Picture wire and the Book of Revelations.
“What was that about the hands?” Fynn asked Madison as she was almost out the door.
She turned to him. “The cuts on John Cameron’s hand,” she said. “Foley saw it happen—he saw it all.”
Chapter 28
Madison sat at her desk. The life of the shift flowed around her—phone calls and conversations and computer clicks—but she heard nothing. The notion that she had been standing two feet away from one of the men who had done that dreadful thing, that awful act that had changed so many lives in the space of a single missed heartbeat—it was almost too much to bear, because where Vincent Foley was, he could not be reached, he could not be taken down by the law, he could not be touched. What did you do with that? How did you begin to live with that?
Madison reached for her phone; there was so much she needed to tell; there were people who deserved to know what was happening.
Not now, not yet.
She straightened the Ronald Gray file, aligning the edges of the various reports inside it with the tip of one finger, then tackling the small pile of notes and paperwork that seemed to have taken up residence on her desk. She straightened her pens, pencils, and orange Day-Glo marker. She straightened her pale pink eraser and the pencil sharpener. And finally, when everything was at a ninety-degree angle—even the yellow square Post-it pad—the sounds from the world around her found their way back into her consciousness, and Madison flipped her notepad open and began to write.
The details of the people involved might change—their motivations, the particular twist of their heart; however, the questions asked remain the same: who did this? Why did they do it? There were two bodies in Dr. Fellman’s morgue, and the questions had to be answered, and answered quickly.
They did not have all the links yet, but they were working on it, because Nathan Quinn had been right: four men had taken the boys, and one man—or a group of men—had given the order. Where were they today?
Twenty years ago a man named Timothy Gilman fell into a trapping pit and died. There is reason to think he was one of the four kidnappers.
Madison grabbed her coat.
She dialed the call as she was leaving the precinct. “I’m on my way now, and it’s not a social visit,” she said.
She remembered from Gilman’s file that he was already in his early forties at the time of the kidnapping. Neither Lee nor Gray had a record; in 1985 they would have been no match for Gilman, who had already done a stretch upstate for assault in the second degree. He had to be the ringleader, and he would not have taken orders from some fresh-faced twenty-year-old or someone like Vincent. There is reason to think he was one of the four kidnappers. Madison drove automatically and found herself pulling into the parking space before she knew it. She turned off the engine and gathered herself. The streaks of rain on the windshield shielded her from anyone’s view.
What had happened that night in December in the Hoh River forest had left some kind of impression on her core not entirely unlike the whorl of a fingerprint on a lump of soft clay; she knew it was there, even though she had hardly begun to understand it or measure its reach inside her. She couldn’t even fathom the mark it had left on Nathan Quinn. Some religions believe that pain—physical and spiritual—has a purifying effect on the soul; Madison believed that pain was pain, and you got out of it only what you brought in, and Nathan Quinn had had bagfuls of it.
It was only the belief that there was no way she would ever feel entirely ready for this particular meeting that got her out of the car.
Madison knew where she was going; she knew the floor and where the room was on the corridor. She knew, because she had come every day when the cuts and grazes on her face and hands were still healing, when Tommy Abramowicz was recuperating in his mother’s arms, and when Nathan Quinn slept peacefully in the blank, empty darkness of a medically induced coma.
Nathan Quinn had been many things: the attorney who protected an alleged murderer; the man who held a small plastic cassette recording with the potential to kill her career; he was the brother who had buried the memory of a thirteen-year-old boy in an empty grave. He had been many things, Madison thought as the elevator doors slid open, and she didn’t know what he was now.
He’s a relative of a victim, she told herself, and she was glad for the sudden scents of the hospital and the paltry distraction they offered.
The door was closed, and she knocked.
“Come in.”
Madison pushed the door open, and Nathan Quinn stood to meet her.
“Detective . . .” he said.
The scars were dark red lines that traversed his fine features. So pale. Tall and thin with stubble on his cheeks.
“Counselor . . .” she replied, looking and not looking at the same time.
“Carl just let me know you were coming.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“The truth, Lieutenant, but as little of it as I can manage. What I don’t tell him, he will guess.”
“I didn’t know I was coming until then.”
“No matter. I’m always home,” he said with a small wave at the hospital room.
Madison took it in: her university apartment hadn’t been as large or as smart. Quinn wore linen—a charcoal shirt over navy blue drawstring pants. He was barefoot and leaned on a cane he grasped with his right hand. The room smelled of the fresh flowers arranged in a vase on a table—Carl Doyle’s work probably.
“Not always,” she pointed out. Doyle’s gatekeeping in the worst days had been fierce.
“No,” he conceded.
“Things are happening, Counselor,” she said. “Things are happening fast, and I need your help and your advice. Shall we sit?”
He nodded, and there was the smallest amount of relief in his expression as he sat in one of the chairs; Madison pretended not to notice it. She wondered briefly if he was on painkillers and whether they would affect his focus and his concentration. Don’t underestimate him. Bare feet and a linen shirt don’t make him any less dangerous.
In their acquaintance she had never lied to him, but her honesty had been dearly bought. She wouldn’t lie today, and the truths she had brought were blades sharp at both ends.
“Something has happened,” she started. “We have new information about the men who took the boys.” Madison let him absorb that; she didn’t need to explain what she meant.
He was very still.
“I need you to tell me what you know about Timothy Gilman.”
Quinn sat back. “This ‘thing’ that happened, was it because of my appeal on TV?”
“Possibly. We can call it an ‘appeal’ if you like, but we both know you put a bounty on their heads.”
Quinn’s eyes held hers.
“Did it work?”
Madison hesitated. “We still don’t know,” she replied. “At this stage we are building the case, making the connections.”
“What can you tell me?”
A little pool of gold surrounded by small print in a Bible. “I can tell you that we found David’s St. Nicholas medal,” she said.
A pause. It was the first item ever recovered that had belonged to his brother, and it would likely be the last.
“Where?”
“It was left for us to find as part of another investigation.”
“Another cold case?”
“No.”
Quinn nodded. “The ‘something’ that happened because of my appeal?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“That’s why we need all you have on Gilman. We need to put him in the forest twenty-five years ago. Nothing in his record suggests his involvement.”
Quinn said nothing.
“Who told you about him?”
Quinn said nothing.
Gee, doesn’t this bring back memories?
“Mr. Quinn, this is how I see it: your ‘appeal’ was like a hand grenade—you had to throw it hard and far to
get things moving. But Gilman, Gilman was the pin of the grenade. You put a bounty of over a million dollars on the heads of the men who killed David, and you’re just a brother doing what he can to bring murderers to justice. You say Gilman, and the people who did it, and those who paid them to do it, know you’ve got something real. And they scatter.” Madison took a deep breath. “You wouldn’t waste that opportunity with a name that wasn’t gold, which means you had full confidence in the information. Gilman died twenty years ago. If you had found out while he was alive, you would have crucified him—figuratively speaking—and that means you found out after he died.”
Quinn didn’t seem in a hurry to join in the conversation, and she remembered another day, in another conversation, John Cameron speaking to her and Quinn listening at her grandmother’s table. She knew his silences.
“How did you find out about him?” she pressed.
“I just did. How that came to be is irrelevant.”
“How can I verify the information?”
“You can’t.”
“But you’re betting the house on it?”
“Your assessment was right on the money. Would I use that name unless I was completely sure?”
“‘Completely sure’ is very nice, but it won’t really cut it with the King County prosecutor’s office unless we have proof.”
“Then you might have to go another way.”
“There is no other way, and you know it. Gilman would have been the leader; he would have been the one giving the orders. If I can’t prove Gilman’s involvement, I can’t get to the people who paid him to take the boys.”
Quinn leaned forward, and Madison knew that, painkillers or not, his focus was as sharp as ever.
“Be . . . creative,” he said.
“I can only work with what I have.”
“All evidence to the contrary. You believed that John Cameron was innocent in spite of all the evidence you had.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one. What can you tell me?”
“Ask me, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“Was it an informant who told you about Gilman?”
“No.”
“Did you find out yourself?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He shook his head.
“What makes you absolutely sure it was him?”
“It was him.”
“Was there an informant at any stage? Are you protecting someone?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions, Detective.”
“Then you tell me, what are the right questions?”
“Someone left the medal for you to find?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps one of the two men found murdered in the last week?”
What she wasn’t saying he would guess. She chose her words carefully and gave him what truth she had.
“Mr. Quinn, I didn’t come here to tell you that there is a very strong chance that two of the men who took the boys are dead. That’s what I think, yes. And it’s the trail I’m following. But I have no solid proof, and you are the last person on this planet to whom I would ever say anything like that if I couldn’t back it up.”
“You went to the place where they had buried David?”
Madison didn’t even know how he could bear to say it, and Kevin Brown’s former description of Quinn came back to her: That man is made out of some kind of metal we don’t even have a name for.
“Yes, I went there. It was about a mile from the clearing.”
One day, when he left the hospital and could walk without that damn stick, Madison was certain he would find his way there, too. Maybe by then Vincent Foley would have given up his secrets.
“Warren Lee and Ronald Gray,” Nathan Quinn said quietly.
“That’s what you wanted,” Madison said. “You knew we had less than nothing to work David’s case: no new evidence, no new witnesses. Still, if the men who gave the order felt sufficiently threatened by your ‘appeal,’ they might very well decide to tidy up all the loose ends, and in the process they would give us something real to pursue. New evidence, new leads, and new bodies,” she said. “And somehow we’d follow the trail back to David.”
“Not everyone, no. Just you. I knew you would follow the trail back to David.”
Madison didn’t know what to say to that.
“I’m only a brother doing what he can,” Quinn said.
“Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“Do you have new leads?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Nathan Quinn said, his voice coming from a dead place, “it worked.”
“Two men were killed. Another might have been hurt.”
“I regret that. I had hoped for lifelong imprisonment, one wretched day after the other.”
“Not a death sentence?”
“Have you ever tried maximum security with a child-killer sign around your neck?”
“We don’t know for sure yet that they were involved, and I still need Gilman.”
“Gilman is long dead.”
“Yes, and I’m sure we all regret his early demise. I still need to find out about him, though.”
“I can’t help you there, Detective.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Does it matter in the end?”
“Are you willing to stake the success of all this, finding those men and bringing them to justice, on that single piece of information you will not share?”
His eyes were bright—maybe it was fever, maybe not. “Absolutely,” he replied.
What we choose to say, what we hold back, how the cards are held in the player’s hands: Madison had been to countless poker games by the time she was old enough to realize there was something unusual about it. She didn’t know exactly what she had now that she didn’t have before; however, something in her gut told her that Nathan Quinn had inadvertently given her a small truth. Maybe the larger one would follow later.
“Where is he?” he asked her. The hospital around them had all but disappeared, and Madison dreaded his next words.
“Who?” Madison replied. One down, three to go.
“The fourth man. The one you’re not looking for. The one you haven’t mentioned. Where is he?”
It was her turn to be quiet.
“You said you need Gilman to go after the men who gave the order, but there was a fourth man in the forest that day.”
“Yes, there was.”
“If you’re not looking for him, it means you already know where he is. Is he dead?”
I don’t know what he is, Madison thought. Was she really going to tell Quinn that there was a flesh-and-blood human being walking this Earth who had dug the hole in the ground his brother had been buried in? The world was not this hospital room—one day Quinn would be out of here. One day he might stand in the same white day lounge as Vincent Foley, who had garden dirt under his nails.
“Do you believe I could reach him from here? That Jack could reach him from where he is?”
“I don’t want to lie to you,” Madison said simply.
“An admirable sentiment.”
“He’s alive, but he’s not going anywhere.”
“You have him?”
In that moment Madison was grateful that Quinn was a sworn officer of the court and that John Cameron was behind a number of locked steel doors.
“We know where he is, and, where he is, he’s already in his own jail.”
“Where is he?”
“Where he can’t be reached.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“He’s not in any condition to help with the case.”
Quinn took that on board. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. As far as I can tell, he was a witness. I can’t tell you anymore about him for now—I hope you understand. We’re still trying to put it together ourselves.”
Quinn nodded. “He’s not going anywhere?”
“He’s . . . in custody.”
“Will you bring charges?”
“It will be very difficult, practically impossible.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in a clinic for psychiatric disorders,” she finally revealed. “He’s been there since September 1985,” Madison said. “One wretched day after the other.”
She stood to leave. Quinn stood with her.
In their acquaintance there was no room for the words she said next; nevertheless, they had to be said. “How are you?” Madison asked him.
“Alive, Detective.” He unconsciously touched the place where his spleen would have been. “More or less.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re alive, and so is my godson, Tommy.” Sometimes thank you is pitifully inadequate.
“Carl says the boy’s doing well,” he said.
“He is,” she replied. “You asked me if I believed you could reach the fourth man from here. Truth is, I believe you could do anything you put your mind to; I know that for sure, because Tommy will be seven in a few weeks.”
Madison’s hand was already on the door when he spoke.
“Your ballistic vest saved my life.”
Madison nodded and left.
Chapter 29
August 28, 1985. It was a hot day coming at the end of a hot month; standing in the concrete parking lot on the corner of South Lander Street and Utah Avenue South, Ronald Gray was aware of the perspiration between his shoulder blades and how the fabric of his shirt stuck to it in patches. He had promised Vincent an ice cream at the end of their working day, but he could do with one himself right now, with an iced beer chaser—actually, make that two. He squinted in the full morning glare and looked around: shoppers, passersby, and Vincent, hunched and unhappy.
The work would be straightforward: he had done something similar three times before, though never with kids. It would be easier than with adults, he thought. Kids can be handled without danger, they scare easy, and parents think twice before talking to the cops. The money today would be pretty damn good, too—and that’s where Vincent came in. He was a cheap pair of hands and didn’t talk back.
He had taken Vincent on a couple of jobs before, as a lookout. The thing about Vincent was, he always did as he was told. If he told him to stand on that corner and wait for him until hell froze over . . . there he would stay, waiting, icicles dripping off his hair.
The Dark Page 17
