Fear the Dark (25 page)

Gasoline fumes rise from the backpack as I remove the BIC lighter from my jacket pocket. I remove the first Molotov cocktail, ignite the gasoline-soaked wick and toss it against the crushed glass and blood smeared across the floor. The glass bottle explodes in flames, and I can feel heat as strong as a fist punching me. I remove the second Molotov, ignite it and throw it against the counter where the bald man had been sitting, doing DNA testing. I throw the third towards the back and the fourth and last one against the floor in the middle of the trailer. The heat is stifling as I grab the backpack and exit through the side door.

The trailer is burning nicely. I could wait for the flames to ignite the liquid nitrogen and all the other chemicals stored in there, which would blow everything to kingdom come; or I could use the last item stored inside my backpack, a long piece of gasoline-soaked cloth and make quick work of it.

It takes me a moment to find the cap for the gas tank. I remove it and then stuff the wet cloth into the hole. I can feel the heat from the flames rocketing out of the windows when I light the last wick and run across the street, heading for my car and thinking about my next and, God willing, last stop.

45

Darby entered the Wagon Wheel Saloon at quarter past ten. Last night’s Bible Belt crowd had been replaced with the kind of people she’d grown up with in Boston, blue-collar types and roughnecks who passed around bottles and pitchers of beer, everyone drinking, eating and laughing in an atmosphere that reminded her of a Roman banquet. The dining-room was at full capacity and the pool-room was packed with young guys in their twenties, the juke playing The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’.

For the next half hour, in the uncomfortably close atmosphere reeking of spilled beer, testosterone and sweat, deodorant and cologne, she interviewed the bartender and waitresses about any customer or local who may have smelled like fish or garbage. Coming up empty-handed, she moved to the pool-room and put the same question to a group of college-aged guys who had the collective IQ of a balloon. Most didn’t listen to her, their gazes listless and their attention elsewhere, as they wondered what she looked like naked, she supposed, or how she’d be in the sack.

When she struck out with them, she went to tackle the dining crowd and found Coop standing by the corner of the bar, his chest rising and falling as he sucked in air. His nostrils were wide and white around the edges, and as she
drew closer she could see his eyes glowing with the atavistic intensity of a boxer who was about to step into the ring and unload all of his dark energies.

Darby cleared her throat several times. She felt like a rock was lodged there.

‘I was going to tell you, Coop.’

Coop said nothing. Darby couldn’t meet his eyes. She turned her head, folded her arms on the bar and pretended to read the labels on a row of vodka bottles.

‘
Well?
’

‘Lancaster knew the autopsies had been rescheduled for this morning,’ Darby said. ‘He –’

‘You had no proof of that when you cold-cocked him –
in an autopsy room
.’

‘Guys like Lancaster lose a piece of their brain every time they sit on a toilet. You want a guy like that spearheading an investigation like this?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Sometimes you’ve got to stick their dicks into a socket to rewire their thinking.’

Coop’s head looked like it was about to explode.

‘He’s been screwing with us ever since we got here,’ Darby said. ‘The autopsies were the cherry on the sundae.’

Coop leaned sideways against the bar. ‘The guy’s an asshole. Everyone
knows
he’s an asshole; it’s an established fact. You’ve dealt with your fair share of career-climbing dicks who use cases as political leverage, pencil-pushers and bureaucratic cocksuckers who get off on napalming your work. But not once have you ever clocked one in
public – at least not that I’m aware of. Then again, I’m learning all sorts of new and interesting things about your behaviour.’

‘Like Williams says, Teddy Lancaster brings out the best in people.’

Coop dug his tongue hard into one of his back molars and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘Lancaster decided not to press criminal charges, obviously, or we’d be having this conversation inside a holding cell,’ he said. ‘A civil case, well, that’s another matter. He’ll go after you first. He’ll go after the Bureau, because we hired you and because we’ve got the deeper pockets. Lancaster will get a nice little payout to keep his mouth shut, and then the Bureau will need to make an example of someone, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Terry Hoder. Before you went all Mike Tyson on him, did you once stop to consider how poorly this would reflect on
me
?’

‘I lost my cool.’

‘No shit. Why? What happened?’

‘He said something to me privately.’

‘What? What did he say?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘You just tossed a Molotov on to my career, and you’re not going to tell me
why
?’

Darby swallowed. Cleared her throat.

‘It’s done, Coop.’
And I don’t regret it either
, she added to herself.

Darby could feel his eyes burrowing into the side of her face. When he spoke again, his voice vacillated between rage and disbelief.

‘I went to the station looking for you. To give you this.’ Coop placed a satellite phone on the bar. ‘Hoder said you were at the station. After he filled me in on what was going on, knowing you, I figured you’d come here to ask around about this Timmy character. Little did we know you were at a Rite Aid. So you can imagine my surprise when that 911 call came through. The kid working the cash register called it in, in case you’re wondering.’

‘I showed him and the pharmacist my ID,’ Darby said. ‘After it was all over, I told them they had nothing to worry about.’

‘That’s not the point. You sneaked out of the station and tried to put the screws on the pharmacist.’

‘I was following up on our lead.’

‘You went alone. You’re not supposed to go anywhere alone and, worse, after what went down you didn’t call it in. The guy you spoke to, was he the same one who called you last night at the hotel?’

‘I’m pretty sure. Voice was altered.’

‘So why didn’t you call it in?’

‘Do you think he was standing around waiting after he left the rope in my car?’

‘What rope?’ Coop asked.

Darby realized that, in her exhausted state, she hadn’t told anyone about it. She had gone straight to the Wagon Wheel after leaving the Rite Aid.

‘While I was inside the pharmacy, he was inside my car. He left the door hanging open, and when I went outside I found two pieces of rope tied into a surgeon’s knot lying on my car seat.’

Coop looked away, blinking. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘It’s in an evidence bag in the trunk of my car – not that we’re going to find anything on it.’

‘There’s a thing called procedure, remember? You
follow
procedure in order to build a
case
, and you have to
build
a case in order to –’

‘
IT’S A WASTE OF TIME
.’

Darby had drawn the attention of nearby people. She scooped up her new satphone, stuffed it inside her jacket pocket, inched closer to him and, leaning forward, crossed her arms against the bar, their shoulders touching.

‘Don’t you see what he’s doing, Coop? The bullshit with the photos, tracing the cell signal, calling the pharmacy, leaving the rope – the
second
this guy does something, we all jump. He wants us to keep spinning our wheels until we fall over exhausted or until we’re forced to leave, whichever happens first. Finally we’ve got a lead on this guy, and you want to waste time turning my rental into a crime scene?’

Coop saw her point. His face softened a bit, but the anger was still in his eyes.

‘Look, I’m sorry for what happened with Lancaster,’ she said. ‘And maybe I should have called after what went down at the pharmacy.’

‘
Maybe
? Are you serious?’

‘While I was driving, I kept checking my mirrors to see if I was being followed. There’s no way he tailed me.’

‘Maybe you couldn’t see him through the snow.’

Darby shook her head. ‘That’s what I thought at first,’
she said. ‘But I didn’t see a single car light behind me during the entire ride – and he had to have had his lights on because almost every road I took was pitch-black, not a single street light on anywhere. And I passed hardly any cars.’

‘So how did he know you were at the pharmacy?’

‘I asked myself the same question,’ Darby said. ‘What’s the best way to follow someone in today’s high-tech world without being seen?’

‘He put a GPS tracker on your car?’ Coop asked.

Darby nodded. ‘I immediately checked my car after I left the pharmacy. Found it wired in right near the engine block. It’s one of those hundred-dollar units that send out their location every couple of minutes to a smartphone or laptop. He didn’t have to tail me because he knew where I was going.’

‘I love it when the pervs go high-tech.’ Coop sighed. ‘This tracker, where is it?’

‘Still there. I don’t want him to know I found it. If we can get its frequency, we might be able to lock on to it and track him down. Hoder told me you brought the equipment from Denver.’

Coop nodded. ‘He swept our rooms for bugs and didn’t find any, by the way. Yours was the only one.’

‘Where’s Hayes now?’

‘Back at the MoFo working on the computer traces for Hoder. Nothing yet.’

‘We should check all of our other vehicles, see if anyone else has been tagged with a tracker.’

‘Sure.’ Coop pinched his temples and then rubbed the
corners of his eyes. He stared down at the bar top for a moment, his anger seemingly abated. He looked hollow-eyed and sullen. ‘Anyone here know anything about this Timmy guy?’

‘No. If he doesn’t live in Red Hill, he’s got to be living somewhere nearby. Someone knows him. A person with a metabolic disorder or skin condition or whatever it is that makes him smell like a walking dumpster – a guy like that is going to stand out like a turd in a punch bowl.’

‘You always knew how to turn a phrase.’

‘There’s something else, Coop.’

‘What?’

‘Nobody in this town wants to talk about the Red Hill Ripper.’

‘And that surprises you? It’s a small town. They’re wary of outsiders.’

Maybe
, Darby thought, picking up a plastic drinking straw and twirling it between her fingers.

‘Look at where I grew up,’ Coop said. ‘In Charlestown, when you saw someone doing something illegal, stealing, mugging, shooting – whatever was going down, you never called the cops, and you kept your mouth shut when they came round asking questions.’

‘The whole “code of silence” bullshit.’

‘I’m not saying it’s right; I’m saying how it was. Charlestown, East Boston, Southie – they all had that small town, tribal mentality. That’s why a gangster and serial killer like Whitey Bulger was able to get away with all that shit for so long.’

And it certainly didn’t hurt that the
FBI
had been watching his back the entire time
, Darby thought. For two decades – while Whitey and his gang flooded cocaine into Boston’s neighbourhoods, murdered their competition and smuggled guns across the sea to the IRA – he and his long-time business partner, Stephen ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi, also worked as federal informants for the FBI’s Boston field office. In exchange for information about the Italian Mafia operating in Boston and Rhode Island, their federal handlers gave them tips about wiretaps – and about criminal rivals, who were later killed by Whitey’s gang. A witness who had come forward with information on Whitey’s illegal activities was brutally murdered. Others mysteriously vanished, never to be heard from again. The corruption grew, the bodies piled up; yet, when sealed indictments were about to come down, Bulger’s handlers ensured that he had plenty of time in which to leave town. For the next sixteen years, twelve of which were spent on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, he and his common-law wife lived as fugitives, until a call on a tip line revealed that the octogenarian couple were in an apartment complex in Santa Monica, California. The whole sordid affair read like a thriller – except that it was true.

She didn’t need to tell any of this to Coop. Not only had he grown up during the Bulger era, he had barely survived it.

‘Your people,’ Darby said, catching how Coop bristled at the words, ‘the people living in Southie and East Boston – they didn’t protect Whitey because he was keeping the streets safe and free of drugs.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Evil doesn’t operate in a vacuum.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning nobody in this town is afraid of the Red Hill Ripper.’ Darby tossed the straw back down on the bar top, then turned her head to him. He looked as exhausted as she felt. ‘What if we’re approaching this the wrong way? What if there’s another component at work here? Something that isn’t sexual?’

‘You saying this guy isn’t a sexual sadist? Because what we saw inside the bedroom yesterday says otherwise.’

‘No. This guy’s a textbook sadist. But not one of the female vics was raped. If we take away sex, what are we left with for motives?’

‘Money and power. Revenge.’

Darby nodded. ‘Here’s another question: why is the killer only targeting families living in Red Hill?’

A cell phone trilled. ‘That’s me,’ he said, and straightened. He reached inside his jacket pocket, came back with the satphone and flatted a palm against his other ear. ‘Cooper.’

She saw him swallow, saw the alarmed expression on his face when his gaze cut sideways to her; then, with his head, he motioned to the front door and quickly headed towards it. Darby followed behind him, walking through the space Coop left in his wake, the pulse racing in her neck.
Another family is dead
, she thought as she stepped outside, on to the enclosed porch.
The son of a bitch watched that interview I did and he decided to kill another family
.