The Gift of the Darkness (26 page)

“I'm Alice Madison.”

“You're Kevin's partner.”

“Yes.”

“Ellen McCormick, his sister.”

“How is he?”

“Stable, but things would look better if he was breathing on his own.”

Ellen McCormick was in her late forties and wore a white T-shirt under a smart navy suit. Her manner was direct, and her answer had been plain. “I'm a doctor,” she continued. “Which right now is a blessing and a curse.”

“I understand.”

“I was going to get a cup of coffee. Will you join me?”

“Sure.”

Ellen McCormick turned to the uniformed officer. “I'll be back in five minutes.”

“Nobody's going in, ma'am.”

Which was exactly what Madison wanted to do, and she sensed Brown's sister knew that. She was a couple of inches taller and a good many years younger than Ellen, but there was a grim determination there that Madison was familiar with. They rode in the elevator together, and once they were alone, the woman spoke. “You were ambushed.”

“Yes. Did Lieutenant Fynn give you the details?”

“Yes.” She quickly scanned Madison's injuries.

“How long have you worked Homicide?”

“Not long. Why do you ask?”

“You're younger than I expected. I'm trying to work out whether you have the experience to go after the shooter.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

There was darkness under Ellen McCormick's eyes and cold anger in her voice.

“Your boss told me that everybody is looking for this man and he will be caught. Once, many years ago, Kevin's partner was shot and killed in an attempted robbery. The shooter escaped, but my brother found him three days later. He did not touch him, he did not put a finger on him, and the son of a bitch is still upstate, as far as I know.
I don't care what you do to him after you find him—what I want to know is that you won't stop until you do. Because that's what my brother would have done for you.”

“I know,” Madison said.

“I want you to see to it yourself that whatever needs to be done will be done. Can you promise me that?”

Madison nodded.

“You hadn't worked with him long, right?”

“Long enough to know what kind of man he is.”

Ellen smiled. “Did he give you a hard time?”

Madison smiled; then the smile went away. “I will find the shooter.”

The woman exhaled slowly. “Would you like to go see Kevin?”

Madison pushed the door very gently and walked in. Without a sound it swung shut behind her. Ellen McCormick had stayed outside.

There were monitors and IVs and the rhythmic hiss of the machine that was breathing for him, but at the center of it all Brown lay in the bed as if he were asleep.

She approached slowly and kept a respectful distance. He was still Brown, and their relationship, with its structure and boundaries, had not changed in the last twenty-four hours.

The only color in him was the pale ginger hair visible through the straps of the respirator.

It felt odd to stand there, knowing how private and somewhat formal he was; he would have hated the notion of people coming in and seeing him like this.

Madison dug her hands deep into the pockets of her blazer. She hadn't taken any painkillers; then again, if there was a pill for what she was feeling, she didn't know about it.

She started talking because it justified her being there, her words punctuated by the rush of oxygen through the machine.

“I spoke with Kamen this morning. He was very helpful—he gave me some ideas, things to look into. The boss is letting me do this quietly and carefully, but, as you thought he would, he's not giving up Cameron. I have to give him something, and it'd better be good.”

She took one step toward him.

“Spencer is the primary. I'm not supposed to tell him anything, and I don't know if I can. He should be given the chance to make up his own mind, you know. Jesus, I wish I understood why all this happened.”

His glasses were on the bedside table next to an upturned cup and a beaker of water. There was a day's growth of beard on his cheeks, darker than his hair, speckled with gray.

“They matched the casings to the Sinclairs',” she continued. “It was the same weapon. The shooter used the .22 he used on the kids. I'm going to pick up the records you requested from the Academy, and I'll chase Sorensen.”

She was close enough to touch him now. She stood there quietly; she didn't need to make any promises, and there was nothing she could say he didn't already know. For a moment, she laid her good hand next to his on the white sheet.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she said.

Brown's sister was talking to a doctor on the other side of the ICU reception lounge; their eyes met. As the elevator's doors closed, Ellen McCormick's gaze never left her.

There were taxis waiting at the hospital's main entrance. Madison got into one and gave the man the precinct's address. They had been on the road for a couple of minutes when she startled the driver.

“Stop the car.”

“What—”

“Would you mind stopping the car?”

“What's up?”

“Now, please.”

The driver pulled over. Madison got out and threw up. Cars sped past beside them. She shivered, and her guts ached.

“I think I should take you back to the hospital. It doesn't look like you were ready to leave yet, miss.”

“I'm sorry about that. I'll be all right in a second,” she said with her head still down, waiting for the waves of nausea to stop.

As she straightened up, the driver saw the leather holster and her weapon in it.

“You're the cop on TV.” He was leaning on his car door with his arms crossed as if they had stopped to look at the view. “You ought to get some time off—you don't look so good.”

“Yes, well, thank you.”

When they got to her destination, she gave him a big tip for almost throwing up in his cab.

Madison spent less than five minutes inside the precinct. She got her mail from the pigeonhole: two letters reminding her of court appearances in the next few weeks and one large envelope addressed to Brown—with luck, the Academy records he had requested.

Madison didn't have a bag with her, so she folded the larger envelope around the smaller ones and left. Not a great moment for the sanctity of the postal service, but she didn't think twice about it—Brown would have kicked the whole thing off the wall, had it been necessary.

She walked a few blocks and felt her stomach settle a little. She found a coffee shop as it was beginning to rain. Tiredness had started to fray her concentration: caffeine would help, at least for a while. She sat on a stool by the window; the pane steamed up, and she took a couple of sips. The shop was busy with downtown shoppers and tourists; nobody paid any attention to her.

Madison tore open the flap of Brown's envelope. There it was: a list of names going back years. It did not give details; the specifics of the rejections were confidential. Still, if any of those names had even the slightest connection to Cameron, it was well worth pursuing.

Madison scanned the list; there must have been over two hundred names. She rolled her eyes—a needle in a haystack would have looked pretty good at that point.

She tried to lift the cup with her right hand, and the wrist wouldn't work. Her left would have to get busy, Madison thought, stretching it wide and closing it into a fist. There was something she must do, the sooner the better.

She finished her coffee and walked out, the startling chill finding every ache and pain in her body. Madison's thoughts were already elsewhere, though, and she moved fast through the crowd with her head down.

Underground, surrounded by near-darkness, her left hand held out before her, Alice Madison put three quick shots into the target provided by the firing range. She focused on the concentric circles that had taught her to shoot: the innermost was the center of a man's chest; go up a foot and a half, and you're aiming for the head.

The air coming from the ventilation system was cool, the same temperature all year round, the same low lighting between the cubicles. Nobody on her left, nobody on her right. Madison liked to do her shooting alone. It was a place where she had always found it easy to get out of herself, to clear her mind and let her hands and eyes do the work.

She slowly squeezed the trigger, her front sight clear, her rear sight and the target appropriately blurred. The kick traveled back up her arm like an electric crackle. She lowered the .45 and took off the goggles. The grouping was good but not good enough. She wriggled the fingers almost covered by the splint, passed the weapon into her right hand, and started to extend the arm in front of her. The pain was not unbearable, but there was no way she would even hit the target that way.

She breathed deeply, left arm extended, and squeezed on the exhale. And again. And again.

The man had been tall. Madison remembered his voice in the deserted street as she was getting out of the car with Brown. Officer Mason, he had said. Just over six foot. Wiry, with a plain face. Hair, Madison couldn't remember—he had been wearing a cap. Would she recognize him if she saw him again?

Breathe in and exhale and shoot. Lower the weapon, and do it over.

Madison had reported the ambush in detail but had not spent much time with the memory of it herself. It almost made her smile that she had chosen to go back to it now, as she emptied her weapon
into the target.
I must remember this for the counseling session,
she thought. She would be obliged to attend one before returning to duty—it was a rule.

Madison pressed the switch to collect the target and replace it with a new one. It came to her, what was left of it, and she put it aside. She pressed the switch again, and a blank target slid down the line back into position forty feet away. Then she reloaded, resting the .45 against the palm of her right hand.

The first shot felt as good as the jolt through her arm after swinging a baseball bat, when the wood makes contact with the ball. It tore a neat hole at the center of the target. Madison looked at it. Pretty good by anybody's standards. Still, a day late and a dollar short, her grandfather used to say.

It would be difficult to identify the man in a lineup, true, but there was something she knew for sure. They had not been looking at Cameron: the plain face with the small mouth and the straight nose was not John Cameron's.

Ballistics might very well say that the .22 used against Brown had shot three members of the Sinclair family—she couldn't argue with that—but eyewitness testimony was a whole different ball game. She couldn't identify Cameron as the shooter—in fact, she could positively exonerate him. It was definitely worth a conversation with Spencer.

Lieutenant Fynn would be unhappy, of course. He had asked her to keep her thoughts to herself, try not to give Quinn ammunition to contest the integrity of the warrant, and she had lasted less than twenty-four hours.

Madison took off the spent target, the center of it now almost nonexistent, and put a new one in place.

Her body remembered the fight, sudden and quick. They prepare you for the worst in training; what they cannot do is give you a sense of the fear and the shock of being physically attacked. Had she been afraid?
Goddammit, yes
, Madison thought. Had it stopped her thinking and reacting? Madison lowered the .45.
I can ask Brown the next time I pop in to see him
.

By the time she was done, there was a small pile of spent targets at her side, and her left hand was shaking with fatigue. Madison took off her earphones and goggles and turned to find J. B. Norton, her gunnery instructor, leaning against the wall behind her. He was a welcome sight—a quiet man who looked like a librarian and had taught generation after generation of law enforcement officers.

“J. B.”

“They told me you were down here, and I thought I'd bring you a present.” He threw it, and she caught it—a squeeze ball to strengthen her left hand.

Madison smiled. “Thank you. I need it.”

He didn't ask her how it had gone—he picked up the target sheets and examined them. He considered the progression from the first to the last.

“We don't see you around here as often anymore,” he said without looking at her.

“I know. I'm sorry. The last few weeks have been pretty full.”

“Look, Madison, all I wanted to say is that you can shoot if you have to, right-handed or not.” He picked up the last target with two fingers; the inside circle was all but blown out. “And you've got good judgment—not like some of the cowboys who pass through here. Have you ever aimed your piece at another human being and pulled the trigger?”

“No.”

“A lot of cops never do, but you never know.” His glasses glinted in the half light. “If you have to, aim for the middle of the chest. It will bring a man down before he does the same to you.”

Under her sweater, the tiny hairs at the back of her neck stood up. It was a terrible notion. She nodded, and Norton left.

Madison gathered her things and found the exit. Her hands smelled of gunpowder as she dialed the precinct's number.

Lieutenant Fynn always stood during conversations that tested his patience. He was standing now. His office door was shut, and Madison, also standing, had come in to make a bad day worse.

“Run that by me again,” he said.

“I'm going to tell Spencer,” she replied. “The description of our shooter, the man who called himself Officer Mason, exonerates Cameron. Whatever Ballistics says, Spencer ought to know that much.”

“Twenty-four hours you couldn't keep it to yourself?”

“I should have told him last night at the hospital. I was wrong not to.”

“You mean
I
was wrong.”

“
I
was wrong. My description of the attacker was vague at best, but I can tell you for sure who he was not.”