The Gift of the Darkness (45 page)

Quinn had been right: it took him two minutes, and he was there, the ground leveled and the thicket opened into a clearing. It was harder being there at night: the boys, James and Jack, had spent a night here alone and terrified, David already gone by then.

The flame threw shivering light over the first of the trees he knew so well; it was the one Jack had been bound to and that had held him up while they tortured him.
Timothy Gilman like a bear in a trapping pit.

James had been tied to the second tree. The flame wavered on the rough bark and past it and lit the third, David's tree. Quinn stopped: a hole had been dug in the hollow between the massive roots. It opened like a black wet mouth into the earth, and for a moment he could not bring himself to go any closer. But he had to look. He must look.

He stood over the hole and held the torch above it. The cage was of metal bars and fit tightly against the pit's walls, the boy curled up inside it, wrapped in a blanket. Quinn wasn't even aware of the cry that passed his lips; he wedged the torch between two rocks and threw himself flat on the ground, his right arm stretched into the hole. He reached through the bars, tight but not impossible, and the tips of his fingers brushed the face of the child. The boy was on his side, and Quinn's hand trailed around the edge of his collar until he found it: a slow but steady pulse and the mere suggestion of body warmth.

Something shifted under his body, and water started to trickle out of an opening in the wall of the pit—a hole the size of his fist, below his reach in the cage and level with the boy's feet.

He grabbed one of the bars on the top; he could see the damn spring lock now and a red wire from the mechanism that disappeared into the earth. He yanked the bar with all his strength. It barely moved.

The water was starting to pool on the surface where the boy was lying unconscious. How long did he have?

Quinn didn't need a toxicology report to know the child had been drugged: he wasn't moving, he wasn't responding, his breathing was shallow, and if the water rose high enough, he would stop breathing altogether.

He had to think. He had to stop and think, because that's what Salinger had meant to happen—and there
had
to be a reason.

Quinn stood up, and something came loose under foot. He ran his fingers through the damp leaves and the pine needles. The flat tile was barely concealed—a pressure switch. He had caused it to happen, he had started it, his weight on that piece of ground, lying down to check if Tommy was alive.

A wire was connected to the tile, a thin brown wire that popped out of the dirt as Quinn lifted the switch. The cable snaked his way for a few feet and disappeared behind a shrub.

Nathan Quinn had known madness in his years in the courts, he had known grief and the cloud of violence that takes over from people's humanity on their worst days, but this was beyond it all.

He checked on the boy, the water rising slowly—soon his clothes would be soaked. The choice was drowning or hypothermia. Quinn followed the wire to the shrub and pushed the branches out of the way. It was a bad piece of camouflage that anyone would have spotted in daylight from ten feet away, greenery hastily thrown that he flung to the side until the object was clear.

Nathan Quinn took an involuntary step back and stared at it. He stared at it until awareness came back and slapped away any silly notion of rescues and resuscitations.
Pierce County.
The hard plastic tank that held the water leaking into the pit was kept within a metal cage with bars secured with stakes hammered into the earth. It was all Quinn's mind could contain: steel blades and glass shards welded and pointing inward in a birdcage that curved like the spiral of a seashell.
Low on the ground but wide and long enough that the tank could not be reached unless one was
inside
the cage. A pipe must be running underground. The tap and the red wire from the spring-lock mechanism were obvious, and if the valve was turned, it would stop the pit from filling up and unlock the device.

Quinn looked to the forest in the direction they had disappeared. How long before any of them would come back? And who would come back? He tried to use logic: either Jack or Madison. It must be one or both. Salinger could not get away from both of them, not without a working weapon, and he had not heard any shots.

He checked on the boy again—there wasn't much time. Looking at the thing Salinger had created, he understood the photographs of the ravaged men that Madison had shown them and how they had been slowly and inexorably killed by it.

The water was rising. Quinn shrugged off his coat and was surprised by the hard texture of the ballistic vest over his shirt—he had forgotten all about it. He took out his cell and dialed and spoke to someone. He was trying to make sense so that they would understand, but he wasn't sure they did, and his mind was already on to something else: the pattern of wounds on the dead men as they had been forced to creep through the cage. He would need to follow its curling shape around the tank in order to reach the tap.

He laid the cell gently by his feet, the call still connected—no more time now—and looked back behind him to the forest. One of them would come back; one of them would find the boy.

Quinn, his belly flat on the damp ground, steadied himself to crawl inside the cage and pushed in. The first cut was a long, stinging slash on the underside of his forearm; a blade grated against the ballistic vest, and something pierced his side between the straps. He groaned.

What would happen if his body gave out before his mind? Quinn's focus batted against the searing pain. He closed his eyes briefly: only one way to find out.

Chapter 46

John Cameron saw Alice Madison disappear back into the woods. The last glimpse of her face had been a mask of dread and disbelief. He was pinning Salinger down, and the point of his knife was still resting against his cheekbone.

Cameron exhaled. He had tried to keep Quinn safe by hunting this man down, and he had failed. Whatever had already happened . . . Cameron stopped that train of thought. Everything was different from even two minutes ago, and spilling the blood of this fraction of a person would bring neither satisfaction nor balance in his books.

He cocked his head to one side. “Are you sane?” he asked Salinger.

The man seemed to give the question some thought. “I don't know,” he replied.

“I wonder how the courts will deal with what you've done. So much preparation, so much thinking ahead.”

His grip tightened around the man's throat, and Harry Salinger understood that his careful plan had gone to the dogs, and he was in the hands of a man who wanted him to suffer, and if he had to let him live to do so, then so be it.

“I've dug the pit at the foot of the tree where David died. Do you remember where that is?” Salinger whispered. “How long will it take
for
your attorney
to make up his mind? Do you know that he still visits every month? How far will he manage to crawl into the pit before blood loss and shock will take over?”

Cameron said nothing; his eyes held the man whole.

“Do you have any idea how hard your other friend fought for his family? How long before his body grew still lying next to theirs? One of the children tried to hide—”

Cameron hit him hard on the temple with the handle of his knife, and Salinger fell back, sprawled on the rocks of the Hoh River bank.

“I don't have much time. You need to be restrained, you need to be punished, and you must be alive for the law to find you and drag you through the long life of pain and misery that you so much wish to leave.” John Cameron knelt down. He had never worked within those parameters, but he could certainly learn.

The patches of moonlight disappeared behind her as Alice Madison raced along the open stretch, her flashlight revealing streaks of forest and rocky ground. Soon she would get to the steep incline and would need both hands—if she was going to do it, she had to do it now. She dug for her cell and prayed for a signal. The bars were barely there, but it would have to do.

When the call connected, her voice burst through. The operator made her repeat everything three times—Madison gave her badge number and quite calmly, given the situation and the fact that she was running full tilt, assured the young woman that if she asked her to repeat her details a fourth time, she would find her way back to civilization without her assistance, haul her into the darkest woods, and dump her there. Could
she
repeat that?

She rang off and called Fynn, hoping that this time it would not go to voice mail; when it did—at the bottom of the hill—Madison skidded to a stop. She knew she had spoken, and yet, just seconds later, trying to climb back up the slope and sinking in the wet leaves, she couldn't remember what she'd said.

None of this had been about Cameron; all of this had been about Nathan Quinn. She saw Salinger, new at the restaurant, one of the
busboys looking over his shoulder with a sneer.
“Do you know who that is?” “Yes, I do.”

Enough
. Nathan Quinn's body could go no farther. He tried to slither forward, the vest now slack and twisted, and he could not. Something had jabbed into his leg, and he could not move it; the other leg he couldn't feel at all. Agony had given way to numbing cold. He couldn't see the tap anymore, because he couldn't see anything.

The fingers of his right hand, slick with blood, stretched along the side of the tank; he could feel something under the tips, something that he couldn't quite grasp.

Time had lost any meaning, and his body was turning into stone. Maybe if he just rested for a moment, he could gather his strength and continue. Just one moment.

Madison tore out of the undergrowth and into the clearing. She saw it all at once—the pit, the cage, the blood. She called out their names, even if she could not hear her own voice over her thundering heart, and she didn't stop calling when no one answered back. Lying at the mouth of the hole, her voice cracking, she pulled on the bar of the cage, and the lock mechanism sprang open. She pushed the damp blanket out of the way and managed to slide her hand under the boy's arm. Gently, nearly losing him once, she pulled him out, laid him down, wiped her grimy hand on her pants, and looked for a pulse.
There
, there it was.

All the breath whooshed out of her. “Quinn!” she yelled. “He's alive, he's breathing.” She scrambled to the cage, holding Tommy against her, but Quinn's body was curled facing the inside, and she could not see his face, his eyes; all she could see was ripped clothing and blood. His left arm was bent behind his back. Madison stretched through the bars, and her hand closed over his.

“Quinn!” She could not find a pulse; her fingers kept slipping. “Quinn!”

Madison rested Tommy on her lap and shrugged off her backpack, pulling out a handful of small heat pads and two hypothermia
blankets. Tommy had to be warmed up slowly: she inserted the pads on the inside of her own coat, swaddled Tommy in the blankets and wrapped one arm around him so that he was held against her and under her coat. The other hand found Quinn's—it was ice-cold.

“Quinn!”

Tommy sighed.

“I have you, Tommy. It's going to be okay. I have you.” Tommy whimpered in his sleep. Madison held him close, her voice a whisper in his soft hair as she sang “Blackbird.”

Quinn's hand, clasped tightly in hers, twitched.

Alice didn't know how long had passed, but she raised her eyes, and John Cameron was there; he dropped to his knees. His face was smeared with something she could hardly look at—it was all over his hands and clothes. His eyes were dead. He reached inside the cage and touched Quinn's arm.

“Where did you leave him?” she asked.

“On the riverbank,” he replied without looking away from Quinn. “Alive.”

Their eyes met. The sound of helicopter blades was thin but getting closer.

“If you want to leave, leave now. If you stay, do not say anything to me or to anybody at all. Do you understand?”

Cameron settled on the ground. His hand never left Quinn's arm.

They came in waves: the Hostage Rescue Team was first, swarming the clearing with their long-range rifles and their lights; Madison held up her SPD detective badge, and Cameron laced his hands behind his head. Medics pried Tommy from her arms and put him on a warm-air inhaler as officers patted Cameron down for concealed weapons and found none.

The cage drew their silence and more focused work than Madison had ever witnessed; within minutes Quinn had an IV in the arm they could reach, and his stats were constantly monitored out loud while it was being generally agreed that trying to get him out of the
contraption in the middle of the forest was an impossible risk. The low temperature and the metal structure had, in fact, kept him alive, barely, and if they freed him now, he would bleed out. Simple as that. He would have to be airlifted as he was and dealt with in a hospital if he survived the journey, which was unlikely.

Another man was found on the Hoh River bank. He was stabilized and stretchered, and no one asked him any questions, as he was not in any condition to speak.

Chapter 47

Billy Rain handed the bank teller the check for $100,000 to deposit into his account, which at present held $147.27. He wore a suit—his one suit—because Carl Doyle had issued the reward check in the offices of Quinn, Locke and invited him to pick it up there, where Tod Hollis would meet him and drive him to a bank of his choosing if he so wished.

The bank teller didn't so much as blink. Billy Rain, dazed and in shock, accepted the deposit slip he had asked for. He had just that morning resigned from his job in his brother-in-law's garage and was on his way to the family home, a house he did not have keys for anymore, for a conversation with his wife. Today there were things to talk about she couldn't possibly imagine.

Carl Doyle sat on the bench that had been his office, his home, and his watchtower for the last three days. He was the gatekeeper to Nathan Quinn's hospital room and, as of three days earlier, also his next of kin, and no one had been allowed in except for doctors and nurses. Even Alice Madison had been kept on that side of the door in spite of her numerous visits; Quinn would decide who, if anyone, he wanted to see when he woke up. That had been Doyle's mantra.

The thread that was keeping Quinn tethered to his life had been dangerously thin in the last seventy-two hours, but it had not snapped. The doctors had been surprised by his resilience as much as by the scale of his injuries: a few of them had dealt with survivors of bear attacks, and some of those badly mauled hikers had looked a darn sight better than the man who had been delivered to them inside a sheared-metal-and-broken-glass cage.

The residents had stopped keeping count of the stitches once they had reached four hundred, the spleen had gone almost completely, and the ophthalmic surgeon was offering positive if as yet unproven updates. It wasn't much—in fact, it was pitifully little—but it was what there was.

So Carl Doyle ran Quinn, Locke from a bench in a hospital corridor and would do so for as long as necessary.

The woman who was approaching hesitantly looked as exhausted and drawn as he was. When she stopped in front of the door, Doyle looked up from his papers.

“No visitors and no comment,” he said, politely but without room for misunderstanding.

“I'm Rachel Abramowitz. Tommy is my little boy,” Rachel said.

Doyle took her hands, and she sat next to him, trying to hold it together.

“How is he?” Doyle asked gently.

Rachel smiled weakly. “He doesn't remember anything. He woke up, he seems fine, he eats and sleeps. But one of us is always with him. Always.”

Doyle nodded.

“How is
he
?” Rachel asked as she looked at the closed door.

Doyle explained. She, of all people, had the right to know the truth.

“Would you do something for me?” Rachel asked.

“Sure.”

“Would you give him this from my boy?”

Rachel left, and Doyle went into Quinn's room. The blinds were drawn, and the man on the bed was deeply asleep in the comfort of a medically induced coma.

Doyle didn't know what the object meant. It didn't matter; Quinn would know. He slipped the baseball under Nathan's good hand and closed his fingers around it.

Mary Sue Linden hurried down the long corridor, a lunch tray held tightly in her hands. For the past three days she had been the youngest member of the nursing team treating Patient X: he had come in without a name and under police protection. The rumor was that he was a witness to some hideous crime, and a drug cartel was on his tail.

Mary Sue walked past empty rooms on either side and nodded hello to the two police officers standing guard. She pushed the door open with her hip. Patient X was awake; he could not speak, but he was breathing on his own. The doctors could not fathom how, exactly, he'd received his injuries. Maybe from a shark with a knife, someone had suggested.

Mary Sue approached the bed, and he followed her with eyes as pale as rainwater. She placed the tray carefully on the bedside table, and her eyes flicked to the door. She leaned forward, her voice as quiet as she could make it.

“I have a special message for you,” she said. “From your detective friend with the Irish red hair.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Can you hear me okay?”

Harry Salinger blinked once.

“He said to tell you this and make sure you understand.” A whisper. “The boy lives, he is fine, and the man is alive, too. They are both going to be just fine.”

When the patient turned his face away, she patted his arm gently. Men could be funny about showing emotion—no news there.

John Cameron stood in his cell and let the light from the high small window slide over his face. He wore the orange coveralls of a man charged with a very serious felony who has been denied bail. It didn't surprise him or worry him in the least. Detective Madison had visited
regularly with news of Quinn's progress, and so far that was all he was interested in.

They had sat on either side of a pane of glass, in different clothing but with nearly identical cuts and bruises on their faces and hands.

“They found a wooden box in his van, a small bone in it. Could be the brother's,” Madison said.

“Have you found out where they're keeping him?”

“Yes. He's in protective custody.”

“Good. The man needs protecting.”

“We made sure he knew that he had failed, that they both lived.” She passed a sheet of paper through the slit in the glass, the court record from Salinger's trial and the closing argument Quinn had written.

Cameron read:
“. . . It is something at the heart of every human being that makes us seek justice for those who have been wronged, those who have been harmed . . .”

Madison stood to leave. “Before you went into the forest, you said to Quinn—”

“He had given me his word that he wouldn't do anything foolish, wouldn't put himself in harm's way.” He sat back in the chair. “Ask me the question, Detective. I know you've been wondering.”

They could have been talking at her dining table, the fire lit and coffee scenting the room.

“How long are you planning to stay?” Madison asked him.

“For as long as it suits my purpose,” Cameron replied.

For a moment there was no glass at all between them.

John Cameron was kept in isolation for his own safety, which everyone knew was a rather pathetic lie. Nevertheless, he had managed to get hold of a newspaper. It seemed Harry Salinger had switched gravestones, and the body that had been found in his twin's grave was actually his father, while his dead twin had been removed to die again in the fire.

When tested, the body in the coffin had no mitochondrial DNA in common with Salinger. On suicide watch and charged with four
counts of murder, one of assault on a police officer, and one of kidnapping, Salinger, wherever they were holding him and treating him, probably wished he was his brother. Cameron closed his eyes: the cell meant little to him. Above him the sky was so blue, it hurt to look at it.

Kevin Brown woke up and let awareness come back slowly as he got his bearings. He was in a hospital—that much was reasonably obvious—and yet the last thing he remembered was a conversation with Madison in the precinct. Winter light filtered through the slats in the blinds, and the clock on the wall said it was 3:07 p.m. on December 28. He couldn't work out how long he had been there, because he had no idea what day the thing had happened that had landed him there in the first place.

He tried to move, and nothing much happened. He turned his head a little and saw Madison, fast asleep in a chair by his bed with a heavy book open in her lap; she looked as if she'd run through a rosebush. She sighed in her sleep, and Brown remembered something just then, out of a dream—her voice speaking and reading to him. Speaking and reading for hours and hours.
Call me Ishmael.
At least for today, then, their work was done. He watched her sleep for a while, until the nurse came in, and she stirred.