There was a knock at the door. It opened and the patrolman Darby had seen rooting around in the kitchen stepped inside the bedroom, a folded and badly wrinkled brown paper grocery bag pinched between his gloved fingers.

‘I found this on top of one of the kitchen cabinets,’ the patrolman said.

‘What’s in there?’ Darby asked.

‘A whole lot of pervert,’ he said. ‘Panties and bras of all colours and sizes, lipsticks, you name it, I’ve got it.’

62

Coop drove. The storm seemed to have tapered off, but the roads weren’t well ploughed, and it was slow-going.

‘You were awfully quiet back there,’ he said.

‘I have an Olympic-standard headache.’

Coop drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. The windshield wipers throbbed like a racing heartbeat.

‘I think there’s another agenda at work here,’ he said.

‘And what would that be?’

‘You really need me to say it?’

Darby didn’t answer, just stared out the front window. Everywhere she looked was white and wet; branches sagged from the weight of the snow.

‘I think you’re disappointed you’re not going to be alone in a room with Eli Savran. You want a shot at ripping his skin off,’ he said.

‘Wrong.’

‘For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve carried this idea in your head that evil can be extinguished. That if you put down a guy like Savran, it will somehow restore balance to the world. That’s what shrinks call “magical thinking”, right?’

‘Eli Savran is forty-seven,’ Darby said. ‘That would have made him fifteen or sixteen when Hubbard was abducted.’

‘The man who worked at the department store, Fisher, told the police he saw Hubbard walking out of the toy aisle and holding hands with a teenage boy. It fits.’

‘Fisher didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face.’

‘True. Not that it would matter if he had at this point. Fisher died eight, maybe ten years ago. Heroin overdose.’

‘I remember reading about it,’ said Darby.

‘Joan Hubbard is still alive, I’m pretty sure. Her husband, though, died. Heart attack or something.’

‘Coop, if Savran was fifteen when he took Hubbard, he wouldn’t have been old enough to drive.’

‘Doesn’t mean he couldn’t drive. He probably had his learner’s permit.’

‘Either way, why would Savran drive all the way to a mall in Wichita, snatch a seven-year-old girl and then drive all the way to Red Hill to kill her? That’s got to be at least five hundred miles each way.’

‘You’re assuming Savran was living here in Red Hill at the time. According to what Williams said, Savran was living with his old man.’

‘Okay, let’s say he was living in Wichita. Why would he decide to drive all the way to Colorado to kill her? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Since when do these guys ever think logically? They’re locked in a mind-meld with their peckers. And teenagers, even normal ones, do stupid shit and act reckless. You expect a teenager who’s also a budding psychopath to be well thought out and rational?’

Darby said nothing.

‘We don’t know anything about this guy yet,’ Coop said. ‘We haven’t dug into his background, we have no idea where he’s lived for the past thirty years or how his head’s wired.’

‘If Savran abducted and killed Hubbard, there’ll be a string of other related disappearances in his wake. Guys like this don’t stop at one. They keep going until they’re caught.’

‘We’ll be sure to ask him once we have him in custody.’

‘The guy shot at us last night. You think he’s going to surrender peacefully?’

Coop shifted in his seat, his tongue digging into a back molar.

‘We need to find a hardware store,’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘So I can buy a can of pesticide and kill that bug that’s crawled up your ass.’ He turned to her and said, ‘You want to tell me what’s really eating at you, or do you want to stay in this foul mood?’

‘If Savran who, at fifteen, maybe sixteen, abducted Hubbard and killed her inside the Downes house, why would he return to it some thirty years later to bind, torture and kill an entire family? Why revisit the crime scene?’

‘Ted Bundy revisited his killing grounds. All those women in Seattle who disappeared – he later admitted to bringing them all to the same area up in the mountains, where he raped, killed and buried them.’

‘That was outdoors. We’re talking about a house. He killed an entire family and left them there for the police. He had to have known we’d come there and find Hubbard’s blood – if it is, in fact, her blood.’

‘Which is why he decided to go over it with bleach.’

‘The man who killed these families is extremely methodical and careful. He wouldn’t kill a family at the same place where he killed a seven-year-old girl who went on to become the world’s most famous missing kid. There’s no way he’d take a risk like that unless he –’

Darby cut herself off and straightened a little in her seat.

‘Unless he what?’ Coop prompted.

‘Last night at the bar I told you that no one in this town seemed afraid of the Red Hill Ripper. That maybe we were looking at this from the wrong angle, that if we removed sex from the equation we were left with only two possible motives.’

‘Power and money.’

‘What if the Ripper had to kill the Downes family?’

‘Then that would mean all the families are linked somehow – that they weren’t randomly selected.’

‘And he’s only killing families who live in Red Hill. He hasn’t killed a single family in a neighbouring town. It’s all focused here in Red Hill.’

Coop’s satphone trilled and vibrated inside the dashboard cubbyhole.

The caller was a federal agent named Susan Villa who worked in the lab. She was calling about the duct tape.

‘Susan, I’m going to put you on speakerphone. I’ve got Darby McCormick with me. She’s consulting with us on the case.’ He handed Darby the phone so he could concentrate on driving. ‘Okay, Susan, go ahead.’

‘The duct tape samples you sent match a brand called True Armour.’

‘All the samples?’

‘Every one. Brand’s very popular and used mainly for boating and outdoors because the glue is especially water resistant.’

‘We found several rolls inside a suspect’s home. I’ll FedEx out a roll to you hopefully sometime later today. Right now we’re still buried in a snowstorm.’

‘One other thing,’ Villa said. ‘That strip of tape you sent us with the piece of latex stuck on it – that spot you found is ink. Hayes identified it using the mass spectrometer in your mobile lab. But your mass spec didn’t have the proper library loaded on to it, so it couldn’t identify the brand.’

The relaxed and breezy way the woman spoke made it clear she hadn’t yet found out about what had happened to Hayes, Otto and Hoder.

‘It’s a black ink called “Magic Moon”,’ Villa said. ‘You can’t find it any more, except on places like eBay or on websites that cater to fountain pen and ink enthusiasts. Company that made it, J. D. Humphrey, went out of business in the early seventies.’

‘This ink,’ Darby said. ‘Does it come in a pear-shaped bottle? Is there a picture of a penguin in a tuxedo on the label?’

‘Yeah,’ Villa replied, surprised. ‘I take it you’re into pens?’

‘No, but I know someone who might be.’

63

Coop dropped her off in front of the Silver Moon Inn and then went to park at the back, where a plough attached to a truck with a blown front suspension was trying to clear away the snow. Her rental, which was still parked across the street, was hidden behind a ploughed wall that was higher than the car’s roof.

The hotel lobby was quiet and thick with heat from the fire that cracked and hissed in the hearth. Darby stomped the snow off her boots and went to the reception desk. The scuffed black fountain pen and ledger she’d seen the night she checked in were still on the counter, along with the pear-shaped bottle of ink.