The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  “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: unknown@unknown.com

  Delivered-To: alex@r-garrett-assoc.com

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

  Message-ID: none

  From: unknown@unknown.com

  To: alex@r-garrett-assoc.com

  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 th
e 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.”

  “Trust me, it’s over.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “It’s over.” The line fell silent for a moment. “Did you get the second piece of film I emailed you? At the moment, those pieces of footage seem to be the best chance we’ve got of finding out what happened to Holly and the others.”

  “I did, and I’ll send it to the image lab just as we did with the first one. But I think you’re wrong about them being the best chance we have, Alex; you know I don’t believe the woman in the film is Holly.”

  “You’ve not tried to hide that, no.”

  “Cody gave you directions to the place where he claimed he dumped her body. The locations he marked on the map, both for Holly and Katelyn, are very vague, but given what we know of his movements, the places he knew and would have felt comfortable hiding her corpse, we’ve come up with two reasonably solid search areas. Examination of the ground is due to start today.”

  “You won’t find anything,” I said. “Not at the place he’s supposed to have dumped Holly, anyway.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’ve spoken to the guy about it, and that convinced me.”

  “We’d be fools not to look, though. Was there anything in the description he gave you that you didn’t pass on, anything at all?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The Tynon dump site is only a half hour from Ashworth,” she said. “Even if you can’t remember anything else he may have suggested to you, I’d like you to go down there and see the ground for yourself with our team. Something might seem familiar from Williams’ description — you’re the only person who’s talked to him directly, after all. Please?”

  “We won’t find anything. That whole story of his was bullshit.”

  “Do you really want to explain to the press why you didn’t think it worthwhile checking out? Especially if you’re wrong and we do find something?” she said sharply.

  “There’s going to be jack shit there and there’s nothing I’m going to add to your search effort. And I don’t give a fuck for the press either. You honestly think they’ll say I should have been down there with a goddamn shovel?”

  She sighed. “I didn’t mean to snap, Alex, but you know how much interest there’s been already. We’ve been taking our share of flak as well, and I really don’t want to face any more, from outside or within the Bureau. Please? It won’t take long.”

  “It’s a waste of time I could be spending trying to find Holly Tynon. Alive. Sorry, Tanya, but I’m not doing it.”

  “Jesus, Alex.”

  The line went dead. Something told me I wasn't going to be speaking to her again.

  I picked up a copy of the Herald when I stopped for gas on the way back from the prison. They were still working on the Williams story a couple of pages in. Digging deeper. Muddying the waters with an op-ed piece .

  Beyond Reasonable Doubt?

  Seven years ago, a Massachusetts man was sent to prison for life for a murder he always denied committing on evidence that was less than overwhelming. Now Cody Williams is dying in jail. A just fate for a convicted killer, or the terrible price of a miscarriage of justice?

  It was a sunny October morning and Shanya and Terry Owen had just walked their 11 year-old son David to West Rise Junior High in Brockton when they heard a young girl screaming in terror. In a nearby side-street, they found 12 year-old Nicole Ballard struggling valiantly with a man who was fighting to carry her into a waiting van.

  While Shanya called 911 on her cell phone, Terry rushed to Nicole’s aid. He wrestled the man to the ground and managed to hold him there until the police arrived. Cody Williams had been caught red-handed.

  At the time, the Northeast was in the midst of a spate of child abductions. Williams was, naturally, a suspect in these and his home was searched. Police found a bracelet that had belonged to Kerry Abblit, one of the missing girls — a bracelet Williams would later claim he’d bought at a yard sale. No other traces of the children were found at his home, but police did find a handgun hidden in his closet.

  This weapon would send Cody Williams to jail for the rest of his life.

  The gun bore the fingerprints of an ex-con named Clinton Travers, a suspect in a series of rapes in Connecticut a few months previously whose name had leaked to the media. Travers had been found dead at his home, shot after a struggle. Testing confirmed that it was this weapon that had killed Travers. Cody Williams had no alibi for the time of the killing.

  Although he denied any involvement, he was charged with murder, tried and convicted.

  At his trial, the prosecution alleged that Williams had been jealous of Travers’ press attention and wanted him out of the way when he embarked on more of his own crimes. There was no evidence to support this beyond conjecture.

  Key witness for the prosecution was the FBI agent leading the investigation into the missing girls, Special Agent Alex Rourke. He had spoken with Cody Williams during the early part of the investigation and considered him a lead suspect. He also interviewed him repeatedly after his arrest.

  Rourke’s testimony was vital to the case.

  Before the abductions, Rourke had already worked in New England. He had assisted police in Hartford, Connecticut, on the Travers rapes. Rourke had been present at a police search of Travers’ home, and had interviewed the man himself.

  The Hartford rapes had, in fact, stopped for some time — possibly due to considerable police vigilance — before, on that fateful night, one of the investigators themselves, Detective Naomi Carson, was assaulted.

  This newspaper has spoken with the officers on duty that night, and with friends of Detective Carson. Speaking exclusively, Detective Sergeant Ed Frost told us: “Yeah, I had to spread the word about what had happened that night. I called some of the team working the case, and a few of her friends — y’know, so they wouldn’t hear it second-hand.”

  “Did that include Agent Rourke?”

  “Yeah. He’d worked with us, and I know he was pretty friendly with Naomi. I figured he’d better know.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He was shocked, I guess. And angry. If we’d kept up the watch on Travers, he thought it wouldn’t have happened. Everyone took it hard, y’know.”

  “Rourke was angry? Furious?”

  “Yes.”

  Travers was shot with what appears to have been his own weapon after a struggle around midnight that same day. The killer took the gun with them from the scene. It only surfaced again during the search of Cody Williams’ house.

  Police evidence logs show that after entering Williams’ home that October morning, the man who found the handgun was none other than Agent Rourke.

  27.

  Orange lamplight cast a copper halo over Boston. I waited for Brandon to buzz me through. There was something dark and strangely discolored in the twilight on the damp-streaked wall by the door. Moss or algae, colonizing the water tracks left by the broken guttering above. A thin film of life clinging to the brickwork. It looked a little like curls of hair.
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  I’d called on Rob earlier in the day. Explained the available options — pulling something worthwhile off the footage, getting a lucky hit from one of the porn producers I’d contacted, talking to people from the original investigation who’d known, or who might have known, Williams — and he’d offered to help. The agency was quiet and the kids were handling the day-by-day. We had a little time to play with.

  “Hey, Mr Rourke,” the kid’s voice said over the intercom as the lock buzzed to allow me inside. He was waiting in his doorway. “Sophie got here a while ago. She just made coffee. You want some?”

  “Thanks,” I said and stepped inside. Nothing much seemed to have changed from last time. Brandon’s t-shirt read: ‘Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.’

  Before his incarceration, Williams had led a solitary life — few friends, just neighbors and the guys he worked with at Drill Hall Collectors’ Autos. A bunch of customers he’d made deliveries to at the time of the disappearances, many of whom had been contacted by the Bureau or the cops during the initial investigation to see if they noticed anything unusual about Cody or his van. I very much doubted they’d remember much about it now, beyond marking the incident as ‘the time the Feds questioned me’. Even deeper background searching at the time of his arrest had turned up little between the time he’d run away from home as a teenager and the year or so before he’d started snatching girls. He just seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

  From his prison days, there was always Billy Perry, of course. The problem was that he was still nowhere to be found. We were going to use the agency to chase him up through every conceivable channel, legit or otherwise. I wasn't confident, but we had to try.