The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (9 page)

In the evenings I left the phone off the hook. My dreams were plagued by flashes of dead children.

Joanne Tilley was on the under-13s swim team and also enjoyed gymnastics. She'd spend her Saturdays shopping at the local mall with her friends. She used to enjoy skateboarding, but a badly broken arm had seriously dented her confidence. Cody broke it again, before strangling her with electrical cable.

Then, on the fourth day, there was a letter waiting for me in the mailbox when I left for the prison. Handwritten address, Rhode Island postmark.

Dear Agent Rourke,

The FBI told us they were hoping to persuade Cody Williams to tell them where we might find Holly’s remains before he dies, but they never said they would be asking you to speak to that man again. After the work you did to catch him and the evidence you gave at his trial we wouldn’t have asked you anything more. We had thought we’d managed to put the whole thing behind us, knowing she’d never be coming back to us and that we had to move on. Strange how we still cling to any hope of news after all this time. Now we are both praying that you can learn what we need from him.

We’ve seen those people protesting on the news. We can’t believe it or understand it. Please don’t let them get to you, Agent Rourke. You were always good to us while you were looking for Holly and the man who killed her. Please keep trying, for us.
 

Good luck and God bless,

John and Martha Tynon

I read the letter through, then dropped it on the coffee table. Headed for the jail under the cold sunshine of the Massachusetts fall. I swallowed the emotions, tried not to get caught up in the old hurt of the Tynon family.

Williams greeted me with a long, ragged clearing of his throat. This time he didn’t manage to hawk up any phlegm, just made dry gasping noises, his mouth opening and closing like a fish, before he got himself under control. Once he was finished, he said, “So who do you want to talk about today, Agent Rourke?”

I grabbed a coffee from the machine and sat down opposite him. “Well, we’re done with the kids we already know about. So how about we start with Katelyn Sellars? She was the first of your victims we still haven’t found.”

“Well, it ain't necessarily so that we’re out of
people
we know about. There’s at least one other we both know.” He smiled faintly, wolfish. “But sure, let’s talk about that Sellars girl.”

“You picked her up on her way to school, right?”

Williams smirked. “Yeah. I had to leave early that day, driving all the way to Albany. You got a photo of her? For old times’ sake.”

“No.”

“Too bad. She looked real fine that morning. Good enough to eat. Black school trousers. Them little white socks. Just lovely.”

I sighed, tried to hurry him up, get him to the point. “You snatched her in the usual way? The lost delivery driver routine. Bundle her into the van.”

“Yeah. Her mind must’ve been elsewhere ‘cos she hardly knew it was happening. Hadn’t even started trying to scream by the time I had her in the van and the door shut again.” He ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip. “I took her away, had to stash her before we got to Albany.”

“Where did you stash her?”

“That doesn’t matter, Agent Rourke. She wasn’t there long. Some place off the highway.”

“You moved her again afterwards?”

Williams picked at one of his ragged fingernails. “Sure. Ain’t no good doing all this if you’ve got no privacy. There’s a house near Lake Stevenson. People I used to know sometimes used it for fishing or getting drunk. Abandoned for ages, and I guess none of them had been back there in years. So the place was ideal. I took her there. Kept her there for a while, a couple of days.”

“Could you mark it on a map if I gave you one?”

Williams shrugged, thought for a moment, looking down at his hands. “Maybe. Might take a while for me to figure out what’s what. Leave a map with me and maybe I can find it.”

“After you’d kept her there for a few days, then what?”

“She was in a bad way by then and I had a load of work on, y’know? I had a lot of deliveries and things to do. She was just a nuisance, pretty fucked up by that time. So I strangled her, right there on the floor.” There was no emotion in his voice at all. He might as well have been reading a weather report. He really didn't care, didn't feel a thing. The only hint of anything deeper came after a brief pause, when he added, “It was strange, seeing her lying there. She’d looked so perfect, walking down the street. Didn’t seem like the same girl.”

Katelyn Sellars was in the Girl Scouts. She had a crush on a guy in the grade above her called Jack. She had dreams of becoming a fashion designer and moving to Europe.
 

“You dumped her body?”

“Yeah.”

I frowned. “Where?”

“Took her out and buried her not far from the shore, maybe a mile from that first girl.”

“You don’t remember more exactly than that?”

Williams shrugged. “Hey, she was a piece of meat.”

“If this shit is all you’ve got to tell me, Cody, then as far as I’m concerned we’re finished here.”

“Easy, Agent Rourke. I’m thinking about it. You’ve just got to give me time to remember back to these things. Bring that map tomorrow, that should help. It ain’t easy, especially not now.” He coughed, something wet rasping at the back of his throat. I was certain he was only doing it for effect. “But all this talking about old times is making it clearer, and that’s helping some.”

I remained unconvinced that he was telling the truth. “Really?”

“Yeah. We should talk more. How about we talk about Clinton Travers while I’m trying to remember what I did with them girls? You could tell me all about him, and maybe while I’m listening and thinking back something’ll shake loose.”

The room darkened, the air becoming thick and cloying, as Cody’s intentions became clearer. We had our shared past and the ties that bound us, and now he was pulling them anew. I wondered how far he’d go with this.
 

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “We can stick to the girls and nothing else. I’ll have the map with me tomorrow. Between then and now, you think hard. If I don’t get some clear answers from you soon, these conversations will be over for good.”

I stood and made for the door. Behind me, I heard him give a satisfied little sigh. “Oh, come on, Agent Rourke,” he whispered just loud enough to hear. “Let’s talk about what happened to Travers.”

I didn’t look back.

09.

Hartford, CT. 1997.

March, four months before Holly Tynon failed to come home, and I was in Hartford trying to find a rapist who’d committed a string of attacks with alarming frequency and regularity. The cops had decided they needed help, and they’d turned to the Bureau. Technically, it should have been the Behavioral Analysis Unit’s baby. But while they’d done a large chunk of the initial analysis work, they were too busy with other cases to provide operational support for the investigation and suspect interviews, so it had been passed to me.

“I was jogging. Before breakfast. Just like I always do,” the woman said. Thin lipped, fighting to concentrate and stay focused. Her red eyes and creased brow above showed just how much emotional strain she was under talking to us. Her hands clasped around the coffee cup played and fiddled with each other incessantly.

Naomi Carson, the detective with Hartford PD heading the investigation, gave her a warm, understanding smile and said, “You were near the river?”

“I like to run there,” the woman, whose name was Mary, said. She was the rapist’s ninth, most recent victim. The only one he’d snatched in daylight so far. “I always go jogging there. Unless it’s raining. Or I’ve got to hurry to get to work.”

“So you jogged from your home…”

“I jogged from home and I’d almost got as far as the river. I was by that… that row of stores on Henry Street. That one that sells all the chocolates and things. And then I felt a… his hand… I…”

“It’s okay, Mary,” Naomi said softly. “He grabbed you?”

She sniffed. “From behind me. I didn’t hear him. He had his hand over my mouth… and he dragged me back… He had a knife. He held it by my neck. There’s an alleyway behind the stores. He dragged me back there…”

“And that’s where he attacked you.”

“He put something over my eyes. Like… like a bag or a blindfold. I thought he was going to kill me. I thought I was going to die. He kept saying I was a… a… bitch. All while he was… And then, then he left. When he’d finished.”

Naomi nodded. “What happened when he left?”

“He took the thing he had over my eyes and said he’d kill me if I looked. He… said he knew where I lived. Then he ran back down the alley behind me. I think he had a car somewhere. Maybe. I… I heard one start up not long after.”

“Did you get a look at the man?” I asked, calm and gentle. “Do you remember anything about his appearance?”

“I… I did, not very much — he was running away — but I did.” Mary gulped. “He had a black ski mask. Like a bank robber. And he had a dark blue jacket, and dark jeans, I think. And I saw his shoes. They were like work boots or something. The ones with the thick soles. I saw them as he was running.”

“Was he wearing gloves at all?”

She nodded. “Yes, sorry, yes. He had gloves.”

“How tall was he?”

“Tall. Taller than me… six foot, maybe? And he was big. He was a big man.”

Naomi smiled. “That’s really good, Mary. That’s a massive help to us. Do you remember anything else about him?”

“I… I don’t know.” Mary thought for a moment. “Yes, I saw his hair. Sticking out underneath his ski mask. It was dark, black or brown. Yes, dark. But… no, that’s it. I can’t think of anything more.”

“That’s okay, Mary,” I told her. “You’ve given us a lot to go on. Thank you.”

She looked at me. “Will… will you catch him?”

I smiled. “You’ve got the whole of Hartford PD and the FBI looking for this guy. We’re going to catch him, Mary. He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

Months later, I’d hear an echo of those words in the promise I made to Martha Tynon.
 

Nine women raped, at a rate averaging one attack per week. Same MO each time. A hand clamped over the victim’s mouth. She was forced at knifepoint to a nearby sheltered spot. The rapist blindfolded the victim, possibly using the sort of eye-mask used by people to help them sleep, before he made any move around from behind them. He said hardly anything throughout, except to call his victims “bitch” or “whore”. The attacks were short and brutal. He raped them, often beating or slapping them about the face and head, then left with a final warning that he knew who they were and where they lived. Hartford was normally a fairly quiet city and the whole place was on edge. The crimes had been front page news since well before local law enforcement requested our help. The media coverage didn’t seem to have bothered the attacker. Every week longer the investigation took us meant another woman was likely to be raped.

After duty hours, I sat with Naomi Carson in a bar down the road from police headquarters. All-red interior, comfortable seats, more mirrors on the walls than most regular establishments. I didn’t know its actual name, but Naomi told me everyone called it ‘the Bordello’.

“Do they serve you at the table, or do you have to ask for a private room?” I asked.

It was a lousy joke, but it had been a hard day and she laughed anyway. She was a couple of years younger than me, doing well to have got her shield already. Short blonde hair, no jewelry. She’d been calm and clear in every interview we’d done. I liked her.

“It could be worse,” she said as the drinks arrived. “There’s a bar not far from here called The Slaughterhouse.”

“Nice. An old meat warehouse or something?”

She shook her head. “Nope. No one knows
why
it’s called that, but it is. That’s the way it’s been for as long as anyone can remember.”

“You’ll have to show me it sometime. It’ll be nice to have some place to celebrate when we nail this son of a bitch.”

“
If
we do,” Naomi said.

“If?”

“So far, he’s picked on lone women, all but one after dark. Approached from behind very quietly, never lets them get a look at him until they’re in post-attack shock.”

“Except for the first one.”

“Yeah, except then. But she only got a tiny glimpse when he slapped her face during the assault. Back before he started using the blindfold.”

“True. And she didn’t give much to go on.”

“Let’s see if I remember it right: ‘A broad-shouldered white guy wearing a ski mask. Uneven teeth. Stubble just visible on his top lip. Too dark to say what color his eyes were. Tall, probably. Breath that stank of alcohol.’ That’s hardly a big deal. We could pull in every alcoholic in town with that description.” She gestured around the bar, although the place was practically empty. “He uses a condom and we’ve found no pubic hair or other readily traceable evidence. Zip at the scenes, apart from four condom wrappers with no prints.”

“It’s not much.”

“Alex, this guy could move out of town tomorrow and we’d never find him and never know who he was.”