Over the ensuing years, Brad discovered that no amount or combination of heroin, booze or pills could stop him from wondering what had happened to Nicky Hubbard. Only God knew.

Sometimes he would ask God: Why didn’t you help her?

Sometimes God replied, but His answer was always the same:

Why didn’t you help her? You were there, not me. You could have stopped it from happening, and you didn’t.

Darby stopped reading and skimmed the rest of the file, glancing at its meagre offerings – the pithy investigative notes and false leads, the lack of evidence. When she reached the last page, she looked up at Coop.

‘Aren’t you going to read the rest of it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I didn’t realize you were already familiar with the case.’

‘Nicky Hubbard is the nation’s poster girl for missing children. She’s the reason why Congress created the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in ’85. People wrote books about what they think happened to her, they made a TV movie of the week.

‘Why did you give me this?’

‘The plastic print I found in the polyurethane along the Downes bedroom skirting board – the database came back with a match,’ Coop said. ‘That fingerprint belongs to Nicky Hubbard.’

57

Darby’s mouth and throat went dry.

No one knew what had happened to Nicky Hubbard – no one except her killer, who had never been caught. And now Coop was telling her he’d found Hubbard’s fingerprints more than three decades later at the scene of a recent triple homicide in another state.

‘I examined the print myself,’ he said, and reached inside his rumpled, blood-stained overcoat. ‘There’s no question: it belongs to her. But don’t take my word for it.’

He came back with another folded set of papers and handed them to her. It was the forensics report on the plastic fingerprint he had recovered from the skirting board.

The FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System had found four possible matches. The one with the highest probability belonged to Nicky Hubbard. Wichita PD had collected the girl’s fingerprints from items inside her bedroom and they had been loaded into IAFIS when it was officially launched on 28 July 1990.

Someone at the federal lab had pulled Hubbard’s original prints and emailed them to Coop, who performed a visual side-by-side comparison with the plastic print recovered from the Downes home. The evidence was conclusive. Nicky Hubbard, the seven-year-old missing girl who had been adopted by the nation had, at some point in time, been inside the bedroom where David and Laura Downes and their daughter had died. It was impossible to tell when Hubbard had been in there; fingerprints couldn’t be dated. There was no known method to determine how long a print had been on a surface.

‘This came through about five minutes ago,’ Coop said, pointing to the forensics report in her hand. ‘The IAFIS office called to tell me. No one else knows yet.’

‘Where d’you print these out?’

‘Robinson’s office. Williams is letting me use it.’ Then Coop’s face clouded, and he added, ‘Robinson is at Brewster General too. Heart attack. At the moment he’s in a stable condition.’

Darby placed the pages on her lap. She leaned back against her pillow and stared out the door, at the brightly lit hallway. Her mind felt empty, her body devoid of any feeling, as though she had been disconnected from everything that had happened since her arrival in Red Hill. It was as if her blood had been replaced with Novocain.

‘How old were you when it happened?’ Coop asked.

‘Eleven. You?’

‘Thirteen. You remember what that time was like?’

Darby nodded. ‘You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing Nicky Hubbard. She was on the front page of every major newspaper, magazine and supermarket tabloid. Parents were suddenly terrified their kids were going to get snatched in broad daylight. After she disappeared, my parents never let me out of their sight.’

‘My mother was the same way with me and my sisters,’ Coop said. ‘Forget about leaving the house after sundown. Suddenly I couldn’t walk or ride my bike anywhere or play hoops without her chaperoning me.’

Darby’s gaze dropped back to her lap. Nicky Hubbard smiled up at her. The now-famous photograph, Darby had remembered reading, was the last picture Joan Hubbard had taken of her daughter.

‘The Hubbard case was really the first of its kind,’ he said. ‘A real watershed moment for the nation and for law enforcement.’

Coop wasn’t exaggerating. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hadn’t existed in 1983, and the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was still years away. In 1983 there was no Megan’s Law requiring law enforcement agencies to inform the public about registered sexual offenders living in or around their neighbourhoods. No internet or email, just Teletype and fax machines. In 1983 it was easier to find a missing horse than an abducted or missing child.

‘Now we know why he cleaned up that area in the bedroom,’ Coop said. ‘That blood we found wedged between the hardwood floorboards must’ve belonged to her.’

‘I wonder why he didn’t try to remove the fingerprint.’

‘He probably didn’t see it. Christ, we could barely see it with the ALS machine.’

‘How many blood samples were in the trailer?’

‘All of them. They’re gone.’

Darby smoothed out the wrinkles on her sheets, thinking.

‘I think you were right about what you said to me at the bar,’ Coop said.

‘I said a lot of things last night.’

‘I’m talking specifically about what you said about him running us around to exhaust us. I’m on Day Three with a total of maybe five hours of sleep and my head feels like it’s stuffed full of cobwebs. I can’t think straight. I want to shut my eyes and not wake up for a week.

‘But the truth is, we haven’t been able to conduct a full investigation,’ Coop continued. ‘We haven’t been able to examine the other homes – all of which, by the way, are vacant. Including you and me, we had a total of five federal investigators here. Ray Williams is the only detective. Ever since we arrived, the perp has been taxing our resources. Why? Because of the blood he left behind. Can you imagine what would happen if it got out that Hubbard’s blood was found thirty years later at the scene of a triple homicide? This place would turn into a geek show. Every reporter, retired cop and private investigator would be crawling through town. We wouldn’t be able to get work done, and this guy would bolt – has probably already bolted. What, you disagree?’

‘No. No, I’m with you.’

‘But?’

‘Why not just lay low or, even better, pack up and get out of town? Why stick around?’

‘I had the same question.’

‘And if the Red Hill Ripper brought Nicky Hubbard to the Downes house three decades ago, why would he go back there and kill the Downes family?’

‘Another excellent question. We’ll have to ask Eli Savran.’

‘Who’s Eli Savran?’ Darby asked.

‘Our man Timmy,’ Coop replied.

58

‘His full name is Eli Timothy Savran,’ Coop said. ‘Remember the cleaning crew Robinson told us about last night, the one from Brewster that services the police stations and the sheriff’s office?’

Darby nodded. ‘Robinson said Williams was going to talk to the guy who owned it, Ron something.’

‘Ron Gondek. Williams did, last night. Turns out Gondek hired Timmy – and that’s what he prefers to be called, Tim or Timmy, not Eli. Timmy’s forty-seven, and he worked for the cleaning company for about two months and then he quit.’

‘Why?’

‘He told Gondek his mother had died and left him a good sum of money and a mortgage-free house. He was going to go back to school to get a degree in business or computer science, Gondek couldn’t remember which. But he did remember that Timmy cleaned the Red Hill station and that Timmy suffered from a rare metabolic condition known as TMAU, also known as Fish Odour Syndrome.’