The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (18 page)

“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.

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.
 

Sophie was in the kitchenette, nursing a mug of coffee. “Hey, Alex,” she said. “I had a look at the recording while I was waiting. It’s much worse than the first one, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. I hope that’s as bad as they get. And I hope we find the guy soon.”

Brandon handed me a drink and sat down in front of the computer. “I don’t know how much help this is going to be,” he said. “Same as the last one, there’s not much.”

“Show me what you’ve got.”

“Sure. Look, I’m sorry it took me a while longer to work this time.”

“That’s OK.”

“Had a bunch of other stuff to deal with. Boyfriend trouble, a break-up to get through.”

“Really, it’s no problem. Just glad for the help.”

Shots of Holly caught in freeze frame filled the screen. Stills grabbed from the footage. Mouth open, mid-scream. Body straining against the restraints as the blows rained down on her. Some had been magnified, some recolored or retouched, all in an attempt to bring out smaller details.

“The coding is exactly the same as the first segment,” Brandon said. “And again, the audio has been stripped out. But it’s not from the same recording as the first one.”

“How can you tell?”

“The resolution’s different. And the color balances have changed as well. While it could be that he altered settings on the camera to adjust for different lighting when he moved rooms, I doubt it. More likely this is a separate recording.”
 

“And you’re certain it’s another room?”

He nodded. “From the direction the floorboards run, and from changes in the floor-to-ceiling height. And like I said, there's the lighting as well — probably more than one source, and at lower intensity than in the first segment.”

“That’s interesting, but it doesn’t tell us much,” Sophie said.

Brandon shrugged. “No, true enough. But it’s a little more detail. I’ve also been able to estimate your guy at around five-seven to six foot tall. And he has short hair. Well, I suppose it could be long, but if so it’s tied back. And he doesn’t wear glasses.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

“Remember what I said about the light sources being different?” He switched pictures. “Look at this. When he changes position, you can see a faint shadow on the wall behind the bed.”

He was right. Image-enhanced, magnified and with the light levels changed to accentuate the darker patch, there was a clear shadow of the guy. Blocky in the low resolution, but distinct. Medium build at a guess, and I agreed with Brandon about the hair.

Sophie frowned. “Won’t the distance from the lamp to the guy make a difference to the size of the shadow? How can you tell how big he is?”

“I showed it to one of my old roommates. You can also see the two posts at the foot of the bed in the shadow. Beds come in pretty standard sizes, so you can guess how far apart they are in reality and compare that to how far apart they are in the shadow. Then you know how big the guy is in perspective compared to his shadow. It’s rough, but sounded pretty sensible to me.”

“Nice work,” I said. “Damn nice work.”

Brandon grinned a little sheepishly. “Apparently, the light is probably around nine feet from the foot of the bed. So the room’s at least fifteen feet across. Of course, if it’s a wall light that’s casting the shadow, the room’s
exactly
fifteen feet across.” He shrugged. “Again, not very useful until you’re actually standing in it and then, hey, you got everything you need anyway, but you wanted to know as much as possible.”

“Well, at least if I find the place and fancy doing a home makeover while I’m there I’ll know what amount of carpet to bring with me. Does the guy have any other identifying features you could find?”

“Nothing,” Brandon said. “His hand’s in shot a few times, but I couldn’t get any detail out of it that we didn’t already know. Nothing distinctive there that I could see at all.”

“Nothing?”

“You’re not going to be able to get the guy from this video. Sorry.”

28.

The ugly weather that had plagued Massachusetts all fall was in full force as Rob and I drove south to catch up with Williams’ old associates. Oily black clouds lashed everything beneath them with iron-hard needles of water. The incessant hammering on the roof of the car was like ball bearings shaking in a steel drum. Mid-morning, and like the rest of the traffic we’d had to turn our headlights on just to be seen in the downpour. It didn’t look like easing, either.