The Gift of the Darkness Page 17

  Her passing became an adverse reaction to prescribed medication, and if anyone at the station wanted to check her death certificate, Richard Salinger would just have to set them straight. It was something Richard did a lot, putting people straight—it was the job and his life and his particular place in the order of things.

  Ten years later. Michael and Harry Salinger are riding their bicycles at full speed on the curb, flying toward their house in time for their afternoon curfew. They are tall for their age and blond, their eyes almost colorless. They take after their mother, whom they don’t remember at all: soon they will be taller than Richard Salinger, not that it will do them any good.

  They hear it as they are locking the gate behind them: the telephone ringing in the kitchen.

  It is an acknowledged fact between them that Michael runs faster.

  “Go!” Harry yells.

  Michael throws his bike to the ground and legs it to the back door. He grabs the key from the pocket of his jeans, shoves it into the lock, and turns it. He pushes into the kitchen and gets to the phone in one stride. His hand is slick as he picks up the receiver.

  “Hello,” he gasps. “It’s Michael. Okay. Yes, sir. Here he is.”

  Harry takes the phone from his brother.

  “Hello, sir. Yes. Okay. We will.”

  He puts the receiver down, and for a moment they stand in the dark room. Then Michael opens the fridge door and starts to make them both peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

  Richard Salinger kept his promise to himself: he brought up the boys alone, in the same house they were born in. A local woman in her fifties, Etta Greene, looked after them and did a little housework while he was out; the rest of the time it was just the Salinger men, as he used to call them.

  He knew the boys were afraid of him and enjoyed telling them what he had done at work, especially if any violence had come to pass.

  One afternoon when the boys were five, during their playtime, Etta Greene asked Harry to name a color with the letter b. Without hesitation Harry said, “Red.” Etta looked a little disappointed, and Harry didn’t understand why.

  As far back as he could remember, the letter b had always been red—it felt red, and it brought a sense of red to any word it was a part of. Even though they sometimes disagreed on what color went with which letter, Michael knew exactly what he meant. It was their mother’s gift, undiagnosed and unacknowledged.

  She had considered it a kind of madness, but Lynne Salinger was neither crazy nor cursed, and the only issue with synesthesia is that it is statistically rare and deeply misunderstood. It frightened her that most sounds carried a sense of color, vibrant and beyond her control. She did not cherish nor begin to understand the experience: she endured it and every day tried to suppress it. Then she would think of her husband, and his name would come to her unbidden, in shades of charcoal and red.

  Etta Greene assumed that Harry was confused and left it at that.

  By the time the boys started school, they knew enough of the world never to mention the hidden colors, not to anyone, especially their father.

  When Richard Salinger was shot in the line of duty by an armed robber, he took a bullet in the right knee. Once he left the hospital, he had a limp and a disability pension, both guaranteed as long as he lived.

  The stream of visitors and well-wishers who had come by in the early days of his injury became a dribble and then stopped altogether. Six months later, they were completely alone.

  One morning, while the boys were at school, Richard Salinger went through their room and found a soiled sheet in a bundle in a corner. When they came home, he was waiting for them in the living room. He was stone-cold sober, and his face was set hard.

  “I’m going to ask you one question,” he said. “Be straight with me, and it ends there. Lie to me, and I’ll know it.”

  From a plastic bag he pulled out the bundled sheet. Harry’s insides filled with icy water.

  “Who did this?”

  Salinger knew and didn’t need to ask. He could have washed the sheet and let it go, but he was not that kind of man. He waited. Michael stepped forward. Harry’s eyes grew wide.

  “I did, sir,” Michael said. “I’m sorry.”

  Richard Salinger’s eyes did not move from Harry’s face. “What have you got to say, boy?”

  At ten years of age, Harry knew exactly who he was: a skinny runt with neither guts nor smarts. He knew that, because he had been told enough times. Still, he’d rather get a hiding than let his brother take the rap.

  “I—I did it,” he stammered.

  “I know,” Richard Salinger said as he stood up. “This is how it’s going to work from now on: when one of you fucks up, the other will be punished. Michael, you’re up.”

  Harry Salinger, thirty-seven, crouches in his basement. Sparks from the torch flare across his goggles. It’s not his best work, but he can see the beauty of the idea beyond the faults of his own workmanship, and it pleases him. Salinger peels off his gloves and throws them onto the workbench. Time to go.

  In the Olympic National Park, a three-hour drive from Seattle, there is a stretch of ground blessed by old-growth trees and ferns, trunks thick with moss, and twisting paths that tourists travel days to see and take pictures of with their cell phones.

  Harry Salinger does not take pictures, and he hardly looks up from the slippery, rocky path. In the depths of winter there are no visitors, and in the gloom of the early evening he takes in every detail of the trail. It is in all likelihood the last time he will have the opportunity to do this.

  He bends to check that the laces are properly tied on his walking boots, and then he waits, making sure the last little bit of daylight is extinguished. When the time is right, he’s off. He runs, trusting his memory of the trail, weaving among the trees because a straight run could get him killed; his boots cut and rustle through the greenery, not too fast and not too slow.

  In his mind the earth rises to meet his feet and steady his purpose—the forest is on his side. It is the thirty-eighth time he runs the trail, the twenty-first in darkness.

  Chapter 23

  6:30 a.m. The offices of Quinn, Locke were still deserted. Nathan Quinn closed the door behind him and Tod Hollis. From a filing cabinet he pulled out a clear plastic envelope and passed it to Hollis. The envelope contained the anonymous notes.

  Hollis wore a heavy coat with a black turtleneck underneath. He took the envelope and looked at it for a few seconds.

  “Coffee?” Quinn asked.

  “Thanks.”

  Quinn left him in his office and went to the kitchen. From a box he took out a paper filter, shook some fresh coffee into it, and turned on the machine.

  He knew Hollis would tell him to go to the police with the notes, that they’d have the resources to examine them quickly for prints and run a check on the paper. He would recommend they call the detective in charge and give them to him specifically. It made perfect sense, of course. Except Quinn was not ready to do that yet, not until he knew what the writer wanted.

  Hollis would not be happy about it, but there was little he could do to change his mind: it all came down to a choice Quinn had made years before, for a time he had hoped would never come. Judge Martin would be waiting for him in a few hours, and everything else was nonsense. The coffee started to drip.

  Quinn’s reward had brought in more than a hundred calls in twenty-four hours. All of them had been screened and logged, and none had had anything to add to the investigation.

  Madison flipped through the sheets of calls while Brown was on the phone: a SWAT team was on standby to back them up if they got an address, telephone records could be accessed in minutes, and Crime Scene Unit officers had been warned of a possible quick-response situation. Depending on the outcome of the hearing, there might or might not be a press conference, in which the picture of John Cameron would be made public. The one thing Fred Tully did not already have.

  “We never did understand why he retied th
e knot,” she said.

  Brown looked up.

  “The ligature,” she continued. “Cameron replaced the ligature around James Sinclair’s wrists. We found the hairs, but we still don’t know why he did it.”

  “Do we need to know?”

  Do we need to know?

  “Quinn is going to blow a hole right through anything we’re unsure of,” she said.

  Brown stood up, closed the door between them and the squad room, and sat back down.

  “Okay, what do you need to know?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. We have four bodies, a motive, a suspect. We have physical evidence. What else do you need to know?”

  “Everything,” she replied without hesitation. “If something happened, I want to know why. If it didn’t, why didn’t it?”

  “Cameron does exactly what he needs to do. No more, no less. The murder of Erroll Sanders fits that principle. The murders of the Sinclairs do not.”

  “Sometimes people break their own patterns—it depends on circumstance. With James Sinclair, the punishment was Cameron’s priority. It’s possible that killing him was entirely secondary, and knowing that his family was being slaughtered was more important than Sinclair’s own death.”

  “Tell me this: why does it matter to you so much to know why the ligature was tied twice? Forget about the case in court, and tell me why we should be asking that question.”

  “You know why.”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s about behavior. The ligature is one tiny part of it. Like the prints on the glass.”

  “What about the prints?”

  “When we got the call that Payne had matched the prints to Cameron’s, you looked like that was bad news. I asked you why, and you said—”

  “I was surprised.”

  “You were disappointed.”

  “Maybe you’re worrying too much about the small stuff.”

  Madison leaned forward. “The glass the prints were recovered from was by the sink in the kitchen. I saw it before the CSU officer collected it: it was standing right next to a can of Coke.”

  “Okay.”

  “They did not recover any prints from the can. Why is that? Cameron, wearing gloves, pours himself a drink. Then he takes off the gloves, picks up the glass, and drinks from it. It’s sloppy, and he is anything but. There is no small stuff here.”

  They regarded each other for a moment. It was the first time she had even half raised her voice with Brown.

  “Why did you join Homicide?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not for the money, and I’m pretty certain it’s not for the glory.”

  “Why are you asking me now and not five weeks ago?”

  “If I’d asked you then, I wouldn’t have had any context in which to put your answer. Now I’ve seen you work. Why Homicide?”

  Madison realized she had been waiting for him to ask her since they had first met. She heard herself say: “It’s the only place I wanted to be.”

  He nodded slightly. Someday he might ask her again.

  The press surrounded the courthouse. Brown, Madison, Kelly, and Rosario had to push through bodies, microphones, and cameras. Flashes went off, and nobody missed the significance of the primary detective on the Sanders case being present at a hearing for the Blue Ridge murders. For the occasion Kelly wore his court suit.

  It was going to be Sarah Klein’s show. Away from the noise of the crowd outside, the courthouse was quiet, and people went about their business, this hearing only one of dozens.

  Tony Rosario was still pale from his recent illness; then again, drained pallor might have been his natural state. It didn’t help that he was wearing a suit, shirt, and tie combination in shades of gray.

  “Do me a favor and don’t lean against the wall; I’m afraid I’m gonna lose ya,” Kelly said.

  “Gray is my signature color,” Rosario replied.

  The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. Klein turned to them, her voice low.

  “If you want to tell me anything during the hearing, write it on a piece of paper, and only if it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Can you ask him anything about the Sanders situation?” Kelly felt involved but only marginally. They had Cameron’s print on the underside of Sanders’s car, but it wasn’t enough even for a search warrant of Cameron’s residence. Not that a search had done Brown and Madison much good.

  “No, it has nothing to do with this. I have to stick to whatever passed between Quinn and Cameron when they first met to discuss the murders. Anything after that is privileged. You’re a tourist, Detective Kelly—just enjoy the ride.” Klein walked into the courtroom, and they followed.

  Madison had been in court a number of times, both as a witness and as a spectator. She had seen some juries get it right after the prosecutors did their worst and others get it wrong after they had done their best. She believed in the system because it was what they had and it was meant to change and develop as human beings did, in their wisdom and their flaws. She took a seat in the pew behind the prosecutor’s table; Brown sat down next to her, Kelly and Rosario behind them.

  Brown took his glasses from their case and put them on. He was glad the hearing was closed to the public. Everybody wanted something out of it, and though his expectations might not be the same as everyone else’s, he knew he wouldn’t be disappointed. The night before he had spent an hour on the phone with Fred Kamen. He looked at Madison and hoped that by the end of this long day he’d be able to tell her about it.

  Nathan Quinn took his place at the other table. He was representing himself, as Madison had imagined he would. He was alone, and if anything about the proceedings was troubling him, it didn’t show.

  “Sarah,” he said.

  “Nathan.” She nodded back to him.

  The rest of them did not exist.

  Judge Martin took her place on the bench, and Nathan Quinn was sworn in.

  “Swift and to the point, Miss Klein,” the judge said. “There is no jury to impress, and we all know why we’re here. Mr. Quinn, you’re under oath now, and you know what that means.”

  Quinn sat in the witness box, and Sarah Klein stood by her table.

  “Mr. Quinn, would you please take us through the events that occurred last Monday from the moment Detective Sergeant Brown and Detective Madison came to your office and told you about the murder of James Sinclair and his family?”

  “Detective Sergeant Brown told me that James Sinclair had been found dead in his house, with his wife and children. They had been murdered by an intruder. They asked me to identify the bodies, which I did.”

  “What was the time frame?”

  “By then it was early afternoon.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “I called John Cameron.”

  Klein looked up from the papers she was holding in her hands. It had taken them all of forty-five seconds to get there. Quinn held her eyes.

  “For the record, who is John Cameron, and what is your relationship to him?”

  “He is a friend and a client. I now represent him in legal matters, and we share a business interest in the property we inherited from our fathers. James Sinclair was part of it, too.”

  “Why did you call Mr. Cameron after you left the office of the Medical Examiner?”

  “I knew that reporters would be swarming the case, and I did not want him to find out that way. I thought I should tell him in person. I called his beeper number, and he called me back on my cell phone.”

  The court stenographer finished tapping his keyboard, and there was a beat of silence. Something was wrong: Klein was getting what she wanted, and it shouldn’t have been that easy.

  “Your Honor,” she began, “the purpose of this hearing is to make sure that Mr. Cameron—who, for the record, has an outstanding arrest warrant for four counts of murder—does not avail himself of the attorney-client privilege in order to esca
pe capture.”

  “We are very clear on that, Counselor,” Judge Martin replied.

  “Mr. Quinn, how do you contact John Cameron when you need to?”

  “As I said, I call his beeper, and he calls me back.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “The People request the number, Your Honor.”

  “Are you going to object, Mr. Quinn?” Judge Martin asked him.

  “No.”

  Quinn gave them the number, and the stenographer took it down. So did the detectives. A beeper: Cameron had probably tossed it into the trash five seconds after Quinn told him about the hearing.

  “When Mr. Cameron called you back, what did you say to him?”

  “I told him it was an emergency and that we needed to meet straightaway.”

  “Did you mention the nature of the emergency?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did he seem surprised?”

  “He asked me what it was about, and I said I couldn’t tell him on the phone.”

  “Right, the phone. Where did he call you back from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he have a cell phone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is an old friend and a business partner, and you don’t know if he has a cell phone?”

  Quinn turned to the judge. “The question was asked and answered, Your Honor.”

  “Move on, Miss Klein,” she said.

  “So, you called his beeper, and he called you back. How long did it take him to do so?”

  “A minute, maybe.”

  “Was he standing right next to a pay phone when you called him?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Miss Klein.”

  The attorney half raised her hand in apology and moved on.

  “You told him you couldn’t tell him on the phone. How did he react to that?”

  “He just asked me where I wanted to meet.”

  “Do you often have this kind of conversation when there are subjects you’d rather not deal with on the phone?”