The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut Read Online Free PDF Page B

room. The lights were either off entirely or turned down real low and the room was wreathed in gloom.
    “This is Outer Control,” Shaw said. “You’ll have to leave most of your personal items here for security reasons. I’ll provide you with one of our debit cards so if you want a coffee or anything you can get it from the machines in the visiting room.”
    I dropped my wallet, keys and scant pocket clutter into the box provided by the guard on duty.
    “You’re not going in, is that right, Agent Downes?” Shaw said.
    “That’s correct. I’ll be watching through the door from here.”
    Shaw turned to the guard and said, “Tell them to show Williams in.”
    A grating, mechanical buzzing echoed across the dim emptiness of the visiting room. A door on the far side opened and the bright electric glare beyond temporarily flooded the area with light, picking out everything in sharp relief. Silhouetted against the blue-white glow were two men, one of them a guard with his hand on the other’s shoulder. A flash of the second man’s long, unkempt hair, bouncing against his shoulders as he shuffled forward. No more than five and a half feet tall, a ragged, wiry figure hidden behind a prison uniform slightly too large for him. Eyes that caught a stray reflection from the high windows to the right and glittered in the gloom as he sat and his escort turned to leave.
    “For Christ’s sake, Clive, turn some lights on,” Shaw said to the guard next to us.
    Two of the fluorescents inside flickered into life, strobing the prisoner below, picking out every feature in crystal detail. Lank curly brown hair. Hooded eyes and sallow skin. Blank expression. Grey sweatshirt stamped with the DOC logo over a rumpled white shirt turning yellow at the corners. Manacled hands resting on the table, fingernails bitten and ragged.
    A second buzzer sounded, and the door in front of me opened. Cody Williams looked up and smiled crookedly.

05.

    Providence, RI. 1997.

    “I want to start by walking Holly’s route,” I said to Detective Hall and Jeff Agostini once we’d left the Tynons alone and retreated to the kitchen. “It should only take five minutes. I’ll go talk to the friend she was with and her family. What are their names?”
    “Tina Aitken is the girl,” Hall said. “Cole and Natasha are her parents.”
    “Tina, Cole, Natasha. Right.”  
    “What do you need to ask them?”
    “I just want to hear whatever details they can give me first-hand. Have you spoken to them?”
    Hall nodded. “Yeah, I have.”
    “Any chance the father did this? It’s best to start close and work outwards in my experience.”
    “No,” Hall said, shaking his head. “He was watching TV with his wife between the time Holly left and the time John Tynon called him to see whether she was still there.”
    “In which case, all I want is just to hear their stories and to get a look at the neighborhood. There’s a chance Holly wasn’t grabbed by a complete stranger, but by someone who lives locally who might have seen her on the journey home.”
    “You think that’s likely?” Agostini asked.
    “No. Possible.”
    “Possible, right. It’s just, like, hard to imagine the son of a bitch who’d do something like that living somewhere like this, you know?”
    “It’s always hard to imagine it happening anywhere,” I said. “But it happens.”  
    Hall nodded. “Yeah, it happens. Even here. Although this is the first we’ve had in years. What’ll you be looking for, Agent Rourke?”
    “I’ll just run my eyes over the neighborhood, see if anything stands out. I’ll see if Tina can think of anyone else Holly might have gone to meet. Other friends. Maybe someone secret she wouldn’t tell her folks.”
    “It’s ground we’ve already covered, but I guess there’s no harm in seeing if anyone’s remembered anything more. Is there anything you need us to do?”
    “You’ve checked her route with K-9 units, is that right?”
    “Earlier this