Darby McCormick: Fear The Dark Part 24

Betty spoke into her headset. '911, what is your emergency?'

On the end of the line Darby heard rapid breathing.

Crying.

Her attention was fixed on the monitor with the ANI/ALI screen. The software had caught the incoming number but there was no address.

Land-line calls were traced in a matter of seconds. Call from cell phones took longer; the software had to triangulate the signal as it bounced between towers. Betty moved her computer mouse with one hand and punched her keyboard with the other.

Now a frightened woman's voice: 'He's got us tied up in the bedroom. Me and my family.'

Darby felt cold all over. She leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, and stared down at the scuffmarks on the floor. The voice had a slight echo to it. She's on a speakerphone, Darby thought.

'There's a rope tied around my neck,' the woman sputtered.

From the corner of her eye Darby could see Coop looking at her, and she recalled what he had said to her before she went into the squad room to do the interview: I saw the list of questions and answers the two of you came up with. You go on the record saying those things, you might as well be jamming a stick of dynamite up this guy's a.s.s. Once you light the fuse, who the h.e.l.l knows how he's going to react? Maybe he'll decide to take his aggression out on someone else instead of you. 'Is the intruder inside the room with you?' Betty asked. While she had been taught to keep her emotions in check, to speak clearly and calmly, Darby caught a slight hitch in the woman's reedy voice.

The woman on the phone didn't answer. He's listening in on the conversation, Darby thought. He's telling her what to say.

'Ma'am, are you still there?' Betty asked.

'Yes,' the woman sputtered. 'Yes, he's here with me. With us.'

'Where do you live, ma'am?'

Another pause. Darby pictured the killer whispering the answer into the woman's ear. She looked again at the ANI/ALI screen. Still no address.

'He said to put her on the line. Darby McCormick.'

'I'm right here,' Darby said.

Then the woman broke down, sobbing hysterically. 'He just put a bag over my husband's head, please, you've got to help us. Twenty-two '

The woman started choking.

He's strangling her. Darby hit the mute b.u.t.ton on her headset and whipped round to Betty. 'Why's the address taking so G.o.dd.a.m.n long to trace?'

Betty's eyes didn't move from the screen. Police Chief Robinson answered the question. 'We don't have the software to trace cell signals,' he said. 'Only the state police can do that, system called One-Click.'

The woman's choking filled their headsets.

Robinson continued. 'Betty already b.u.mped up the call to them. They can't pinpoint a cell signal's exact location, but they can give us co-ordinates, longitude and lat.i.tude. We'll be able to get an address with that.'

'How long is this gonna take?'

Robinson didn't have an answer. Over her headphones Darby thought she heard the crinkling sound of a plastic bag and her heart leapt high in her chest. She got back on the line, reminding herself not to beg: begging was the lifeblood of a s.a.d.i.s.t, what fed their need to torture. Beg and he'd start to kill everyone.

'You wanted to talk to me,' she said into the microphone. 'I'm here. Tell me what you want.'

Silence. Still no address listed on the screen.

'Tell me what you want,' Darby said again.

Then a gulping and gasping sound roared over their headphones, like the noise of someone breaking to the surface of the water after having been submerged.

'Alone,' the woman managed to say. Her wretched coughs exploded over the line for what seemed like minutes. 'Come alone and he'll won't kill us.'

'I'll come alone; you have my word,' Darby said. 'Tell me where you live.'

Hysterical sobbing. 'Please help us.'

'I'm coming. Alone. Give me your address '

'Please.'

Click and the call ended.

48.

Palms damp and her throat dry, Darby glanced at Coop and saw the thinly disguised blame in his eyes. She looked away from him, at Hoder, who was standing near the doorway. The colour had drained from his face. Betty hit the redial b.u.t.ton for the phone number.

Darby felt sick and clammy, and she had trouble swallowing. A voice that wasn't her own, cold and flat and without mercy, broke in and said: He's using the family as bait. He's setting a trap for you so he can kill you.

'No matter how we cut it, someone is going to have to go into that house,' Darby said. 'It may as well be me.'

Coop, not surprisingly, was the first to speak. 'The family's dead and you know it.'

Hoder nodded in agreement. 'Coop's right,' he said. 'He wants you to come alone so he can lure you into a trap.'

'And if I don't do as he instructed if you send in the first responders, then the EMTs who the h.e.l.l knows how he's going to act?' Darby asked. 'If he wants me to come alone, chances are he's somewhere close by, watching the house. Once we get the address, I say we set up a perimeter and block him in.'

Then Darby looked at Robinson and said, 'You let the emergency people in there first, they'll be going in blind. If our guy has set some sort of trap, they won't know what to look for. I will. I'm the best candidate, and besides, it's me he wants anyway.'

Coop threw up his hands. 'This is insane.'

'And what if the family's still alive?' Darby asked.

'There's no way you honestly believe that I know you don't believe that. He wants you to go there so he can kill you that's why he had that woman feed you that bulls.h.i.t line about how he won't kill everyone if you come. He's playing off your sense of decency. You're letting a psychopath manipulate you.'

'I'll need a car. I left mine at the bar.'

'You can't save that family. They're gone. What this is about is your guilt.'

Then Coop's expression transformed itself into an odd mix of grief and sympathy the look of a man about to suffer an irrecoverable loss. 'And it's going to kill you,' he said.

Betty spoke up. 'Staties traced the cell signal,' she said, and handed Darby a slip of paper. '22 Exeter Road, in Red Hill.'

'How far away is it?'

'In normal conditions, I'd say about six, ten minutes max.'

Darby got to her feet. She felt a cold and hollow spot in the pit of her stomach.

Robinson held out his car keys to her. 'Take my truck,' he said. 'White Ford parked out front. It's got four-wheel drive so you won't get stuck out there.'

'Your truck got GPS?'

'No.'

'Then I'll need you to give me directions. You can relay them to me over the phone. Tell me what number to call.' Darby gave the slip of paper in her hand to the police chief.

Coop looked at her longingly. Don't do it, his eyes said. Please.

Robinson handed the paper back to her. 'I'll coordinate everything from here,' he said. 'I have everybody's numbers.'

Darby left the room. When she reached the end of the corridor, she turned and, glancing back to the call centre, saw Coop setting down his headphones on the counter. He had the look of a man placing a rose on top of a coffin about to be lowered into the ground.

49.

The snow was still coming down at a furious clip, thick and wet, but the roads Darby took had been ploughed. She parked the police chief's truck at the top of the driveway belonging to the house at 22 Exeter Road. Coop was riding with Hoder, and their car was parked near the perimeters that had been set up in a quarter-of-a-mile radius around the house. It belonged to the French family, Robinson had told her. Luther and Carla French had a 23-year-old son named Sebastian and an older daughter, Rita, who was twenty-six.

In her headlights she caught glimpses of the pleasant brown Colonial with its attached two-car garage. There didn't appear to be a single light turned on. She could also make out a series of depressions, holes caused by the Red Hill Ripper's footsteps, in the driveway leading up to the front of the house.

'I'm here,' she said into the phone. She killed the engine and pocketed the keys. 'Don't have any of your people move in until I've cleared the house.'

'Understood,' Robinson replied. 'Good luck.'

Darby opened the door to a blast of cold air. She got out and clipped the satphone to her belt near the front of her jeans, so Robinson could hear her back at the call centre. Then she removed the nine from her shoulder holster and attached a tactical light underneath the muzzle. She clicked off the safety, pulled back the receiver and eased a round into the chamber. Then she shut the truck's door and trudged through the white, knee-high blanket covering the driveway.

Snow as sharp as needles blew against her face, and it was bitterly cold. As she got closer, she saw that the front door was wide open, like an invitation, and again she wondered what was waiting for her inside.

Was Coop right when he said she was allowing a psychopath to manipulate her? Probably. And maybe her need to go in there alone, as instructed, had something to do with her guilt about having gone ahead with the video interview. She had no way of knowing whether the Red Hill Ripper had watched it, and, if he had, if it had prompted him to vent his rage on another family. What if the Ripper had been planning this moment, this endgame, or whatever it was, from the moment she'd arrived?

During the journey, her imagination had gone into overdrive, conjuring up all sorts of grisly scenarios and possibilities. There had been a case just outside Boston where a serial killer murdered families and then planted bombs for when the police arrived. Her first major serial case had involved Traveler: he had blown up a SWAT van and later bombed a major Boston hospital. Had the Ripper taken a page from their book? What if he had come up with another way of killing her? In Boston a killer had b.o.o.by-trapped a closed door with a shotgun. The first responding officer had opened the door and nearly had his head blown off.

Conjuring up different scenarios was both useless and unproductive. She wouldn't know anything until she got into the house. Right now she needed to keep her attention sharp and focused. She clicked on the tactical light beneath the gun's muzzle and brought up the nine as she mounted the steps to a small, enclosed front porch. The snow had stopped blowing against her face, but not the wind; it hit her like a fist and roared inside the dark house. She cleared everything in her immediate line of vision; and then she darted to the right side of the door and pressed her back against the vinyl siding, blinking the melting snow out of her eyes.

Darby took off her jacket the thick leather would only enc.u.mber her and dropped it on the porch floor. Her face and hair, which she had tied behind her head with an elastic band before she left the station's parking lot, were soaked. She used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe away the wetness from her face.

Was the killer lurking inside the darkness of the house? If so, where was he hiding?

50.

Her chest tight, Darby swung around the doorway and swept the torch's bright and narrow beam of light on the areas on either side of the stairs, her blind spots. A formal living-room was to her right, a dining-room to her left. Both were clear, everything in order, no signs of a struggle.

She turned away and again pressed her back against the vinyl siding. The downstairs windows had been opened: the air inside the house was frigid, and she'd seen curtains billowing in the wind. She also saw that three of the dining-room chairs were missing.

Now she played her light over the doorway and threshold and foyer floor. She didn't detect anything remotely suspicious or out of the ordinary.

Gingerly, she placed one foot on the foyer's hardwood floor, as though testing her weight on a pond of ice. She entered the house.

A gust of wind blew past her and she started when the front door slammed. Heart racing, she searched the wall for a light switch. Finding a bra.s.s switch plate with four click b.u.t.tons, she hit one at random. No lights went on. She pressed the other b.u.t.tons, but the house remained dark. Moving to the base of the stairs, she pointed her light up to the next floor.

'It's me, Darby McCormick,' she called up into the darkness. Her light reflected off the upstairs banister and, beyond it, off an opened door leading to what looked like a bathroom. 'I'm alone.'

Her voice echoed and died.

Darby strained to listen. Heard nothing but the wind howling and shaking the nearby trees, the branches creaking and splitting. She examined the hardwood staircase in front of her. There were seven steps leading to a small landing, where she spotted a puddle. Melted snow from boots the Red Hill Ripper's boots. There was a second set of steps hidden from view behind a wall.

First, she had to clear the downstairs. For the next forty minutes she worked systematically clearing each of the rooms, including the attached garage. She watched where she stepped and moved slowly and checked everything and found nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary.

At least not yet, she thought, returning to the base of the stairs. If the Red Hill Ripper had laid a trap, chances are it would be somewhere on the next floor.

Again, Darby called up into the darkness. 'I'm alone, just as you asked.'

Again, there was no answer.

Because they're all dead, Coop had said. You know that.

Her skin was soaked with sweat, and her shirt and jeans felt glued to her skin as she moved up the staircase quietly, taking one step at a time. The sc.r.a.pe of her thick-soled boots on the hardwood echoed throughout the house. She reached the landing. The door opposite the top of the stairs was the only one that was closed.

Darby climbed the remaining steps, shivering. The air was cold because all the windows upstairs had been opened. She could hear the wind blowing through the screens and she could see plumes of breath in the torch's halo of light. She thought of the metabolic disorder she'd read about on the web, TMAU or whatever it was called; then she thought about what the Tuttle woman had said about her client, the man named Timmy who reeked of garbage, and Darby surmised that the killer had opened all the windows to remove the stench of fish that seeped from his pores.