The Gift of the Darkness (12 page)

For less than a second he balanced curiosity against caution, head cocked like a bird's as he listened to the small sounds from the living room. Then he started moving. See him, not see him—he honestly didn't care one way or the other. His work had been interrupted, and he was not in a forgiving mood.

Madison looked around. The Sinclairs had lived well but not extravagantly. There were two cars in the garage and the usual trappings of an affluent lifestyle scattered around the house, the furniture mostly modern with some exquisite antique pieces. It all added up to a comfortable life, and yet it didn't answer Madison's question: why would James Sinclair need to steal money from the one person he shouldn't mess with? How could he be that dumb?

Gambling debts nobody knew about, blackmail, a woman on the side—it was all possible. Madison knelt in front of a low shelf of DVDs.

The films were mostly Disney classics for children, with a few Scorseses and Spielbergs. All pretty standard stuff. Then, bingo.
Christmas concert and party
. The handwriting was neat and clear. Home movies. She reached for the disk, put it in the player, and pressed Play.

A school auditorium, Christmas decorations hanging from the walls. A stage with empty chairs.

“Here they are,” a male voice said.

“I see him,” a female voice behind the camera responded.

Anne Sinclair pointed the camera at a group of children who trooped out from the wings and took their seats with their instruments.

“Where is he?” A boy's voice. A rustle of clothes close to the mike.

Without seeing it, Madison imagined James Sinclair lifting one of the boys onto his shoulders so that he could see his brother play. The music started. Madison smiled in spite of herself: teachers never changed. It was Pachelbel's Canon.

The first bars would have covered Cameron's steps on the stairs, had he made any sound. He came halfway down and paused; the house was dark except for a table lamp in the living room.

In the pool of light, a woman sat with her back to him, the television throwing blue shadows onto the walls.

Cameron saw her profile against the screen as she turned to pick up the remote. A black-and-white photograph taken by a bored reporter was enough for him to recognize Alice Madison as the detective who had marched the fake FedEx man out of the crime scene. Whatever
Detective Madison was looking for, she was looking for it in a Christmas recital.

He'd rather have found her going through the bookshelves and emptying drawers; instead, she sat still watching the DVD. Cameron watched her and the screen in front of her. She didn't move, and neither did he.

The music was awkward and frail, John Sinclair's face half revealed by the recorder. Madison continued to watch.

The piece came to its end, and another one started; this time it was Bach's “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.” Sometimes the shot widened to show the whole stage, but mostly it stayed on the Sinclair boy.

When the audience started clapping, Madison paused the video. She got up and went to the kitchen. It was off the living room to the right.

Cameron heard cupboards being opened and a tap turned on. Had he been a sensible man, he would have left then, gone out a window, and crossed the back lawn in seconds. But John Cameron didn't feel sensible at that point of the evening. He leaned back against the banister and crossed his arms: time was all he has. To his immense relief, he felt nothing at all.

Madison drank a glass of water from the tap, refilled it, and drank another. Those videos were all that there would ever be of the Sinclairs on this earth.

After she washed and dried the highball glass, she put it back and sat down with the video again. She pressed Play. The film continued into the after-performance party: children ran around, and parents stood in groups and chatted. James Sinclair wore a navy blue shirt and jeans; he had an easy smile and looked nothing like the dead man Madison had seen upstairs. She was glad there wasn't any more music.

Madison ignored the boys and concentrated on the parents: when the husband took over the camera, she saw that Anne Sinclair was tall with an angular face and intelligent eyes. She wore no jewelry that Madison could see aside from her wedding band.

Madison played the video till the end. She puffed her cheeks and exhaled slowly and went on to the next. There were at least a dozen. She ran through a birthday party with the Fast-Forward button pressed and wished that she could make herself a cup of coffee. Strangely enough, that seemed inappropriate.

She was changing disks when her phone rang. It startled her, and she automatically looked at her watch.

“You're still there.” It was Brown.

“I'm going through the home movies.”

“Anything good?”

“A lot of regular stuff. Recitals, birthday parties.”

“No jackpot yet?”

“No. I'm going to watch another couple of films, and then I'll clock off.”

“Half day.”

“You got that right.” She smiled. “Brown . . .”

“Yes.”

It sounded as if he was in his car.

“Why would he need $25,000? I'm looking around here, and I see nothing that he couldn't already afford on his salary.”

“Which, as it happens, was far higher than either yours or mine.”

“Exactly. So?”

Cameron wished he could hear the whole conversation and not just Madison's half. It was certainly a very interesting subject. He would have been able to give them one or two illuminating facts, but this was neither the time nor the place.

Suddenly, Madison stood up and stretched. Cameron's eyes followed her every movement.

“I don't know,” Brown said.

“Well, we'd better find out.”

“We'll talk to the bank in the morning.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Madison slipped a new disk into the video; it was the younger child's birthday—David. His seventh, his last. She let it run at normal speed, listening to the now-familiar voices and keeping an eye on it
while she looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. It was the normal assortment of formal occasions and candid shots. A nice group wedding picture taken at the reception. Her eyes found Nathan Quinn, paused for a second, and moved on. She scanned all the faces. No John Cameron.

David Sinclair's voice screamed in delight from the television. His mother laughed.

“What do you say, David?” she said.

“Thank you, Uncle Jack.”

Madison froze. Cameron exhaled slowly. Madison backed up a few seconds and pressed Play.

The family was inside the house. A big table was covered in paper plates and decorations and discarded wrapping paper, flashes from other cameras. Madison found the mother, the father, the elder brother, the birthday boy. Quinn was there too, a dozen other children of roughly the same age, and more unidentified adults. Once she had eliminated the women, there were only six unknown men. Two were too old, one was Japanese, three were just plain wrong.

“Thank you, Uncle Jack,” David said, looking at the camera.

Damn, he's shooting the film.

She went back to the beginning and watched every last frame. She did that three times and got absolutely nowhere. “Uncle Jack” was never on camera, and if he had spoken at all, which at some point he must have, he had done so away from the mike. There was no way to identify his voice in that mess of sounds.

Madison freeze-framed the shot of the child looking at the camera. She drummed her fingers on the remote. To be so close was maddening.

John Cameron was also looking at the screen, his eyes narrowed at the memory of that day. For a moment he didn't even notice Madison getting up.

Madison opened the cupboard doors under the bookcase, closed them, opened the next ones. No good. She opened the last set of doors: on the bottom shelf, a small pile of photographs. They were in the fourth envelope: David Sinclair's birthday stills.

John Cameron took a step down on the staircase.

Madison stood under the lamp. She looked at each picture intently for a few seconds and then put it aside. She was halfway through the pack when she found it. John Cameron was not in the picture, but his reflection was, caught in the glass of the garden door: a dark-haired man holding a camera against a blue sky.

“Hello, Jack,” Madison said quietly.

In the near-darkness, Cameron's right hand twitched.

She held the photo under the light; it was like looking at someone underwater. A loud knock on the front door brought her back. Madison turned and walked out of the living room, through the hall, and to the front door. She didn't look back or turn on any lights. She opened the door, and Officer McDowell was stomping his feet on the ground to get some circulation going.

“Just wanted to say we're being relieved.”

There was another patrol car parked next to theirs; a couple of uniformed officers looked rosy-cheeked and rested at the beginning of their shift.

“Thanks for helping me with the keys.”

“I told the guys you're still in here.”

Madison glanced at the relief shift; they nodded, but she could see they were mildly suspicious of anybody who chose to be there at 2:00 a.m.

Hell, I'd be suspicious myself,
she thought, and she closed the door. She was still holding the photograph, and, for the first time that night, she was completely alone in the house.

Madison went through the other packs and found nothing. She put them back as she had found them and finally decided that she was done for the day.

When she got home, she could still smell the crime scene in her hair. She showered and shampooed, put on red flannel pajamas, and climbed into bed.

Out of Three Oaks heading north, John Cameron drove fast with the windows rolled down.

Chapter 18

Fred Tully had barely left the offices of the
Star
in the last twenty-four hours. He'd gone home to change his clothes and managed a one-hour nap on the sofa. In spite of that, he hadn't felt so good in ages.

It was 4:00 a.m., and he was sitting at his desk, in his hands a proof of the front page that was about to hit the newsstands. He smiled.

The intern had dropped the envelope on his desk at around 8:00 p.m.

“Did you see who brought this?”

The kid just raised his eyebrows.

In the last thirty-six hours, since the identities of the victims had been made public, a steady stream of visitors had come to Lincoln Elementary in Three Oaks, the school attended by John and David Sinclair. It started with a couple of bunches of flowers by the main gates, brought by mothers who had known the boys. It had since become a shrine with candles, small gifts, and messages taped to the flowers.

KING and KOMO-TV reporters used it as a background when they shot their updates, and a couple of volunteers from the school made sure the children were careful with the candles' flames near the cards and the soft toys.

Harry Salinger got out of the van with the camera already on his shoulder. The van, white with Oregon plates, had darkened windows and the letters KTVX printed on its side.

Harry Salinger was six foot one, built for high jumps rather than weight-lifting. He'd been wearing his sandy hair in a buzz cut ever since he started losing it in his early twenties. Today, under timid rain, he wore a heavily lined jacket and a fleece cap with flaps that covered his ears.

Salinger moved through the group of reporters as if he belonged with them. He shot a few minutes of the makeshift shrine and looked suitably somber as he did so. In truth, being around children made him uncomfortable, and he left as soon as he could.

As he turned to go, a mother holding a toddler bumped into him. She apologized with a sad smile and went on her way.

Salinger reached his van, unlocked the door, and climbed in. He slid the door shut behind him and pulled off his hat. Inside, the van smelled clean: Salinger had laid a new carpet in it only the previous week.

Crowds usually unnerved him—the voices, the physical contact. The camera had given him a safe distance from which to observe and record without getting caught up in the unpleasantness of all that human proximity.

The shrine was lovely; he was glad he got a few shots of it. He especially liked the muted colors of the cards and the way the candles looked blurred in the viewfinder.

He backed out of his parking spot and drove off. He found KEZX on 1150-AM and waited for the news to come on. When it did, he knew what the first item would be. In his eyes, as colorless as rainwater, a light flickered briefly. He got onto Highway 99 and headed north, past Greenwood and Mountlake Terrace. He came off 99 in Lynnwood.

His house sat on a drive two hundred yards back from the road, behind a group of firs bunched together in the middle of a field. He had no neighbors in the immediate vicinity, and the house was closer to Everett than Seattle.

He parked the van in the garage, next to his Accord. The house had been built in the 1920s, with parts added to it as it became necessary:
three small bedrooms upstairs and living room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor.

Salinger usually ate in the kitchen, and no one had sat on the upholstered sofa since his grandparents' notary, who had given him papers to sign and slapped him on the shoulder. Salinger had said all the right words, and the man was out of the house quickly.
His
house now.

Salinger had closed the door behind him and looked at the spot on his blazer where the notary had touched him; he rubbed it lightly. Then he had opened all the windows to get rid of the man's cologne.

The garage could barely accommodate two vehicles, but Salinger was as careful in his driving as in everything he did.

There was no communicating door into the house; he locked the garage with a padlock and walked to the small porch that led to the entrance. The house had been painted white years before, and it would soon need seeing to again; he put it in a mental checklist of “to do's” for the new year and then realized that, all being well, he wouldn't be there to do it anyway, and he smiled. It was an immense relief to know that things were on their way, and soon all this would be behind him.

Salinger lived alone. He still loved the feeling of walking into his own home, shutting out the distant sound of traffic, and being almost absorbed by the complete silence. Others might have found it unsettling, but for a man who had been in the places he had been, it was more than his heart had ever dared to wish. He would eat a bite while he worked, he thought.

He made himself a ham sandwich, pink and white, wrapped the end in a triangle of wax paper, and took it downstairs, where he did his work.

The basement was vast and ran the length and breadth of the house, completely open. He used a quarter for storage and the rest he'd swept clean, extra lights hung from the beams and spotlights clipped to the plain wooden shelves on the brick walls. Dozens of pencil sketches were tacked up, some floor plans and others showing the development of a metal and glass object. Salinger has never taken any art class but his efforts would be first puzzling and then shocking to any visitor.

Metalwork and welding tools were lined up on a bench in a corner, and two large tables, next to each other, took up most of the space in
the middle. On each table sat three monitors, the kind that came with a video player/recorder. Next to a row of pencils, a seashell caught his eye for a moment, its delicate spiral no bigger than his fingernail.

He bent down by the table on the left and found a switch among the many cables and wires: two monitors came to life, the sound muted. Morning television.

His eyes drifted from one to the next, his skin prickling. Cooking shows, talk shows, quiz shows. It was a language he did not speak from a world he did not understand. He checked his watch: the news would be on soon.

On a smaller table at the side he had set up a sound system; he pressed a couple of keys, and a crackling sound came through the speakers.

It was definitely a homemade job, nothing high-tech, nothing that anybody with time on their hands couldn't put together. Still, Salinger was proud of it. He fast-forwarded until the numbers on the counter told him that he was where he wanted to be, then he let it play. Alice Madison's voice filled the basement.

“He's blindfolded with a piece of black velvet. Not torn, cut. On the forehead, there is a sign like a cross. Drawn in blood. He's bound with . . . looks like leather. Thin strip. Around his neck, hands, and feet. Hands are tied behind his back. Makes it really difficult to move if you're lying down on them.”

A pause.

The screen flickered on the third monitor, and when the picture came into focus, it was the Sinclairs' bedroom. In the grainy darkness, a figure moved before the lens. Behind it, on the bed, three bodies were visible, completely still; the fourth body, closest to the camera, was struggling, thrashing around, almost coming off the bed in an effort to break free.

Salinger turned down the volume; the muffled sounds from under the blindfold were a distraction.

“Deep red ligature marks where he's been tied. Some bruising. He put up a fight.”

Harry Salinger narrowed his eyes as he looked at the screen and started on his sandwich. He had listened to the recording many times.
In fact, he had transferred the whole thing onto a cassette so that he could listen to it anywhere in his house, on an old Walkman he could hook onto his belt.

When he had left a tiny voice-activated microphone at the crime scene, one he could easily monitor from the crowd of reporters, it had been a purely functional decision. He had wanted to have an idea of what the police were talking about, their first impressions of the case, his work. He knew part of it was vanity—he had to admit that much. However, he honestly needed that little advantage, and that was all.

He had seen Alice Madison drag out the photographer in a FedEx uniform. Most of the reporters had instantly pointed their cameras at Andrew Riley, but not Harry; he had followed the detective down the drive, caught her look at the crowd, and stayed on her until she went back inside the house, which he now knew as well as his own.

That first night, after his work in the basement was done, for hours he had walked from room to room in headphones.

“Contact wound to the head. You can see the tattooing. The shooter was less than two feet away. All of them, except the father. Just one shot. No bruises, no signs of struggle.”
Salinger closed his eyes, and each word revealed its true color, a blaze of scarlet and blue that burned right through him. Best of all, though, something he would never have expected: Alice Madison's voice was indigo. In the deep hollow of his house, it was the only human sound.