Fear the Dark Page 8

  Darby was sliding into a pair of jeans when a cold, neutral voice that wasn’t her own spoke inside her head: The Downes family owned two iPads.

  So what? They also owned two laptops, and each family member had their own iPhone.

  The iPads were standing upright.

  Darby remembered seeing her reflection on the screen of Samantha’s iPad.

  The tablet was facing the young woman’s bed, and it contained a camera.

  And the iPad sitting on the nightstand in the master bedroom – that camera was aimed at the three chairs seated at the foot of the bed.

  Darby’s skin turned cold and her hands trembled as she rooted through the evidence files, searching for the pictures of the bedrooms.

  Here was a photo of the Connelly bedroom. A laptop sat on a bureau, the camera above the screen pointed at the carnage of the dead family.

  Here was a shot of Jim and Elaine Lima and one of their twin sons, Brad, bound and taped and dead. An iPhone, tilted against a stack of books, was resting on a nightstand, its camera aimed at them.

  Darby grabbed the cordless and dialled Coop’s number.

  ‘Cooper.’

  ‘He was watching himself and the families and he was probably watching us today.’

  ‘Watching how?’

  ‘The iPad in the bedroom: it was sitting upright and the camera was pointed at the family. Same deal with the other four families. I’m looking at the pictures right now. In each bedroom there’s a laptop, smartphone or iPad, and the cameras are aimed at the families.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the iPads and the other stuff have to be turned on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think this is a coincidence.’

  ‘I’ll get the computer guys on it first thing in the morning.’

  After Darby hung up, she threw on a shirt and then paced the rough carpet in her bare feet. The Red Hill Ripper had used those devices to watch himself, she was sure of it.

  The phone rang and she realized she had forgotten about her drink with Williams.

  ‘Sorry, Ray, I’m running late. I’ve found something about the Ripper – how he’s watching himself and the families.’

  Williams didn’t answer.

  ‘Ray? You there?’

  ‘You’ve got really nice tits. And I like those tight little boy shorts you just put on.’

  The voice on the other end of the line was deep and guttural, almost a moan. It was also disguised by a voice-changer.

  ‘I can’t wait to get you in the rope.’

  ‘Why wait? Why not –’

  ‘Goooooodbye.’

  Darby was staring at the window when the line went dead.

  Day Two

  My mother, whose name was also Sarah, was a slim woman with rough hands who wore too much makeup and smoked too much and dressed every day like she was going off to a country-club dance or a thousand-dollars-a-plate political fundraiser. She had wanted a girl and made no secret about it.

  Boys confused her, she told me on several occasions. They ate like pigs, shovelling food into their mouths before bouncing outside with the boundless energy of a puppy, and spent each day rolling around and digging in dirt and getting into fistfights and playing sports. They came home covered in filth and sweat and reeked of BO. They wolfed down their supper and they put up a fuss when they were asked to wash their hands or take a shower.

  Girls, my mother said, were the complete opposite in almost every way. They didn’t come home smelling like they had spent their day swimming in a sewer. They enjoyed taking long baths and they wore clean clothes and they made an effort to look pretty. They were polite and had table manners. The biggest difference – the most important one, my mother argued – was when girls reached puberty they didn’t act like unneutered dogs, humping legs and bedposts, pillows, whatever got them off. Girls developed into ladies. Boys turned into monsters of fornication.

  I don’t know how my father felt about boys or girls or children in general because I’d never met him. My mother told me his name was Roy, just Roy, no last name needed, and the only contact I had with my father was through a small steamer trunk that sat in a dusty attic corner strung with cobwebs. Inside, I found an army uniform and a bayonet and a collection of detective magazines from the fifties and sixties. They had had the word ‘detective’ in the titles – Real Detective, Spicy Detective and Gold Seal Detective – and each cover featured a woman wearing a ripped dress or a skimpy bikini or just her underwear and bra. All the women were tightly bound with thick rope to chairs, posts, beds, tables and radiators, some gagged, some captured mid-scream with their teeth bared and their lips painted blood-red, every one of them frightened.

  The articles were the kind of tripe you’d usually expect – ‘THE NUDIST CAMP MURDERS!’ and ‘HE MADE THEM SLAVES … AND THEY LIKED IT!’ A few, though, usually the ones that weren’t advertised on the front cover, were instructive, explaining the mysteries of women, how they really wanted to be treated, their true desires, needs and wants.

  When my mother wasn’t home, which was often, I would spend long afternoons inside the attic, alone with the pictures. It was the most peaceful time of my life. I was thirteen. Everything ended – changed – when my mother caught me in flagrante delicto – the magazines spread over the floor and my shorts and underwear around my ankles, my free hand slowly increasing the tension on the rope I had tied around my neck. She didn’t give me a chance to explain. She beat me with her hands, and when she spotted my father’s belt, which was conveniently sitting inside the trunk, she picked it up and hit me with it until I couldn’t stand without help.

  That night she made me kneel on grains of rice as she read from the Good Book. When dawn finally, mercifully arrived – my knees cut and bleeding, the muscles in my thighs and lower back locked in spasm and my head filled with an excruciating, skull-splitting pain that had, at least twice that awful night, caused me to collapse and black out – my mother slammed her Bible shut, convinced that she had fully exorcized the succubus. From that day on, until I left home for good, she’d tie me up every night to prevent the demon from returning, binding my wrists to the headboard and tying my ankles to the bedpost.

  I’m startled into wakefulness, the red glow of the alarm clock the only light in the bedroom. In my mind’s eye I see my mother staring at me accusingly. She has a smile that says I know who you really are and I know all your dirty little secrets. Wait until I get hold of you …

  She would never speak that way to me, of course. Too many words.

  Sarah, my loving partner all these years, gently touches my arm.

  ‘Bad dream?’

  She’s dead, I remind myself. I swallow, my heart tripping. She’s dead and I buried her.

  ‘You’re shaking,’ Sarah says.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You were crying out for Tricia. Who’s that?’

  I whip off the covers. ‘I’m going out for a run,’ I say.

  It’s coming up on 5 a.m. and the cold air feels like razor blades against my skin, like shards of ice inside my lungs. I want to turn around and go home, but I keep running, pushing myself, because exercise is the only way I can banish my mother. Even now, after all the years she’s been dead, it still amazes me in a naive, childlike way how you can bury someone but you can’t bury that’s person’s memory, their connection to you. I spoke about my mother once to a psychologist, years ago, a matronly woman with kind eyes who had once been a nun. She refused to see me again. The woman’s secretary never explained why.

  I don’t need a psychologist to explain to me why my mother visits me in my dreams: she is the embodiment of my fear, specifically the fear of being discovered by the police. I made a critical mistake at the Downes home. If the police don’t discover it, Hoder will.

  I return home, rubber-legged and sweating, and take a long shower. When I arrive downstairs, the air is warm and smells of coffee and eggs and sausage. Sarah is cooking breakfast and listening to the radio, an old mod
el with a manual dial and an antenna mended with duct tape. It sits on the windowsill above the sink, tuned to the local news. She shuffles about the kitchen, wearing her slippers and the frumpy pink housecoat I’ve told her to get rid of tied around her body, which has started to thicken with age.

  I curl and uncurl my fists for a reason I can’t pinpoint or explain.

  Sarah hands me a mug of coffee and returns to the stove. I sit at the table and stare out the kitchen window. The exercise and fresh air and shower and promise of another fine morning – the sky above the tall pines is a deep red and gold, cloudless – these things should have me feeling light. Buoyant. Instead, nameless and shapeless thoughts like an army of fire ants crawl through my skull, eating their way through my brain.

  Sarah puts a plate of eggs, ham and sausage in front of me and goes back to the stove to fix her breakfast. My two Sarahs, I think, picking up a fork. One a demon who visits me almost every night in my dreams, the other a Milquetoast angel who offers up endless and bottomless wells of forgiveness, patience and kindness.

  Sarah refills my coffee mug and I’m possessed by the urge to tell her about what happened at the Downes house. About the mistake I made and how the FBI are in town and they’re poking around – I want to unburden myself but it would only burden her.

  There’s got to be a way to fix this, I tell myself, sipping my coffee. There’s got to be a way out.

  As I watch Sarah pick up strips of bacon with a fork and lay them on a plate covered with a paper towel, I feel a tight band of pressure around my head. She sees me watching and gives me a shy smile and the pressure intensifies. I scratch my eyebrow with a knuckle and watch her cook and think about how she does the laundry and washes the dishes and cleans the house and irons my shirts and wakes up at the same time as I do every morning and she doesn’t complain and she doesn’t ask questions or talk back – so why does my chest feel so tight and why won’t my heart stop racing? Why do I feel like I’m suffocating to death?

  ‘Baby?’

  I look up and find Sarah staring at me in alarm.

  ‘You’re burning up,’ she says.

  I drink my coffee. Sweat pours in rivulets from my brow. My armpits are soaked.

  ‘You feeling okay?’ she asks.

  STOP ASKING ME THAT.

  ‘Fine,’ I reply, gripped with a sudden, inexplicable urge to pick up the kitchen chair and smash it against the table. Instead, I get up so quickly that I almost knock over the chair. I collect my briefcase and grab my coat from the foyer closet.

  I’m about to head out when Sarah calls to me from the kitchen: ‘She’s beautiful.’

  When I return, I find her standing at the table, sipping coffee and looking down at six folded and creased pieces of paper – colour printouts of the women I’ve researched.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Sarah says again, and points to a picture of Tricia Lamont coming out of her parents’ home. ‘Is this Tricia?’

  I don’t answer: my mouth is as dry as bone. Bacon sizzles in the skillet and the weatherman on the radio is talking about an upcoming storm that could dump three to five feet of snow through central Colorado.

  ‘But this one,’ Sarah says, tapping a finger against the picture of 37-year-old Angela Blake, a tall woman with blonde hair and wide hips and fair skin. She wears perfume that smells like fresh citrus and when you get up close to her you can see the fine spray of freckles along her nose and shoulders. ‘This one is … what’s her name again?’

  ‘Angela.’

  ‘Angela,’ Sarah repeats, almost dreamily. She sips her coffee while she studies the women, appraising each face as though it were a painting in a museum.

  Then she places her mug on the table and picks up the sheet of paper holding Angela’s picture. Sarah folds it as she shuffles towards me, her slippers scraping against the floor.

  ‘This one,’ she says, and tucks the paper in my coat pocket.

  ‘Why?’ My voice is thick and wet in my throat.

  ‘Because she looks like a fighter. You like the ones who fight back.’

  Then Sarah raises herself on her toes and, touching me lightly on the neck, kisses me goodbye.

  19

  ‘You think he might’ve recorded himself in the act?’ Terry Hoder asked, his voice flat, almost dismissive.

  Darby swallowed her coffee. ‘Don’t you?’

  Hoder finished pouring coffee into a paper cup. It was 7.35 a.m., and they were the only ones inside Red Hill PD’s break-room. Bright morning sunlight flooded through the small window, a welcomed presence in the grey surroundings.

  He leaned the small of his back against the counter; the hand gripping his cane was white-knuckled. ‘I know that type of software exists for home computers, but I don’t know anything about iPads and tablets. Totally different operating system and different software, right?’

  ‘Right. And, yes, the software exists for both iPads and iPhones. The iPads, phones and the laptops in the bedroom photos all had cameras and microphones. He could stream the video to his own phone or a laptop halfway around the world if he wanted to, and replay it at his leisure. All he’d need was the family’s network name and password. They all had Wi-Fi in their homes, I’ve checked.’

  ‘It’s an interesting theory. Solid.’

  Hoder seemed distracted. Lost in thought.

  Then he stared out the window, at the snow-capped mountains in the distance. The sky was a ceramic blue and cloudless, the perimeter of the empty parking lot dotted with aspens and tall pines that creaked and swayed in the wind.

  Darby had heard the stories about the man’s two broken marriages; the grown son and daughter who barely spoke to their father, a relentless workaholic who had suffered a nervous breakdown and almost died from encephalitis. With a little over a year to go from the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, Hoder should have been at home resting, recovering from his knee surgery or coasting through his remaining time. He had certainly earned it.

  Instead, he was here in Colorado. Why? Because he had nothing left in his life. As Darby drank her coffee, she felt a vague and uncertain horror about her future. She was at the halfway point in her life where the finish line was no longer hidden behind the fog of youth; it was real, it was approaching, and there was no turning back. Looking at Hoder, she felt as though she were being paid a visit from her own Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come.

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence that in all the crime scenes there was an electronic device with a camera pointed at bound family members,’ Darby said.

  ‘Agreed. I’m afraid I have a rather embarrassing confession.’ When Hoder looked at her, his eyes were bright and full of mirth. ‘Don’t tell anyone this, but I’m somewhat of a technophobe. Computers and smartphones and now these tablets – frankly the whole thing gives me a headache. I can’t keep up with it, nor do I want to keep up with it.’

  ‘I feel the same way.’

  Hoder chuckled. ‘I doubt it. All these gizmos and programs, they make me feel … old. Obsolete.’

  ‘Technology and software changes from day to day. You’ve got to be a full-time geek to keep up with this stuff. The rest of us are left in the dust.’

  Darby refilled her cup. The coffee was bitter, but it would do the job. ‘Let’s start with Wi-Fi. You know what that is?’

  ‘Wireless internet connection.’

  ‘See, you’re not as bad as you think.’

  ‘My seven-year-old grandson had to tell me what it meant.’

  ‘Then I take back what I just said.’ Darby smiled over her cup.

  ‘If what you’re saying is true – that the Ripper recorded his interactions with the families – then can I assume he may have been watching or listening or both yesterday, when you, Cooper and Williams went inside the bedroom?’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘How could he do that? Do you need some sort of special software?’

  ‘That I don’t know. The RCFL guys –’

&nbs
p; ‘Who?’

  ‘Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory out of Denver. Forensics geeks who specialize in phones and computers. Coop is going to meet with them first thing this morning, at nine.’

  ‘You spoke with him?’

  ‘This morning, about five.’ Coop had been up all night with four other agents on loan from the Denver office.

  ‘Did he have anything to say about the evidence he brought to Denver?’

  ‘No prints were recovered from the plastic bag, duct tape or plastic bindings. But there are a few potential bright spots.’

  ‘The blood Coop recovered from the bedroom flooring.’

  Darby nodded. ‘There’s also a chance our man left either sweat or skin cells on that piece of latex stuck to the duct tape – and we have that fingerprint pressed into the polyurethane while it was still in the process of drying.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if our man was in our databases?’

  ‘It certainly would be,’ Darby said, although she wasn’t pinning her hopes on it.

  While there was a fighting chance the fingerprint might find a match on IAFIS, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CODIS, the Bureau’s Combined DNA Index System, was another matter. The majority of DNA samples stored on that database belonged to unsolved violent crime investigations. If the blood found on the floor, or skin or sweat from the duct tape, did, in fact, belong to the Ripper, and if he had left a matching DNA sample at another crime scene, a link would then have been established. If, if, if, Darby thought. She could count on one hand the number of cases where CODIS came back with a match linked to a known offender.

  ‘DNA testing will take longer,’ Darby said. ‘Coop is thinking of sending the samples directly to your lab. He’s also going to send the duct tape there.’ Because duct tape was often used in murders, the federal lab kept its own library of tape samples.

  Hoder shifted uncomfortably and then moved the cane to his opposite hand. ‘Why do you think the Ripper contacted you?’