Darby McCormick: Fear The Dark Part 8

'Goodnight.'

Darby hung up. She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her face, thinking about Ray Williams, with his strong jawline and soft brown eyes and rough masculine hands. It was her first pleasant thought of the day, the only one that didn't remind her of death.

She also realized something else about the man, another thing he had in common with Coop: Williams hadn't treated her any differently because she was a woman. That wasn't always the case with male cops and it was especially true when it came to s.e.xual crimes. Some men were simply embarra.s.sed to talk about the subject in the presence of a woman; they smiled tightly and chose their words carefully and then excused themselves to have whispered conversations with the other males in corners and behind closed doors.

The good majority, though, still carried a deep resentment at the whole politically correct and liberal diversity movement that had allowed women into what was still considered to be, even in the twenty-first century, a boys' club.

She fished Williams's card out of her back pocket and dialled his direct number.

'How about I buy you a drink?' Darby asked.

'What time?'

'I'll meet you across the street in fifteen.'

'See you then.'

Darby went into the shower and scrubbed the stink of slaughter off her skin and hair under the hot water. She kept seeing the faces of the dead.

She reached for something more pleasant and relaxing Siesta Key. She had been in a motel in Pittsburgh, thinking about going someplace warm, when the name popped into her head. She had never been there before but had heard how beautiful the barrier island was eight miles long and just offsh.o.r.e of Sarasota, the Gulf water a pale blue and warm, even during the winter. She had pulled out her iPhone, plugged 'Siesta Key' into Google, and seconds later had an endless supply of links, photos and videos to choose from. A website for a sidewalk cafe whose name she couldn't recall offered a live streaming webcam for the Siesta Key beach. She remembered lying on her hotel bed, with its hard mattress and stiff, starched sheets, and thinking about how she could reach Siesta Key in just under seventeen hours.

How had the Ripper watched the Downes family?

Darby shut off the water and dried herself quickly. She ran a comb through her hair, pulled her hair behind her head and fastened it with an elastic band as she moved into the bedroom. She slipped into a clean pair of underwear, picturing the son of a b.i.t.c.h parked in some dark driveway and watching them through a pair of binoculars, waiting for them to leave so he could get inside the house. Did you watch them through binoculars or did you do it another way?

How else could he watch?

Darby fastened her bra, thinking. There were so many different ways nowadays. You had cameras installed in cell phones and tablets and laptop computers. Like the parents she had seen inside the bar, you could have a face-to-face conversation on your phone with your kid or with someone halfway around the world using programs like Skype and apps like FaceTime and ooVoo. You could watch a beach in Florida, day or night, any time you wished.

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 t.i.ts. 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 p.u.b.erty 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 t.i.tles 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 model 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 pa.s.sword. They all had Wi-Fi in their homes, I've checked.'

'It's an interesting theory. Solid.'