Fear the Dark (26 page)

‘Right around the corner,’ he said into the phone as he moved down the steps. A blast of wind howled past them, temporarily blinding her.

Coop hung up. ‘He called looking for you,’ he said, fishing the car key out of his jacket pocket. ‘Said he’ll call back in ten. We’ll take my car.’

‘What does he want?’

‘Don’t know yet. He told the dispatcher – this is a direct quote – he said, “Tell her fifteen minutes or I’ll kill them all.” ’

She buckled herself into the passenger’s seat and set the stopwatch function on her digital watch.

46

Darby entered the lobby of the police station expecting to find cops gathered in anxious crowds, pacing and drinking coffee and talking among themselves, wondering aloud and privately if the Red Hill Ripper was just minutes away from butchering another family. That had been her experience back in Boston. Instead, she found the lobby peacefully quiet and most of the nearby offices dark. A phone rang from somewhere down the hall.

She glanced at her wrist as she followed Coop into the squad room and saw that she had a little over twelve minutes until the Red Hill Ripper called back.

Hoder sat on the edge of his desk, rubbing the sleep from his face. His tie was gone, but he was wearing the same clothes she had seen earlier. Police Chief Robinson was with him, dressed in a pair of badly wrinkled khakis and a grey sweatshirt with frayed cuffs. His boots were damp, flecked with melting snow.

The chief eyed her coldly. Hoder too seemed to be looking at her differently now, not with contempt but with disappointment and, she thought, sadness.

‘He called 911 from a payphone in downtown Red Hill,’ Hoder said. ‘Chief Robinson sent a couple of cruisers. They’re still there, dusting it for prints. When this guy calls back – if he calls back – the chief’s got all his people
standing by. Most of ’em got vehicles with four-wheel drive, so hopefully that will help their response time.

‘The woman who spoke to him, Betty, said his voice seemed altered. He identified himself as the Red Hill Ripper and asked to speak to you. When she said she’d have to put him on hold, he replied, “Tell her or I’ll kill them all.” Then he hung up.’

‘Where’s the call centre?’ Darby asked.

‘Right down the hall. We may have a lead on this Timmy person.’ Hoder turned his attention to the police chief.

Robinson said, ‘Like every other station, we hire a cleaning crew to come in during the night and empty the trash and clean up our holding cells. Outfit called RBG Cleaning, operates out of Brewster. Services them, us and a good number of the surrounding towns. Until about two years ago, they used to come in every night. Now we’ve only got ’em twice a week.’

Darby glanced at her watch again. Just under ten minutes left. The snow on her head had melted, making her scalp itch, and she felt sweat gathering along the small of her back.

‘Reason I bring it up,’ Robinson said, ‘is because a year ago, maybe a year and a half, the people working the night shifts complained about the halls stinking like rotten food. Couple of ’em said it smelled like fish. This was during the summer, so we thought that maybe someone dropped food somewhere or left it in a trashcan and it spoiled. We were bleaching all of our buckets. This went on for about a month or so and then it stopped.

‘Terry told me about the interview you two had with
the hooker, escort, whatever she is, how this Timmy guy smelled, and it got me thinking, so I talked to Ray about it. He’s on his way to Brewster to talk to Ron Gondek, the guy who owns the cleaning company, to see if he employed someone matching Timmy’s description.’

‘If he did, it means Timmy was in here before the killings started. Do the janitors have access to the offices?’

Robinson nodded, knowing where she was heading. ‘All the cabinets and desks are locked up every night – at least mine are,’ he said.

‘Computers?’

‘Password protected, every last one of them – and not with those rinky-dink passwords you can guess, shit like your birthday or your pet’s name.’

Darby’s attention had drifted to the pictures of the dead women on the whiteboards. For a moment the only sound she heard was Robinson jingling his change and car keys in his pockets.

Hoder said, ‘The guy from our facial-imaging lab finished up with the Tuttle woman about half an hour ago. He should be emailing the sketch to us any minute now.’

She nodded absently, still looking at the pictures. ‘You said he called the call centre’s emergency number?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That number in the phone book? On the internet?’

‘No, it’s a private line used only by cops.’

‘So somehow he got that number. And we know he got all of our cell phone numbers, because he sent out those pictures of me earlier today.’

Darby glanced at her watch. Six and a half minutes left.
Plenty of time
, she thought, and moved to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Coop asked.

‘To check Williams’s office. Be right back.’

His light was still on. The computer was a tower unit; it stood on the floor, underneath the desk. She took out her penlight, got down on the linoleum and examined its back. It took her a only moment to find what she was looking for.

When she returned to her feet, she found Coop standing in the doorway, looking at her expectantly. She moved into the hall, motioning for him to follow, and checked her watch again. Three minutes and forty seconds left.

‘There’s a small USB key installed in the back of the tower,’ Darby said as they walked. ‘Those things have PC-monitoring software on them. You plug them into someone’s computer and bingo, you have access to emails, contacts, every single thing on their computer – and you can do it all remotely.’

‘You got all of that from looking at a USB stick?’

‘The words “Spy Cobra Delux” are printed along the side.’

‘Well, that’s a clue, sure.’

‘How he got his hands on everyone’s cell phone numbers has been nagging at me all day. Using a device like that makes sense since our man likes computers.’

‘And bugged your phone,’ Coop added. ‘That USB spy device, I wonder why he left it there.’

‘Maybe it does double-duty as an audio bug. We’ll run the name through Google and find out what it does.’

Coop took her to the call centre, a warm, boxy room with long counters along the walls that served as desks. The dispatcher, Betty, a mountain of a woman poured into a tight-fitting black fleece sweatshirt, sat in front of a bank of three computer monitors. She kept shifting in her seat and swallowing nervously, like someone waiting for a bomb to go off.

The woman gave Darby a headset; everyone else had headphones so they could listen in when the Ripper called.

While they waited, Darby explained what she had found to Hoder and Chief Robinson.

Darby was checking her watch when a 911 call came through.

47

Betty spoke into her headset. ‘911, what is your emergency?’

On the end of the line Darby heard rapid breathing.

Crying.

Her attention was fixed on the monitor with the ANI/ALI screen. The software had caught the incoming number but there was no address.

Land-line calls were traced in a matter of seconds. Call from cell phones took longer; the software had to triangulate the signal as it bounced between towers. Betty moved her computer mouse with one hand and punched her keyboard with the other.

Now a frightened woman’s voice: ‘He’s got us tied up in the bedroom. Me and my family.’

Darby felt cold all over. She leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, and stared down at the scuffmarks on the floor. The voice had a slight echo to it.
She’s on a speakerphone
, Darby thought.

‘There’s a rope tied around my neck,’ the woman sputtered.

From the corner of her eye Darby could see Coop looking at her, and she recalled what he had said to her before she went into the squad room to do the interview:
I saw the list of questions and answers the two of you came up with. You go on the record saying those things, you might as well be jamming a stick of dynamite up this guy’s ass. Once you light the fuse, who the hell knows how he’s going to react? Maybe he’ll decide to take his aggression out on someone else instead of you
. ‘Is the intruder inside the room with you?’ Betty asked. While she had been taught to keep her emotions in check, to speak clearly and calmly, Darby caught a slight hitch in the woman’s reedy voice.

The woman on the phone didn’t answer.
He’s listening in on the conversation
, Darby thought.
He’s telling her what to say
.

‘Ma’am, are you still there?’ Betty asked.

‘Yes,’ the woman sputtered. ‘Yes, he’s here with me. With us.’

‘Where do you live, ma’am?’

Another pause. Darby pictured the killer whispering the answer into the woman’s ear. She looked again at the ANI/ALI screen. Still no address.

‘He said to put her on the line. Darby McCormick.’

‘I’m right here,’ Darby said.

Then the woman broke down, sobbing hysterically. ‘
He just put a bag over my husband’s head, please, you’ve got to help us. Twenty-two
–’

The woman started choking.

He’s strangling her
. Darby hit the mute button on her headset and whipped round to Betty. ‘Why’s the address taking so goddamn long to trace?’

Betty’s eyes didn’t move from the screen. Police Chief Robinson answered the question. ‘We don’t have the software to trace cell signals,’ he said. ‘Only the state police can do that, system called One-Click.’

The woman’s choking filled their headsets.

Robinson continued. ‘Betty already bumped up the call to them. They can’t pinpoint a cell signal’s exact location, but they can give us co-ordinates, longitude and latitude. We’ll be able to get an address with that.’

‘How long is this gonna take?’

Robinson didn’t have an answer. Over her headphones Darby thought she heard the crinkling sound of a plastic bag and her heart leapt high in her chest. She got back on the line, reminding herself not to beg: begging was the lifeblood of a sadist, what fed their need to torture. Beg and he’d start to kill everyone.

‘You wanted to talk to me,’ she said into the microphone. ‘I’m here. Tell me what you want.’

Silence. Still no address listed on the screen.

‘Tell me what you want,’ Darby said again.

Then a gulping and gasping sound roared over their headphones, like the noise of someone breaking to the surface of the water after having been submerged.

‘Alone,’ the woman managed to say. Her wretched coughs exploded over the line for what seemed like minutes. ‘Come alone and he’ll won’t kill us.’

‘I’ll come alone; you have my word,’ Darby said. ‘Tell me where you live.’

Hysterical sobbing. ‘Please help us.’

‘I’m coming. Alone. Give me your address –’

‘
Please
.’

Click
and the call ended.

48

Palms damp and her throat dry, Darby glanced at Coop and saw the thinly disguised blame in his eyes. She looked away from him, at Hoder, who was standing near the doorway. The colour had drained from his face. Betty hit the redial button for the phone number.

Darby felt sick and clammy, and she had trouble swallowing. A voice that wasn’t her own, cold and flat and without mercy, broke in and said:
He’s using the family as bait. He’s setting a trap for you so he can kill you
.

‘No matter how we cut it, someone is going to have to go into that house,’ Darby said. ‘It may as well be me.’

Coop, not surprisingly, was the first to speak. ‘The family’s dead and you know it.’

Hoder nodded in agreement. ‘Coop’s right,’ he said. ‘He wants you to come alone so he can lure you into a trap.’

‘And if I don’t do as he instructed – if you send in the first responders, then the EMTs – who the hell knows how he’s going to act?’ Darby asked. ‘If he wants me to come alone, chances are he’s somewhere close by, watching the house. Once we get the address, I say we set up a perimeter and block him in.’

Then Darby looked at Robinson and said, ‘You let the emergency people in there first, they’ll be going in blind.
If our guy has set some sort of trap, they won’t know what to look for. I will. I’m the best candidate, and besides, it’s me he wants anyway.’

Coop threw up his hands. ‘This is insane.’

‘And what if the family’s still alive?’ Darby asked.

‘There’s no way you honestly believe that – I
know
you don’t believe that. He wants you to go there so he can kill you – that’s why he had that woman feed you that bullshit line about how he won’t kill everyone if you come. He’s playing off your sense of decency. You’re letting a psychopath manipulate you.’

‘I’ll need a car. I left mine at the bar.’

‘You can’t save that family. They’re gone. What this is about is your guilt.’

Then Coop’s expression transformed itself into an odd mix of grief and sympathy – the look of a man about to suffer an irrecoverable loss. ‘And it’s going to kill you,’ he said.

Betty spoke up. ‘Staties traced the cell signal,’ she said, and handed Darby a slip of paper. ‘22 Exeter Road, in Red Hill.’

‘How far away is it?’

‘In normal conditions, I’d say about six, ten minutes max.’

Darby got to her feet. She felt a cold and hollow spot in the pit of her stomach.

Robinson held out his car keys to her. ‘Take my truck,’ he said. ‘White Ford parked out front. It’s got four-wheel drive so you won’t get stuck out there.’

‘Your truck got GPS?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll need you to give me directions. You can relay them to me over the phone. Tell me what number to call.’ Darby gave the slip of paper in her hand to the police chief.

Coop looked at her longingly.
Don’t do it
, his eyes said.
Please
.

Robinson handed the paper back to her. ‘I’ll coordinate everything from here,’ he said. ‘I have everybody’s numbers.’

Darby left the room. When she reached the end of the corridor, she turned and, glancing back to the call centre, saw Coop setting down his headphones on the counter. He had the look of a man placing a rose on top of a coffin about to be lowered into the ground.