by Chris Mooney
The second shot came just as fast, and, as she staggered and fell into the snow, she heard the round split a tree directly behind her. She had let go of Hoder and was scrambling to her feet when the rifle fired again and there was a whang sound, metal hitting metal. She saw Coop lying face down in the snow, his hands covering the back of his head.
Grab him or Hoder: you can choose only one, she thought.
She went for Coop. The rifle fired again, and then suddenly there was an ear-splitting boom. House and car windows shattered, shards flying everywhere. A great pressure wave slammed into her and sent her spinning. The side of her head struck the driveway, and before she passed out she saw a huge ball of flame, like an eruption from the bowels of hell, light up the night sky.
Day Three
53
Darby awoke to the sight of a dozen eyes watching her.
Body slick with sweat and her heart banging like a snare drum, she blinked furiously until the dimly lit room came into a sharper focus.
Not human eyes – doll eyes. Glassy and lifeless, with long, unnaturally thick eyelashes set in tiny oval faces painted beauty-pageant pretty. All little girls, each one dressed in a different outfit: wedding gowns and farmer’s overalls and period costumes that went as far back as the Civil War. They crowded the six white laminate shelves on the wall opposite the foot of her bed, a row of soft square track lighting shining down on their bright smiles and plump, outstretched arms.
Darby swallowed. Her throat was bone-dry, and the entire left side of her face was numb. Pain there, a faraway throbbing hidden behind some sort of narcotic.
It was then she realized she could see only out of her right eye.
The left eye was completely covered. Gently prodding it with her fingertips, she felt the fabric of a compression bandage. It was wrapped around her head to keep the thick, gauzy dressing from moving.
Darby had been placed in a sitting-up position to reduce the swelling in her head. She was in a hospital room, that much was clear. But this one had been designed for little girls. In addition to the dolls, the walls were decorated with pink-and-lavender wallpaper featuring Barbie the Ballerina, Barbie the Skater – Barbie everywhere, along with Tinker Bell and Disney princesses of every ethnic variety.
The door to her room was shut. A steam radiator hissed and clanked underneath a pair of snow-caked windows glowing with a silver light. Morning light. The wall clock read 8.45.
Then she remembered the rifle shots and Hoder being hit, followed by more shots and then an explosion. It had come from outside the house, she thought. In a panic she wondered if she had glass or debris in her eyes and had been blinded. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The throbbing in her head increased as she slowly got to her feet.
Darby staggered towards the bathroom, the floor slippery beneath her socks. Her stomach lurched in protest, and the throbbing had transformed into what felt like hot nails being hammered into her skull.
Darby turned on the bathroom light. A bandaged, Frankenstein mess of cuts and swollen skin stared back at her in the mirror. After unwrapping the compression bandage, she slowly peeled away the gauze and found a snake of surgical staples stretching from her hairline to the middle of her cheek, the raw wound covered in a greasy ointment. She was staring at it when the door to her room clicked open.
A sprite of a woman dressed in jeans and a charcoal-grey turtleneck sweater stood in the doorway. The doctor. The stethoscope was always a dead giveaway.
‘Coop,’ Darby said in a thick voice.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Jackson Cooper. He’s with the FBI.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Is he here?’
‘No. The gunshot victim was transported to Brewster General and is in critical condition. The others are dead. I’m sorry.’
Darby’s legs felt shaky. She gripped the edge of the sink.
The doctor grabbed Darby firmly by the arm. ‘You’re at the Rockland Family Medical Centre in Red Hill. I’m Dr Mathis. We need to get you back to bed.’ A long sigh of irritation, and then the woman added, ‘I need to redress that wound.’
Darby allowed herself to be led back to bed. She felt numb all over.
‘Your CT scan came back normal,’ Dr Mathis said, and went to work cleaning and redressing the wound. ‘No inter-cranial bleeding or fractures. You have an unusually thick skull for a woman.’
Darby barely heard her, thinking about Coop. He had been lying in the snow not far from Hoder, and he hadn’t been moving.
‘Your eye is fine, by the way,’ the woman said. ‘Now, about your temple and cheekbone … I saw you looking in the mirror, and I know it looks like a God-awful mess, but there’s no need to worry. The swelling will go down in a few days. The bruising should subside in about fourteen days, which will be right around the time the staples should be removed. The wound itself will take some time to heal, but you should consult a plastic surgeon – the same one who did that work on your other cheek. You can barely see that scar.
‘I noticed your left cheekbone was replaced with an implant. What happened there?’
‘Someone tried to split my head open with an axe,’ Darby said, her voice sounding far away, as though someone else were speaking.
Dr Mathis looked uneasy. Nervous. Nice ladies don’t discuss such nasty things, her prim expression said. Nice ladies certainly aren’t involved in such things.
‘How did I get here?’
The doctor stopped working. She tilted her head to the side and eyed Darby quizzically. ‘You don’t remember?’
‘Remember what?’
‘Speaking to Detective Williams. He was here twenty, maybe thirty minutes ago. You were awake.’
Darby had no memory of it.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ the doctor said. ‘Short-term memory loss is common with brain trauma, even in cases of a mild concussion. I’ve also seen it in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a condition where –’
‘I’m familiar with the term.’ Darby rolled on to her side, picked up the phone from the nightstand and placed it on the side of her mattress.
‘You can make your call after I finish up here.’ Dr Mathis reached for the phone.
Darby gently grabbed the woman’s wrist. ‘Go tend to your other patients.’
54
Darby was about to dial information for the number of Brewster General when she felt a sick fluttering inside her chest.
The gunshot victim was transported to Brewster General and is in critical condition, the doctor had told her. The others are dead.
She had been speaking to Coop when the first gunshot went off.
Please, God, don’t let him be dead.
That inner voice spoke up: You need to prepare yourself.
But you couldn’t prepare yourself for something like this, even when you had time to prepare. She had been thirteen years old when her father had been shot. She’d insisted on going with her mother to the hospital. When the surgeon came into the ICU’s waiting room, she saw the expression on the man’s face and knew right then her father was going to die.
And then there was her mother who, at fifty-eight, had developed a stage four melanoma. A mole the size of a pinprick on Sheila McCormick’s back had quietly turned malignant. The surgeon had excised the mole but the cancer had already spread past the lymph nodes and into her bloodstream; it had been greedily feasting on her healthy organs for months. You need to prepare yourself, the doctor had told Darby. She’d been thirty-three.
And Darby had tried to prepare herself. Every day she reminded herself that, in an odd way, she had been handed a gift: her mother was going to die – it wasn’t a matter of if so much as when – but at least this time there was time to come to grips with what was happening. She’d spent every available moment in her mother’s company.
But another part of her had, with a childish stubbornness, refused to give up hope. Her mother’s immune system was incredibly robust, the doctor
s said, so the special chemotherapy cocktail might work. That new, experimental skin cancer vaccine being tested in Baltimore might save her mother – and there was a chance Sheila McCormick might survive long enough to be a part of the clinical trials. Darby still remembered those long days, scouring the internet for doctors who specialized in melanoma, phoning offices all over the country and believing some sort of magic bullet existed, that all she had to do was to find it.
That was the danger of hope. It made you believe endless possibilities existed.
In its own way, hope was a form of cancer. A disease that could be eradicated only when presented with an immutable truth: death. Until that moment, hope would remain alive, even flourish, because there was always a chance, no matter how slim or remote, that the overwhelming truth you were facing was, in fact, wrong. Darby had learned that hard lesson first-hand.
She summoned the courage to dial directory assistance and ask for the number for Brewster General. The operator connected her and, after wading through the automated options, Darby finally got a live voice on the line. She explained who she was and what she wanted, and she was transferred to patient care.
Darby was on hold, waiting for someone to pick up, when Coop walked into her room.
She blinked as though he were a mirage produced by her fear. But he was there, looking real in the sunlight. His overcoat was torn in several places and spotted with dried blood along the lapels – Hoder’s blood – but he had changed into a new suit.
Darby hung up and stared at him, her eyes wet.
When Coop sat on the side of her bed, his eyes bloodshot, the skin under them bruised from exhaustion, she leaned forward, wrapped her arms around him and, clutching him close to her, sobbed into his chest.
55
When Darby’s tears subsided, Coop gently pried himself away from her. She tried to grab him again, not wanting to let him go, but he was already shuffling towards the bathroom.
Darby heard running water. A moment later he came back and handed her a cold, damp facecloth. She wiped her eyes, careful of the wound and staples.
Coop slid out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he returned to the warm spot he’d left on her bed. Darby stared down at the blood-stained facecloth in her hands, afraid to ask any questions.
Coop provided answers without her having to say a word. ‘Hoder is in critical condition at Brewster General,’ he said in quiet, weary voice. ‘Fortunately Robinson had ambulances standing by. I stemmed the bleeding in his shoulder as much as I could before they arrived. Otto and Hayes are dead. As best we can tell right now, it looks like someone set fire to the trailer before it exploded.’
‘The shooter?’
‘Still in the wind. The explosion at the French home came from a propane tank that was sitting on the side of the house.’
‘Tracer rounds,’ she said.
‘How do you know he was using tracer ammo?’
‘I thought I saw a bright, burning white round just before it hit Hoder.’ Because tracers had small pyrotechnic charges built into their base, they burned brightly when fired, which allowed the shooter to follow the projectile’s trajectory and make aiming corrections. ‘I heard one of the rounds strike metal, but I thought it was one of the cars.’
Coop sighed. Nodded. ‘It makes sense,’ he said. ‘An ordinary round could pierce the tank without making it explode. A tracer, though, would.’
The room took on the sober silence of a funeral home.
‘The owners of the house, the parents, Luther and Carla French, were pronounced dead at the scene along with Sebastian, their 23-year-old son. The couple also have a 26-year-old daughter, Rita. She’s a ski instructor living in Aspen. Williams talked with her. She’s on her way down to Red Hill to identify the bodies.’
Darby didn’t want to say the next part, but she had to. Her throat burned and her eyes filled with fresh tears.
‘You were right. About the interview stirring him up.’
Coop got back to his feet.
‘It was my idea,’ she said. ‘I’m the one who pressed Hoder to –’
‘It’s done.’
His words echoed inside the room. Darby remained quiet.
‘There’s no rewind button,’ Coop said. He stood by the chair and, leaning forward, picked up his jacket. ‘There’s no way we can fix it. Hoder is as much to blame for this as –’
Then he cut himself off, the unsaid you hanging in the air between them.
‘Hoder could have put a stop to it and he didn’t,’ Coop said. ‘I gave him ample opportunity.’
Me too, Darby thought.
Coop removed a thick stack of paper that had been folded so it could fit inside his inner jacket pocket. He came back to the bed and handed the pages to her.
The first page contained a laser-printed copy of a photograph from another time – an ancient Polaroid of almost blurred colours showing a Caucasian girl of around seven or eight. She wore a white tank top stained with what looked like spaghetti sauce, her stringy blonde hair spilling across her tanned shoulders. The camera had captured her big blue eyes and her broad, gap-toothed smile.
Darby’s scalp tightened. The skin on her face flexed and her muscles constricted, and, as her stomach went into free fall, the photograph went out of focus and her mind snapped back to her own childhood, a time when children rode their bikes after dark and wandered through neighbourhoods, malls and stores freely, without adult supervision, secure in the knowledge that the world was a good place and that monsters were nothing more than creatures relegated to bad dreams and not kindly seeming men who hunted with smiles in broad daylight.
56
It happened on the morning of 15 August 1983. A Monday. At half past eight, Joan Hubbard loaded her seven-year-old daughter into the family’s station wagon and made the 22-mile drive from her small but pleasant ranch home in El Dorado, Kansas, to the North Colony Shopping Mall in Wichita. The Carter & Sullivan circular in Sunday’s paper had advertised its annual overstock sale of bed linen. Joan wanted new sheets and a comforter, maybe even a couple of decorative throw pillows, to replace the hand-me-downs given to her by her older sister.
Finances had been tight ever since Joan O’Donnell married Peter Hubbard. The first three years Peter worked as a shop sweeper at General Electric and went to school nights. It had been one hell of a long slog, but the hard work had paid off. When Peter graduated with his engineering degree – the same day Nicola turned five – he was promoted to GE’s jet-engine shop. The bump in pay wasn’t life changing by any means, but the extra money had given them some well-deserved breathing room. No more penny-pinching on the groceries. No more Ramen Noodles and Hamburger Helper or buying second-hand clothing and used toys at the Salvation Army. Joan felt as though she’d been liberated from prison.
Then the workers went on strike. To make ends meet, Peter took a job at a local auto-parts store and drove a cab three nights a week and every other weekend.
But that was all in the past. The strike was months behind them, and Peter was back at work with GE. They could afford to celebrate a little. Instead of a night out on the town, they decided to redo their bedroom.
Joan arrived just as Carter & Sullivan was opening its doors. She parked her Buick station wagon with its wood-panel trim near the mall’s south-east entrance. For the next three decades, whenever Joan was interviewed about what happened, she’d tell reporters she wished she’d parked near the store’s north entrance. That way they wouldn’t have passed the toy aisle.
Nicky stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted what would become that year’s popular Christmas toy: the Cabbage Patch doll. Nicky wanted to stop and look. Joan wanted to get the bedding and go home. Unlike her mother and sister, she didn’t care for shopping.
‘Please,’ Nicky begged, tugging her mother’s hand. ‘Please, Mommy, pleeeeease.’
‘You promise you’ll stay here? Right here, in this aisle?’
‘I promise.’
‘You promise what?’
‘To stay with the dolls.’ Nicky smiled her gap-toothed smile. ‘I won’t walk away.’
Joan left her daughter alone without giving it a second thought. Another girl was standing in the aisle, a cute tomboy with curly black hair. It was 1983; parents left their kids alone all the time.
Joan found the comforter she wanted easily enough, but the advertised sheets were another matter. When she failed to locate them, she hunted around for a store employee. The pleasant older man she spoke with didn’t know anything about the advertised linens but said they might be out back in the storeroom and went to investigate. It was 9.13 a.m.
During this time, recent high school graduate and newly minted Carter & Sullivan employee Brad Fisher was running late. He was supposed to arrive at work at 8.45, but he had somehow slept through his alarm – again. He headed for the toy department, which was next to the door for the stockroom. When he cut through the aisle displaying those creepy Cabbage Patch dolls, he saw a teenager or a boy of at least twelve kneeling next to a young girl matching Nicky Hubbard’s description. Brad would later tell the police he remembered the little girl clearly, because her long blonde hair was pulled back from her face and tied with a white marble elastic band. They were all the rage that summer; his younger sister wore the same sort of stupid things in her hair. The stores could barely keep them in stock.
Brad would also tell police about the teenager, who he had assumed was the girl’s brother. How when the boy got to his feet he was short, barely a few inches over five feet. How he wore dirty jeans, scuffed work boots and a stained black T-shirt.
The boy grabbed his sister’s wrist. When she tried to take her hand back, he yanked her arm, hard. When she let out a small yelp, he smiled.
A brother wouldn’t act that way, an inner voice whispered.
Then another voice countered: Remember when you got so pissed at Maggie for ratting on you when you sneaked out to meet George and Tony? What did you do?
