The Gift of the Darkness

The Gift
of
Darkness

New York • London

© 2013 by Valentina Giambanco

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2014

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e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-847-2

Cover design © Ervin Serrano

Cover photo © Bill Hinton Photography

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercus.com

For Claudio Giambanco and Giulio Cardi, my father and my grandfather

Last night

Darkness. The waves roared and crashed against the pebble beach. It was the loudest sound James Sinclair had ever heard, and it filled his whole body as if poured into him.

He couldn't remember waking up and walking across the lawn and down to the pier. A cold wind brushed his face, and something hot and dry started to spread through his lungs. He panicked and tried to wake up; instead he tasted blood and heard himself cry out: the bed he lay on, the blindfold, the wire around his neck and hands. He thought of his children; he thought of his wife.

Chapter 1

On a good night you could smell the sea from way up on University Hill. Alice Madison rolled down her window a couple of inches and sniffed the air. The night was cold, and December mist hung low and damp between the houses and the naked trees. Christmas was two weeks away, and the students who could afford to live on that side of the hill had already left for the holidays, gone back to homes all over Washington State.

The clock on the dashboard read 4:15 a.m. Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, a dark shape sitting next to her, had put the seal on the evening hours before.

“After all the coffee has been drunk and all the talk has been talked, stakeouts are just long stretches of time with little to do, for people who'd like to be doing something else, somewhere else, in somebody else's company.”

It was a pretty fair description, she thought.

Her breath was vapor on the pane. It was a choice between being cold and being reminded of other men's hours of boredom and sweat. She'd rather be cold.

Brown turned around to look at the other end of the street, and she caught a whiff of aftershave, cool and not unpleasant. Madison knew
that they had been sent out there with next to zero chances; Brown was not a happy man.

Gary Stevens—white male, twenty-three, no priors—was the hot favorite for the murder of a nineteen-year-old student from the campus. Handcuffed to a radiator, Janice Hiller had been sitting up with her back to the wall when the police found her, dead.

The day she had joined Seattle Homicide, four weeks earlier, Alice Madison had visited her grandparents' grave in a cemetery near Burien. She'd put a bunch of white roses by the headstone and stood there alone. In their heart they would know, wherever they were, that she was who she was because of them, and their love was a blessing she carried like gold, against her skin and out of sight. That night Madison had gone home, fixed herself dinner—nothing frozen, nothing canned—and slept for ten hours straight.

Brown had since been neither cold nor unhelpful, just detached. He was as good a cop as they came, better than most. They would never be friends—that much she had already guessed—yet she would trust him with her own life any day. Maybe that was enough.

Brown and Madison had not stopped to discuss the nature of evil when they saw the ring of seared flesh around Janice Hiller's wrist, the radiator heating up the metal of the handcuff at regular intervals; they just got busy trying to spare Stevens's next victim, if there was to be one, working steadily and fast to keep another innocent out of the path of a hurricane.

At the other end of the street two men in a dark Ford sedan were trying to keep each other awake, long out of coffee and dirty jokes. Given Brown's reticence, Madison would much rather have spent the evening in their company: Detectives Spencer and Dunne had been partners for three years, knew each other from the Academy, and worked well together. They were an odd couple. Spencer was second-generation Japanese, married with three kids and a degree in criminology from night school. Dunne, on the other hand, was Irish red, had put himself through college on a football scholarship, and dated women whose short skirts were part of the mythology of the precinct. They clearly knew each other's thoughts and could anticipate each other's actions.

Alice Madison sat and waited; she hoped she wouldn't need that much from Brown or anybody else. Still, this was where she was, and the rest mattered little when all she had to do was stare into the darkness ahead.

Brown had been right about the essential nature of stakeouts, and yet Madison suspected that a part of her actually looked forward to the quiet waiting before the target appeared, when everything in the world stilled and there was nothing but the trap and the chase.

The Police Academy had taught her much, except what it felt like to run full tilt after a human being who meant to do some serious harm—that she would have to learn on the street. Detective Madison settled into the worn leather seat. Spencer and Dunne might have been better company, but tonight she was exactly where she needed to be.

The wind was blowing hard now; only a few blocks away the sea rose and fell, spraying the deserted piers, shaping puddles of black seawater. Stevens would not come home tonight. He had probably already left the state, changed his name, and started all over at some other campus. Madison did not dwell on that thought—she was still at a stage where she could remember every single red name on the Homicide board, and those gone from red to black, the all-important clearance rate.

“Good morning, Seattle, it's a balmy thirty degrees outside. And the time is . . .” Dunne's voice croaked from the walkie-talkie.

Brown picked it up from in between their seats. “I make it about 4:15 a.m.”

“Same here. How long do you want us to stick around?”

“It's late enough.” Brown sighed. “That's it, gentlemen—let's hit the road.”

Madison felt a twinge of disappointment. Even if they had gone out with low expectations, turning away wasn't any sweeter.

“I don't mind hanging around a little longer,” she said.

“There'll be other nights.”

“Not for Stevens.”

“Stevens is gone,” Brown said, echoing her earlier thought.

“He might not stay gone.”

“Us waiting here—it'll make him come back?”

“Probably not.”

“But—”

“It makes me feel better, to be doing something . . .” she said.

Brown turned to Madison. In the half-light her gaze moved over the shadows in the street as if to conjure up their man.

“That and five bucks will get me a cup of coffee, I know,” she said.

“There'll be other nights,” Brown repeated.

Dunne's voice came back. “There's a twenty-four-hour place two streets away. We can meet up there.”

“All right. We'll follow you.” Brown put the engine into gear, and the car moved softly away. The street was left just as it had been found hours earlier.

A couple in their late twenties were wandering down the aisles of the Night & Day. They looked as if they had been partying somewhere—they were a little giggly but not really drunk. They couldn't have been that much younger than Alice was.

Dunne had headed directly for coffee and donuts, Spencer for mineral water, and Brown for a Diet Coke. They didn't say a word to one another; their hours in a car had become real as they stepped into the convenience store. Dunne stretched and yawned.

Madison picked up a carton of milk and drifted by the video rental shelf. It held mostly action and horror pictures with a few Disneys thrown in for the family. She had been on a diet of Billy Wilder for the last few weeks. Coming home after the graveyard shift, she had fallen asleep on the living room sofa listening to Josephine and Daphne. It took her mind off things, because sometimes her mind was not a pleasant place to be. She paid and went to wait outside.

Madison leaned against the unmarked car and drank the milk. It was still misty; maybe the morning light would get rid of it. The breeze from the sea was much stronger now and brought the lone call of a foghorn. She hugged her heavy mountain jacket and thought
about all the things that she wanted to cram into the next twenty-four hours, and that was when the girl came out of the mist.

Madison noticed her because she looked so young and out of place with her denim jacket and lightweight pants.
She must be freezing.
Madison kept looking—the kid might need help. Her hair was baby blond and cut short. She looked, maybe, fourteen, just about right for a runaway, small backpack included. She wore pink lipstick and heavy eyeliner, her cheeks flushed with the cold.

Leaning against the car in her jacket and with a baseball cap on, Madison didn't look the obvious cop, which was good—she didn't want to spook the kid. Now she could see the dark shadows under the girl's eyes.

“Hey.”

Her voice broke the girl's step; she turned toward her and nodded slightly. Madison gave her a half smile so that the girl wouldn't think she was some kind of creep, at once realizing that was exactly what she looked like. Experience told her that the kid was probably sleeping rough, eating not nearly enough, and possibly nursing the beginning of some respiratory infection.

The girl paused, hands deep in her pockets, and then with two strides was up the steps and into the store. She was traveling light, Madison had noticed; the small bag on her shoulders couldn't hold much. But then there was the thing in the right-hand pocket of her jacket, the thing her hand had been clutching under the fabric—she had seen it as the kid was turning away. It had been a cold, sad waste of a night, and it was getting worse: what Madison had seen looked like the butt of a gun. She was up the steps and behind the girl in a heartbeat.

The kid was ten feet in front of her, looking at row after row of candy bars, her head swaying slowly from side to side as she took in the array.

Brown was standing by the cashier and about to pay, four, maybe five, feet to her right; Spencer and Dunne were at the back of the store. The young couple had piled up their basket with boxes and
cartons and were coming toward the cashier. Their chatter had died out, and the only sound was the hum from the neon lights and the fridge.

In one movement Madison opened her jacket and unhooked the small leather strap that secured her gun to the holster on her right hip. It wasn't a good time to remember that the majority of Homicide detectives never even had to draw the damn thing. She took one step toward Brown and touched his shoulder, her gaze never leaving the girl. She nodded toward the kid and made a gun with her fingers. Brown raised his eyebrows and unhooked the strap on his holster.

The hand in the pocket of the jacket was clammy, and Rose didn't like it, but she didn't want to take it out and wipe it against the side of her pants—that would have been even worse. She hated the feel of the weight of the metal; it dragged her pocket down on that side. The hand clenched and unclenched around the butt of the gun as her eyes swept over Hershey bars, Milky Ways, Reese's. Too many names.

The couple put their basket on the counter, and a likely underpaid and overworked clerk started to ring up the items. Madison went up behind the pair, her voice so soft, she could hardly hear it herself.

“Police. Leave the store.”

“What—” The young man opened his mouth and closed it when he saw the flash of the badge on the inside of her jacket.

“Now. Do not look around. Go.”

Mercifully, they did as they were told, but not without shooting a glance over their shoulders.

The clerk wasn't as accommodating.

“What is this—?”

The girl turned around, gun held with both hands at eye level.

“Nobody move.” Her voice was shaky but clear, and the clerk dove under the counter.

The girl faced Brown and Madison, the gun moving in jerks between one and the other. Spencer and Dunne had disappeared behind the racks. Madison knew as if she could see them that they both had their pieces out and were figuring out a way to reach the kid without getting anyone shot.

“You have our attention. What next?” Brown was calm and in control. Some part of Madison could actually appreciate the man at work.

“Do as I say. Lie on the ground. Do it.” The girl's voice went up and cracked.

Madison could see her breathing getting more labored; they needed to calm her down pretty quickly, or she'd give herself a heart attack.

“Do it!” She was losing it fast.

“It's not worth it,” Brown said. “There's probably less than fifty bucks in the till. And you're pointing your piece at two cops.” He nodded toward Alice.

The girl's eyes went into “Oh, shit” mode for a fraction of a second. It was long enough for Brown.

“Put the gun on the ground, and run like hell,” he said.

The girl's mouth was hanging open, and she was clearly thinking very hard. The four detectives knew all too well that anybody could be a tough guy with a gun in his hand, but some lucky ones still hung on to their brains.

Madison struggled to keep her vision sharp, to still the internal hum of anxiety and clear her mind. There was the girl's hand, pointing the revolver at Brown's head, and the girl's arm and the girl's heart. She knew she could clear leather and shoot and drop the kid in less than three seconds. She saw the muzzle tremble in line with Brown's eyes, and the man did not flinch but looked straight back and still talked kindly. The girl wore glitter nail polish, and her ears were pierced, twice on the left side, once on the right. There was worn sheepskin lining the inside of her denim jacket, and under the neon light her pale skin was translucent.

“Stop talking!” the girl screamed, and Madison did not see her anymore but only the gun, and she steadied herself to act. In the space between heartbeats Madison felt everything that was good and true drain from her.

“It ain't worth it,” Brown said—to whom, Madison didn't know.

“All right. All right.” The girl was nodding. “I'm going to grab some things. You stay where you are.”

The moment had passed.

“Nobody's moving.” Brown smiled. “We're just three people talking.”

She reached behind her with her left hand and found the candy bars, grabbed a couple and stuffed them into her jacket, grabbed another couple and put them in the back pocket of her pants.

“I'm going to leave now. I'll leave the gun on the steps. Nobody follows me.”

“Wait a minute. Put the gun on the floor now. I give you my word, me and my partner here won't move for three minutes after you leave.”

“Yeah, right.”

“My word.” Brown didn't want her out on the street with a piece in her hand.

“Do as he says. Nobody wants trouble. Put the gun down, and get the hell out of here,” Madison said.

“What if I don't?”