The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Are you all right?” Doyle asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Quinn replied.

  He walked to the living room—each cautious step born out of stubbornness and determination—and he noticed what was different: the semi-pro Meade telescope that stood mounted on a tripod next to the French doors to the garden. Quinn stared down to where the tips of the tripod legs met the parquet flooring. Years earlier he had found the perfect spot for the telescope, and it had remained in the same place ever since—three small indentations in the wood marked its usual position. It was quite clear that the tripod had been moved about five inches to the left.

  “Carl?” Quinn said over his shoulder. “When where you last here?”

  “Four days ago,” Doyle replied.

  “Since I’ve been in the hospital, have you ever come anywhere near this telescope? Looked through it? Moved it perhaps?”

  “No. Usually I just pick up the mail, put the flyers in the garbage, and that’s it. I don’t even walk to that part of the room.”

  “Did you go into the study?”

  “No, I didn’t need to.”

  “I just have to check something.”

  Bookcases covered every wall; a mahogany desk sat in a corner; a thin film of dust had built up over the green glass banker’s lamp that reminded him of his college library. Nathan Quinn remained by the threshold and examined the room: his eyes went over the small, significant objects of his past life: pens, papers, a framed photograph of his parents’ wedding day, an antique carriage clock.

  On a bookshelf, the hourglass and the three nineteenth-century nautical compasses that had belonged to his father sat where he had placed them. Quinn’s eyes held them whole: almost where he had placed them. Our life and its minute parts are an indistinct landscape to others, but to us even the smallest detail has its own precise coordinates, and any change, however infinitesimal, is obvious.

  “Someone was inside the house,” he said to Doyle, proceeding to the alarm box fixed on the inside wall next to the main door. He’d had it installed seven years ago, and at the time it was top of the line.

  “I don’t understand,” Carl said. “The alarm was set; there was no . . .”

  Quinn keyed in a number combination, and a list of dates and hours appeared on the box’s screen. All the times were during daylight or early evening.

  “Are these the days and times you were here?” he asked Carl.

  Doyle looked and shrugged. He tried to remember the precise times he had been in the house, but they had blended into a blur of repeated actions.

  Quinn took out his cell from his coat pocket and dialed the telephone number on the alarm box. He gave his name, a password, and an eight-number code. “I need you to e-mail me the last twenty entries in the log. Thank you.”

  “Nathan, did I mess up somehow?” Carl asked.

  “There’s nothing you could have done, and there’s no way anyone but me would have noticed.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  Quinn looked around. It had been a nearly immaculate job, because they weren’t there to rob; they were there to examine and analyze the enemy.

  “Come with me,” he said to Doyle.

  The safe was fifteen by twelve inches of steel concealed behind a panel in the linen closet. Quinn ran the combination quickly on the electronic locking device and opened the thick metal door. The contents—various papers and some antique jewelry boxes—seemed intact. Quinn took them out, then reached inside and pressed a hidden switch that revealed a secret compartment within the safe. He looked inside.

  “Nothing has been touched,” he said to Doyle.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “I think so,” Quinn replied.

  The alert pinged on his phone. Quinn opened the e-mail from the alarm company: the last entry in the log was his and Carl’s arrival at the house; the second from the last entry indicated that the previous night someone had disarmed the system at 3:10 a.m. and alarmed it again at 3:57 a.m. Quinn showed it to Doyle.

  “Nathan . . .”

  “They deleted the entry from the box here, but it had already been registered in the central database. They spent forty-seven minutes inside, and then they left.”

  Suddenly the house seemed quite different.

  “Nathan, I—”

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” Quinn repeated. He knew Doyle well enough to understand that he was as angry as he was mortified that this breach had happened on his watch.

  Quinn thought quickly. “We must treat this as a crime scene,” he said as he dialed Tod Hollis’s number.

  He needed to make sure that nothing had been taken, but he needed to make just as sure that nothing had been left.

  Chapter 36

  They left Dr. Takemoto with Vincent Foley and returned to the precinct. Sorensen at the lab had been alerted to the possibility of a match to Peter Conway’s DNA from the samples recovered at the Lee and Gray crime scenes, and Lieutenant Fynn had been briefed.

  Madison read the Conway file at her desk. It was a catalog of brutality that had begun eleven years earlier and swept its way across both coasts and the mainland. Fred Kamen had been right: Conway and his crew had been involved—allegedly involved—in every kind of violent felony, bar very few, and they were good at their jobs.

  Madison had printed out Kamen’s notes and, with the tip of her index finger, ran down the long list. Murder of a witness in a racketeering case, murder of a local boss, kidnap/murder of a drug dealer, suspected murder of a journalist (victim never recovered/probably deceased), suspected murder of a made man in Jersey (victim never recovered/probably deceased). And on and on.

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine those men breaking into Warren Lee’s home, torturing him with whatever they had found in his kitchen, and then leaving him under the water towers. Madison checked the list of alleged felonies: bodies had been recovered in some cases, not recovered in others. These creeps had wanted the police to find Lee and Gray just as they were, and Wallace . . . Madison hoped that there was another explanation for the disappearance of Jerry Wallace, though she held out little hope. He had been the equivalent of a walking, talking Wikipedia of West Coast crime. No wonder they wanted him gone. They. Nathan Quinn’s appeal had sent out a question; these men were the answer.

  I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Quinn.

  Her cell started vibrating. It was Dr. Takemoto.

  “Detective, I just wanted to let you know that we’re done for the day here. I’ve kept it pretty light and breezy for Vincent, but Dr. Peterson stopped the session when he thought his patient was getting tired.”

  “What do you think? Can you recover anything from his memories?”

  “Are we talking about Vincent’s mind as if it were a hard drive?”

  “In a way, yes. A fabulously complex and unspeakably damaged hard drive.”

  “I see. The only person he had any meaningful interaction with was his brother. Everybody else here, kind as they are, didn’t really make a dent. I think Vincent’s memories have been corrupted, to follow your metaphor, by the trauma, but they are there, even though he might not know the meaning of what happened. But maybe the only person who could have accessed those memories was his brother.”

  “What did you learn about his relationship with Ronald?”

  “Mr. Gray was very loyal; he visited him frequently and spoke to him all the time. Apparently he could keep him calm without recourse to drugs. It will take me some time to be able to get through to Vincent, if I ever do . . .”

  Time was what they did not have. Madison closed her eyes—the brightness of the Anglepoise lamp still shone through her lids.

  “Doctor, assuming that Vincent knows something, anything that comes out of his mouth we have to treat as gold. Dr. Peterson said his mind is locked inside a day long gone, frozen during certain traumatic hours. We are going to need a complete account of every single word he utters, because we should assume t
hat everything is related to that day.”

  “I’ll e-mail you a transcript after each session.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  There was a pretty black iron railing around the Walters Institute, two security guards who patrolled the grounds, and a couple inside to keep an eye on things; there were well-meaning and well-trained nurses who made sure the patients didn’t harm themselves or one another, and there were doors with magnetic locks and swipe cards. And all these measures would count for nothing if Peter Conway wanted in.

  Madison closed the file, her palm flat on the cover that contained such horrors. There were things that they could do—must do: information to sift through, traffic cameras’ footage, trace evidence that had been recovered and might perhaps be matched to this crew from hell. And yet all Madison could think about was an empty house at the end of a long, narrow lane and the darkness pushing in through the windows.

  Madison’s cell started vibrating as she was going through the traffic footage from the bus-station abduction. She recognized the number.

  “Detective.” Nathan Quinn’s voice was soft.

  “Mr. Quinn.”

  “I thought you might like to know that my house was broken into last night, and the burglars didn’t take anything; they just had a good snoop around.”

  “How . . . what happened?”

  “I came home late this morning, I noticed something, and the records from the alarm company agreed with my theory.”

  The first thing Madison registered was that Quinn had been discharged from the hospital—he had finally been discharged; the second thing was that no one in that house should touch anything; better still, he should wait in the car while she called the crime lab and they processed the house from top to bottom.

  “I’m on my way,” she said. “And—”

  “I know. I’ll try not to wreck the scene.”

  Detective Kelly buckled his seat belt and sighed; he could have stayed behind at the precinct, but he had come, Madison knew, mostly out of curiosity. He had lifted a solitary eyebrow when she called Sorensen at the lab, and he had expressed his doubts that this was any of their business—an attempted burglary; the intruders had been disturbed and left before taking anything. However, a chance to look at Nathan Quinn and his quarters up close was not to be wasted, and so there he was: a silent, surly presence that Madison tried her level best to ignore.

  It wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t an interrupted burglary, and it wasn’t Father Christmas coming late to Seward Park. It was Peter Conway and his crew paying Quinn’s house a visit because of a single piece of information they did not have: how did Quinn know about Timothy Gilman?

  Madison drove fast through a haze of rain. She couldn’t bear to think about what might have happened if Quinn had been discharged a day earlier.

  Seattle was surrounded by water: the long strip of Puget Sound to the west and the large expanse of Lake Washington to the east; salt water and fresh water holding a ribbon of land between them.

  They arrived in Seward Park just as the sun broke out of the cloud cover, and the sudden light found every last raindrop on the thick stretch of green that surrounded Nathan Quinn’s house. Madison parked next to his Jeep. She had never been to his home before: their dealings had been mostly in courts, precincts, and dark woods in the middle of the night. A home was almost too mundane.

  At the bottom of the sloping garden Lake Washington lapped at the lawn, and a long pier jutted toward Mercer Island.

  Stone and wood, seasoned by the Pacific Northwest: though there were other, much larger houses on the same road, there were probably none as quietly striking.

  The door opened and stayed open.

  “You’ve met him since?” Kelly asked as they got out of the car.

  “Yes, once,” Madison replied.

  Kelly grunted something that she didn’t catch.

  In spite of the brief sunshine, the ground was still soaking wet after days of rain; they wiped their shoes on a mat and walked inside.

  Quinn met them in the hall; he was talking on the phone and said good-bye to someone.

  “Thank you for coming, Detective,” he said.

  They dispensed with the introductions as quickly as courtesy would allow—Quinn had never met Detective Kelly—and moved on to the intricacies of breaking and entering into a house with a top-of-the-line alarm system.

  “When did you notice something was not right?” Madison asked Quinn.

  “The telescope had been moved from its usual place,” he pointed. “And two small objects on a bookshelf in my study.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It was enough.”

  “While you were in the hospital, only Carl came over?” Madison turned to Kelly. “Carl Doyle is Mr. Quinn’s assistant,” she explained.

  “Just Carl,” Quinn replied. “And he didn’t even go near the telescope or the study.”

  “What about the alarm company records?” Madison was aware of Kelly’s eyes taking in Quinn and the dark red lines that crossed his features, watching him as if he were some kind of exotic creature.

  “They were good,” Quinn replied. “The intruders erased the record of the entry, but it had already been registered on the central database at company HQ.”

  “What time were they here?”

  “Between three and four last night.”

  “You’re positive they didn’t take anything?”

  “They didn’t take anything—I’m sure.”

  “Left anything?”

  “Hollis swiped the whole house and found nothing.”

  Madison nodded; she remembered Tod Hollis from the Harry Salinger case. If the Quinn, Locke investigator had swiped the house and found no bugs, it meant there were no bugs to be found. It also meant that another person had been in the house to add to the trace evidence that the Crime Scene Unit would have to process. They were standing just inside the living room door now, trying to limit the contamination of the scene.

  “Is that why you waited to call us?” Kelly asked. “You got the house swiped first and called it in after?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s really not the way to go about it, Counselor.”

  “At that point I didn’t know whether I would call it in at all,” Quinn replied.

  Madison understood what he meant: if Hollis had picked up a device, they might have left it in place and used it to their advantage. It would have been the most dangerous course of action and absolutely typical of Nathan Quinn.

  “Perfect,” Madison said.

  “They just had a look around and left?” Kelly said.

  “Yes,” Quinn replied.

  “Let me understand, our little theory here is that this—” Kelly gestured at the house around them—“intrusion is connected to the whole mess started by your television appeal, right? So if they didn’t come for your hidden treasures, what were they looking for?”

  “Information,” Madison interjected, and her eyes found Quinn’s. “The single piece of information that made the appeal dangerous for the killers: how you found out about Timothy Gilman’s connection to the abduction and who else knows.”

  “I imagine so, yes,” Quinn replied.

  They had been over this at the hospital, and he didn’t seem any more inclined to reveal his source.

  “You’re absolutely sure they didn’t manage to find your notes, your documents, whatever in the name of all that’s holy you’ve got hidden away, then copied them and left them for you to believe they hadn’t found anything?”

  “That information is not to be found on any paper and never has been.”

  The Crime Scene Unit van rumbled to a stop in the drive, and Quinn left to open the door for them.

  “I have to make a call,” Kelly said, and he went back to the car.

  Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce walked in carrying their equipment, nodded hello, and began their sifting and sieving.

  “A B-and-E—how refreshing,” Joyce
commented, looking around. “No blood-spatter chart for once, Madison.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” she replied.

  Madison and Quinn went out to a side deck and left the CSU team to it. The pale sun offered little warmth, and they were both wearing their coats with the collars up.

  “I’m not even going to say anything about you not calling this in straightaway; it would be a waste of breath,” Madison said. “But this you should know: have you ever heard of a man named Jerry Wallace?”

  Madison told Quinn about the phone call from Fred Kamen, about Peter Conway and his crew, about the file sitting on her desk and what it contained.

  “There’s every reason to believe these are the men who went after Lee, Gray, and, in all probability, Wallace. We’re hoping that the evidence will link all the crime scenes,” she concluded.

  “And you are protecting the fourth man?”

  “Yes, protecting and interrogating him, as far as his condition allows.”

  It was to Quinn’s credit that he had not asked her to let him meet Vincent Foley. Technically speaking, Foley was still merely a patient in a psychiatric facility.

  “I have to ask you about your parents,” she said, treading lightly in a territory that was both unfamiliar and perhaps difficult to navigate.

  “What about my parents?” Quinn replied evenly.

  “At the time of your brother’s abduction, and also before and after, did you ever hear them mention the names Eduardo Cruz, Leon Kendrick, or Jerome McMullen?”

  “No, they never did mention those names, not once. Not at the time or ever,” Quinn said. “Years later, when I was working in the prosecutor’s office, I made my own inquiries and read the file and came up with the same names, for all the good it did.”

  “If the men who broke in last night didn’t find what they were looking for, they might very well come back for it,” Madison said. “And they might be inclined to ask you personally.”

  “Last night’s was a subtle job, Detective; they didn’t want to attract attention to themselves. I’ve been in a hospital—without any security or protection—for long enough that if they wanted to pay me a visit, they could have done so at any time of their choosing.”