Fear the Dark (29 page)

‘It’s done.’

His words echoed inside the room. Darby remained quiet.

‘There’s no rewind button,’ Coop said. He stood by the chair and, leaning forward, picked up his jacket. ‘There’s no way we can fix it. Hoder is as much to blame for this as –’

Then he cut himself off, the unsaid
you
hanging in the air between them.

‘Hoder could have put a stop to it and he didn’t,’ Coop said. ‘I gave him ample opportunity.’

Me too
, Darby thought.

Coop removed a thick stack of paper that had been folded so it could fit inside his inner jacket pocket. He came back to the bed and handed the pages to her.

The first page contained a laser-printed copy of a photograph from another time – an ancient Polaroid of almost blurred colours showing a Caucasian girl of around seven or eight. She wore a white tank top stained with what looked like spaghetti sauce, her stringy blonde hair spilling across her tanned shoulders. The camera had captured her big blue eyes and her broad, gap-toothed smile.

Darby’s scalp tightened. The skin on her face flexed and her muscles constricted, and, as her stomach went into free fall, the photograph went out of focus and her mind snapped back to her own childhood, a time when children rode their bikes after dark and wandered through neighbourhoods, malls and stores freely, without adult supervision, secure in the knowledge that the world was a good place and that monsters were nothing more than creatures relegated to bad dreams and not kindly seeming men who hunted with smiles in broad daylight.

56

It happened on the morning of 15 August 1983. A Monday. At half past eight, Joan Hubbard loaded her seven-year-old daughter into the family’s station wagon and made the 22-mile drive from her small but pleasant ranch home in El Dorado, Kansas, to the North Colony Shopping Mall in Wichita. The Carter & Sullivan circular in Sunday’s paper had advertised its annual overstock sale of bed linen. Joan wanted new sheets and a comforter, maybe even a couple of decorative throw pillows, to replace the hand-me-downs given to her by her older sister.

Finances had been tight ever since Joan O’Donnell married Peter Hubbard. The first three years Peter worked as a shop sweeper at General Electric and went to school nights. It had been one hell of a long slog, but the hard work had paid off. When Peter graduated with his engineering degree – the same day Nicola turned five – he was promoted to GE’s jet-engine shop. The bump in pay wasn’t life changing by any means, but the extra money had given them some well-deserved breathing room. No more penny-pinching on the groceries. No more Ramen Noodles and Hamburger Helper or buying second-hand clothing and used toys at the Salvation Army. Joan felt as though she’d been liberated from prison.

Then the workers went on strike. To make ends meet,
Peter took a job at a local auto-parts store and drove a cab three nights a week and every other weekend.

But that was all in the past. The strike was months behind them, and Peter was back at work with GE. They could afford to celebrate a little. Instead of a night out on the town, they decided to redo their bedroom.

Joan arrived just as Carter & Sullivan was opening its doors. She parked her Buick station wagon with its wood-panel trim near the mall’s south-east entrance. For the next three decades, whenever Joan was interviewed about what happened, she’d tell reporters she wished she’d parked near the store’s north entrance. That way they wouldn’t have passed the toy aisle.

Nicky stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted what would become that year’s popular Christmas toy: the Cabbage Patch doll. Nicky wanted to stop and look. Joan wanted to get the bedding and go home. Unlike her mother and sister, she didn’t care for shopping.

‘Please,’ Nicky begged, tugging her mother’s hand. ‘Please, Mommy,
pleeeeease
.’

‘You promise you’ll stay here? Right here, in this aisle?’

‘I promise.’

‘You promise what?’

‘To stay with the dolls.’ Nicky smiled her gap-toothed smile. ‘I won’t walk away.’

Joan left her daughter alone without giving it a second thought. Another girl was standing in the aisle, a cute tomboy with curly black hair. It was 1983; parents left their kids alone all the time.

Joan found the comforter she wanted easily enough,
but the advertised sheets were another matter. When she failed to locate them, she hunted around for a store employee. The pleasant older man she spoke with didn’t know anything about the advertised linens but said they might be out back in the storeroom and went to investigate. It was 9.13 a.m.

During this time, recent high school graduate and newly minted Carter & Sullivan employee Brad Fisher was running late. He was supposed to arrive at work at 8.45, but he had somehow slept through his alarm – again. He headed for the toy department, which was next to the door for the stockroom. When he cut through the aisle displaying those creepy Cabbage Patch dolls, he saw a teenager or a boy of at least twelve kneeling next to a young girl matching Nicky Hubbard’s description. Brad would later tell the police he remembered the little girl clearly, because her long blonde hair was pulled back from her face and tied with a white marble elastic band. They were all the rage that summer; his younger sister wore the same sort of stupid things in her hair. The stores could barely keep them in stock.

Brad would also tell police about the teenager, who he had assumed was the girl’s brother. How when the boy got to his feet he was short, barely a few inches over five feet. How he wore dirty jeans, scuffed work boots and a stained black T-shirt.

The boy grabbed his sister’s wrist. When she tried to take her hand back, he yanked her arm, hard. When she let out a small yelp, he smiled.

A brother wouldn’t act that way
, an inner voice whispered.

Then another voice countered:
Remember when you got so pissed at Maggie for ratting on you when you sneaked out to meet George and Tony? What did you do
?

Brad smiled at the memory.
I cut the hair on all her Barbie dolls and flushed the evidence down the toilet
. Maggie, with her big fat mouth, was a tattletale bitch. So he breezed right past the brother and sister and entered the storeroom. When he punched in, it was 9.19 a.m.

At 9.24 a.m. Joan Hubbard had her new sheets in hand. She went to collect Nicky, only to find that her daughter was no longer looking at the Cabbage Patch dolls.

She’s probably wandered off to look at some other toy
, Joan thought. With a frustrated sigh, she went to find Nicky, who would be spending the rest of the day inside the house, grounded, for breaking her promise not to wander off.

The frustration turned to a slow but growing fear when she failed to find the child anywhere in the toy department.

The kids’ clothing section was nearby. But Joan couldn’t see her daughter anywhere among the racks.

Had Nicky gone to look for her? Had she hurt herself? Joan dropped her bedding items on a nearby display table and hurried off to the customer service department at the front of the store. She bypassed the people standing in line to return items and with her voice rising in panic told the young girl working the counter that she couldn’t find her daughter.

The counter girl called the manager over the loudspeaker. Joan, hysterical with nightmarish thoughts about
her daughter, about her being lost or hurt or –
Don’t say it, don’t say it or it will come true
– darted behind the counter and pressed the microphone button.

‘Nicky. Nicky, it’s Mom. Come to the front of the store, Nicky. Mom is at the front of the store. My daughter’s name is Nicky Hubbard. She’s wearing a yellow sundress and sandals. She has blonde hair. Her name is Nicky Hubbard.’

The Carter & Sullivan store manager acted quickly and promptly. He announced Nicky’s name and physical description over the loudspeaker, and told his employees to stand by all the store exits and stop any little blonde girl from leaving. It was now 9.56 a.m.

Brad Fisher hadn’t heard any of the announcements. He was outside, standing in the unbearably hot Kansas sun, doing the same thing he did every morning: using a utility razor to break down the mountain of empty cardboard boxes stacked next to the dumpster. He returned to the storeroom a few minutes after ten, surprised to find it empty. Usually there were employees going in and out to stock the shelves or to take one of their allotted ten-minute breaks. He ducked into the staff bathroom and splashed cold water on his face.

The moment Brad stepped back into the store he knew something was wrong. Customers were huddled together and speaking in hushed tones. Others were moving swiftly through the aisles, searching the clothing racks and looking underneath the display tables, concern and dread etched in their faces. Carter & Sullivan employees were posted near the store exits.

When Brad found out what happened, his stomach turned to ice. He would never forget that feeling or the way the polished white linoleum floor seemed to dip and sway in his vision, or how he wanted to slip inside a black hole and disappear. Brad was eighteen years old and felt like crying.

What would always come back to him – what would continually haunt him – was that moment in the toy aisle when the boy had grabbed the little girl’s wrist. How the brother’s smile hadn’t been, in fact, brotherly at all but something more sinister, something more in line with the way Brad’s father smiled when he discovered a raccoon caught inside a steel trap.

I should’ve done something
, Brad Fisher would later tell himself, as he took another slug of beer stolen from his father’s workshop refrigerator.

If only I had said or done something
, he would later tell himself as he took another hit off the bong.

If I hadn’t been so spineless, so selfish, maybe she wouldn’t have been taken
, he would later tell himself as he rode the needle; heroin was the only thing that banished the images from that day, the only thing that offered him comfort.

Over the ensuing years, Brad discovered that no amount or combination of heroin, booze or pills could stop him from wondering what had happened to Nicky Hubbard. Only God knew.

Sometimes he would ask God:
Why didn’t you help her?

Sometimes God replied, but His answer was always the same:

Why didn’t you help her? You were there, not me. You could have stopped it from happening, and you didn’t.

Darby stopped reading and skimmed the rest of the file, glancing at its meagre offerings – the pithy investigative notes and false leads, the lack of evidence. When she reached the last page, she looked up at Coop.

‘Aren’t you going to read the rest of it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I didn’t realize you were already familiar with the case.’

‘Nicky Hubbard is the nation’s poster girl for missing children. She’s the reason why Congress created the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in ’85. People wrote books about what they think happened to her, they made a TV movie of the week.

‘Why did you give me this?’

‘The plastic print I found in the polyurethane along the Downes bedroom skirting board – the database came back with a match,’ Coop said. ‘That fingerprint belongs to Nicky Hubbard.’

57

Darby’s mouth and throat went dry.

No one knew what had happened to Nicky Hubbard – no one except her killer, who had never been caught. And now Coop was telling her he’d found Hubbard’s fingerprints more than three decades later at the scene of a recent triple homicide in another state.

‘I examined the print myself,’ he said, and reached inside his rumpled, blood-stained overcoat. ‘There’s no question: it belongs to her. But don’t take my word for it.’

He came back with another folded set of papers and handed them to her. It was the forensics report on the plastic fingerprint he had recovered from the skirting board.

The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System had found four possible matches. The one with the highest probability belonged to Nicky Hubbard. Wichita PD had collected the girl’s fingerprints from items inside her bedroom and they had been loaded into IAFIS when it was officially launched on 28 July 1990.

Someone at the federal lab had pulled Hubbard’s original prints and emailed them to Coop, who performed a visual side-by-side comparison with the plastic print recovered from the Downes home. The evidence was conclusive. Nicky Hubbard, the seven-year-old missing
girl who had been adopted by the nation had, at some point in time, been inside the bedroom where David and Laura Downes and their daughter had died. It was impossible to tell
when
Hubbard had been in there; fingerprints couldn’t be dated. There was no known method to determine how long a print had been on a surface.

‘This came through about five minutes ago,’ Coop said, pointing to the forensics report in her hand. ‘The IAFIS office called to tell me. No one else knows yet.’

‘Where d’you print these out?’

‘Robinson’s office. Williams is letting me use it.’ Then Coop’s face clouded, and he added, ‘Robinson is at Brewster General too. Heart attack. At the moment he’s in a stable condition.’

Darby placed the pages on her lap. She leaned back against her pillow and stared out the door, at the brightly lit hallway. Her mind felt empty, her body devoid of any feeling, as though she had been disconnected from everything that had happened since her arrival in Red Hill. It was as if her blood had been replaced with Novocain.

‘How old were you when it happened?’ Coop asked.

‘Eleven. You?’

‘Thirteen. You remember what that time was like?’

Darby nodded. ‘You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing Nicky Hubbard. She was on the front page of every major newspaper, magazine and supermarket tabloid. Parents were suddenly terrified their kids were going to get snatched in broad daylight. After she disappeared, my parents never let me out of their sight.’

‘My mother was the same way with me and my sisters,’ Coop said. ‘Forget about leaving the house after sundown. Suddenly I couldn’t walk or ride my bike anywhere or play hoops without her chaperoning me.’