The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Do we know why ‘there’ was there?” Madison said. “I mean, did Warren Lee have any connection to that spot? Far as I could see, he never worked at the reservoir, and no one around there knew him.”

  “No connection to his life that we can see,” Spencer replied.

  Madison went back to typing up her interviews. Lieutenant Fynn was waiting for Spencer to come up with motive and suspects, and for the moment he had neither. What he had was a brutal home invasion that had ended with the victim being dropped off in a spot known for its water towers. Madison had not read the medical examiner’s report sitting on top of Dunne’s desk—she didn’t need to. It had taken a very long, hot shower to wash off the autopsy room from her skin.

  The man on the chair had found posthumous fame if not fortune at the hands of the press. Quick to catch the details that mattered, online and in print, the media grabbed the story and shook it hard for all it was worth: a sadistic murder, the torture of a defenseless man taken from his own bed, the body dumped in such an unusual manner. Select words had been picked up by the search engines and YouTube; crime-scene footage shot with cell phones—grainy and shaky but perfectly clear—was all over the Web. The words were torture, murder, Seattle, and, Madison found out to her surprise, chair.

  The city reacted the way it did when a person who is not involved in a life of violence meets a violent death: it held its breath, waiting for law enforcement to comfort and reassure with its own set of words. The killers were known to the victim, possibly a drug deal gone wrong, possible retribution, leads are being followed, and, most important, arrests have been made. And when no such reassurance was forthcoming—because Warren Lee had no ties to gangs and not so much as a parking fine to his name—the city held its breath.

  Chapter 15

  Madison finished typing the interviews, printed them, and left the pages on Spencer’s desk; Spencer was in Fynn’s office, having what was, no doubt, going to be a very brief conversation on the Lee case.

  She checked the wall clock, turned off her Anglepoise lamp, and shrugged on her jacket.

  As she was leaving the detectives’ room, she noticed that Tony Rosario’s desk had been cleared of papers—the man must be on yet another medical leave. She had never seen him look anything other than stick-thin and gray-faced; maybe that’s what fifteen years in Homicide do to you.

  She had found out what she could reading the reports on Cruz, Kendrick, and McMullen—the three men Detective Frakes had identified in the David Quinn file. At different times they had individually been charged with a variety of felonies from insurance fraud and corruption to all colors of assault, malicious harassment, and coercion, which fit with the potential protection motive for the abduction of the children. Eduardo Cruz had died in 1987, a hit-and-run that had first left him in a coma for three days. The driver was never found. The second, Leon Kendrick, had withdrawn from the business and moved to California in 1998, never to spend a single day in jail. The last of them, Jerome McMullen, was doing time in the Bones, the McCoy State Prison north of Seattle, for extortion.

  Files and reports were useful, but, as always, there was much that hadn’t made it onto the page. If Madison wanted to find out about what things were like on the street in 1985, she had to go to someone who had been there. Before the Internet, before e-mail and text messaging, before the dozens of ways in which information was acquired or dispersed, encrypted or straight, before all this there was Jerry Wallace, who always knew who was doing what, where, and for how much, and he would be happy to share that information for a fee. He didn’t take sides and was consulted by all, the Switzerland of the West Coast crime scene.

  Detective Frakes had said that after the boys’ kidnapping, a shroud of silence had fallen on the informants’ community in the city, but now, twenty-five years later, there was no harm in trying for a chat with Seattle’s retired information bureau chief.

  Wallace lived off Highway 165 just before the bridge that led into Burnett, in Pierce County. Madison didn’t want to call: this was a conversation that needed a face-to-face, and if Wallace was not in the mood to converse, even his reaction would be some kind of response.

  The drive on 165 was uneventful. There were strips of bright February sky between the clouds, and yet darkness fell quickly after the middle of the afternoon. By the time Madison arrived, she had turned on her headlights, and they swept across a dense copse as she almost missed the turn. Wallace’s bungalow was three hundred yards off the highway, and Madison could see lights at the end of the narrow lane as she drove under the low branches.

  It was a rural part of the state, and Madison was not surprised to see a four-wheel-drive pickup truck parked by the front door.

  She pulled in at the end of the drive and closed her car door without slamming it but making it clear for anyone who was listening out that she wasn’t interested in stealth. Jerry Wallace had lived out here for fourteen years, give or take; however, she was reasonably sure that the ingrained habits of a lifetime hadn’t quit the moment he had retired. The front-door light came on, courtesy of a motion sensor, as Madison approached, and she rang the bell.

  The two-story wooden house looked neat and well kept; Wallace hadn’t made millions trading information, but he had made enough to live comfortably in a town with two shops and one church. A clear semicircle of bare dirt demarcated the driveway, but Madison felt sure that the woods would reclaim it just as soon as Wallace looked away. Something small scuttled through the undergrowth, and she tracked it as it moved deeper into the gloom.

  A couple of minutes went past. Madison could hear muted voices inside the house, maybe a television. Her breath puffed white before her. She rang the doorbell again and looked around. No pretty flowerpots by the door, no other car tracks on the ground.

  She stole a glance inside the pickup: it was old, its cabin was clean, and there was no sign that more than one driver ever used it.

  When it became clear that no one was coming to answer the door, Madison decided to walk around the right-hand side of the house. Wallace was sixty-nine years old, and it was perfectly possible that he hadn’t heard the doorbell above the sound of the television.

  The lights were on downstairs, and the voices from inside became louder as Madison walked down the side. A brief memory of another house and blaring music came back to her, a case from a lifetime away, and she paused.

  Maybe it was the darkness of the woods pushing against the house, maybe it was the memory of a fresh-faced police recruit who had once found herself in a situation they didn’t teach you about at the Academy, but Madison’s hand went to her holster, and she flicked off the safety on her piece.

  She proceeded to the first window that looked into a living room that ran the length of the house: she saw French doors into the backyard and a dining table in one corner, and on the television someone was interviewing someone else about something, and they were both having a wild time of it. Then she saw a four-foot floor lamp that had been knocked onto the rug, the lampshade rolled to one side and the lightbulb in pieces.

  Damn. In one gesture Madison cleared leather, settled into a two-handed grip with the Glock pointing at the ground, and stepped quickly around to the French doors. Even in the gloom she could see that the backyard was empty.

  She grabbed the door handle and turned. It was unlocked.

  “Mr. Wallace,” Madison called out. “Jerry Wallace.”

  The television continued its bouncy chatter. Madison stepped into the living room.

  “Mr. Wallace, this is Seattle Police.” Madison’s gaze went over the room. The table was set: scrambled eggs, bacon, and a slice of toast on plain white china. A tumbler lay on its side, a few drops of milk still in the bottom. A paper napkin was on the floor by the chair.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions if you have the time.”

  The eggs were congealed, and the milk had become a stain on the cotton place mat.

  “Mr. Wallace . . .”

  I
t would have taken some hours for the milk to dry; the glass was upturned but not broken. The lamp, close to the French doors, had been knocked to the floor on someone’s way in or out.

  Madison noticed the remote control on the table near the plate, picked it up, and pressed the Mute key. Now there was nothing except the quiet susurration of the trees finding its way in through the chimney. Madison stilled, listening to the house and its unfamiliar creaks and hums from the heating system.

  “Mr. Wallace . . .”

  Everything else in the living room seemed to be in place: the sofa cushions were plumped, and a landscape painting was hanging straight above the fireplace. Under the table, though, abandoned on its side, rested a single navy woolen slipper, as if Jerry Wallace had been lifted clear out of it and out of this house.

  Madison walked to the kitchen and leaned on the door; it opened slowly and revealed nothing more than a pan on the stove, where someone had cooked the eggs and bacon.

  A hallway led to the stairs. Madison turned on the lights. There was no sense now in calling out, only in paying attention to whatever the house wanted to tell her.

  Madison peeked ahead, around, and behind her as she climbed each step. She reached the landing; her heart beat fast but steady. Maybe cars were streaming past on Highway 165, but there in Jerry Wallace’s house, there was only silence and Madison’s soft steps on the carpet.

  The bedroom was unoccupied; a man’s black leather wallet was on the bedside table. She checked the closet and under the bed.

  Who hides under the bed? Monsters. Monsters hide under the bed, her six-year-old self answered instantly. But not in this bedroom, not tonight.

  Perhaps they didn’t wait for me, she thought, but something had definitely come into the house. The bed was made, she noticed. How long ago, she couldn’t say.

  A quick look into the bathroom and a second bedroom confirmed to Madison that she was alone.

  Jerry Wallace had high-blood-pressure pills on the counter and an herbal solution for insomnia; he was not a guy who went off on a whim and left upturned furniture and tumblers and his wallet by the bed.

  Where was the telephone, she wondered next. She returned downstairs, looked around in the living room, and found it on a small table by the sofa. The handset sat on a gray box with a red LED light that told the world that seven messages awaited Jerry Wallace.

  Even though she was unexpectedly investigating a possible crime scene, Madison hesitated to play the messages. She was, after all, inside a stranger’s house. She would look around a bit more first.

  From the stale warmth of the house she emerged into the clean, early-evening chill and stood on the back steps. The line of trees that circled the small yard was almost completely indistinct. Had someone hidden there and watched while Wallace went about his life inside the house? Was someone watching now?

  Madison’s gaze followed the low branches that almost reached the ground, the curve of a root jutting out of the earth, and she saw something that was neither tree nor ground.

  She crossed the yard in long, running steps, and there it was, caught by a twisting root—a navy woolen slipper. She didn’t touch it. It was sitting on the damp earth, on the edge of the impenetrable darkness. Madison, her piece in her hand, stood stock-still and searched the shadows for movement or sound. It was a wall of black, and the rustle of the top branches, shifting and swaying, was all there was and, she suspected, all there ever would be. She paused there, one hand against the rough bark of a tree and the other holding the Glock.

  Then the telephone was ringing inside the house, and Madison, startled and swearing under her breath, ran back and managed to grab the handset.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Who . . . who is this?” a woman’s voice replied.

  “Detective Madison, Seattle PD. Who is this?”

  “Katy Wallace. I think I have the wrong number.”

  “No, you don’t. This is Mr. Wallace’s home number—”

  “Is my father there? I’ve been trying to reach him for the last two days.”

  Madison looked around the room, at the muted television and the eggs on the plate. She passed the receiver to the other hand.

  “Ma’am . . .” she began.

  Officers from the Pierce County sheriff’s department arrived in their whites with full lights and sirens thirteen minutes after Madison’s call and took over the scene. Jerry Wallace’s daughter, Katy, was on her way from Portland with her boyfriend. She had said “yes” a lot during their conversation, as dread became reality and panic took hold.

  Madison and two deputies swept the woods behind the house with the beams of their heavy-duty flashlights, but, as one officer said, it was blacker than a bag of crows out there, and all they were achieving was trampling a possible crime scene.

  He turned to Madison. “There’s a trail five, ten minutes that way.” He pointed ahead of them. “Someone doesn’t want to be seen approaching the house could park there and walk through, no problem, even in daylight.”

  Madison nodded. Jerry Wallace was gone. Jerry Wallace, who knew everything and everyone, had been lifted clear out of his own life.

  Madison drove back to Seattle, her thoughts chasing one another in circles, and by the time she got home, she was bone-tired. She dug out some leftover roast chicken in a Tupperware container and didn’t even bother with a plate. She ate it thinking about two-day-old eggs and bacon on white china.

  At 4:00 a.m. Madison woke up with a start. Her heart was drumming fast, and she was covered in perspiration in spite of the chill in the room. She wrapped herself in her blanket and waited for her breathing to return to normal. She had been due a bad dream for the last few days, and there it was. You have occasional nightmares, possibly an exact memory of the event but more likely your own perception of the event and whatever troubles you about the nature of your own actions in it.

  Dr. Robinson had been right, of course, and yet Madison knew that he had been wrong about the most important part of the dream. Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms such as her sensitivity to chloroform were born out of fear: often the fear a victim felt in the moment of an attack, the acute recollection of which was then triggered by any of a list of sensory perceptions. But Madison’s dream—the long run in the pitch-black forest, the smell of blood in the clearing—was not about being attacked, it was not about being a victim, and it was not about being defenseless.

  She slipped her feet into a couple of woolly socks at the bottom of the bed and padded to the kitchen to make herself some hot milk. It didn’t really help; it never had. And yet it was what her grandmother had done when Madison was a girl, and that was the comfort, that memory.

  She crawled back into bed and stared into the darkness above her. She started to think of ways in which the inmates could have smuggled vials of undiluted bleach into their cells at KCJC and kept them hidden until they needed them, and how many inmates it would have taken to make sure they surrounded Cameron, and her last thought as she fell asleep was that the inmate who had frozen during the attack was in as much trouble as Cameron right now.

  Chapter 16

  Ronald Gray sat in the waiting area of the bus station; the long strips of fluorescent lighting gave him a headache, and the seating—row after row of metal mesh—bit into his back. The clock said 8:22 p.m. Almost half an hour to go. His bag, a black American Tourister with wheels, rested against his leg. He had bought the ticket and then grabbed a bite—more to kill some time than out of real hunger—and now he wished he hadn’t.

  All he wanted to do was to get on that bus, rest his head against the cool glass, and fall asleep. He didn’t know how long it would be before they let the passengers on board; he had never traveled by bus. His car, a 1998 maroon Lincoln Continental, sat idle in front of his apartment house.

  Ronald Gray was fifty years old, looked fifty years old, and today felt a hundred and seven. He was wiry and capable, but his nerves were in shreds, and he was exhausted. He stood
up and looked around: at least he could visit the restroom before the journey. He wheeled his suitcase behind him and tried to get through the dozens of passengers waiting in the cramped station. A man behind him took offense at a vending machine and started kicking it. Ronald Gray jumped at the sound, but security guards were already moving.

  Chapter 17

  “Jerry Wallace is gone,” Madison said to Dunne, both of them standing by the coffee machine. “I went by last night, and the house looked like someone had come in and just snatched him off the chair he was sitting on and dragged him into the woods.”

  “Some weird burglary-type felony gone wrong?”

  “Not really. The house was untouched. No big valuables that I could see, but his wallet was in plain sight. Plastic and cash inside.”

  “Was he kidnapped?”

  “We don’t know what happened yet: the daughter couldn’t get hold of him for a couple of days, but there were no ransom calls or notes.” Madison took a sip. “He was just . . . taken.”

  The call came in at 9:27 a.m., and Madison, being the primary for the next homicide case, got up to get her things and go to the crime scene.

  “Madison,” Lieutenant Fynn said from the door to his office as he beckoned her.

  Madison stepped in. Detective Chris Kelly was slumped in one of the visitors’ chairs with a face like a big dog at the groomer’s. He looked up, and she knew what Fynn was about to say, and the sheer inevitability of it hit her with full force.

  “Boss . . .”

  “No way around it, Madison. Your partners are both out on medical, and you both need a partner for the next few weeks or whatever. This is how it’s going to be.”

  Kelly was speechless in his obvious misery. He and Madison had disliked each other from the moment Madison joined Homicide. She thought he was mean, obtuse, and proud of it. He didn’t need a reason; he just plain disliked her. Nothing to do with gender, history on the force, or anything else that could pass for a reason. Kelly’s disregard had been immediate, absolute, and unreserved.