by Chris Mooney
‘I need this. The next few weeks, I’m going to be under a lot of stress. You know what happens when I get stressed.’
‘I can satisfy you,’ Sarah says, blinking back tears. ‘I know how to satisfy you.’
‘Is there anyone outside?’
Sarah looks, begrudgingly.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No one’s coming.’
‘Keep watching – and put on those gloves.’
The drug has taken effect; Darby has gone limp, sliding into unconsciousness. Head pounding, I move off the couch and crawl towards Lancaster. I find his key fob inside his jacket pocket and toss it to Sarah. Then I get to my feet, collect Darby’s satellite phone and the Glock, and hand them to Sarah.
In my present physical condition, it takes what feels like an hour to pick up Darby and sling her over my shoulder. Sarah holds the door open for me as I carry her outside and lay her gently across the SUV’s backseat.
As we return to the house, I tell Sarah what she needs to do next. She listens and doesn’t ask any questions.
‘I’ve got to shut off my phone,’ I tell her. ‘I won’t be able to call you for a while.’
‘Are we safe?’
‘As long as you do what I said. We’ll have to lay low for a bit – the FBI will have all sorts of questions about Nicky Hubbard, but –’
‘They know about her?’ Her face is bloodless.
I gently cup her face in my hands. ‘The FBI found one of her fingerprints in the bedroom – that’s all they know and that’s all they’ll ever know.’ I step inside the house. ‘Slip out of your boots. Follow me – and watch where you step.’
‘What about Sherrilyn O’Neil?’ she asks, referring to the woman I had accidentally killed before the arrival of the FBI. She lasted a good eight months before the fight left her. Darby, I’m sure, will last longer – a year, maybe even two.
‘They don’t know about Sherrilyn,’ I say, ‘or about any of the other ones.’ I pick up the severed bindings from the floor and stuff them in her jacket pocket. Sarah looks panicked. ‘Sarah, there’s nothing to link Nicky to the other girls.’
‘What about Teddy Lancaster? He recorded you, so he knows about Nicky –’
‘He doesn’t,’ I say, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. Teddy never mentioned Hubbard while he had me tied down to the chair. Sure, he knew something had happened inside the Downes bedroom – he had recorded a video of me on my hands and knees scrubbing away, trying to destroy any trace of Nicky’s blood. But I refused to tell Teddy what I was doing, or why I was doing it. He thought he could beat the truth out of me, but he was wrong. He had finally given up when Darby McCormick rang the doorbell. He said he would find out. The truth would come out, and, whatever it was, he said, he would expose me.
And now I’m safe again, and there’s only one last thing to do.
‘Nicky can’t hurt us,’ I tell her as I sit down on the desk chair. ‘She’s dead. They all are.’ I point to the small bag of plastic zip-ties Kelly had placed on the counter and say, ‘Grab a couple of those. I need you to tie me up.’
Sarah returns with the bindings. ‘Everyone on the planet is looking for Hubbard,’ she says as she ties my wrists together. ‘The FBI aren’t going to go away. They’ll stay here and look for her.’
‘They won’t. Grab the tape from the floor.’
She does, and I say, ‘The Hubbard stuff will die down, I promise. After that, we’ll be free to go wherever we want, together.’
Sarah kisses me deeply. Smiling and grateful, she secures the tape over my mouth.
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone inside the house, tied up and gagged, another unfortunate victim of the Red Hill Ripper. The air reeks of blood and gun smoke and, as I close my eyes, I think about the way Sarah stiffened when I touched her. I’m not worried. She loves me. She always does what she’s told.
69
Coop sat back down in Chief Robinson’s office chair, about to have another go at the property records for the Downes home, when from down the hall he heard the dispatcher’s alarmed voice say, ‘Dead. They’re all dead.’
Coop was suddenly on his feet and moving into the hall, which was practically desolate. Red Hill PD had been called in to help with the manhunt for Eli Savran. His Ford Bronco hadn’t been sighted anywhere in Red Hill, Brewster or the surrounding towns. The Colorado state police had started reviewing the security-camera footage for all their nearby tollbooths, looking for the Bronco, but Coop was willing to bet a week’s salary that the guy had changed it for a stolen car and left town. By now, he was probably already out of the state.
Inside the communications room, Betty the dispatcher was talking to a patrolman Coop hadn’t seen before, a tall, skinny guy with a slight overbite who looked like he had just graduated from puberty. They saw Coop approaching and visibly stiffened.
Darby, he thought, a cold pit forming in his stomach.
She’s dead, he thought as he jogged towards them, rubber-legged. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed since Darby had called to tell him she’d arrived at Sally Kelly’s house. Then she had gone into radio-silence mode and refused to answer her satellite phone. No big surprise there. When it came to working a case, Darby always did things in her own way and in her own time, which was why he had sent the patrolman with the gummy smile, Whitehead, to chaperone her. There had been no reason to worry, he had told himself, throwing his attention back into the property records.
Coop didn’t need to ask the question. Betty, face ashen and voice tight, answered it for him. ‘Doug’s there right now. He just called.’
‘Doug who?’
‘Freeman. He’s one of ours.’ The look in the woman’s eyes made Coop want to turn away and block his ears, just as he did when he was a boy, when his parents were fighting. If don’t see it or hear it that means it didn’t happen.
The dispatcher licked her lips and her body trembled as she spoke. ‘Sally Kelly, Lancaster and Whitehead – Doug Freeman says they’re all dead. Gunshots. Blood everywhere, he said.’
Coop had his keys in his hand. ‘Dr McCormick?’
‘He didn’t say anything about her. He had just radioed to say he was entering the house. I’ll call him right now.’
But Coop was already running down the hall.
The snow had stopped. It was a few minutes shy of 5.30, and the sky was pitch black. He couldn’t hold his hand steady when he dialled the number for the computer guys in Denver to trace the signal for Darby’s satellite phone. After he hung up, he drove with both hands gripping the wheel to stop his arms from shaking.
Dead, the dispatcher had said.
The wind howled and slammed against his car, and it occurred to him, again, how a good portion of his adult life had been spent caged with anxiety, worrying about the moment when he received the call that Darby had finally died.
They’re all dead, Betty had said.
For as long as he’d known her, she had been attracted to darkness – and attracted too much darkness. And yet wasn’t that the reason why he had fallen in love with her in the first place? He had tried to disconnect himself from her, to gain some distance, by dating a string of women who had the intelligence, emotional depth and career ambition of a cucumber. Why? They were a distraction, sure, but more importantly they were uncomplicated, easy to be with and, emotionally, easy to manage. The moment one of them wanted more, he picked another living Barbie doll.
Darby was dangerous to him – to everyone, really, when he thought about it. Inviting her into his life on a full-time basis meant subjecting himself to a purgatory of anxiety and aggravation, waiting for the inevitable call that she had been killed. Naively – maybe even stupidly – he thought he could spare himself the full impact of that moment by refusing to allow himself to be emotionally entangled with her. That decision, he thought, would give him some much-needed distance. A possible buffer. And yet here he was, sinking, his lungs and stomach filling with what felt like wet cement.
His
satphone rang. As he reached for it, he knew it was the dispatcher, Betty, calling to tell him Darby was dead. But the caller-ID said ‘Harold Scott’. Who was that? It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t remember why, and then suddenly he did: Scott was the special agent in charge of the Denver field office. He was due to arrive at the Red Hill station at six.
Coop answered the call.
Scott got right to it. ‘What happened last night, Eli Savran – the cat’s out of the bag,’ he said. ‘Story’s all over the local and national news, the internet and Twitter. You got anything new on your end?’
Coop told him about Sally Kelly’s house. ‘I don’t know much,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way there right now.’
‘So Savran is still in Red Hill.’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Give me the address.’
Coop did, reading it off the GPS. He was ten minutes away – probably more, because of all the snow packing the barren roads.
‘I’ll meet you there,’ Scott said. ‘Take control of the scene, make sure no one tramples on anything.’
‘Understood.’ Scott hadn’t mentioned anything about Nicky Hubbard’s fingerprint. It was possible he didn’t know yet. That, or he had been told by the lab’s fingerprint people and was sitting on it for the moment. Either way, Coop knew he couldn’t sit on it any longer. ‘Sir, are you someplace where you can talk freely? I have some sensitive information I need to share with you.’
‘I’m alone in my car.’
Coop told him about finding Nicky Hubbard’s fingerprint and about what he’d found out earlier in the property records – that before the Downes family moved into their home, it had been vacant for nearly a year. The original owners, Robert and Alice Birmingham, were dead – Robert of a stroke in ’79; the wife following four years later, of a heart attack in her sleep, during the spring of 1983, the same year Nicky Hubbard had been abducted. During the time the home was vacant, their only child, Stephen Birmingham, who had been living in San Diego when his mother died, hired contractors to renovate the house – new roof, new carpeting, the walls and floorboards in all the rooms stripped down to the bare wood and freshly painted and stained. At some point during that time, Savran had brought Nicky Hubbard there and she had touched the floorboard while it was still drying, her fingerprint forever sealed in the poly.
‘You’re sure about this?’ Scott asked. ‘About Hubbard’s fingerprint?’
‘There’s no question.’
‘Jesus H. Christ.’
In the silence that followed, Coop’s mind swung back to Darby, to the dead waiting for him inside Sally Kelly’s house. As he glanced again at the GPS, he pictured the patrolman navigating his way through a house of blood and gun smoke.
‘We’re going to need a list of the contractors, painters – whoever was working on the house during that time, I want their names,’ Scott said. ‘One of them might’ve seen Savran there at some point.’
‘We can ask Savran when we find him.’
‘If we find him. A mook like Savran isn’t going to surrender. Guys like him exit the planet one of two ways: a blaze of glory or the noose route. We’ll need to establish a timeline for when he was inside the house with Hubbard.’
Then Scott was gone, and Coop was alone with his thoughts again. As he drove down yet another cold and bone-white tunnel, thinking about Darby and all the blood waiting for him, the wind whipped against his car as if wanting to shove him in another direction, any direction but the one in which he was heading.
A pretty EMT named Leila is stitching up the laceration near my mouth when the back of the ambulance door swings open, letting in a blast of cold air and the blinking merry-go-round of police and emergency lights.
Agent Cooper’s hair is windblown, and his cheeks look sunken and hollow.
‘Could you please give us a minute?’ he asks Leila, yelling over the outside voices shouting orders to one another through the wind and crackle of handheld radios.
After she leaves, Cooper sits on the gurney across from me, elbows on his knees, his satellite phone gripped in one hand. When I see the crushing terror in his face, I can’t conceal my delight. Fortunately, my face and lips are swollen and numbed by Novocain, so my true expression and emotions are withheld from him.
His gaze roves over the various cuts and lacerations, the stitches and Steri-Strips.
‘Savran did that to you?’ he asks.
I nod, slowly. ‘He was waiting behind the front door.’
The words come out in a slurred, wet mess. Cooper doesn’t understand me. I use the pad pinched between my fingers to gently wipe at my lips. They feel as thick as a bicycle tyre.
Cooper leans closer, straining to hear.
‘The front door was unlocked,’ I tell him. ‘I stepped inside and saw Kelly and Lancaster dead on the floor. But it was too late. Savran must’ve been standing behind the door, because that’s when he attacked me. I didn’t see him.’
I feel myself drooling and wipe at my mouth again. ‘When I woke up, he had me tied down to the chair in the kitchen. He wanted to know how we found him. Savran. Wanted to know what we knew. He was using a billy club on me when we heard someone pull into the driveway. Then he hit me again and I was out. Next thing I know, patrol is inside the house, cutting me from the chair.’
‘And Darby, where was she?’
‘I’m not following.’
‘Did you see her come inside the house?’
‘No. What’s going on?’
‘I think Savran took Darby.’
He didn’t, Agent Cooper. I did. And after I’m done playing with her, Sarah and I are going to move far, far away and start a new life together.
‘Did you hear Savran say anything?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’
Cooper looks like a man who has been forced out of a plane without a parachute. I want to smile. Instead, I stare at him blankly, pretending to be horrified.
‘We’ll find her,’ I say.
‘What were you doing at Kelly’s house?’
‘Teddy called me.’
Which is entirely true. Teddy did call me while I was on my way to the river. Up until that moment, I too believed Eli Savran was, in fact, the Red Hill Ripper. I knew that the Red Hill Ripper had surreptitiously recorded himself killing the families – had, in all probability, recorded me down on my hands and knees, wiping down the wall and floor in the corner of the Downes bedroom. When I tossed Savran’s MacBook and computer paraphernalia into the water, I truly believed I was halfway home to saving myself. All I had to do was to find Savran before anyone else did and, God-willing, kill him – a definite long shot, which was why I had Sarah shadowing me in case we needed to run. I had finally shared with Sarah the horrible truth of the mistake at the Downes house that morning.
‘Teddy wanted me to talk to Kelly,’ I say.
‘About what?’
‘Kelly said she had something on Savran, but she would talk only to me.’
This too is true. Teddy called and used those exact words. When I arrived at Kelly’s house, I had no idea Teddy Lancaster was the Red Hill Ripper – that it was he, and not Savran, who had been recording the families. Teddy greeted me warmly at the door, and when I entered, on my way to the kitchen to talk to Sally Kelly, he smacked me over the head with his billy club. Kept hitting me until I blacked out. It wasn’t until after I woke up and found myself bound to the chair that I learned of the monster living inside Teddy Lancaster.
‘I walked inside and then this happened,’ I say, and point to my face. ‘That’s all I remember.’
‘Think for a moment. Maybe you thought you heard Darby or Savran talking.’
I heard all sorts of things, Agent Cooper. I can tell you that Teddy Lancaster killed the families because they were standing in the way of the town’s incorporation. The state had developers all lined up, but the families refused to sell their properties for well below fair market value, and unless they sold the incorporation wou
ldn’t go through. The state was in thrall to the developers, who would help it to meet all its costs – and line any number of individuals’ pockets as well of course. Teddy’s power base would expand as a result, and he and his state cronies – the ones who had made all the financial arrangements – would receive kickbacks galore. Teddy disguised the murders to look like the work of a serial killer, so he and his politician friends could get rich turning Red Hill into a strip mall. Oh, and Eli Savran is dead. Teddy killed him, and I heard him say where Eli’s body is.
‘Can you tell me anything?’ Cooper asks. He’s barely able to conceal the beautiful hopelessness in his voice. ‘Anything at all?’
Yes, Agent Cooper. I can tell you I made a mistake that morning. I fully admit that. When I stepped inside the Downes bedroom and found them all dead, my first thought was to protect Sarah. I couldn’t risk your finding any lingering traces of Nicky Hubbard’s blood because you and I both know that forensic DNA identification has evolved light years since 1983.
‘Ray?’
Teddy doesn’t know about Nicky Hubbard or what I did to her in that bedroom a long, long time ago. About how, when I was strangling her, she cut her head and started to bleed everywhere – you know how cuts on the head are. But Teddy knew I was up to something, because he had recorded me cleaning up that area – which is why he wanted me to go to Kelly’s house, why he tied me up to the chair. He wanted to know all about the fingerprint because he had run out of time – because you and the FBI refused to leave, and Teddy didn’t want to leave any loose ends. I refused to tell him, which is why he tried valiantly to redecorate my face. He doesn’t know about Nicky Hubbard or any of the others – and neither will you, Agent Cooper – neither will you.
‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ I say.
His crestfallen expression makes my heart surge. I can smell the fear and desperation bleeding from his pores.
I grab his wrist and squeeze. ‘We’ll find her.’
His satellite phone rings. As he answers the call, he removes a pen from his shirt pocket.
‘Go ahead,’ he says into the phone. He’s patting down his pockets, searching for his notebook, when I hand him mine. He writes down an address and then hangs up.
