The Gift of the Darkness Read online

He went to the closet and took out the Federal Express uniform he had paid top dollar for three months earlier. It was a beaut. It came with clipboard, pad, baseball cap, boots, and, best of all, a pristine FedEx bag that he slung over his shoulder. The day he got it, he took it to a friend of his to get it customized. The lens of a micro-camera was hidden in a buckle on the side, a tiny remote that fit easily in his pocket controlled the shutter, and it was sensitive enough to shoot indoors with no flash. Because that’s where the bodies were.

  He shaved quickly—appearances mattered—and cut himself slightly on the cheek. A reverse directory told him who lived at 1135 Blue Ridge: Sinclair, James R. Riley wrote the name on the FedEx envelope, together with the details of an imaginary sender, filled it with a copy of yesterday’s Seattle Times, and pressed the envelope shut. If he managed just one good shot of the bodies—four dead bodies—inside the house, where nobody else was allowed, it could be worth thousands.

  From the second he had heard it on the scanner, Andrew Riley was out and driving in thirteen minutes.

  The crime-scene photographer had covered every inch of the victims and the bedroom they were in.

  “All right,” Dr. Fellman said. “Let’s see.”

  He took out of his pocket a tape recorder, put it on the night table closest to the body of the man, and pressed the Record button.

  “Sam, can you check the heating system? I need to know the exact times it comes on and goes off.”

  Dr. Fellman’s assistant, Sam, whom Madison had never heard utter a single word, went off to follow orders. The pathologist placed the tips of his fingers on the side of James Sinclair’s head and tested the rigidity of the neck muscles. He ran his fingers along the man’s jaw.

  “Rigor’s complete. I’d say between twenty-four and thirty-six.” He turned to Brown. “Can you smell it?”

  “Smell what?” Brown asked.

  Fellman sniffed the air two inches from the dead man’s face. He reached behind the head.

  “Did you get a picture of the blindfold’s knot?” he yelled to the photographer, who was now on the landing.

  “Yeah. All of them.”

  Dr. Fellman cut neatly through the blindfold near but not through the knot. “Chloroform,” he said finally. “Look at the blisters around his nose and mouth. It could have been enough to cause heart paralysis in a few minutes. We’ll know for sure after the PM. It doesn’t look like he suffocated, though.” He pushed up each eyelid in turn and looked into the eyes.

  Madison had not smelled the chloroform and made a mental note not to make the same mistake again.

  Dr. Fellman put the blindfold in a paper evidence bag and tagged it. “Let’s roll him over.”

  Brown helped the pathologist turn James Sinclair’s body onto its side, and Dr. Fellman proceeded to snip the leather strip binding Sinclair’s wrists—again, close to but not through the knot. He put it in another paper evidence bag. It was encrusted with blood from the man’s wrists. He tested elbows, wrists, and fingers. He rolled him to his back once more and tried to bend the knees without taking off the ligature around the ankles. Then he went around the bed and started all over with the other family members, taking off all their blindfolds by cutting near the knots and looking closely at their gunshot wounds.

  “Twenty-two?” Brown asked.

  “Looks like it. Very close range, but no exit wound on the woman.”

  “There’s a couple of rounds in the wall by the children’s bunk beds,” Dunne said, standing by the door.

  “Any good?” Brown said.

  “Pretty flattened out.”

  “That’s all I’m going to do for now,” Dr. Fellman said, and he turned toward his assistant, who had returned from his errand. “Let’s bag the hands and get these poor souls out of here.”

  Brown was looking intently at the four now-naked faces, dark crosses above the eyes.

  Officer Hall, not quite stepping into the room, half cleared his throat and half coughed.

  “Yes?” Brown asked quietly.

  “There’s a FedEx man downstairs. Says he has an envelope for the victim, and somebody’s got to sign for it.”

  “Madison, could you . . .”

  “Yes.”

  Hall turned around and pretty much bumped into the delivery man. “Hey,” he protested, “I told you to wait downstairs.”

  “Sorry, Officer.” The man was short and stocky, with a crew cut under the FedEx cap and bright eyes like a bird’s. “I have to get this signed.”

  Madison stepped right in front of him. “I’ll sign for it downstairs. You can’t be up here.”

  The man did not move.

  Madison stepped closer. “Sorry, but you can’t be up here. Let’s go.”

  His gaze kept darting past her to the bedroom.

  “You in charge?” he asked her, one hand holding out the envelope, the other fiddling with something in his pocket as he tried to edge around her. “I have to get this signed by the person in charge. Company rules.”

  Madison saw his eyes and did not like what she found there. The news-channel helicopter made a slow pass just above the house, and suddenly she knew.

  “You. Downstairs. Now.”

  The FedEx man backed off, suddenly apologetic. “Sorry, Officer. I didn’t mean to get in the way.” He started down the stairs, Madison and Hall by his side.

  Madison eyed his hands, the envelope, the messenger bag. “Let me see your bag,” she said.

  “No. It’s this here you’ve got to sign . . .”

  Madison put her hand out. “Give me your bag.”

  He was pretty much surrounded; the two uniforms he had passed at the door now standing behind him, the woman cop right in his face. He raised his hands. “Hey.”

  “‘Hey’? Just give me the damn bag.” Her voice was low, meaning it.

  He reluctantly took the carrier off his shoulder and handed it to her. Madison held his eyes. She opened the large flap, and the mechanism inside it was easy to see.

  “You have anything else on you?”

  “No.”

  His belt had no buckle, no other hiding places.

  “ID?”

  Riley took out his driver’s license. No point in trying to show a dud. His eyes went to the bag. You bitch, he thought.

  Madison took his right arm above the elbow and started walking outside into the rain, dragging him with her.

  “If I were you, I would keep a really low profile from now on.” She could feel anger flapping in her chest. “Those people out there could get very upset if they knew what you were trying to do.”

  They were heading up the driveway toward the main road. Caring neighbors and curious passersby alike were under dark umbrellas, the crowd now a few dozen. Bored newspeople started their cameras as the two of them left the house.

  “I was just doing my job,” Riley hissed.

  Madison’s grip tightened. They got to the line of blue uniforms holding back the crowd. Madison had her back to the press; she leaned forward and whispered, “I ever see you again on a crime scene, you and I are going to have an abrupt disagreement. Have a nice day.”

  She took one look at the crowd and started back to the house, ignoring the calls from the reporters.

  “Bitch!” Riley muttered. He was getting drenched.

  “Yo! Riley!” A familiar face from the wall of photographers and cameras beckoned him. More flashes went off.

  Madison went back inside just as Andrew Riley started to tell his tale to a buddy under a raincoat tented over their heads.

  The Sinclairs were carried out in body bags; the little procession would be on the news within minutes. The ambulances left, followed by the ME’s car.

  As the crowd of onlookers closed in behind the vehicles, the principal players now gone, the rain kept falling, soft but steady, over the detectives and officers who walked from person to person and to neighboring homes, gathering what information they could.

  Brown gently poked at the hole where a b
ullet had been, by the top bunk of the boys’ room.

  Madison froze her anger out—no use for it. Someone had tried to tell them something with these murders: the message was cruel and twisted and ugly, and it was time to find the messenger.

  She and her partner moved through the house, trying to get a sense of the life that had been lived in it. Brown paced back and forth between the master bedroom and the children’s. On the glossy white door frame of the parents’ room, about five feet from the ground, he pointed out a smudge of blood and something else, probably hair.

  Madison walked from room to room, seeking other signs of the killer’s visit. As Officer Giordano had reported, no windows were broken, no doors jimmied. The kitchen on the ground floor was a long, narrow room, windows facing a garden on the left, white appliances on the right. It was spotless. Her gloves back on, Madison opened the door of the dishwasher; inside were clean plates and glasses. By the sink, a tall glass and a can of Coke, empty. One of the forensic technicians was dusting the windowsills for prints.

  “Will you pick these up?” she said, pointing at the can and the glass.

  “Yeah,” he said without turning.

  Madison made a note in her book to try to determine whether the husband, the wife, or one of the kids had been the last person roaming around the house, for chronology’s sake. Judging by how neat everything was, the dishwasher must have already started its cycle when the Coke was drunk, or the glass would have been put in it.

  She went back upstairs. Thinking her own thoughts, she almost missed Brown’s question.

  “Why didn’t he shoot the father? Instantly immobilize him? If you break into a family’s home to do your thing, who’s the greatest threat?”

  “The father,” Madison said. It had bothered her, too.

  “You saw all his bruises.”

  “Yes. He put up a fight. So why not shoot him?” she echoed.

  “I don’t know,” Brown said.

  “I think the killer got to them before they even knew he was there.” Madison looked around. “He knew the layout of the place. He got in and got on with it. So cocky, he even let the father try to fight for his life.”

  Brown said nothing for so long, she thought he had left the room. She turned toward him. He was transfixed, staring at the top of the door frame on the inside of the bedroom. Two words had been carved into the glossy white, the letters two inches tall, rough and angular but perfectly readable.

  Thirteen Days

  “We’d better get CSU to take a look at it,” Brown said.

  The letters were carved with a kind of violent precision that was almost hard to look at. Someone had tried to give a little curl to the end of each one, to make them pretty.

  “Have you seen anything like this before?” she asked.

  “No,” Brown replied.

  “It could be a warning.”

  “It could be many things. None of them good.”

  Walking down the stairs, they could still smell the pine wax. The banisters were oak and recently polished. A lovely house, a nice family.

  On the doorstep, Brown looked out at the crowd.

  “Has someone taken pictures of the crowd? Somebody shoot us some video. The faces—I want to be able to see the faces.” He pointed at the wall of umbrellas as flashes started popping and television cameras swung into action.

  Chapter 6

  Frank Lauren stood in the middle of the upstairs study in the Sinclairs’ house and took it in. His partner, Mary Kay Joyce, snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. They had been collecting evidence. The windows had been dusted for prints, and the powder now stained the glossy white sill. On the leather armchair in front of the desk a book lay open facedown, a hardback edition of Isak Dinesen’s Letters from Africa. Joyce picked it up, slid it, still open, into a plastic bag, sealed it and fixed the sides with two small clamps, tagged it, and signed the label, Lauren scribbling his signature under hers. They worked the room methodically and in complete silence.

  Joyce was running her hand around the seat of the chair behind the desk, to check whether there was anything trapped in the cushion. Her fingers dislodged a thin strip of pale green paper. She picked it up with a pair of tweezers and held it against the light.

  Madison was organizing her notes as Brown drove. They had found the name of the ICE contact in Sinclair’s wallet and repeated—for the maid’s benefit—on a pad on the kitchen wall. In this case more than others it was important to talk to the in-case-of-emergency contact as soon as possible, as the house was probably already on the news, with all its gory significance.

  Lieutenant Fynn would soon release a statement promising “swift justice,” but no details of the victims or the crime had yet been released. Madison wrote a note to remind herself to ask Dr. Fellman about the time of death of the father compared to that of the others.

  “So something else is going to happen,” she said. “Thirteen days from the victims’ death. Sometime between the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth? Chistmas Eve, even? Thirteen is only eleven days away from Saturday night.”

  “Two hundred and sixty-four hours and change, to be precise,” Brown said.

  The car pulled up to the curb, the traffic slow and the crowd of shoppers a sluggish river around them as they got out. Madison saw a mother yank her toddler back to her side just as he was stepping in front of a car.

  “Have you met him before?” Brown asked as they got into the Stern Tower elevator.

  “No. But I have seen him in court. He can make things pretty nasty for a prosecution witness.”

  “Yeah, well, most cops would rather stick pins into their eyes.” Brown smoothed down his tie with the flat of his left hand.

  They stepped out on the ninth floor and entered the offices of Quinn, Locke & Associates, where they showed their badges and asked to see Nathan Quinn. They were directed to a waiting area and asked if they wanted anything to drink, which they declined, and were told Mr. Quinn would see them in a few minutes. Madison looked around at the expensive art on the walls and remembered pictures in the papers of charity events Quinn had attended.

  They were shown to his office, and Nathan Quinn stood to greet them. He was somewhere in his forties; his eyes appeared black with the same grave quality Madison had noticed in court. Up close, he didn’t have the manner of detached affluence one might expect from a partner in a successful law firm with corporate clients. He looked like a man who would take somebody apart with whatever the legal system gave him, and, failing that, he’d simply use his bare hands.

  “Sergeant Brown. Detective Madison. What can I do for you? Please sit.”

  This was a man who was used to dealing with the police, and Madison realized that he probably thought they were there because of a case he was working on.

  “Mr. Quinn, is James Sinclair an associate in this firm?” Brown asked.

  Quinn sat back in his chair. “He’s been a partner for the last four years.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “What is this about?”

  “I’m sorry,” Brown said. “I have some very bad news.”

  Quinn pulled himself back.

  “There is no good way to say this. James Sinclair was found dead this morning in his home. Murdered. His family . . .” Brown paused. “His wife and children, too.”

  “Annie . . . and the boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “What—what happened?”

  “An intruder. We think sometime on Saturday night.”

  Nathan Quinn leaned his elbows on his desk and rested his brow on his hands. For maybe a minute the only sound was the clicking of a computer keyboard somewhere nearby. When his gaze finally rose to meet theirs, he spoke again, his voice steady. “Where are they now?”

  “If you think you’re up to it, we’d like you to make a formal identification at the coroner’s.”

  “I understand.”

  “There are some questions we need to ask you—to ask the people who work
ed with Mr. Sinclair.”

  “Whatever I can do.” Quinn hesitated. “How did they—”

  “We’ll know more later on,” Brown said, avoiding the word postmortem.

  “Was it a burglary?”

  “It’s not clear yet.”

  “You said you had questions you’d like to ask me . . . ?”

  “We’d like to get a clear picture of the family. You knew them well?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?”

  “I saw James in the office on Friday. He left at about five, five thirty. I left a little after he did.”

  “Did you notice anything strange, anything unusual in his behavior in the last few weeks? Did he seem worried or concerned about anything?”

  “No. Everything was normal.”

  “How well did you know Mrs. Sinclair?”

  “As I said, quite well.”

  “Did you also meet the Sinclairs outside of work?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did you visit their home?”

  “Yes.”

  “As far as you know, did they have any enemies, someone who might want to do them harm?”

  “Absolutely not. James is a tax lawyer, and Annie teaches in primary school. They are—they were—decent and kind and generous. They had no enemies.”

  “Nobody from an old case?”

  “No.”

  “You understand, Mr. Quinn, there are some personal questions we have to ask, as well.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “To your knowledge, were either James or Anne Sinclair having an affair, or were they engaged in any illegal activities?”

  “No,” Quinn said.

  “Would you know if they had been?” Brown asked gently.

  Quinn’s eyes held Brown’s for a moment. He would tell the police things to help them do their job, Madison saw that in him, but Nathan Quinn would not unfold the lives of his friends and lay them open for strangers to take apart.

  “They were law-abiding citizens and devoted to each other.”

  “I think that’s it, for the moment, except for the formal ID. Can we drive you to the morgue?” Brown said, standing up. Madison followed suit.