The Gift of the Darkness Read online

  “Thank you, Uncle Jack,” David said, looking at the camera.

  Damn, he’s shooting the film.

  She went back to the beginning and watched every last frame. She did that three times and got absolutely nowhere. “Uncle Jack” was never on camera, and if he had spoken at all, which at some point he must have, he had done so away from the mike. There was no way to identify his voice in that mess of sounds.

  Madison freeze-framed the shot of the child looking at the camera. She drummed her fingers on the remote. To be so close was maddening.

  John Cameron was also looking at the screen, his eyes narrowed at the memory of that day. For a moment he didn’t even notice Madison getting up.

  Madison opened the cupboard doors under the bookcase, closed them, opened the next ones. No good. She opened the last set of doors: on the bottom shelf, a small pile of photographs. They were in the fourth envelope: David Sinclair’s birthday stills.

  John Cameron took a step down on the staircase.

  Madison stood under the lamp. She looked at each picture intently for a few seconds and then put it aside. She was halfway through the pack when she found it. John Cameron was not in the picture, but his reflection was, caught in the glass of the garden door: a dark-haired man holding a camera against a blue sky.

  “Hello, Jack,” Madison said quietly.

  In the near-darkness, Cameron’s right hand twitched.

  She held the photo under the light; it was like looking at someone underwater. A loud knock on the front door brought her back. Madison turned and walked out of the living room, through the hall, and to the front door. She didn’t look back or turn on any lights. She opened the door, and Officer McDowell was stomping his feet on the ground to get some circulation going.

  “Just wanted to say we’re being relieved.”

  There was another patrol car parked next to theirs; a couple of uniformed officers looked rosy-cheeked and rested at the beginning of their shift.

  “Thanks for helping me with the keys.”

  “I told the guys you’re still in here.”

  Madison glanced at the relief shift; they nodded, but she could see they were mildly suspicious of anybody who chose to be there at 2:00 a.m.

  Hell, I’d be suspicious myself, she thought, and she closed the door. She was still holding the photograph, and, for the first time that night, she was completely alone in the house.

  Madison went through the other packs and found nothing. She put them back as she had found them and finally decided that she was done for the day.

  When she got home, she could still smell the crime scene in her hair. She showered and shampooed, put on red flannel pajamas, and climbed into bed.

  Out of Three Oaks heading north, John Cameron drove fast with the windows rolled down.

  Chapter 18

  Fred Tully had barely left the offices of the Star in the last twenty-four hours. He’d gone home to change his clothes and managed a one-hour nap on the sofa. In spite of that, he hadn’t felt so good in ages.

  It was 4:00 a.m., and he was sitting at his desk, in his hands a proof of the front page that was about to hit the newsstands. He smiled.

  The intern had dropped the envelope on his desk at around 8:00 p.m.

  “Did you see who brought this?”

  The kid just raised his eyebrows.

  In the last thirty-six hours, since the identities of the victims had been made public, a steady stream of visitors had come to Lincoln Elementary in Three Oaks, the school attended by John and David Sinclair. It started with a couple of bunches of flowers by the main gates, brought by mothers who had known the boys. It had since become a shrine with candles, small gifts, and messages taped to the flowers.

  KING and KOMO-TV reporters used it as a background when they shot their updates, and a couple of volunteers from the school made sure the children were careful with the candles’ flames near the cards and the soft toys.

  Harry Salinger got out of the van with the camera already on his shoulder. The van, white with Oregon plates, had darkened windows and the letters KTVX printed on its side.

  Harry Salinger was six foot one, built for high jumps rather than weight-lifting. He’d been wearing his sandy hair in a buzz cut ever since he started losing it in his early twenties. Today, under timid rain, he wore a heavily lined jacket and a fleece cap with flaps that covered his ears.

  Salinger moved through the group of reporters as if he belonged with them. He shot a few minutes of the makeshift shrine and looked suitably somber as he did so. In truth, being around children made him uncomfortable, and he left as soon as he could.

  As he turned to go, a mother holding a toddler bumped into him. She apologized with a sad smile and went on her way.

  Salinger reached his van, unlocked the door, and climbed in. He slid the door shut behind him and pulled off his hat. Inside, the van smelled clean: Salinger had laid a new carpet in it only the previous week.

  Crowds usually unnerved him—the voices, the physical contact. The camera had given him a safe distance from which to observe and record without getting caught up in the unpleasantness of all that human proximity.

  The shrine was lovely; he was glad he got a few shots of it. He especially liked the muted colors of the cards and the way the candles looked blurred in the viewfinder.

  He backed out of his parking spot and drove off. He found KEZX on 1150-AM and waited for the news to come on. When it did, he knew what the first item would be. In his eyes, as colorless as rainwater, a light flickered briefly. He got onto Highway 99 and headed north, past Greenwood and Mountlake Terrace. He came off 99 in Lynnwood.

  His house sat on a drive two hundred yards back from the road, behind a group of firs bunched together in the middle of a field. He had no neighbors in the immediate vicinity, and the house was closer to Everett than Seattle.

  He parked the van in the garage, next to his Accord. The house had been built in the 1920s, with parts added to it as it became necessary: three small bedrooms upstairs and living room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor.

  Salinger usually ate in the kitchen, and no one had sat on the upholstered sofa since his grandparents’ notary, who had given him papers to sign and slapped him on the shoulder. Salinger had said all the right words, and the man was out of the house quickly. His house now.

  Salinger had closed the door behind him and looked at the spot on his blazer where the notary had touched him; he rubbed it lightly. Then he had opened all the windows to get rid of the man’s cologne.

  The garage could barely accommodate two vehicles, but Salinger was as careful in his driving as in everything he did.

  There was no communicating door into the house; he locked the garage with a padlock and walked to the small porch that led to the entrance. The house had been painted white years before, and it would soon need seeing to again; he put it in a mental checklist of “to do’s” for the new year and then realized that, all being well, he wouldn’t be there to do it anyway, and he smiled. It was an immense relief to know that things were on their way, and soon all this would be behind him.

  Salinger lived alone. He still loved the feeling of walking into his own home, shutting out the distant sound of traffic, and being almost absorbed by the complete silence. Others might have found it unsettling, but for a man who had been in the places he had been, it was more than his heart had ever dared to wish. He would eat a bite while he worked, he thought.

  He made himself a ham sandwich, pink and white, wrapped the end in a triangle of wax paper, and took it downstairs, where he did his work.

  The basement was vast and ran the length and breadth of the house, completely open. He used a quarter for storage and the rest he’d swept clean, extra lights hung from the beams and spotlights clipped to the plain wooden shelves on the brick walls. Dozens of pencil sketches were tacked up, some floor plans and others showing the development of a metal and glass object. Salinger has never taken any art class but his effor
ts would be first puzzling and then shocking to any visitor.

  Metalwork and welding tools were lined up on a bench in a corner, and two large tables, next to each other, took up most of the space in the middle. On each table sat three monitors, the kind that came with a video player/recorder. Next to a row of pencils, a seashell caught his eye for a moment, its delicate spiral no bigger than his fingernail.

  He bent down by the table on the left and found a switch among the many cables and wires: two monitors came to life, the sound muted. Morning television.

  His eyes drifted from one to the next, his skin prickling. Cooking shows, talk shows, quiz shows. It was a language he did not speak from a world he did not understand. He checked his watch: the news would be on soon.

  On a smaller table at the side he had set up a sound system; he pressed a couple of keys, and a crackling sound came through the speakers.

  It was definitely a homemade job, nothing high-tech, nothing that anybody with time on their hands couldn’t put together. Still, Salinger was proud of it. He fast-forwarded until the numbers on the counter told him that he was where he wanted to be, then he let it play. Alice Madison’s voice filled the basement.

  “He’s blindfolded with a piece of black velvet. Not torn, cut. On the forehead, there is a sign like a cross. Drawn in blood. He’s bound with . . . looks like leather. Thin strip. Around his neck, hands, and feet. Hands are tied behind his back. Makes it really difficult to move if you’re lying down on them.”

  A pause.

  The screen flickered on the third monitor, and when the picture came into focus, it was the Sinclairs’ bedroom. In the grainy darkness, a figure moved before the lens. Behind it, on the bed, three bodies were visible, completely still; the fourth body, closest to the camera, was struggling, thrashing around, almost coming off the bed in an effort to break free.

  Salinger turned down the volume; the muffled sounds from under the blindfold were a distraction.

  “Deep red ligature marks where he’s been tied. Some bruising. He put up a fight.”

  Harry Salinger narrowed his eyes as he looked at the screen and started on his sandwich. He had listened to the recording many times. In fact, he had transferred the whole thing onto a cassette so that he could listen to it anywhere in his house, on an old Walkman he could hook onto his belt.

  When he had left a tiny voice-activated microphone at the crime scene, one he could easily monitor from the crowd of reporters, it had been a purely functional decision. He had wanted to have an idea of what the police were talking about, their first impressions of the case, his work. He knew part of it was vanity—he had to admit that much. However, he honestly needed that little advantage, and that was all.

  He had seen Alice Madison drag out the photographer in a FedEx uniform. Most of the reporters had instantly pointed their cameras at Andrew Riley, but not Harry; he had followed the detective down the drive, caught her look at the crowd, and stayed on her until she went back inside the house, which he now knew as well as his own.

  That first night, after his work in the basement was done, for hours he had walked from room to room in headphones.

  “Contact wound to the head. You can see the tattooing. The shooter was less than two feet away. All of them, except the father. Just one shot. No bruises, no signs of struggle.” Salinger closed his eyes, and each word revealed its true color, a blaze of scarlet and blue that burned right through him. Best of all, though, something he would never have expected: Alice Madison’s voice was indigo. In the deep hollow of his house, it was the only human sound.

  Chapter 19

  Alice Madison, ten years old, leaned her bike against the warm concrete wall and knocked on the rusty screen door of the bungalow. She had told her mom she would be back in an hour, and she had ridden fast in the midday wind. The sky above the Nevada desert was blazing, but she knew the house would be soothingly dark and air-conditioned.

  The men in the basement had been playing for twelve hours straight, and nobody cared that the basement had no windows. It did not have a famous Vegas name, either, but that didn’t seem to matter much—the game was just as real and the money just as hard.

  A $500 entry fee bought you a chair in Joey Cavizzi’s basement; the rest was up to the players.

  A soft knock, and a stocky man pushed the door ajar. The girl walked in.

  “Hey, honey,” one of the players said.

  “Hey, Dad,” Alice replied.

  She went around the table and climbed onto a tall stool next to the bar in the corner; the room was a combination of ashtray and monkey cage. Joey’s nephew was in charge of drinks.

  “The usual?” he asked her.

  She nodded. From a small refrigerator he got out a ginger ale, scooped some ice cubes out of a bucket and into a tumbler, poured the drink with a flourish, and wrapped a folded napkin around the glass. He handed it to her and slid a fresh bowl of pretzels to where she could reach it.

  “Honey,” her father said, “ten minutes ago, Richard here was dealt a straight flush. What are the chances of that happening?” His eyes glinted.

  “Seventy-two thousand one hundred and ninety-two to one,” Alice replied without hesitation. All the men laughed. Alice Madison had been to countless games of theirs. The players didn’t mind—in fact, they got a kick out of it. She was their mascot: the ten-year-old who understood the joys and mysteries of their religion.

  She sat quite still, but her eyes followed the cards and the men’s hands. Her father watched her, and she watched Richard O’Malley, sitting on his left. Father O’Malley, that was, weekdays at 5:00 p.m. and twice on Sundays. Alice knew he held enough to take the pot and was ready to make his move. Her father smiled.

  Wednesday morning. Madison walked into the precinct at 7:45 a.m., a quarter of an hour before the beginning of her shift. A couple of reporters saw her from the opposite side of the parking lot and tried and failed to catch up with her on the steps.

  The alarm had woken her from a heavy sleep. She felt as if she had been chasing things and doing things and generally running around without a break even in her dreams.

  As she walked upstairs, a couple of detectives from Vice were coming down. A look passed between them when they saw her. The woman half turned to Madison as they passed each other and said, “Fasten your seat belt.”

  It could only mean one thing: OPR was on the floor—the Office of Personal Responsibility; the change of name from Internal Affairs had not made it any nicer. Madison rolled her eyes.

  One man and one woman were in Lieutenant Fynn’s office. The door was closed, the slats from the blinds open enough that she knew she hadn’t met them before.

  Brown was standing at his desk, holding a newspaper. “Coming in today, you didn’t listen to the radio?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Have a read. It’s a charming piece of investigative journalism.” He passed her the copy of the Washington Star.

  Blue Ridge killer slew family for revenge. It went downhill from there. Madison sat on the edge of her desk and read on. Her eyes caught the name of the reporter, Fred Tully. The article went into sufficient detail about the manner of the deaths that any crank with fourth-grade literacy would be able to bluff his way into a confession. It mentioned evidence, documents, and motives. And finally, to crown it all, there it was: John Cameron’s name.

  Tully wrote about Cameron’s relationship to the dead family, to Quinn, Locke & Associates; he listed all the myths, the rumors, and the half-truths attached to Cameron’s name.

  “Son of a bitch,” Madison whispered under her breath.

  Brown looked darkly at the paper. “They’ve started a thirteen-days countdown.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.” Brown’s voice was flat.

  The implication was that someone in the department had talked. It was not entirely unheard of, reporters arriving at a crime scene at the same time as the police, getting a small exchange of infor
mation for some green. It was bad, but it happened. But this was not about a couple of guys with cameras turning up unexpectedly. It was unthinkable to her that anybody who had looked at dead children would pawn them for an easy buck.

  She read the article once more. She realized that she was standing up. Her first instinct was to get into her car and go find the little worm.

  “Later,” Brown said, snapping her back from that line of thought.

  Lieutenant Fynn’s door opened, and he motioned them in. Introductions were made: Detectives Julianne Casey and Bobby Carr from OPR were there to investigate how the case had sprung such a monumental leak. Nobody shook hands.

  Casey and Carr were both in their early forties, and Madison judged they probably hadn’t soiled their loafers at a crime scene for quite some time. On the other hand, they seemed smart, and they had both made eye contact when introduced.

  “Tully is a hack,” Casey began. “And to be honest, I’m surprised he even knows that the past tense of slay is slew. The point, though, is that this is an embarrassment we don’t need. It hurts the case; it hurts the department.”

  Good work, Madison thought. Casey was going for the “we are all one team” approach.

  “As soon as possible, we are going to need to interview all the detectives involved,” Carr said, clearly not feeling they were all one team after all. His eyes were dull and his tie too bright.

  “I would like to make one thing absolutely clear,” Lieutenant Fynn said. “You find a leak, it’s not going to be from this room. If this situation is going to be taken care of in the middle of a multiple-murder investigation, I don’t want anybody’s time to be wasted. If you want to start talking to my detectives, do it now. We’ve all got jobs to get on with. But my advice to you is to look elsewhere.”