The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  Casey and Carr turned to Brown and Madison.

  “Okay if we start with you two?” Casey said.

  Madison poured herself some water from the cooler. The interview had been predictably pointless. Anger and frustration were not going to make her thinking any clearer; she needed to get on with things and put the Star on the back burner for a while.

  Chapter 20

  Nathan Quinn stood by the window in his office, looking out and seeing nothing. He had spent most of the night talking with Tod Hollis and arranging the notice of the reward with the offices of the Times and the Post Intelligencer.

  He had been the last person to leave the office in the early hours of the morning and the first back in. The darkness in the window hadn’t changed.

  When the detectives had come in to give him the news, he knew what would happen. He knew that the bitter taste in his mouth was adrenaline; he remembered it from when they called him and told him about David. His father had come to pick him up at the airport and explained. All those years ago, and that taste was the first thing that came back to him. He couldn’t get rid of it now and genuinely thought he never would.

  He kept thinking of his father, dead for years, and how he used to sing to David when he was a baby in his heavy Scottish brogue: “Now the summer’s in its prime with the flowers sweetly bloomin’.” His father’s favorite song. Quinn hadn’t thought of those words for a long time, and here they were, squatting in his mind, when all he wanted was blessed silence.

  Carl Doyle knocked on the door and came in with his mail.

  “Nathan,” he said, “you should read this.”

  Doyle put the pile of envelopes on Quinn’s desk and gave him a copy of the Star.

  “Thank you, Carl.”

  “You’re meeting Victor about Redmond versus Woodleigh in five minutes. And Judge Martin expects you in chambers at eleven.”

  “Give me ten minutes, and then bring him in.”

  “Okay.”

  Nathan Quinn read the article where he was standing. He read it twice to make sure he understood exactly all the connections Tully had made. The background work he had done on the relationship between Jimmy and Jack was sketchy, but every newspaper in the state would pick up the story, and the later editions would carry the story of the Hoh River kidnappings and their common past. Quinn was not surprised: forty-eight hours from the discovery of the bodies, that was exactly what he would have expected. The bodies . . .

  Quinn dialed Hollis’s number. Hollis picked up on the second ring.

  “It’s started,” Quinn said.

  In the pile of mail, among the holiday wishes and the condolences, sat a cream-colored envelope, waiting to deliver neither blessings nor sympathies.

  Billy Rain worked in his brother-in-law’s garage off Eastlake Avenue. He was an okay mechanic who understood cars and knew how to deal quickly and accurately with most problems.

  He was working on the engine of a Pontiac when he felt Tom Crane’s eyes on his back. He kept his head down; he knew his brother-in-law despised him, but he didn’t hold it against him.

  The problem with Billy was that there was only one thing he was truly great at: he was the guy you went to if you needed something opened, such as a seamless steel door, a safe, a multiple lock, a bank vault. Billy had a gift. Some people had an aptitude for music or maybe math. Billy could get into anything anywhere. Older, tougher boys had found him soon enough and had never really let him go.

  Billy straightened up and saw that Tom was talking to another mechanic, both of them looking at him every so often. In spite of the looks, no one there had ever given him any real trouble: he stood six foot four, and they all knew he had been in and out of jail all his life. The myth of the tough ex-con suited him just fine.

  Billy had never been in a fight or looked for one: while in jail he had been left alone, protected by those who might need his skills on the outside. His hands, now smeared with grease and oil, were a valuable commodity. He wiped them on the sides of his blue overalls.

  Tom Crane had told his sister that her jailbird husband could work for him when he was paroled. A once-only concession, Billy thought, that would allow Tom Crane to look down every day on someone more miserable than himself. Billy didn’t care. He had a wife who deserved better, a fifteen-year-old son who detested him, and a nine-year-old daughter who adored him.

  One day soon Tom would find a reason to fire him, and the only life Billy had ever felt comfortable in would claim him again.

  “I’m going on a break,” he said.

  He grabbed a cup of coffee from the pot in Tom’s office and took it to the yard. It was cold, and the sky was sheet-metal gray, but there was a small bench by the chain-link fence, away from the radio and the unremitting chat.

  He balanced the cup on the slat by his side and glanced at the paper he had picked up that morning. It was the Washington Star. He started reading Tully’s piece.

  Billy had never been a violent offender. He wasn’t even a thief, really—he only ever got the other guys in. The business on Blue Ridge was upsetting; one of the murdered boys had been the same age as his girl.

  Billy read the description of the killings, and slowly, gradually, the banging and the radio fell away, and a heavy, clammy silence pressed on him from the inside. In his sordid way, Fred Tully had been as revealing as the photograph he had been sent.

  Somehow Billy found the toilet on the left of the yard and locked himself in. It was a one-man job with a mirror and a gray little soap bar on the sink. His face in the mirror was as white as the tiles on the wall. He felt a dry heave coming and threw up in the toilet.

  About three years ago, doing time upstate, on a morning as cold as this one . . .

  He threw up again.

  Billy Rain was finishing up in the prison laundry; nobody else was there during the shift change. He turned a corner and was suddenly aware of two men locked in a silent fight. He pulled himself back and out of sight, waiting for them to get it over with and leave. There was a wet, choking gasp and someone trying to kick his way out of trouble. Leaning with his back against a tall cart, Billy froze.

  Then, one minute of quiet rustling and one man’s steps walking away. The body lay flat on the concrete floor, the hands tied at the front. Billy recognized a young firebug called George Pathune; he’d been blindfolded with a strip of dark prison denim. He was dead. On his brow, what looked like a cross had been smudged in blood.

  Billy had looked at him only for a few seconds, then left in a hurry. He told no one, and when the body was discovered, he didn’t talk about it with the other cons. He kept his head down and waited for his parole hearing.

  In the garage toilet, Billy rubbed his soapy hands on his face and splashed water on it. The work on the Pontiac and the rest of the day were little more than a blur.

  Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Nathan Quinn left his office and took the elevator to Stern Tower’s underground parking level. He got into the Jeep and started the engine for the short journey to the courthouse on Sixth and Spring. He wasn’t anxious; he wasn’t afraid. Sarah Klein, a prosecutor who could sense a weak argument from farther away than a cheetah could spot a limping gazelle, couldn’t possibly fathom his real concerns, not in a thousand years.

  The sky was low and dazzling over the city, waiting to snow and heavy with it. Nathan Quinn blinked into the light as the car left the building. Under a sheet of frost the ground would be hard, he thought; the gravediggers would have to start early and finish late.

  “I was having a good week, Miss Klein. And we all know how rare that is. Then your request landed in my docket.”

  Nathan Quinn and Sarah Klein sat in silence opposite the Honorable Claire Martin. They had both spent enough hours in her courtroom to know better than to interrupt her. They waited as the judge took off her robes and hung them on a coatrack. As always, her long salt-and-pepper hair was in a bun and her bifocals on the tip of her nose.

  In over two decades on the be
nch the Honorable Claire Martin had surprised many an unprepared attorney: no one could, on any given day, make any assumptions about how she would rule, only that her rulings stuck and had never been reversed by a superior court.

  “Attorney-client privilege,” she said as she sat down. “All right then, Miss Klein, pretend, if you will, that I live in a paper bag and haven’t read the papers or seen the news. Give me the details. Be brief.”

  Sarah Klein had rehearsed that opening in her mind over and over. Four counts of murder, the manner in which the crime had been planned and executed, the ages of the children—these factors would lie heavily on the judge’s mind when it came time to rule.

  She was indeed brief and still managed to spare no detail. Judge Martin listened and took notes.

  “At present the Seattle Police Department and the County Prosecutor are doing what they can to locate Mr. Cameron, who has an outstanding arrest warrant on his head. Meanwhile Mr. Quinn here knows exactly how and where to contact his client.”

  “Your Honor—” Quinn started speaking, but Judge Martin raised her left hand.

  “Not yet,” she said. “What do you want from me, Sarah?”

  “Privilege protects the communications between an attorney and his client but not the fact that they occurred or the manner in which they took place or the location where they happened. Not when, on balance, the interests of justice override the purposes of the privilege.”

  “It took you ten minutes to get to the interests of justice,” Quinn said pleasantly.

  “I think society’s interests would be best served should Mr. Quinn be required to reveal the whereabouts of his client and the means he uses to get in touch with him. Your Honor, Mr. Quinn can pick up a phone or send a message in a bottle for all I care, but if he is protecting the murderer of at least four people, that does not fall within privilege.”

  “‘At least four people’? We’re not dealing with anything but the case on the table.”

  Klein nodded.

  “The People have the right to ask these questions,” she said. “A dangerous criminal might be hiding behind the Right to Counsel. This is not what the Sixth Amendment was created for.”

  Judge Martin turned to Nathan Quinn. “Nathan?”

  It was his turn to speak. He looked from one to the other.

  “No one in this room wants the man who committed these murders more than I do, I assure you. But the arrest warrant is based purely on circumstantial evidence and that an eyewitness, in the middle of the night, across a dark street, saw a truck ‘similar’ to my client’s. He couldn’t put my client at the scene or anywhere near it.”

  “I signed the warrant myself; I know what it says,” the judge said.

  “Let’s put the prosecutor’s wishful thinking aside for a moment. Nothing in the case as presented challenges the principle of privilege, and any disclosure on my part would be a violation of the canons of professional ethics. Before the privileged status of those communications can be lifted, the prosecution must demonstrate that they were in aid of an intended or present illegality, and that I, as my client’s attorney, was party to that.”

  “Come on, Nathan, that’s beside the point,” Klein said.

  “That is precisely the point.”

  “The privilege does not extend to facts that are not part of the communication. You know where Cameron is because your relationship is personal, which makes you a potential witness in this case. That’s even why you exonerated yourself from your duties as executor of James Sinclair’s will.”

  “Is that true?” Judge Martin asked.

  “Yes.”

  Claire Martin sat back in her chair and took her glasses off. Quinn did not like where this was going, not one bit. He realized that there was indeed one door slightly ajar, and he hoped to God that Sarah Klein wouldn’t see it. He needed to get her away from that angle.

  “Sarah, I am both an advocate for my client and an officer of the court, with all the obligations that entails. I couldn’t sit here and make an argument for confidentiality if I had any knowledge or evidence that my client committed the murders.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’re giving me Drinker? Good faith, honorable dealing, and a minister in the temple of justice?”

  “Both of you,” Judge Martin interrupted, “remember where you are, and check your tone.”

  “Your Honor, it’s amusing that Mr. Quinn would mention that he is an officer of the court, when his refusal to disclose is clearly a hindrance to the court’s efforts to get his client to come in and be interviewed. That’s all we’re asking.”

  “I’d say this is a mess, Miss Klein,” the judge said, and she turned to Quinn. “Are you familiar with Heidebrink versus Moriwaki?”

  “Client’s intent?”

  “That’s right. The crucial point in the attorney-client privilege is the intent of the client when the communication was made.”

  Quinn continued. “If there is a belief by the client that he is seeking professional legal advice, and the lawyer is consulted in his legal capacity, then the communication is protected.”

  “Miss Klein, the client’s intent here is not in doubt. What else do you have?”

  Quinn knew her answer before she spoke.

  “What about the attorney’s intent?” she said. She had seen the door and walked right through it.

  “Go on,” the judge said.

  “When Mr. Quinn was interviewed by Detectives Brown and Madison, it was put to him that he had given Mr. Cameron the news of the deaths in person because he wouldn’t want him to learn about them in the news. He did not deny it. My point is that Mr. Quinn’s intent at the time was not to offer legal advice but to spare a friend. And that is not covered by attorney-client privilege.”

  Judge Martin thought about it.

  “Did you initiate that communication?” she asked Quinn.

  “I believe that to be privileged,” he answered.

  There was a long silence in the chambers. Judge Martin looked at the two attorneys on the other side of her desk; she picked up her fountain pen and signed the top sheet of the subpoena.

  Chapter 21

  “Tomorrow morning. Eleven a.m. God bless the Honorable Claire Martin.” Sarah Klein’s voice crackled through her cell.

  Madison smiled: they could all do with some good news. The OPR detectives had been hard at work all morning. They had gone through everybody and kept Lieutenant Fynn’s formal interview till last. When they were done, they left, and the squad room went back to its normal noise level.

  The Sinclair investigation was now in its third day. There had been a lot of curiosity: even detectives who had no good reason to visit had somehow wandered in. Madison was glad she and Brown had set up the murder board out of everybody’s way. Among all the photos and maps and floor plans and a diagram of which detectives had interviewed which neighbors, Madison had pinned up the birthday-party photo she had found at the Sinclairs’. Next to it, she had copied and enlarged Cameron’s fingerprint card. A current photograph would have been nice but at least the whorls and arches, black on white, reassured her it was a real person that they were looking for. Flesh and blood and mortal.

  Madison’s desk was covered with papers: notes from the library about the Hoh River kidnappings, the Nostromo file, the relevant press clippings, and, on the top, James and Anne Sinclair’s bank records.

  “This one.” Madison picked up the sheet from Seattle First Savings & Loan. “James Sinclair opened this account six months ago. The other one is a joint account with his wife. But this one is only in his name.”

  She scanned the page; there was not much to read.

  “He put $500 in when he opened it. Then, a deposit for $25,000 every month for four months. It goes in one day and out the next. Withdrawn in cash. It’s the same amount on the forged check.”

  “I guess we found where the money went, if not why,” Brown said.

  “He took out the cash. That’s $100,000 overall.”
r />   Brown sat back in his chair, took off his glasses, and started cleaning them with his white handkerchief.

  “How much is Quinn’s reward?”

  Madison knew he didn’t need to ask; he was not a man who forgot details.

  “$100,000.”

  They had both thought the same thing: in the end, it all evens out.

  Quinn’s reward was, first and foremost, a pain in the neck. Everybody agreed on that; news of it had been greeted in the squad room by a general groan. No workable information on Cameron was ever going to come out of it, just a whole load of nuts with phone cards and time to spare. It was an attorney’s attempt to muddy the waters, no more, no less.

  Brown went back to compiling a list of John Cameron’s known associates. It was a very short list, containing names that had been mentioned over the years in connection with the cases Cameron had not been charged with.

  “Harry Cueron,” Brown said.

  Madison looked up. “Little guy. Low-level weapons dealer?”

  “Yes.”

  “ATF got him last year. He’s doing time upstate.”

  “Bobby Hooper, drugs and prostitution.”

  “Moved to Miami.”

  Brown drew a line through the names.

  “John Keane,” Madison tried. “Two-time loser; his brother died on the Nostromo.”

  “Killed in jail three months ago.”

  “Eddy Cheung. Midlevel docks and distribution.”

  “Maybe but not likely. Eddy keeps his head down.”

  A small silence.

  “This is not going to work,” Brown said.

  The squad PA knocked and came in. “This came in from Records and ID; it’s the hard copy.” She handed Brown an envelope, made a point of ignoring the photographs on the walls, and left.

  A computer program had been developed in the 1980s to aid the search for children who had been missing for a long time: starting from the most recent photograph, the software could project what that child might look like in five, ten, twenty years.