The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (10 page)

“It’s not much
yet
. All we need is one break, one lead on one suspect. You know how these things work.”

“Nine victims down, and we’ve got nothing to go on.”

I had to agree. When I’d come to Hartford, the BAU had just finished its report on the rapist. What they’d given the cops was sketchy as hell, even more so than what the BAU normally produced, and I guessed that might have influenced their decision to pass on the fieldwork. They’d suggested looking for a white male, mid-twenties to early forties. Physique and dress suggested a manual laborer or former manual laborer. Quite possibly with a history of violent crime, given his lack of nerves and the effort he made to avoid leaving usable evidence behind. Probably lived alone, as the timing of his attacks would have aroused the suspicions of a spouse or loved one. Some kind of recent personal trauma that triggered the first attack, most likely involving a woman — a divorce or relationship break-up, for instance. The first rape had seemed less planned than the later ones — no blindfold, for instance. He’d probably lived in Hartford for some time, was very familiar with the city.

Nothing, in fact, that the cops here hadn’t already known for themselves.
 

We had a quiet couple of drinks in the Bordello, let talk turn to other things outside work. Small stuff. Time filler. Then Naomi apologized and said she had to go.

“I’ve got to get ready for a gig.”

“A gig?”

“Yeah. As in ‘musical performance’.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“I’ve played violin since I was in high school. There’s a few of us play as a kind of folk-blues band. Only local, bars and such.”

“No shit. I’m a blues fan myself.”

“You should come along,” she said. “The Glasshouse, starting at nine. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

I smiled and watched her leave.
 

The next day, one of the investigative team managed to identify a car caught on security camera a couple of blocks from Mary’s attack. There was very little traffic at that time of the morning, so we homed in on it as a workable lead. The car belonged to an ex-con called Clinton Travers. Travers had a couple of convictions for assault with a deadly weapon — a knife — and assault and battery, unarmed. A third conviction for armed robbery had been overturned on appeal and he’d been implicated in a number of other crimes. He’d finished his parole nearly a year before and was last known to be working in a machine shop and living with his a woman called Angelina Lewis. Even better, his build and features all matched what we knew about the rapist.

Once we’d found Angelina, now sharing an apartment with a friend and presumably no longer involved with Travers, Naomi and I went to speak to her. Almost the first thing she said was: “Is this about them rapes?”

For a second, I was convinced we’d got him. That she had concrete information we could use on Travers.

“Why would you say that, Ms Lewis?” Naomi asked.

“Clint’s got a record, I know that. I figured you’d be looking at anyone with a record as a suspect. He’s a violent son of a bitch, I know that for sure.”

I cursed inwardly and tried not to let it show while Angelina told us all about her ex-boyfriend.

“I walked out on him about a week after New Year. Told him I was fed up with him and that Macy was waiting in the car for me outside, that she’d call the cops if he did anything.”

“He was violent towards you?” Naomi said.

“Yeah, sometimes he’d knock me around. If he had a bad day or he thought I’d been too friendly with someone else.”

“Why’d you stick with him?”

“He could be nice the rest of the time. I think he really cared for me, in his way. And he always apologized and shit afterwards, like it was going to be the last time.”

“But it never was?”
 

“I guess not. Never is with guys like him. But I felt sorry for him, some ways. Hard to get a decent break when you’re an ex-con. But it got too much in the end.”

“How did he take it when you told him you were leaving him?”

She frowned. “Strange. First off he started shouting, asking if there was another guy. Bunched his fists like he was going to hit me, but didn’t. I just yelled back that it was him that was the problem and it wasn’t anything to do with anyone else. So he shouted some more, called me a fucking bitch and stuff. But then, when I was about to walk out, he just started crying. Burst into tears. Begged me not to go. But I did, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“When was this, Angelina?” I asked.

“January twelfth.”

The night of the first rape. As soon as we were done talking to her, we applied for a search warrant for the home of Clinton Travers.

10.

Boston, MA. 2004.

Once I’d made it back to my apartment from MCI-Ashworth, I slumped into a chair and called Agent Downes. My landline’s voicemail was showing a half dozen messages waiting, but I ignored them for now.

“Williams has started talking,” I told her once we’d finished with the formalities. “He says he buried Katelyn Sellars on Horseneck Beach about a mile from Kerry Abblit. I’m going to take him a map tomorrow to see if he can pinpoint where exactly.”

“That’s great, Alex. How reliable do you think he is?”

I thought for a moment, back to the last words he said to me before I left. “I think he’s willing to tell the truth.”

“But?”

“But he likes playing little games. So as long as I can keep him on track, I’ll hopefully be able to get everything you need out of him.”

“Have those people outside the prison given you any trouble?”

“No, not really. Harmless idiots, most of them. Some nasty messages on my phone and in my email, but nothing much else.”

“Good. Don’t let them get to you, Alex. We all want you to do well. The SAC even had Deputy Director Woods on the phone yesterday to find out what progress we were making.”

“The publicity machine’s in full swing, then.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” she said. “We’ll all come out of this looking good if we get a result.”

“If Williams really does play ball. If he’s just jerking me around, we might still end up with nothing. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t.” She sighed quietly. “I’d better go. Keep me posted.”

“Sure,” I said. “Goodbye, Agent Downes.”

“Tanya. Goodbye, Alex.”

I’d barely hung up when the phone started ringing again. I considered ignoring it, but as there was a chance it was something important and not a pro-Williams head-case I picked up.

“Yeah?”

“Mr Rourke? I’m sorry to call you at home like this, but I’ve not had much luck with your office.” A man’s voice. Deepish and a little nasal. No one I knew.

“Who is this?”

“Will Holden. I’m a journalist with the
Boston Herald
. You probably won’t remember, but I covered the original disappearances as well as the trial.”

“Sorry, Mr Holden. Nothing to say.”

He dived in fast before I could put the phone down. “That’s what your partner’s been telling me.”
 

“Remind me to thank him for doing so.”

“Look, just give me a minute for a couple of quick questions and then I can stop bothering you. If you’re lucky, the other papers will pick up what you tell me for their own coverage and they won’t have to hassle you to do it.”

“I can’t give you any details.”

“You don’t need to,” Holden said. “Be vague—”

“I’m good at vague.”
 

“—Is Cody Williams co-operating with the questioning? How confident are you that he’ll help? How it feels to be back on the case, that sort of thing.”

For a moment, I thought about the protesters gathered outside Ashworth. About the anonymous voices calling to tell me I was going to hell, that I was hounding an innocent man, that I was a hero. I thought about fielding questions at the scenes of the abductions, outside family homes, on the steps of the courthouse. I remembered how it all felt, all of it.
 

Eventually, and picking my words carefully, I said, “Okay. Williams and I have had some productive informal conversations. So far he seems to be co-operating and I hope that he’ll be able to shed light on what happened to those girls. I expect that anything I learn will be passed on to the families and others by the FBI in due course. I can’t comment on what he may or may not have said so far. That’s for the FBI to do, not me.”

“You said ‘informal’. Does this mean he’s not being questioned in any official legal capacity?”

“That’s right. I’m not in law enforcement any more and he isn’t being formally interviewed. I’m the only one speaking to him and our conversations are not being recorded in any way, as per his request. None of what he says is admissible evidence and as far as I’m aware there will not be any further court cases arising from what he tells me.”

“And how does it feel to be back on one of your old cases?”

“No comment on that,” I said.

“No?”

“Is that it?”

“I think so. Thanks a lot, Mr Rourke. I appreciate your time. I’ll let you know through your office if we get anything back on this.”

“Sure.”

I hung up and headed into the kitchen. Got a glass of water. I held it for a long time, staring at my reflection in the window. Didn’t much recognize the man staring back at me. By the time I drank any of it, it was warm. The glass of the guy in the window was dark. When he drank, the liquid took on a reddish hue. I left and he watched me go.

With nothing better to do but watch figments of my own imagination in the dark, I opened up the case files Tanya Downes gave me and started by checking what he’d already told me against what we knew from both the original investigation and the later discovery of the three sets of remains, trying to judge whether he was being straight with me. Most of it seemed OK, but I hit a sour note in the scene report for the discovery of Kerry Abblit’s remains. Only a small one, possibly the result of failing memory or his illness, but equally something he might have invented for kicks. Williams told me he’d wrapped Kerry’s body in an old beige sheet for burial. Forensics had found no sign of a sheet, and the only fibre evidence was a small number of what might have been dark carpet threads, all synthetic. No match to any of the materials known from his house or van; all of those had been checked. He said he’d parked up some place quiet to have his fun and then kept her alive for a couple of days. I wondered if he’d held her at the old lake house he said he’d left Katelyn at, and why he hadn’t mentioned the place before. If the fibers had come from there, or if there was more to it than that. If he’d started feeding me bull, and if this was going to continue or not. If I’d find the others, or get nothing.

11.

On the way to MCI-Ashworth the next morning, neck cricked and teeth on edge where I’d slept badly, I picked up a copy of the
Herald
. Buried a couple of pages into the interior was a more or less word-for-word repeat of what I’d told Holden the previous evening, alongside some refresher case background and a mention of the ongoing protests. Not a bad piece, and I found I didn’t care if the FBI disagreed.

In the visiting room, Williams was waiting and he didn’t look well. A wheeled drip stand next to him was hooked into a vein on the back of his hand. His eyes were hooded and red and I guessed he’d slept very little. Every so often he rubbed at his mouth and smacked his lips as if he was thirsty.

“Rough night?” I said, trying not to let it show that I thought he deserved it. Williams knew it anyway, and I felt no sympathy towards him at all, but I still felt the pull of the automatic social mechanism that enforced a certain degree of civility towards a dying man. I hated myself for it.

Williams shrugged his slumped shoulders. “Guess I’m getting used to them by now. Who’d you want to hear about today? That Providence girl’s next, right?”

“Yeah, she is. But first I want to go back to Kerry Abblit for a moment,” I said.

“What about her?”

“You said you had her for a couple of days before she died.”

“Uh-huh.”
 

“Did you take her to the same place as Katelyn Sellars? That house by the lake?”

He thought for a moment before shaking his head and blinking twice. “Yeah. Yeah, the house. Why?”

“What’s the floor of the house like?”

“What the fuck's that got to do with anything?”

“When they found her body there was no sign of the sheet you say you wrapped her in. But there were carpet fibers, and they weren’t from your van or your house. I’m trying to understand where they came from.”

Another pause. “Yeah, the house had carpet in it, I guess.”

“Guess?”

“Yeah.” Williams must have known I wasn't convinced, as he continued, “Or I might have got that confused with one of the others. There was a lot of them and it was a long time ago, y’know? Shit, I don’t remember half the things I did last week, especially not now. And they were worth dick once they were dead. Why'd I care?”

I leaned forwards, rested my hands on the table. “So how can I be sure that what you tell me in here is correct?”