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 hell 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 bullshit 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 booby-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 encumber 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 brass switch plate with four click buttons, she hit one at random. No lights went on. She pressed the other buttons, 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.’