Darkness Falls

by Alex Knight

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Twenty years ago, her brother was murdered. Tonight, she's found his killer.

Thessaly Hanlon is four hours into a long drive home through the night when she pulls into a 24-hour roadside diner to take a break. She's exhausted, but when she hears a chillingly familiar voice from the next booth, she wonders if he'll ever sleep again.

The voice is unmistakable. It belongs to Casper Sturgis, the man who murdered Thessaly's brother two decades before, and then disappeared without a trace.

Thessaly makes the decision to follow the killer. As Thessaly begins to unravel the second life of Casper Sturgis, she finds that digging into the past can have deadly consequences...

Release date: September 16, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

Thursday, February 4

Rain, beating down like it had always been raining, and always would be.

The windshield wipers struggled to keep up, even on their fastest setting. The reflections of the lane markers and the taillights of the truck ahead would become clear for the briefest instant, before being submerged again in a thick sheet of water. Melting into blurry, untrustworthy hints of themselves, shifted an inch this way or that, becoming unreal.

Thessaly risked taking her hand from the wheel for a second to rub her eyelids, one at a time. She didn’t dare risk letting the road out of her sight for a second.

Impossibly, the downpour seemed to step up a pitch, and she saw the brake lights of the truck flash as the driver slowed down, facing the same visibility challenge. Thessaly braked a little harder than necessary, saw the needle drop to thirty, and then gradually eased the pedal down again to match the removal truck’s forty-five miles an hour. Rolling Movers, the livery on the rear door had read, back when visibility had been good enough to make it out. Some family’s earthly possessions making their slow way across America through the night. It was attractive. The thought of a blank slate. Starting again somewhere completely new.

But for the moment, she had no choice but to head back home. She wished she could have stayed over in Reading, but she couldn’t cancel the editorial meeting tomorrow morning. It had been a straight choice between going and driving back after the post-service get-together, or missing the funeral entirely. It had sounded like a good compromise a couple of days before, but the weather meant a three-hour drive was looking like extending to four or five hours, if the periodically readjusting ETA on her GPS was anything to go by. Barely halfway home, and she was already tired. So tired.

The day had taken more out of her than she had expected. Still, she was glad she had made the trip. Nate had been one of the best friends she had made in her time on the magazine. He had always been so much more full of life than any of the others. Always the first at the bar, always the first to suggest a beer on a Friday. If any of Nate’s contemporaries had been asked to bet on his eventual cause of death – and Thessaly thought Nate would have enthusiastically approved of such a poor-taste suggestion – it would have been liver failure or alcohol poisoning. Suicide? She thought that would be the last thing anyone considered. Nate had always seemed so … together. Like a lot of her former colleagues, she had lost touch with him after Inside NY had finally shut down in 2017.

The sign for an exit flashed by. She had a momentary panic as she read ‘Greenville’, because that would have put her a couple hundred miles west of where she thought she was, but then she realized the sign had said ‘Grenville’. Only one E. Also derived from ‘green village’, she supposed. Or perhaps just named after some long-dead British guy.

The removal truck was crawling now, down to thirty-five. If the rain didn’t let up, she wouldn’t make it back in time for the meeting in the morning. At this rate, she would get there sometime in late July.

A third light source suddenly appeared in the darkness. Up ahead and on the right-hand side, a red glow beyond the taillights of the truck.

The wipers swept the wash aside for another moment and she could see that it was a sign. A big red circle with some words beneath. It blurred again before she could read it.

A second of clarity. She saw that the circle was an ‘O’, and below it the word

OLYMPIA

And some smaller words beneath, which might have been ‘All Nite’.

Blur. A third sweep would take her past the sign.

On the spur of the moment, she slowed and signaled, getting ready to take the turn when she could see it properly. She pulled into the almost-empty parking lot as the wipers cleared and the rest of the sign revealed itself.

OLYMPIA DINERALL NITEFOOD * COFFEE * LIQUOR

At least two of those sounded like a very good idea.

There were only two other vehicles in the lot: a silver sedan and a black BMW SUV. Thessaly parked beside the BMW. She watched the road as the taillights of the removal truck slowly retreated from view. Her wipers were still on. Blur. Clear. Blur. Clear. Eventually the twin red points of light vanished. Perhaps the rain would stop while she took a break. It didn’t seem likely, but her eyes needed a rest. She turned off the wipers and the engine and steeled herself for the run to the door of the diner.

She was drenched in the ten seconds it took her to get there. She opened the door and stepped out of the February night chill and into the warmth, blinking in the bright light of the interior. A sign by the entrance said, Please wait here to be seated, so she did. She wiped the rainwater from her forehead and looked around. It was an old-fashioned diner, but not old-fashioned in the fashionable sense. It wasn’t a Disney reproduction of some kind of 1950s ideal, with checkerboard floor tiles or chrome fittings or red leather upholstery, but all the basics were there. A stainless-steel lunch counter down one side, booths arranged along the opposite wall. A mix of fake vintage and humorous signs on the walls. If My Music Is Too Loud, You’re Too Old. An old Coca Cola ad with two ladies in Victorian-looking bathing suits. She could smell coffee and hot oil.

There was only one other customer in the place. A middle-aged bald man in a worn gray suit, looking down at a notebook, a cleared plate to one side. He glanced up at Thessaly as she entered, his eyes squinting behind his glasses, then looked back down again. She thought that he looked tired, and not just because of the lateness of the hour.

Salesman, she decided. Was traveling salesman still a profession? Or another thing the internet had killed, like magazines. She thought about Nate again, and the others. She had been luckier than most, snagging her first book deal right before the final round of redundancies. But perhaps the universe owed her that luck.

A door behind the lunch counter opened and a waitress stepped out. She was young, with brown freckles and dark hair tied back in a ponytail with a yellow ribbon. She didn’t greet Thessaly with a hello or a how can I help you, just raised her eyebrows expectantly.

‘Just for one,’ Thessaly said.

Her name tag said, Kayla. Kayla turned her gaze to the row of booths, thought about it for longer than seemed strictly necessary, and then gestured at the one closest to the bald man.

Thessaly noticed that there was a plate on the opposite side of his table. The remains of somebody’s meal on it; bacon offcuts and an ignored pile of hash browns. She sat down with her back to the other booth.

She ordered a black coffee when Kayla came around, and glanced at the menu, quickly opting for French toast and bacon before she departed again. She shivered suddenly as a drop of icy rainwater dripped down the back of her neck. She ran her fingers through her hair to strain some of it out.

Leaning forward, she put her face in her hands, massaging her eyelids with her fingers. The urge to doze off was powerful. She didn’t fight it too much. Better here than behind the wheel. Still well over a hundred miles to go.

She breathed through her nose and listened to the sound of the rain beating rhythmically off the roof, and then splashing into puddles at the side of the building. She listened to the hum of the coffee machine or the milkshake dispenser or whatever it was, behind the lunch counter. Underneath that, she heard the muffled sound of plates and skillets clattering and rattling in the kitchen.

‘So are we done here? I guess I should tell you good luck.’

She started and opened her eyes before she realized the man in the next booth wasn’t addressing her. She felt a bump through the back of her seat as someone sat down behind her and adjusted their position.

She blinked the tiredness out of her eyes and saw that the coffee she had ordered had already appeared. She must have been closer to sleep than she thought.

And then she heard something that made her wonder if she would ever sleep again. The voice of the person sitting opposite the bald man.

‘You ever hear that old saying? Waiting for luck is like waiting for death.’

Thessaly felt an icy chill travel the length of her spine that was nothing to do with rainwater.

She knew that voice better than she knew her own mother’s. She had been hearing it in her dreams for half a lifetime.

The voice of the man in the booth behind her belonged to a man named Casper Sturgis.

The man who had murdered her brother twenty years ago.

2

Waiting for luck is like waiting for death.

Thessaly straightened up in the booth seat like somebody had yanked her strings.

The words were as painfully familiar as the voice. Mitch’s killer had told him it wasn’t his lucky day. Then he had used those exact words before he pulled the trigger.

She didn’t turn around. She stared straight ahead, at the vintage Coke poster on the far wall. It felt like she wasn’t in the diner anymore. It was twenty years ago, and she was still in the Redlands Mall. She had never left Deadlands.

The guy who looked like a salesman was talking quietly. She couldn’t make out individual words over the thump of her pulse in her head. And then she heard the voice again. Cold and deep. So deep that if she heard it on a song, she would assume the producer had looped in some kind of effect. Like the voice of a bad dream. Like the feeling of a partly healed wound being scratched at with ragged fingernails. She felt her head begin to swim, and the two Victorian ladies on the Coke poster looked like they were moving. She gripped the edge of the table and closed her eyes.

‘You okay there?’

Kayla, the waitress, was examining her with a mildly concerned expression. She was carrying Thessaly’s order in her right hand. Her left was poised for action, as though she expected Thessaly to topple onto the floor at any moment.

‘Fine,’ she mouthed, but no sound came out. She cleared her throat. ‘Maybe a glass of water?’

Kayla nodded and then looked up as one of the men in the other booth caught her eye. Had to be the bald man. The killer was facing the other direction.

‘You fellas okay?’

‘Just the check when you got a minute, thank you.’

Thessaly reached for her phone. It was lying face down on the table. When she turned it over and looked down at the screen, she was almost surprised to see the slender black mirror of a Samsung Galaxy, and not the chunky gray Nokia 3310 she had thought was pretty nifty back in 2001.

She risked glancing around. She could only see the back of his head. Dark blond hair with some gray. The collar of a plaid shirt.

Beyond where they were sitting, on the far wall of the diner, there was a neon arrow pointing toward the restrooms around the corner. She gripped the edge of the table and slid out. Her legs were unsteady as she moved quickly past the two men. She passed a mirror sign advertising Budweiser and her reflection told her why the waitress had seemed so concerned. She looked as though she was auditioning for a vampire movie.

When she had made it three booths down, she risked stopping and turning around. The two men were continuing their conversation, neither looking up.

She couldn’t see the man on the other side of the table at first. The salesman’s head got in the way. But then he shifted position to take his wallet out and she had a clear line of sight.

Dark blond hair. A dusting of stubble that had pinpricks of gray. A little fuller around the face and the chest than he had been twenty years ago. He was wearing a white t-shirt under a plaid shirt. He noticed Thessaly staring and glanced in her direction. She looked down quickly, pretending to examine her phone screen. When she stole another glance, he had looked away again and was talking to his companion.

Him.

It was him.

She went around the corner and stood outside the restrooms. Relieved to be out of the line of sight of the man in the seat, but not wanting to take her eyes off him. How long did she have? They had already asked for the check, and the waitress didn’t have anything else to delay her other than Thessaly’s glass of water.

She tapped the three numbers on her phone and held it to her ear.

‘Nine-one-one emergency, which service do y—’

‘Police.’

‘Putting you through.’

The line wasn’t great. Weather making the sound glitchy. She glanced around the corner and saw that the waitress had left the check on the table the two men were sitting at. The salesman was leaving cash.

‘Pennsylvania State Police, are you reporting an emergency?’

‘Yes. I mean … I think so.’

‘What is the nature of your emergency, ma’am?’

‘I think I saw a murderer. I mean, I know I did. He’s here now. His name is—’

‘You’re reporting a murder?’

‘No, a murderer. The person who committed a murder.’

‘Ma’am are you in danger at this moment? Where are you?’

‘No, he doesn’t know I’m here. His name is Casper Sturgis. He killed my brother, and I just saw him.’

‘Somebody’s hurt?’

She gripped the phone tighter and tried to speak slowly without raising her voice.

‘No, he killed my brother twenty years ago.’

‘Twenty years ago?’

‘I think he’s leaving. You need to send someone now.’

There was a long pause, and Thessaly wondered if the dispatcher was going to admonish her for wasting police time. Too late, she realized she shouldn’t have been specific. Send a cop. Any reason. She could explain when they got here.

‘What’s your location?’

‘Can’t you tell from my phone? I’m at some diner on the seventy-eight.’

‘The location I’m getting is no good. Looks like you’re somewhere in Northampton County, but I can’t see specifically.’

Her mind went blank for a second. What the hell was this place called again? Something about sports? No – the Olympics. Olympia. ‘I’m at the Olympia diner on the seventy-eight eastbound. Please hurry.’

She looked out again and saw that the two men were already leaving.

‘Sit tight, ma’am. We’ll have somebody with you in about fifteen minutes.’

Thessaly hung up and looked around the corner. The booth was empty, the door at the exit slowly swinging shut. By the time the cops got there, they would both be long gone. She made the decision in a second and headed for the door. If she could get a license plate, she would have something to give them.

She hurried outside and saw that she was too late. The silver sedan at the far side of the lot had started up, its headlights bright in her eyes. It started moving out and turned right onto the highway. She saw the red light of the diner sign reflect off the driver’s glasses for a split second. The salesman.

The BMW followed it out, turning in the opposite direction, crossing over to the westbound side.

Thessaly ran for her own car. She had left her jacket in the booth inside, and she was soaked to the skin by the time she got into the driver’s seat. She pulled out of the space and accelerated out of the lot, sending a shower of muddy rainwater over the windshield as she bumped in and out of a big pothole at the exit. She turned into the westbound lane and pushed the pedal down as far as she dared. The needle climbed above seventy before she was rewarded with the sight of taillights ahead of her. She switched the wipers to full and risked going a little faster, feeling the wind buffet her as the rain poured down like she was in a car wash.

She was gaining. Soon she would be close enough to read the BMW’s license plate. And then the other car seemed to widen the gap a little. Did he know he was being followed? Had he noticed her coming out of the diner right after he did?

She gritted her teeth and pressed the pedal all the way to the floor. The needle jumped over eighty and kept rising. This was insane. She never drove this fast on a cloudless summer’s day in the middle of nowhere. She was closing the gap though, the other car slowing a little as the road began to climb. Almost there. She could make out the contrast between the white plate and the blue numbers now. Another two seconds and—

A truck appeared over the crest of the hill in the opposite lane, full brights on. She braked and squinted as she tried to keep her car in the lane. The truck dimmed his lights and blew past her with a thunder of eighteen wheels. She opened her eyes fully again, but it was too late. The other car had disappeared over the crest of the hill and the needle had dropped to forty. She floored it again, the transmission taking its time to shift and the engine complaining as she tried to accelerate uphill.

She crested the hill, wondering how much the gap would have widened, and saw … nothing.

Just blackness ahead, the strip down the center of the road the only feature she could make out. The other car had vanished. The highway curved around and she hoped it would straighten out and she would see a set of taillights, but there was nothing.

She passed a sign.

Grenville ¼

He had to have taken the turn for Grenville. There was no place else to go. The GPS map showed a straight road ahead. This exit was the only one for miles.

She slowed and took the exit.

3

Thessaly pulled into the parking lot of the Olympia diner thirty minutes later. She took a sharp breath when she saw the gray patrol car parked in the very same space she had occupied earlier. In all of the excitement of trying to follow Sturgis, she had completely forgotten she had called the police.

Grenville had been a dark maze of buildings with unlit windows. It felt like it had no center. If the BMW really had taken that turn, it could have been anywhere. The car could have been any of the dozens parked in the driveways that she drove past. Challenging in daylight, impossible at night during a rainstorm. There was nothing to do but go back and retrieve her jacket.

She parked next to the patrol car and steeled herself again for the run to the door. When she made it inside, soaked to the skin once again and shaking, the waitress from earlier looked up at the doorway and pointed an accusing finger at her.

‘That’s her, Officer.’

There were two uniformed state troopers at the lunch counter, both men. Cups of coffee in front of them. Raindrops beaded on the waterproof canvas of their jackets. One was older: late fifties, gray-white hair and a mustache. The other had blond hair and green eyes and looked ridiculously young to be in any kind of position of authority. What was it they said, about the policemen looking younger?

‘Hi,’ Thessaly said, giving an apologetic smile. ‘You came.’

‘You’re the one who made the nine-one-one call, ma’am?’ the older of the two men asked.

‘That’s right, my name is Thessaly Hanlon.’

‘I’m Trooper Fetterman, this is Trooper Reed,’ he said. Fetterman had hooded eyes that made him look like he was on the point of dropping off. ‘Says here you got …’ he stopped to consult a notebook in front of him, rather unnecessarily. ‘… a murder. Is that correct?’ He finished by taking a moment to look around the surroundings, remarkable as they were only for the lack of murder.

‘It was a bad line. I saw someone. The man who killed my brother Mitch, years ago.’

Fetterman glanced briefly at his partner and the waitress, then back at Thessaly. ‘You saw him in here?’

‘Yes. She saw him too.’

Fetterman looked at Kayla expectantly.

‘There were two guys here when she came in. I guess she’s talking about them?’

‘One of them, yes. Casper Sturgis. The blond man with the plaid shirt.’

Fetterman looked at Thessaly, then Kayla.

Kayla shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you want. Yeah there was a guy in a plaid shirt and a guy in a suit. They ordered coffee, pancakes, paid cash. We don’t require names and ID.’

‘Do you have any security cameras?’ Fetterman asked.

‘Covering the register, not the seats.’

‘Thank you.’ Fetterman’s gaze switched from Kayla to Thessaly. He indicated the stool next to him. ‘Have a seat, Ms Hanlon.’

When she sat down, he scratched her name in his notebook and then put the pen down to massage his temple. ‘Let’s backtrack a little. Your brother was killed?’

‘Murdered, yes.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss. When did this happen?’

‘Twenty years ago. In New Jersey.’

‘In Jersey?’ Reed interjected, as though Thessaly had said ‘the surface of Mars’ rather than the next state.

Fetterman held up a hand to silence his partner and shifted around on the stool so he was facing Thessaly, subtly distancing Reed and Kayla from their conversation.

‘And this man …’

‘Sturgis.’

‘Sturgis murdered him?’

‘Yes. I saw it happen. I was a witness.’

‘When did he get out?’

It took Thessaly a moment to work out what he was asking. ‘What? No. He didn’t get out. He didn’t go in. They never caught him.’

Fetterman raised his eyebrows and took another sip of his coffee. He turned to Reed for a second. Thessaly couldn’t see his expression, but she expected it conveyed the sentiment ‘this is gonna be a long night’.

He turned back to her. ‘The local police investigated your brother’s murder?’

‘Yes. McKinley Hills PD. The detective who was primary on the case was Mick Hendricks. If you speak to him, he’ll confirm everything.’

Fetterman held a hand up. ‘I didn’t suggest you were making this up, ma’am.’

She opened her mouth to say that maybe he hadn’t out loud … and then decided this approach wouldn’t get her anywhere she wanted to go. She bit her tongue and took a deep breath.

‘We were … exploring. We went to see a dead mall.’

‘A dead mall?’ he repeated, saying each word carefully, as though neither was familiar.

‘Yeah, you know. They call it urban exploring these days. A closed-down mall, an abandoned place out in McKinley Hills. The Redlands Mall. Me and my brother Mitch and our friend, Lee. It was supposed to be deserted. We interrupted some kind of drug deal or something – they never worked out exactly what it was. I was hiding. I saw a man shoot my brother, my friend Lee, and the guy he was there to meet.

‘The police got there, but Mitch was dead. Lee survived. I told them everything. Gave them a description of the man, the car he was driving, everything.’

‘They find him?’

She shook her head. ‘No sign of him. It was a good description. I had a lot of time to look at him. To listen to his voice. I’m never going to forget him. They were looking for the vehicle right away. They never found it. Somehow he just disappeared.’

As she said that, she remembered hearing the sound of the engine fading to nothing as she knelt over her brother’s body, fruitlessly searching for a pulse. From that moment, he had been gone. They both had; Sturgis and Mitch. She cleared her throat and tried to marshal the important details.

‘They took Lee to the hospital and Mitch to the morgue. They drove me to the police station. These days I guess they’d have a counselor or something, but I’m glad they didn’t. They just got straight into questioning me. They did a great job. Well, Hendricks did, anyway. He wanted to know everything: why we were there, how we got in, if we knew the two men. I think at first he thought we were mixed up in it. They got a sketch artist. They showed me mug shots. Nothing.’

‘What about the other man who was killed?’ Fetterman asked. He was interested now. Maybe he had accepted she wasn’t making this stuff up.

She nodded. ‘They moved on to him next. They identified him pretty easily. ID in his wallet. He was a used car dealer named John Ammerman. His wife had no idea he was there. He had told her he was in Sacramento for a conference that day. They looked into his finances and found he had a lot of gambling debt, like two hundred grand.’

‘I’m assuming he was mixed up with some criminal elements.’

‘It seemed so. They found irregularities in his business’s accounts, going back years. It hadn’t been picked up on by the IRS, but once they knew there might be something there to look for, they found it. He had been laundering large sums of cash for a long time. Hendricks told me if they could work out who Ammerman was working for, it might lead them to the shooter.’

‘And, since you have a name, I’m assuming that’s what happened,’ Fetterman said. ‘Mob guy?’

‘No. Not anybody they knew about locally, anyway. They looked into that at first. The man I had seen wasn’t on their radar. Detective Hendricks cast the net wider. I went through more mugshots, and we found him.’

‘A guy who looked like the shooter?’

She shook her head firmly. ‘No. Not a guy who looked like him. It was him. Casper Sturgis.’

She could see the scene in her mind like it was five minutes ago. The cold interview room with the scarred wood table. The six color photographs laid out like playing cards. She remembered it had been the eyes that convinced her. That didn’t make sense, of course. Back in the Redlands Mall, she had never been close enough to see his eyes. But when Detective Hendricks had flipped over the page in the book, the eyes had told her this was the one. Blue and empty, like the eyes of an intelligent animal. Wily, but without a soul. And then, widening her focus, the rest of the features had matched up perfectly. Dirty blond hair, the distinctive jawline.

She had asked who he was, after repeating three times that she was certain this was the man who had killed her brother.

‘Hendricks said they would bring him in. But they didn’t.. . .