The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “We need to head back, Detective.”

  Madison straightened up and nodded.

  “Those shrubs all around the pit?” Curtis pointed. “They’re Dicentra formosa.”

  Madison looked blank.

  “Bleeding heart,” he said. “That’s the common name. Flowers are real pretty.”

  Madison shouldered her pack and pulled up her hood. Above her and out of sight, beyond the layers of green, she heard a rapid flutter of wings start off and fade into the distance.

  The journey back was faster in spite of the coming dusk, and Ryan Curtis wasn’t interested in small talk. They reached his truck, and before Madison knew it, he was already pulling in next to her Civic in the Hoh River rangers station parking lot.

  “Thank you.” Madison said. “I mean it. For getting the SWAT team to us, as well. I’m sorry I didn’t remember you.”

  “No problem. I’m not surprised, really. I had never seen anything like it.”

  “You and me both.”

  She left the truck, got into her Honda, and drove off. The pickup’s lights followed her until the exit to Forks.

  Madison felt winded and tired, as if she had sat for an exam and not even understood the questions. Later, sitting in a booth on the ferry, her hands around a cup of tea she was not drinking, she realized she had made a vow, whether the child proved to be David Quinn or not.

  She was still making notes when the ferry docked.

  Nathan Quinn checked the round clock on the wall. Three minutes to go to his call with Scott Newton, the prosecutor who represented the County in the case against John Cameron. As per Quinn’s standing instructions to Carl Doyle, a senior associate from Quinn, Locke had represented Jack while Quinn was incapacitated, but there was never any question that he would revert to his original role as Cameron’s attorney.

  Quinn wanted Cameron out of jail as quickly as possible. Every day he spent inside KCJC was a day in which he was a target and a day in which he might be pushed to defend himself with maximum force to stay alive. It might be something the inmates would pay good money to see, but Quinn just wanted him out of there, fast. Even protective custody—who was being protected? he wondered—was barely more than wishful thinking.

  Technically Quinn was only consulting on the case: he was still on pain medication, and officially the Quinn, Locke attorney had to sign off on any deals. However, everybody knew who made the decisions.

  Quinn checked the clock. It was time.

  “Let me understand,” Scott Newton said. “Your client attacked Harry Salinger and cut him up like a paper doll, and you think a charge of attempted murder is an overreach?”

  “I think assault in the first is an overreach. Honestly? I think assault in the third would be an overreach. The only thing John Cameron was attempting was to restrain and detain Harry Salinger after the man had admitted to four counts of murder and one of kidnapping a minor,” Nathan Quinn replied.

  “I can see how you’d like this to turn into a citizen’s arrest gone badly wrong.”

  “No jury is ever going to give you attempted murder, Scott. Not when Salinger is about to be declared insane, not when they can look at the photographs of the cage he had built for the boy.”

  Newton was quiet. Salinger had built two cages, and one had been for Quinn. “Salinger could have died. Everything Cameron did to him could have led to his death.”

  “Do you know how we know that it wasn’t attempted murder?” Quinn asked. “Salinger is still alive. That is not accidental.”

  Newton didn’t want to go to trial: there was too much risk involved in prosecuting the man who had physically apprehended Harry Salinger, the Blue Ridge Killer, and he had no idea where he would find an impartial jury. On Mars, maybe.

  “What are you offering?” he asked Quinn.

  “What’s on the table?” Quinn replied.

  Newton snorted. “Assault in the first degree, and my boss will be justified to kick me down to prosecuting traffic violations.”

  “Do you have proof of intent? And by that I mean actual proof of deliberation and intent to cause great bodily harm?”

  “I have Salinger’s medical reports.”

  “I’m sure they’re a fascinating read, but—I ask you again—do you have intent?”

  Newton did not reply.

  “Second, do you have a weapon?”

  “They’re still looking.” He sounded weak even to himself.

  “They found Salinger’s gun pretty quickly, as well as the tools he used to set up the cages.” The silence on the line stretched into a long pause. Quinn closed his eyes; his head rested against his pillow, and his energy ebbed and flowed unpredictably with his medication. “Reckless endangerment,” he said.

  “I’m not even taking that into consideration.”

  “Take your time, and consider what you can prove in front of a jury. They will have to ponder how hard it would be to restrain a man of Harry Salinger’s . . . temperament.”

  “We’re talking about John Cameron here.”

  “Who has no priors and did not resist arrest.”

  “Nathan, have you looked at Salinger’s medical sheet?” Newton asked. “Have you seen what Cameron did to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you call that simply ‘reckless endangerment’?”

  Quinn did not know what to call it, and he realized that that notion applied to much of Cameron’s behavior. “You don’t want to take this to trial,” he said.

  “I’ll do what I have to to keep John Cameron inside for as long as the law will allow me.”

  “Good luck.”

  Chapter 5

  The man stood by the tall window in the white recreation room and watched as the sun dipped below the trees. Each minute brought a new shadow and the familiar tightening of fear in his narrow chest as the line of darkness stalked the red-brick building. He watched and waited. Soon it would be time, and he would be alone until the sun rose again.

  He felt the room emptying, the television on the high bracket tuned to the news, and the footsteps behind him.

  “Somebody’s coming,” he said without turning around.

  The view didn’t let him go until he felt the hand on his arm, and slowly, reluctantly, he turned.

  “It’s getting dark,” he said. “We should go; we shouldn’t stay here.”

  “Time for bed.”

  “We shouldn’t stay when it’s dark.”

  “Yes, I heard you, same as yesterday and the day before. Come on, my friend, time for bed.”

  “It’s not personal; it’s business.”

  “Sure, it is.”

  He stood by the bed in his room, plain walls around him and a three-drawer chest for all he owned in this world.

  From the top of the dresser he picked up the stump of a gray crayon and raised his hand; he closed his eyes and drew a long, shaky line along the white wall; it joined dozens of similar gray lines all over the small cell. Up and down the walls, wherever he could reach.

  The authorities found it easier to let him do it than take the crayon away and go through the horrendous fits of terror that plagued him.

  He brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas. They were white cotton and hung loosely on his thin shoulders. He washed his hands; the nails were cut to the quick and yet grimy with garden dirt. He attempted to scrub them clean and sat down.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he started, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

  He slid under the heavy blankets, and the shivering started almost immediately.

  A quick knock on the door sounded before Thomas stuck his head into the room.

  “All set for the night?” he asked.

  Vincent Foley, forty-eight, shook his head. “Somebody’s coming,” he whispered, and he rolled himself up into a tight ball.

  Thomas Reed, a psychiatric nurse at the Seattle Walters Institute, turned off the light and closed the door. A soft click told Vincent that the door was locked. Then again,
what was a simple wooden door against what was coming for him?

  He hurried to finish his desperate prayer. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  In the room, shadows and light began to move over the walls as if the lines he’d drawn in crayon were themselves shifting. Vincent squeezed his eyes shut; all through the night, above and around him, the drawings crept and crawled.

  Chapter 6

  In the relative gloom of his hospital room Nathan Quinn listened to his own breathing. Regular and steady. It was still a surprise to him that he was alive; he had fully expected to die. Instead, he had woken up to a different world: Jack was in jail, and David had been found.

  The Jefferson County officers had taken a swab of the cells inside his cheek for DNA-comparing purposes, a swift and routine procedure they had completed in seconds. Now all there was to do was wait.

  His waking hours were a combination of pain, boredom, and sheer, unadulterated fury. His temper, disciplined by years in the courtroom, seemed to elude its usual filters. His body was a prisoner of his injuries, but his intelligence was not, and he had argued with the doctors to reduce the painkillers as much as possible, because he could cope with the pain, but the slow, thick dullness that coated his mind was not something he could bear much longer.

  All he knew at that point was that he needed to think and think clearly: the results from the DNA test would come in in the next few days, and then the world would change again, shift on its axis as it had done at least twice before in his life. This time, though, he would be ready.

  If the remains were not David’s, if another boy had been lost out there in the woods, would that make things better? Quinn didn’t know how to feel about the question or what to wish for. To have David back would mean that his little brother had experienced that dreadful blow that had ended his life. If not, then another child had gone through that horror; another family had been torn apart.

  He breathed deeply and realized not for the first time that grief felt like both a weight and a hollow in his chest. He went back to what he knew, thinking like an attorney, like the prosecuting attorney he once was. He closed his eyes and felt a familiar spark of anger. Good. Anger was better than pain.

  The odds were against them: there was no statute of limitation for murder in Washington State. However, he could not remember a single case in which a defendant had been successfully prosecuted for a twenty-five-year-old murder without trace evidence, witnesses, or a confession.

  The visiting officers had been reticent; they knew that the chances for any convictions at this late date were negligible. The best they could hope for was a name for the victim found in the forest. Breathe in, breathe out, ignore the pain. Still, a name could be a very powerful thing, even if it was all they had. A name was the beginning: five years after the children’s abduction a man had fallen and been impaled in what hunters call a trapping pit. His name was Timothy Gilman, and he had died as he had lived, the trapper now trapped. John Cameron had been about eighteen years old at the time.

  For twenty years Nathan Quinn had believed that Cameron had killed Gilman—his first victim—because he had met him accidentally and recognized him as one of the kidnappers, maybe even the man who had given him his scars. Jack knew that there wasn’t enough evidence to successfully take Gilman to court and that that loss would surely kill Quinn’s family, as if David were to die each day again.

  Quinn, then working in the prosecutor’s office, had learned of the trapper’s-pit incident entirely by chance, and one could say that any potential charge against Cameron would have to be based on circumstantial evidence alone. One could say that an eighteen-year-old boy does not spend days digging a hole in the snow and frozen earth to lure a man to his death. And so Quinn didn’t speak of it; the case stayed unsolved; life went on.

  Distant sounds from the ward drifted into the room, voices and footsteps and the chiming of medical equipment. Quinn felt the weight of the blankets; his tall frame had become thin since December, and he was aware of every cell of his body struggling to heal itself.

  He thought about fear: what it does to a man and what a man will do under its talons.

  Chapter 7

  Madison woke up at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, brewed herself a particularly strong cup of coffee, and drove to work with a box of peanut butter Granola Thins and a half-eaten banana beside her on the seat. She had stayed up late preparing her argument and hoped that getting to Lieutenant Fynn good and early, before his day became inevitably soured by reality, would help.

  She nodded hello to Jenner, the desk sergeant, and quickly climbed the stairs to the detectives’ room. The previous tour was out, and her shift had not checked in yet. The room was a combination of beaten-up desks, worn gray metal filing cabinets, and new computer screens with cables winding under worktables.

  Fynn arrived half an hour before the official beginning of the shift and noticed Madison at her desk. She gave him a couple of minutes and then knocked on his door.

  “Thought you might want to speak to me about something,” he said, and he beckoned her in.

  “I’d like to work the David Quinn case. I know it’s a case for the Cold Case team to handle, but they have a full plate, and I could start getting everything together and go over the original kidnap investigation. If the boy is not Quinn, I would still like to work the case. Aside from the remains, we have no new leads, and it’s going to be so low on Cold Case’s priorities, it will never get a thorough look.”

  “Good morning, Madison. How was your weekend?”

  “Very good.”

  “This is when you ask me how my weekend was.”

  “How was it, sir?”

  “Not bad, thank you. Could have done with another one. What brings you to my office, Detective?”

  “I’d like to work the David Quinn case.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. I spoke with Willis from Cold Case on Saturday. They are up to here right now.” He drew an imaginary line across his chin. “And the remains are so old, they won’t give us much to work with.”

  “I know.”

  “Something else.” Fynn gazed steadily at Madison. “The one surviving witness is not exactly talking at the moment, and nobody wants to waste a trip to KCJC to sit in a cell with John Cameron and came away with bupkes.”

  “I see. That’s why I get handed the case. Because Cameron and I do our nails and braid our hair together?”

  “Pretty much. Do you care?”

  “Not a bit. If they don’t want it, I’m happy to have it.”

  “That’s what I thought. Did you go to the site?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “The killers dug it fast and just deep enough that an animal wouldn’t dig him out overnight.”

  “Well, here’s how it’s going to go: we wait for the DNA result—which nobody’s in a big hurry to do in the first place, since we have hundreds of fresh cases—and if it’s Quinn, it’s yours; if it isn’t, it stays with Jefferson County, because we won’t know where the child started out from, and the forensic anthropologist will have to get to work on an ID before anything else.”

  By the time Madison got back to her desk, the squad room was full and buzzing with activity, and for the first time she wondered whether she should hope the dead child was Nathan Quinn’s brother. It was a child, and that was all that mattered.

  It took nine days for an infinitesimal sliver of mitochondrial DNA to confirm beyond a doubt that the human remains found in the Hoh River forest were, in fact, David Quinn’s. As soon as it was official, Madison collected the Hoh River kidnap file from Records: she wasn’t going to interview Cameron without knowing every detail of the original investigation.

  He hadn’t spoken about it in twenty-five years, as far as she knew, and the chances of him talking now were less than zero. Then again, the chances of Cameron talking to anyone about anything were generally less than zero. T
he kidnap was merely one more entry on the extremely long list of no-go subjects. Nevertheless, they now had a body and cause of death, and there would be an investigation, there would be questions, and, somewhere inside the mind of John Cameron, was the truth.

  Thus it was that two days after her last visit, Alice Madison found herself back in the King County Justice Complex meeting cell, without her piece and without much hope for meaningful conversation, either.

  She thought of John Cameron as a twelve-year-old boy, terrified in the woods, and she hoped that boy would want to help her after she told him that the child they’d found was David Quinn.

  The cell was warm, unpleasantly so, and it smelled of vending-machine coffee from previous visitors. Whatever the day might be like on the outside, in this room the natural light fell milky pale and ineffective on the sparse furnishings. Madison had gone over her conversation strategy three times when she heard the metal lock of the prisoners’ door clank open.

  A single guard came in—she had seen him a couple of times before. He looked as if he’d seen a few decades of working for the Department of Corrections and was there to stay. His name tag read: MILLER, B.

  “He’s not coming, Detective,” he said.

  Madison stood up abruptly, her pushed-back chair scraping the floor. That she hadn’t planned for.

  “He’s not coming?”

  She realized that she sounded almost personally offended, but—honest to God—she didn’t think she could help it.

  “He said he knows the DNA was a match,” the guard continued, “and to come back when you know something he doesn’t.”

  Madison kept her face blank; she nodded, put her notepad into her jeans back pocket, and pushed the chair under the table, leaving the room tidy and ready for the next visitor. The guard’s sharp blue eyes followed her every move.

  “Okay, then,” she said.

  “Don’t feel bad. It’s more than anyone else ever got out of him.”