The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (14 page)

“Sophie,” I said again with a smile, “the FBI are already working on it as well, but this could do with being finished as soon as possible and I doubt they’re going to get results soon. It’s just image manipulation from a video clip I’ve already given them. That’s all.”

“Okay. Are you going to pay him?”

“Sure.” Rob coughed loudly in the background, but I ignored him. “This might take a bit of effort. And the subject matter isn’t great.”

“This would be the could-be-alive-but-still-captive girl you were talking about,” she said very matter-of-factly. “How bad is it?”

“Nothing gruesome. No blood.”

“Uh-huh. What’s wrong with it then?”
 

“It’s got some violence in it, and there’s what must’ve come after. But it’s more the fact that it could be genuine that’s unsettling. Of course, it might just be an S&M film that someone’s using for a joke.”

“Okay, I’ll ask him.” She checked her watch. “I think he’s in a lecture right now. I’ll call him when he gets out. Is there anything specific you want?”

I shook my head. “Anything that can be sharpened, magnified, picked out of the darkness. Any little detail at all. Tell him I can always meet up with him to go over what he can find out.”

“No problem.” She changed the subject. “How’s it going at the jail?”

“Ask me again after today. So far I’ve heard a lot of things I’d rather have missed and not much of any use. How Cody’ll react when I ask him about this film, I don’t know.”

“Well, there isn’t much I can do with that apart from wishing you good luck. Talking to these people is much more your department than mine, Alex. Out of reach of us mere students. All I can do is offer moral support.”

“Don’t knock it, I need it.”

There were no protestors outside MCI-Ashworth, and for that I was glad. All the way there I’d been thinking about the person who’d emailed me the file and I’d found myself checking the rear-view mirror more than once. The last thing I would have wanted after that would be to be met by a pack of strangers, all staring at me.

I had to be given special dispensation by the prison administration to take my laptop into the visiting room. I spent half an hour explaining the reasons why and waiting for them to check with the Bureau that I wasn't about to try smuggling anything to Cody.

When I made it inside at last, Williams was slumped in his chair. He looked sick and tired, worse than yesterday, and gave me a long, washed-out stare before dropping his gaze to the table again. One claw-like hand draped around the drip stand by his side, which was rattling almost imperceptibly as his arm shook. His skin was pale and stretched paper-thin.

“Morning, Cody,” I said, sitting down.

“Agent Rourke.”

“Have you had a chance to look at that map yet? Any details for me?”

He sniffed and dropped the map in front of me. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”
 

“I think I know how I got to some places. Maybe.”

“I came out here for ‘maybe’? You’d be lucky to get me to answer my phone in the morning for ‘maybe’, much less come out to a dump like this to talk to someone like you. I need more than ‘maybe’, Cody. Or maybe I should give up on these little conversations and go home, and
maybe
you can go back to rotting inside.” I didn’t know if I meant ‘in prison’ or if I was referring to the cancer. Sentiment was the same either way.

“Maybe’s all I’ve got, Agent Rourke. Take it or leave it. Maybe you need it more than I do.”
 

I let that slide.

“How about you?” Cody continued. “You been doing any thinking, Agent Rourke? Just maybe?”

“I have, but not about what you’re talking about. I want you to tell me about Holly Tynon again.”

This seemed to confuse him. “What about her? You want to know if I can tell you more about where I buried her?”

“Not exactly.”

“Good. I already told you: ‘maybe’.”
 

“You grabbed her while she was walking home.”

“Right.”

“You took her, what, back to that cabin of yours?”

He paused. A guarded look for a brief moment. “Yeah.”

“You kept her there for a few days.”

“Uh-huh.” He still looked nervous.

“Then you killed her, stuffed her body in a gym bag and buried her in some woods in a state park.”

“Like I said.”

“And you’re sure about that,” I said. “You’re not confusing her with one of the others? Not just making this up, telling me what you think I want to hear?”

“Took that bitch, killed her, buried her in a bag.”

“So maybe you can tell me who this is?” I opened the laptop, turned it round to face him. “Because she looks to me like Holly Tynon, years older. I could be wrong, of course. But I want to know for certain what you did with her when you abducted her. No fucking maybes with this, Cody.”

Williams stayed perfectly still for a moment, watching the video play itself out. Slowly, ever so slowly, his mouth cracked into a smile. A wolfish look broke over his cracked lips.

“Well now,” he said. “That does make things interesting. Where’d you get it?”

“Turned up in my email yesterday. What did you do with the girl, Cody?”

He chuckled fondly, or so it seemed. “Someone’s been watching the news. That’s real nice.”

“Who is it in that film?”

“What makes you think I’d know?” Carried on thinking, staring at the screen. The question was absentminded, softly-spoken.

“You’re the only one who can say for sure what happened to Holly, Cody.”

“Well, if that did happen to be her on this recording, and ‘maybe’ it is,” he said, looking up from the laptop, “then I certainly ain’t the only one. Maybe I never knew at all.”

“Credit me with some sense. Even if all you did was pass her on to someone else, we both know it was you that abducted her in the first place. So stop dicking around and tell me, is that her in the video?”

“And if it was, you and your FBI buddies’d have to go find her, right? I guess that would be pretty fucking tough. Not much to go on in that film. Can’t even see the guy she’s with. Shame. She don’t look good.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And if you know it’s her, you’d know who she’d be with and where we’d find them. Can we skip the fucking around, Cody? What do you want in exchange for the information?”

Williams shook his head, stifled a cough. “Wrong question. I’m dead, one way or another. There’s nothing that’s gonna stop that, and so there ain’t much anyone can give me that would really matter. Not that them dickwads I’ve seen outside would know that. Nah, the only question you
should
be asking is what
you’re
willing to do to find that girl.”

“No, the question I need an answer to before we go any further is whether that’s Holly or not, and whether I’ve got any reason to listen to your bullshit on this.”

“Okay, Agent Rourke, I’ll give you this one for free. She’s changed, but I’d guess that was her. Surprised she lasted this long. I’ll level with you, Agent Rourke.”

“Yeah?”

“First off, I just wanted to fuck with you one last time. Y’know, give you the runaround, mess you around, fuck up your chances of finding them girls and make you look like a failure.”

“Nice.”

“It’s all I’ve got left to me. I’d go happy to my grave knowing how the papers would be calling you a failure and shit. That’d be great.”

“I love you too, Cody.”

“But this,” he said, ignoring me and pointing at the laptop. “This changes everything. I never expected
this
.”
 

“So where is she? Who did you give her to?”

“Well now,
that
ain’t going to be free.” Williams smiled, blowing a blast of fetid air over his crooked teeth. “How badly would you want to find her? How much can you sacrifice for her, eh? I’ve got nothing to lose here — I’m a dead man anyway. But what about you?”

I folded my arms. “What do you want, Cody?”

“I want you to tell your other Feds that I was set up. I want you to admit that you framed me for killing Clinton Travers.”

I said nothing, just sat still, kept staring at him.

“It’s your choice,” Williams said. “Nice easy one. You get to decide which is worth more to you — your career, or that girl’s life.”

16.

“So what’s Williams playing at?” Rob said. “What does he want out of all this?”

We were nursing bottles of beer in a desperately trendy bar called ‘Aqua’. Busy, but not full. The crowd was mostly identikit student types, indistinct in the spotlit gloom. Sugary spirit smell hung in the air. The music was just soft enough to hold a conversation. The choice of venue for a quiet evening drink came down to the place being within walking distance of both our homes, not its aesthetic qualities.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Alex. You’ve been talking to the guy for long enough to have some kind of handle on him. Do you think he was always planning for the business with that video? What’s the son of a bitch’s angle?”

I swigged from the bottle. “To start with, before he’d seen the video, this was all supposed to be a big joke for Cody. One last chance to get at me by lying about what he did with the missing bodies. Dredging everything up again.”

“He’d bother with that?”

“That’s what he told me, and I’ve got no reason to doubt him. Not on this, anyway.”

“And then what?”

“He wasn’t expecting to see this video, or that it’d get sent to me out of the blue. But he sure as hell knew what it was about as soon as he saw it.”

“You’re so sure he was lying to you before, that the Tynon girl is really alive?”

“Yeah.” I thought back to the look on his face, each little twitch, each flash of his eyes. “Yeah, he was lying through his teeth, and he was enjoying it. That video changed his whole ballgame. Now he’s got a far bigger carrot to offer me, and still nothing to lose at all.”

“The guy
is
dying.”

“Yeah, and that puts him in a pretty unique bargaining position.”

Rob watched a couple of girls taking their pool shots at the table at the far end of the bar. “So do you think you’ll be able to get him to talk now? Figure the guy won’t want to rat out whoever he gave the girl to, but none of them ever do.”

“And he doesn’t want to either. I don’t know how to get to him, though.” Another swig. Concealing the half-truth behind the easy movement. Bury it, hide it.

“Do you think he
could
give you this guy, even if you do break him? It’s been a long time for him.”

“Yeah, I think he knows exactly where Holly is.”

“But he won’t tell you.”

“No, he won’t.”

One girl sunk the last ball and her partner began racking them up for a second game. “What’s going on between you and Williams, Alex?” Rob said, gesturing at me with his beer bottle.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on. We’ve been friends for a long time. It’s pretty obvious the guy has a major problem with you, and it’s obvious he thinks he’s got something to gain by talking to you.”

“I told you, one last joke at my expense. I’m the guy who put him away.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Which would explain a lot, but that’s a pretty major fixation. Way beyond what anyone would normally show, even a backwoods psycho like him. What’s he got against you, Alex?”

I finished the rest of my beer and gestured for another round from the barman. “Williams was put away for killing Clinton Travers. He thinks I framed him for the murder.”

“Did you?” Rob didn’t hesitate.

17.

Hartford, CT. 1998.

 
It was a murky, unpleasant evening. An early nightfall and driving rain, and I was watching myself drive from Massachusetts to Hartford. That’s what it felt like: like I was detached, floating somewhere behind my own head. My hands were white on the steering wheel, and I knew that down there my mind, my
other
mind, was full of Naomi Carson and the leer on Clinton Travers’ face the last time I’d seen him.

When I reached his house, I walked up the path in the rain, knocked twice on Travers’ door. More aware of my own actions, but still not wholly there. Still not sure exactly what I was planning to do.

When Travers answered my knock, it was obvious he wasn’t sure what I was going to do either. We headed inside. I confronted him, told him I knew what he’d done to Naomi and that he was finished. He laughed in my face. Taunted me. Aiming for a harassment lawsuit, maybe; I didn’t know.

I also didn’t know who threw the first punch, but I found myself laying into him. I was wearing gloves, but the blows still hurt my fists. Hurt him more. He got away from me, dived for a cupboard, came out with a gun in his hands. It hadn’t been there during the search; he must’ve picked it up since.

I didn’t slow down. Grabbed him. Grabbed the pistol. He sprawled against the wall while I pointed his own gun at him.

Travers brushed the blood coming from his bruised mouth with the back of his hand and said, clear as a bell, “What’re you going to do, Feebie? You can’t shoot me. You’re already in so much shit for this — you’re fucking toast, man.”