And now I’m safe again, and there’s only one last thing to do.

‘Nicky can’t hurt us,’ I tell her as I sit down on the desk chair. ‘She’s dead. They all are.’ I point to the small bag of plastic zip-ties Kelly had placed on the counter and say, ‘Grab a couple of those. I need you to tie me up.’

Sarah returns with the bindings. ‘Everyone on the planet is looking for Hubbard,’ she says as she ties my wrists together. ‘The FBI aren’t going to go away. They’ll stay here and look for her.’

‘They won’t. Grab the tape from the floor.’

She does, and I say, ‘The Hubbard stuff will die down, I promise. After that, we’ll be free to go wherever we want, together.’

Sarah kisses me deeply. Smiling and grateful, she secures the tape over my mouth.

Then she’s gone, and I’m alone inside the house, tied up and gagged, another unfortunate victim of the Red Hill Ripper. The air reeks of blood and gun smoke and, as I close my eyes, I think about the way Sarah stiffened when I touched her. I’m not worried. She loves me. She always does what she’s told.

69

Coop sat back down in Chief Robinson’s office chair, about to have another go at the property records for the Downes home, when from down the hall he heard the dispatcher’s alarmed voice say, ‘Dead. They’re all dead.’

Coop was suddenly on his feet and moving into the hall, which was practically desolate. Red Hill PD had been called in to help with the manhunt for Eli Savran. His Ford Bronco hadn’t been sighted anywhere in Red Hill, Brewster or the surrounding towns. The Colorado state police had started reviewing the security-camera footage for all their nearby tollbooths, looking for the Bronco, but Coop was willing to bet a week’s salary that the guy had changed it for a stolen car and left town. By now, he was probably already out of the state.

Inside the communications room, Betty the dispatcher was talking to a patrolman Coop hadn’t seen before, a tall, skinny guy with a slight overbite who looked like he had just graduated from puberty. They saw Coop approaching and visibly stiffened.

Darby, he thought, a cold pit forming in his stomach.

She’s dead, he thought as he jogged towards them, rubber-legged. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed since Darby had called to tell him she’d arrived at Sally Kelly’s house. Then she had gone into radio-silence mode and refused to answer her satellite phone. No big surprise there. When it came to working a case, Darby always did things in her own way and in her own time, which was why he had sent the patrolman with the gummy smile, Whitehead, to chaperone her. There had been no reason to worry, he had told himself, throwing his attention back into the property records.

Coop didn’t need to ask the question. Betty, face ashen and voice tight, answered it for him. ‘Doug’s there right now. He just called.’

‘Doug who?’

‘Freeman. He’s one of ours.’ The look in the woman’s eyes made Coop want to turn away and block his ears, just as he did when he was a boy, when his parents were fighting. If don’t see it or hear it that means it didn’t happen.

The dispatcher licked her lips and her body trembled as she spoke. ‘Sally Kelly, Lancaster and Whitehead – Doug Freeman says they’re all dead. Gunshots. Blood everywhere, he said.’

Coop had his keys in his hand. ‘Dr McCormick?’

‘He didn’t say anything about her. He had just radioed to say he was entering the house. I’ll call him right now.’

But Coop was already running down the hall.

The snow had stopped. It was a few minutes shy of 5.30, and the sky was pitch black. He couldn’t hold his hand steady when he dialled the number for the computer guys in Denver to trace the signal for Darby’s satellite phone. After he hung up, he drove with both hands gripping the wheel to stop his arms from shaking.

Dead, the dispatcher had said.

The wind howled and slammed against his car, and it occurred to him, again, how a good portion of his adult life had been spent caged with anxiety, worrying about the moment when he received the call that Darby had finally died.

They’re all dead, Betty had said.

For as long as he’d known her, she had been attracted to darkness – and attracted too much darkness. And yet wasn’t that the reason why he had fallen in love with her in the first place? He had tried to disconnect himself from her, to gain some distance, by dating a string of women who had the intelligence, emotional depth and career ambition of a cucumber. Why? They were a distraction, sure, but more importantly they were uncomplicated, easy to be with and, emotionally, easy to manage. The moment one of them wanted more, he picked another living Barbie doll.

Darby was dangerous to him – to everyone, really, when he thought about it. Inviting her into his life on a full-time basis meant subjecting himself to a purgatory of anxiety and aggravation, waiting for the inevitable call that she had been killed. Naively – maybe even stupidly – he thought he could spare himself the full impact of that moment by refusing to allow himself to be emotionally entangled with her. That decision, he thought, would give him some much-needed distance. A possible buffer. And yet here he was, sinking, his lungs and stomach filling with what felt like wet cement.

His satphone rang. As he reached for it, he knew it was the dispatcher, Betty, calling to tell him Darby was dead. But the caller-ID said ‘Harold Scott’. Who was that? It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t remember why, and then suddenly he did: Scott was the special agent in charge of the Denver field office. He was due to arrive at the Red Hill station at six.

Coop answered the call.

Scott got right to it. ‘What happened last night, Eli Savran – the cat’s out of the bag,’ he said. ‘Story’s all over the local and national news, the internet and Twitter. You got anything new on your end?’

Coop told him about Sally Kelly’s house. ‘I don’t know much,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way there right now.’

‘So Savran is still in Red Hill.’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Give me the address.’

Coop did, reading it off the GPS. He was ten minutes away – probably more, because of all the snow packing the barren roads.

‘I’ll meet you there,’ Scott said. ‘Take control of the scene, make sure no one tramples on anything.’

‘Understood.’ Scott hadn’t mentioned anything about Nicky Hubbard’s fingerprint. It was possible he didn’t know yet. That, or he had been told by the lab’s fingerprint people and was sitting on it for the moment. Either way, Coop knew he couldn’t sit on it any longer. ‘Sir, are you someplace where you can talk freely? I have some sensitive information I need to share with you.’

‘I’m alone in my car.’

Coop told him about finding Nicky Hubbard’s fingerprint and about what he’d found out earlier in the property records – that before the Downes family moved into their home, it had been vacant for nearly a year. The original owners, Robert and Alice Birmingham, were dead – Robert of a stroke in ’79; the wife following four years later, of a heart attack in her sleep, during the spring of 1983, the same year Nicky Hubbard had been abducted. During the time the home was vacant, their only child, Stephen Birmingham, who had been living in San Diego when his mother died, hired contractors to renovate the house – new roof, new carpeting, the walls and floorboards in all the rooms stripped down to the bare wood and freshly painted and stained. At some point during that time, Savran had brought Nicky Hubbard there and she had touched the floorboard while it was still drying, her fingerprint forever sealed in the poly.

‘You’re sure about this?’ Scott asked. ‘About Hubbard’s fingerprint?’

‘There’s no question.’

‘Jesus H. Christ.’

In the silence that followed, Coop’s mind swung back to Darby, to the dead waiting for him inside Sally Kelly’s house. As he glanced again at the GPS, he pictured the patrolman navigating his way through a house of blood and gun smoke.