Fear the Dark (32 page)

62

Coop drove. The storm seemed to have tapered off, but the roads weren’t well ploughed, and it was slow-going.

‘You were awfully quiet back there,’ he said.

‘I have an Olympic-standard headache.’

Coop drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. The windshield wipers throbbed like a racing heartbeat.

‘I think there’s another agenda at work here,’ he said.

‘And what would that be?’

‘You really need me to say it?’

Darby didn’t answer, just stared out the front window. Everywhere she looked was white and wet; branches sagged from the weight of the snow.

‘I think you’re disappointed you’re not going to be alone in a room with Eli Savran. You want a shot at ripping his skin off,’ he said.

‘Wrong.’

‘For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve carried this idea in your head that evil can be extinguished. That if you put down a guy like Savran, it will somehow restore balance to the world. That’s what shrinks call “magical thinking”, right?’

‘Eli Savran is forty-seven,’ Darby said. ‘That would have made him fifteen or sixteen when Hubbard was abducted.’

‘The man who worked at the department store, Fisher, told the police he saw Hubbard walking out of the toy aisle and holding hands with a teenage boy. It fits.’

‘Fisher didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face.’

‘True. Not that it would matter if he had at this point. Fisher died eight, maybe ten years ago. Heroin overdose.’

‘I remember reading about it,’ said Darby.

‘Joan Hubbard is still alive, I’m pretty sure. Her husband, though, died. Heart attack or something.’

‘Coop, if Savran was fifteen when he took Hubbard, he wouldn’t have been old enough to drive.’

‘Doesn’t mean he
couldn’t
drive. He probably had his learner’s permit.’

‘Either way, why would Savran drive all the way to a mall in Wichita, snatch a seven-year-old girl and then drive all the way to Red Hill to kill her? That’s got to be at least five hundred miles each way.’

‘You’re assuming Savran was living here in Red Hill at the time. According to what Williams said, Savran was living with his old man.’

‘Okay, let’s say he was living in Wichita. Why would he decide to drive all the way to Colorado to kill her? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Since when do these guys ever think logically? They’re locked in a mind-meld with their peckers. And teenagers, even normal ones, do stupid shit and act reckless. You expect a teenager who’s also a budding psychopath to be well thought out and rational?’

Darby said nothing.

‘We don’t know
anything
about this guy yet,’ Coop said.
‘We haven’t dug into his background, we have no idea where he’s lived for the past thirty years or how his head’s wired.’

‘If Savran abducted and killed Hubbard, there’ll be a string of other related disappearances in his wake. Guys like this don’t stop at one. They keep going until they’re caught.’

‘We’ll be sure to ask him once we have him in custody.’

‘The guy shot at us last night. You think he’s going to surrender peacefully?’

Coop shifted in his seat, his tongue digging into a back molar.

‘We need to find a hardware store,’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘So I can buy a can of pesticide and kill that bug that’s crawled up your ass.’ He turned to her and said, ‘You want to tell me what’s really eating at you, or do you want to stay in this foul mood?’

‘If Savran who, at fifteen, maybe sixteen, abducted Hubbard and killed her inside the Downes house, why would he return to it some thirty years later to bind, torture and kill an entire family? Why revisit the crime scene?’

‘Ted Bundy revisited his killing grounds. All those women in Seattle who disappeared – he later admitted to bringing them all to the same area up in the mountains, where he raped, killed and buried them.’

‘That was outdoors. We’re talking about a
house
. He killed an entire family and left them there for the police. He had to have known we’d come there and find Hubbard’s blood – if it is, in fact, her blood.’

‘Which is why he decided to go over it with bleach.’

‘The man who killed these families is extremely methodical and careful. He wouldn’t kill a family at the same place where he killed a seven-year-old girl who went on to become the world’s most famous missing kid. There’s no way he’d take a risk like that unless he –’

Darby cut herself off and straightened a little in her seat.

‘Unless he what?’ Coop prompted.

‘Last night at the bar I told you that no one in this town seemed afraid of the Red Hill Ripper. That maybe we were looking at this from the wrong angle, that if we removed sex from the equation we were left with only two possible motives.’

‘Power and money.’

‘What if the Ripper
had
to kill the Downes family?’

‘Then that would mean all the families are linked somehow – that they weren’t randomly selected.’

‘And he’s
only
killing families who live in Red Hill. He hasn’t killed a single family in a neighbouring town. It’s all focused here in Red Hill.’

Coop’s satphone trilled and vibrated inside the dashboard cubbyhole.

The caller was a federal agent named Susan Villa who worked in the lab. She was calling about the duct tape.

‘Susan, I’m going to put you on speakerphone. I’ve got Darby McCormick with me. She’s consulting with us on the case.’ He handed Darby the phone so he could concentrate on driving. ‘Okay, Susan, go ahead.’

‘The duct tape samples you sent match a brand called True Armour.’

‘All the samples?’

‘Every one. Brand’s very popular and used mainly for boating and outdoors because the glue is especially water resistant.’

‘We found several rolls inside a suspect’s home. I’ll FedEx out a roll to you hopefully sometime later today. Right now we’re still buried in a snowstorm.’

‘One other thing,’ Villa said. ‘That strip of tape you sent us with the piece of latex stuck on it – that spot you found
is
ink. Hayes identified it using the mass spectrometer in your mobile lab. But your mass spec didn’t have the proper library loaded on to it, so it couldn’t identify the brand.’

The relaxed and breezy way the woman spoke made it clear she hadn’t yet found out about what had happened to Hayes, Otto and Hoder.

‘It’s a black ink called “Magic Moon”,’ Villa said. ‘You can’t find it any more, except on places like eBay or on websites that cater to fountain pen and ink enthusiasts. Company that made it, J. D. Humphrey, went out of business in the early seventies.’

‘This ink,’ Darby said. ‘Does it come in a pear-shaped bottle? Is there a picture of a penguin in a tuxedo on the label?’

‘Yeah,’ Villa replied, surprised. ‘I take it you’re into pens?’

‘No, but I know someone who might be.’

63

Coop dropped her off in front of the Silver Moon Inn and then went to park at the back, where a plough attached to a truck with a blown front suspension was trying to clear away the snow. Her rental, which was still parked across the street, was hidden behind a ploughed wall that was higher than the car’s roof.

The hotel lobby was quiet and thick with heat from the fire that cracked and hissed in the hearth. Darby stomped the snow off her boots and went to the reception desk. The scuffed black fountain pen and ledger she’d seen the night she checked in were still on the counter, along with the pear-shaped bottle of ink.

Darby was looking at the label, at the tiny words
MAGIC MOON
printed underneath the tuxedoed penguin, when the door behind the counter swung open. Laurie Richards stepped out; her gaze fell on Darby and she started, nearly dropping the plastic bucket gripped in her hand.

Darby hadn’t called in advance; she had wanted to catch the woman unprepared, didn’t want her to have time to rehearse her answers.

‘Good
Lord
, you gave me a fright,’ Richards tittered. Then she noticed Darby’s bandages and her expression turned serious. Bright yellow Playtex cleaning gloves were stretched tightly all the way up to her forearms, and the
baggy grey sweatshirt and black leggings she wore were marred with bleach stains.

‘I heard about what happened,’ Richards said quietly. Her hair was pulled back on her head, and her round, oily face glistened with sweat. ‘I’m truly sorry for your loss.’

People who aren’t psychopaths or pathological liars reveal themselves in small ways when they’re working at trying to conceal the truth. They begin to fidget and sweat, and they have trouble maintaining eye contact. The rush of adrenalin dries up their saliva and they constantly swallow and clear their throats; they breathe faster, their noses itch and they constantly scratch or cover their mouths as if trying to cover the lie. The mouth appears tense, the lips pursed.

Nine times out of ten, their eyes and ‘micro-expressions’ – those fraction-of-a-second facial movements that reveal the true emotion beneath the lie – are what betray them. They act distressed and their eyes are drawn upwards and they blink rapidly. Darby watched for any changes in the woman’s expression.

‘Who told you?’

‘It was on the radio. I listen to the news and NPR while I’m cleaning the rooms.’

‘Was Eli on the radio too?’

The woman blinked once, and her brow furrowed in thought. ‘Eli?’

‘Eli Savran. People call him Tim or Timmy.’

‘I don’t think I heard anything like that on the radio.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘No.’

‘You sure? Guy I’m talking about smells like a human garbage truck.’

The lobby door opened. Richards watched as Coop headed their way.

‘Ms Richards?’

‘No. No, I don’t know anyone like that.’

When a suspect, witness or any ordinary citizen hesitated before answering a question, it meant they were debating whether to hide information or whether deliberately to lie about it. Laurie Richards hadn’t paused to think about her responses; she didn’t look away and she seemed genuinely confused about who Eli Savran was. Now Darby had a baseline to work with when she asked her next set of questions.

Coop stepped up to the counter. His face was not friendly.

‘Would you tell me?’ Darby asked Richards.

‘Tell you what?’

‘If you did know someone like Eli Savran.’

‘Of course I would,’ Richards replied, indignant. ‘My mother didn’t raise a liar.’

‘Good. So I don’t have to explain to you that lying to a police or federal officer is a crime.’

Richards arched her back slightly. After she placed the bucket on the counter, she put her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest a little.

‘With all due respect to the both of you, I don’t like the way you’re treating me. I’ve been nothing but helpful to you people, I’ve been nothing but truthful.’

‘Then maybe you can explain this,’ Darby said. She tapped a finger against the bottle of ink, her eyes never leaving the woman’s face.

It was only a fraction of a second, but Darby saw that her words had hit home. And, while her gut said the woman had nothing to do with Eli Savran or the Red Hill Ripper, Darby knew she had stumbled upon something. Richards swallowed and licked her lips. Then she swallowed again.

‘That’s a bottle of ink.’

‘A bottle of ink that’s no longer in production,’ Darby said. ‘It’s actually forty years old.’

‘So?’

‘It showed up on the duct tape wrapped around David Downes’s mouth.’

Now Laurie Richards looked distressed. Her eyebrows drew upwards, towards the middle of her forehead, and suddenly she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

Coop took out his handcuffs. ‘Think real carefully before you answer,’ he said, and placed the cuffs on the front counter.

‘It was a gift,’ Richards said.

‘From Eli Savran?’ Darby asked.

‘No! I told you I don’t know who he is. David gave them to me. The ink and the fountain pen.’

‘David who?’

‘
Downes
. He was really into fountain pens and stuff. He was cleaning out his office closet or something and came across the bottle of ink – it’s called “Magic Moon”, see? We’re the Silver Moon Inn, and David thought the owner
would like to use it here on the front desk because it went with the décor. He was kind like that.’

‘You didn’t tell us you knew him.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘But you didn’t volunteer the information either. Why? Were you having an affair with him?’

‘An
affair
,’ Richards said, aghast. ‘He was a
married man
.’

‘So David Downes just waltzed in here one day out of the blue and decided to give these things to the hotel? That’s what you’re telling us?’

‘No, he did … He …’

‘He
what
?’

‘Stop yelling at me! You’re getting me all confused.’ A sour, unwashed odour rose from Richards, and her breath was rank. ‘When my husband, Larry, dropped dead of a heart attack, David helped me with all the probate stuff. Larry was a good man but he wasn’t exactly a forward-thinker, so he didn’t leave a will. I went to David’s office a few times, and during one of them he gave me the pen and the bottle of ink. Why? Because David was a very thoughtful and very kind man. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you talk to his secretary, Sally Kelly. She was there the day David gave me the pen and the ink.’

‘So explain to me how the ink from that bottle wound up at a crime scene.’

‘How the heck should I know? That’s
your
job, number one. Number two, who’s to say David didn’t have a similar bottle inside his office? Or his house?’ The woman smiled a greasy, triumphant smile; her eyes roved over them as though she had made a profound observation.

Everything Laurie Richards had said sounded perfectly logical, and Darby sensed the woman was telling the truth. And maybe Darby would have let the whole thing go if it weren’t for the smile that had punctuated her last words. It was as if she had swerved at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision and had righted herself, back on course to her destination, no one knowing how close she had come to a fatal accident.