The Gift of the Darkness (33 page)

“Arnelle? It's Alice Madison. Sorry to call you on a Sunday.”

“Detective, I saw you on the news. Are you all right?”

“I'm okay.”

“Your partner?”

“He's still in ICU.”

“I couldn't believe it when I heard what happened.”

“Arnelle, let me get straight to it. I need a favor. I need to look at the file on the murder of an inmate called George Pathune; it happened about two to three years ago.”

There was silence on the line.

“The late George Pathune is getting kinda popular all of a sudden.”

“Someone already called you?”

“Three hours ago, a PI asked me about him.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said, ‘I don't know how you got my private home number, but you can sure call me in the office. I'll be there between and nine and five, Monday to Friday.'”

Hollis would have offered to compensate her for her time, and she had turned him down.

“Good one.”

“Does the Pathune file have anything to do with you and your partner getting beaten up?”

“Probably,” Madison replied. Today, Quinn had only one client.

“Look, give me a couple of hours; I'll leave your name with security.”

“Arnelle—”

“Yeah, yeah. See ya later.”

Madison stood up. She had a good drive ahead of her and ought to get going. If Quinn was after the file, it was definitely worth her time to find out why. She put some of the leftover coffee in a sealed travel mug and checked that her cell phone was charged. She was almost out the door when she remembered that Fynn wanted the Sinclair keys back, and she hadn't had a chance to copy them yet. Well, she could always crash through the French doors if need be.

Outside, the early-afternoon darkness had dulled the colors and a thin veil of snow softened the lines of her car. The engine started easily. Madison dug a couple of painkillers out of her jacket pocket and downed them with a sip of coffee. It was time to find out how George Pathune had left his wicked life.

Madison gave the keys to the desk sergeant at the precinct for Fynn and got back to her car, its engine still running. Sorensen had asked her if she was going to pin her career on something that was little more than conjecture. One week ago all she had wanted to do was to learn from her partner and do well in her new post. Just as well. It made her think of the old Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.”

She drove north on I-5. The roads were nearly empty, but the weather held her back, and her right arm emitted regular waves of
pain. In her thoughts she tried to organize a timeline of events that ended with the Sinclairs and went back to a point where the killer had crossed paths with John Cameron. Somewhere along that line George Pathune might turn up.

Madison was convinced that the killer had spent some time working it all out: he needed to get the fingerprints and the physical evidence that would lead them to Cameron. He needed to set up James Sinclair's bank account and pay funds in and out of it, transactions that would throw the shadow of embezzlement over James Sinclair.

All of that took patience and a passion for detail. A bitter taste in her mouth reminded her that they had only about five days left on the killer's deadline of “thirteen days.” The monster who had drawn crosses in the blood of the Sinclair children wasn't done with whatever he was up to.

Sorensen's results seemed to confirm how thorough he had been in his preparation and how familiar he was with forensics. Madison had scanned the list of Police Academy rejects—it went back years, and if she didn't have something to run it against, it might as well have been the Seattle phone book.

Hollis had called Sorensen, even though it wasn't their jurisdiction at the time; there was a small chance that he should have known that. He wasn't interested in the man's life or what crime had led him there, just in the manner of his death.

Madison pulled into the McCoy State Prison, also known as the Bones. It rose from a concrete parking lot into a combination of high chain-link fences, towers, and walls within walls. There were different levels of units, graded in degrees of security: some of the two thousand-odd inmates would get to work outdoors, grow something maybe or build something and go to classes. Others would have no meaningful contact with anybody but prison wardens for the length of their stay.

Madison was used to jails—through the years she had certainly done her bit to increase their population. She stretched and breathed deeply, and her arm ached like a son of a bitch.

Twenty-five minutes later, sitting in her car with the engine idling and the windows fogged up, she read the pages that Arnelle had copied
for her. She scanned them, running her fingers along the lines, cursing the dim light above her and the faint ink. Her mouth was dry when she was done, and she laid ten inches of rubber as she sped out of the parking lot.

Poulsbo, Kitsap County. On Sunday afternoon the shops close early: the weekend tourists had come and gone, and the pretty main street with its Norwegian-American bakeries and grocery stores was deserted. Strands of holiday lights carefully wound around the shop fronts and the naked branches of the trees by the marina. The seven piers were three-quarters full, and the boats, sails tightly secured, rose and fell.

A Kitsap County Electricity Board van drove into the waterfront park and stopped by the Harbormaster's office, and two men in regulation gray and red jumpsuits got out. One of them took a key from his pocket and opened a black metal box that hung on the back of the small brick building. Ten seconds later the whole marina and the street plunged into darkness. They locked the box and went back to the van, where a cell phone was ringing. After a brief conversation, one of the men swore loudly and slammed his side door shut; the other turned on the engine, and they drove off.

Two streets away and around the corner the van pulled up to the curb, and the men got out. The taller one said, “A little overdone maybe.” His companion rolled his eyes, opened the back of the van, unzipped his jumpsuit, and stepped out of it. Under it, he wore a black uniform and a ballistic vest; on the back, in large yellow letters, it read SWAT.

“Let's go,” he said. From the carpeted floor he picked up two assault rifles and passed one to his colleague, also in SWAT uniform. The tall one adjusted his earpiece, and a steady stream of voices crackled into life. He clicked on his night-vision goggles, and the world glowed bright green. Snowflakes, like black specks, found their way to the ground.

Madison flew south on I-5, her mind vaguely aware of a speed limit being broken. No wonder Quinn was interested in how Pathune had
died: when a guard found his body, he had been blindfolded, hands tied at the front, and the sign of the cross drawn in blood above the blindfold, smudged on the skin but still perfectly visible. The Medical Examiner's report said his neck had been broken, and a piece of ripped denim had been found in his right hand. The cloth was then matched to the shirt of an inmate called Edward Morgan Rabineau; he had been working in the laundry up until a few minutes earlier, and there was a window of time when he could have committed the murder.

There had not been a trial, but the warden would have a quiet word with the board every time his parole came up, and Rabineau wasn't going to come out anytime soon. He was still inside, within the walls of the aptly called Intensive Management Unit. On the other hand, the Sinclairs had been found blindfolded, hands tied at the front, each with a cross neatly drawn in their own blood.

It would have been an impossible coincidence if the similar circumstances were the work of two different men. Of the two suspects, Rabineau was still in jail, and Cameron had never been in it, which meant neither of them could have committed both murders.

Whoever had investigated Pathune's death had no reason to doubt the evidence, even if it was no more than a scrap of cloth and no motive had ever been proved. Madison, though, had every reason to doubt. The murder gave her a time frame: the killer had been in prison at the time Pathune died, and she was willing to bet he had been released shortly after that; he would have wanted to get the hell away from Rabineau and his pals. Rabineau must have been going nuts, knowing someone had set him up, and jail retribution comes swift and sharp.

If the killer had ever applied to the Police Academy, it would have had to be before he went to jail. Nobody was stupid enough to apply with a record, and this guy might have been crazy, but he wasn't stupid. No, he wasn't crazy; he just liked playing with cops.

Madison remembered the night of the ambush—the man who called himself Officer Mason, dressed like a cop, using the right language. She was sure he had applied to the Academy, he wanted to be
one so badly. Madison saw him looking at himself in the mirror as he buttoned up the uniform, thinking of her and Brown and how he was going to draw them into those trees and do whatever he did to please his long-dead heart.

She rolled down the window and let the air brush her face. She suspected that it had pleased him to shoot Brown while he was himself a police officer; it had made things right, almost legal.

George Pathune. The killer must have left some physical trace of himself on the body of his victim, but the investigators had followed only the ripped cloth back to Rabineau. She wondered if Sorensen would have looked further than that and remembered her skepticism in the diner.

There was little Madison could do that would have shaken Amy's confidence in physical evidence. Madison might as well have picked up Sorensen's spoon, with her prints and DNA on it, and shown her how easy it would have been to—And in that instant Madison was lucky that the road was empty and lay straight in front of her, because for a moment she saw nothing but the killer picking up the glass that held Cameron's prints, the glass the police had found in the Sinclairs' kitchen, picking it up from the table where Cameron had put it down
because the son of a bitch worked at the restaurant.

One hand on the wheel, the other dug into her jacket pocket for her cell phone, Madison made a conscious effort to keep her eyes on the road. She dialed the precinct number by touch and got through to Jenner, the desk sergeant.

“It's Madison. Could you put me through to the lieutenant?”

“He's not in his office.”

“Okay, I'll try his cell.”

“He's out with the detectives. They're all out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'd better patch you through.”

“Jenner?” Madison held the phone close against her ear, but the static silence on the line lasted a lifetime.
Brown
. Something had happened to Brown, and they had all gone to the hospital. Brown was dead.

Madison, driving like an arrow through the night, waited for the voice that would tell her he was gone. As long as she wasn't told, Brown was still alive. As long as she wasn't told . . .

She waited alone in that awful silence, and seconds later Andrew Dunne's voice came on the line. “Madison?” Voices all around him.

“Andy? What's going on?”

“We got him.” His voice came and went in the static.

“What?”

“We found Cameron. The boat's in Poulsbo marina. I'm looking at it.”

Madison had to find her bearings, had to come back to herself quickly and think. Relief flooded through her.

“Is he on the boat?” She wasn't sure she was going to like any answer he was going to give her.

“Yes. He was seen boarding it about an hour ago.”

Talk fast.

“Andy, is Fynn with you? I need to speak with him.”

“He's kind of busy.”

“I need to talk to him right now.”

“He's with the Assistant Chief, the SWAT commander, the Kitsap County Sheriff, and the Poulsbo Chief. He's got his hands full, and we're about to go in. You tell me, and I'll pass it on.”

“You've got SWAT there?” she said.

“We got
everybody
here. We locked down the marina and two blocks around it.”

“Put me through to Fynn.”

Something in her voice reached Dunne.

“What happened?”

“Two years ago in the Bones someone was killed and the body left just like the Sinclairs. Put me through to Fynn
now
.”

“That's impossible.”

Madison didn't know if he meant the murder or Fynn. “Andy?”

Silence.

“Andy?”

Radio crackle.

“Madison, I'm going to call you back.”

“No—”

He was gone.

They were about to go in. They were seconds away. Madison was gripping the wheel so tight, even her good hand hurt. She knew every single one of the officers on the SWAT team. Good people all of them, they were well trained and did their job carefully so that at the end of the day everybody on either side would go back home alive. And then there was John Cameron, and as far as they knew, he had shot one of their own. Madison rolled the window all the way down. In minutes someone was going to die—from either side, it didn't matter, a life would be taken. They thought they were about to grab Brown's shooter, and he would never let them take him alive.

One day soon, Madison thought, they would get Cameron for Sanders and for the LA dealers, but not like this. Because like this, the Sinclairs' killer would win.

Madison picked up her cell. She remembered the number from all the times she had dialed it days before.

“Hello.”

His voice was soft and close, and Madison asked herself what in the name of everything holy she was doing.

“Mr. Quinn, it's Detective Madison.”

“Detective.”

“Quinn, Tod Hollis works for you. You told him to call Amy Sorensen, knowing it would get back to me somehow. Cameron called you, he told you we met last night, he told you what I said, and Hollis must have known it wasn't Sorensen's jurisdiction.” She took a breath. “You
gave
me Pathune, didn't you?”