Free The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut by John Rickards Page A

have asked you anything more. We had thought we’d managed to put the whole thing behind us, knowing she’d never be coming back to us and that we had to move on. Strange how we still cling to any hope of news after all this time. Now we are both praying that you can learn what we need from him.
    We’ve seen those people protesting on the news. We can’t believe it or understand it. Please don’t let them get to you, Agent Rourke. You were always good to us while you were looking for Holly and the man who killed her. Please keep trying, for us.  
    Good luck and God bless,
    John and Martha Tynon

    I read the letter through, then dropped it on the coffee table. Headed for the jail under the cold sunshine of the Massachusetts fall. I swallowed the emotions, tried not to get caught up in the old hurt of the Tynon family.
    Williams greeted me with a long, ragged clearing of his throat. This time he didn’t manage to hawk up any phlegm, just made dry gasping noises, his mouth opening and closing like a fish, before he got himself under control. Once he was finished, he said, “So who do you want to talk about today, Agent Rourke?”
    I grabbed a coffee from the machine and sat down opposite him. “Well, we’re done with the kids we already know about. So how about we start with Katelyn Sellars? She was the first of your victims we still haven’t found.”
    “Well, it ain't necessarily so that we’re out of people we know about. There’s at least one other we both know.” He smiled faintly, wolfish. “But sure, let’s talk about that Sellars girl.”
    “You picked her up on her way to school, right?”
    Williams smirked. “Yeah. I had to leave early that day, driving all the way to Albany. You got a photo of her? For old times’ sake.”
    “No.”
    “Too bad. She looked real fine that morning. Good enough to eat. Black school trousers. Them little white socks. Just lovely.”
    I sighed, tried to hurry him up, get him to the point. “You snatched her in the usual way? The lost delivery driver routine. Bundle her into the van.”
    “Yeah. Her mind must’ve been elsewhere ‘cos she hardly knew it was happening. Hadn’t even started trying to scream by the time I had her in the van and the door shut again.” He ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip. “I took her away, had to stash her before we got to Albany.”
    “Where did you stash her?”
    “That doesn’t matter, Agent Rourke. She wasn’t there long. Some place off the highway.”
    “You moved her again afterwards?”
    Williams picked at one of his ragged fingernails. “Sure. Ain’t no good doing all this if you’ve got no privacy. There’s a house near Lake Stevenson. People I used to know sometimes used it for fishing or getting drunk. Abandoned for ages, and I guess none of them had been back there in years. So the place was ideal. I took her there. Kept her there for a while, a couple of days.”
    “Could you mark it on a map if I gave you one?”
    Williams shrugged, thought for a moment, looking down at his hands. “Maybe. Might take a while for me to figure out what’s what. Leave a map with me and maybe I can find it.”
    “After you’d kept her there for a few days, then what?”
    “She was in a bad way by then and I had a load of work on, y’know? I had a lot of deliveries and things to do. She was just a nuisance, pretty fucked up by that time. So I strangled her, right there on the floor.” There was no emotion in his voice at all. He might as well have been reading a weather report. He really didn't care, didn't feel a thing. The only hint of anything deeper came after a brief pause, when he added, “It was strange, seeing her lying there. She’d looked so perfect, walking down the street. Didn’t seem like the same girl.”
    Katelyn Sellars was in the Girl Scouts. She had a crush on a guy in the grade above her called Jack. She had dreams of becoming a fashion designer and moving to Europe.  
    “You dumped her