The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Back door. There was no alarm.”

  “Does it look like a burglary?”

  “Ain’t nothing to rob here, and, far as I can see, nothing was taken. He must have made a little more than minimum wage, but not much more than that. Cause of death?”

  “Not yet. I’m going back in.”

  Fellman and his assistant were still focused on the top half of the victim’s body. Even at a distance Madison could see that the rest of it—except for the wrists and ankles, where he had been tied—seemed unblemished. An average man, slightly overweight, whose age as given by the driver’s license was forty-nine but who looked a few years older.

  Her cell started vibrating, and Madison again left the room.

  “We found a whole mess of drugs in his bathroom cabinet, all prescription. I’m going to send you a picture, and you can ask the doc,” Spencer said.

  “They didn’t touch the drugs?”

  “No, left them where they were. The guy had more pills than Walgreens.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Madison wandered over to the vending machine at the end of the corridor and got herself a bottle of water. The autopsy room managed to be both cold and suffocating at the same time. It was the smells, Madison told herself. You could build a kind of resistance against the visuals, but the darn smells got you every time. She drank deeply, and by the time she walked back in, Fellman had performed the Y incision, and the chest cavity was exposed.

  “I think we might have cause of death,” he said.

  Some of the internal organs had already been removed, she noticed.

  “He had an enlarged heart. There could be a number of causes for that, from coronary artery disease to cardiomyopathy, but the result was heart muscle that did not work as it should have.”

  Madison checked that Spencer’s picture had arrived on her phone and showed it to Fellman.

  “This is his medicine cabinet.”

  “Yes, it makes sense. Have a look at his stomach contents.” He pointed at a metal bowl on a wall-mounted shelf.

  Madison looked: what was in the bowl made no sense.

  “I know,” Fellman said. “Hell of a last meal.”

  “Are you kidding?” Spencer said.

  “It was green, and if you check out the sink in his kitchen, you’re going to find a bottle of dish detergent, apple scented. They forced him to swallow it, as well as what could be clothing detergent. Fellman thinks that the streaks on his face were caused by a bleach-based cleaner.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “His heart wouldn’t have been able to take the stress. The doc said the massive release of adrenaline and cortisol would have been fatal for a heart as damaged as his was.”

  Madison heard Spencer sigh, or maybe it was only a background sound.

  “We’re going to get the entire kitchen packed up,” he said. “Did I tell you we found a roll of picture-hanging wire under the sink?”

  “No.”

  “Looks like they used what they found lying around,” he said. “Did the doc say how long?”

  “No, he’ll tell us more after the tests.”

  “I hope he died quickly.”

  “So do I.”

  By the time the autopsy was finished, it was the middle of the afternoon, and Madison couldn’t wait to be outdoors. On Cherry Street she grabbed a chicken sandwich and a coffee to go and had both while typing out her notes for Spencer’s case file.

  The victim’s death was due to a preexisting condition, likely exacerbated by extreme stress. Madison wondered if it was at all possible that the intruders had not actually meant to kill Warren Lee and straightaway excluded that option: they had tied him to a chair with picture wire; there was no way that the man wouldn’t end up on the corner of 35th and Myrtle under the water towers. How much his death had surprised them and how much it had ruined their plans for the night was something the police would only discover in due course.

  Warren Lee had never married and didn’t have a criminal record; he had driven unremarkable cars all his life and held jobs that had paid enough to live on if you didn’t like expensive things. His drugs had been paid for by the medical insurance his job provided—stock keeper for a hardware company. Madison realized that the picture wire he had been tied with was probably made by the people he worked for.

  She left the report on Spencer’s desk, her shift long finished, and clicked off her desk lamp.

  Alki Beach was deserted. The sun hadn’t even made an appearance that day, and the air carried a bite that easily found the spot between her shoulder blades that tightened her whole back.

  Madison started running. A sense of falling and the coppery scent rose up immediately, and she ignored both. She pushed through the sensations, sped up, and inhaled the sharp air as deeply as she could to wash out the faint apple smell from the autopsy room.

  Back home she put a steak on the grill pan and had it with some leftover potato salad. She went over her notes from the David Quinn file and sought out the names of the men Detective Frakes had mentioned. Men who would take an interest if your business was successful. Protection. There were three names: Eduardo Cruz, Leon Kendrick, and Jerome McMullen. Madison circled each name.

  Chapter 13

  John Cameron lay on his bunk and focused his attention on a tiny crack in the ceiling. Folded on the wall-mounted table was a two-day-old copy of the Seattle Times sent by Carl Doyle from Quinn, Locke. The front-page headline was Bounty on the Heads of Kidnappers: $1,600,000 to Solve a Cold Case.

  In the last forty-eight hours Cameron had felt the atmosphere in the jail change the way a wild animal senses winter’s imminent arrival. Those inmates who did not have television privileges or did not read had heard about Quinn’s appeal from their visitors, and the news had spread like an oil spill. The guards, who had so far treated him with wary caution, seemed even more watchful.

  John Cameron had known Nathan Quinn all his life: the time before, when he was a boy, and the world had been a bright shining thing, and the time after, when the colors had changed, and he had thought he would drown in his own rage. And, miraculously, the time after that, when Quinn had not turned away from who, or what, he was. Cameron had never entertained any doubts about his own nature, but he was glad and grateful that the link with Quinn had never been severed.

  Quinn’s television appeal had not surprised him; he understood what his friend was doing more than anyone else on Earth. The one thing that had interrupted his train of thought like a stone tossed against a window was that name. Because Quinn should not have known; knowledge of the name should have been Cameron’s, and Cameron’s alone, to carry. That had been the deal that he had made with himself when he was eighteen: Timothy Gilman would die because he was the man who had taken them into the woods, who had cut him up, and who was responsible for David’s death. He would die by Cameron’s hand because there was no way they would ever be able to get him into a courtroom.

  Still, Quinn had known. For how long, Cameron couldn’t be sure. He thought back to a conversation in a diner, eating pie, and how young he had been and willfully deaf to what Quinn was trying to tell him. A few weeks after that day Quinn had left the King County Prosecutor’s office and set himself up in private practice, criminal defense. He had never told him he knew; he had simply waited all those years for a time when Cameron would need him, as his nature had always fated that he would.

  When two guards came to escort him out for his yard time, the drumming sound started almost immediately. He barely noticed it.

  The metal door clanked open, and John Cameron was hit by a sudden rush of cold air, air that was not channeled through pipes and conduits. It was damp and gritty and felt wonderful.

  Cameron was in protective custody, which allowed one hour twice a week in a human version of a dog run: a structure in every way similar to a cage, eight feet wide with closely interwoven bars, in a yard that contained a number of such structures. Inside
it, he could walk—five long strides—stretch, exercise, or do whatever he pleased while being simultaneously outdoors and separated from every other inmate.

  In a jail—a world within a world—yard time was precious: it was a brief opportunity to socialize, strike alliances, and establish boundaries among the groups. Inmates at risk in the general population or those being disciplined for any number of offenses would have their yard time in the cages.

  Cameron had been to a dog kennel when he was a kid: a not altogether different setup, he thought.

  He looked up: a dark sky, heavy clouds rolling in from the west, but no rain.

  Manny Oretremos stood by the door of his cell in the appropriate position and waited for the guard to approach. He was perspiring already; there didn’t seem to be a moment in the day when he wasn’t cold and clammy. He wanted to straighten his shoulders and pretend to himself that he was ready and willing—more than willing, in fact. Instead, he wiped his hands on the sides of his pants and settled for keeping his breathing regular and his mind blank.

  “Ready, Oretremos?” the guard asked.

  John Cameron stood in the center of his outdoor cage. This was the closest he ever got to any other inmate, and their energy flowed around him. Some stretched, some jogged in place, some ignored him, some stared. He was aware of the correction officers guiding each convict into place and the metal locks snapping shut.

  Over the weeks he had had the opportunity to watch these inmates, to become familiar with their routines and their mannerisms. In a place where individuality was taken away with your personal effects when you arrived, every one of those men fought to get it back in any way he could and at any cost.

  Cameron was never in the same cage: his position and that of the men around him changed depending on the guards’ shifts. Today he was in the center of the yard. The cages were at least three deep on each side of the exit. On his right, a young Latino man was hunched against the chill. He stood quite close to the metal mesh and stared at the concrete floor.

  He was nervous—Cameron had noticed him on other occasions—and he couldn’t wait to get back indoors. In fact, he always seemed profoundly relieved when the guards came to collect him to escort him back to his cell.

  Cameron understood fear, and the boy seemed even more terrified than usual this time. It was the slightest movement; he caught it almost by chance: the boy had made the sign of the cross. At the same time a call had sounded out in the yard, and, as one, all the inmates stepped right up to the cage wall that put them closest to Cameron.

  The second yell ripped the silence, and he felt more than saw that every man around him was reaching back like a pitcher before a hard throw.

  Cameron locked eyes with the Latino kid; he alone hadn’t moved. Manny Oretremos stood frozen where he was, in his right hand a two-inch vial filled to the brim with sodium hypochlorite—bleach—in a concentrated form strong enough to disintegrate skin on contact.

  Cameron took one stride up to the wall nearest Manny—the long side of his cage—while around the two inmates the yard exploded in a hell of sounds. The guards hollered as they rushed through the maze of cages, the inmates shouted at Manny to throw, and above all was the sound of the tinkling, crashing, and hissing of the vials dropping like rain around Cameron.

  He heard the first warning shots of the guards, and all the inmates dropped to the ground, but Cameron knew that the safest place for him to be was standing right by the side closest to the kid. His amber eyes held the boy still, only a few feet between them. Vials hit the roof of the cage; some shattered on impact, glass shards and their contents dripping onto the ground; others rolled and fell through the gaps in the bars. Something bounced and broke on his shoulder, and he shrugged off his jacket, pain like a bee sting through his orange coveralls. Cameron never broke eye contact.

  Pale green drops of the solution fell from the top of the cage and fizzed on the concrete. The guards reached the door of Cameron’s cage, fumbling with the lock, yelling instructions as they beckoned him out—no one going inside—and the alarm sounded high and wide.

  Cameron walked the stretch to the door as the last of the sodium hypochlorite trickled down from the ceiling mesh. As soon as he was over the threshold, two guards clasped him above the elbows, their touch curiously hesitant as they ushered him toward the exit from the yard. He turned: every inmate in every cage was lying flat on the concrete, watching him, dead eyes following him as he went past, except for the Latino boy, who was still standing—guards shouting their orders at him—until he finally lay down and the glass vial rolled away from his hand.

  Inside the now-empty cage Cameron’s Department of Corrections jacket rested in a heap as the scent of bleach reached every corner of the yard and the crackle of the guards’ radios was the only sound.

  “I want to know how,” Will Thomas said, trying to keep calm. “I want to know how, and who, and when.” The deputy warden of the King County Justice Complex had been briefed about the event in the yard. The warden himself was on his way back from a conference.

  The supervisors of each wing of KCJC, including D wing, where John Cameron resided, were assembled in his office; the guards who had been present in the yard stood at the back; the doctor on duty hovered by the door.

  “We recovered one of the vials completely intact,” the supervisor of D Wing said; he seemed to have aged five years since he’d gotten up that morning.

  “We’re talking about vials. Not a sharpened toothbrush or a shiv or a shank.” The deputy warden looked around the room. “Glass vials,” he repeated.

  The event was still only one hour old, and the jail was in lockdown.

  “What’s the situation, Harry?” Will Thomas asked.

  Dr. Harry Norringer looked at his notes. “We have a number of inmates with various injuries. Nothing that warrants a hospital transfer. Small lacerations mostly, and a couple of contact burns where the solution touched them.”

  “They were flinging the vials with some kind of elastic-type, homemade catapults, and they had to get it through their own bars first. Some of them didn’t manage it, and it bounced right back,” one of the guards, Miller, said.

  “What was in it?”

  “Some kind of bleach. The smell is still all over the yard.”

  “Cameron,” the doctor continued, “has a burn on his shoulder the size of a dime; the skin is raw, but it didn’t go much deeper than that. His jacket caught most of it. I bandaged the wound and put him on a course of antibiotics. His blood pressure is better than mine, and his heart rate was practically at coma level.”

  “How many inmates were involved?” the deputy warden asked Miller.

  “We think at least nine, maybe more. We’ll be looking at the CCTV to confirm. And then there’s Manny Oretremos—the kid who had a vial and didn’t throw it. By now he’s on the ‘bad-news list,’ so he’ll have to stay in protective custody.”

  “The inmates never go into the same runs, right?” Thomas asked.

  “No, they rotate in a nonrepeating pattern,” Miller replied. “Just so that what happened today cannot happen.”

  “But it did happen. And what it means is that they waited, for weeks, possibly, so that he would be in the middle.” Will Thomas ran his hands through his hair. “We’ve been lucky today.”

  No one said anything; it was a conclusion they had all already reached in the privacy of their own minds.

  An ill wind, Will Thomas thought. An ill wind blows through my jail.

  Chapter 14

  Madison held her cell in her hand for a long minute after Doyle rang off. KCJC had called Cameron’s legal representatives to report the ambush of their client; Doyle had called her as he was driving to the hospital to tell Quinn in person.

  It was not unexpected, Madison reasoned. In fact, it was the very thing KCJC had tried to avoid by having Cameron in protective custody from the start. Yet there was something repulsive about a targeted attack where the prey had no chance to defend himse
lf. Even against a con with a shiv, Madison’s money was on Cameron, and that was the problem. There was something unsettling about the amount of preparation and patience that had gone into the attack; likely it was the one piece of their life that got those inmates up in the morning, wondering if that was going to be the day and how much damage they could do before the guards stopped them.

  Madison left her desk and went outside for a few minutes. People didn’t smoke anymore—Madison had never smoked in the first place—but she missed the pretext to stretch her legs and feel fresh air on her face. It sounded silly to say, “I need to breathe different air for a little while,” and yet occasionally that was precisely the case. A few minutes were enough.

  The day had been about canvassing Warren Lee’s neighborhood and the area where the body had been left by the killers—forensics seemed to indicate that at least three unknown males had been present in the victim’s kitchen. They had boot prints by the back door, though as yet nothing to match them to and no witnesses to the abduction or the dropping off.

  Madison had been supporting Spencer in his investigation, but the whiteboard with the list of Homicide detectives in black marker and the names of the victims in red indicated that she would be the primary on the next one. Soon Spencer and Dunne would have to look after their dead, because Madison would have her own.

  She automatically reached for her cell to call her partner and then decided not to: it was up to Brown to decide when he was ready to go to the shooting range with her, and the worst thing she could do was put him under pressure at a time when he was already feeling its heavy load.

  “We got something,” Dunne said from his desk, where he had just replaced his receiver. “A resident on 35th Street came home at 3:10 a.m., and he could swear the vic was not there yet.”

  “That leaves a three-and-a-half-hour window when they could have left him there,” Spencer said.