The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  Madison wrote down the names.

  “Richard Lucas and his brother, Paul.” She hesitated. The memories were gradually coming to the light like stowaways.

  “Does the name Ronald Gray mean anything to you? Or Vincent Foley?”

  “No.”

  “Did Warren ever mention a man named Gilman? Timothy Gilman?”

  The woman ran the palm of her hand over a pillow on the sofa—a soft, quilted square had been embroidered on the top: robins over cherry blossoms. “Lisa was a sweet girl; she was a lap dancer at the club. I have no idea what happened to her,” she said, and she stood up. “I need to check on the roast.”

  Madison waited as Paula Wilson Kruger busied herself in the kitchen for a few minutes. She knew that an answer would come, and if the woman needed time to get herself together and feel the comfort of the life she had built, Madison would let her have it.

  “Is he dead?” the woman asked her from the kitchen door. “Gilman—is he dead?”

  “You knew him?”

  “I met him. Once. Is he dead?”

  “Yes. Twenty years ago.”

  “Good. That’s good,” the woman said.

  There it was: Quinn had been right. They knew each other.

  “Please tell me about him.”

  “He came to our house. He had found the job at the club for Warren, and Warren talked about him all the time. The things he’d done. He was like a puppy around him.”

  “And you met him?”

  “Once was enough. He came to pick up Warren one afternoon, June or July that last summer, and I had heard so much about him already, but he didn’t come inside; he just stood by his car.”

  “Did you speak with him?”

  “No, I watched him through the screen door. Warren was rushing around getting his things.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. He was just standing there, next to his car, and these kids were playing football on the street. Little kids, ten or twelve years old, and he was staring at them.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” the woman said. “He stared, and all I wanted was for him to leave. He was waiting for one of them to throw the ball a little too close, a little too hard . . .”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. Warren ran outside, and they left.”

  “Will you come to the precinct and sign a witness statement? Tomorrow maybe?”

  The woman nodded.

  “When was the last time you saw Warren?”

  The woman didn’t need to think about it. “February 14, 1986.”

  “And you were still living together in 1985?”

  “Yes, for most of that year. I moved out in the summer, went back to my parents.”

  “In the summer . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you still together in June ’85?”

  “Yes.”

  “July?”

  “Yes.”

  “August 1985?”

  Paula Wilson Kruger set her mug on the coffee table between them. “I left him at the end of August,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “I took the car keys and drove to my parents in the middle of the night and never came back. My dad came for my clothes and things a few days later.”

  “What happened?”

  “He came home late one night and said he’d run over a deer.”

  “A deer?”

  “He came back late, after midnight. He smelled like smoke—not cigarettes but like bonfire smoke—and his clothes were filthy. He said to put them in the machine and wash them right away. There was dirt and mud, but there was also blood all over his jeans and T-shirt. I saw it, and he said he’d run over a deer and had to drag it off the road.”

  “Did he say where it had happened?”

  “I was too afraid to ask. I’d never seen him so terrified and angry, and I thought anything I asked would set him off.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I washed his clothes, went back to bed, and when I was sure he was asleep, I left.”

  “I know it’s impossible to remember the details of something that happened so long ago, but—”

  “It was August 28, 1985,” the woman said, “if that’s what you’re asking me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Some days you just don’t forget. I never went back. He came to look for me, but I wouldn’t see him. He came the last time on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1986. By then I was already back with Martin—he had been my high-school sweetheart—and we married eighteen months later.”

  “Why did you leave that night?”

  The silence between them stretched, and Madison found herself listening for the husband’s car and hoping they wouldn’t be interrupted.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “Because it wasn’t a deer’s blood,” the woman said. “I just knew it wasn’t. And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Chapter 31

  Nathan Quinn was exhausted. His meeting with Detective Madison had left him drained, and yet, after she left, he had paced the floor for all it was worth: he couldn’t bear to lie down, and the room was too small to contain his brittle energy. Three weeks ago they had nothing; today they had names. His knuckles were white as he leaned on the cane; he knew he would have to lie down soon, even though his mind would keep up its restless vigil.

  They had names. He sat down on the edge of the bed and speed-dialed the fourth number on his list. Tod Hollis, the chief investigator for Quinn, Locke & Associates, picked up on the second ring.

  “Warren Lee and Ronald Gray,” Quinn said. “The third one is in a psychiatric clinic. We’ll find out who he is soon enough, I’m sure.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “The full works. Every little scrap of information that the police will not have time to go after. Gilman chose these men, but somebody chose him. Somewhere in Gilman’s connections is the man who ordered the kidnapping.”

  “I agree, this is not someone who went up to him cold. I’d say you’d have to have done business with a guy before you asked him to abduct three children.”

  “Lee and Gray don’t have records.”

  “Just because someone doesn’t have a record, it doesn’t mean they haven’t done very questionable things.”

  “If they have, I trust you’ll find them.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  They hung up, and Quinn went back to the pile of mail that Carl Doyle had delivered that morning. He picked up one envelope—heavy paper and his name in the black ink of a fountain pen. No address was needed: the envelope had been handed to Carl by the other senior partner in his law practice. Conrad Locke.

  Quinn read the card inside, written in a familiar scrawl.

  Dear Nathan,

  I hear that you are confounding the doctors’ expectations and healing faster than they anticipated. They might be surprised, but I’m not: I know what you’re capable of, my boy. Once you are well enough to go home, you might like to come and spend some time with us at the estate. It will be peaceful. Grace wants to spoil you and bake that pie she knows you love.

  Let me know if there’s anything I can do with regard to John’s case.

  Take care of yourself,

  Conrad

  John’s case. No other attorney would refer to it as such except for Conrad Locke. He had been a friend of Quinn’s father’s, had run a thriving law practice, and, most of all, had known John Cameron since he was in elementary school. There was still someone in the world who remembered him as he was then, and it was an unexpected source of comfort. And no one else would dare to call Nathan Quinn “my boy.”

  Quinn had no real desire for company, and even one of Grace Locke’s blueberry pies held no attraction; however, he picked up a blank card and started writing a reply, because their kindness and their concern required paper and ink.

  September 1985. Nathan leaned on the wooden banister and br
eathed in the salty air. David’s memorial service had come and gone, and somehow he was still walking and breathing when he’d thought he couldn’t possibly live through it.

  The ceremony had been brief, the rabbi himself almost in shock, and they had all gathered at the restaurant, which was going to be closed for the rest of the week.

  The fathers were in the kitchen, everybody else was in the main room, and Nathan had escaped to the narrow deck that ran along the building. So this is what hell is like. He felt empty. A photographer had intruded into their grief as they were leaving the cemetery, and Jack—his arm still in a sling—had reacted and attacked the guy with all the strength and the madness of that day. Everybody else, including Nathan, had been too numb and dazed to do much of anything.

  The sky was a shade of gray barely lighter than the water, cloudy and yet bright even without the sun. Too bright. Nathan looked away from Elliott Bay and took off the velvet yarmulke he was still wearing. He couldn’t go back inside, not yet.

  “Nathan.”

  He turned to see Conrad Locke standing there in his dark suit and black tie.

  “How are you, my boy?” he said. “Forget it—stupid question. May I keep you company for a moment?”

  Nathan had nodded, and they had stood companionably in silence for a while, looking out at the view as the gulls did their best in the wake of a fishing boat.

  Twenty-five years had passed, and Quinn still appreciated how the older man had not tried to talk away his grief. Years later, when Quinn’s law practice had become so successful that he needed to expand it, joining forces with Conrad Locke was the logical thing to do. Locke had spent most of the last ten years in San Francisco, semi-retired and busy with his charity foundation, and Quinn had run the most successful legal practice of the Pacific Northwest.

  Tod Hollis would find something—Quinn was sure of it—and there was much that he himself could do, starting with Cameron’s bail and the plea-bargain situation.

  He looked around the room: the monitors were still there, reminders of a time when his life had been measured by the fluid ounces of the IV drip. This room, both comfortable and featureless, was where he had found his way back from the jagged metal cage in the forest. He had no idea how the rest of his life would be measured. Time to go home.

  Chapter 32

  Amy Sorensen sat in the darkness of the lab and studied the image projected on the portable screen. It took up most of the wall and was blessedly archaic in a world that was dominated by digital technology. It couldn’t be simpler than that: the scrap of paper recovered in Ronald Gray’s Bible had been carefully unfolded, straightened, and placed under the keen eye of an overhead projector.

  Amy Sorensen was a great believer in “simple,” and she thought that the most important thing that she could do at that point was just to look at the darn piece of photocopied paper and see what it would tell her.

  They already knew it was standard copy supply—the kind you buy in Staples in boxes of 5,000 sheets—20-pound weight, 92 US brightness. Good for heavy-duty, high-velocity copying. If you wanted thicker, stronger paper, you had to be ready to shell out a good deal more.

  So far, so good. Someone, probably Ronald Gray, had taken very good care of the scrap over the years: he had kept it in paper, not plastic, and had not handled it a great deal. Maybe he knew that paper would preserve it better; maybe he didn’t. Sorensen didn’t care. Like an archeologist standing at the edge of an ancient tomb, she was merely grateful for the find.

  On the wall, light against the gloom around it, David Quinn in his middle-school yearbook photo. Sorensen’s sharp blue eyes swept the firmament of tiny dots and imperfections in the photocopy paper; they followed the contours of the fragment: it was from the top right-hand corner of the page, and it had been torn to make a triangular shape that included the Quinn picture. Torn, she noted, not cut: the edge was neat, because someone had folded down the corner, pressed, and then carefully ripped off that piece. If the person had used scissors or any kind of blade, the edge would have been more than neat; it would have been nearly perfect.

  Sorensen picked up a small yellow bottle of chocolate milk she had filched from her daughter’s stock and took a long swig. Perfect was no good to her; her whole life was about the individual, the unique, the anomaly in the pattern. This was what she was looking for now.

  One of her crew put his head around the door. “I’ll fume it for prints once you’re done,” he said.

  “Yes, thanks,” she replied without looking away from the projected image.

  “When do you think . . . ?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “Not really.”

  “Would you prefer it if I—”

  “Left? Yes, thanks, Nick. I’m better at this on my own.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sorensen focused her attention back on the bright image. There were ways and means to identify a printer and a copier, and they used those methods on a regular basis to track down alleged terrorists, counterfeiters, and all kinds of felons. However, modern techniques that exploited a printer’s individual intrinsic and extrinsic signatures were pointless when the image was twenty-five years old and the machine that had created it was, in all probability, lying splintered on a heap of garbage somewhere. The notion that a piece of plastic and ink from the 1980s was still churning out copies was ridiculous when anybody could buy a new one for $59.99.

  Although there was a point to getting the latent prints off the paper as soon as possible, Sorensen wanted to track the origin of the page. Who had held the yearbook down on the copier and pressed the Start button? If the picture had been used to identify one of the boys, it was certainly something worth pursuing.

  The Quinn picture was not complete: the angle at which the corner had been torn meant that a little had been lost—a bit of his right shoulder. It also meant that a very small portion of the top of the photograph below Quinn’s had been caught. Sorensen sat forward in her chair.

  The pencil line around Quinn had obviously been drawn on the photocopied page, the depression still visible on the other side after all these years. And yet . . .

  “Oh, my . . .” she said to herself as she grabbed her head magnifier and slipped it into place.

  They were small, but they were definitely there, and Sorensen thought of her own yearbooks and what she used to do as soon as she had her own copy in her hands: you got them signed. You wrote on the glossy photos and in the margins; you forever and irreversibly altered the pristine beauty of the book with adolescent scrawls. That was the point of a yearbook.

  Sorensen reached for her cell.

  Madison was driving back into the precinct from Bellevue. Paula Wilson Kruger had asked her about Warren Lee’s death, and she had tried to be truthful without giving her too many details—the tabloid press and the Internet had done enough scavenging around it. The traffic on the bridge was moving at the usual rush-hour speed, and she was about to hit the tunnel, when her cell phone beeped. She pressed the speaker button and left it next to her on the passenger seat.

  “Madison.”

  “It’s Sorensen. I’ve been looking at the paper with David Quinn’s picture on it. I think we have something.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know there’s the pencil mark around the boy, and it was made on the scrap of paper we have?”

  “Yes, made before it was torn off from the rest of the page.”

  “Right. Well, there are two further identifiable marks that are clearly not dust on the copier or a paper imperfection.”

  “Pencil marks?”

  “No, it’s pen. I’m thinking ballpoint, pen-type marks . . . but they’re not on our scrap,” Sorensen said, her voice crackling through in spite of the bad reception. “They’re on the original.”

  Madison’s brain—up to that point still in Bellevue, dealing with memories of blood on Warren Lee’s clothing—lurched forward and caught up with he
r.

  “On the original? Do you mean that if we had the right yearbook in our hands, you could match them to it?”

  There was static on the line as Madison drove fast through the traffic. There was crackle and a beat of silence.

  “Yes,” Sorensen said finally. “Now I have safety copies to make and prints to lift.”

  “Thank you, Amy.”

  Madison reached for the cell without taking her eyes off the road, pressed the End button, and rang off. Sorensen was right to go hunting for latents, but they had to expect that the only prints lifted would be from Ronald Gray, and a lot of good that would be to them.

  On the other hand, the yearbook was the breadcrumbs trail to the man who had wanted to mark David Quinn for kidnap and, ultimately, death.

  Madison drove automatically while her thoughts chased a sea of numbers: how many yearbooks had been made that year, how many they could check against Sorensen’s mark, and how long it would take to gather them. There was another point, no less important: whoever had made that photocopy was also looking closely at the investigation into Warren Lee’s and Ronald Gray’s murders, and she could not simply roll up, knock on doors, and demand to see decades-old yearbooks. She groaned; she would need to find a very good excuse to go trawling through people’s basements, and it wouldn’t be dozens but hundreds of books that they would need to get hold of and check.

  Madison checked the time on her dashboard—Fynn would still be in the office. They had to come up with a really good story and go lie to the general Seattle public as soon as possible.

  She saw an opening in traffic and hit the accelerator. Two men dead by the same hand, nineteen blows including three to the head, two GSWs, three men in the CCTV footage, twenty-five years in psychiatric care. One down, three to go. A sea of numbers.

  Sitting at her desk, Madison dialed the call to the Walters Institute, and even before the receptionist asked her to stay on the line, she knew that Dr. Peterson had not gone home yet.