Fear the Dark by Chris Mooney Read Free Book Online Page A

having an autopsy performed before the organs had completely deteriorated. Williams had followed the morgue van to Brewster to plead his case to Ben Stern, the district coroner and chief medical examiner. Williams promised he’d beg – on his knees, if necessary – to get the autopsies slated for sometime tomorrow.
    Darby doubted Ray Williams would have to go to such lengths. Like Coop, the Red Hill detective had been blessed with effortless charm, someone who could get both men and women to do favours, pull strings and jump through hoops with smiles on their faces.
    Darby entered the house. She put on a mask, then signed the log and moved up the stairs. Coop appeared inthe bedroom doorway, his head and face covered by a hood and a respirator mask.
    ‘Bad news on the duct tape,’ she said to him. ‘No prints on the adhesive side. The smooth side, I don’t know yet; they’re in the Superglue Chamber.’
    ‘Not that surprising. We know this guy’s careful.’
    ‘What I did find, though, was a small piece of latex that’s marked with what looks like ink. If we can get sweat or some skin cells off it, we might have a DNA sample.’
    ‘Otto and I just finished using luminol. Our man didn’t use bleach to wipe down anything inside the bathroom, and he didn’t dump it down any of the drainpipes either. We took them apart and swabbed them just to be sure. Now come and take a look at this.’
    She followed him to the corner of the bedroom. A square section of flooring had been removed and then taken apart and placed inside evidence bags.
    ‘In addition to using Mr Clean on this area, he also used bleach,’ Coop said. ‘I sprayed it with luminol and everything glowed. The hardwood is old and scuffed – it’s probably the original flooring. The poly sealant is pretty much gone, which is good news for us. The chemicals and rag or whatever he used couldn’t penetrate the crevices between the boards.’
    ‘You find blood?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Coop said. ‘A ton of it.’

I find Red Hill incredibly depressing this time of year – grey winter mornings and short afternoons where the wind hits your skin like a drill bit, keeping people off the streets and tucked inside their homes. By 4 p.m., the world is swallowed inside a pitch-black darkness.
    And yet it is during this time – what I call my ‘black hole hours’ – when I feel the most alive – when the part of me that I keep hidden during the daylight is wide awake, throbbing for attention.
    Just a glimpse , I tell myself as I drive. Just a glimpse, and then I’ll go home .
    My destination tonight is two towns away, a place called Kelly’s Bar and Restaurant. I have no idea if Tricia’s working tonight; this trip is a last-minute idea, a way to clear my head and think. Still, my heart sinks into an acid pit of worry and fear at the idea of her not being there. I need to see her tonight or I won’t be able to sleep.
    When I pull into the parking lot, I spot a white Honda Civic with a battered rear bumper and a University of Denver decal stuck to the rear window. The anxiety caged inside my chest uncoils, and I immediately feel myself start to relax.
    The bar’s Christmas decorations are still up. A fake wreath hangs on the front door and, secured to a railingwith a bungee cord, is a big, glowing plastic Santa that I’m pretty sure was rescued from a garbage dump. It’s scraped and stained; a chunk of plastic the size of my fist is missing from Santa’s head.
    The interior is small, just a handful of tables sprinkled around a U-shaped bar of polished walnut, its edges decorated with white lights shaped like icicles. The warm, fetid air smells of fried food, even though the dining-room tables are empty, and there is only one person seated at the bar, an old timer wearing a red flannel shirt. His ruddy cheeks are peppered with patches of grey whiskers, and the remaining wisps of white, downy hair lie across his liver-spotted scalp like feathers.
    Standing behind