Seven years ago Cody Williams was the FBI’s prime suspect in a series of horrific New England abductions. Seven years ago Alex Rourke put Cody Williams behind bars. Now Cody Williams is dying. He wants to set the record straight. And he’ll talk only to Alex . . .
Former FBI agent Rourke has successfully re-invented himself as a private detective, but he’s still haunted by the Williams case. And facing the monster again will mean squaring up to some demons from the past. For Cody has nothing left to lose – and a big final hand to play. When it appears that a victim of Cody’s might still be alive, Alex is left to make a terrible choice that, either way, will mean the end of at least one life.
Because it’s not just Cody Williams who has a dark secret . . .
What do you know about the people you see every day? Really? Just in passing?
You go swanning into the local Kentucky Fried McBurger King on the way back from the pub, or queue up for a couple of minutes for an evening of cinematic gunfights and explosions (or a four-hour epic in Polish about the decline of the wicker industry, if that’s more your cup of tea). You exchange the usual half dozen customer-worker sentences in conversation. A nice guy or a pretty girl gives you a smile at the bar, or you get chatting with someone in the queue at Sainsbury’s who happens to share your opinions on what constitutes a decent sausage. And then you’re off on your way and you never think about those people again.
Or – since you’re reading this on the internet and I assume you’re at least aware of the vague details even if you’ve never indulged in it yourself; this is, after all, an age when Sweden can open an embassy inside a virtual world whose first millionaire has just been mobbed with an a flock of animated dancing penises at an official news conference (an outrage top analysts describe as “very, very funny”) – you’re watching porn or seeing a picture of some half-naked girl in a newspaper. Even though you may be seeing them in mid-simulated intimacy, you know absolutely nothing about them, and maybe it doesn’t even occur to you to wonder any more about their lives than it does when you’re ordering a 12-piece McWhopper Bucket from someone in an unconvincing baseball cap.
But the odds are fairly good that, at some point, one of those people who’ve sailed in and out of your life like proverbial ships in the night has been, or is still, reported as missing from home or family.
Now, chances are if they were, it was a teenage runaway case and not some full-blown child abduction. Such tragic crimes are rare, in both the US and the UK. Far rarer than public perception or media portrayal would have you believe (people who quote figures saying that one child is abducted/disappears every X seconds don’t usually go on to say that the majority of those are temporary teenage runaways or one separated parent snatching the child from the custody of the other).
But still, you’ve seen them and you didn’t even know it. Now, suppose they vanished when they were just a kid. Even if you’d known them well, would you recognise them now?
Now, obviously this is a very long preamble to some talk about child abductions which basically boils down to “buy my book, it’s terribly good and interesting and everything”, but stick with me. Imagine, for a moment, bearing in mind you’ve probably already seen a missing person you didn’t know, how it would feel to learn that you’d seen a missing kid you did know. And that it was just in passing, they’re gone now and you have no idea where they’d be.
Not nice, I’d bet. Is it even possible? We’re talking years and years here, after all.
There are few things more depressing than seeing the appeal for help for a missing child on the news. A snippet of home video footage, a holiday photo showing them – well, usually her – at their best and brightest, the standard police press conference appealing for the missing girl to get in touch, for anyone who has her to come forward, for witnesses to call the officers dealing with the case.
By the time that conference, that news story, those appeals come round, it’s a sad fact that chances are she’s already dead. The FBI’s own statistics show that in child sexual abduction purposes, three quarters of the victims are dead within six hours, nine out of ten within 24. By the time that press conference appears on the news, the police certainly know the chances, the press probably do if they know their subject matter, and the family… well, who knows? It’s a terribly hard thing to do, giving up hope.
Unfortunately, it’s also not always possible to catch the person responsible, certainly not very quickly. Evidence is usually thin on the ground in the early stages of these investigations. A time of disappearance. A vehicle make or colour, maybe even a very, very vague description of the man responsible. At best, some grainy CCTV footage of a car. While this all helps narrow down the suspect list, it’s not much to start from. No physical evidence, nothing conclusive, few angles to work from. Until the body is found, weeks or months later.
And all that time the police, other families, everyone’s wondering if there’s going to be another one. Another child snatched. And the family of the first may still be clinging to the faint hope of seeing their kid return. It’s a genuinely horrible scenario.
Sometimes, of course, they do. Last year saw Natascha Kampusch found after 8 years in captivity. The last two of Mark DuTroux’s victims were found alive, one of them having spent nearly three months trapped in his basement dungeon. Tanya Kach, abducted at 14, was found last year after 10 years imprisonment. Teenagers run away from home and can turn up months or years after the event. But if they’ve been gone that long, it’s rare. If they’ve been abducted, doubly rare.
Now put yourself in the shoes of someone investigating one of these disappearances. You’ve got to deal with the family, families if there’s more than one. You’ve got pressure from all sides to get it solved. You’ve got a faint, faint hope of finding the victim alive. And you’ve got the gnawing feeling that you won’t have something solid to work with until they show up dead.
The complications don’t stop there, of course. Even if you’re successful, you have the psychological effects on the victims and their families, you have to deal with a perpetrator whose actions place them beyond the pale as far as the rest of humanity is concerned, but who you still have to at least try to understand if this sort of thing is to be stopped in the future.
Chances are, of course, that you won’t be. Not completely. Things of this sort rarely work out entirely. Usually, by the time anyone’s aware of the true extent of the crime, it’s too late for someone, somewhere.
So next time you’re in GeneriCoffee paying the server’s hourly wage for a decaff latte, or you see a young woman, strangely forlorn, sitting by herself in a parked car, or a stranger smiles at you in a bar, take a moment to wonder about who they are, how they got there. Where they’re heading.
