Madison had pulled her hair up in a hurried ponytail and borrowed a navy blue Huskies baseball cap from a plainclothes officer. Go, Dawgs. She was screened by a large potted plant that would give her, maybe, a five-second advantage if Conway came in. She had picked up a magazine from the reception desk and tried to look fascinated by a season of conferences and leadership seminars in the Pacific Northwest. Her body, however, was a taut ball of wiring held together by adrenaline.
In her ear was the steady, clear monotone of the officers reporting on status: “Red Ford wagon pulling into parking lot. Family of three: man, woman, and child coming out.”
Five seconds later the family entered the hotel.
“Silver Honda Civic pulling in. Single female passenger.”
A woman in her fifties in a business suit came in and stopped at the reception desk.
“Unit 3 in position,” a soft voice whispered from her earpiece.
Madison breathed in. Unit 3 was on the second floor, getting ready to take down the guest in Room 237. She shifted in her chair and tried to keep her focus on the main door.
“Unit 3 is a go,” the response came.
Voices tumbled through the earpiece: someone issuing commands, someone giving a count to three, quick, heavy steps, and the rustle of clothing against the mikes.
Madison was utterly still.
Silence. Five seconds. Ten seconds.
“He’s down,” the disembodied voice said. “The target is down. Tasered, breathing, and with healthy vital signs.”
Madison exhaled.
“Captain? We had to Taser him, but he managed to hit a panic button. It’s a wireless system connected to the hotel Wi-Fi, and he activated it before we took him down.”
A black van with darkened windows that had just come off Exit 10 signaled right, took a sharp turn, and rejoined the Interstate due west toward Seattle. Inside it, Peter Conway was not a happy man.
The prisoner lay facedown in the middle of the room: a wiry man in his late thirties wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt. He was barefoot and cuffed, and from the moment the Taser’s wires had been retrieved, he had not said a single word.
Technically speaking he was Bellevue PD’s prisoner, but the paperwork was already being sorted out, and a police van was on its way. He’d spend the night, and quite possibly longer, as a guest of the Seattle jail on 5th Avenue, where the signature colors were not oatmeal and maroon.
Chapter 45
The Silver Pines Motel was not inclined to have the normal flow of its life interrupted by something as mundane as the SWAT arrest of an—alleged—dangerous felon. The portion of the second floor that included the four rooms that the Conway crew had rented for the last three days had been cordoned off, and the SPD Crime Scene Unit had been called with the understanding that, even though the motel was in Bellevue, any findings would be shipped to Amy Sorensen and her team. Thus, it might be convenient for everyone if—with the blessing of the smaller though equally dedicated Bellevue CSU—Sorensen took a ride across the Memorial Bridge and came to collect her evidence herself.
As they were piling into their vans, Sorensen had warned her people: they would be inspecting four motel rooms of four men who were not keen on being identified or tracked down. Short of hospital appointments that included actual emergency surgery, they might want to cancel their private lives for the next few days.
Madison stood by the threshold of one the rooms and looked inside. Unfortunately, the motel’s cleaning service had already done their job for the day, which in this case included wiping away prints and Hoovering up hairs, epithelials, and other biological trace evidence.
Madison suspected that the room would have been tidy even without professional help: there were hardly any personal possessions that she could see—just a few leaflets on a desk for local attractions and a change of clothing in the wardrobe. Conway’s men traveled light. Arson and murder in the evening and breakfast in Pike Street Market in the morning.
She didn’t know which room was Conway’s; with luck, the cleaners had not entirely eradicated his presence. One Bellevue PD detective had been allowed into each of the three empty rooms to look for weapons that had been stashed or items that might require an immediate response, though she had found nothing of use.
“No itinerary found, then?” Dunne commented.
The detective had smiled politely and moved on.
On the other hand, in the room of the presently detained Henry Sullivan—no one believed for a second that it was his real name, but he had booked Room 237 under that name, and they had to call him something—the detectives had recovered the following: one Beretta 92FS 9mm with three spare magazines, one hunting knife with a seven-inch stainless-steel blade, one military-style boot knife with a rubberized aluminum handle and a 3.5 420HC blade with a fiberglass sheath, and, stripped down inside its modified leather briefcase, an M24 sniper rifle with ammunition in a separate case.
Madison looked at the hoard as an officer photographed it where it had been found. It was bad enough to have had firsthand experience of what Conway and his men could do up close and personal, and the thought that they had come prepared to do some long-distance target practice made everything even worse.
By the time Spencer pulled into the precinct, it was almost midnight, and Henry Sullivan was somewhere nearby on 5th Avenue getting his picture taken and his fingerprints detected by sensors. Lieutenant Fynn had been briefed, and the general consensus was that Sullivan should be interviewed as soon as possible. Spencer would do the honors with Dunne in the box and Madison observing behind the two-way mirror. She had no ego about this: Spencer was much more experienced than she was, and she was happy to observe the prisoner and draw her own conclusions.
“No hits on AFIS yet,” the uniformed officer told them when they arrived; it meant that so far the fingerprints collected and put into the system for identification had drawn a blank, and for the time being Henry Sullivan would have to remain Henry Sullivan. “He hasn’t said one word, by the way,” the officer added as he left them at the door of the interview room.
Madison was glad to be the only person in the observation box. At a different time of day there might have been someone else there, even—God forbid—Kelly, and for what she had to do, she preferred privacy and no distractions.
Henry Sullivan sat at a metal table screwed to the floor. He was cuffed, and an orange jumpsuit had replaced his jeans and T-shirt. Madison watched him. Her eyes, unseen from the other side, found his—dark, birdlike—and stayed there. He was calm and uncommunicative, almost bored-looking. It was quite possibly an act; then again, maybe not. He would be aware that he had not been identified and all they had on him was what they had found in Room 237. If the bullet that had killed Thomas Reed in the Walters Institute turned out to have been fired from his Beretta, it would be an unexpected bonus for the case, although Madison—without a logical reason for it—believed that it had been Conway’s work.
What was Sullivan thinking? Madison studied the small, bright eyes. He probably realized that an arrest with everything that went with it implied a considerable change in lifestyle. Whatever happened here tonight and whatever charges would be laid against him, his days in Conway’s crew were over. The latter had been fanatical about keeping himself out of the reach of law enforcement, and he had largely succeeded by making sure he worked with men who would not turn up in AFIS or CODIS searches—once prints and DNA were in the system, a man was useless to him. Madison blinked; that was something worth remembering.
Spencer was talking, and she tried to pay attention to that, but her focus was on Sullivan’s hands, on the way he held his shoulders, on the involuntary eye movements that followed Spencer’s words. Sullivan stared at the mirror and ignored the two detectives in front of him.
He didn’t reply to a single question and seemed utterly unconcerned about the proceedings.
To Madison he looked like a guy who’s holding a great hand in a hard game: he knows it, and
everybody else at the table knows it, but they all play on because they want to see what in the sweet name of everything holy he’s holding.
Sullivan drummed his fingers once on the table. It was all the movement he had allowed himself.
After an hour, Spencer and Dunne stood up.
“I want a lawyer,” Henry Sullivan said. His voice was Brooklyn with a hint of Jersey.
The processing officer had told them that Sullivan had turned down the standard offer of a phone call, even though he was cut off from his people and drifting in dangerous waters. When the detectives left the room, his behavior didn’t change, and his gaze remained on the mirror.
Madison arrived home at 3:00 a.m. She had been up for twenty-four hours straight, and the darkness she had left in her windows looked exactly the same. A hot shower relaxed her, and she wrapped herself in her comforter as her mind wandered through the last hours of this long day. They had upset Conway’s plans for sure when they broke up his crew; nonetheless, so far he’d followed a clear plan, and nothing said that his systematic destruction of everything and everyone connected to the Hoh River case would stop just because he had one fewer pair of hands to do his killing for him.
Chapter 46
Madison woke up at 7:00 a.m., not exactly late enough for a restorative sleep. Well, it’s the thought that counts. She made coffee and promised herself a trip to the supermarket—a real store, not a deli, with wide aisles and freshly washed produce. She could survive without food in the house, but a lack of ground coffee for her countertop machine was an eventuality that she could not face.
The sun had decided to toy with Elliott Bay, and dawn was making promises it might not intend to keep. Madison dressed quickly and badly missed her Glock in the shoulder holster. She wrapped the strap around the holster and carried it with her to her dining area. Her backup piece was in place, but her body felt strangely unbalanced.
She finished her coffee looking at the notes she had made on Timothy Gilman, the pages still spread on her dinner table. Conway would have finished Gilman with the same ease with which he’d finished the others. The latter was a sadist and a bully who enjoyed hurting little children, and the former was a cold-blooded murderer who killed for money. Out of curiosity Madison checked the date Gilman had last been seen alive. He would have been a boy somewhere on the East Coast at the time. That is, if he had ever been a boy.
Henry Sullivan had been assigned a public defender from the King County’s Office of Public Defense. Spencer decided to give him a couple of hours’ grace and then resume the interview. The Crime Scene Unit had been working nonstop in the Silver Pines Motel, and an unofficial list of their initial findings had been sent over. It was a very brief list, and, aside from the illegal weapons, it made for very dull reading. Sullivan’s wallet had contained a driver’s license—fake—and $357.23 in cash. No credit cards, no plastic of any kind, and none of the insignificant receipts that chart the existence of a person from when he gets up in the morning to when he goes to bed at night. Henry Sullivan had materialized at the entrance of the Silver Pines Motel, and the rest of his life was a blank.
Madison was on McMullen duty: though the man had been in prison for years, he must have associates who could organize a cleanup operation of that size on his behalf. It was not the kind of thing that could be handled by a stranger; if McMullen asked someone to do this for him, it would be someone he knew before his arrest, someone he trusted implicitly with his life, because that was exactly what was at stake here.
There was an issue that had bothered Madison from the beginning, and there really was no way around it: Conway was expensive, very expensive. Whoever had hired him had paid top dollar for his services. Madison scanned McMullen’s file and looked for signs of potential wealth. Most, if not all, of his capital would have been frozen and then impounded as illegal gains as soon as he had been sentenced.
“I want to talk to McMullen,” she said to Kelly, hoping to God he had some previous engagement that could not be canceled.
“Why?”
“Because I need to see his face when I ask him about the Hoh River case.”
“Why?”
“Because on paper he has all the credentials to have been involved in it at the time, but I don’t see how he would have the capital to pay for Conway’s crew.”
“If your neck is on the line, you find whatever money you need to shake off the noose. We don’t know that he wasn’t owed favors by people who could take care of the bill.”
“He’s divorced—twice—with three kids, none of whom have visited him unless they’ve done it under assumed names. Before his sentencing, he cut a deal with the prosecution and delivered at least four wanted felons. None of that would have created instant goodwill in prison, and he spent some time in administrative solitary for his own protection. I’m saying, I looked at this file, and it doesn’t seem to me like he has the pull to do this. That’s why I need to see him.”
“Okay.” Kelly shrugged, stood up, and grabbed his coat.
“Okay,” Madison replied.
The McCoy State Prison, also known as the Bones, sat in a valley north of Seattle. They had called ahead and were expected. Officer Starecki met Madison and Kelly and led them through the labyrinth that housed over a thousand convicts.
“You know his parole is coming up in days, right?” he said over his shoulder as they proceeded down the corridor.
“We know,” Madison said. “What’s your impression of the man? You’ve been dealing with him since he arrived.”
Officer Starecki stopped, clearly rather surprised that someone was asking his opinion on the matter of Jerome McMullen. “He’s a model prisoner,” he replied. “Never any trouble, never gets involved even if other people want trouble, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“He’s older than a lot of the guys here, and some of them look up to him a bit, but I’ve never heard him take advantage of it. He should sail through the parole hearing. What do you need to speak to him about?”
“He might be able to help us with a cold case.”
“I’m sure he will if he can. He’s found religion, too, after his heart attack two years ago.”
“Right. Good to know,” Madison replied.
Jerome McMullen stood up as they entered the room. He was wearing immaculate prison clothing, and his salt-and-pepper hair had been slicked back. Madison’s first impression was that the man had been carved out of bone: he was lean and tall; his eyes were brown and striking against his pale skin. He was sixty years old and looked ten years younger—within the jail population that was highly unusual. They sat around the table. He was ramrod straight and took measure of them.
“How can I help you, Detectives?” Jerome McMullen asked, and Madison knew instantly that once he was out of that parole hearing and far away from the walls of the Bones, he would shed religion and good manners like a cheap suit. I know you, she thought, and she sat back in her chair.
“Mr. McMullen,” she started, “we’d like to talk to you about your business dealings in 1985.”
McMullen sat and smiled, and the effect was not pleasant. “That’s one way to put it, Detective, but the Lord Jesus says that the truth will set me free—how apt—and we both know that in 1985 I was a foul, violent, unremorseful man who’d hurt anyone who got in his way and who made his money stealing it from others.”
“The Lord Jesus?”
“Yes. I had a heart attack two years ago, and when I woke up, the world around me had changed, because I had changed. I had accepted His Word, the only Word that matters.”
Madison felt Kelly shifting in the chair next to her.
“I will not ask you if you have been saved, Detective,” McMullen continued. “After all, that’s none of my business, and you’re not here to talk about my spiritual journey.”
“No, but thanks for sharing,” Kelly commented.
“We’re here because in 1985 the kind of felonies you were
involved in meant you extorted money from small businesses and made sure they knew what would happen if they didn’t pay,” Madison said.
From the first moment, she had been checking him for any signs of apprehension and concern, anything that might tell her he had been expecting their visit and knew what they wanted to ask him. She saw none. He was calm and collected, and his hands rested on the table before him.
McMullen frowned delicately, as if the effort of thinking back to those times and the person he was then was physically painful. “Go on,” he said.
“Are you aware of a restaurant on Alki Beach called The Rock?”
“Yes. Is it still there?”
“Yes, it is. Did you approach the owners at the time? Did you ever speak with them, or did any of your men ever speak with the owners to indicate that you would hurt them and hurt them badly if they didn’t pay you protection money when you asked for it?”
McMullen nodded. “I understand. You’re asking me if I had any part in the kidnapping and death of that poor, poor child.”
“No, I’m asking you if the foul, violent, and unremorseful man you were then paid four men to snatch three boys. And it wasn’t an accidental death; it was murder.”
McMullen shook his head. “It was terrible thing.”
“Well, that’s what you say now with the benefit of a heart attack and your ongoing spiritual journey. What would you have said then?”
“I can tell you that it would have been right up my ‘business’ alley, and the reason I didn’t approach the owners was because the kidnapping happened before I had a chance to. And afterward, you couldn’t have gotten anybody to go near The Rock. As far as I know, no one ever approached them, and, of course, in more recent years no one would, anyway, considering who the present owners are.”
The Dark Page 28
