The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (13 page)

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not convinced at all about this.”

“Looks like the same person to me.”

“It could be any blonde woman in that film.”

“There’s a strong similarity there,” I said.

“I’m not as sure as you.”

“Look at the eyes.”

She shook her head. “I suspect someone’s simply noticed that one of the snippets in their personal porno collection looks a little like one of the girls we’re looking for and has sent it to you as a sick joke. It’s not like the papers haven’t been full of this case.”

“Could we do an age advancement on Holly’s photo for better comparison? That shouldn’t take long.”

“Sure. We’d probably better.”

She led me up one floor and along a maze of corridors interspersed with more open office space to a cubicle where a bespectacled woman in her forties was working on a report.

“Janice,” Downes said. “Have you got a few minutes spare? I need a quick favor.”

“What is it?” Janice glanced at me briefly, then back at Downes.

“I need an age advancement done. It's a single photo which shouldn’t need very much detailed adjustment. Not yet, at least.”

“Give me the photo.”

Janice scanned Holly’s picture and brought it up on the screen. “How much advancement do you need?”

“Seven years,” I said. “She’s thirteen in that photo.”

“Keeping the same relative body size? Any significant weight gain or loss expected?”

“No.”

I watched as the face on the screen morphed, flowing like mercury, shifting and pooling into a new, older shape.

“Hair?”

“Longer. Down to shoulder length. Worn loose.”

More changes on screen. Janice looked back at me. “There. Done.”

The printer spooled off a hardcopy of the image. Looking at it, thinking back to the face on the film, I was even more sure that it was Holly in the footage. The thought shook me hard, reflecting as it did past mistakes and misjudgments that I wouldn’t easily live with if it were true.

“I still don’t know, Alex,” Downes said, staring at the picture as we walked back through the corridors. “I don’t know at all.”

“It’s her.”

“You might be looking too hard for something that’s not there.”

“It’s her.”

We returned to her office and she brought up the frozen still from the footage and compared the two directly. “The quality of this film is so low that I think it could be anyone there and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. And the chances of it really being the Tynon girl… well, you know just how unlikely it is that a child kidnap victim could possibly be alive after all this time.”

“It still needs analyzing. We might be able to sharpen up the image to get a better look at the girl. Maybe even learn a few things about where it was shot.” I frowned. “And besides, even if the chances are small, you’ve got to follow this up.”

“We got the guy, Alex. You know it and I know it. Once Cody was behind bars, there were no more disappearances. Three of his victims have already been found dead and he’s started to give you the locations of the remainder. Has he ever given you any reason to think some of the girls were kept alive?”

I stayed quiet.

“Exactly,” Downes said. “Even
he
hasn’t floated the possibility. I still say this is most likely to be the work of one of his supporters who saw the news reports and decided to try to make it look like he’s innocent. They dug around for an old piece of obscure pornography with a blonde woman who’d roughly fit Holly’s adult appearance and sent it to you to throw you. That’s all.”

“If that was the case, why not send copies to the newspapers, along with a letter saying what it’s supposed to be? If they want Williams freed, they’d need media exposure for something like this.”

“Maybe they have. Maybe it just hasn’t made it to print yet.”

“And maybe they haven’t. Maybe it really is Holly.”

“A scheme like this still won’t get him freed,” she said, tapping her fingers on the age-advanced printout. “We never charged him with the abductions of any of those girls. He wasn’t convicted of anything that involved them. You had him for two clear-cut crimes — the murder of Clinton Travers and the attempted abduction of Nicole Ballard. Not Tynon or the others.”

I held my tongue for a moment, staying calm. “If that’s Holly in the film, we
have
to find out what happened to her. You know that the same as I do; if it is, she’s been gone seven years and we all just assumed she was dead. We could be sitting on a seven-year fuck-up and... Jesus. Maybe Williams sold her into the kiddie porno trade and she’s been underground ever since, and someone had this in his collection and thought we should see it without incriminating himself. Or maybe she simply ran away from home and this is just a home movie she made last year with her boyfriend that somehow found its way back to me. Doesn’t matter — we need to know. So do her family. If it’s not her, it’s not her. So be it.”

“Okay. I’ll pass the film on for image analysis and we’ll see what, if anything, turns up. But I’m going to tell you now that it’ll just go into the regular work queue. I’m
not
going to ask for it to be prioritized.”

“Why not?”

“Mostly because I don’t believe it to be genuine. The odds of her being alive after all this time are very low even if we did make a mistake. Partly because I don’t think we’re likely to learn too much from it in any case. And even if it did turn out to be genuine, Tynon’s been alive for seven years after she disappeared and so I see no reason to suppose she’s going to be killed now.”

“What?”
 

“There’ll be plenty of other, more recent, cases where the need for analysis is far more urgent, Alex. You know that. They
have
to be given priority. Williams isn’t the only serial abductor or murderer in the world. This case doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This film will be examined, but it may take a while. In the meantime…”

“Can you imagine the media frenzy that’ll result if this turns out to be real and we screwed up all that time ago? You can’t let this slide.”

“In the meantime…”

“Unless you don’t want anyone to think we botched the original investigation in case any of the shit sticks to you.”

“
In the meantime
,” she said again, “I suggest you ask Williams for everything he can tell you about Tynon and determine whether there’s any chance she might still be alive.”

I wasn't happy about it, but equally I knew I had no real choice but to accept her answers for the time being. What other options were there? “OK,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.” She sighed and the fight drained out of her.

“It’s OK. It’s your call. Not mine.”

“It is, but I shouldn’t be snapping like that. Blame it on the stress or something. Are you free later on, by the way? I just thought that if you were, there’s a new French place I’d like to try and I did say I’d take you out.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“How’s eight o’clock sound?”

I nodded. “Fine.”

I left Downes’ office with a copy of the age-advanced photo and a head trying to concoct quicker solutions than those likely to emerge from the Bureau. At least, that part of it that wasn’t dwelling on the unpleasant idea that Williams might be innocent of the crimes I’d assumed he’d committed since we first met.
 

That part of it that wasn’t thinking of where those assumptions had taken me, and what might have been.
 

And what was.

15.

Dinner with Tanya Downes was a slightly uncomfortable affair, despite the pleasant surroundings of the French restaurant near the Common. Like going to the funeral of a distant acquaintance, seeing all the other mourners and realizing they had a lot more invested in this than you.

Over warm goat’s cheese salad, she told me how she was hoping to make SAC before too long, if she could get a couple of major cases under her belt and build a name for herself. Then keep climbing the ladder, maybe become the first ever black woman to make director of the Bureau. I nodded in all the right places and chased pine nuts around my plate with a fork.

Over grilled swordfish with herb-laced polenta, she told me about her father, an accountant who’d died from lung cancer a couple of years previously. She told me how she hadn’t seen her mother in years, since her parents divorced. I kept nodding and briefly mentioned that my parents were both dead. I avoided going into details and concentrated on the last of the fish.

Over caramel cranberry tart she told me how she’d always avoided settling down, raising a family, that sort of thing, to concentrate on the job, because she didn’t feel confident about managing both. I told her I’d been the same. She asked me how I was now. I told her it was still the same, but that the reasons had changed. She didn’t seem to know if I was joking or not.

By the time we said goodnight, I was pretty sure I should never have agreed to the whole thing in the first place. I wasn’t interested, so why say yes? Because what else would I have done tonight? Hell.

Next morning, I surprised Rob by going into the office. Nothing seemed to have changed much. A few more ‘in’ tray items had become ‘outs’. A few new ones had replaced them. My desk was still a mess. “What’s up, Alex?” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you back here for another few days to a week yet. I haven’t heard anything about you breaking that Williams guy.”

“I found out yesterday that one of his victims could still be alive,” I said, dropping into a chair.

Rob fell silent for a moment. Blinked once, twice. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I wish I was.” As I said it, I wondered why. Would I really have preferred it if Holly had been killed all those years ago? Would that have been better than finding her alive now, after years of God-knows-what, and exposing my mistakes for what they were? Mercy for years of suffering, or a sense of guilt on my part?

“Fucking hell.”

“Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”
 

“Who is it? Which girl?”

“Holly Tynon,” I said.

“So what happened to her? Where is she now?” Rob threw up his hands. “I mean, how the hell is she still alive?”

“By the looks of things, she’s being held by someone else.”

“After all this time?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“So Williams was working with someone,” he said. “Must’ve been.”

“Yeah.”

“Or at least passing girls on to someone else.”

“Yeah. We screwed up.”

“You didn’t have enough to get him on the murders anyway. That part of the investigation wasn’t getting much anyway.”

“It was still our clusterfuck. No way we should be finding out about a surviving victim from a murder investigation that’s seven goddamn years old. And what that girl must’ve been through…”

He shook his head. “Christ, Alex. I don’t know what to say to all this. Hell, is it even possible? Like you said, it’s been seven years.”

“It wouldn’t be the first case like this, but it’d certainly be a rarity. So yeah, it’s possible.”

“How likely is it that he knows what happened to her?”

“Cody?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. “That, I don’t know. He hasn’t suggested anything like that before, so… I don’t know. I can’t even be sure that she really is still alive. I need to borrow Sophie to find out for certain.”

Sophie Donehan, our college student part-time intern, glanced up from where she was sipping coffee and pretending to read something on her monitor like she wasn’t listening to everything we’d just said. We sometimes found ill-at-ease male students hanging around in the foyer downstairs, waiting to pick her up out of work. Rob made a point of terrorizing them. He had that sense of humor. She should have been doing an internship with the city police department or a similar body to help her studies, but she claimed to prefer the private sector. Her marks didn’t seem to have suffered.

“I don’t know what you’d all do without me,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes were wide, though, and I guessed deep down she was pretty shocked by what she’d heard. “What do you need, Alex?”

“Your photographer friend.”

“Brandon?”

“Yeah. How good is he with digital pictures, do you think?”

“Taking or processing?”

“Processing. Someone else already took these.”

Sophie shrugged. “I know he does a lot of photo manipulation, so I guess he must know his stuff.”

“Do you think he’d be willing to do some analysis work for me? Clean up images, sharpen them. Look for details that might have been missed. That sort of thing.”
 

“I doubt he’ll object,” she said. “But is this, like, something the FBI should be doing? I mean, I don’t know what it is you want, but if you’re working with the Feds, and you’ve got something that needs looking at, shouldn’t you give it to them?”

“Sophie…”

“I’m not saying you
wouldn’t
, or that you
haven’t
. I just wouldn’t want anyone to kick down the door to Brandon’s apartment and arrest him for withholding evidence or something.”