The Gift of the Darkness Read online

  Carl Doyle sat down across from Madison; his eyes were red-rimmed, but he looked under control. Madison liked how he had tried to comfort some of the others; under the slightly campy manner she sensed some real strength. He ran his hands through his hair and rubbed his eyes.

  “What can I tell you, Detective?”

  “First, how long have you been at Quinn, Locke?”

  “About ten years.”

  “About the same as James Sinclair.”

  “That’s right. I started two months before he did.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  Doyle poured himself some water; he was giving the question some thought. “I don’t know if I can say I did. We didn’t go out for dinner or a beer, if that’s what you mean, but I saw him every day. I knew when things were going badly with a case, when something good happened.”

  Doyle’s eyes were a sharp blue and fixed on Madison’s.

  “I remember when his first boy was born.”

  Madison leaned forward. “What do you remember of these last few weeks? How was he?”

  “There’s a complex lawsuit they wanted to sort out before the holidays; all was going well with that. James was tired but okay. He was talking about going away for a few days for New Year’s.”

  “Was he in any way different from usual? Was there any change to his routine?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody come to see him who didn’t look right to you?”

  “No.”

  Madison felt disappointment like a slow, bitter drink she had to sip over and over again.

  “One last question: are you aware of a client or a friend of James Sinclair called John Cameron?”

  Doyle looked at her for a long moment, the pale eyelashes blinking.

  “Of course,” he said. “James has known him for years.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They’ve known each other since they were kids.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The Hoh River. They were the Hoh River boys.”

  Madison hadn’t heard the name for a long time but remembered it instantly. How, years after the event, her grandmother had walked her to Rachel’s house so that she wouldn’t be on the street alone, not even for five minutes.

  “Have you met John Cameron?” she asked.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Thank you very much. That’s it for now.”

  Doyle left and closed the door. Madison punched in Brown’s cell number and hoped to God he had it on.

  “Sinclair has known Cameron for years. They’re friends. The Hoh River kidnapping case,” Madison said.

  Brown went quiet for a while; then his voice came back.

  “We have DNA. There were hairs in a ligature knot. Preliminary tests indicate they don’t belong to the victims.”

  “Any possible characteristics for the perp yet?”

  “Not much. Judging from wound trajectories, about six foot, right-handed, and strong. Dark hairs recovered from the ligature. It covers at least a quarter of the population.”

  “We should talk to Quinn. He was that close to Sinclair, he must know he was friends with Cameron.”

  “I’ve tried him all afternoon. His phone is off.”

  “He’s going to have to go home sometime.”

  “You’re three hours past the end of your shift.”

  “I know. I’ll come in to write up the interviews. Will Records have the file for the Hoh River case?”

  “Not where you can find it this late. It’s too old.”

  “How late are you going to stay?”

  “I still have to talk to VICAP.”

  VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, was a database of offenders and crimes created by the FBI: if a murder in Arkansas had the same characteristics as a homicide in Maryland, the investigating authorities could compare reports and find out if they had been committed by the same individual. It was an invaluable tool, and Brown was the contact man in Seattle.

  Madison got up to leave and switched off the overhead light. The view, which had been made invisible by the reflection in the window, revealed itself. From the pitch-black where the sea was, the wind was carrying snowflakes out of the darkness and into the flickering lights of the city. Without thinking, Madison put her palm flat on the glass as if she could touch them. Beyond it, a Thing lived and breathed that had drawn crosses in blood. I see you, she thought.

  Chapter 10

  Andrew Riley sat on a stool at the bar, an empty shot glass by his hand and a bottle of Budweiser he was working his way through. He had been at the business of getting drunk for a while and had managed to dull the edge of his anger a little.

  It still bit hard every time he thought of the camera in the FedEx bag he would never see again and the humiliation of having made the front page looking like a jerk. A copy of the Washington Star had been passed from hand to hand in the crowded bar, and some of the regulars had bought him drinks and slapped his back.

  Jordan’s was a sports bar off Elliott Avenue; it had signed Mariners and Seahawks pictures on the walls and framed newspaper articles written by reporters who got drunk there from time to time.

  After being dragged out of the Sinclair house by Detective Alice Madison, he had stayed on the lawn and bitched with a colleague. Standing on the balls of his feet, he had seen the bodies being taken away and had gazed after the ME vans until they had disappeared in traffic.

  Back home he had quickly changed out of the FedEx uniform, grabbed his camera bag with the Leica and the Olympus and their different lenses, and practically run out of the house. He couldn’t bear to be in it. Driving toward downtown, he had called his agency and a friend at the Star.

  Steamed up in his car, he had waited for hours to get a picture of a Hollywood actress who was shooting a movie in town. He saw her and snapped her and e-mailed the agency, and all the time he thought only of the three minutes he had spent inside 1135 Blue Ridge. Then he had gone to the bar.

  The guy sitting on his right had been talking to him, his voice reaching him through the cheers of the crowd watching the game on cable and his own disordered thoughts.

  “What it is, it’s a hawks game.”

  What the hell was a hawk’s game?

  Riley rubbed his eyes with his fists like a child. His companion was a couple of decades older than he was, with a good suit and an expensive watch. He made a circling motion with his right index finger, and the bartender nodded and brought them both fresh drinks.

  Riley downed the shot in one, turned to the suit, his left elbow on the bar, and tried to concentrate on what the man was saying. A whole load of nothing, he thought.

  He had not seen the door open or the man walk in, find a way through the crowd, order a Coke, and lean on the bar behind him, his eyes on the game.

  More often than not it’s what you don’t know that keeps you safe. Andrew Riley would never be so close to the making of his own death as he was at that moment, sad and frustrated, talking to a stranger in a noisy bar.

  “Do you know who Weegee was?” Riley asked, referencing a famous street photographer from the 1940s.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  Alcohol made him melancholy, and he’d rather be angry. He did not feel the eyes scanning the crowd behind him, then resting back on the game. A loud cheer and clapping—somebody somewhere had done good work on the field.

  The telephone behind the bar rang, and the bartender picked up, the flat of his hand against his other ear.

  “Riley,” he said, and he held the receiver out to him.

  He occasionally got calls there.

  “Riley here.”

  Nothing. There was noise and crackle; he wasn’t sure whether it came from the telephone or from the headache pushing against the inside of his eyes.

  “Hello?”

  The line went dead.

  “Shit!” He replaced the receiver and finished his beer in one long draw. He could smell
old sweat and cigarette smoke on the fleece top he was wearing, and it almost made him gag.

  “Nice talking to you, man,” he said, and he put a couple of bills on the bar. He was wearing a heavy mountain jacket from REI with down-filled lining and Velcro straps on the wrists. He patted the inside pocket, where he had tucked his Olympus. Like an off-duty police officer, he always carried a weapon.

  He made his way through the crowd and a moment later was standing in the freezing cold. He had left his car in an alley on the side of the building, where staff parked. No more than three seconds away from a quick drive home and a long sleep.

  “Riley.” The voice came out of the darkness behind him.

  “Yeah?” He started to turn, and something hit him hard on the side of the face. A pain so sharp, it knocked the breath out of him. And again, before he could put his hands up and fall to the ground on his knees. He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t see. He put his arms around his head. He felt hands patting him down. His face was on the wet concrete, rough against his bloody cheek.

  The man took the camera from his inside pocket, wrapped the strap around his own hand, and slammed it against the brick wall just above Riley’s head.

  Once, twice. A crunching sound and a shower of tiny fragments of plastic and metal shattering. Three times, until there was hardly anything left at the end of the strap.

  Riley felt the man pause, standing over him as he fought for every breath.

  This is it, he thought, and he passed out.

  A waiter found him ten minutes later, called 911, and put a blanket around him to keep him warm until the paramedics arrived.

  Chapter 11

  Brown had three neat piles of paperwork on his desk, and he referred to them as he was talking on the phone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his tie still tightly knotted.

  “No. Thought not. The blood work isn’t in yet.”

  Madison came in the door with notebooks under her arm and a cardboard holder with two coffee cups in it. They had taken over the third interview room. Members of the public came up to talk to detectives from time to time, and the large open-plan room was an inappropriate location for their crime-scene photos.

  Madison put a cup on the corner of Brown’s desk and took out the pad with her interview notes.

  “Thank you,” Brown said. He put a hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Kamen.”

  Fred Kamen was one of the bright lights of the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, the section once called Behavioral Science. He had taught one of Madison’s classes at the University of Chicago. It was at the time of the Goulden-McKee kidnapping, and she remembered that he would always leave with another agent at the end of the sessions and spend the rest of his waking hours trying to get the teenager back to his family. It had given a sense of urgency to the classes, and they had all felt somewhat involved. When the boy had been found safe and unharmed after four weeks, Madison and her classmates had cheered.

  “Yes, I know. It will be posted on the hotline. Tomorrow. Bye.”

  Brown adjusted the reading glasses on the bridge of his nose. On top of the piles of interviews lay four pictures, one for each victim as they had been found. On the windowsill, unread and untouched, was Brown’s copy of Moby-Dick. For a second there Madison saw him as a clerk in some unearthly office.

  “It will take a few hours to get an answer from VICAP, but Kamen has never personally encountered this kind of staging before, and he doesn’t think cult, either. He doesn’t like the ‘thirteen days’ thing, though—there’s a timeline here we know nothing about.”

  “Any news from Prints?”

  “Nothing unusual. Payne called half an hour ago—they were done for the day. They found a whole load of the family’s, some of the maid’s, some small ones in the kids’ bedroom— friends, probably. But no Cameron.”

  Madison was talking and typing. “If we did find any, a good attorney could argue he’d left them there on another occasion.” She stopped typing and looked up. “How many people know about the possible Cameron connection?”

  “You, me, Fynn, Payne, Lauren, and Joyce.”

  “I mean, what are the chances of this being just a coincidence, and the name on the check is actually a doctor in Tacoma whose taxes Sinclair was doing?”

  “I’d say pretty close to zero.”

  “I don’t remember any message left on the Nostromo or on the drug dealer’s body.”

  “No, that’s a first.”

  Madison went back to typing, the words coming out in a rush while her mind was somewhere else.

  “You did good today,” Brown said.

  She looked up, but Brown was holding a blood-spatter chart against the light and did not meet her eyes.

  “This case, whatever is going to happen with it, we are going to build it from the ground up. Piece by piece. The check is only one brick. Don’t let that close off any other possibilities,” he continued.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, keep an open mind.”

  “I intend to.”

  “I know, but cases can have a momentum of their own. This one is likely to start running very soon.” He was still looking at the chart. “Don’t let that affect your judgment.”

  Somebody else might have found his tone condescending; Madison thought it over for a second. He was trying to teach her something—every other consideration was irrelevant. She finished the paperwork and added it to Brown’s.

  “First thing tomorrow we are going to dig up the Hoh River file,” he said. “If that’s how they once knew each other, that’s where we start.”

  “I want to get going on that.” Madison put on her jacket. “I’m going to the library.”

  Brown looked out the window. It was pitch-black.

  “I have a friend,” she explained as she straightened a couple of pencils on her desk. “The papers must have run the story at the time. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Madison, driving north toward Fourth Avenue, pulled in at an all-night grocery store and punched a number into her cell phone.

  “Mr. Burton, it’s Alice Madison. Is it all right if I come by tonight?”

  The store didn’t have much in the way of patisserie, but manners dictated that you didn’t go visiting empty-handed. She remembered her last visit and picked a rich chocolate cake. There was no traffic, and, for no reason at all, she drove past the library and down Sixth Avenue. The ninth floor of Stern Tower, the offices of Quinn, Locke, lay in shadow. She looked up, drove around the block, and then made a loop back to where she had come from. She parked only a few yards from the service entrance of the Public Library and pressed the buzzer lightly. The metal door sprang open almost immediately.

  A few years before, Ernie Burton’s sixteen-year-old daughter had gotten herself into some minor police trouble. Madison had made the trouble go away, and that had bought her a lifetime all-hours pass at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. Burton was the head night guy, as they called him, and he had wasted no time extending privileges to her and making sure his colleagues did the same.

  She found him and three others in the thick of a card game. They were all men who had come to security work after a life doing other jobs and who welcomed, as well as the salary, the opportunity to escape their retirement and their wives. Madison looked at the table for less than three seconds and knew who was winning, who was losing, and who was glad of the interruption.

  “Look who’s here.”

  “Jeez, Detective, I thought we’d never see you again. I was all heartbroken.”

  “How’s your wife, Ronnie?” Madison asked with a smile.

  “Still alive. You married yet?”

  “What, give up the chance to come down here and flirt with you guys?”

  They cut the cake and ate it with some terrible instant coffee.

  “I know you’re here to do your work; we don’t want to be holding you up,” Ernie said.

  “I’d better get
going,” Madison agreed.

  The four men went back to their card game, and Madison found her way through the familiar building.

  When Burton had first given her the pass, it was the most he could do to repay a kindness; he couldn’t have imagined that in Madison’s eyes his gift far outweighed what she had done for him. It had taken her less than fifteen minutes to make things right with her boss and Social Services, in exchange for which she now had the keys to the toy store.

  Most of the times she had come looking for something in particular, but after her grandfather passed on, she would drop by once a month or so and spend a couple of hours reading in the vast room, after midnight, until the cleaners turned up.

  Madison stopped by the Humanities Department on the first floor to check on a file-card index the date on which the articles had appeared in the local papers. The reader-printers for the microfilm of the Newspapers Department were on the second floor, and it took her fifty minutes to get together what she had come for.

  The story had been covered extensively, and she made photocopies of every single article. She organized the sheets roughly in chronological order, giving precedence to serious reporting over tabloid hacks. The large rectangular room was dimly lit; the sounds of the men playing cards downstairs didn’t reach that far. There was a sign by the librarians’ desk: No eating or drinking on the premises.

  Shortly after 11:00 p.m. Madison sat at her usual table, took out of her bag a can of Coke and a yellow legal-size notepad, had a sip, and started reading. The Times was the first: an unemotional piece, economical with the gory details. She read it twice.

  On August 28, 1985, three boys had been kidnapped while they were fishing in a wooded park in Ballard. Their names were David Quinn, 13; James Sinclair, 13; John Cameron, 12.

  David Quinn.

  Four men in a blue van had approached the boys at Jackson Pond. They used chloroform on rags, bundled them into the van, and left. There were no witnesses.

  When the boys did not come home in the afternoon, the parents started to worry, and a search party was organized. Their bicycles were found at the bottom of the pond. The families started to panic. Relatives and friends searched every inch of the area surrounding Jackson Pond and knocked on every door of the neighborhood. Night came and brought no news. The boys had vanished.