The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (20 page)

I was skimming the book again just in case I’d missed anything when the phone rang.

“Alex,” Tanya Downes said, “I thought you should hear this from me.”

“What?”
 

“Cody Williams died a half hour ago.”

29.

On a cold, dreary morning, under gray skies heavy with promised rain, I stood on the turf by the side of a pauper’s grave, looking down at the simple wooden casket in front of me. The priest droned through a by-the-numbers eulogy, then followed it with the standard blessing for tradition’s sake. I was the lone mourner present, and the priest had never met his charge. Like the men lowering Cody Williams into the ground, he knew him only through the news, if at all.

I wasn't even sure why I was there. I’d hated Cody, I was glad he’d spent the final years of his life in jail, and I was happy he was dead. But like or not, he’d been a part of my life, and he was gone. He had no family, no friends, no one who wanted to mark his passing apart from the FBI agent who’d framed him for murder because he couldn’t think of another way of stopping him. Not even the media were here — now he was dead, Cody was history. His burial meant nothing.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the priest said, and nodded at one of the guys on burial duty. “All yours, Terry.”

The gravedigger glanced briefly at me, then began to shovel dirt into the hole. I looked down at the grave and wished Cody hadn’t held out on me until the end, wished he’d given up his accomplice, told me where to find Holly. My confession was no longer called for and my secret was safe for the time being. But how much suffering would Holly have been spared if I’d talked to him in those last hours? If I’d given him what he wanted?

The world was a better place without him, but I couldn’t help thinking Cody might have gone a way to redeeming himself if he’d wanted to.

“Goodbye, you batshit-crazy son of a bitch,” I said to empty air.

As I picked my way between the burial markers, a thin, reedy drizzle began to fall like fog with gravity. If anyone watched me go, I didn’t care. Let them watch.

“Is that Alex Rourke?” The voice was deep, the accent heavily Californian. A radio was playing in the background, tinny pop leaking over the receiver. “This is Nathan Sheffield from Hot Steel Productions in LA. You sent me some stills of a girl you were looking for.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“You might be in luck. I think I remember this one. Have you got the video these pics came from? Could you email it to me? I’ll know for sure if I can see the film.” He read off an address.

“No problem.” I juggled the phone, pinning it between ear and shoulder, as I found the file and sent it to the guy. “Shouldn’t take too long,” I said.

A minute or so later, he said, “Uh-huh. Got it.” Another couple of minutes passed. “Yeah, yeah. This is the one I’m thinking of. Knew it looked familiar.”

“You must have a good memory,” I said, genuinely surprised.

“It helps in the trade. I don’t want to end up paying for a scene I already own the rights to, and it’s always handy to know who the upcoming talent is.” I heard him tapping on a keyboard. “Let’s see, it would’ve been about six months ago, I think. Some guy out east sent me a CD with samples of his films, wanted to know if I’d be interest in buying his stuff for distribution.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Yes and no. There’s regular performers and smaller-scale operators whose work my company distributes, but I know most of them in person. But occasionally we get amateur submissions, mostly people looking to make a quick buck from their private home videos of them and their wives or girlfriends.”

“Seriously?”

“We don’t often take them — they’re usually too poor quality. This is more specialist stuff, but the roughly-filmed look works for some BDSM scenes.”

“BDSM? I know S&M, but I’ve never heard of that one.”

“Very similar. ‘Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism’. Not something I sell a lot of, but there’s a steady market for it. All net-based for me, not worth bundling onto DVD, as it’s not something I specialize in. Anyway, this guy sent me the samples he had and I decided to offer him a deal — standard amateur rate, nothing major. But I said before that I’d need to have all the paperwork straight to meet my USC 2257 requirements.”
 

“Uh…”

“Never heard of it?”

“Not really my field.”

Sheffield chuckled, deep and low. “No kidding. It’s a federal requirement for proof of identity and legal age, things like that, which I’d need to keep records of.”

“Okay. Paperwork to stop people using underage girls in their films.”

“That’s right.” He seemed to want to explain himself a little. “I run a strictly legitimate business, Mr Rourke. It’s an industry like any other, and everyone I work with has to follow the rules to the letter. No exceptions. I’m a professional.”

“I never thought otherwise,” I said. “What did the guy give you for your records?”

“Nothing. I never heard back from him. I figured either he couldn’t give me the documentation, or he got a better offer from someone else, or he had second thoughts about the whole thing. It happens.”

“Or he wasn’t on the level with what he was offering.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t suppose his face was anywhere in the sample material he sent?”

“No, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t. From what I remember, everything was the same kind of POV shot used in the film you sent me. No way of telling who’s behind the camera.”

“You don’t still have the CD he sent you?”

“Again, sorry, I don’t. It’s policy never to hang on to anything from an unverified source. The last thing I need is to find out some girl in a video someone’s sent me is underage and end up in court myself for possessing child pornography. That CD will have been thrown out long ago,” Sheffield said. “Aha, here it is. Contact information. You got a pen?”

“Yeah. What’ve you got?”

“No phone number. Postal address is a PO Box in Berwick, Massachusetts.” He rattled off the details, such as they were.

“What name did the guy give you?”

“Richard Goddard, according to this. Whether it was his real name or not, I couldn’t say. He claimed the girl’s name was Violet, but
those
are almost always fake.”

“I thought the guys who made porn all went for pseudonyms like ‘Max Woody’.”

He laughed loudly. “Yeah, some do, Mr Rourke. It’s kinda silly, but some parts of our market expect it. Not every male performer or producer does, though. It’s much more common with the girls.”

“Yeah?”

“The puns are even worse for them.”

“Do you still have his email address?”

“Sure. It’s [email protected].”

I knew I couldn’t ask the Hotmail administrators for the user information on that account, not without a warrant. Said, “No actual email from the guy, though.”

“That’s right. He sent his stuff by post. That must just have been with his details. Shame, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“We had a problem with nuisance email a couple of months ago. Someone feeding me all this shit about the evils of sleaze, threats, all kinda sad. Turned out to be a woman somewhere in the Midwest. But to find where to send the nasty ‘stop doing this or we’ll take you to court’ letter, we had to find out who it was.”

“You traced her?”

“Yeah, got an expert in to help us out. Turns out the email’s header includes a number which corresponds to the place it was sent from. Like, for this Goddard guy, it could show where he was accessing Hotmail from. You just check who owns the number online.”

“Like a reverse phone number lookup.”

“Yeah,” Sheffield said. “Just like that. We were lucky with out moralist freak — she was with a small company which helped identify her when we explained that she was harassing us.”

“Did she stop?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “I hear she wrote a pretty rude letter to our lawyers, but that was the last we heard of her.”

“And I’d need a message from Goddard to try the same thing on him.”

“That’s right. If I had one myself I’d pass it on to you, help you find the guy.”

I smiled. “That’s okay. If he gets in touch with you again, or you get any similar footage from a similar source, could you call me, Mr Sheffield? I’d appreciate that.”

“Nath,” he said. “And yeah, that’s no problem at all. Glad to be a help. Good luck, Mr Rourke.”

Berwick Post Office was a blocky modern building with plate glass framed in blue steel running most of the way along its frontage, presumably there to give passers-by a good look inside and leave them with the impression that the US Postal Service could be trusted with their packages. It also afforded me a far better view of the interior than I’d normally have expected on a surveillance job. From the tables outside a coffee shop across the street I could see the three rows of locker-like boxes on the right-hand side. They were separate from the main section of the building, and it was easy to distinguish between those come to check their boxes and customers on other business. I had direct line of sight to PO Box 14, the address used by the would-be porn peddler. I had no idea whether it was still in use by the same guy; all I could do was watch and hope. I perched across the street each day with a newspaper or a paperback, and hoped he checked the box fairly regularly. Closing time meant the freedom to leave my position. A cheap motel room, take-out or bar food, trashy cable TV, warm beer.

I did this for three days, and the staff were starting to get slightly uncomfortable with the stranger who’d taken up residence at one of their tables, all day, every day. One waitress struck up light conversation whenever she passed and the place was quiet. Her name was Chantel and she was a dropout from U-Mass who was trying to become a graphic designer. My name was Andy Hames and I was a writer waiting for inspiration. It was the best excuse I could come up with at the time. I hoped she hadn’t seen any of the news reports on Williams or my trips to the jail. If she knew I was bullshitting, she didn’t show it.

During this time I watched dozens of people entering and leaving the post office. Men, women. All ages, all types. Box 14 remained unopened. Then, just when I was thinking I’d have to get a laptop from somewhere to keep up my pretense, my prayers were answered and my hopes dashed at the same time.

Light traffic in the mid-morning sunshine and another uneventful day. Chantel was doing her rounds and my brief conversation with her, and the boredom of three blank days spent staring at the far side of the street, distracted me more than it should have. By the time my eyes and attention had wandered back to the post office, there was someone standing by the open door to Box 14.

30.

A man, height and build about average ordinary. Dark, puffy jacket, baseball cap pulled down low. Sunglasses.

Three days’ worth of caffeine jolted through my system and I nearly vaulted out of my chair in surprise. I just about held back the urge; I didn’t want to draw attention to myself before I knew who this guy was and where he’d come from. Nevertheless, I sat bolt upright, one hand clenched on the arm of my chair, as I watched him leaf through a few pieces of accumulated mail before closing the box again.

There were a good ten or eleven cars in the bays in front of the post office. No way to tell which was his. My own was round the corner. Close, but I didn’t know, now, if it was close enough.
 

The guy walked out through the sliding doors and back into the sun, keeping his face shaded by his cap. I guessed he was somewhere into his fifties, which fitted with what I knew, senior enough to order Cody around back when they were snatching girls. Apart from that I couldn’t make out any more about him. I held my coffee up at mouth level, hoping this’d disguise the fact that I was staring at him.

He unlocked a dark blue station wagon, fairly old, and opened the door. Glanced up as he was about to drop inside, and saw me. That momentary pause as I felt the eyes behind the sunglasses meet mine, that hesitation in his movements as everything tensed up.
 

Fight or flight.

I dropped a twenty on the table for Chantel and snapped out of my seat.

He vanished into the station wagon and started the engine with a roar. I ran for my car as he whipped out of the bay in reverse and hit the gas. As it passed me I caught a flash of blonde hair, a glimpse of a woman’s face from the passenger seat. Eyes glinted once in the sun, the same eyes, the same face as in the footage.

Holly’s eyes, Holly’s face.

She looked at me in surprise and for a second everything else slowed and froze, the world closing to a tunnel between the two of us. She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something and then everything rushed back inwards and the station wagon accelerated away.

I tried to get the plate, but it was impossible while running and I only got the first couple of numbers before it grew too small to see.

By the time I reached my car and pulled away in pursuit, I guessed he had maybe a mile on me. But he was heading west out of town, and the main highway didn’t have many turns between here and the state line. He was heading into upstate New York, almost certainly.