The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (7 page)

I raised my eyebrows and said nothing as we turned in our visitors’ badges and left the sterile prison and its lukewarm, recycled air. I knew for a fact that Cody wasn’t doing this because he was impressed by me.
 

Far from it: Cody hated me, with good reason.

Outside, iron-hard specks of rain fell sporadically from the sky, whipped by the wind into darts of icy water. The protesters were still standing on the far side of the gates, most of them now huddled in raincoats and ponchos in various garish colors, although the last of the news crews was loading up their van for the journey home. A middle-aged man in a raincoat half-heartedly shook the ‘LIBERTY BEFORE DEATH’ sign at us as we passed. Hardly anyone else bothered to make the effort.

When we reached my apartment in Boston, Downes said, “Are you going to be OK handling this on your own for the next few days?”

“Should be, yeah. Does Ashworth know I’ll be coming and going like this?”

“They do. You’re cleared with the prison for as long as you need.”

“Okay. I’ll be in touch once I’ve got anything or if something comes up.”

I waved to Downes as she pulled away from the curb, then unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The place was on the small side and I hadn’t tidied in a while. I had a coffee table covered in papers, magazines and other clutter. There was a plain mantel on one wall over an old setting for a fire or heater of some sort, now long gone. A TV wedged into one corner. An aging sofa and a totally mismatched armchair, and not a whole lot else. I dropped the bulky FBI case file on the chair and made a cup of coffee before I started reading.
 

I skipped over the paperwork for those victims whose remains had already been found and concentrated on Marie Austen, Brooke Morgan, Katelyn Sellars and Holly Tynon. It felt strange, looking back on reports I’d written all those years ago. Some of the details had faded from my memory, but I could still remember how I’d felt when writing each one. Tiny associations with every page, paragraph, scribbled notation. Fragmentary windows into history, jumbled and confused like a dream.

Early evening and I was still working my way through the stack of papers and photographs when the phone rang.

“You’re at home, aren’t you, Alex?” Rob said. “Turn on the news.”

I fumbled for the TV remote. “What’s on?”

“You are,” he said.

07.

Worcester, MA. 1997.

Five weeks past the discovery of Holly Tynon’s wallet in the park, the investigation had stalled completely. We’d found nothing more at either scene, and despite Providence PD’s best efforts we hadn’t turned up any useful leads. I’d interviewed dozens of potential witnesses and long-shot suspects, both for Holly’s abduction and the previous two cases. So far, all we had were a few scraps of near-useless information to go on. A guy who thought he might have seen a white van, unknown make or model, in the area of Katelyn Sellars’ disappearance; no other details, no one else came forward, no corroboration. Someone’s neighbor was acting funny around the times of the disappearances; it turned out he was having an affair with a married woman, and we discounted him. By now, everyone knew Holly was dead and even her parents rarely asked the cops for any news. I’d grown used to living out of a motel while hoping for a break – a body, a witness, anything. Frustration at our inactivity and the sense we were going in circles built with every day of little progress.

Then eleven-year-old Brooke Morgan went missing from Auburn on the outskirts of Worcester.

“What exactly do we know?” I asked Agostini, who’d managed to beat me to the scene.

We stood in a leafy, pleasant street lined on one side by a sprawling privet hedge bordering a churchyard and on the other by a community hall. Red brick houses began a hundred yards or so further along. The road was packed with police vehicles and, back behind a taped-off boundary area, there were already a couple of spectators.

“One of the neighbors said he was driving home from the store and saw a girl who could have been Brooke talking to a man next to a white or cream van of some sort.”

“He couldn’t get a make?”

“Apparently not. The cops spoke to him for a while, they said. No clue.”

“Not even a vague idea?”

Agostini shook his head. “Just the color.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe it’s for the best. I mean, how often do these guys say, ‘I saw this and I saw that and it was a car like this’ and it turns out to be nothing but bullshit that either their eyes or their brains have got all screwed up inside? I’d rather look for, like, ‘a white van’ than ‘a white Ford van’ and find out it wasn’t one of them after all but another make, you know?”

“We should have a word with him ourselves too, just to be sure.”

“He’s over there. Told him not to go anywhere yet.”

I nodded. “Good.”

“Anyway, he didn’t see what happened to her – apparently he was back at the intersection.” Agostini jerked a finger behind us, past the church. “Traffic cut off his view. When it cleared, she was gone and the van was pulling away. He hadn’t seen any sign there was a struggle or that she’d got in the van, so he didn’t think much about it.”

“When did he report this?”

“As soon as word got out she was missing. The cops say he’s feeling real guilty about not trying to get a better look, or trying to stop the guy.”

I found I didn’t care much about the witness’s feelings, one way or the other. “Too late for feeling guilty.”

“Yeah. She’s been gone about five hours now.”

“What did he see of the kidnapper?”

“Nothing much, not from that distance. He couldn’t even tell us the guy’s build or clothing.”

“Was he sure it was a man?”

Agostini scratched his neck. “That’s what he says, although I doubt he’s as certain of that as he claims. I don’t think he saw dick apart from the van.”

“How about the girl? Was he sure it was her?”

“What do you think?” He raised his eyebrows. “About as certain as he was about the man. Some goddamn witness.”

“Yeah.”

“But the cops checked as soon as they hit the scene, asking after other kids in the houses down here. None of them talked to anyone in a van this afternoon, so I think we can assume that was our girl.”

“Okay. What are our chances of getting any kind of physical evidence?”

“They’ve got forensics on the way. There’s nothing immediately obvious here, but we could get lucky.” He gestured at the roadside. “Maybe shoe impressions on the verge…”

“Something small he might have dropped…”

“Yeah, anything like that. What do you reckon on the van? Whole nine yards?”

I thought for a moment, watching a uniformed cop walk up the drive to the Morgan family home. In a way, I hated these moments in an investigation. The early hours, where you had the best chance of breaking the case, as well as the best chance of making the one wrong move that screwed the whole thing up, and then you had nothing coming but weeks of getting nowhere and another dead girl on your conscience.
 

“It’s about the only lead we’ve got, so yeah. Get as much detail on it as we can and start trawling. We’ll have to get the local and state police to give us anything they have on traffic stops, minor reports, anything at all involving light-colored vans of any kind from today within twenty or thirty miles of here. The same with the cops in Fall River, Springfield and Providence. Any vehicle we can tie to the areas of the disappearances at the right times.”

Agostini glanced at me. “They didn’t get anything on traffic reports before. How much are we likely to find this time?”

“We didn’t know the vehicle before. It might jog a few memories — a cop remembers a white van with a loose fender that he thought about stopping but didn’t, that sort of thing. Whatever we can turn up.”

“Sure. Check for owners?”

I nodded. “All light-colored vans registered to anyone living within five miles of any of the abductions. Same with commercial vehicles, but we might have to handle them differently than domestic owners.”

“That’s going to be a long list, Alex.”

“No shit. Be even longer if we get nothing and have to broaden the range.”

“We’ll have to start eliminating people from it as soon as we get further information,” Agostini said.

“Yeah, and there’s no guarantee the guy we’re looking for is local to any of these crimes. It just seems likely that he would’ve been for at least one of them.” I thought of Brooke Morgan again, and the knowledge that every decision I took could mean the difference between life and death for her. If she was still alive, still in that lucky twenty-five percent. “Let’s get what we can from this scene. This is as fresh as we’re going to see, so let’s make the most of it. But now I guess I’d better go and speak with the family. Do the usual questions.”

“Right. I’ll go talk with that witness, see if he’s remembered anything more. Don’t hold your breath though.”

Joe and Andrea Morgan were dead-eyed with shock over their daughter’s abduction, made all the worse by the knowledge that she really
had
been snatched by someone and wasn’t just lost. I passed a couple of uncomfortable minutes in their house in monosyllabic conversation with them. We did nothing to encourage each other and I left again, hoping privately for some instant breakthrough that would allow me to return Brooke alive, just to alleviate their despair.

We didn’t get one.

Examination of the abduction scene yielded mixed results. On one hand, they corroborated the witness’s story; we found clear shoe impressions from both a child and a man in a pattern that matched the scenario of Brooke standing close to her abductor, talking, when she was snatched. The man’s prints were cheap boots or heavy shoes with no markings on the soles. The cops tried to get a closer match to a particular brand and failed. There were no clear tyre impressions left by the roadside, so we got nothing on the van.
 

We did find a couple of pieces of trash that might or might not have come from the abductor’s vehicle. A Mars wrapper — no prints, no saliva — and, much more interesting, a piece of plastic shrink wrap backed with paper that looked like the packaging for a syringe. There was no sign of the needle itself. There was a partial print on the plastic, which we eagerly ran through the AFIS system only to draw a blank. Whoever had owned it, they didn’t have a record. As it could just as easily have belonged to a diabetic or a junkie as to the abductor, I also knew we couldn’t rely solely on the print. We needed more, and we couldn’t get it.

Our list of van owners gave us a huge number of ‘possibles’, many of whom were eliminated by the cops over the space of a couple of weeks once they were contacted and had their alibis checked. I decided Agostini and I should handle the interviews with many of the remainder as possible personally, just in case anything workable came up. That’s what I told myself, anyway. The reality was that we had nothing to do beyond wait for another child to be taken or a body to be found, and neither of us wanted to leave the case alone. Most of the uncleared van owners were self-employed manual workers, delivery drivers, or unemployed, and either had no idea what they were doing at the times we were interested in, or had no one to corroborate their whereabouts. After a we’d spoken to the first dozen or so of these guys, their faces, voices, homes all began to blur.

A brick two-story with a bare front yard.

“I was off work with flu that day,” a stocky guy with a beard and big glasses said, voice a nasal whine. “Must’ve been like that for three or four days, I think.”

A small apartment near a river.

“You should ask my neighbors. I see them pretty often. They might remember seeing me.”

A blocky family home with wooden siding in need of repair.

“I was driving roofing supplies out someplace near Beckett.” A bald man with a prominent nose. His shrewish wife was waiting in the kitchen for us to finish. “I’ve got the work schedule; the customer might be able to say when I was there, if that’s any help. I heard about what happened. You any closer to catching the guy?”

Dreary apartment building that smelled like old coffee.

“So am I suspect or something? Shouldn’t my lawyer be here?” Stick-thin guy well into his fifties. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. It’s not like I’ve done anything. Come on in.”

A scruffy little office above a thrift store.

“No, I was at my sister’s place in New Hampshire. But I’ve seen this case on the news, and I’ve got a theory you might be interested in…”

An anonymous small house in Fall River.

“Yeah?” said Cody Williams. “What do you want?”

 His home was a narrow two-story house with a square patch of slightly ragged greenery that passed for a front yard. A few shrubs, some flowers, all starting to grow rampant. An unmarked white van sat on the driveway. When Williams — a pale, wiry guy with long curly hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a grey T-shirt and jogging pants — opened the door, a wash of warm stale air, moist and acrid, flowed past him. The slick skin reek of old sweat. Older scents embedded in the fabric of the house itself. My nostrils recoiled, but I tried not to show it.