“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.
Acknowledgments
Some of the names of the locations in the story are fictitious because I’d rather not set murder and mayhem in a specific house on a real street. Similarly, the various precincts and jurisdictions of the Seattle Police Department have been slightly adjusted.
This story would not have seen the light of day without the enthusiasm and reckless faith of friends and family: Sue and Bruce Berglund in Seattle, who opened their home and their hearts to me and gave my tale the view from their deck; Kezia Martin, the first reader, with her encouragement and her fortitude to read the manuscript as it was being written; my mother, who taught me that the world is indeed full of possibilities; and, finally, Gerald, who made everything possible.
This book would not exist without my agent, Teresa Chris, whose support, trust, and vital humor has been invaluable, and Jo Dickinson at Quercus, who has been incredibly kind and tactful while making sense of a 142,966-word monster. They have made this a better story in more ways than I can count. My deepest thanks also to Kathryn Taussig and the team at Quercus in London for all their energy and the magic that turned loose pages into a book, and to Nathaniel Marunas and the wonderful team at Quercus in New York who brought Madison home.
About the Author
V. M. Giambanco was born in Italy. She started in the film industry as an editor’s apprentice in a 35-mm cutting room and since then has worked on many award-winning UK and US pictures, from small independent projects to large studio productions. She lives in London.
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