Fear the Dark (35 page)

Darby said to Whitehead: ‘He’s going to kill you, dumbass. Lancaster’s not the type to leave loose ends.’

Lancaster pistol-whipped her against the right side of her face; the gun split open her ear and pain exploded in black and red clouds behind her eyes. Her hands immediately went up to protect her face, but her wrists were tied behind her back. She staggered and her knees gave out. She dropped to the floor, near the couch, falling face first into the plastic-covered cushions.

Kelly screamed. Whitehead’s hand had reached the butt of his weapon when Lancaster fired.

The round went through Whitehead’s shoulder and the wall behind him exploded in a mist of red. The patrolman’s eyes were wide, his mouth a round, wet O; he stared in helpless confusion as he tumbled against a small sideboard, knocking over the Hummel figurines that had been sitting on its top. They smashed against the floor as Kelly screamed again, her hands pressed against her cheeks, staring in horror at what was unfolding.

Darby had moved to her side. There was some give in the restraints. She was getting to her feet and trying to slide out her wrist when Lancaster turned his weapon on Kelly and fired. The round went through her forehead, and she collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

But Lancaster thought Darby wasn’t a problem. Her hands were tied behind her back, and he had to deal with a more immediate problem: Whitehead, who had managed to remove his side-arm. The patrolman lay sideways
on the floor, his shoulder gushing blood from a severed artery. He clicked off the safety just as Lancaster fired a round into his stomach.

Lancaster was about to charge forward, most likely to plant a final round into the patrolman’s skull. Darby saw her opportunity: she swung her leg and felt it connect with his shin. He tripped, and his forward momentum knocked him off balance. He pinwheeled, and by the time he had tumbled against the floor she was already on her feet and moving.

Lancaster had landed face first on the carpet. But he wasn’t injured, and he could attack. He threw himself on to his side, pointed the Glock at the couch and fired. Darby, who had already placed herself behind him, kicked Lancaster in the back of his head. She heard a crunching sound and his arm faltered. She raised her foot and brought the heel crashing down on his temple and he went limp.

She was about to kick him again when a voice said,
If you kill him, you’ll never know what happened to Nicky Hubbard
.

Darby kicked his gun across the floor. Her head was pounding, her stomach roiling; she gulped in air, trying to clear her head, trying to keep the sour mash of breakfast from coming up. The room smelled of cordite and blood, and she could hear Williams moaning in the kitchen. She sat on the floor, leaning back against the carpet and working her cuffed hands over her rump and the back of her legs.

Her wrists were still bound, but her hands were in front of her now. Kneeling, she found Lancaster’s handcuffs,
then she pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him. She got to her feet, dizzy and nauseous, and entered the kitchen.

Ray Williams’s head bobbed up, and he made a sick, wheezing sound.

‘Give me a minute and I’ll have you outta there,’ she panted, and removed a knife from the butcher’s block next to the stove.

Darby sat at the breakfast nook where Sally Kelly had served tea to her yesterday and propped her arms on the table. Because of the way her hands were bound, it took her a moment to angle the blade correctly so she could saw through the plastic without slitting a wrist in the process.

It was slow going. Her hands were not steady, shaky from the adrenalin, and the pounding in her head made it difficult to concentrate.

Finally, her hands were free. Darby made quick work of Williams’s bindings. He slumped back against the chair as his fingers scratched at the duct tape plastered across his mouth. She helped him to peel it off.

‘My ribs,’ Williams wheezed. ‘I think he broke them.’

He needed to stand to reduce the pressure and strain. Darby threw his heavy arm around her shoulder, and when she helped him to his feet he locked her in a chokehold.

To perform a standing rear-chokehold correctly, you need to wrap one arm around the victim’s throat. You place your other hand squarely on the back of the head and, gripping the hair, push the head forward while cutting off the airway. All it takes is five pounds of pressure; it takes more force to crack an egg. Almost always, the victim is immediately subdued.

But Darby McCormick is no ordinary victim. She’s a cop and, like me, she has not only been trained in the art of the chokehold, she knows how to break out of one. She knows to sink her chin against the crook of my elbow and hold on to my arm while she crouches forward. She knows she needs to wrap one of her legs around the back of my calf to trap my leg, then turn a sharp 180 degrees to break out of the hold – and she needs to do it fast, because the blood flow to her brain has already been cut by 13 per cent.

Which is why I immediately launch myself backwards while I hold on to her, squeezing. I pull her out of the kitchen and into the hall, where I press my back against the wall. Now she has no way to free herself. She’s trapped, thrashing against my chest, using her elbows to deliver sharp blows against my ribs. But my ribs are fine; I lied to get her to help me up so I could easily grab her.

Six seconds later, her vision fails.

In eight seconds her frontal cortex shuts down.

Nine seconds in, and she slumps in my arms, completely unconscious. I could keep squeezing and kill her right now and be done with it all; or I could take advantage of this tremendous blessing.

I release my grip and carry her into the living-room. Not wanting to cause any further trauma to her face, I lay her down against the couch. Her face will heal in time, and then she’ll look as radiant and beautiful as the day when she stepped inside the entryway of the Downes home. God willing, we’ll have plenty of adventures together, she and I.

But I have to act quickly.

I push her hands behind her back and secure her wrists with the steel handcuffs from my belt. Sally Kelly has a pair of decorative Christmas dish-rags hanging from the stove handle. I retrieve them and stuff one in Darby’s mouth. The other I use as a makeshift blindfold.

Then I notice Teddy Lancaster is watching me. His eyes are open, blinking; he either can’t or won’t move. A deep, gurgling sound escapes his bloody lips as I pick up his silenced Glock. He tries to raise a hand, about to speak, when I park a round into his brainpan, the gunshot as loud as a balloon popping. I toss the nine on the floor and my head throbs in what feels like hundreds of different places. It’s difficult to concentrate, and the floor doesn’t feel stable underneath my boots.

The burner is still tucked inside my jacket pocket. I take it out and call Sarah as I step into the bathroom off the
hall. The window facing me is dark; night has fallen. Another blessing.

‘I was getting worried,’ she says.

‘You still parked down the street?’ I’ve asked Sarah to shadow me, to stick close by, in case we need to run together.

‘I’m still there, like you asked,’ Sarah says. ‘What’s wrong with your voice?’

I yank down a pink bath towel hanging on a rack. ‘Teddy hit me in the face with a billy club and split my lips open.’

‘Teddy who?’

‘I’ll explain later,’ I say, and march back towards the living-room. ‘I need you to come here. Now.’

‘There’s a police car parked in the driveway. I’m looking at it through the binoculars.’

‘They’re all dead. Hurry – and bring my kit. Make sure no one sees you.’

I hang up, not knowing why I said that last part, as Kelly, like everyone else who lives in Red Hill, doesn’t have any nearby neighbours. The advantage of hunting in a town like this instead of a city is that you don’t have to worry as much about potential witnesses.

But I’ve never hunted in Red Hill or in any of the other nearby towns. I’ve always abducted my women either from out of state or from someplace very far away from Red Hill, which is how I’ve managed to hunt all these years without getting caught. When the Red Hill Ripper started killing here, though, I saw it as an opportunity to
take women closer to home – women like Tricia Lamont – and blame it on the Red Hill Ripper.

Is there time to take Tricia today? I’ve never had two women at once. The possibilities are … No. No, I’m being greedy. The McCormick bitch is my prize.

Darby moans as I use the towel to tie her ankles together. The knot won’t hold for long, but it will prevent her from kicking. I sit next to her and use my weight to pin her face and chest against the back of the couch. I pat down her pockets but I don’t find her satellite phone. Did she leave it out in the patrol car? No, there it is, lying on the bloodied carpet.

Darby has come back to life; I can feel the muscles in her back tensing just as Sarah’s SUV pulls into the driveway. Seconds later, the front door opens. Sarah no longer flinches or pales at the sight of the blood and carnage; she’s seen it before, many, many times. The small black leather case is gripped in her gloved hand.

‘Don’t come inside,’ I say. I don’t want her footprints to be discovered inside the house. ‘Just toss me the kit.’

Sarah is staring at Lancaster’s body.

‘That’s Teddy,’ I say. ‘Teddy Lancaster. He’s the Red Hill Ripper.’

‘So he’s the one who recorded you inside the bed-room?’

I nod. ‘The video was on Savran’s MacBook, along with all the others. The laptop is now at the bottom of the river. Now toss –’

‘What if he made copies?’

‘One thing at a time, Sarah. Now hurry up and toss me the kit.’

She does. I use my teeth to unzip it, then take out a preloaded syringe. Sarah watches me with a strange mixture of anger, fear and, I think, jealousy, as I sink the needle into Darby’s neck and inject her with Etorphine. The opioid is several thousand times more potent than morphine, and I need only a small amount to send her off into the valley of sweet dreams.

‘You said this wasn’t about her.’

‘It isn’t,’ I say. ‘It just worked out this way. You got the latex gloves in your pocket, like I asked?’

Sarah nods. Looks disappointed. Hurt.

‘I need this. The next few weeks, I’m going to be under a lot of stress. You know what happens when I get stressed.’

‘I can satisfy you,’ Sarah says, blinking back tears. ‘I know how to satisfy you.’

‘Is there anyone outside?’

Sarah looks, begrudgingly.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No one’s coming.’

‘Keep watching – and put on those gloves.’

The drug has taken effect; Darby has gone limp, sliding into unconsciousness. Head pounding, I move off the couch and crawl towards Lancaster. I find his key fob inside his jacket pocket and toss it to Sarah. Then I get to my feet, collect Darby’s satellite phone and the Glock, and hand them to Sarah.

In my present physical condition, it takes what feels like
an hour to pick up Darby and sling her over my shoulder. Sarah holds the door open for me as I carry her outside and lay her gently across the SUV’s backseat.

As we return to the house, I tell Sarah what she needs to do next. She listens and doesn’t ask any questions.

‘I’ve got to shut off my phone,’ I tell her. ‘I won’t be able to call you for a while.’

‘Are we safe?’

‘As long as you do what I said. We’ll have to lay low for a bit – the FBI will have all sorts of questions about Nicky Hubbard, but –’

‘They
know
about her?’ Her face is bloodless.

I gently cup her face in my hands. ‘The FBI found one of her fingerprints in the bedroom – that’s
all
they know and that’s all they’ll ever know.’ I step inside the house. ‘Slip out of your boots. Follow me – and watch where you step.’

‘What about Sherrilyn O’Neil?’ she asks, referring to the woman I had accidentally killed before the arrival of the FBI. She lasted a good eight months before the fight left her. Darby, I’m sure, will last longer – a year, maybe even two.

‘They don’t know about Sherrilyn,’ I say, ‘or about any of the other ones.’ I pick up the severed bindings from the floor and stuff them in her jacket pocket. Sarah looks panicked. ‘Sarah, there’s nothing to link Nicky to the other girls.’

‘What about Teddy Lancaster? He recorded you, so he knows about Nicky –’

‘He doesn’t,’ I say, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. Teddy never mentioned Hubbard while he had me tied down to the chair. Sure, he knew
something
had happened inside the Downes bedroom – he had recorded a video of me on my hands and knees scrubbing away, trying to destroy any trace of Nicky’s blood. But I refused to tell Teddy what I was doing, or why I was doing it. He thought he could beat the truth out of me, but he was wrong. He had finally given up when Darby McCormick rang the doorbell. He said he would find out. The truth would come out, and, whatever it was, he said, he would expose me.

And now I’m safe again, and there’s only one last thing to do.

‘Nicky can’t hurt us,’ I tell her as I sit down on the desk chair. ‘She’s dead. They all are.’ I point to the small bag of plastic zip-ties Kelly had placed on the counter and say, ‘Grab a couple of those. I need you to tie me up.’

Sarah returns with the bindings. ‘Everyone on the planet is looking for Hubbard,’ she says as she ties my wrists together. ‘The FBI aren’t going to go away. They’ll stay here and look for her.’

‘They won’t. Grab the tape from the floor.’

She does, and I say, ‘The Hubbard stuff will die down, I promise. After that, we’ll be free to go wherever we want, together.’

Sarah kisses me deeply. Smiling and grateful, she secures the tape over my mouth.

Then she’s gone, and I’m alone inside the house, tied up and gagged, another unfortunate victim of the Red
Hill Ripper. The air reeks of blood and gun smoke and, as I close my eyes, I think about the way Sarah stiffened when I touched her. I’m not worried. She loves me. She always does what she’s told.

69

Coop sat back down in Chief Robinson’s office chair, about to have another go at the property records for the Downes home, when from down the hall he heard the dispatcher’s alarmed voice say, ‘Dead. They’re all dead.’