Darby McCormick: Fear The Dark Part 33

'You still parked down the street?' I've asked Sarah to shadow me, to stick close by, in case we need to run together.

'I'm still there, like you asked,' Sarah says. 'What's wrong with your voice?'

I yank down a pink bath towel hanging on a rack. 'Teddy hit me in the face with a billy club and split my lips open.'

'Teddy who?'

'I'll explain later,' I say, and march back towards the living-room. 'I need you to come here. Now.'

'There's a police car parked in the driveway. I'm looking at it through the binoculars.'

'They're all dead. Hurry and bring my kit. Make sure no one sees you.'

I hang up, not knowing why I said that last part, as Kelly, like everyone else who lives in Red Hill, doesn't have any nearby neighbours. The advantage of hunting in a town like this instead of a city is that you don't have to worry as much about potential witnesses.

But I've never hunted in Red Hill or in any of the other nearby towns. I've always abducted my women either from out of state or from someplace very far away from Red Hill, which is how I've managed to hunt all these years without getting caught. When the Red Hill Ripper started killing here, though, I saw it as an opportunity to take women closer to home women like Tricia Lamont and blame it on the Red Hill Ripper.

Is there time to take Tricia today? I've never had two women at once. The possibilities are No. No, I'm being greedy. The McCormick b.i.t.c.h is my prize.

Darby moans as I use the towel to tie her ankles together. The knot won't hold for long, but it will prevent her from kicking. I sit next to her and use my weight to pin her face and chest against the back of the couch. I pat down her pockets but I don't find her satellite phone. Did she leave it out in the patrol car? No, there it is, lying on the bloodied carpet.

Darby has come back to life; I can feel the muscles in her back tensing just as Sarah's SUV pulls into the driveway. Seconds later, the front door opens. Sarah no longer flinches or pales at the sight of the blood and carnage; she's seen it before, many, many times. The small black leather case is gripped in her gloved hand.

'Don't come inside,' I say. I don't want her footprints to be discovered inside the house. 'Just toss me the kit.'

Sarah is staring at Lancaster's body.

'That's Teddy,' I say. 'Teddy Lancaster. He's the Red Hill Ripper.'

'So he's the one who recorded you inside the bed-room?'

I nod. 'The video was on Savran's MacBook, along with all the others. The laptop is now at the bottom of the river. Now toss '

'What if he made copies?'

'One thing at a time, Sarah. Now hurry up and toss me the kit.'

She does. I use my teeth to unzip it, then take out a preloaded syringe. Sarah watches me with a strange mixture of anger, fear and, I think, jealousy, as I sink the needle into Darby's neck and inject her with Etorphine. The opioid is several thousand times more potent than morphine, and I need only a small amount to send her off into the valley of sweet dreams.

'You said this wasn't about her.'

'It isn't,' I say. 'It just worked out this way. You got the latex gloves in your pocket, like I asked?'

Sarah nods. Looks disappointed. Hurt.

'I need this. The next few weeks, I'm going to be under a lot of stress. You know what happens when I get stressed.'

'I can satisfy you,' Sarah says, blinking back tears. 'I know how to satisfy you.'

'Is there anyone outside?'

Sarah looks, begrudgingly.

'No,' she says. 'No one's coming.'

'Keep watching and put on those gloves.'

The drug has taken effect; Darby has gone limp, sliding into unconsciousness. Head pounding, I move off the couch and crawl towards Lancaster. I find his key fob inside his jacket pocket and toss it to Sarah. Then I get to my feet, collect Darby's satellite phone and the Glock, and hand them to Sarah.

In my present physical condition, it takes what feels like an hour to pick up Darby and sling her over my shoulder. Sarah holds the door open for me as I carry her outside and lay her gently across the SUV's backseat.

As we return to the house, I tell Sarah what she needs to do next. She listens and doesn't ask any questions.

'I've got to shut off my phone,' I tell her. 'I won't be able to call you for a while.'

'Are we safe?'

'As long as you do what I said. We'll have to lay low for a bit the FBI will have all sorts of questions about Nicky Hubbard, but '

'They know about her?' Her face is bloodless.

I gently cup her face in my hands. 'The FBI found one of her fingerprints in the bedroom that's all they know and that's all they'll ever know.' I step inside the house. 'Slip out of your boots. Follow me and watch where you step.'

'What about Sherrilyn O'Neil?' she asks, referring to the woman I had accidentally killed before the arrival of the FBI. She lasted a good eight months before the fight left her. Darby, I'm sure, will last longer a year, maybe even two.

'They don't know about Sherrilyn,' I say, 'or about any of the other ones.' I pick up the severed bindings from the floor and stuff them in her jacket pocket. Sarah looks panicked. 'Sarah, there's nothing to link Nicky to the other girls.'

'What about Teddy Lancaster? He recorded you, so he knows about Nicky '

'He doesn't,' I say, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. Teddy never mentioned Hubbard while he had me tied down to the chair. Sure, he knew something had happened inside the Downes bedroom he had recorded a video of me on my hands and knees scrubbing away, trying to destroy any trace of Nicky's blood. But I refused to tell Teddy what I was doing, or why I was doing it. He thought he could beat the truth out of me, but he was wrong. He had finally given up when Darby McCormick rang the doorbell. He said he would find out. The truth would come out, and, whatever it was, he said, he would expose me.

And now I'm safe again, and there's only one last thing to do.

'Nicky can't hurt us,' I tell her as I sit down on the desk chair. 'She's dead. They all are.' I point to the small bag of plastic zip-ties Kelly had placed on the counter and say, 'Grab a couple of those. I need you to tie me up.'

Sarah returns with the bindings. 'Everyone on the planet is looking for Hubbard,' she says as she ties my wrists together. 'The FBI aren't going to go away. They'll stay here and look for her.'

'They won't. Grab the tape from the floor.'

She does, and I say, 'The Hubbard stuff will die down, I promise. After that, we'll be free to go wherever we want, together.'

Sarah kisses me deeply. Smiling and grateful, she secures the tape over my mouth.

Then she's gone, and I'm alone inside the house, tied up and gagged, another unfortunate victim of the Red Hill Ripper. The air reeks of blood and gun smoke and, as I close my eyes, I think about the way Sarah stiffened when I touched her. I'm not worried. She loves me. She always does what she's told.

69.

Coop sat back down in Chief Robinson's office chair, about to have another go at the property records for the Downes home, when from down the hall he heard the dispatcher's alarmed voice say, 'Dead. They're all dead.'

Coop was suddenly on his feet and moving into the hall, which was practically desolate. Red Hill PD had been called in to help with the manhunt for Eli Savran. His Ford Bronco hadn't been sighted anywhere in Red Hill, Brewster or the surrounding towns. The Colorado state police had started reviewing the security-camera footage for all their nearby tollbooths, looking for the Bronco, but Coop was willing to bet a week's salary that the guy had changed it for a stolen car and left town. By now, he was probably already out of the state.

Inside the communications room, Betty the dispatcher was talking to a patrolman Coop hadn't seen before, a tall, skinny guy with a slight overbite who looked like he had just graduated from p.u.b.erty. They saw Coop approaching and visibly stiffened.

Darby, he thought, a cold pit forming in his stomach.

She's dead, he thought as he jogged towards them, rubber-legged. An hour and fifteen minutes had pa.s.sed since Darby had called to tell him she'd arrived at Sally Kelly's house. Then she had gone into radio-silence mode and refused to answer her satellite phone. No big surprise there. When it came to working a case, Darby always did things in her own way and in her own time, which was why he had sent the patrolman with the gummy smile, Whitehead, to chaperone her. There had been no reason to worry, he had told himself, throwing his attention back into the property records.

Coop didn't need to ask the question. Betty, face ashen and voice tight, answered it for him. 'Doug's there right now. He just called.'

'Doug who?'

'Freeman. He's one of ours.' The look in the woman's eyes made Coop want to turn away and block his ears, just as he did when he was a boy, when his parents were fighting. If don't see it or hear it that means it didn't happen.

The dispatcher licked her lips and her body trembled as she spoke. 'Sally Kelly, Lancaster and Whitehead Doug Freeman says they're all dead. Gunshots. Blood everywhere, he said.'

Coop had his keys in his hand. 'Dr McCormick?'

'He didn't say anything about her. He had just radioed to say he was entering the house. I'll call him right now.'

But Coop was already running down the hall.

The snow had stopped. It was a few minutes shy of 5.30, and the sky was pitch black. He couldn't hold his hand steady when he dialled the number for the computer guys in Denver to trace the signal for Darby's satellite phone. After he hung up, he drove with both hands gripping the wheel to stop his arms from shaking.

Dead, the dispatcher had said.

The wind howled and slammed against his car, and it occurred to him, again, how a good portion of his adult life had been spent caged with anxiety, worrying about the moment when he received the call that Darby had finally died.

They're all dead, Betty had said.

For as long as he'd known her, she had been attracted to darkness and attracted too much darkness. And yet wasn't that the reason why he had fallen in love with her in the first place? He had tried to disconnect himself from her, to gain some distance, by dating a string of women who had the intelligence, emotional depth and career ambition of a cuc.u.mber. Why? They were a distraction, sure, but more importantly they were uncomplicated, easy to be with and, emotionally, easy to manage. The moment one of them wanted more, he picked another living Barbie doll.

Darby was dangerous to him to everyone, really, when he thought about it. Inviting her into his life on a full-time basis meant subjecting himself to a purgatory of anxiety and aggravation, waiting for the inevitable call that she had been killed. Naively maybe even stupidly he thought he could spare himself the full impact of that moment by refusing to allow himself to be emotionally entangled with her. That decision, he thought, would give him some much-needed distance. A possible buffer. And yet here he was, sinking, his lungs and stomach filling with what felt like wet cement.

His satphone rang. As he reached for it, he knew it was the dispatcher, Betty, calling to tell him Darby was dead. But the caller-ID said 'Harold Scott'. Who was that? It sounded familiar, but he couldn't remember why, and then suddenly he did: Scott was the special agent in charge of the Denver field office. He was due to arrive at the Red Hill station at six.

Coop answered the call.

Scott got right to it. 'What happened last night, Eli Savran the cat's out of the bag,' he said. 'Story's all over the local and national news, the internet and Twitter. You got anything new on your end?'

Coop told him about Sally Kelly's house. 'I don't know much,' he said. 'I'm on my way there right now.'

'So Savran is still in Red Hill.'

'It looks that way.'

'Give me the address.'

Coop did, reading it off the GPS. He was ten minutes away probably more, because of all the snow packing the barren roads.

'I'll meet you there,' Scott said. 'Take control of the scene, make sure no one tramples on anything.'

'Understood.' Scott hadn't mentioned anything about Nicky Hubbard's fingerprint. It was possible he didn't know yet. That, or he had been told by the lab's fingerprint people and was sitting on it for the moment. Either way, Coop knew he couldn't sit on it any longer. 'Sir, are you someplace where you can talk freely? I have some sensitive information I need to share with you.'

'I'm alone in my car.'

Coop told him about finding Nicky Hubbard's fingerprint and about what he'd found out earlier in the property records that before the Downes family moved into their home, it had been vacant for nearly a year. The original owners, Robert and Alice Birmingham, were dead Robert of a stroke in '79; the wife following four years later, of a heart attack in her sleep, during the spring of 1983, the same year Nicky Hubbard had been abducted. During the time the home was vacant, their only child, Stephen Birmingham, who had been living in San Diego when his mother died, hired contractors to renovate the house new roof, new carpeting, the walls and floorboards in all the rooms stripped down to the bare wood and freshly painted and stained. At some point during that time, Savran had brought Nicky Hubbard there and she had touched the floorboard while it was still drying, her fingerprint forever sealed in the poly.

'You're sure about this?' Scott asked. 'About Hubbard's fingerprint?'

'There's no question.'

'Jesus H. Christ.'

In the silence that followed, Coop's mind swung back to Darby, to the dead waiting for him inside Sally Kelly's house. As he glanced again at the GPS, he pictured the patrolman navigating his way through a house of blood and gun smoke.

'We're going to need a list of the contractors, painters whoever was working on the house during that time, I want their names,' Scott said. 'One of them might've seen Savran there at some point.'

'We can ask Savran when we find him.'

'If we find him. A mook like Savran isn't going to surrender. Guys like him exit the planet one of two ways: a blaze of glory or the noose route. We'll need to establish a timeline for when he was inside the house with Hubbard.'

Then Scott was gone, and Coop was alone with his thoughts again. As he drove down yet another cold and bone-white tunnel, thinking about Darby and all the blood waiting for him, the wind whipped against his car as if wanting to shove him in another direction, any direction but the one in which he was heading.

A pretty EMT named Leila is st.i.tching up the laceration near my mouth when the back of the ambulance door swings open, letting in a blast of cold air and the blinking merry-go-round of police and emergency lights.

Agent Cooper's hair is windblown, and his cheeks look sunken and hollow.

'Could you please give us a minute?' he asks Leila, yelling over the outside voices shouting orders to one another through the wind and crackle of handheld radios.

After she leaves, Cooper sits on the gurney across from me, elbows on his knees, his satellite phone gripped in one hand. When I see the crus.h.i.+ng terror in his face, I can't conceal my delight. Fortunately, my face and lips are swollen and numbed by Novocain, so my true expression and emotions are withheld from him.

His gaze roves over the various cuts and lacerations, the st.i.tches and Steri-Strips.

'Savran did that to you?' he asks.

I nod, slowly. 'He was waiting behind the front door.'

The words come out in a slurred, wet mess. Cooper doesn't understand me. I use the pad pinched between my fingers to gently wipe at my lips. They feel as thick as a bicycle tyre.

Cooper leans closer, straining to hear.