The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

Madison had no doubt that John Cameron’s memories were as sharp today as they had always been; the worst moments of her own childhood had hardly lost their fine, bitter edge.

  “I think a drink would be appropriate. May I do the honors?” Cameron glanced at Quinn and, at his nod, stood up. “Coffee or bourbon, Detective?”

  “Coffee, thank you.”

  Quinn opened the door to the deck and went outside. Madison let him be. All those years ago he had probably begged that little boy to tell him what had happened; it didn’t make it any easier to hear it today, even knowing that this time something might come of it.

  She busied herself studying the telescope until Cameron came back with their drinks and Quinn returned indoors—the rain had spattered his suit, his hair was damp, and he looked ready to walk barefoot to hell.

  “What can you tell us about the fire the other night at the Walters Institute?” he asked Madison.

  She gave them what details she could, which excluded her conversation with Vincent Foley in the gardens and the fact that they had Henry Sullivan—or whatever his name was—in custody.

  “This man from the clinic,” Cameron said. “How sure are you that he was involved?”

  “He’s too damaged to be of any use to you, Mr. Cameron. Either as a witness or a source of whatever retribution you might seek.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “I’m sure,” Madison replied. “All his mind has kept are the scraps of memories. He barely knows his own name at this point.”

  “And yet you mean to use him, do you not? To wring what you can out of this poor soul?”

  “We’re interviewing him, yes.”

  “And after you’re done with your questions? What will happen then? Will he get a pass back to a life of soft foods and plastic cutlery?”

  “I honestly don’t know. And I can’t begin to imagine what your feelings on that matter might be, either of you. But if you saw him, if you saw that strange, eerie creature, you would get no joy from killing him—if that’s what you have in mind. I think vengeance is trickier than that, and if you are going to go for it, the subject should at least be aware of the reason he’s about to die. Killing this man would give you nothing. He’s defenseless and so slight, you’d break him with a harsh look.”

  She had their full attention, and she continued. “On the other hand, take someone like Timothy Gilman, someone who spent his life dispensing evil. Maybe finally someone caught up with him, someone who had knowledge of his crimes but nothing that would stand up in court. So he dealt with him. Alone, quietly, and in a very tidy manner.”

  “He dealt with him?” Cameron said.

  Madison took a sip of her coffee. “Yes. Alone, quietly, and in a very tidy manner. Because to do it any other way would bring more damage and pain than he could bear to inflict on Gilman’s surviving victims.”

  Madison looked from one man to the other. Quinn’s scars looked livid against his skin, his eyes darker than she had ever seen them.

  “That’s my theory,” she said. “I have no proof, and in all likelihood I never will. My feeling is, whoever caught up with Gilman is long dead, too. Maybe he’s Gilman’s last true victim.”

  “Maybe,” Cameron said, the truth balancing on a single word.

  Madison finished her coffee and left. Even though there had been an exchange of information, she wasn’t sure which side had gained the most. She arrived home and changed into her running gear, her backup piece fitting easily under the cotton sweatpants. The rain was seeping through the hood of her sweatshirt, and her hands were freezing. There are no sides, she thought—not about this. Not anymore.

  Her feet bounced on the wet concrete of her neighborhood sidewalks, and in minutes she was drenched. She kept running, because it was easier to think about Cameron’s story while she was moving. The streets were empty, and she followed the road parallel to the water. The black pavement was strewn with leaves and twigs, slippery and snapping underfoot.

  Madison ran and let John Cameron’s words come back to her as they wished, because pieces of some stories take you and change you and will not let you get hold of them whole. Some stories splinter, and the shards dig themselves deeply under your skin.

  What she’d heard stayed with her while she showered and put on clean, dry clothes; while she cooked herself a steak and ate it at the table, adding to her notes and sipping from a longneck; it stayed with every breath she took until she slipped at last into a broken sleep.

  In his bedroom Nathan Quinn listened to the wind rattling the windows as the rain gushed against the glass. He had drunk a measure of bourbon with Jack tonight, as he had promised himself only twenty-four hours earlier, and another glass after that.

  He hadn’t known when he’d woken up that morning that by the time he went to bed, many of the questions he’d been asking himself for years would be answered. It had been nearly impossible to listen to the story. Detective Madison’s steady calm had helped him: she hadn’t interrupted, she hadn’t asked questions, and she had listened with focus and compassion.

  He should have known that she would work out what had happened to Gilman, that she wouldn’t give up until she did. One day, if Jack continued his life on the path he had chosen, Detective Madison would be the most serious danger he would face. But not today and not about Timothy Gilman. In the same night she had managed to be both a threat and a source of comfort.

  He stayed awake in the darkness for a while, then got up and went to the living room.

  Cameron was staying in the guest bedroom: the door was open, and the room was empty. As soon as they’d arrived home from the courthouse, he had altered the alarm system so that Jack could come and go without him. His Ford Explorer had been parked in Quinn’s garage.

  Quinn didn’t need to check to know that the car was gone, too.

  Chapter 55

  John Cameron drove fast on the deserted road due east toward the neighborhood of Admiral above Alki Beach. One of the advantages of a ride at 2:30 a.m. was that a tail would be easy to spot. After leaving the house, he had spent forty minutes making sure that he was not trailing any unwanted parties. Once he was sure he was not being followed, he took a turn and headed for his destination.

  About twenty-four hours earlier he had been running around in the main yard of a jail with the red dots of rifle scopes dancing on his back. The guards might even be there tonight, looking down from their towers at the empty yard and aiming their rifles at the shadows. We all have our jobs to do, Cameron thought as he breathed in the salt air and the pine trees.

  He keyed in the entry code for an unassuming gate and waited until it swung open, drove in, and waited again to make sure that it would shut properly behind him.

  There was a lot of land around the house, a simple three-bedroom on the top of Duwamish Head—probably more land than usual for lots in the area. Cameron had bought it in another man’s name, and no person alive or dead knew of its connection to him.

  He put his key into the door and turned off the alarm. His hand hovered above the light switch, and he decided against it. In a few steps he was in the living room, and there was the real reason he had bought the house: one wall was entirely glass. Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle, the lights glimmering in the distance in spite of the early hour. The cloud cover was still hugging the city close, and it reflected back a sickly orange glow. The room itself was bright with it.

  Cameron went to work: he needed to pack a bag and pick up a few items without which he felt underdressed. The clothes went into a soft leather weekend bag. The rest needed holsters and sheaths. A slim knife with a six-inch blade found its place next to his inner arm, a snub-nosed Glock .38 into an ankle holster by his foot, and a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic .40 in its holster went on the bottom of the bag among the clothes, together with extra ammunition for both weapons.

  The drive back to Seward Park went just as smoothly. Cameron disarmed the alarm system and went to his room. When Quinn woke up a few hours later,
Camero had already made coffee.

  Chapter 56

  Alice Madison sat at her desk at 7:00 a.m. and started her day with takeout coffee and a granola bar. She read through the overnight reports in case any witnesses had suddenly and unexpectedly come forward. None had.

  She composed an e-mail to Fred Kamen at the FBI and attached Henry Sullivan’s arrest file.

  We have this man in custody. He’s part of Peter Conway’s crew and has been involved in at least three murders and an arson attack on a psychiatric clinic. We know him as Henry Sullivan; he’s lawyered up, and he’s not talking.

  The reply came back in minutes:

  I’ll let you know if he’s been active around here.

  Madison didn’t hold out much hope, but they had to spread their net as wide as possible: just because Sullivan was not in the system, it didn’t mean someone wouldn’t recognize his face from somewhere. People have lives: they live in neighborhoods, shop at supermarkets, and gas up their cars. Someone somewhere must know his real name and where on this Earth he called home.

  Madison thought about the man she had observed from behind the mirror and his behavior with Spencer and Dunne. How much of Conway’s brand of evil was in this man? And how much did Sullivan know of Conway’s plans?

  At 8:00 a.m. Dunne brought donuts and good news: Sullivan’s room had been booked on a credit card registered to a Peter Curtis, a fictitious resident of Missoula, Montana. They could trace each payment on the card and see where it would lead them, and even though it had not been used from the moment Conway had been warned off coming back to the Silver Pines, it was their first proper lead.

  The weather had gone from grim to morose, and under the drizzle the detectives split the credit card payments and began to check each one, traveling from gas station to diner to outfitters and piecing together the movements of Conway and his men. Some of these establishments had closed-circuit cameras, and some of those cameras worked.

  Madison was getting rained on in a gas station forecourt in Everett when a call came through on her cell.

  “It’s Deputy Walbeck from Pierce County.”

  It took Madison a second to remember. Jerry Wallace.

  “Deputy,” she said.

  “I’ve got some news, and it’s pretty bad. Did you know the man?” the officer said, trying to gauge how to best deliver the information, whether she was talking to an acquaintance or a stranger.

  “No, I’ve never met him.”

  “Well, we found human remains. The body had been doused with lighting fluid, set alight, and then dumped in South Prairie Creek. What was left didn’t look human at all. Only good thing I can say about it is that he died of two GSWs to the head and didn’t feel a thing after that. The daughter identified a ring he was wearing.”

  “Deputy, we’re holding a man who might have been involved in it. He’s just been arrested and goes by the name Henry Sullivan. You might want to check any trace evidence found in the house against his DNA. He’s already been connected to a murder here.”

  “Will do.”

  Out of the blue the sharp scent of gas from the pumps hit Madison. Lighting fluid and a match.

  Chapter 57

  John Cameron finished reading the last document and replaced it on top of all the others. They had spent the day going through Tod Hollis’s files and matching Cameron’s account of the events with the reality of who these men were.

  “Nathan,” he said abruptly, “do you remember that last Fourth of July when we went to Conrad Locke’s estate?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “David, Jimmy, and I went off wandering by ourselves in the woods, and Jimmy said something to us. He said that he’d overheard his father talking to someone on the phone and saying that he would ‘use his bat to put a dent in their future’ if they ever came back to the restaurant.”

  “Jimmy’s father said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. That’s all he’d heard. We thought it was pretty grown-up stuff and decided to keep our ears open and see what was going to happen. Did David ever mention it to you?”

  “No.” Quinn had left that night before the fireworks and had not come back for days.

  They were both thinking the same thing, and Cameron said it. “Is it possible that something happened between Jimmy’s father and one of these men who’d come around like jackals sniffing for easy prey?”

  “Jimmy’s father was not the kind of man who’d likely respond with a baseball bat to anything less than a direct threat.”

  “Like I would? People do strange things when they’re afraid.”

  Quinn didn’t reply. He was thinking about Jimmy’s father—always kind, always ready to play with the younger kids. Had the jackals threatened the boys?

  Later, while Quinn was on the phone to the alarm company, the doorbell rang, and it was the daily delivery from Chef O’Keefe. Cameron opened the front door and walked up to the gate. The chef was a world-class poker player, and it was their luck that he was just as good in the kitchen. During the weeks in KCJC his senses had been dulled by the quality of the prison food, and O’Keefe’s clam chowder had provided a fitting return to life.

  The gate swung open, and Cameron moved to take the packages from the delivery man—a busboy he didn’t know wearing whites under a leather jacket, his motorcycle helmet on the bike’s seat.

  The movement was subtle: perhaps a shift in the man’s eyes, perhaps a rushed move forward to pass him the bags. Cameron’s heartbeat was as slow as his instincts were quick. If he held the bags, both of his hands would be full. And then he saw the Taser gun ready to fire.

  Cameron let go of the bags as he lunged forward faster than the man could step backward. The busboy pulled back his gun hand to have enough room to fire, but Cameron had already reached for his knife and struck in one swift movement. The man’s white throat was exposed and vulnerable. A single lethal slash and the blood flew in a red arc. The man fell backward, eyes wide, his mouth gasping short, ragged breaths. It’s never just one man. Cameron turned snake-fast, and the blade hit a soft target behind him; then Taser wires found him, and his muscles tensed and cramped as the electric shock traveled through his body.

  Three men in total: one down, one injured.

  Hands cuffed him behind his back and snapped tape over his mouth. Hands lifted him off the ground and pushed him into the back of a van. He saw two men grab the body of their dead comrade off the pavement and throw him next to him in the van.

  They shoved the door closed and were off. The attack had lasted seconds, and it had happened in complete silence. Cameron’s last thought, as a needle in the arm sent him to sleep, rang out from the overwhelming darkness: Nathan’s not here; Nathan’s safe.

  Nathan Quinn’s call from the alarm company had ended unexpectedly: he noticed the front door open and heard car doors slam shut and the screech of tires on asphalt. He was already dialing 911 when he reached the gate and saw the Taser gun on the ground in a pool of blood—more blood than he thought a human being could even contain. Quinn spoke to dispatch as clearly and calmly as he could. His second call, moments later, was to Detective Alice Madison.

  Chapter 58

  John Cameron awoke in the half-light of the back of the van. He gave himself a couple of seconds for his awareness to come back fully and then took stock of his body. He was blindfolded with a strip of fabric. His hands were cuffed—plastic cuffs—behind his back. Some kind of larger cuff had been locked just below his knees and a third above his ankles. He couldn’t move his feet apart, but by lifting them an inch off the floor, he could tell that the holster where his snub-nosed Glock had been was empty. There was bunched-up rough fabric under his cheek, and they had placed him on his side, which would made it less likely for him to choke on his own vomit if he reacted to the drugs they’d given him. All in all, an efficient and professional job.

  The men had laid a thin cotton sheet over him: if someone took a look ins
ide the van, and he was still sedated, they’d see a lump of white wedged between the usual debris of a workingman’s van.

  Cameron felt the tiny bumps and shudders from the van floor, and he knew they were traveling fast on an asphalt road. He listened for voices, but no one was talking in the cabin.

  He relaxed his muscles as much as he could to counteract the odd spasms of the Taser hit and because being tense would bring nothing useful to the situation. He wasn’t physically hurt, he wasn’t bleeding, and the fact that they’d used a Taser gun meant that, at least for the moment, they wanted him alive and intact. A burning ache radiated from the spot on his side where the darts had hit, but that was all. On the other hand, he had seen their faces, and that meant that at some point he wouldn’t stay alive and intact.

  And what had they done with the body of their dead colleague? Cameron shifted a little and felt a shape next to him on the floor. Just then the van turned into what must have been a dirt track, and the vibrations became harder.

  After a few minutes he heard voices whispering in the cabin, the engine slowed down, and the brakes came on. They had stopped.

  Cameron couldn’t see under his blindfold and couldn’t move, and wisdom told him to stay still and let them think he was still sedated. He was curious about these people who had managed what many others hadn’t, and he would learn a lot more about them if they thought he was unconscious.

  The door slid open with a rush of cold air. The van creaked as the two men climbed into the back. Grunting, each apparently took hold of one end of the dead body, and they climbed back out.

  Cameron listened hard: no traffic, and the men’s footsteps were pushing their way through undergrowth and bushes.

  “Here,” one said, and a heavy burden thudded onto the ground.

  Steps walked back to the van, and someone picked up something off the floor. Fluid sloshed inside a container. The man stopped where he was, and Cameron felt his eyes crawling over him. He kept his breathing regular under the sheet and let his chest rise and fall and rise and fall. After a beat the man moved away.