The Gift of the Darkness (41 page)

“What notes?” Madison asked.

“The day you came to my office with your partner and told me about James and Annie and the boys, that morning I had received a card, a simple cream card and envelope. It read
Thirteen Days.
Last Wednesday I received an identical card. It read
82885
.”

“Eight-two-eight-eight-five.”

“No. Eight, twenty-eight, eighty-five,” Quinn said. He didn't expect the numbers to mean anything to her.

Madison's anger bubbled up, and she just grabbed it with both hands, because anger felt better than fear. “You mean to tell me that
Salinger contacted you personally? You must have had no doubt it was from the killer when you read in the papers that he had carved
Thirteen Days
on the Sinclairs' bedroom door. And you said nothing. And he writes again, this time with the date of the Hoh River kidnappings? Something so personal to you and Cameron and Sinclair. And you still say nothing? What in the sweet name of everything holy were you thinking?”

Quinn was surprised that she had made the connection with the date, but nothing showed in his voice. “Twenty-four hours ago, Jack was the prime suspect in the investigation, and the notes were the only link to the man I knew was the real murderer. If I knew what he wanted, he could be manipulated. I wasn't going to give up that chance.”

“You are now. You're giving the notes to Forensics, and they'll take them apart. Prints, paper, ink, spit under the stamp, forensic botany, what-have-you. He contacted you, he chose direct communication with you, the person most likely to be standing with Cameron when he was sentenced for four murders he had not committed.” Madison ran her hand over her face and gathered herself. “Could you drop the notes tomorrow early at the precinct? Or, better still, can I pick them up now?”

She calculated that Sorensen would be back in the morning, and she would deliver them like gold into her hands and nobody else's.

Quinn nodded. “Tomorrow morning. Seven-thirty at your precinct.”

“Fine.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Cameron said, and before she knew it, the front door was open, and he was gone.

She stared at the door for a long moment.

“This was . . . interesting,” she said.

“It always is,” Quinn replied.

Chapter 39

Twenty years ago. Nathan Quinn sits in his cramped office in the King County Prosecuting Attorney building. He has been checking telephone records for hours, and the boredom is slowly but surely killing him. Six months previously there had been some phone threats to the attorneys involved in the Reilly-Murtough case, and he had been one of those who had received calls at home. In their wisdom, his superiors had decreed that all calls should be recorded and kept track of. Hence Quinn sat at his desk, going over the numbers, ticking them off and waiting for his eyes to fall out of his head.

He found an unidentified number from a call received a few months earlier at home and checked his own log. The log said,
Jack called from bar, brief conversation.
Nathan Quinn blinked slowly. He looked at the date of the call. It was a date he wouldn't easily forget—it was the night he had bailed Jack out of a jail cell, the boy reeking of alcohol. He ticked off the call.

A few days later a major spring thaw hit Washington State, and the body of Timothy Gilman, or what the winter had left of it, was found by hikers very much as John Cameron had last seen it weeks before, dead and impaled on the spikes he had planted. It took them a week to identify him, two days to track down the bar where he did
his drinking, and twenty minutes to accept that in all probability the case would remain unsolved.

Apparently he had had an appointment with one of his pals he hadn't turned up for, and the friend remembered very clearly the last night they had met at the bar—the last time anyone had seen Gilman alive. Everyone at the bar had been interviewed, but nothing had come of it.

Nathan Quinn read the report because Gilman was well known to the King County courts, and their paths had crossed before. Gilman was an enforcer who did low-level cash work: intimidation, extortion—nothing that required more than muscle and two brain cells. There, in the middle of the report, was the address and telephone number of the bar. A number he had read only a few days ago on his own phone records:
Jack called from bar, brief conversation.

Nathan Quinn looked at the number as if it were some kind of alien code. He took out the file with the phone records and checked. It was the same number. Jack had called him from that bar that night, the last time Gilman had been seen alive, the night he had bailed him out of the police lockup.

Nathan Quinn did not know why he drove to the bar and what moved him to talk with the bartender. He didn't know why he asked him about Gilman, his friends, and all the people who had already been interviewed by the detectives. And when the bartender told him that of all the people there that night, only the kid who always sat at the bar had not been interviewed, because he had never been back there again, Nathan Quinn didn't know how he drove himself home. Work had been relentless, and he had hardly spoken to Jack in the last eight weeks, and the last meaningful conversation he remembered was at lunch in the diner, when Jack had been so interested in his work as a prosecutor and the case he had been working on.

Quinn sat in his parked car, his thoughts running away from him, unable to simply get out and go into his house. Two months ago, in the diner.

“What are we talking about here?”

“What if you didn't even have enough on the woman to charge her, but you knew she'd done it?”

“Then you go back to the drawing board, and you find the evidence you need.”

“Still, sometimes you don't.”

“Sometimes you don't.”

“What would you have done then?”

“In this case?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know. Sometimes, however hard you work the case, it just doesn't happen.”

“What about eyewitness testimony?”

“In theory?”

“In theory.”

“Without evidence?”

“Yes.”

“It would be very difficult. A good defense attorney would tear the witness apart.”

Quinn saw Cameron in the lockup, the boy's eyes dead and glazed and his voice saying over and over, “It's done, Nathan. It's over. It's done now.” He hadn't understood then. The spring air was sweet as Quinn left his car. He lay on his bed in his suit and tie, only kicking off his shoes as he turned and wrapped himself in the bedspread.

The understanding of what Cameron had done and why he had done it had reached into his chest like smoke; it burned and choked him. When dawn came, his decision had been made. He showered, put on a fresh suit, and went to the office. His letter of resignation was a surprise to all his colleagues; then again, it wasn't the first time someone as good as Quinn left to make some proper money in the private sector. Two days later, Quinn and Cameron met for lunch in the diner.

“Hikers found a dead body in the woods—guy fell in a hole and was killed by wooden spikes.”

Cameron didn't so much as blink. “It's called a trapping pit—they're used for bears. Maybe the poor guy was a careless hunter.”

“No, he was a cheap, boorish enforcer. A bad guy. I knew of him.”

The waitress came, and Cameron ordered pie. He took out a schedule of the Sonics games and pushed it toward Quinn. “Get busy and decide which ones you want to see. Pie's great today.” Cameron's eyes were bright and held Quinn whole. “Try some.”

A quiet kid. A beer or maybe coffee with a shot. Trying to look older than he was, you know, but looking like he was passing razor blades half the time. Oh, yeah, I remember thinking there was something odd with one of his hands, always in his pocket. I notice things like that—it passes the time.

Quinn circled a few dates with his pen. Jack would never say, would never tell him, so he would never have to know that the legal system Nathan believed in—the life he had carved out of his grief—would have failed him again in the only way that mattered. Gilman had been one of the kidnappers, one of the men who had taken David away and lost him in the woods forever, and Jack would carry Gilman alone.

Quinn opened his private practice a few weeks later. His colleagues were right: it would be hugely successful.

Chapter 40

The call came in from an early commuter into Seattle, driving past and noticing the eerie light behind the trees. A neighbor would later say she thought she'd heard an explosion around 1:00 a.m. The Everett Fire Marshall's Office engines raced to the isolated property; the flames were still high beyond the firs in the distance. A circle of bare ground had spread out and around the house, the snow withdrawing to the tree line.

A row of firefighters in full gear stood and watched the burning hell. No one had made it out of the house: they had checked the perimeter, sweeping the gritty snow with their flashlights where the light of the flames didn't reach.

The second floor had collapsed into the first, which had folded into itself and crashed into the basement. A wooden house built at the beginning of the last century, like so much tinder waiting for a spark. The fire had burned hot and fast. The crisscrossing jets of water did what little they could, but by the dawn's first light Harry Salinger's house was no more than blackened stumps and a pile of ashes.

Madison grabbed the phone on the second ring and automatically swung her bare feet onto the cold wooden floor.

“Hello.”

“Madison.”

It was Spencer.

“I'm here.”

“Listen. The hotline got a call from San Diego last night: a woman says she's Salinger's aunt, saw him on the news, gave us a lead. His grandparents left him a house in Everett while he was in jail; he just never bothered to register the property in his own name.”

Madison was already walking to the bathroom to shower. She froze midstep.

“Tell me you have an address.” She flashed to a sudden memory of green, Everett's Forest Park in spring.

“Slow down, Madison. We're all about five hours too late.”

“What—”

“There was a fire. The house has burned down to nothing; there might have been accelerants involved. Right now we know diddly-squat. The FMO investigators are already all over it.”

“Spencer, we can't let ourselves believe he was inside the house. Life is just not that kind.”

“I know. But apparently there was an explosion. We can at least hope.”

“Hope—I could go for a little of that.”

Madison held the cell in her hand for a minute after the call ended, still slightly dazed by broken sleep and new information. This was unexpected; this was a turn in the road.

She checked the time. 6:10 a.m. She was due to meet Quinn in a little less than an hour and a half to pick up the notes. Spencer had mentioned accelerants: that meant either Salinger had quite literally burned his bridges behind him and moved on to the next thing on his to-do list, or he had accelerants around the house, and they had blown up on him.

She turned on the cold water and stepped into the shower. In her experience, life was definitely not that fair.

It was after her second cup of coffee that Madison realized that she hadn't told Spencer about Quinn and Cameron dropping by. Then
again, only the mugs in the sink confirmed beyond doubt what, even a few days ago, she would have filed away under
surreal dream
.

There was no way around it, the fire had deprived them of a wealth of details about Harry Salinger: how he lived his days and how those days had sometimes been measured by hours filled with death and horror. Madison adjusted her holster and tightened the strap. If the house had held evidence that could connect him to the John Does, that evidence was gone, too. Forever.

Spencer's call came just as she was getting into her car.

“They found a body inside the house. Everett FMO is making sure the site is safe, but they have definitely seen human remains.”

Madison leaned her head against the steering wheel. For one brief, sickening moment a dead body in a burned-down house had felt like a good thing. Was that where she was now? Because the only thing worse than that would have been to pretend it hadn't happened. Madison wound down the car window and breathed deeply. She wasn't going to turn away from it; she had been glad a body had been found, and she had hoped it was the man whose work she had witnessed in the photographs from Pierce County.

It occurred to her that if she had been at that house when the fire started, in the twisted way our hearts turn, she would have tried to get Salinger out.

She turned on the ignition, and the familiar purr broke the silence, a bird flapped away from the branch above her, and a handful of snow drifted onto the windshield.

If the fire had gotten to Salinger before the King County Prosecutor's Office, before John Cameron and his judgment, then maybe fire was a more appropriate resolution.

Madison was on 509 when the cell started vibrating on the seat next to her.

“Make that three sets of unidentified human remains,” Spencer said, his voice rough from lack of sleep.

She didn't quite know how to respond: if he had blown himself to hell, then he had taken company.

“Spencer, wait. I have to drop something off at the lab first, and then I'm going to brief Fynn. You really want to be there.”

“Brief him about what?” He yawned.

“I met Cameron last night. We had a chat. Anyway, I guess that's one way to describe what happened.”

“You do keep things interesting, don't you? Yeah, I'll be there.”

Madison stepped on the gas. What she really wanted was to drive straight to Salinger's house and go through the smoking ruins on her hands and knees and find something, anything, that would confirm he'd been there. Instead, there were more victims to identify, more relatives to inform, and all she could do was wait for DNA testing and the will of a Fate that, quite frankly, had been pissing on their shoes lately.

Just as she recognized that schoolyard swearing was oddly comforting, she also knew that at some point that day she would be standing on the edge of the snow looking into the wreckage for an answer she wouldn't get, and, without a doubt, Quinn and Cameron would do the same.

Nathan Quinn came out of his Jeep as Madison pulled into the precinct parking lot. A large padded envelope changed hands, and she took it without looking inside.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded.

“You know what to do if you receive another one.”

“There might not be another one.”

“You heard.”

“Yes, an hour ago.”

Madison didn't ask how he knew. “Three dead in the house so far,” she said.

“Three?”

That he hadn't known. Good news and bad. Madison watched her very own reaction play on his face.

“How long will it take for the tests?”

“I don't know. It depends on so many variables.”

Quinn sank his hands into his coat pockets; snowflakes touched and melted on his shoulders.

“When you want to kill a search in court, you send your opponent a blizzard of paperwork. Every document they ever requested in triplicate and everything even vaguely mentioned in discovery. Before they can find what they're looking for, they're drowning in paper.”

“He sent us a blizzard.”

“Do you believe our luck would have him blow himself up?”

“Not this week.”

“Exactly.” He started to move away.

“You know what to do if you receive another one.”

Quinn's eyes found hers for the briefest moment.

“Absolutely.”

Madison groaned inwardly. It wasn't so much that Quinn couldn't even bother to lie effectively—there had been a flash of something there, and, way down the line, it would be trouble.

“I thought we were working on the presumption of transparency,” she said to his back.

“I've never lied to you, Detective, and I'm not about to start now.”

“Why is that no comfort to me whatsoever?”

“Because you're wise beyond your years.”

“If he's still alive, he will write again.”

Quinn didn't reply.

“You get another one of these, you get on the phone to me like your life depends on it. Which it does.”

Quinn didn't reply.

“Last night it was Cameron who mentioned the notes, not you. Since when is he the one with common sense in the partnership?”

“Don't you have a briefing to go to?”

“I expect there will be a certain interest, yes.”

Quinn turned on his car's ignition, and the engine came to life. “Have fun.”

Considering all they had gone through in the last week, Quinn should have been at least moderately relieved that now they were getting close to the real killer. Madison had seen no trace of that.

In a small pool of bright light Sorensen's tweezers gave a flash of steel as the first envelope revealed the card inside. Their heads bent above the table, Sorensen's red hair held back in a ponytail and Madison's under the collar of her blazer, the rest of the room was in darkness.

To know in her mind what the notes contained was one thing, but to see
Thirteen Days
on the handsome cream paper was to see it carved on the door frame of the Sinclairs' bedroom, the letters pretty against the white gloss, and to see that brought back the heavy scent of flesh decay and wood polish. Madison held her breath.

The room was quiet, the unnatural silence of a number of bodies in a small space; no one dared shift their weight from one foot to the other for fear of missing a single word.

“He was wary but confident,” Madison said an hour into her briefing with Fynn, with Spencer, Dunne, Kelly, and Rosario sitting and standing around them.

Kelly looked ready to burst, the unfairness of the youngest and most inexperienced of the unit briefing
them
about anything was beyond him; the fact that she'd had coffee with the man who'd broken his partner's nose two days earlier was beyond belief itself.

Madison had spoken carefully: this was not the place for conjecture, and she was aware that a false sense of familiarity with John Cameron might give any of them something much more serious than a broken nose.

“Sorensen will call when she has any results on the cards,” she concluded.

“Good job,” Fynn said.

I need to tell Brown,
Madison thought.
Then the briefing will be complete.

Madison sat at her keyboard. Originally her e-mail to Kamen would have only contained the Pierce County pictures; then Quinn had turned up on her doorstep, and twelve hours later she was staring at the blank e-mail in-box, trying to put some order into last night's revelations, this morning's fire, and the bone-deep sense that Salinger's letter-writing days were not done yet.

After she had been typing for a while, she stood up and paced the tiny length of the room her desk and Brown's still occupied. It felt pretty much like her mind did at the time, crammed but missing something vitally important.

We don't know why he singled out Quinn, and these cards, this unfinished message, carry the weight of his promises, his hopes for what he wanted to achieve. And unless we understand what that is, if he is still alive, we will not be able to stop him.

Madison signed off on the e-mail, attached the pictures, and pressed Send.

Fynn had been pleased with her unofficial report and had given her the task to walk backward, so to speak, in Salinger's shoes and build up his background and anything from his past she could dredge up in order to make sense of the present. Every available warm body was out interviewing anybody Salinger had ever met.

Madison set out to build a timeline that started with twin boys learning to walk and ended with one of them shooting people at point-blank range and worse. Her note-taking was interrupted by an appointment with a young man from Records.

On the screen, Cameron's already altered picture from his twenty-year-old arrest glowed bland and unremarkable.

“You met him, right? How did we do?” the technician asked her, his voice too full of hope for Madison to answer directly.

“Well, he's a difficult customer, this one. We need to adjust some details.”

“That bad?”

“The aging of the original picture was effective, but the lines here and here are different, and the hairline—”

“Wait. I'll work in the changes as we go.”

He cracked his knuckles and tightened his blond ponytail. “Let's start with the hairline.”

Madison closed her eyes and went back to the previous evening, turning around and seeing him for the first time, sitting at the table and studying him, Salinger's own Rosetta Stone.

A while later, there he was, on the screen.

“Done. Did I get the slant of the eyes right?”

Madison leaned forward.

“Yup,” she replied. “Now, can you take away
conscience
and
morality
?”

She left with a few freshly printed copies, put one under a stapler on Spencer's desk, and grabbed her car keys.

Madison took 99 northbound and hoped that the Everett Fire Marshall's office would let her get close enough to Salinger's house or whatever was left of it. She had to remind herself every mile that there would be no immediate answers, no sudden epiphanies just because she would be physically closer than she had ever been to the man's life and its mysteries.

The sky was heavy and low, and she drove as fast as legally allowed to get there before daylight began its slow fade.

She found the place easily, emergency vehicles backed up all the way down the drive, the trees hiding the object of her interest. News helicopters circled overhead, and at least a dozen camera crews were trying to frame anything worthy of note in their lenses.

She parked, hooked her badge on her coat's breast pocket, and left her car with her head down. She pointed at her ID when she reached the police barrier and was waved through. It was the smell that found her first: in the chill it was a sharp blade of acrid and bitter air with every breath she took, underneath it an oily residue that clung to the inside of her mouth.