The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut Read online

  “Some guy you brought in for questioning, I heard. I think someone was talking about that at the office.”

  “Yeah, we had a guy,” I said.

  “Was it at the office? No, no. Saw it on TV.”

  “He wouldn’t talk and the cops haven’t nailed him on the evidence. Not yet.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Some of them are real hardasses like that, yeah. Had one guy we brought in on one of the first cases I worked after the Academy. He was running guns and all sorts of shit in through Boston Harbor. Two years ago? Eighteen months ago?” He paused, fingers drumming still on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. “When did the Steelers take the Cowboys to the cleaners? Broke their quarterback’s leg, beat them by nearly fifty clear points.”

  “No idea.”

  “Anyway, whenever. So we have this guy with a warehouse – not just, like, a truck or something, but a fucking warehouse – full of serious military hardware. We have half a dozen people who claim they work for him. And, ha, we’ve even got a dozen Haitians he’d shipped in for some side deal with someone. They’re happy to testify that he was the one giving orders to the men who took them out of the container they were kept in on the way up from Florida. We’re still getting the forensics, but we’ve got the guy by the balls, right?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “By the balls. And would he talk? Not a bit of it.”

  “Not even to cut a deal?”

  “You got it. He kept claiming he was just renting out this warehouse to some people he’d never met and the whole thing was nothing to do with him. Even after the forensics came in. He was just a landlord to the mob, or some shit. He was as innocent as anything.”

  I nodded. “And he was dead in the water when the case came to court.”

  “Jury took less than an hour to decide. Sent down for a whole lotta years. And the look on his face, like he couldn’t believe it. I’m telling you, man, I laughed for days at that.”

  As the strip malls on the outskirts of Providence began to thicken and intensify, Agostini took his eyes off the road long enough to look down at the case wedged between my feet. “Is there anything you want to know that wasn’t in the reports?”

  “I don’t think so,” I yelled back as another sheet of lightning wracked the sky. “You’ve got three missing kids so far, all between the ages of twelve and thirteen. The last one, Holly Tynon, went missing, believed abducted, some time late yesterday.”

  “From right here in Providence. The first two, Kerry Abblit and Katelyn Sellars were from Fall River and Springfield, across the state line in Massachusetts.”

  “Yeah. And there’s been no sign of them since, and no suggestion they were running away from home.”

  “Right, right. No way were these runaways,” he said. “Good girls, from good families.”

  “It’s been two months since Abblit went missing and around four weeks for Sellars. Information on what happened to both of them is sketchy.”

  “Sketchy. Yeah, you could say that.”

  “No one saw it happen, and there’s nothing in the way of physical evidence to work on.”

  “Yeah, and both city police forces were seriously thorough in canvassing for information, did a shitload of door-to-door, but there’s been nothing much of any use so far.”

  “Nothing helpful on suspicious vehicles at the first two disappearances?”

  “Uh-huh,” Agostini said. Tap, tap, tap from his fingers. “That is, we have a bunch of possibles, but both happened in urban areas, so there were a lot of vehicles around. We could try tracking every car and truck and shit that were around at the time and still be working on it by the time we retire, you know?”

  Into houses now, residential areas, as the highway blended into the town’s road network. A news van passed us, heading in the other direction. Above, the storm continued to pound away.

  “Okay,” I said, running through the facts more for my own benefit than for extra input from Agostini. “So Holly was last seen at around 9:00 PM yesterday, leaving a friend’s house to walk home, a journey of just under a quarter mile. A couple of people living on the same street as her friend remember seeing her pass by.”

  “Yeah, they were the last ones we know that saw her.”

  “For the moment. We might get lucky when this thing hits the evening news. Jog a few memories. At around 9:45 PM, Holly’s parents called her friend but found out she’d left well before then. They then phoned other friends to see if she was with any of them, gone somewhere else on her way home. When those calls drew a blank, her father John went out to check the route between the two houses to see if he could find any sign of her.”

  “And he found jack shit.”

  “Right, nothing. At around 10:15, they called the police.”

  Agostini nodded. “And forty-five minutes later, the cops contacted us, and as this is a child abduction we contacted you NCAVC guys. Speaking of which, isn’t there, like, supposed to be another agent here with you?”

  “Bert Drury. Went down with serious food poisoning this morning. Hospitalized and out of action for the time being.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. They didn’t tell you?”

  “No, but I’ve been kinda busy, so I might have missed it.”

  “Well, you’re working with me on this case. For now, at least. Have you had anything from Behavioral Analysis yet?”

  “Not so far as I know. Last I heard they were still working on it.” Tap, tap, tap. “I’m partnering you on this?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Cool. Because I really hope we get this asshole before he snatches any more kids.”

  “You got kids of your own?” I asked.

  “No, this kind of thing just gets to me, you know? I guess you work on these cases a lot though.”

  “I guess so. But you never get used to it. Not when it’s children.”

  Agostini swung the car into a street of pleasant identikit suburban housing. Upper-end blue collar or non-management white collar family homes. Tidy, compact front yards. Boxy, but reasonably attractive buildings. There was a block of small stores and a gas station down one of the side streets we passed. And up ahead, two more news vans and a couple of patrol cars belonging to Providence PD. No TV crews were out filming; they were probably sheltering from the rain.

  We pulled up next to one of the cop cars and climbed out. The Tynon house looked exactly the same as all the others on the block. If it wasn’t for the vehicles crowding the road outside, I wouldn’t have given the place a second glance. There was no sign of the rest of the street’s residents; like the news teams, the storm must have been keeping them indoors. That, and fear. Something had invaded their quiet neighborhood and taken one of their own. I inhaled deeply, drawing in as much of the clean, rain-washed air as I could.

  Agostini scrunched his neck down into his suit collar to try to protect himself from the elements. I turned away from the street and followed him up the driveway to the house.

  The uniformed cop who answered the door checked our ID, then pointed us through into the living room. There, a man and woman sat with their hands clasped together, saying nothing and staring at the far wall. Their skin was pale, eyes sunken and dark. A second man was sitting on the far side of the woman, one hand resting on her shoulder as he looked up at the two of us. From the sad, uncomfortable look on his face, and a hint of family resemblance, I guessed he’d be Mrs Tynon’s brother.

  Just as he leaned towards Mrs Tynon’s ear to speak, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to see a detective in a suit and tie, his badge on his belt. He looked the pair of us up and down and said, “I’m Detective Hall. Glad you could come.”

  We shook hands briefly, then he slipped past us and went to speak to the family, hunching down to their level so he didn’t have to raise his voice. “Mr and Mrs Tynon,” he said. “These men are from the FBI. They’re here to help us look for Holly.”

  The brother kept his e
yes lowered, but man and wife craned their necks to look at us. Both were haggard, emotionally battered. Some people reacted to the presence of the Bureau in an investigation with renewed hope, an indication of the effort being made on their kids’ behalf. Others saw it as a sign that the worst was coming. Forensic techs in plastic coveralls on the evening news. Body bags and tactfully covered stretchers. Lonely collections of flowers left by strangers.

  “Mr and Mrs Tynon,” I said, making eye contact with both. I saw no renewed hope there. “I’m Special Agent Alex Rourke and this is Agent Jeff Agostini.”

  “What happened, Agent Rourke?” she asked. “What happened to our little girl?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out, Mrs Tynon. Between us, Providence Police Department, Rhode Island State Police and a dozen other departments in New England, we’re going to find out. Whoever's responsible for taking Holly, he won't get away with it, I promise.”

  I didn’t know if her husband picked up on something in my reply or not, but he dropped his eyes and said, half-croaking, “You’re here because of the others.”

  Agostini glanced at me.

  “Bill’s wife heard them talking about it on the news,” Tynon said. “Those other two girls, the ones in Massachusetts. They’re saying it’s the same guy. The same as got our little girl.”

  I went with the truth. “We don’t know that, but there is a possibility, yes. Just as there’s a possibility that something totally different happened to Holly. It’s our job to find out for certain what happened and get her back for you if we can.”

  I stopped there, and paused as I caught sight of the framed family photos on the mantel at the far side of the room. Holly, smiling at me from behind the glass. Preserved like a butterfly in a case. Next to the pictures were a couple of sporting trophies from some school tennis competition. A tiny model of a clarinet. Maybe she’d been learning to play the instrument. Fragments of a life preserved in miniature. Part of me wanted to warn her parents, to soften the inevitable blow. To tell them that in child kidnap cases of stranger abduction for sexual purposes where the child is not released after the initial offense, ninety percent were dead within twenty-four to thirty-six hours of the abduction.

  Mrs Tynon opened her mouth and said in a quiet, clear voice, eyes blank and hollow, “Did you find out for certain what happened to the other girls, Agent Rourke?”

  That seventy-five percent were killed within the first three hours.

  “Did you make the same promises to their parents? In all those weeks, do you even know where those children are?”

  That chances were, she’d never see Holly alive again.

  “My daughter is dead, isn’t she Agent Rourke?”

  03.

  Boston, MA. 2004.

  “Cody Williams was one of the worst pieces of human filth I ever encountered in the Bureau,” I told Rob. That look in Marie Tynon’s eyes, blank and dead and utterly bereft of all hope, like a light behind them had suddenly been switched off, rose to the surface once more. No parent should outlive their own child. To miss out on seeing them grow and bloom. Never to see the outcome of their years of love and attention. No parent should have all that torn from them in an instant by a total stranger. But all that had happened to her.

  “Yeah, I saw what he was supposed to have done on the news.”

  “I worked a bunch of cases involving kids,” I said. “But he was the worst by far. The news doesn’t show how bad he was.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “He grew up in New York State, but ran away from home at thirteen. Nothing to do with the parents, as far as we could ever make out.”

  “No history of abuse or anything?”

  “No abuse. We never found out much of what happened after he ran, but I got the impression that he’d hung around with some strange people.”

  Rob raised an eyebrow. “‘Strange’? You mean like ‘serious head cases’ strange, or strange as in ‘a little eccentric’?”

  “He never said. But occasionally he’d mention something, some little thing he’d done or that might have been done to him, and you’d get an impression. Some indication of the way he’d grown up in his teens. And the things he considered normal…”

  “Bad?”

  “Tell me about it. But despite that, he had no criminal record or anything like that. He just surfaced again in Fall River maybe a year before Kerry Abblit went missing, out of nowhere. He was twenty-two.”

  “That’s young for one of these.”

  “Now he’s almost thirty; he’s young to be getting cancer, too. Just a shame he couldn’t get it any younger. Anyway, he worked as a delivery driver for a specialist auto parts firm, driving rare or imported spares to repair shops and private owners all over southern New England.”

  Rob nodded. “Giving him a truck or a van, and reason to travel almost anywhere.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know what point on his travels he decided to start snatching young girls, but he certainly had plenty of opportunity. We never could find out for sure what, if anything, started him off.” The remembered scent of the man assailed me once more. “From what he said in my interviews with him, I know the son of a bitch enjoyed the whole thing. He was smart, though, and never gave away anything that could tie him conclusively to any of the crimes, certainly not where we didn’t have the bodies.”

  “Which is why he was never charged.”

  “Right.”

  “Not with the kids’ murders, anyway,”

  “Thing was, I knew it was him as soon as I first talked to him. Everything about the guy screamed ‘child murderer’. He must have known we didn’t have the proof to make a case stick.”

  “How did you get him in the end?”

  “Arrogance,” I said, trying to brush off the question. Thinking about Williams again was making my skin itch. “He committed a murder he couldn’t hide, well outside his usual victim range. Then one of the girls he tried to grab managed to fight him off, and she IDed him. We got him. We just did it too late. The cancer can’t kill him soon enough, you ask me.”

  Rob raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask any further questions.

  04.

  Next day, I waited on the doorstep of my apartment building for Agent Downes, smoking. I’d managed to cut down to ten a day or so over the previous year. Probably wasn’t long before I’d quit altogether; that was the way the world was going. Early morning sunlight slanted across the street in front of me, glittering from under the far edge of a bank of black cloud that covered most of the sky. A cold day, and the promise of rain. I should’ve been thinking about the interview ahead, preparing questions, strategies. Instead I was trying not to think of the events of seven years before.

  A red Pontiac Bonneville pulled up by the side of the road and Tanya Downes waved me over. I had to move a bulky box file out of the way before I sat down. The car smelled of air freshener and seat fabric, bitter and chemical. The radio was on at low volume, tuned to a talk-only station.

  “Good morning, Alex,” she said as she slipped the Pontiac into gear. She was dressed in a deep blue trouser suit, crisp and clean. Dark hair in a neat ponytail, mouth set in a business-like smile. She reminded me of a schoolteacher, the sort you got in movies who cracked down on troublemakers in her class while simultaneously showing the kids the joys of poetry or classical literature. The stereotype, not the real thing. I wondered if she’d learned it, or if it was natural.

  Not quite what I’d expected from our phone conversation. For one thing, I’d thought she’d be older, my age at the very least. For another, she seemed to be friendlier in person. A body language thing, I guessed. Or else she was just making a deliberate effort to get on my good side before things got unpleasant.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “All ready for today?”

  “As I’ll ever be. What’s in the box?”

  “In there you’ll find a copy of the case files on all the missing girls, as well as Williams’ other crimes
– Nicole Ballard and Clinton Travers – and everything we’ve been able to learn about the bodies that we’ve found since his conviction.”

  “Some light bedtime reading, huh?”

  “I thought you might want to refresh your memory, just in case there’s anything there you can work with to persuade Williams to talk.”

  I nodded, glanced down at the file. “Thanks.”

  “You can hang on to that until you’re done working with us. It's not as if there's anything in there we need for the time being.” She smiled. “You’re not quite as I imagined you, you know.”

  “You must have seen photos.”

  “They never tell the whole story.”

  “And you must have read my file.”

  “I did, but like the pictures, it’s all out of date. You’ve changed since your Bureau days.”

  “I guess I have.”

  “You’ve lost the regulation suit for one thing.”

  “That’s the private sector for you. Rob insists I wear pants to work, but other than that I’m my own man.” I shrugged. “How long have you been with the field office here in Boston? I thought you’d be older.”

  “Maybe I am. They can do wonders with skin creams and the right diet these days.”

  “You’ll have to tell me your secret.”

  “You’re big into women’s skin cream?”

  “Trying to recapture my youth.”

  She laughed. “I’ve been at the field office for a few years now. With a bit of luck I’ll be able to make SAC before too long.”

  “Onwards and upwards.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to make the most of my career. Besides, if I could climb into the upper echelons I might be able to do some large-scale good. Make my mark on Bureau policy.”

  I refrained from passing judgement on both her chances of having much of an effect, and on the impression her words engendered that she saw fieldwork as just a stepping stone on the path to glory. Instead I said, “I was never any good at playing Bureau politics in Washington myself.”