The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (21 page)

Unless it was just a trick to lead me away from his real home, of course.

I burned up the highway. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Flashed past regular traffic like the Devil was after me. The roadside faded to a green-brown blur and my eyes strained from reaching towards the horizon. Despair slowly set in as the miles rolled past and I couldn’t find him. Took a turning somewhere, hid the car back in town while he was out of sight, I didn’t know. But he wasn’t out here. I’d lost him.

And Holly.

All the time I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and talking to Chantel, watching the guy inside the post office, she’d been in a car across the street. At any point I could’ve saved her just by walking over and getting her out.
 

She’d been there, right in front of me, and I’d done nothing. It might all have been over.

But it wasn’t, and maybe she was in even more danger now the guy knew how close I’d come to him, and all I could do was go back to Boston knowing I’d blown my main lead.

It was probably too late, and he’d probably be long gone, but I wanted to do something, anything, that felt like I was still tight on Goddard’s tail before I went back to fruitlessly tracing anyone involved in the Williams case with Rob.

I fired up my computer and thought for a moment. What to send the guy to elicit a response from him? I didn’t know if a ruse might work, and if so, what sort, or if he’d respond better to another nasty shock to match seeing me in Berwick. In the end, I tried both. First, I set myself up with a free email account and sent him a message claiming to be from a newly-established porn producer interested in his material. Then I opened my regular personal email and started typing.

From: Alex Rourke

To: [email protected]
 

Subject: Holly Tynon

Message:

I’m coming for you.

31.

The first couple of cops from Providence PD who’d been involved with the search for Holly we tried were no use. One had quit the force to settle auto accident claims for an insurance firm. One had made detective. Neither remembered anything.

The next name on our list was the one I knew best. I hadn’t seen Detective Frank Hall since I washed my hands of Cody Williams. His home was a basement apartment in downtown Providence, well away from the city’s commercial and college districts. The building was a three-story brick structure that I guessed had last been renovated the best part of thirty years ago. The gutter lining the path to the front door was full of old cigarette butts, and a broken pram lay overturned on the straggly front lawn. Past the unlocked door, we followed cracked linoleum steps down into a narrow, fetid corridor splashed yellow by the overhead lamps. The air smelled of old cooking and other people’s sweat.

I could hear a TV playing from behind the door to apartment B when we went to knock. “Are you sure this is the place?” Rob said, hand poised over the woodwork.

“I think so. Only one way to find out.”

It took a while for Frank to answer the door, and when he did I wasn't even a hundred percent sure it was him. His hair was gone apart from straggly tufts that formed a rough belt starting just above his ears and running around the back of his head. His nose looked to have been broken and re-set slightly out of joint somewhere down the years since I’d last seen him, and his skin was blotchy and dry. He was wearing a grubby white T-shirt and a ragged black jogging top, both of them with holes at the armpits, and a pair of scuffed shorts. He was thin, worn-out.

But the most striking thing about him was the smell. The sickly-sweet reek of cheap alcohol surrounded him like an invisible fog, made worse when he opened his mouth to say, in a voice gone scratchy and broken, “Yeah? Do I know you?”

Rob looked to me for some indication of how to proceed. In all honesty, I wasn't entirely sure myself. “Hi, Frank,” I said. “Alex Rourke. Haven’t seen you in years.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Holly Tynon? The girl abducted not far from here.”

Something stirred in his yellowing eyeballs. “Yeah, Rourke. Fed, right?”

“That’s right.”
 

“Yeah, I remember. C’mon in.”

He left the door open and we followed him into a poky studio apartment lit by a naked bulb in the centre of the main room with the assistance of a couple of windows looking into the trash-spattered concrete trench that surrounded the building. A portable TV was showing a game show in one corner of the room, faced by a single sagging brown armchair. A matching couch squatted beneath the windows, half-covered by old newspaper and dirty laundry.

The floor held my attention, though. Aside from a few well-worn paths — from bed, to chair, to kitchen, to bathroom — the place was carpeted with empty Colt 45 cans. There must have been hundreds of them. Here and there — mostly by the bed and chair — there were fresh cans in opened crates or six-packs.

“Drink?” Frank said, dropping into his armchair.

“Thanks, no,” Rob said, staring at the detritus. “Too early for me.”

“Fair ‘nuff. Have a seat. So, how you been, Alex?”

I joined Rob in trying to find a clear perch on the couch. Neither of us wanted to move anything if possible, just in case something worse lurked beneath. “I’m fine, Frank. Not in the FBI any more these days.”

“Same here — quit the department.”

“Yeah?” I said, trying not to make it sound like that was obvious from his surroundings. Trying to find a polite way of asking him what the hell had happened. He’d been a good cop last time we’d met. A decent man. The slide seemed to have been long and spectacular. “What made you quit?”

“My wife, Tricia, left me.” He took a swig from the opened can next to his chair. Blinked once or twice, like he was trying not to cry. “Got a phone call at work one day, saying she was gone. Packed her stuff. Said she’d met someone else. Totally, well, y’know, floored me.” Another swig, a lopsided nod in our direction, but he didn’t meet our eyes. “I mean, I had work and all, and sometimes something would hit you, like the one we worked on about the girl. But never often, and I always treated Tricia right. Treated her real well. I loved that woman. I dunno. Came out of the blue. Divorce didn’t seem to matter much when that came around — pretty insignificant next to her leaving. And I, I dunno, I didn’t cope well.” He raised the beer can to illustrate his point, looked almost apologetic. “I haven’t coped well since.”

“That’s rough, man,” Rob said. “Always happens when you least expect it. I know — I’ve been there.” Which I knew was bullshit, but he said it like he meant it, and Frank didn’t seem to pick up on the lie.

“Thought about finishing it all, y’know? Bunch of times. Not like I’ve got much left. But I never tried it.” He sniffed and drained the rest of his beer. “She still sends me Christmas cards. Can you believe that? No idea where she is now.” He trailed off into silence, lost in thought or trying to force his emotions back down into the comforting morass of old alcohol and empty memory.

“Frank, how much do you remember about Holly Tynon, and what we did when we were trying to find her?”

“Plenty, sure.”

“Do you remember anything or anyone strange — at the time or since then — connected with the case in any way? Something you might have noticed at the time, but which didn’t seem important back then?”

He scratched his face with grimy nails. “Shit, Alex. I mean, it was all pretty strange. Thing like that makes people act crazy. Had people keep volunteering to search and stuff. Had people saying all kinds of things, like they’d seen her, or they knew where she was, and it was all bullshit. Didn’t deal with them myself, but I know we even had a few whackjobs saying they’d taken her, or they wanted to, or they were going to take more. Crazy stuff. It all got checked, I think, ‘cos you’ve got to, but they were nothing but freaks. More of them when the guy went to trial. Saying we should kill him for what he did, or that we were lyin’ bastards who’d got the wrong man. More crazy shit.” He shook his head. “Poor fucking girl.”

“Did any of those people stand out, do you remember, Frank?” I said. “Any who seemed to be more knowledgeable than the others, or more vocal in what they were asking? Or any that were just plain creepier than the rest?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t deal with them, not myself. Just heard the stories from the others. Only time I saw any of them was outside the courthouse, and there was only a few of them. One guy gave me a flower.”

“A flower?”

“Yeah. Think he was nuts. Or strung out on something. Said something about God. Some religious vengeance kick. ‘God loves those who send sinners down to Hell’, or something. I don’t remember too clearly.” He sniffed again. “Was gonna say it’s sad when people get that way. But I guess that sounds kinda stupid coming from a mess like me.”

I shrugged in a way I hope looked friendly. “True, though. Was he the only one you remember?”

“Yeah. The rest would be in the files, I guess, from when we checked them out. But I don’t know if any of them were anything much. Apart from that, can’t think of anything else from that case. Poor fucking girl.”

“Yeah.”

“Poor fucking girl.” His head drooped a little and I guessed his mind was back wandering the fuzzy halls of remembrance again. I didn’t think we’d get much more from him. I glanced at Rob and stood to leave.

“Well, thanks, Frank. I appreciate your help. We’d best be going.”

“‘S okay,” he said, and clambered unsteadily out of his chair. “Whatever. Good to see you again. Old times.”

“Yeah.” He showed us to the front door. “Take care of yourself, Frank.”

“Sure,” he said, without any conviction at all. “You too.”

We headed back down the stale corridor towards the stairs, watched most of the way by the shell of a man behind us. Out in the open air and away from the cloying atmosphere of the basement I puffed out my cheeks and said, “I don’t believe that.”

“He certainly wasn’t what I expected. He a friend of yours back then?”

“No. I knew him from the Tynon case, and he seemed like a good cop — handled the family with a lot of sensitivity, knew the job, and didn’t play the jurisdiction game once with us. A real professional.”
 

I looked at the broken remains of the pram as we passed by. In the near distance, a group of four or five kids were taking it in turns to push each other down the road in a shopping cart. “He came up to see me during the trial. He wasn’t testifying or anything — as we couldn’t pin any of the abductions on Williams, we couldn’t use evidence from those cases — but he showed up on the day I started my testimony just to wish me luck and say that everyone from his department was rooting for us. I appreciated that.”

“It’s a nice gesture.”

“Yeah. He seemed pretty solid, plenty of confidence in himself. I can’t understand how he got like he is now.” I thought for a moment about what I’d just said. “Well, maybe I can understand it a little, just from my own situation. I know how hard it is to lose something that means so much to you. But even so...”

Rob nodded and stayed quiet.

 We spent the rest of the afternoon in the office, going through the mess of old interviews and statements from the case records. Every nutjob the cops had had to check out sounded like exactly that — nutjobs. There was nothing to suggest any of them actually knew a thing about the abductions. A few of them they never managed to trace, but none of them mentioned any true details that hadn’t been in the press, and most were plainly just totally wacko. One guy claimed to have already snatched a dozen girls and needed Holly to make his ‘perfect thirteen’ with which he could summon Satan to earth. Probably felt pretty damn stupid when the next girl went missing.

“Nothing,” Rob said, closing the last of his stack. “Not a damn thing. The amount of crazy makes you weep for humanity.”

I glanced out the windows at the darkened sky stained orange by the street lights. “It’s late. Let’s head for home.”

“Fair enough. Drop me at your place. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

 Boston was cloaked in damp blackness. Haloes surrounded every light, circles of hazy neon hovering against the night, angelic moths to each and every flame. Plenty of traffic, as always, but it was quiet, muted somehow.

I swung into my resident’s parking space and killed the engine. Checked I had everything, and climbed out of the car. The air outside was cold and sharp.

“Are you still going to be working with me tomorrow?” I said as Rob adjusted his coat and plunged his hands into his pockets, out of the chill. “I didn’t notice what had come in at the office.”

“Yeah, I should be. It still looked pretty quiet to me. Are you planning on trying to talk to Williams’ repeat customers?”

“Next on the list, yeah, unless anything else comes up.”

“Worth a try, isn’t it? Might get lucky — one of them could be the guy we’re looking for and we can go home heroes of the hour.”

In my mind I heard journalists asking me why we didn’t find Holly seven years before, why we’d abandoned the search for her. I heard them asking why we’d been so sure Cody was the guy who’d taken her. I pictured the look on her parents’ faces as their daughter was returned to them, in God only knew what kind of mental state, seven years too late.