Darby closed her notebook and placed her business card on the table. ‘If you remember or think of anything else, you can call me on my cell. You can also leave a message for me at the station or at the hotel, the Silver Moon Inn. Thank you for your time, Miss Kelly.’

Sally Kelly gripped the back of the bench and struggled to rise.

‘I can let myself out,’ Darby said. ‘Please, sit.’

‘I need to lock up after you leave.’

Darby helped the woman to her feet. ‘What’s your take on the Red Hill Ripper?’

‘My take?’

‘You have any thoughts on it?’

Kelly looked like she’d been asked to lick a toilet seat. ‘Absolutely not,’ she said, as they shuffled into the living-room. ‘That is not a topic I choose to dwell on.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Are you married? Live with anyone?’

Darby shook her head.

‘I’ve been on my own my whole life. You reach a certain age and you learn to shut out certain things or you’ll spend the remainder of your life in a constant state of paralysing fear.’ There was no anger or remorse in her voice or expression, just a sad acceptance. ‘I purposefully don’t follow the news any more because I find it too upsetting, too violent. I’m not naive, but that doesn’t mean I have to invite it into my life. And I certainly don’t want to carry such thoughts with me into bed each night.’

They had reached the front door. There was no peephole or deadbolt, just a cheap rickety security-door chain that had probably come with the house. It looked old, and the brass plating had chipped away over time.

‘It’s an exercise in futility, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘Evil. Trying to understand it, trying to stop it. It will have its way with you if it wants, won’t it?’

Sally Kelly seemed to be waiting for an answer. Darby didn’t have one to give her.

16

The Silver Moon Inn resembled one of those old-time prosperous banks built during the height of the mining boom – three floors of weathered brick and Victorian-style windows, each with a fleur-de-lis above the keystone. Parking was in the back.

Darby stepped inside the dimly lit lobby and felt as though she had just slipped through a portal into an early-nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club, the kind where old white men wore three-piece suits and carried pocket watches and sat around discussing politics and the matters of the day while smoking cigars and drinking single-malt Scotch served to them by white-gloved waiters. The ornate chandelier hanging over the well-worn leather club chairs looked like it had been rescued from some dank English castle. The small reception desk was made of old wood. Mounted on the wall behind it was an old-fashioned cabinet of pigeonholes, used to store the individual room keys. A banker’s lamp glowed from the corner of the front counter.

Darby placed her box of files on the counter. Apparently the owner wanted to keep the whole Boardwalk Empire motif going, because she didn’t find a computer, just a thick ledger, and, lying on its top, an antique-looking fountain pen and a small, pear-shaped bottle of black ink with a tuxedoed penguin on the front. The blue and red sticker for ‘J. D. Humphrey Ink’ had cracked and yellowed over time, and its edges had curled.

Darby found the hotel bell, but there was no need to press it; the door behind the reception counter had swung open. The woman who lumbered out had a braided grey ponytail and wore lots of silver jewellery. She looked exhausted, the bruised skin under her eyes hanging like black curtains. Darby assumed she slept in the back office: she had spotted a cot propped up against the wall before the door shut.

‘Welcome to the Silver Moon Inn, Miss McCormick.’ The woman saw the question mark in Darby’s face and said, ‘The FBI told me you’d be coming in sometime today. You’re on the ground floor, Room 8.’ She reached into a pigeonhole and came back with a key.

‘An actual, physical key,’ Darby said with a grin. ‘I can’t remember the last time I was at a hotel that used one of those.’

‘The owner is real intent on maintaining the hotel’s Old World charm.’ The woman stepped aside and, turning, pointed to a rotary phone mounted on the wall behind her. ‘That’s the hotel’s original phone.’

‘Does that thing still work?’

‘Absolutely. There’s a company in Iowa that adapts all the old phones so they’ll work with the new technology.’ Then with a sly grin, she added, ‘But don’t worry, everything in the room is completely modern. My name’s Laurie Richards. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you need anything, Miss McCormick.’

Darby entered her hotel room, tired and sore, and wanting two things – a long shower followed by a stiff drink.

The stiff drink wasn’t an option, at least at the moment. The room didn’t have a mini-bar, but there was a bar across the street, a place with a big wagon wheel in the front. As far she could tell, it was the only thing open in downtown Red Hill besides the Silver Moon Inn.

The country’s never-ending economic recession seemed to have hit Red Hill especially hard. Taped to the inside glass windows of virtually every business she’d passed on the way here were signs and handwritten messages on poster boards that read OUT OF BUSINESS or CLOSED PERMANENTLY. She hadn’t seen a single Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts; there were no chain restaurants or big box supermarkets, hardware or department stores. Either gentrification had somehow bypassed Red Hill or big business wasn’t interested in creating anything here, viewing the town as the equivalent of a toxic-waste dump, a place where nothing would thrive.

Darby placed the cardboard box of evidence files on her bed. Then she went back into the hall to retrieve her suitcase, forensics kit and briefcase, and used her foot to shut the door.

Her room had crimson-painted walls and a headboard and bedframe crafted from birch logs. It had recently been cleaned; she could smell lemon-scented furniture polish, and the vacuum cleaner had left tread marks in the soft carpet. The pair of windows on the far wall overlooked what appeared to be a dense section of woods, but it was too dark out there to see.

Darby hung her jacket inside the small closet and slipped out of her boots. She opened up the box, picked up a random file and opened it – the Connelly family, who had been murdered last month. She flipped through the thick stack of pages, pleased to find that the Denver state lab hadn’t skimped on crime scene photos.

Her encounter with Deputy Sheriff Lancaster hung in her mind like an uninvited houseguest. The only way to get him to leave before he took up permanent residence was to focus her attention on something else – something productive. She sat cross-legged on the bed and removed the remaining evidence files.

The first murders had occurred just over a year ago, on 4 January. Eighteen-year-old Cynthia Gardner, home for the Christmas holidays, had stayed the night at a friend’s apartment in Denver. When she went to her parents’ house the next morning she found them seated across from each other in kitchen chairs placed at the foot of their bed. Her mother had been strangled, the T-shirt that she slept in ripped open to expose her breasts. A black garbage bag had been tied around her father’s head. The Red Hill Ripper had waited until spring to kill the Bowden family. The Brazilian woman they employed to clean their house every two weeks had used the key given to her to enter. When she stepped over the threshold, an odour like spoiled meat and sewage hit her like a fist. After she vomited in the bushes, she used her cell to call the police. Martin and Heather Bowden had been killed the same way as the Gardner family.

Talk of a possible serial killer had spread through the small town. Jim and Elaine Lima had installed new locks on their doors to protect them and their twin sons, Brad and Alex, who were in their senior year at Brewster High. Brad hadn’t been home that night; he had been away on a ski trip when the Red Hill Ripper killed his brother and parents the week before Thanksgiving.