Fear the Dark

They had collected the usual preliminary evidence found at a homicide – hairs and fibres from the bodies and rooms as well as an assortment of fingerprints, all of which, Darby suspected, belonged to the Downes family. The footwear impressions on the living-room floor were matched to footwear belonging to the family. No fingerprints had been found on either the toilet or the blue plastic bucket, which suggested he had wiped everything down. And he had taken away whatever rag or towel he’d used on the bedroom wall, because they hadn’t found it in any of the garbage cans.

Darby had checked the family’s medicine cabinets. While David Downes took medications for high blood pressure, insomnia and several anti-depressants for anxiety and depression, Darby hadn’t found a prescription bottle for neomycin belonging to him, his wife or his daughter, nor had she found an empty one in the trash. They’d need a court order to access the family’s medical records to see if any of them had been taking the antibiotic.

Coop had also found a ‘plastic’ fingerprint on the skirting board – a three-dimensional friction-ridge impression created when someone presses a fingertip in fresh paint, soap, hot wax, tar or car grease. In this case, it was in polyurethane. The skirting board had been treated with the polymer years, maybe decades, ago. There was no way the Red Hill Ripper could have left the print, but procedure dictated that Coop process the print anyway. He would use it later, in the courses that he taught at the FBI Academy, where students, forensic investigators and law enforcement officers learned how to identify and retrieve tricky prints from various surfaces.

The mobile lab’s satellite was down and could be fixed only in Denver. MoFo Coop, along with Otto and Hayes, would go there to work on the rest of the collected evidence.

Coop had another reason for wanting to go to Denver tonight: the Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, an FBI-sponsored and accredited full-service digital forensics laboratory and training centre that worked with law enforcement agencies in Colorado and Wyoming. RCFL had agreed to examine all the home and business computers and tablets belonging to the Downes family.

The Denver RCFL facility also had a cell phone kiosk that utilized a newly developed FBI technology called UFED, short for the Universal Forensic Extraction Device. It could download data from any cell or smart phone and collate it into a report, which could then be burned on to a CD or DVD in as little as thirty minutes. Use of the kiosk, however, was by appointment only, and Coop had booked a slot for tomorrow at 11 a.m.

It was now coming up on seven. Darby stood with Coop inside the kitchen, cataloguing evidence. Hoder, who had been on his feet most of the day, balancing his weight on his cane, had returned to the hotel so he could ice his swollen knee. He wouldn’t be making the trip to Denver.

‘I want you to stay here, in Red Hill,’ Coop said.

Darby looked up.

‘If Williams can get the autopsies scheduled for tomorrow, one of us should be here. Besides, I’ll have help in Denver.’

Darby felt relieved. She wanted to spend the evening going through the evidence files. A long-time sufferer from motion sickness, she had never been able to read or concentrate while in a car.

‘Sounds good,’ she said, and went back to writing.

‘Really?’ Coop asked in mock surprise. ‘Here I was expecting an argument.’ He handed her the keys to his rental and added, ‘You must be getting mellow in your old age.’

As Darby wrote, she thought about the plastic bag that had been stuck to David Downes’s face like a cobweb, his skin pale and sweaty beneath the bag, the thi

But it was the man’s eyes, wide and nearly bulging from their sockets, that haunted Darby; how, after the bag had been removed, they had been locked on his daughter. Intimately familiar with the mechanics of death, she could feel the man’s terror – could feel the plastic bindings biting and then cutting through his skin as he thrashed about with the bag taped over his head, sucking in the last few breaths of precious oxygen through his nose and unable to see his wife or daughter but able to hear Samantha begging and pleading and screaming.

Coop was saying something to her.

‘Sorry, what’s that?’ Darby asked as she continued writing.

‘I said I hope there aren’t any surprises when this case goes to court. You know how lawyers can get.’

‘Which is why we should put this guy in a body bag.’

Darby caught Coop’s reproachful glare. ‘You can’t treat, let alone cure, a sexual sadist, Coop. There’s no therapy or psychotropic-medication regimen that will bring them anywhere near the neighbourhood of normal, that will allow them to feel remorse or empathy. If you don’t want a sadist to kill again, you either lock him up for life or you put him down.’

‘And you’re for putting him down.’

‘Why should taxpayers have to pick up the tab for someone who’s the mental equivalent of a rabid dog?’

Coop studied her face.

‘You don’t resolve evil, Coop. You extinguish it.’

‘You might want to keep these thoughts to yourself while you’re out in the dating pool. Just a suggestion.’

After Coop and the others left, Darby sat alone in the house, waiting for the patrolman to deliver copies of the case files, which had been promised by Williams.

The man arrived a few minutes past 7.30. He had a handlebar moustache and smelled of pipe tobacco. The nametag stitched into the breast of his coat read MILLER. He stood on the front porch, and he didn’t ask to come in.

Not that Darby would have let him: every person allowed access to a crime scene increased the risk of contamination or the destruction of evidence.

‘Evidence files are in my trunk,’ the patrolman said to Darby. ‘You done in here?’

Darby nodded. ‘Does Williams want me to seal the door?’

‘No, just lock it up. Mike will seal it.’ Miller jerked a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the patrol car parked in front of the driveway. ‘He’s taking the night shift.’

‘Williams told me David Downes had a secretary, Sally something.’

‘Sally Kelly.’

‘Do you know her address? I’d like to talk to her tonight.’

‘I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I can get it for you.’

Darby grabbed her jacket and the keys to Coop’s rental. She placed the time of her departure on the security log, shut off all the lights and locked the door behind her. She carried her box of evidence to Miller’s patrol car, where she exchanged it for one stuffed with files.

Miller had written Sally Kelly’s address on a piece of paper. Darby plugged it into the GPS.

The faces of the dead crowded her thoughts as she drove through the pitch-black roads. They had streetlights, but they were turned off. She suspected the struggling town had cut the power to save money.

Darby was halfway through her sixteen-mile trip when she realized she’d left her kit at the house. She wanted to use her own equipment at the autopsies that she hoped would take place tomorrow. Not wanting to have to get up early to come and retrieve it, she turned around and backtracked to the Downes home.

Fifteen minutes later, when she pulled up against the kerb and parked a few feet behind the police cruiser assigned to watch the house, she felt her throat constrict, her breath like shards of glass trapped in her chest.

The lights for the master bedroom had been turned on.

13

Darby could see a shadow moving behind the shade facing the street. Then she looked to the cruiser bathed in the beam of her headlights and, seeing it was empty, killed the headlights and the ignition. She pocketed the keys as she threw open the car door, the veins in her temple and arms humming with what felt like an electrical charge.