The Gift of the Darkness (21 page)

Chapter 25

Alice Madison opened her eyes in the darkness. She was suddenly awake and aware; the time her clock projected onto the ceiling showed 5:43 a.m. The telephone by her bedside rang again, and she grabbed it.

“Hello.”

“Brown told me to call him
as soon as
. I tried him, but I couldn't get through. You're the next best thing.”

“Sorensen.”

“Good morning.”

“Give me a second.” Madison turned on the table lamp and swung her legs out of the bed. She was wearing only a T-shirt, and the instant chill woke her up a little—the heating had not clicked on yet. She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to oxygenate her brain into action.

“I'm here,” she said.

Amy Sorensen didn't believe in chitchat.

“The fibers are cashmere, the blood is human, and we have a five-point match for the fingerprint, which doesn't hold up in court, but, hey, it's the thought that counts.”

Madison was trying to keep up.

“Are you still there?” Sorensen didn't sound like she had just pulled a double shift with a fresh appendectomy scar under her coveralls.

“I think so.”

“Because this is where it gets good. The five-point match is to John Cameron.”

Madison wanted to write it down. Her notebook was in her coat pocket; the coat was on a chair in the living room. She walked fast.

“We're still waiting for the DNA results. Five points is way too few to mean squat in court—”

“I know, but it's still something.”

“Gee, you're an upbeat kind of gal, aren't you?”

Madison smiled as she scribbled in her book. “Cashmere?” she said.

“Black. At least he has good taste. Find me something I can match it to—a sweater or maybe a scarf.”

“I will. Thank you, Sorensen.”

“Okay, you pass it on to Brown. I'm off home now for a nap. I'll be back before lunchtime.”

There was no point in trying to go back to sleep. Madison put the coffee on; while she waited, she pulled on sweatpants and a heavy top. She took her mug out onto the patio, braving the early-morning frost and warming her hands around the coffee.

Without even a hint of daylight there was little to see, but Madison knew every tree and every bush, and she had missed being out there. It was so quiet. She hoped a little of that peace would last her through the day.

The human traffic of the main terminal of the Seattle-Tacoma airport flowed undisturbed around them. Madison and Brown were going over payments and ticket purchase dates when Brown's phone started beeping: a young patrol officer, Jerez, all of six months out of the Academy, had been canvassing cab drivers at King County Airport and had something they might want to hear. Madison felt a drop of adrenaline coming loose.

There was no scheduled passenger traffic at Boeing Field, but they still clocked an average of 833 aircraft operations per day between corporate and private planes and flying clubs.

“His right hand,” taxi driver George Malden had told Officer Jerez. “I remember the scars.”

Late Tuesday afternoon the cab driver had picked up a single man with one small piece of luggage. The photograph Officer Jerez had shown him didn't exactly ring a bell, but when he had mentioned the scars on the man's right hand, that was something Malden could swear to.

During the fast drive to King County Airport, Brown had called the precinct to get a sketch artist on standby.

Again, they showed Malden the photograph. Malden looked up. “If I tell you that the guy I saw is
like
this guy but different, you're going to think I'm a flake, aren't you?”

Brown shook his head with a brief smile. “We had this picture doctored with a computer; what we had was twenty years old.”

“Well, you got the eyes right. But the guy's leaner, his jaw a little different, and he had one of those little beards—a goatee. And the hair was kinda blond, but like peroxide, you know?”

“Let's go inside and sit down for a minute,” Brown said, and Madison felt her body tense. They had picked up the scent again.

Malden had dropped Cameron off at the Marriott Residence Inn on Fairview. A hotel.

Two things bothered Madison: why would Cameron need to go to a hotel, given that he had the house in Laurelhurst and probably another somewhere in King County? And the hand—it bothered her that, after seven dead bodies in four days, with all his caution and care for details, Cameron would not make sure the driver didn't see his one identifying characteristic.

He was coming back for Erroll Sanders, to finish off the work he'd started with the Sinclairs in the early hours of Sunday morning. He
should
have been wearing gloves. Maybe he didn't pack them; maybe the sun in LA was too warm and sweet, and he forgot.

Sure
. Madison filed those thoughts with another couple of unanswered questions that needled her from time to time.

The Marriott Residence Inn stands on the edge of Lake Union and does well with business travelers and the tourist trade. It has all the
amenities one is accustomed to in hotel chains, with identical rooms in muted pastels, but John Cameron did not avail himself of any of them. It took Brown and Madison just under an hour to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Cameron had not checked in on Tuesday evening. Not under his own name or Roger Kay's. In fact, no one at all of his description had checked in between Tuesday and Wednesday. Madison went through the computer printouts, and Brown handled the staff.

Cameron might have had a drink at the bar—the bartender couldn't swear either way—but that was that. Madison couldn't honestly say she was surprised. Disappointed, sure, but not exactly shocked.

They walked out of the hotel, just as Cameron must have done four days earlier. So, he arrives at the airport with his chartered plane, grabs a cab, and gets dropped off there. He doesn't register; he walks right back out. What next? Madison sniffed the breeze coming from the water, Lake Union, just across the road, dark and still.
Damn
. She turned to Brown. She knew it in her bones.

“He's got a boat.”

Brown held her eyes; he nodded. “Yeah. That's what Quinn was protecting.”

They stood there, Chandler's Cove stretching out before them, pier after pier, more boats than they could count in the damp, salty dusk.

“Let's take a walk,” Brown said.

A boat was bad news, and Madison was suddenly annoyed with herself for not having considered the possibility before. A boat in Seattle meant he could
go
anywhere and not
be
anywhere. On the water he was practically invisible. The numbers were unforgiving: in the Seattle King County area there were many thousands of licensed boats.

They had no solid proof yet of his boat ownership, but they knew as if they had seen him with their own eyes, walking out of the hotel, making sure the cab had gone, stepping lightly over to the pier where his boat was moored. It could have been anything—Chandler's Cove fuel dock could take up to sixty-five-footers, it was open twenty-four hours a day, and from Lake Union he could get into Lake Washington
or maybe out to Puget Sound and on to wherever. The journey to Vancouver Island, Canada, would have been really pretty.

Madison looked around; hardly anybody else was on the piers, and they were going to be short on witnesses. The Ford Explorer had been registered to a different name, Roger Kay—that was very likely standard operating procedure for Cameron, which meant the boat could be registered to a whole different identity. Keep them separate, keep them safe. He hadn't lasted that long without being careful. He probably had several well-maintained identities for separate purposes—driving license, boat, properties, airline tickets. Madison was deep in thought when she realized Brown was talking.

“Do you know anything about boats?”

“I have a kayak, if that counts.”

“Well, let's put it this way: you have to moor them, put in fuel, maintain them through nine months of rain. Just think of taking one of these forty-footers out, and you're already burning money.” Brown's gaze moved over the sleek sails and the heavier motor boats with their well-appointed cabins. “Cameron doesn't mess around; if he has a boat, he's got himself a nice piece of nautical engineering, and someone somewhere must have seen him on it. I don't care what he did to his hair.”

Madison put her hands in the pockets of her coat and looked up at the purple sky.

“We have eight square miles of water against eighty-four of land.”

Brown turned to her, about to say something, then changed his mind. The boats bobbed up and down, bumping gently against one another.

Back in the precinct, Madison opened the fridge in the rec room and examined its contents. She had promised herself many times that she would keep something in her desk or in their makeshift kitchenette for occasions such as this.

The fridge was nearly empty and could have done with a cleaning. The same carton of chicken soup had resided at the back of the second shelf since Madison had joined Homicide. Next to it, half a bagel
with something green in it that Madison could only pray was salad. Something yellow and sticky had spilled at the bottom—maybe a soft drink, maybe soup. Never mind OPR, she thought; the World Health Organization would shut them down in a nanosecond.

Andrew Dunne walked over in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. He stood next to her, and they both stared at the desolation. His red hair stuck out a little at the back, and he was pale under the freckles.

“I heard you got boat trouble,” he said.

“Yup.”

“I've got a buddy in the licensing office, if that helps.”

“Thanks, but it's just going to be a paper-cuts job.”

“Lucky you.”

“Anything from Sea-Tac?”

“No. Except Kelly was ticked off he wasn't with you at Boeing Field. He came right back and kinda yanked the cab driver away from the sketch artist.”

Nothing much Madison could say to that; she simply raised her eyebrows. That had been exactly why Brown had phoned in the news about the driver and not taken Kelly with them.

Dunne shut the fridge door with the tip of his index finger.

“It's meat-loaf night at Jimmy's.”

Jimmy's was a cop bar three blocks away; if they knew you and they weren't too busy, they delivered. Dunne had their number on speed dial. Twenty minutes later six Friday-night specials appeared.

Madison's first instinct was to pick up her carton and go back to her desk, where a small mountain of printouts from Sea-Tac airlines and the Washington State Board of Vessel Licensing were waiting. Instead, she sat on the edge of Spencer's desk and spent a few minutes not being antisocial. Kelly ignored her, Rosario read his paper, Dunne and Spencer talked about tattoos, and Brown sat quietly, picking at his food and going over the fax LAPD had sent them earlier.

Madison took a bite of meat loaf. It was glorious; her grandmother would have approved.

After a while she returned to her desk. The paperwork was arranged in neat piles. She was holding a cup of coffee; to make room for it, she picked up a file. It was her notes from the library, her research on the Hoh River kidnappings, and the background on Cameron, Sinclair, and Quinn. Madison opened the file and quickly scanned her own writing—four more dead since then.

The newspaper articles had the photographs of David Quinn's memorial service—the crowd picture and one of John Cameron Madison didn't remember. One arm was in a sling, and with the other hand, he was grabbing the camera off the neck of a photographer. The men and women around him hadn't noticed the intrusion, except for Nathan Quinn. The photographer's face was a flash of surprise, Cameron's pure hatred. The man, much taller and heavier than the boy, was stumbling back to get away. Cameron looked completely unafraid: something more powerful than his small body had washed over him.

Madison blinked. When she had moved the file, she had glanced at a page under it—another article she had cut out. Now she reached for it. It was the report on Andrew Riley's attack in the alley behind the bar—he who had been so cocky when he tried to take photos of the Sinclairs' bodies at the crime scene. She remembered how the detective had described him after the attack on him: the fear, the shock.

Madison blinked. Somewhere far outside her immediate attention, Brown was by the door with Spencer. She looked up at him, hearing nothing. Brown met her eyes, Spencer still talking to him. Madison looked down, in one hand Cameron's picture, in the other Riley's article. And the notion was there, clear and unavoidable and utterly compelling. Because one moment ago she didn't know, and now she did.

She looked up, and Brown held her eyes; he said something to Spencer, and Spencer left. Brown closed the door of their temporary office and leaned against it.

“Cameron attacked Riley,” she said, still stunned.

“Yes,” Brown replied simply.

“‘Yes'?”

He nodded.

“Because he had tried to take pictures of his dead friends.”

Madison paused. Everything she knew was being reshaped and renamed.

She lifted her hand. “Give me a minute.” Her eyes could not rest on anything. The Sinclair crime-scene report, the pictures, Nathan Quinn's interview notes, Sorensen's preliminary on the Explorer. Everything she had seen, everything she had done.

“Dammit!” Madison slapped the wall with the flat of her hand. She felt as if she could have punched a hole right through it easily enough, but when she turned to Brown, her voice was controlled and her anger in check.

“You
knew
?”

“Yes.”

“And you chose not to share that thought with me?”

“If I told you, it would have been worth nothing to you. I trusted that you would get there. If we have to sell this to Fynn or anybody else, I can't be worrying that you only half believe it yourself. You had to see it with your own eyes.”