Robert Locke had been an irritating, spoiled little kid who had grown up to be a good man, he’d found his path in life fixing people’s hearts, and he said he’d be there to prove to them all how wrong they were. He had stood quietly in that room next to Madison, Lieutenant Fynn, and Sarah Klein from the prosecutor’s office, next to John Cameron—whom he hadn’t seen since middle school—and had listened to his life unravel.
And then the offices filled with people: Detectives Spencer, Dunne, and Kelly poured out of the elevator with two uniformed officers and, behind them, Carl Doyle. John Cameron moved through the crowd without a sound to stand next to Nathan Quinn. Detectives and officers regarded him warily. His amber gaze rested on Conrad Locke. Nathan Quinn leaned back against the edge of the long table and watched as Spencer read Locke his rights. Locke, who was first and foremost an attorney, didn’t say a word.
Considering the number of people present, the offices of Quinn, Locke & Associates were quiet as the arrest was dealt with and the suspect led away.
“Thank you for earlier, Carl,” Quinn said.
Carl Doyle shook his head. He needed to do something, to organize something or file something. He felt bereft. “What can I do to help?” he said.
“Nothing. I’m done with this place for tonight.”
It seemed to Madison that Nathan Quinn couldn’t stand to be within those walls one second longer.
They turned off the lights, locked the office, and took the elevator down. Doyle left at street level; Madison, Quinn, and Cameron came out in the underground parking lot. Their cars were among the few still there. There would be statements to the police, sworn declarations, and the documents left by Ronald Gray to be authenticated. The page of the yearbook would be officially matched by Sorensen, and the recording of Quinn’s conversation with Locke would be entered into evidence. But all that was for another time. Even talking about what had just happened seemed too much. Quinn’s eyes held Madison’s. “Would you join us for a drink, Detective?”
She saw through the old-fashioned courtesy: he was exhausted.
“Rain check,” she said. “How’s the . . .” She indicated Cameron’s injured side.
Cameron shrugged—a boyish gesture that told her how far from themselves they all were.
They nodded to one another and got into their cars, Madison trying to make sense of the last few hours, and Quinn and Cameron of the last twenty-five years.
Madison drove. She was numb and watched herself park and walk into Husky Deli. She bought a bowl of French onion soup and a chicken cashew sandwich. At home, she ate both sitting on the sofa, her feet on the coffee table, the television muted. She wanted to speak to Brown and to Rachel, but she just couldn’t, not yet. She would call them in the morning.
Her one call was to Maryland. “Detective Frakes, I have some news . . .”
For as long as she lived, Madison would never forget the moment she had seen David Quinn’s picture of Conrad Locke and Senator Newberry in the woods, and then finding buried in the file the fact that Locke had represented Timothy Gilman. She hoped Quinn would manage to sleep tonight; she hoped she would never again see that hurt on the face of another human being.
Madison fell asleep remembering the soft rain in the forest as she’d walked with the ranger to the place where a child had been buried. Among the sorrows of the day, she had fulfilled her promise.
Ronald Gray looked around at his untidy apartment. He had done what he could: the acrid scent from the stove was evidence of it. He glanced at the bookcase. Five times in the past twenty years—each time he had moved house—he had done the same thing. When he first started, memory sticks didn’t even exist. At least he’d gotten better with the wallpaper.
With each letter he had written, the words had changed a little, as he had gotten older and the landscape of his life and his heart had changed. He didn’t feel proud of what he was doing, as he wasn’t proud of what he had done. It had started as a way of protecting Vincent and himself and had ended up as a mission.
Time to go, he thought as he closed the door. He had a bus to catch.
Chapter 68
Nathan Quinn woke up in the darkness and knew without looking at the clock that it was hours to go before dawn. Sleep had been hard to come by and brittle once there.
He slipped out of bed and padded downstairs. Jack was sitting in one of the armchairs—with the lights off, looking out into the gloom toward where Lake Washington would be.
Quinn sat down in the other chair. They had hardly spoken since they had returned to Nathan’s home, and neither had been able to stomach any food. Cameron had been driven back after his own hospital visit to find a different world, and since then things had moved too fast to take stock of.
Quinn was glad to see that his friend was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and had not been out for one of his night drives. So much between them was still unspoken.
“Are you in any pain?” Quinn asked him—Cameron’s bandage was visible under the cotton fabric.
His friend shook his head and stood up. “Drink?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Cameron poured them a double measure of bourbon each and then, without asking, went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a carton of eggs. He was his father’s son, Quinn thought, and he stood to get out a couple of plates while Cameron scrambled six eggs and served them golden and still soft, his hands nimble at the stove.
They had them at the breakfast bar, because the table was covered in papers, and neither mentioned the things that Quinn had told Conrad Locke about Jack. It was the truth, and it didn’t need explanations.
Once back in bed, Nathan Quinn closed his eyes, and the music came back to him as it often did on the verge of falling asleep, and for the first time since that night in the forest he knew that it was Detective Madison’s voice, cradling the boy on one side and holding his hand in hers through the bars of Salinger’s cage. Blackbird.
Chapter 69
The hush that had begun in the offices of Quinn, Locke & Associates pushed itself into the crevices of other lives during the following days. Madison spoke to Kevin Brown and to Rachel Abramowicz—the rocks, the anchors, at the opposite ends of her life—but she didn’t read or watch any news and generally kept to herself except for the obligatory meetings and debriefings.
She ran on the beach, cleaned the house, and cooked dinners from scratch. The gunshot wounds and the face of the bodyguard in the field came back to her every so often, and she let them. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of night; sometimes she slept through. She didn’t speak to Nathan Quinn or John Cameron, but they were never far from her thoughts.
It was a bright February afternoon, and the sky was a clear sheet of silver. Madison walked down the rickety pier at the end of the pebble beach at the bottom of her garden and dropped her kayak into the water. She wore her yellow REI life jacket and was not armed.
She paddled toward Three Tree Point and almost expected to see a fourteen-year-old Rachel Lever paddle toward her in her kayak. After a while she stopped and leaned as far back as she could. A few gulls were busy on the afternoon shift, but for the rest it was quiet. After the initial numbness, feelings were coming back like blood to her limbs. Some she could live with, some confused her, and some she had to find a permanent way of dealing with; otherwise, they would damage her like a broken bone left unset. Good friends, good food, and Billy Wilder could only get her so far, and Madison made her decision. She paddled for three hours and felt blissfully tired by the time she was done.
The call came as she was drying herself after the shower.
“They’ll never want me for Special Weapons and Tactics, but for Homicide I’ll do.”
Brown.
“Sarge, that’s just . . .”
“I know, same here. I’ll be back in the precinct as soon as the paperwork is through.”
“As long as I’m on leave, you’re going to have Kelly.”
“Every clo
ud has a silver lining . . .”
The following morning, Stanley F. Robinson, PhD, took the elevator to go up to his office. When the doors slid open, Alice Madison got up from the carpeted corridor floor where she had been sitting with her back against a wall, waiting for him. She felt as if she was about to ask him to prom. “You said I could come up and look at the view.”
“So I did,” he replied, hardly breaking stride. “How was your week?”
Later on that day Madison drove home, took off her backup piece and her holster, and walked to Rachel’s house. The door was festooned with balloons with the number 7.
“He’s in the garden,” Rachel said, and she hugged Alice tightly. “I’m so happy you could make it.”
The house was crammed with children and adults, most of whom Madison knew already.
“I’ll call him in,” Rachel said.
“No, don’t. I’ll see him when he comes.”
Tommy was seven. He was seven today because one man’s courage had prevailed over another man’s insanity. She watched the boy run around and play and squeal with delight. When he saw her, he waved at her, and she waved back.
That night Madison slept through.
Chapter 70
Conrad Locke never made bail; he was too much of a flight risk and had the means to disappear. Every single law enforcement agency in the land wanted to speak with him, and Madison trusted they wouldn’t give him immunity even for his testimony against his many clients. There were lots of out there, people with skill sets similar to John Cameron’s, who would be following very closely the progression of the case.
Henry Sullivan—arrested in the Silver Pines Motel—and Conway’s accomplice, who had survived Cameron’s attack, would be charged with a number of Class A felonies and would never in their life be free again.
Jerome McMullen was given parole and spent his probationary period volunteering for good causes in King County. He went on to start his own support group for ex-convicts.
Nathan Quinn adjusted the knot in his tie. He had shaved off the stubble, and his hair was almost as short as it had been in December. He didn’t notice the scars anymore—other people might, but that was not his problem.
It had been a few weeks since Conrad Locke had been arrested—and Quinn’s slow recognition that nothing would ever be the same. Jack had spent quite a bit of time on his boat, which had been moored in Poulsbo while he was in jail. And they had spoken about some things, even though others they would probably never discuss. It was enough. It was a start.
Quinn didn’t know what had stayed with Cameron of those hours when death had come so close. Jack seemed to absorb everything and somehow compute and deal with it the way a rock deals with the weather. And yet his time spent on the boat, sailing around the San Juan Islands, had to be a pause for reflection, for finding his balance after some disorienting moments of vulnerability. Taking such a pause was what someone else would have done, and Quinn realized yet again that the inner workings of his friend’s mind were an unknown country, and it was one of life’s twisted pleasures that this man, practically a brother to him, should be so very hard to read.
When he told Cameron what he had decided to do, his friend had smiled.
“You understand the implications of this,” Quinn continued. “I will never be able to represent you as an attorney again.”
“I know, but it’s where you should have always been,” Cameron said.
“There won’t be any attorney-client confidentiality, Jack.”
“We’ll just have to take it as it comes. When do you start?”
“In June.”
“Good. The sooner, the better.”
And that was all that had been said between them on the matter.
Nathan Quinn picked up one of the nautical compasses that had belonged to his father and slipped it into the pocket of his dark suit.
David Quinn’s funeral took place under a soft rain on a March afternoon, the sky unsure of itself and occasionally letting sunshine through, anyway. Rabbi Stien spoke of a boy who had been a bright light for all who had known him, and he spoke of hope. Four people were present: Nathan Quinn, John Cameron, Alice Madison, and Carl Doyle. It was a brief ceremony, and at the end Quinn placed their father’s nautical compass on David’s coffin, and his hand rested there for an instant. John Cameron stood by his side.
Madison hung back a little and thought of the baseball mitt and the Sonics jersey; she thought of the seashells in the cardboard box. When Rabbi Stien hugged Quinn, she looked away.
Around them the cemetery was deep green and lush as they walked through quietly, and none of them noticed the photographer with the telephoto lens.
Andrew Riley, heart pounding, took twenty pictures in mere seconds, got back into his car, and drove away. One of the photographs would be sold by his agency and make most of the front pages the next day. Some would print it next to the one from twenty-five years ago. It was a sweet victory for Riley, who would make enough to move out of his studio apartment. This one, he reflected with his professional eye, was probably not as dramatic as the old one, but it was infinitely more interesting. Attorney Nathan Quinn, brother of the victim, flanked by a killer on one side and a cop on the other.
After the funeral, all except Carl Doyle went to The Rock, where Chef Donny O’Keefe had given the staff the rest of the day off and for once enjoyed the run of the empty kitchen.
Madison went to grab a breath of fresh air on the deck, sharp salt almost crackling in the breeze and the wide sky over the water.
She turned, and Cameron was there. They had not been alone since Whatcom County.
“One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you, Detective,” he said.
“Ask away.”
“That night, you were never going to let me get on that plane, were you?”
It felt like a lifetime ago. Madison had made her decision on the drive up to the field, and it was the reason she had not picked up Quinn’s call.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let them take you alive. If there was no other way . . .”
She didn’t need to finish her sentence.
“I knew you wouldn’t.” Cameron leaned on the rail.
“Why did you trust me?”
“Because you couldn’t come back and tell Nathan you’d lost me.”
So it was, Madison thought, and she was glad Cameron didn’t say any more about it.
In the deserted restaurant, the three of them around a table, Madison told them that Amy Sorensen’s computer had separated all the fingerprints from the scrap of paper, but none were Conrad Locke’s. It was one piece of evidence they were not going to have. She still believed that every contact leaves a trace, even if it’s not the trace one expected. In the end Locard always won, beyond computers and software and all their analysis.
“Vincent Foley,” she said, “carried the message that his brother had coached into him, word for word, even if he didn’t understand what the message was.”
“Vincent Foley,” Cameron repeated.
All their ghosts had names now. These men’s lives had grown and formed around a single event, like pearls around a piece of grit, and Madison felt that the very air in their world had changed.
“When are you going back to work?” she asked Quinn.
“I’m not,” he replied. “The junior partners will take over and change the firm’s name. I was offered the position of Special Counsel to the US Attorney of Washington State, and I said yes.”
“You’re going back to being a prosecutor?”
The clock was going back twenty years, and the men’s friendship was about to test new boundaries.
Just then O’Keefe came back from the kitchen with drinks and coffee. “Since we don’t know when you gentlemen will be in the same neighborhood again, we should have our game now and let it see us through the long night.”
“I’m going to do some traveling,” Cameron explained to Madison.
“Business or pl
easure?” Madison said.
“Bit of both.”
California, Madison thought, and her eyes met Quinn’s. Those tests might come sooner than expected.
O’Keefe had already prepared the table and brought out the deck of cards.
“I don’t play,” Madison said.
“You might not, but you sure can,” Cameron said.
“How do you know?”
“Does it matter?”
A silver dollar appeared between the chef’s quick fingers. “Heads, you play. Tails, you don’t.”
“Stay and play, Detective,” Quinn said. “Just this once.”
Madison turned as the silver coin spun high up into the air.
Acknowledgments
Some of the locations in the story are fictitious because I’m reluctant to set murder and mayhem in a real house in a real street. Also, the various precincts and jurisdictions of the Seattle Police Department have been slightly adjusted.
There’s a wonderful website called www.lostairports.com and I have spent quite a lot of time there working out where to land a small plane in North Eastern Washington.
Some people have made this adventure possible and I’d like to thank . . .
My family in Italy for all their amazing cheerleading and tireless PR.
Corinna, Francesca and Claudia Giambanco for sisterly support across various oceans.
Sheyla Ravan for good thoughts and the memory of her arepas.
Kezia Martin and Anita Phillips, who read each chapter as I wrote it, and gave me the occasional elbow in the ribs if I was taking too long.
Clair Chamberlain for wisdom and margaritas when they were needed.
The Berglund family in Seattle for taking us into their hearts and their home.
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