The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (17 page)

For the next few days I stuck to my apartment. I ignored every phone call that wasn’t from someone I know. Checked no email. Asked no questions. Told no lies. I tidied. Cleaned. Hunkered down. Found a hairline crack in my bathroom mirror and taped it shut. Fixed things. Sent out for pizza. Avoided all thought of Williams as much as I could.

The first evening, Brandon called to tell me he’d finished checking out the footage frame by frame. “Sorry,” he said. “Nothing much more there than what you saw last night. Your friends at the FBI might be more use, but I doubt it — I didn’t see anything that might have helped, even if I’d been able to sharpen everything to photo quality.”

“What about any information buried in the footage itself — digital signatures, things like that?”

“If there’s anything there, it was hidden by someone who knows more than I do. Which wouldn’t be hard — kinda out of my usual department.”

“Oh well. Thanks for checking, I appreciate it. You okay to look at any more that turn up?”

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

He hung up, and I sat in my armchair thinking. There didn’t seem to be anything more to learn from the footage, and I still couldn’t know for sure it wasn’t just a clip someone found online and sent to me for a joke. Some piece of random porno with just enough suggested menace to make it work.

But what, I wondered, if the reverse was true, and the film’s maker had attempted to sell his footage to commercial porn distributors to make an easy buck off something he was doing anyway?

I fired up my computer and made a list of email addresses. A request for information, a few stills from the film, a suggestion of the seriousness of the crimes involved. A shot in the dark, but not much different to similar efforts we made in half the missing persons cases the agency handled. You had to try every possibility.

Over the following couple of days, a handful of people left messages — mostly reporters with the same line of crap they’d been spouting before. Rob called to make sure I was okay. I asked him to let the jail at Ashworth know that I was ill and wouldn’t be seeing Williams for a while. Apart from that, I circled the wagons and barely moved from my chair.
 

Holly’s picture stared at me from the coffee table, and I couldn’t think of any other way of tracing her, no matter how hard I tried.
 

I didn’t want to face Williams again — both of us were locked into our individual courses, and I saw little chance of anything changing.
 

But I couldn’t give up on her, not like I had all those years ago.

In the files detailing Cody’s background, I found a mention of his first cellmate, Billy Perry. They’d shared for a couple of years before Perry’s release, and his last known address was in Boston.

If Cody had said anything at all after he was convicted, he’d have said it to Perry.

But the problem was that he no longer lived at his last known address. In fact, he seemed to have dropped off the radar entirely. I started chasing up every record I could find on Perry, calling everyone I could think of for scraps of information.

The only thing I got of any interest came from a friend in the BPD. At one point, three years ago, they’d had Perry as a suspect involved in loansharking for a mobster called Gabriel Heller. However, as far as the cops knew, that was all over and Perry hadn’t stuck his head above the parapet since. No one knew where he was.

On Tuesday, Tanya Downes called. “The image lab has finished analyzing your video clip, Alex,” she said. “I’ve got some stills they took from the footage, sharpened and magnified as much as they were able.”

“Do they show very much?”
 

“I’m afraid the results aren’t especially impressive — too much data was lost in the video compression. I’ve compared them to age-adjusted pictures of Holly Tynon and I’m still not convinced. Any similarities are extremely vague, if there at all. I’ll email them to you anyway.”

I thanked her even though I
was
convinced. “Is that all?” I said.

“Is Williams being any more co-operative?”

“I haven’t spoken to him for a few days. He wasn’t giving me much, nothing to confirm or deny the truth of what happened to Holly or the other girls. So I left him to stew for a while. If he thinks he’s lost the limelight, maybe he’ll be a little more forthcoming.”

“You haven’t heard?” She sounded surprised.

“About what?”

“Ashworth’s management said they called you a couple of days ago — Williams took a major turn for the worst. The doctors can’t give a definite figure, but they estimated his survival at days rather than weeks. You don’t have time to let him sit things out, Alex. If you can’t get him to talk soon, we might never get a chance to do so again.”

I sighed. “And the doctors say I can still speak to him?”

“As far as I know, Williams himself hasn’t ruled the idea out. If he’s still strong enough to take the stress of an interview, and if he wants to see you, I’d guess they’ll allow it. Everyone knows what’s riding on this.”

“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” I said and hung up. I was angry. At Williams for dying. At the Bureau for pushing us back together. With myself, for not identifying his accomplice and figuring out the real fate of the girls they snatched back before it was too late.

I made a cup of coffee and went back to staring out the window again for a while as the rich, bitter aroma filled the place like sour incense. When I checked my email for the message from Tanya, I found that the stills she’d sent weren’t much different to those made by Brandon, and even on these the graininess and blurring made it impossible to see any fresh detail.

When I closed her message, a second was waiting for me.

Return-Path: [email protected]

Delivered-To: [email protected]

Received: from unknown by mail.r-garrett-assoc.com with SMTP

Message-ID: none

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: ATTN: Ex-Special Agent Rourke – Case Information

Message:

You need to see more?

<< h_t_seg6.mpg >>

25.

The video opened abruptly, much like the first, and seemed to be cut arbitrarily, mid-scene, no sense of a natural beginning or pause in the action. No way of telling where it fell in relation to the earlier segment. Holly was lashed, spread-eagled, to an ancient iron bed with a bare mattress spattered here and there with old, dried stains and marks. In the harsh lighting in the footage, I couldn’t tell much about them. A couple could be blood, but I wasn’t sure. Again there was no sound. The room she was in might have been the same as the first segment, but the bare wood walls and floor could just as easily have been somewhere else in the building. No window in shot, nothing to give me some idea of the surroundings.

For a moment the camera lingered on Holly, panning up and down, her captor eyeing her up. She lay still on the bed, the only movement the rise and fall of her chest. She was breathing fast and shallow, afraid, maybe even sobbing.

The camera moved back a little and shook for a couple of seconds, mirroring the actions of the man behind it. Then forward again, right up to the bedside. Holly’s head flicked towards it and she started screaming soundlessly. The cameraman brought up a two-pronged metal fork wrapped with wiring. Not hard to guess what its intended purpose was. With something of a flourish, he snapped it downwards, riding crop style, against Holly’s midriff. Her whole body jerked as it hit, and when the cameraman raised the fork again there was an angry red burn on her flesh.

Twice more he brought the makeshift electric prod down onto her, holding it against her longer each time. The last blow landed on her right breast, and when the fork was raised out of sight again, tears were pouring from Holly’s eyes. She wasn’t even screaming any more, just weeping helplessly in the film’s unearthly silence.

The camera jerked slightly and changed position as the man seemed to clamber onto the foot of the bed, positioning himself between her legs. The view zoomed in on her crying face, and then the footage ended as abruptly as it had begun.

I went to the bathroom and rinsed my face under the cold tap. Stared at my eyes in the mirror and tried not to imagine the years of torture and abuse the girl had suffered. In some ways, I still wished she’d been killed all that time ago. In others, I hoped she was never found, that I’d never have to face her parents once they knew the full horror of what had happened and all those old wounds had been opened afresh.

Back at the computer, I sent copies of the new footage to both Downes and Brandon. With the latter email, I included a warning that the contents were worse than before, and that if he didn’t want to examine the video for me, I wouldn’t hold it against him.

Then I left for a job I couldn’t avoid any longer.

Williams’ eyes flickered open as I dropped into the chair next to his bed in the prison hospital. His skin was the color of milk gone sour, covered with a sheen of damp and the faint reek of a body going badly wrong. A machine off to one side monitored his vital signs. Next to it, a drip fed fluids into his failing system.

“Not a pretty sight,” he said, voice hardly more than a mumble.

“You never were, Cody.” It’s wrong to speak ill of the dying, but I didn’t like him enough to care.

He made a hacking sound that could have been a chuckle. “In a strange way I kinda like you, Agent Rourke. You’re like the idiot kid brother I never had.”

“I’m touched.”

He closed his eyes again. “Not long to go now, Agent Rourke.”

“I’ve got the champagne ready.”
 

“And I’ll be dead, and you’ll never find that girl. Unless you pay the price first.”

“It’s not her, Cody. The film was a fake. That girl was a porn actress called Shawnie Croft. We tracked her to a studio in Los Angeles, her and the guy who shot the film. I just came to tell you that we know it’s all bullshit.”

Williams lurched into a semblance of life, tilting his head up from the pillow to stare at me. “You’re lying,” he said. “That film was the real shit. I’d know her eyes anywhere. He always—”

He stopped himself in mid-sentence and regarded me coldly. “Very clever, Agent Rourke. You nearly caught me with that one. But you didn’t. You ain’t getting nothing from me unless you admit what you did.”

I might have tried sticking with the bluff, but he was wise to it and I knew it. “That’s not going to happen, Cody,” I said. “And even if I did agree to it, knowing you, you’d break your end of the agreement.”

“Why bother?”

“Spite. Some feeling of revenge against me; you’ve already told me that’s what you wanted. And there’s the fact that you’re an evil little fuckbag who’s never done shit if there was nothing in it for him.”

A feeble smirk. “Flattery ain’t gonna get you anywhere.”
 

“You want me to believe you’d uphold your side of things, you’ve got to show me you can be trusted. Give me something to go on now.”

“As a gesture of good faith, you mean? I’ve seen this movie, Agent Rourke. I tell you a little something and you say that’s good, but not enough, that you need more. And pretty soon you’ve got everything I know and you don’t do jack in return. That ain’t happening to me.”

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d have loved to choke the answer out of him if that would have worked. “Well if you’re wise to my plan then you can just give me that first little piece and refuse the rest. You’ve got as far as admitting you know who ‘he’ is. Might as well go a step further.”

Williams said nothing, just lay there.

“Without some sign you can be trusted, I’m not doing a damn thing,” I said.

“It’s all or nothing, Agent Rourke,” he said without looking at me. “Which one of us has more to lose?”

Seconds, then minutes, ticked by in silence. I stayed sitting in the chair, watching the dying man in front of me. He showed no sign of being willing to say any more, and I was sure as hell not about to give him the satisfaction of blinking first, so I stood to leave.

“I’m going now, Cody. Unless you want to play ball, this is the last time you’ll see me. Make your mind up.”

The hacking laugh cut the air again. “Not the last time, Agent Rourke. We’ll be meeting again in Hell.”

26.

In the warm, humid corridor outside, I called Downes to give her the news. “We’re getting nothing from him,” I said. “He’s clammed up for good. I doubt he ever wanted to say anything much to me in the first place. I think he just wanted one more laugh before he died.”

“Are you absolutely sure about this? I don’t want to tell the families we’ve failed if you’re not sure or if this is just something you don’t want to do.”

“I told you right at the start that if I thought it was going nowhere, or if I didn’t want to talk to him any further, I’d walk away and there’d be no complaints from you or the Bureau. My conditions, remember?”

She sighed. “I remember, Alex. I just don’t want you jumping to a hasty decision on this if you’re not a hundred percent sure it’s over. You know how important this is to everyone.”