by Chris Mooney
Coop turned to her. She still wouldn’t look at him.
‘There’s a trapdoor there. He did this to them,’ Darby said, and with her eyes locked on the bed she grabbed the sweater’s collar and pulled it down.
Her neck was covered with raw, red rings, the skin full of cuts and abrasions. Coop felt his face tighten and his stomach roil in anger and fear, as he conjured up grisly possibilities of how Williams had injured her. Coop wanted to say something but there was nothing to say, and he fought the urge to comfort her. He wanted to touch her – needed to, a part of him still believing that this was a dream, that the only way he could prove it wasn’t was to put a hand on her shoulder and pull her close to him. But trying to comfort her or to hold her, he knew, would be a mistake, because she’d shut down on him.
‘He told me one name,’ Darby said. ‘Sherrilyn O’Neil, from Utah.’
Coop recorded it to memory. He didn’t write it down; there would be plenty of time for that later. Right now, all he needed to do was to sit here and listen, just listen.
‘I don’t know where he buried them. Or their names or how many were tortured down there. We may never know.’ Darby’s gaze remained locked on the bed, and her voice sounded hollow. She’s still in shock, Coop thought.
‘I’m sure Hubbard knows things that’ll help us.’
‘She shot him. Hubbard. Blew a hole the size of a basketball through his chest. But I killed him, Coop.’
Darby started to tremble. She opened her mouth, then closed it.
Coop stared down at her cut, bloody and swollen hands. Wait, he reminded himself. Don’t force it.
‘Like a dog,’ Darby said, her voice raw. ‘He made her sleep on the floor next to the bed, like a dog.’
Coop didn’t know what to say, but felt he had to say something. He was searching for the right words when Darby hugged her legs fiercely against her chest. She placed her forehead on her knees and began rocking back and forth, fighting tears.
Day Eleven
83
The following morning, at 11 a.m., Darby walked into Chief Robinson’s office and found Terry Hoder waiting for her. She was freshly showered and dressed, the knuckles of both hands wrapped in gauze and compression bandages. He wore a rumpled suit and a cannula that was connected to an oxygen tank strapped to the back of his wheelchair.
A tense moment followed as Hoder studied her face and hands. Then his gaze landed on the raw, torn circles of skin around her neck. Darby had made no attempt to hide her injuries.
‘Well, don’t you look like shit,’ he said in a dry, raspy voice.
‘You’re not looking so hot yourself, Terry.’
‘It’s that damn hospital food. See what you look like when you’re forced to eat puréed spaghetti and meatballs.’
Darby moved behind the wheelchair. She gripped its handles, and was about to roll him out when he tilted back his head, his face turning serious as his rheumy eyes looked up at her.
‘Coop didn’t get into the specifics of what happened to you down in that … place. I’m not asking you to do so now. But if you need to talk, I’m here.’
Darby said nothing.
‘And I’m sorry,’ Hoder said.
‘For what?’
‘For what you had to endure. No human being should ever –’
‘Come on, we need to get going,’ Darby said as she pushed him into the hall. ‘I was told you only have an hour. I don’t want you to miss your next puréed lunch.’
‘You’re going to dine with me today. But you’re going to hit a liquor store on the way, buy me a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon, and sneak it into my hospital room. That’s an order.’
‘Ten-four on that.’
Darby wheeled him past the station’s front doors. Outside, she spotted the Brewster General ambulance that had delivered Hoder – and a pair of news vans from Boulder and Denver. The Ray Williams story was out, but nobody knew about Nicky Hubbard, not yet.
But they would, maybe even by the day’s end. The FBI wouldn’t be able to contain the story much longer.
Darby pushed Hoder through the hall until they reached Coop standing in a doorway. The room they entered was fitted with an observation mirror that looked on to Nicky Hubbard, who was sitting alone at a table. A breakfast tray of eggs and toast remained untouched, and the famous photograph of Hubbard at age seven had been overturned. Darby had taken the picture into the room with her, hoping it would get the woman to open up and talk. So far, she hadn’t had much luck.
Hubbard, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, her hair unkempt and face puffy from crying and lack of sleep, worked a paper towel over her ink-stained fingers.
‘My God,’ Hoder whispered. ‘Is it really her?’
Coop said, ‘The fingerprints match. Each and every one. But she keeps insisting her name is Sarah, that Nicky Hubbard is dead.’
‘And no one who saw her ever knew?’
Darby answered the question. ‘Williams never went anywhere with her – never allowed her outside the house. The few times people went round, he made Nicky hide in that area underneath the shed. She had her own bed there.’
‘The women Williams abducted – do we have any idea about the number?’
‘Nicky told me she stopped counting after twenty.’
Hoder closed his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ he said under his breath.
‘Williams’s last victim, Sherrilyn O’Neil, was from a small town in Utah.’ Darby felt cold all over as she thought about the O’Neil woman trapped inside that cold, concrete cell with the shock collar tied around her throat, and the terror the woman must have felt when Williams hit the button for the hanging contraption. ‘He abducted her last year, in March.’
‘Any other names?’
‘No,’ Darby said. And we’ll probably never know because I killed him, she thought.
Coop said, ‘Williams had a home computer and we found surveillance notes and pictures of women in the surrounding towns,’ he said. ‘But they’re all alive. My guess is he was staking them out, perhaps with the idea of blaming their disappearance on the Red Hill Ripper. But Williams never went through with it.’
‘We also spoke with Rita Tuttle. In exchange for immunity, she told us Lancaster coerced her into coming forward with that story of Eli Savran being one of her clients. She’d never met him.’
‘And Lancaster was the one who recorded Williams scrubbing down that corner of the Downes bedroom. Williams didn’t want us to find her blood.’
‘I don’t think he knew about the fingerprint.’
‘I wonder why Lancaster didn’t make a move on Williams sooner.’
‘Darby and I talked about this, and our theory is that Lancaster was waiting until he found out more about what Williams was up to. Once the news broke about Hubbard’s fingerprint –’
‘He could swoop in and solve one of the greatest mysteries of the modern century,’ Hoder said. His gaze was locked on Hubbard the entire time. ‘That poor girl.’
‘We think Williams was getting ready to run, probably that night. We found a packed suitcase in the trunk of his car, and a briefcase with cash and fake IDs to give him a new life.’
‘What about Hubbard? Did he have a new ID for her?’
‘No. And we found her suitcase in the basement. Maybe he was going to take her, I don’t know. Darby thinks Williams felt the walls closing in on him, might’ve been thinking of killing Hubbard before he left town.
‘We also found a trunk,’ Coop said. ‘It was packed with dynamite, grenades, ammo, you name it. And he had weapons stashed all over the house.’
The door opened and SAC Scott poked his head inside. ‘You ready to take another run at her?’ he asked Darby.
Darby nodded. Hubbard glanced at the mirror, as if she had heard their voices. As Darby left the room, her mind flashed back to the moment when the woman had raised the shotgun, a Mossberg with ghost-ring sights that had been loaded with 12-gauge slugs – which is why Darby hadn’t been hit. If the shot
gun had been loaded with buckshot, the wide blast radius would have torn through her viscera, and her body would’ve been lying next to Williams’s at the morgue.
Her feelings about Ray Williams were pretty simple: he had gotten what he deserved. His victims, though, deserved better. Instead of arresting him so he could tell them where he had buried the bodies, she had satisfied her own bloodlust, and it ate at her. Darby had to do right by his victims – had to do whatever it took to find their remains and bring them home.
Epilogue
Darby started awake, torn from a nightmare where she was again yanked from her feet to the ceiling, only this time the steel collar snapped her neck. Her eyes flew open, the scream already rising in her throat, when she saw Coop leaning over the front seat, his hand on her arm.
‘We’re here,’ he said.
Heart still tripping with fear from the dream, Darby sat up and swallowed back the scream. She touched her throat to make sure the collar wasn’t there and then took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes, head pounding with exhaustion and the dream still vivid in her mind, screwing into her head like a drill bit.
Whitlow, the agent with the thick, curly hair who had picked them up at the airport, was driving across a long gravel driveway, rocks pinging underneath the car and the air-conditioning on full blast. She glanced out the back window and saw that the pair of Chevy Impalas hadn’t followed, Coop already having told them to hang back at the main road to watch for reporters.
Coming into view through the front window was the Canterbury Retirement Community, a series of connected ranch-style stone buildings with red clay roofs built around the kind of opulent fountain commonly seen in the estates of the rich and famous. The cherry trees and weeping willows, some of them so old they looked like they had been there since the beginning of time, offered shade from the unrelenting Texas sun. The owners had put a lot of time and money into the landscaping, wanting to give the assisted living centre a feeling of vibrant health and activity instead of a way station on the route to death.
Darby was relieved to see everything business-as-usual quiet. For the past forty-eight hours she had lived in fear that someone at Brewster General would recognize Nicky Hubbard and call a reporter or tabloid. Darby didn’t want the news to get out before she’d had a chance to speak with Nicky’s mother.
Darby was also relieved that the FBI had allowed her to be the one to approach Joan Hubbard.
The car pulled up to the front and parked. As Darby got out of the back, she heard Coop ask Whitlow for his cell phone. She shut the door and was unable to hear what was said as they walked back and forth until Whitlow handed over his cell.
She followed Coop into the assisted living centre, with seascape watercolours hanging on the walls and Lysol hanging in the air-conditioned air, trying to disguise the atmosphere of death and decay. At the reception desk, he had a quiet conversation with a blonde-haired woman with an overbite. The woman got up and opened the door behind her. Several minutes passed, and then Coop was invited into the room.
When Coop emerged a few minutes later, he went over to Darby and said, ‘She’s out back, in the garden.’
An orderly escorted them through a maze of rooms fragrant with coffee and the cellophane-baked smell of reheated eggs and potatoes, and everywhere Darby looked she saw elderly people hunched at tables playing cards or doing puzzles; gnarled limbs planted in wheelchairs and dull eyes staring blankly at TVs playing Good Morning America.
Then she was standing outside, breathing in fresh air and feeling the morning sun warm against her face. Darby put on her sunglasses as the orderly left.
Coop turned to her and said, ‘She’s straight ahead.’
A path was carved through the overflowing gardens. Darby was making her way across it when she noticed that Coop wasn’t beside her. She stopped, turned and saw him standing near the door leading back to the activity room.
‘You coming?’ she asked.
‘I want you to do it.’
‘She’s going to have questions about her daughter and –’
‘I’ll be right here.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve earned it. Go.’
Darby carried on across the path, slowing when she saw a small, fair-skinned woman kneeling in the dirt and pressing the earth with a trowel. She wore jeans, a long-sleeved grey T-shirt, a big floppy straw hat that tied underneath her chin and gardening gloves that went up past her wrists.
Aside from the cacti, Darby didn’t recognize any of the flowers. Gardening had been her mother’s thing, Darby never having had any interest in it, unable to understand the point of all that hard work when winter and animals would come along and destroy everything you had spent so much time and money on. And yet her mother kept doing it year after year, right up until the day she died.
Just as I keep doing what I do, Darby thought. And, in her own way, wasn’t she a gardener too? A gardener for lost souls?
The whole flight here, Darby had rehearsed what she would say to Nicky’s mother. When Joan Hubbard looked up from her work, smiling warmly, Darby was struck by how frail the woman was, and the words died in her throat.
But there was nothing frail about the woman’s voice. It was strong, like a fist: ‘Can I help you?’
‘My name is Darby McCormick.’
Joan Hubbard’s gaze narrowed, alarmed at the bruising and cuts on Darby’s face.
Darby licked her lips nervously. ‘I’d like to speak to you about your daughter.’
Joan Hubbard held up a hand and said, ‘Stop right there.’
‘I’m not a reporter. I’m working with –’
‘Stop. Please, just stop.’ Nicky’s mother got to her feet. She dropped her trowel and looked at Darby, a hard-scrabble, no-nonsense woman who knew how to fight with her fists and her mouth. ‘I don’t care who you are, and I don’t know how you got in here. But I want you to leave, now.’
‘Nicky’s alive. I –’
‘Whatever service you’re trying to sell me, I’m not interested. I’ve had the top private investigators and even a few retired policemen who believed they could find my daughter. They couldn’t, and neither can you. My daughter is dead, God rest her soul. Now, please, leave me in peace.’
‘I found her,’ Darby said. ‘She’s alive.’
Joan Hubbard made her hands into fists by her sides. Her mouth worked but no sound came out. Birds chirped from a nearby tree.
‘I’m working with the FBI,’ Darby said. ‘They’re here. Nicky is waiting for you in Colorado. She’s –’
‘How dare you sneak in here and say such a thing to me, you sick –’
‘Nicky is alive,’ Darby said again. ‘Your daughter is alive, and I’m here to take you to her.’
Joan Hubbard looked over her shoulder, at the hard Texas sun beating down on her and on the flat, sprawling land, the heat already so strong it could melt bones. She looked up at the trees and then at the flowers, as though they were going to confirm what she had hoped for, prayed for and dreamed about every night for decades.
‘My daughter is dead. She’s been missing for more than thirty years. There must be some mistake.’
‘There’s no mistake,’ Darby said gently. ‘We found her.’
Joan Hubbard glared at her, wanting more. Darby wondered where to start, how much to tell her. Your daughter wasn’t harmed, at least not physically. The teenager spotted with your daughter that day in the store? His name was Ray Williams. He was a teenager when he abducted your daughter because his mother had always wanted a girl. They cared for her in their own way, and he loved her in his own way. He abducted women from other states for many, many years. Your daughter is doing her best to provide us with their names and, hopefully, the places where he buried them – but she’s mourning his death. I know it sounds odd, almost incomprehensible, but victims in these sorts of situations are often bound up with their abusers. It’s going to take a long, long time for your daughter to heal – and she may never heal psychologically. But the important
thing right now is that Nicky is alive and she’s safe. Your daughter is alive and safe and you two will have time together. You have time.
‘You’re lying,’ Joan Hubbard said, her voice catching on her tears.
‘There’s an FBI agent here with me. His name is Jackson Cooper. He has a phone with him. You can call and talk to her.’
The woman stared at the ground as if she’d dropped something precious.
‘After you speak to Nicky,’ Darby said, ‘we’ll take you to see her. The Bureau has a private plane, they’ve already made preparations –’
Joan’s legs buckled. Darby ran to her.
‘She’s alive,’ Darby said, holding Nicky’s mother in her arms. Joan Hubbard felt as light and frail as a bird. ‘Your daughter is alive.’
And as Joan Hubbard wailed tears of joy and relief and sadness and heartbreak and loss, Darby thought, This is why you do this. This is why you travel through the dark and put yourself at risk. You do it for these moments: to bring lost souls home.
PRAISE FOR
CHRIS MOONEY:
‘One of the best thriller writers working today’
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A mother and her son have been executed in their home and fingerprint matches show their attacker died twenty years ago.
But how can dead serial killers return to haunt the present?
