Fear the Dark (42 page)

It’s her
, Coop thought, suddenly afraid to move.
It’s really her
. When she called him at the hospital, he hadn’t believed
it was her – thought that he was possibly talking to a recording. That someone was playing a sick joke. She had been missing for over a week, and his mind had already begun to accept that her body had been dumped in the rapids, never to be found.

But here she was, alive, and the relief and joy he felt was almost powerful enough to bring him to his knees.

Darby didn’t get up as he approached – didn’t look up either. Her gaze was riveted on the neatly made bed.

‘Hey,’ he said gently, balancing himself on the balls of his feet. ‘It’s me.’

Darby still didn’t look at him. He was about to touch her shoulder when she pulled away. ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Not now.’

‘Okay. I’m just going to sit beside you. We don’t have to talk. I’m just going to sit here with you.’

Coop glanced at the federal agent by the door; he was whispering to one of the paramedics. Coop shook his head and motioned for them to leave. The agent nodded and had the good sense to shut the door to give them some privacy.

He sat next to Darby. Her hands and fingers were swollen, cut and caked with blood, and he wondered how many times she had hit Williams with her fists. The wind roared past the house, shaking it, and, as he looked around the bedroom, everything he saw was clean and meticulously organized. No pictures on the walls or bureaus. It looked like a single man’s bedroom, cold and sterile, not a feminine touch anywhere. Nothing to indicate that he had shared a bed with a woman night after night.

For thirty-one years
, Coop thought, and the picture of Nicky Hubbard at seven, Nicky with her gap-toothed smile and T-shirt stained with spaghetti sauce, flashed through his mind. He compared the photograph with the pale and haggard woman he’d seen downstairs, and his mind couldn’t reconcile the two. But on the phone Darby had told him Nicky Hubbard was alive. Williams had abducted her and his mother had changed Hubbard’s name to Sarah, and Sarah had shared this home with him.

‘The shed,’ Darby said. ‘He brought them there.’

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 shotgun 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.