The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “What is it?” Peterson asked.

  She showed him. Ronald Gray had chosen well: whatever he was hiding was nestling inside the Book of Revelations.

  Madison speed-dialed Sorensen as she rewrapped the Bible in the blue scarf.

  Eli Peterson watched as Madison drove off at top speed. She had thanked him, and he had felt a little better about doubting Ronald, but only a little. The lawn was still pale gray and indistinct, and they all lived in a world where Vincent Foley might be right.

  Chapter 26

  Sorensen’s lamp was the brightest light Madison had seen that day, and it shone directly on the blue scarf. The evidence table had been cleared, disinfected, and covered by a sheet of clean paper.

  “Who handled it?” Sorensen asked Madison; she wore an immaculate lab coat, and her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Ronald Gray, Peterson’s deputy, Eli Peterson, and yours truly, as far as I can tell. We don’t know yet when Gray bought the Bible or if it was already in his possession. We don’t know anything at all about the book.”

  “We’ll get to that later; first I’d like to liberate whatever is held between these pages.” Sorensen put on a head-mounted magnifier. She examined the book from each side and finally peered at the pages bunched together for a long, silent minute.

  Madison fidgeted quietly, leaning against the wall. She knew Sorensen—hurrying her would produce no results except for a lecture on the life-enhancing benefits of patience. On the drive to the lab Madison had had time to think about Gray and what he had left for them to find. A clear explanation would have been nice, and yet somehow she didn’t think that was how things would play out. Whatever it was, Gray thought it had meaning, something so valuable, it had to be kept safe in the only place he could think of that the men who were after him could not reach.

  Sorensen swabbed the side of the book and smelled the spatula, then offered it to Madison. She leaned over and sniffed it. Nothing. Madison had come to believe that the crime-scene-unit investigator had developed the olfactory system of a bloodhound.

  Sorensen smiled. “What kind of kid were you, Madison?”

  “That’s an interesting question.”

  “Did you ever do stuff you were not supposed to do?” Sorensen had turned and was looking for something inside a wall cabinet.

  Madison had absolutely no idea where they were going with this. “Amy . . .”

  “For instance, did you ever steam open a letter that was not addressed to you?”

  “I see . . .”

  Madison had never actually steamed open a letter that was not addressed to her; however, she understood the notion very well. The steam alters the adhesive properties of the glue, and an envelope can be opened or, in this case, pages separated.

  Sorensen made brief work of getting the steamer up to the required temperature and aimed the narrow nozzle at the edge of the book. It took less than two minutes. Her tweezers picked up the corner of the first glued page and turned it. Gray had done a reasonably good job: Sorensen had turned six pages before she hit the jackpot.

  “Here we go . . .” she said, and Madison leaned forward, ready for anything.

  A white paper coin envelope, about four by six inches, had been placed in the middle. Sorensen opened it with her tweezers, and something in it caught the light: at first it seemed as if a minute pool of gold had taken shelter in the small print of Revelations.

  She laid the envelope next to the Bible and delicately teased her find out of its niche.

  “It’s a medal,” Sorensen said.

  A neck chain unraveled as Sorensen lifted the delicate oval to her eyes. “There’s the image of a saint and some words: ‘Saint Nicholas—pray for us.’”

  Madison stepped forward.

  “On the other side I have initials—‘D.Q.’—and a date—”

  “April 14, 1972,” Madison said.

  Sorensen looked up. “Four, fourteen, seventy-two. How did you . . . ?”

  Madison stared at the droplet of gold that now seemed to hold all the light in the room. “It’s David Quinn’s date of birth, and that’s the medal his father’s relatives gave him. He was wearing it the day he was killed.”

  Madison heard Detectives Frakes’s voice. Did you find the gold chain on the remains?

  Sorensen was never speechless, so this was a first. For a moment they both just watched the medal as it swayed lightly with each heartbeat.

  “What else is in the envelope, Amy?” Madison blurted out.

  “Yes,” Sorensen said. She laid the medal to one side.

  The woman reached inside with the tweezers and slid out a thin yellowish scrap of paper folded in half. Sorensen spread it open.

  The scrap was the top corner torn off a page; someone had ripped it very precisely to get exactly what they wanted.

  “Photocopy,” Madison said, her eyes on the shaded blacks and grays of the image.

  “Yes,” Sorensen replied.

  “Yearbook?”

  “Looks like it.”

  On the scrap of paper, grinning as if he’d just heard the silliest joke, was David Quinn in his school yearbook picture, around it a faint but unmistakable pencil line.

  Chapter 27

  Madison walked out of the lab and into the veil of rain. She resented the necessity of getting back into her car; she needed to be outside, where at least she had the illusion of breathing more easily. They were connected, all of them, from Ronald Gray in the warehouse and Warren Lee tied up to a chair with picture wire, going all the way back to the boys blindfolded in the woods. And Jerry Wallace, who had known so much about so many people, had gone missing just as she had needed his counsel.

  Madison called the precinct to make sure Fynn was in his office and left word for Spencer and Dunne, too. There was one more call to make, and when it went to voice mail, Madison could have whooped with joy.

  “Kelly, it’s Madison. Ronald Gray left a Bible in Foley’s safe-box at the clinic. Inside it, he had hidden a chain that belonged to David Quinn and a scrap of paper with his yearbook picture. I’m on my way to the precinct to brief the boss.”

  No hello, good-bye, or see you later. If Kelly wanted to come in, he would; if not, she had told him what was going on, and that was enough for the moment. That was plenty.

  One of the things she missed about working with Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown was that they could develop ideas together and argue about them and eventually come to a conclusion, more often than not a shared conclusion. Brown. She’d call him later; he would want to know about this. And Detective Frakes, too—he deserved to know.

  In the end, whether Kelly had listened to the message or not, he had decided not to be a part of Madison’s day. She briefed Fynn and the others in the lieutenant’s office—door closed and blinds drawn.

  “We seem to understand less about the Lee and Gray murders every day,” Dunne said once she had finished. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  Madison replayed in her mind the conversation with Peterson’s deputy; she had called him on her way in, and, though groggy with sleep, he was very clear about the sequence of events.

  “Gray took the Bible to the clinic last Thursday. He looked beat and edgy as hell,” she continued. “He delivered the medal for safekeeping the day after Quinn’s television appeal and before Warren Lee was attacked and his body found.”

  Madison remembered Gray’s apartment: the disarray left behind, the evident haste and fear.

  “The time line begins with the appeal,” she said. “Gray saw Quinn on television, and he knew he was holding something that could get him into serious trouble. He wasn’t going to come in, testify to whatever he knew, and claim the reward. He was getting out of town as fast as he could.”

  “What would you do if you had information that could net you in excess of a million dollars?” Dunne asked the room.

  “I’d come in, testify, and pick up the check,” Spencer replied.

  “What i
f the information Quinn was after is about what you did twenty-five years ago?”

  One down, three to go. Three to go.

  “I’d get out of town.”

  “Not just Gray,” Madison interjected. “He tried to destroy any link to Vincent Foley before he left.”

  “How about interviewing Foley? Is he anywhere near sane?” Dunne asked.

  Madison shook her head. “Not really, no. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to contribute, though. There might be something there.”

  “Great. Two dead guys and one certified psychiatric patient. That’s three perfect witnesses.”

  “Okay, starting point for the rest of the day,” Fynn said. “What was Ronald Gray doing on August 28, 1985? I don’t care what he was doing two weeks ago; I want to know how he got hold of that chain and why he left it for us to find. Madison, the photograph is being processed?”

  “Yes. Sorensen is trying to pick up as much detail as possible from the photocopy, see if anything can be matched to an original.”

  “Spencer, is Foley in danger?” Fynn asked.

  “Once they know Gray was protecting him, yes, definitely.”

  “Dunne?”

  “Maybe, but we still don’t know what they’re after.”

  “Madison?”

  “He will be in danger the minute they find out that Gray was protecting him.”

  Spencer and Dunne left.

  “Aren’t you off today?” Fynn asked her.

  Madison shrugged. “That’s not how the day played out. I’ll be around.”

  “Kelly?”

  “I left him a message.”

  “How’s it working out with you two?”

  “It’s delightful, sir.”

  “I thought it would be.”

  Madison had officially given up on having a day off. Then again, if she hadn’t been at the precinct, she likely would have been home thinking about the case or experiencing the charms of a prison visit. Even if she had wanted to take out her kayak, the rain would have made it, while not impossible, thoroughly unpleasant and ultimately a waste of time. Which was a pretty accurate description of her relationship with Kelly, Madison reflected as she sipped her coffee.

  The Ronald Gray autopsy report was open in front of her; the photographs, stark and bleak, fanned out on the desk.

  None of the detectives had said it, because they didn’t need to: the obvious reason Gray had the medal might be that he was one of the men who had taken the boys into the woods, one of the men who had dug a hole in the dirt and put David Quinn in it.

  Madison looked at the autopsy pictures. Was this the fate that Ronald Gray believed had been stalking him and Vincent Foley?

  The case required a change of perspective, and Madison had felt that in Fynn and the others. For them Gray had started out as a victim; now he was possibly a kidnapper and a murderer, and yet he was still a victim. Madison replaced the pictures in the report and shut the file.

  As lunchtime came around, Madison’s thoughts were batting against the precinct’s walls, and she needed to get out and stretch her legs. The sky was overcast, the rain had decided to give up for at least a few minutes, and she resolved to walk down 5th Avenue toward Pine Street. She passed the public library on the corner with Spring and resisted the sudden impulse to go inside and spend the afternoon reading instead of going back to the precinct and looking at pictures of dead men who might or might not have been murderers.

  She had always enjoyed ambling down 5th Avenue: the trees were doing their best in the winter chill, and it was so much more pleasant than going from point A to B in her Honda, even for half an hour. Other people hurried past Madison in the bubble of their own lunch break.

  She reached Nordstrom on Pine and turned left. The food court on the third floor of the Westlake Center was as busy as always, and that was exactly what Madison needed: watching people leading their lives, shopping, eating, and generally getting on with things. The smell of food being cooked or, more often, simply reheated was as sharp as it could be in a world of central heat, air-conditioning, and ventilation. The warm air was heavy with jostling spices.

  She silently apologized to her grandmother and got into a queue for a burger and fries to go with it; she found a spot at a large table and picked at her food. It was predictably awful, and yet sometimes that particular kind of awful could be perfect. Half the burger patty disintegrated in her hands, and she wiped the mustard and ketchup off her fingers with a small paper napkin that wasn’t really up to its job.

  Something had unsettled her in a day rather crowded with unsettling things, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She understood as she was washing her hands in the restroom by the food court: it was the pencil mark around David Quinn’s photograph. Someone had drawn that line to make sure the kidnappers abducted the right children, because the kidnappers did not know what they looked like and did not know them personally.

  It’s not personal; it’s business. Vincent Foley’s reedy voice came back to her. The water ran cold on her hands, and she saw him, standing in the white day room in his scrubs, holding his hands out to her and running an index finger over the back of his other hand. And Madison knew then what she had seen. It’s not personal; it’s business. And why Vincent Foley was terrified of the sun setting each day. Somebody’s coming.

  Damn right, Vincent, Madison thought as she hurried down the escalators and out of the building. She hailed a cab and got dropped off at the precinct—no time for pretty walks under the winter trees now. She found Fynn at his desk, a plastic container with a salad in front of him and the fork halfway up to his mouth.

  “Gray left the medal in the Bible,” she said. “He left the medal and the picture in case someone came looking, in case the killers caught up with him. He knew Peterson would contact the police on behalf of Vincent, and we would go chasing after clues, and sooner or later the Bible would turn up. And if he made it out alive, nobody would ever find it. The Bible was insurance in case he didn’t make it.”

  “How did he get the medal?” Fynn sat back in the chair, the fork abandoned among the salad leaves.

  “It’s what we thought: three men plus Timothy Gilman. One down, three to go. Lee, Gray, and Foley.”

  “We have the same evidence now as we did an hour ago.”

  “Foley showed me the hands.”

  “He what?”

  “Let me call Dr. Peterson.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Madison dialed from Fynn’s landline and put Eli Peterson on the speaker. She waved Spencer and Dunne into the office.

  “Doctor.” Madison went straight to it. “Could you tell me the exact date Vincent Foley was admitted to the clinic?”

  “Give me a second,” he replied, and they heard the tapping of computer keys.

  Madison stared at a spot on the oatmeal-color carpeted floor: if it was before August 28, 1985, her theory was all the way dead.

  “September 17, 1985,” Peterson’s voice came back.

  Madison felt the spike of adrenaline hit and the coppery taste in her mouth. “Thank you, Doctor. One more question: you mentioned that Vincent has a repeating pattern of gestures and actions, like the hand movements he did when we were there. Are there others? Are there any other similar—what did you call them—compulsions that you could mention?”

  “They have nothing to do with Ronald . . .”

  “Are there any other similar compulsions?”

  The line went quiet for a long moment, and Madison hoped to God that Eli Peterson wouldn’t suddenly decide to claim doctor-patient privilege.

  “There is something else, yes,” Dr. Peterson said after a while. “He goes into the garden with the other patients—you know, it’s a positive environment for them to be in . . .”

  Madison waited. She could almost hear Peterson thinking and trying to measure the weight of his words. “Doctor . . .”

  “He digs, Detective. Vincent has to be supervised every time he’s outs
ide in the grounds of the clinic, because he will run to the same spot and dig a hole in the dirt with his bare hands as deep as he can.”

  Madison closed her eyes; she had seen that hole in the Hoh River forest. “The same spot?” She asked. Vincent’s hands scrubbed clean but with dirt under the nails.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you describe it to me?”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Please, Doctor, could you describe to me the place Vincent keeps going back to?”

  “Well, it’s right under a very tall fir. There’s a shrub just nearby. The first time Vincent saw it in bloom, he became so agitated, he needed to be sedated.”

  “It’s called Bleeding Heart,” Madison said quietly.

  “Detective . . .”

  “I’ll call you back as soon as I can, Doctor. Is Vincent okay today? I mean . . .”

  “He is how he always is.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Peterson.”

  After she replaced the receiver, Madison took a deep breath. “Vincent Foley has an IQ of sixty-nine; that is, that was the score when he was tested as a young man. When he was admitted to the Walters Institute, Ronald Gray said that months earlier Vincent had likely been the victim of some kind of assault—the details were unclear, because Vincent could not explain. In essence, though, something dreadful had happened to him, and his mind had shut down. He suffered episodes of PTSD and still does to this day. I don’t think an assault on Vincent is what happened.”

  “He digs . . .” Dunne said.

  “The pit in the forest was dug under a western hemlock and a shrub of Dicentra formosa.”

  Spencer sighed. “Bleeding Heart.”

  “We have to prove the connections,” Fynn said. “Who gains from the vics’ deaths? Who stands to gain from Lee’s and Gray’s everlasting silence? We need to work both ends of the case: find out who gave the order to kidnap those boys twenty-five years ago, and we find who ordered Lee’s and Gray’s executions last week.”