“I know.”
“Unless you want us to haul him in here . . .”
“No, thanks. No need for that today,” she said to the guard’s obvious relief. “I’ll just have to survive without the witty repartee.”
“Won’t we all.”
Back in her car, in the jail’s parking lot, with the windows fogged up and the engine running, Madison allowed herself a good full minute of unrestricted swearing. Once she got that out of her system, she put the Civic into gear and drove back to the precinct. It is what it is, her grandmother used to say.
Chapter 8
Carl Doyle waited by the elevator doors, checking his reflection in the brushed steel. He looked immaculate in his gray pinstripe, white shirt, and burgundy tie. He had been running Quinn, Locke from a bench outside Quinn’s hospital room—gatekeeper and executive assistant.
Todd Hollis, Quinn, Locke’s chief investigator, had spent an hour with Quinn and left a few minutes earlier, his mood much bleaker than when he had arrived. Doyle had done what Quinn had asked and now waited by the elevator. He didn’t know what this was about, only that Hollis had disagreed with the decision, and Quinn was going ahead, anyway. Doyle was uneasy. Hollis knew his stuff; if he had had objections, they would have been to the point and well considered. Doyle straightened his tie, fussed with his cuffs, and looked at his watch.
The elevator doors slid open, and Benny Craig from Quinn, Locke staggered out carrying two silver photography cases and a folded tripod stuck under one arm. Benny had been with the firm six months and looked thirteen. Something in Carl Doyle’s demeanor told him to keep quiet and just do as he was told.
“Everything?” Doyle asked.
“Everything,” Benny replied.
Carl started down the corridor, Benny following. Around them the life of the hospital took no notice as it hummed and bustled in its daily workings.
Alice Madison balanced the plate of chocolate cake on the edge of her desk and raised her paper cup. Detective Andrew Dunne’s birthday was an occasion to celebrate, and it had drawn officers from all over the precinct.
Dunne and his partner, Spencer, had been a joy to work with from the beginning. Looking around the busy room, Madison spotted Detective Chris Kelly and his partner, Tony Rosario, with paper cups in hand. Chris Kelly had not been a joy to work with—in fact, Madison believed that joy would flutter, wither, and drop dead if it came within six feet of Kelly. They had ignored each other from the beginning of the year, and she hoped it would last.
Spencer raised his cup—fizzy yellow soda under the fluorescent lights—and called for silence. He had known Dunne from the Academy, and his toasts were sure to touch on his friend’s unmarried status, his Irish red temper, and a large number of embarrassing events that had never made it into their official reports.
“My name is Nathan Quinn—”
The voice cut through the air, and Madison just about jumped out of her skin. Someone shushed the group and increased the television’s volume with the remote.
“It’s the news on KIRO,” someone else said. The room froze into silence.
For the longest moment Madison didn’t turn. She knew what they were all looking at: they were looking at the man who had endured the unthinkable and survived. Each and every one of them had wondered about his injuries. There had been no pictures and no tabloid exclusive.
Madison had not been allowed to see Nathan Quinn since the incident; now she would have to see him for the first time in a roomful of strangers, all of them curious and none of them with any idea about what that night had really been like.
“My name is Nathan Quinn—”
Madison turned. He’d lost weight, and his dark hair was longer: Nathan Quinn in a head-and-shoulders shot, a blue linen shirt open at the collar, no tie. A hospital room behind him, enough light to see him clearly. A red line slashed through his left eyebrow and ran into his hairline; another ran from the corner of his mouth to under his left ear; one started under his jaw and disappeared into the open collar; another smaller line over his cheekbone, his lips. The plastic surgeon had done an amazing job, the best anyone could hope for. Yet, for now, Nathan Quinn looked as if the devil himself had kicked him out of hell but not without some fun and games first.
“—a few days ago the remains of a child were found in the Hoh River forest. My brother, David, was thirteen years old when he was abducted together with two young friends twenty-five years ago. The men who took them killed my brother and left his friends tied up and defenseless in the woods; had they not been discovered quickly, they, too, would have perished. This is an appeal for any kind of information anyone might have that relates to the kidnapping or the murder.”
Madison had seen such appeals made before: for missing or dead children, parents, siblings, wives, and husbands. Something in Quinn’s tone kept a roomful of cops nailed to where they stood, and she sensed the storm coming, because she had seen Nathan Quinn in action before, and he was not a guy who simply appealed for anything.
Quinn raised four fingers of his right hand. “Four men took the boys and murdered my brother—I now put two hundred thousand dollars on the head of each one of those men.” He raised the index finger of his left hand. “One man, or a group of men, planned it—one million dollars.” Quinn paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was low, and it crackled with menace. “They didn’t demand a ransom; they didn’t ask for a reward. This is what they are going to get today: a bounty on their heads. Did any one of them tell a friend, a brother, a lover what happened? Can they trust that person with their life today?” Quinn paused. “Twenty years ago a man named Timothy Gilman fell into a hunter’s trapping pit and died; there is reason to think he was one of the four kidnappers.” Quinn folded one finger back. “One down, three to go. The others should know, wherever they are, that they are not safe, they are not out of harm’s way, and they will be found.”
The picture held for a moment, then went to black and cut back to the news anchor sitting at his desk and clearly thinking that a degree in communications had not prepared him for this.
The squad room erupted with sound, voices overlapped, and someone muted the television. Madison was still inside the voice and inside the words. It was not an appeal; it was a warning. Quinn had pitched it hard, and somewhere out there several men had heard the words and understood the message. And who on Earth was Timothy Gilman?
It was a chemical change. A catalyst dropped into an otherwise inert solution. My name is Nathan Quinn. In offices, in homes, in bars, in television window displays, on ferries, online, everywhere with a screen. People stopped, people looked, and people wondered. After a while it wasn’t even necessary to hear the words. Quinn raising four fingers of one hand, then the index finger of the other. The scars on those hands said something about the man that words could not. And in some of those places where people watched television—places where the tourists didn’t visit and the bartenders knew each customer by nickname and felony type—a few of those customers began to scan the usual crowd and ask themselves who among them had been around twenty-five years ago who would take three children into the woods and bury one in a shallow grave.
Today is a good day; today there are one million and six hundred thousand reasons to be curious.
Carl Doyle, back in his office at Quinn, Locke, had watched the news with the rest of the staff. The camera and lights were back in the stockroom, and Benny Craig was telling his tale for the nth time to a pretty young secretary with a blond ponytail.
Doyle didn’t want to answer any questions and had closed the door behind him. Now he knew why Tod Hollis had disagreed with Nathan’s decision. He understood Quinn’s need to give his brother the justice he had been denied; who wouldn’t? What Doyle couldn’t even begin to describe was what it was like to stand four feet away from Quinn while he’d spoken those words. Benny was young; he was a sweet-natured if slightly dull young man who had little or no real understanding of what he had witnessed. Bu
t Doyle did, and he picked up a pile of paperwork and began to file, sort, and organize, because he needed to fill his mind and his hands with the ordinary and the mundane, and because the steel in Quinn’s voice had been sharp enough to cut his breath in two.
Dunne, still holding his paper cup, came close to Madison and spoke quietly. “You asked the boss for the Quinn case, right?”
“Yup.”
“Nice one. Have you looked at the initial report from Jefferson County?”
Madison turned her back to the room so that her words were for Dunne alone. “There was nothing at the scene. Just the remains and the hole in the dirt they came from.”
“No trace evidence of any kind?”
Madison shook her head.
“Medical examiner?”
“I’m waiting for Fellman’s report. And the forensic anthropologist’s—if we can get one.”
Dunne ran a hand through his hair, exasperated by the seemingly inexhaustible ways the world could find to make their work impossible. “What is Quinn thinking, putting out that kind of reward twenty-five years after the event? About a tenth of it would have been enough to get any information there was to have. All that money is just a beacon for every greedy loser from here to Miami, and each one of them will call us to claim it.”
Madison did not reply: everything Quinn did had reasons behind reasons.
“Do you know anything about this Gilman guy?” she asked Dunne.
“No, never heard of him. Twenty-five years ago my biggest problem was who to take to prom and how to afford a limo.”
Madison looked around: the room was emptying out, everybody back to their duties, Dunne’s cake reduced to a few sticky crumbs on a plate.
“Where’s the boss?” she asked him.
“With the Chief of Ds. Can’t wait for his delight when he hears about the appeal.”
“Do you call that an appeal?”
“No, I call that a mistake. A big juicy one, too.”
Dunne shrugged on his jacket. “Spence and I are going to Jimmy’s for a quick drink before my birthday celebration with the heavenly Stacey Roberts from Traffic. Are you coming?”
Madison smiled. “Thank you but no. I need to find out about Gilman before I can go to Quinn and have an argument with him about it.”
“Have fun.”
“Counting on it. Dunne,” she said to his back. “By the way, Stacey has three brothers the size of boulders. Not that she needs them—she shoots competitively.”
Dunne tightened the knot in his tie and smiled. “Nothing like a date with a woman who can shoot out your tires, right?”
“Happy birthday.”
Madison brought the file back to her desk and the small pool of light from her Anglepoise. The room was blessedly quiet; her own shift was over, and her colleagues had dispersed to the lives they had when they were not there.
In his short time on Earth Timothy Gilman had managed to make few friends and many enemies: what had started as typical juvenile-delinquent behavior had quickly graduated to a range of felonies that spoke to Madison about a deep violent streak. Gilman had clearly cultivated it the way another man might work on his aptitude for numbers. Some hard time upstate for assault in the second degree was no doubt a pretty good accomplishment on his personal-achievements list.
Madison sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with a wraparound color picture of Mount Rainier—blue sky behind the gray rocky top and the glaciers. In the end, somewhere in the woods between Seattle and Mount Rainier, in a trapping pit, hikers had found Timothy Gilman’s body after the first spring thaw, impaled on long spikes. One night the previous winter he had walked out of his local bar and disappeared like so much dust in the wind.
Madison ran her index finger down the list of interviews that had followed: no one knew how he had gotten from the bar to the woods or even whether he’d fallen in by accident or by someone else’s design. She read the file twice from top to bottom, and all she could garner from it was that the life Gilman had lived had been infused with blunt destructiveness and willful harm. Despite that, there was no connection that she could see to the Hoh River abductions. The bulk of his issues with law and order had to do with the low-level enforcer work that seemed to fit so well his particular set of skills.
She made notes as she read, feeling that she was reaching back in time half-blind and trying to grasp something that might not be there at all. The thing she went back to—the only thing she had—was the knowledge that Nathan Quinn would not trifle with Gilman’s name just as he would not trifle with threats. One down, three to go. Quinn had something, and it sure wasn’t in those yellowed pages she had picked up from Records.
Madison wandered over to the office fridge and found her own contribution: an emergency strawberry Yoo-hoo left over from a late-night stakeout weeks earlier. She unscrewed the top and gulped it down to drown the taste of the percolated coffee. It actually tasted pink.
If Quinn knew the identity of one of the kidnappers, it made no sense that he had let go of the thread of evidence there, that he had not turned Gilman’s life inside out and upside down to get to the truth. Unless he had found out after Gilman was dead. In which case—Madison looked at the meager file—all Quinn had had was the same length and breadth of a life spent hurting people that she had and, like her, no answers.
Madison picked up her cell phone and speed-dialed.
“Doyle.” He answered on the second ring.
“It’s Madison. Sorry for the late hour.”
“No problem. I’m still in the office, and I bet so are you.”
“’Fraid so. Carl, I need to see him. The sooner, the better. Tomorrow morning would be good.”
“Do you have any idea how many media requests I’ve had since his appeal went out?”
“A good number?”
“Twenty-two. Do you know how many he has granted?”
“Zero?”
“Zero.”
“I’m not media, Carl. I’m on the David Quinn case.”
“I’ll speak to him in the morning.”
They said their good-byes, and Madison decided she was done with the day. The drive home went quickly, maybe too much so. The day’s work might be done, but there was something to be said for the feeling of suspension, for the deferral of any physical action or endeavor that only heavy traffic could provide. She wanted to keep driving to keep thinking.
She drove south past her exit and ended up making a loop around Normandy Park. The densely wooded area was a pitch-black pause amid the pattern of lights. It was a cold early-February night, and yet Madison rolled down her window a few inches to smell the salt in the air. Her cell phone on the passenger seat started vibrating just as she was looping back. She saw the caller ID and picked up.
“Sarge,” she said.
“Madison,” Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown replied. “Did you see it?”
“Me and everyone else with a screen.”
“You picked up Gilman’s file yet?”
Madison smiled. Brown might be on medical leave, but he was still her partner—her much senior partner—and she missed their conversations.
“Yup, pretty straightforward low-level muscle, some time in jail—not enough if you ask me—and a whole load of nothing regarding how his final hours went. Nothing at all linking him to the abduction—on the surface, that is. Quinn wouldn’t put his name out there unless it meant something.”
“I agree. Quinn’s message was about greed, fear, and that one name.”
“When is your physical, Sarge? When can we expect you back?”
“I have some tests tomorrow. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m done. Boredom is worse than getting shot in the head.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You’re going to see Quinn?”
“Yes, tomorrow.”
“First time since?”
“Yes.”
“Look, that man is made out of some kind of metal we don’t even have a name f
or. You can push him if you need to.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going with flowers and balloons. He’s still the same person he was before the forest, and so am I.”
Later, as she was parking her Civic next to her grandparents’ car, Madison wondered if she had, in fact, lied to Brown—unintentionally, sure, but a lie nevertheless. It had slipped out so very easily, and Madison was glad that they had not been face-to-face. Once Brown was back, she would have to accept that the “all good, nothing to talk about” bull she had delivered to Dr. Robinson would go right out the window.
The file from Jefferson County contained pictures of the boy’s remains in situ, the depressed skull fracture evident even before what remained of the body was moved. Madison asked herself if Gilman had been involved and, if so, what he had left of himself in that hole.
She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich—Jarlsberg and sourdough. She had it on the sofa with a glass of milk, watching The Philadelphia Story, and she fell asleep just as the True Love sailed in the marble pool.
Chapter 9
Manny Oretremos made the sign of the cross once, and then, for safety, he made it again. Inside his cell in the King County Justice Complex he sat on the bed—because kneeling would have been too obvious—and prayed for rain. Not just a few drops or a little drizzle—he prayed for the heavens to open and for a rain to fall that would bring to mind a flood of biblical proportions. Failing that, a heart attack that would incapacitate him and send him to the medical wing. Anything that would prevent him from having to go and do.
Instead, as the minutes passed, he sat on his bunk, gripping the thin blanket with his sweaty hands and waiting for his yard time . . . and his doom.
Manny was small—never a good thing if you were involved with the kind of people he had known all his life. So, in order to gain their respect and a modicum of acceptance, he had found himself doing a series of things that—as many a high school teacher had predicted—would land him straight in a place with no front-door key.
The Dark Page 5
