The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  At 5:30 a.m. on August 29, Carlton Gray was driving along the Upper Hoh Road. A boy, later identified as John Cameron, came out of the woods and almost got himself run over as he stopped the truck. The boy had difficulty explaining himself, but Gray could see that he was in a highly emotional state and wanted to lead him somewhere.

  At that point Gray had noticed that the boy’s arms were covered in blood. The sleeves of his T-shirt had been repeatedly slashed. They walked in the woods for maybe fifteen minutes and then reached a clearing.

  There, tied to a Sitka spruce, Carlton Gray found James Sinclair, alive but in shock. He freed the boy and took both children back to his truck, from which he radioed for help. The State Police and the paramedics arrived quickly. Mistakenly assuming that all three boys had been found safe, they had alerted the parents.

  What had happened in the previous twenty-four hours was not completely clear. The authorities were able to gather the following facts: the children had been driven there, and each had been tied to a tree. Then things became confused: blindfolded, his friends had heard David Quinn gasp and choke. After a while, silence. A few minutes later the men had left and taken Quinn with them. The other two were abandoned in the forest.

  David Quinn. Madison got up and went to the window. She finished her Coke and threw the can into the librarian’s recycling bin. She looked at her watch: Brown would want to know. She dialed his cell phone.

  “The third boy. The one who died in the woods. It was Nathan Quinn’s younger brother.”

  “I guess we have our link.”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re going home soon, right?”

  “I’ll just finish up here.”

  Madison wanted a strong cup of coffee really badly, but the stuff from the dispenser downstairs was like thin, bitter mud. Instead, she splashed her face with freezing-cold water and went back to her desk.

  The Post-Intelligencer had run pretty much the same story as the Times. The sad conclusion for both was that there had been no discernible motive for the kidnapping, and no one had ever been held accountable.

  The tabloids didn’t offer any further facts. However, they did have photographs. Madison held the page up to the lamp. School pictures, one for each of the boys. Her eyes went to John Cameron’s: he was the youngest and looked smaller than the others. James Sinclair was grinning, and David Quinn was wearing a Mariners shirt; his hair was fair and curly, and he had just combed it for the photograph.

  Madison turned the pages. David Quinn was never found, but there was a picture of his family after the boy’s memorial service, no doubt the work of an enterprising photographer who had sneaked into the ceremony the way Andrew Riley had sneaked into the Sinclair crime scene.

  It was an outrageous breach of their privacy in their most painful moment. It was a stunning picture.

  Black and white; it must have been overcast that day, no shadows from anything or anybody. In the foreground a man and a woman wearing black, surrounded by family and friends, their faces stunned beyond grief. A close group of maybe fifty people, mostly adults, some children.

  All the men wore yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcap worn during prayers. A man had put his hand on the father’s shoulder; he was saying something. Next to him the two surviving boys, John Cameron’s right arm in a sling. They looked lost. Standing by them, Nathan Quinn, a few years older, probably already in college. He was looking at his mother, raising his left hand as if to touch her.

  A chill shook Madison as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, a wave of nausea and a sense of falling. She slapped the folder shut and left her palm on it.

  She let a minute go by, just sitting in the gloomy silence, then gathered her things and left.

  She turned the engine on in her car, and out of nowhere she smelled the sweet air of the day in March when her mother had been buried. There were cherry blossoms in the breeze. Madison wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. Her father had stood behind her, the weight of his hands on her shoulders.

  She let the engine turn over and closed her eyes, waiting for the car to warm up.

  It was always the same funeral, over and over. Madison had gone to cops’ memorials, men and women she barely knew, but it was her mother’s grave she would be standing by in dress uniform while the flag was being folded.

  Her grandparents had arrived in Friday Harbor that morning, and they would leave shortly after the service. She hadn’t seen them in years. In their anguish they kept looking at this young girl who was so much like their dead daughter yet was a stranger to them.

  Five months later, Alice woke up in the middle of the night. Her Mickey Mouse clock read 2:15 a.m., and the full moon shone in her open window. Her room looked neat in the pale light, the efforts of a twelve-year-old girl who had a stack of school counselors’ telephone numbers and bereavement support groups’ notices pinned to her bulletin board and had not talked to any of them.

  Alice made her own lunches and got good grades. She’s a fighter, her class teacher had said. She’ll pull through. So she covered her schoolbooks in plain brown paper and lined up her bunny slippers when she went to bed, and that somehow got her through the days; inside, though, she was drowning.

  Alice heard the steps in the hall and knew it couldn’t be her dad, who wouldn’t be home till morning. She grabbed her baseball bat and waited, the adrenaline making her chest hurt.

  When the intruder’s steps had receded down the hall and out of the house, her relief tasted like copper from a bite on her lip. She waited for a minute, then slid out of bed and peeked out the window to make sure the man had really left: way down the road, half in gloom, she saw him, walking fast and away from her. He passed under a street lamp, and, even at that distance, Alice knew it was her father. She dropped her baseball bat and stood there feeling stupid. Sugar! Why didn’t he turn the darn light on? She’d almost had a heart attack.

  Turning the lights on as she went, Alice padded into the kitchen. Still unsettled and a little out of herself, she ran water from the tap and into a glass. As she was walking back, the door to her parents’ room—her father’s room—was ajar, and she saw that the top right-hand drawer of the dresser was sticking out a couple of inches. Her mother’s private drawer. They hardly ever opened it; it contained her mom’s jewelry box, and Alice allowed herself to hold her things only very rarely, every one of them a memory too sharp and sweet.

  She stood by the dresser now, and everything in her soul told her to close the drawer and go back to bed. Nothing good could possibly come of it, that pinprick of doubt that would make her feel too guilty to look her father in the eye for days. She rested her forehead against the dresser; she had to look, and she knew it.

  She pulled the drawer open and lifted the black velvet jewelry box; the small latch in the shape of a hook was undone. The inside was lined in red silk. Alice ran her fingers over the smooth fabric: her mother’s rings were gone, her pendant earrings, the necklace with the S-shaped clasp, and the diamond butterfly.

  Alice did not know how much they were worth, but she knew they were gone, and her father had not turned on the lights. She stood there for a minute, then gently replaced the box where she had found it, went back to her bedroom, and picked up the baseball bat.

  She had never felt such clarity before—it was dazzling. The first blow hit the bookshelf; she swung hard, and it came off the wall. The desk was next. Alice worked her way methodically around her room until her arm ached too much to lift the bat; by then she had cut herself on the glass from her mirror, and she was out of breath. Her father would be home before dawn. She picked her way carefully back to her bed and lay on top of it, still gripping the bat. She was going to close her eyes for just a moment, she would rest for just a second, and when he got home, she would make him take her to whoever had her mother’s things now. She fell asleep with the streaks of dry tears on her cheeks.

  Her eyes snapped open, and the Mickey Mouse clock read 6:47 a.m. She looked around the ro
om and shivered. Everything broken, everything torn. She slipped her bare feet into her sneakers and padded to the door, then opened it a little. She could hear her father’s deep breathing in his room.

  He lay on his front under the sheets, his clothes in a pile by the bed. Alice knelt by the shirt and the jeans as she went through his pockets. She found $12 in small bills and a switchblade knife with an ivory handle she had not seen before. She put them back.

  His breathing was slow and steady. She went back to the dresser and checked the jewelry box. For a moment, as her hand was reaching for it, she allowed herself to hope. Nothing happened this time, no tears, no rage, no pain. In the cold light of day she knew enough about the world to know that what had been lost would stay lost, and that was all there was to it. She sat in the wicker chair and watched her father’s back rise and fall. She sat and watched him until every good memory of him had drained away; it didn’t take long.

  The tip of the handle of the switchblade knife stuck out of the jeans back pocket. Alice reached for it, and the blade came to life. She stood over her father. It seemed as if there was nothing at all between his back and the blade in her hand. She was empty, and the one thing that made any sense was that he should not draw another breath. Nothing else mattered much, not the brown paper on her schoolbooks or her solid grades. Let’s see the counselors get me out of this one, a thin, dark voice said inside her.

  Then, like a gunshot, loud, the dog in the yard next door barked, twice, and Alice saw the room and herself in it, every detail so sharp, it felt drawn on her skin.

  Her father would wake up late on a heavy August morning, the house empty and his daughter gone, the switchblade knife buried two inches deep into his bedside table.

  One week later, when the state troopers found a little girl hitchhiking north of Anacortes, they were surprised that her father didn’t seem to be in a rush to get her back home. In fact, he looked downright relieved when her grandfather took her off his hands. “She looked like a nice kid,” one trooper said to the other afterward, “but you never know.”

  Her grandparents watched her from the kitchen window as she sat for hours looking at the water and Vashon Island; they watched her on their quiet hikes up Mount Rainier.

  “Let the girl be,” her grandfather said. “The only thing that matters is that she’s finally safe, and she knows it.”

  Madison didn’t know whether she had adopted the city or the other way around; all she knew was that the dark woods around it had accepted her as their own. It didn’t bother the mountains and the rivers that she had almost killed her father—they granted her safe passage and whatever peace she would allow herself.

  Madison put the file on the passenger seat and the engine into gear, and she drove home. The answering machine was flashing red. “Hey, Alice, it’s Marlene. You’re not ducking out of our reunion dinner this time. We should be celebrating your gold shield and that Judy made it out of Traffic, if you can believe it. Call me, before I put an APB out on you.”

  Fifteen minutes later Madison was asleep on the sofa, wrapped in the white comforter from her bedroom, a half-eaten tuna sandwich on the coffee table and Some Like It Hot in the DVD player.

  Chapter 12

  Fred Tully’s career had been less than shining for a long time. He sat at his desk in the offices of the Washington Star, a page of copy to proofread in one hand and a slice of congealed pizza in the other. He looked at the round clock hanging on the far wall. Midnight. He’d rather be somewhere else, anywhere rather than here, where he felt his life getting dimmer by the day. He thought of his wife at home, watching cable and not missing him.

  The intern dropped an envelope on his desk, startling Tully almost off his chair.

  “Wear shoes people can hear, will ya?” he snapped without turning.

  It was a rigid white envelope. His name was printed on a small label—there was no other writing. Tully looked around the room; he wasn’t the kind of guy who got hand-delivered mail in the middle of the night—hadn’t been for a while.

  He tore the flap with his index finger. Some son of a gun was going to get his butt kicked if this was a joke. Inside was a sheet of paper and a smaller envelope.

  Tully read the short paragraph once. He bit into what was left of the pizza and held it in his mouth as he opened the smaller envelope and took out a photograph.

  It was color, taken indoors with a flash. A lamp in the foreground and what looked like part of the headboard of a bed. Tully didn’t know what he was looking at. He read the paragraph, stared at the picture, reread the paragraph, stared at the picture.

  Greg Salomon, editor of the Star, didn’t look up when Tully strode into his office. “What’s up?”

  Tully closed the door. He put the photograph on the desk. Salomon pushed up his glasses and picked it up.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The Blue Ridge crime scene.”

  There was a beat of silence between them.

  “How did you get this?”

  Tully smiled.

  “I mean it, how did you get this?”

  “Somebody out there loves me. I just got it.”

  “Did you have to pay for it?”

  “Not one dollar.”

  There was a magnifier under a stack of papers. Salomon found it and examined the picture.

  “You can’t see too much but enough to know what you’re looking at. The real thing?”

  “You bet. This came with it.” Tully handed him the sheet of paper.

  I’ll be in touch.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s not for publication—we’d get our butt chewed by the police and the DA’s office. It’s something to tell us he’s close to the investigation. I’m thinking, cop,” Tully said.

  “Yeah, he’s just getting us interested. The next time he’s going to want money. Thank God for government salaries.”

  “Amen to that.” Tully scribbled on his pad. “I’m calling the primary. We can confirm the positioning of the bodies, the blindfolds . . .”

  He looked over at the picture. The dark crosses were out of focus but perfectly visible. That was all he could see—heads on pillows from the side.

  “Could this be one of your regular sources?” Salomon asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m going to have to call Kramer; he’s working the story.”

  “This is mine, Greg.”

  “I know. We’ll sort something out.”

  We’d better, Tully thought.

  At 5:45 a.m., Madison was suddenly awake. The digital clock glowed on her bedside table. Only three hours earlier she had awoken on the sofa downstairs. The film had finished, and, in a daze, she had switched the television off and dragged herself upstairs and into bed.

  At 5:46 a.m., Madison got up and walked to the kitchen in her bare feet, turning on lights as she went. She poured water into the bottom half of the Italian stove-top percolator, measured coffee for the middle filter, screwed the top back on, and put it on the ring.

  She could perform those actions automatically and without being fully conscious; indeed, she had done so many times, getting up for a tour after two hours’ sleep. By 6:30 a.m. Madison had left the house.

  She drove to Blue Ridge and pulled in next to the blue-and-white parked by the Sinclairs’ front door.

  The two uniforms looked up, the long, cold hours all over their faces. She had never seen them before. Madison rolled down her window and showed her badge.

  “Madison, Homicide. How are you doing?”

  The older of the two just nodded.

  “Quiet night?”

  “A couple of jerks tried to steal some crime-scene tape.” He pointed at the yellow ribbon on the ground by the side door.

  The house already had an empty look to it, as if people hadn’t slept and cooked and walked around inside it for a long time.

  Madison hit the commuter traffic driving into town; in the thin sunlight, glass, metal, a
nd water shimmered in the distance.

  She turned the car radio on, instantly regretted it, and turned it off. It hadn’t been such a good idea to stop by the house. She had felt almost compelled to go in and make her way through it, top to bottom, attic to basement. Now that search would have to wait for hours. The killer had chosen the house to set his stage; that stage was how he would reveal himself to them.

  Nathan Quinn would not be pleased: they were going to need a warrant to sieve through Sinclair’s financial affairs, work files, cases. He probably took work home—half the check had been found in the study.

  There it was: a paltry $25,000 had likely cost four people their lives and was likelier going to bring down, once and for all, a pretty nasty piece of work who should have known better.

  The rec room was cramped, but it was the only private space that would contain all of them at the same time. The detectives sat around the table. The case file, between the polystyrene cups and notebooks, was already inches thick.

  Brown was running the briefing, with Madison to back him up. He checked his watch. Spencer and Dunne had brought in the blackboard with floor plans of the Sinclairs’ house. Lieutenant Fynn had come in with copies of the morning papers wedged under his arm: in two hours he was going to meet a woman from the department’s Public Affairs Office. He’d rather have a root canal.

  They had Spencer, Dunne, and Kelly for another forty-eight hours. After that, Brown and Madison would be on their own—the others would move to new cases and help with the legwork whenever they could.

  Madison noticed that Chris Kelly was wearing his dark blue suit, tight across his ex-linebacker shoulders but still smart, and a garish purple tie. It was his court outfit—they were going to lose him in the afternoon to a year-old robbery-murder just come to trial.

  They had all been at the Sinclair crime scene, had smelled the thirty-six hours dead on their clothes. Brown went straight to the point.