The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (5 page)

Shaw turned to the guard and said, “Tell them to show Williams in.”

A grating, mechanical buzzing echoed across the dim emptiness of the visiting room. A door on the far side opened and the bright electric glare beyond temporarily flooded the area with light, picking out everything in sharp relief. Silhouetted against the blue-white glow were two men, one of them a guard with his hand on the other’s shoulder. A flash of the second man’s long, unkempt hair, bouncing against his shoulders as he shuffled forward. No more than five and a half feet tall, a ragged, wiry figure hidden behind a prison uniform slightly too large for him. Eyes that caught a stray reflection from the high windows to the right and glittered in the gloom as he sat and his escort turned to leave.

“For Christ’s sake, Clive, turn some lights on,” Shaw said to the guard next to us.

Two of the fluorescents inside flickered into life, strobing the prisoner below, picking out every feature in crystal detail. Lank curly brown hair. Hooded eyes and sallow skin. Blank expression. Grey sweatshirt stamped with the DOC logo over a rumpled white shirt turning yellow at the corners. Manacled hands resting on the table, fingernails bitten and ragged.

A second buzzer sounded, and the door in front of me opened. Cody Williams looked up and smiled crookedly.

05.

Providence, RI. 1997.

“I want to start by walking Holly’s route,” I said to Detective Hall and Jeff Agostini once we’d left the Tynons alone and retreated to the kitchen. “It should only take five minutes. I’ll go talk to the friend she was with and her family. What are their names?”

“Tina Aitken is the girl,” Hall said. “Cole and Natasha are her parents.”

“Tina, Cole, Natasha. Right.”
 

“What do you need to ask them?”

“I just want to hear whatever details they can give me first-hand. Have you spoken to them?”

Hall nodded. “Yeah, I have.”

“Any chance the father did this? It’s best to start close and work outwards in my experience.”

“No,” Hall said, shaking his head. “He was watching TV with his wife between the time Holly left and the time John Tynon called him to see whether she was still there.”

“In which case, all I want is just to hear their stories and to get a look at the neighborhood. There’s a chance Holly wasn’t grabbed by a complete stranger, but by someone who lives locally who might have seen her on the journey home.”

“You think that’s likely?” Agostini asked.

“No. Possible.”

“Possible, right. It’s just, like, hard to imagine the son of a bitch who’d do something like that living somewhere like this, you know?”

“It’s always hard to imagine it happening anywhere,” I said. “But it happens.”
 

Hall nodded. “Yeah, it happens. Even here. Although this is the first we’ve had in years. What’ll you be looking for, Agent Rourke?”

“I’ll just run my eyes over the neighborhood, see if anything stands out. I’ll see if Tina can think of anyone else Holly might have gone to meet. Other friends. Maybe someone secret she wouldn’t tell her folks.”

“It’s ground we’ve already covered, but I guess there’s no harm in seeing if anyone’s remembered anything more. Is there anything you need us to do?”

“You’ve checked her route with K-9 units, is that right?”

“Earlier this morning,” Hall said. “The weather hasn’t helped, though.”

“No trail?”

“Some, but it was confused and we couldn’t get a clear abduction point. The handlers say her traces may have faded out a couple of blocks from the Aitkens’, but they weren't certain. We’ve had forensics take away anything they could find from the roadside at that point.”

Agostini drummed his fingers on the kitchen worktop. “You have any luck with that?”

“No. Nothing promising anyway.”

“In that case,” I said, “keep on trying to trace anyone else Holly might have gone to see, or anywhere she might have gone on her own. If she’s just with a boyfriend or something and hasn’t caught the news, I’d be very happy.”

“Probably too young for a boyfriend,” Hall said.

Agostini shook his head. “Hey, my kid sister had her first crush when she was, like, ten.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no boyfriend that we know of.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, in addition to that, get anything you can dig up on traffic in this area last night. Vehicles, drivers, anything and anyone we can put in the right place at the right time. Particularly the point where her scent trail went cold. Keep us posted on anything interesting.”

“Sure,” Hall said.

Agostini looked at me. “What about me? What do you want me to do?”

“Drive up to the Aitkens’ house and wait for me there. We’ll need the car. If you don’t mind the rain, you can walk back to meet me on the way. Once we’ve spoken to them we’ll play it by ear. See what comes up.”

“What do you think our chances are?”

I didn’t answer him. Let the silence do the talking.

“Shit,” he said.

I stepped back outside and the storm hadn’t let up at all. Driving pellets of rain sliced through the air like buckshot, slapping into my suit jacket. Agostini looked at me like I was crazy again as I waved away the offer of an umbrella. In the wind, it wouldn’t have held up anyway. I passed the news vans and left the sad gathering of vehicles outside the house behind.

The neighborhood felt closed-off, abandoned, like the streets in some disaster movie after the killer plague had hit and everyone but the lone survivor was dead. The houses looked to be mostly family residences; people with similar jobs, similar kids, similar lives. Similar times for going out and staying home. The small yards were pleasant, but boxed-in. Most had hedges, or a couple of small trees, or a fence — something to form a barrier between each property and the public street. Even down the cross-streets I couldn’t see any bars, clubs, late-night malls, anywhere local people might go after work. At nine on a weeknight, I doubted there’d be anyone much out at all. People who had to go out of their way to catch a movie or get drunk tended to make a night of it if they could. Otherwise they’d stay indoors and watch TV. In a crime-free neighborhood like this, too, who’d give a second glance to traffic on the streets?

Holly Tynon’s abductor had chosen his area well, if he’d deliberately chosen it at all and wasn’t just passing and got lucky.

The spot where the K-9 teams thought her scent might have gone cold was fairly obvious, at least now I knew what to look for. Despite the rain, it was easy to see the five-yard stretch of gutter by the curb swept clean by forensics techs looking for any kind of trace evidence. Twenty-five feet or so from the nearest intersection. I pictured the driver pulling up, asking for directions, asking the time, offering a ride. Hitting Holly, knocking her out cold so she couldn’t scream for help. Pulling a knife. Pulling a gun.

My cell phone rang, Agostini’s number on the screen. I picked up, said, “Yeah?”

“Alex, I’ve just heard from the cops. They’ve found Holly Tynon’s wallet in a park a mile or so away. Whereabouts are you?”

“The likely abduction site.”

“I’ll come pick you up.”

Less than a minute later, Agostini’s Town Car stopped beside me and I hopped in, realizing for the first time just how soaked I was. He glanced at me once, then pulled away from the curb and headed north without passing comment.

“Did they say anything about it?” I said. The route we took ran past the Tynons’ house. Maybe, I figured, the abductor had come this way too.

“Only that someone out jogging spotted it and called the cops. I don’t know if they moved it or not before they called it in.”

“They were out running in this?” I gestured at the water sluicing down the windshield.

“They must take their fitness seriously as hell.”

“You’ve got that right.”

He gestured at my dripping wet suit. “You’re hardly in a position to criticize.”

I let the remark pass without comment and eyeballed the grey-smeared houses and storefronts as they passed by instead. Lightning snapped like a flash bulb in the sky, but more distant now. The storm seemed to be moving away and the rain was easing off.

We hung a left and pulled up next to a low earthen bank topped with an arrow-straight stand of trees. Two police cruisers and a forensics van were parked just ahead, and a uniformed cop in a rain slicker stood on the sidewalk to shepherd the curious away.

“What’s the situation?” I asked, flashing my badge at him.

“Been on the scene for forty-five minutes or so,” he said, and wiped water from the end of his nose. “Crime scene unit confirmed it was the Tynon girl’s wallet ten minutes ago. They should be on their way over by now.”

“Have you started canvassing for witnesses?”

He nodded. “Sergeant Griffin’s been in contact with Detective Hall. I think they’ve got that in hand, sir. But I’m just here to keep people out of this part of the park. They haven’t told me everything.”

“Sure. Thanks, Officer. Have they marked out a route it’s OK to follow?”

“Yes, sir.” He pointed to a gap between two of the trees. “They’ve left a taped trail on the path that enters the park just over there. One of the first things they did.”

I breathed an inward sigh of relief. The clearer they’d kept the area around the wallet, the more chance we had of getting shoe impressions or other evidence. The last few specks of rain hit my face as Agostini and I cut through the grassy bank on the marked gravel path, and then the wind blew dry and fresh.

The park wasn’t huge. An uneven swathe of green a couple hundred yards across, gently rising and falling. Trees and stands of bushes dotted its surface, breaking up its shape, blurring its edges. The far side looked artificially-flattened, maybe for playing ball. The right was bordered by a small stream that wound away to the south-east. A line of yellow tape ran down the path to a beech a few yards from where a couple of forensic technicians in coveralls were working. There was another uniformed cop on duty by the tree. As we got closer, one of the techs stepped over the tape, holding a plastic evidence bag. His counterpart stayed in place and seemed to be marking out possible impressions for later examination.

“Special Agent Alex Rourke,” I said when we reached them. “What have you got so far?”

The first tech held up the bag. Holly Tynon’s wallet, battered pink nylon that bore an equally-battered depiction of Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh. Cheaply-made, and starting to show threads. It had seen a lot of use, I guessed.

“Jack’s starting to examine the ground for impressions. I’m going to run this back to the lab and we’ll get it fully checked over,” he said.

“Any prints or fibers?”

“Not that we could find out here. We’ll know more later.”

I nodded. “Have you confirmed that it is actually Tynon’s?”

“Yes. We opened it — in the bag, of course — and it’s hers all right. Library card from school. Only coins inside, no notes.” He lowered the bag. “It looks like it was thrown away, most likely from the path. I don’t think we’re going to get much on shoe impressions. Probably deliberate.”

“Aiming for the bushes?”

“Couldn’t say. If it was after dark maybe he couldn’t see where it landed. Maybe he just didn’t care so long as it was gone.”

“Is there any way of telling for sure how long it was there?”

He shook his head. “Not possible, especially with the storm.”

I thought for a moment, weighing up possibilities, the reasons why her abductor would choose this place of all places to dispose of her wallet. He could’ve tossed it in the trash or down the nearest grate in the gutter and we’d never have found it. He couldn’t have carried her across the park, even at night. So why here? “Okay, thanks,” I said to the tech and let him continue. I turned to the cop. “Is the entire park sealed off?”

“I think so, sir,” he said. “We’ve got guys on most of the entrances.”

“Check to make sure.” To Agostini, I said, “Jeff, you get hold of Detective Hall. Tell him to be extra careful about local house-to-house and canvassing. Make sure his officers note anything at all that seems weird or suspicious.”

“Anything weird. Gotcha.”

“Anything at all.”

Agostini nodded vigorously. “I’ll tell him.”

“Do it. This guy could be a local. Could be he wants to watch the show we put on.”

06.

Boston, MA. 2004.

“Long time no see, Agent Rourke,” was the first thing Cody Williams said to me once the door behind closed and we were all alone in the visiting room. His voice was throaty and a little raw. He sounded pleased to see me. Probably knew this is his last time in the limelight and aimed to enjoy it as much as possible.

“That’s right.” I remained standing a couple of yards in from the door, made no move to sit opposite him. No sense letting him get comfortable.

“You still chasing the bad guys?” He examined his fingernails.

“More or less, yeah.”

“And now you’ve come back to see little old me.” He glanced back up, looked annoyed that I hadn’t moved at all, and added, “Now you sit down here with me right now or I’m going back to my cell.”