyn or Rose would react if she showed up for her shift and found him with his face transformed by one of Ian’s masterpieces.

  “I honestly hope you can hear and understand everything I say,” he said as he gathered up his paints and brushes. “That you’ve heard me talk about every man I’ve ever tortured and killed. And that you think it’s all your fault. And Dad, I hope you live a hell of a long time with that belief. Pleasant dreams.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jason’s apartment was trashed. Drawers open with their contents dumped onto desktops and counters. Sofa cushions on the floor. Closets emptied, the items he kept in them scattered across the carpet. Grates covering air vents had been removed and propped against the walls. His mattress lay half-on, half-off the bed.

  He had spent most of the night tearing the place apart looking for evidence Cobb might have planted.

  In his nightstand drawer, beside a watch that had belonged to his father, he’d found another watch, one he didn’t recognize. He’d used a tissue to pick it up and put it in a plastic grocery bag.

  On a closet shelf, in the middle of a stack of several shirts, was a blue golf shirt, neatly folded but without the crisp, clean feel and smell of an unworn garment. Jason couldn’t remember if he owned a shirt like that. He might have but he wasn’t sure. He also couldn’t be certain if that was one of his hairs he saw near the collar. It might have been . . . but the hair looked like it might have been pure blond, lacking Jason’s strawberry tint. The shirt went into the grocery bag with the watch.

  Over the course of the rest of the night, Jason found a pair of dress shoes he didn’t remember ever wearing and that appeared to be half a size too small for him. In his desk he discovered a pair of metal-framed eyeglasses even though he didn’t wear glasses—and a brown speck on one of the lenses looked suspiciously like dried blood. In a drawer in the bathroom was a black plastic comb with several strands of long dark hair, just chock-full of DNA, snarled in its teeth. Hanging on a hook in the closet near the front door was a New York Jets baseball cap. Jason hated the Jets. Behind a grate in an air duct he found a man’s wedding ring. Inside, the inscription read Forever . . . Margaret.

  He consulted his watch. It was 6:45 a.m. With very few breaks, he’d searched his apartment for more than nine hours and found eight suspicious items, some he was pretty sure didn’t belong to him and others that definitely didn’t. What hadn’t he found, though? Where hadn’t he looked? And what items had he seen but simply not recognized as being suspect?

  Cobb had mentioned planting face paints and brushes and even a book on the art of face painting, but Jason hadn’t found those things. Had Cobb lied about them, or were they there somewhere and Jason had simply missed them? Had he missed other things as well?

  He hadn’t even started looking elsewhere in the building or on the grounds outside. He hadn’t searched his car. There were countless places Cobb could have stashed items that could land Jason in prison for the remainder of his days.

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

  Twenty minutes later, the door buzzer sounded. Jason pushed the “Talk” button.

  “Yeah?”

  Ben’s voice came from the speaker. “I’m here.”

  Jason buzzed him in, then unlocked the front door and left it ajar. A few moments later, Ben stood in the doorway, his eyes surveying the wreckage of the apartment.

  “Time to fire your maid,” he said. His words and tone were glib but Jason could see that he was rattled by what he saw. “Are you all right?”

  “You made good time. You said you were still dripping wet from your shower when I called.”

  “Your friend calls and says his life may be over, you tend not to dawdle. I’m not even wearing underwear. What happened here? Who did this?”

  “I did.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”

  “Because I’m freaking out, that’s why. Things are really screwed up, Ben. And I don’t know what the hell to do.”

  “Slow down. What’s going on? Give me the short version.”

  “The short version is that I was right. Ian Cobb actually is Crackerjack. And he planted evidence here implicating me of being Crackerjack instead.”

  He blew out a shaky breath. Then another.

  “Hmm,” Ben said. “How about giving me the long version now.”

  It took several minutes, with numerous interruptions, but Jason finally got nearly all the story out. Essentially the same story he’d told to Sophie, only this time he didn’t omit the fact that Cobb had already killed three more men since he and Jason “escaped” from captivity together.

  When he was finished, Ben looked stunned.

  “Things like this don’t happen to people like us, Jason. In your books, they do. But not in the real world.”

  “No shit. What do I do, Ben? Tell me. What do I do?”

  “Give me a minute. I’m still processing. You had a whole day with it, but you dropped it on me two minutes ago. Let me try to get my head around it.” He thought for a long moment, then said, “Nope. Can
’t get my head around it. You’re saying that because you remind him of his brother, because of these things he thinks you have in common, he wants you to become his partner? He’ll thinks you agree to kill people with him?”

  Jason hesitated. “He says he sees something in me.” He didn’t want to elaborate on that, didn’t even want to think about it himself, so he quickly added, “He’s totally nuts.”

  “As your lawyer, I have to advise you to call the police right away.”

  “You’re not my lawyer.”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “But you’re not my lawyer. You’re not even a criminal lawyer. You do contracts.”

  “I took criminal courses in law school, though, and did an internship in the DA’s office before my third year. And I think you should call the police.”

  “Would you do that? If you weren’t sure you’d found all of the evidence that could implicate you as a serial killer?”

  That shut Ben up.

  “As a lawyer,” Jason said, “what do you think of the evidence against me?”

  Ben looked thoughtful but said nothing. Jason nodded as if his friend’s silence supported his own position.

  “And I haven’t even mentioned that the lead detective on the case thinks I’m guilty of something.”

  “Of what?”

  “I have no idea, but he keeps asking me questions and never seems satisfied with my answers.”

  “Yeah, he asked me a lot of questions about you, too.”

  “He definitely thinks I’ve been hiding something.”

  “Which you have.”

  “Exactly. But if I go to the cops with what I know, Detective Briggs will jump all over me. He’s dying to find something on me. If he gets a whiff of the slightest shred of evidence against me, I’m history. It won’t matter that I came forward and implicated Cobb. Briggs will focus on me.”

  “You don’t know that. If you tell him that Cobb—”

  “You mean the guy with the bones broken and the painted face?”

  Ben opened his mouth but closed it again without saying a word.

  “So let me ask you again, Ben. With everything you now know, if you were in my place, would you go to the police?”

  Ben shook his head. “No, but I have to tell you that you should.”

  “So what would you do in my place? Seriously. I need to know what the hell to do. Because I’m going crazy here.”

  “Sophie and Max are safe where they are?”

  “I think so. I really do.”

  Ben frowned, thinking. “You have to get Cobb out of the picture somehow.”

  “Obviously. But how?”

  “I see only two options. The first is you get him arrested for something . . . something other than being a serial killer, I guess.”

  “Frame him for theft, something like that? That’s a short-term fix at best. Even if he’s convicted of whatever it is, he’ll be out in two years and really pissed off. I need him out of my life for a lot longer than that.”

  “Okay, I agree. Try to stay calm, Jason. So . . . and I’m just spitballing here . . . but there’s only one other option I can see.”

  “Which is?”

  “You know what it is.”

  Jason shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s a terrible option.”

  “Shit, Jason, I didn’t say it was a good option, just that it was the only other one I can think of if you want to get rid of Cobb. What other choice do you have?”

  Jason ran his hands through his hair. He couldn’t think clearly. Someone started pounding on the door and for a terrifying moment he thought it must be Ian Cobb, but then Jason realized that the sound was the blood pounding in his head.

  “It sucks,” Ben went on, “but I don’t see any other way for you to be sure he’s out of your life for good. Out of your family’s life.”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to do something like that.”

  “Dumber guys than you are able to figure it out.”

  “And they get caught.”

  “You’re smarter than they are.”

  Jason backed up a few steps until he was against a wall, then slid to the floor. His chin dropped to his chest. After a long moment, he said, “Sophie . . . wouldn’t want me to do that.”

  “That’s not a shock.”

  Jason looked up. “She has a good reason.” Unconsciously, he touched the slight depression on his head.

  He’d never told Ben about what Sophie thought she’d seen in him the night of the accident, and apparently a few times before—the darkness she feared was inside him. He desperately wanted her to be wrong about him, needed her to be . . . but since that night, he wasn’t always certain. Had she truly seen something in his eyes that night? Was it the same thing that Ian Cobb believed he saw in him now? Did Detective Briggs see it, too? Was that why he seemed so suspicious of Jason? And if Jason could even bring himself to kill Cobb in cold blood, assuring himself that it was the only way to save lives . . . could he be certain that would be the end of it? That he wouldn’t want . . . more?

  With all his heart, he didn’t want to be like Cobb. He’d never wanted to hurt anyone. He couldn’t remember what he was thinking just before his accident, but he refused to believe he could have intentionally run anyone over with a car. And he hadn’t wanted to kill Wallace Barton, but he’d had no choice. It was self-defense, and it all happened so fast. And the way he’d felt after . . . when he stared down at Barton’s body, knowing that he had killed him—well, that feeling could be attributed to the adrenaline coursing through his body. Couldn’t it?

  He wasn’t like Ian Cobb. He couldn’t be . . . not if he harbored the smallest hope his wife might one day look at him the way she used to, or close to it anyway.

  “I’m not going to kill a man in cold blood,” he said to Ben as he rose to his feet. “Sophie wouldn’t . . . I don’t want to do that. I can’t.”

  Ben looked at him closely for a moment, as if noticing something about him for the first time, something he thought he probably should have noticed before. Or maybe Jason was imagining that. Finally, quietly, Ben said, “Even if that man is going to kill other people, which you know for a fact he is? In fact, he already has. And if you don’t stop him, he’s going to kill God only knows how many more?”

  Jason took a deep breath. “What if I decided to try that . . . and I failed?” Or, what if I succeeded . . . and I like it? He turned away from that thought. “If I fail,” he went on, “he could kill me, then go after Sophie and Max. Or, God forbid, what if he killed them and left me alive?”

  “You have to get him out of the picture, Jason.”

  “You’re a lawyer. You can’t talk like that.”

  “I know, but I’m right.”

  “I know. So let’s come up with a way to do that short of my committing first-degree murder.”

  They continued straightening up the apartment while they thought. They stuffed things back in drawers and cabinets and closets, and moved the furniture back where it belonged, and did it all while barely saying a word. After half an hour, Ben said, “Man, can’t you hire someone to do this?”

  Jason looked up from the pile of books he was returning to their shelves, over at Ben, who was in the kitchen putting canned goods and cereal boxes back into cabinets.

  “That might be a good idea, Ben. I’ll hire someone.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’ll help. I was just joking.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  Ben met his eyes. “Oh. Oh . . . you’re right. That might be a good idea. But how the hell—”

  “It’s time for you to leave, Ben.”

  “Would you even know where to begin—”

  “See you, buddy.”

  “I can’t just—”

  “You’re a lawyer. You can’t be around me right now.” Jason glanced around the apartment, which looked nearly like it had before he had gone through it like a tornado last night. “Thanks for your help here. I’ve got the rest.”
r />   “Jason . . .”

  “We don’t know if Ian Cobb knows who you are, but if he does, you could be in danger. So keep your distance for a while. I don’t want to see you. We can talk every few days, as usual, but no more than that. We don’t want it to seem like there’s anything going on here, in case . . . the cops ever look into my phone records.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I take care of this.” Ben shook his head but before he could protest, Jason added, “I know you want to help me, but this is the way it has to be.”

  They looked at each other for a moment before Ben said, “I thought I was the cool one.”

  “Believe me, I’m scared out of my mind.”

  “You don’t seem it all of a sudden.”

  “Just trying to keep it together. There’s too much at stake for me to lose it. Now, seriously, you have to get out of here.”

  Ben sighed, then nodded. “Be careful. Call me when you can. And don’t forget, I’ll be there if you need anything at all.” At the door, he turned. “And Jason? When this is all over . . . I want to be the cool one again.”

  Jason smiled.

  When Ben was gone, Jason found the number for several local home-security companies. It was early in the morning, just after the start of business hours, so he hoped he’d find one with available appointments that day. It wasn’t until the fifth company that he found one willing to give him an appointment in less than a week. SecureHome said they could do an estimate first thing tomorrow morning and, if Jason wanted, do the installation that afternoon. According to online community message boards, it was far from the best alarm company in the area—which was probably the reason they had next-day availability—but Jason was in no position to be a picky shopper. With the appointment scheduled, he called Janice and told her to be home at eighty-thirty the following morning to meet the technician.

  “Why do we need a burglar alarm all of a sudden?” she asked.

  “You haven’t heard about the burglaries in your neighborhood lately?”

  “No.”

  “Three houses in the last two weeks.”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  “It’s true. And I want Sophie and Max to be safe.” If she noticed that he hadn’t mentioned her, she didn’t let on.