Fear the Dark

For the next half hour, in the uncomfortably close atmosphere reeking of spilled beer, testosterone and sweat, deodorant and cologne, she interviewed the bartender and waitresses about any customer or local who may have smelled like fish or garbage. Coming up empty-handed, she moved to the pool-room and put the same question to a group of college-aged guys who had the collective IQ of a balloon. Most didn’t listen to her, their gazes listless and their attention elsewhere, as they wondered what she looked like naked, she supposed, or how she’d be in the sack.

When she struck out with them, she went to tackle the dining crowd and found Coop standing by the corner of the bar, his chest rising and falling as he sucked in air. His nostrils were wide and white around the edges, and as she drew closer she could see his eyes glowing with the atavistic intensity of a boxer who was about to step into the ring and unload all of his dark energies.

Darby cleared her throat several times. She felt like a rock was lodged there.

‘I was going to tell you, Coop.’

Coop said nothing. Darby couldn’t meet his eyes. She turned her head, folded her arms on the bar and pretended to read the labels on a row of vodka bottles.

‘Well? ’

‘Lancaster knew the autopsies had been rescheduled for this morning,’ Darby said. ‘He –’

‘You had no proof of that when you cold-cocked him – in an autopsy room.’

‘Guys like Lancaster lose a piece of their brain every time they sit on a toilet. You want a guy like that spearheading an investigation like this?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Sometimes you’ve got to stick their dicks into a socket to rewire their thinking.’

Coop’s head looked like it was about to explode.

‘He’s been screwing with us ever since we got here,’ Darby said. ‘The autopsies were the cherry on the sundae.’

Coop leaned sideways against the bar. ‘The guy’s an asshole. Everyone knows he’s an asshole; it’s an established fact. You’ve dealt with your fair share of career-climbing dicks who use cases as political leverage, pencil-pushers and bureaucratic cocksuckers who get off on napalming your work. But not once have you ever clocked one in public – at least not that I’m aware of. Then again, I’m learning all sorts of new and interesting things about your behaviour.’

‘Like Williams says, Teddy Lancaster brings out the best in people.’

Coop dug his tongue hard into one of his back molars and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘Lancaster decided not to press criminal charges, obviously, or we’d be having this conversation inside a holding cell,’ he said. ‘A civil case, well, that’s another matter. He’ll go after you first. He’ll go after the Bureau, because we hired you and because we’ve got the deeper pockets. Lancaster will get a nice little payout to keep his mouth shut, and then the Bureau will need to make an example of someone, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Terry Hoder. Before you went all Mike Tyson on him, did you once stop to consider how poorly this would reflect on me?’

‘I lost my cool.’

‘No shit. Why? What happened?’

‘He said something to me privately.’

‘What? What did he say?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘You just tossed a Molotov on to my career, and you’re not going to tell me why?’

Darby swallowed. Cleared her throat.

‘It’s done, Coop.’ And I don’t regret it either, she added to herself.

Darby could feel his eyes burrowing into the side of her face. When he spoke again, his voice vacillated between rage and disbelief.

‘I went to the station looking for you. To give you this.’ Coop placed a satellite phone on the bar. ‘Hoder said you were at the station. After he filled me in on what was going on, knowing you, I figured you’d come here to ask around about this Timmy character. Little did we know you were at a Rite Aid. So you can imagine my surprise when that 911 call came through. The kid working the cash register called it in, in case you’re wondering.’

‘I showed him and the pharmacist my ID,’ Darby said. ‘After it was all over, I told them they had nothing to worry about.’

‘That’s not the point. You sneaked out of the station and tried to put the screws on the pharmacist.’

‘I was following up on our lead.’

‘You went alone. You’re not supposed to go anywhere alone and, worse, after what went down you didn’t call it in. The guy you spoke to, was he the same one who called you last night at the hotel?’

‘I’m pretty sure. Voice was altered.’

‘So why didn’t you call it in?’

‘Do you think he was standing around waiting after he left the rope in my car?’

‘What rope?’ Coop asked.

Darby realized that, in her exhausted state, she hadn’t told anyone about it. She had gone straight to the Wagon Wheel after leaving the Rite Aid.

‘While I was inside the pharmacy, he was inside my car. He left the door hanging open, and when I went outside I found two pieces of rope tied into a surgeon’s knot lying on my car seat.’

Coop looked away, blinking. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘It’s in an evidence bag in the trunk of my car – not that we’re going to find anything on it.’

‘There’s a thing called procedure, remember? You follow procedure in order to build a case, and you have to build a case in order to –’

‘IT’S A WASTE OF TIME.’

Darby had drawn the attention of nearby people. She scooped up her new satphone, stuffed it inside her jacket pocket, inched closer to him and, leaning forward, crossed her arms against the bar, their shoulders touching.

‘Don’t you see what he’s doing, Coop? The bullshit with the photos, tracing the cell signal, calling the pharmacy, leaving the rope – the second this guy does something, we all jump. He wants us to keep spi

Coop saw her point. His face softened a bit, but the anger was still in his eyes.

‘Look, I’m sorry for what happened with Lancaster,’ she said. ‘And maybe I should have called after what went down at the pharmacy.’

‘Maybe? Are you serious?’

‘While I was driving, I kept checking my mirrors to see if I was being followed. There’s no way he tailed me.’

‘Maybe you couldn’t see him through the snow.’

Darby shook her head. ‘That’s what I thought at first,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t see a single car light behind me during the entire ride – and he had to have had his lights on because almost every road I took was pitch-black, not a single street light on anywhere. And I passed hardly any cars.’

‘So how did he know you were at the pharmacy?’

‘I asked myself the same question,’ Darby said. ‘What’s the best way to follow someone in today’s high-tech world without being seen?’

‘He put a GPS tracker on your car?’ Coop asked.

Darby nodded. ‘I immediately checked my car after I left the pharmacy. Found it wired in right near the engine block. It’s one of those hundred-dollar units that send out their location every couple of minutes to a smartphone or laptop. He didn’t have to tail me because he knew where I was going.’

‘I love it when the pervs go high-tech.’ Coop sighed. ‘This tracker, where is it?’

‘Still there. I don’t want him to know I found it. If we can get its frequency, we might be able to lock on to it and track him down. Hoder told me you brought the equipment from Denver.’

Coop nodded. ‘He swept our rooms for bugs and didn’t find any, by the way. Yours was the only one.’

‘Where’s Hayes now?’

‘Back at the MoFo working on the computer traces for Hoder. Nothing yet.’

‘We should check all of our other vehicles, see if anyone else has been tagged with a tracker.’