The Gift of the Darkness (35 page)

Madison hoped that the urgency of the situation would temporarily blur Quinn's appreciation of the law.

“With what you have, you wouldn't even get in to see the judge.”

Madison rolled her eyes.

“I'll meet you at the restaurant,” Quinn said. “How soon can you be there?”

Thirteen minutes later they pulled into the empty parking lot at the same time.

It felt strange to stand on the steps of the dark restaurant as he unlocked the door. Neither had said hello.

Quinn disabled the alarm and flicked a switch. Madison came into the light, and he saw her face for the first time—the deep cut held together by the stitches, the bruises, and in her eyes something that hadn't been there four days ago. He didn't look away.

Madison had disliked Quinn from the instant he had decided to protect Cameron; he had believed in his innocence against everything they had and was proven right. It didn't make Madison like him any better; in his way he was just as dangerous as Cameron, and anything he offered was a gift to be treated with extreme caution. She was glad he regarded her with neither warmth nor sympathy. She returned his gaze; they were in uncharted territory.

“Say we do get a name here tonight,” he said. “All due respect, but is anybody listening to you?”

“If I can back it up, they will.”

“What if they don't?”

He didn't give her time to answer and walked off. Madison knew he was trying not to think of every single time he had shot the breeze with one of the waiters or a busboy or the kitchen help. If the killer had worked at The Rock, Quinn had met him, known him, talked to him.

Their steps echoed in the gloom of the main room, the tables set and ready with their china and white linen napkins, eerie in the half-light coming through the vast windows.

He was already unlocking the manager's office door. “Why is he doing this?” He kept his tone neutral, as if this was nothing more than one of the cases on his desk.

“I don't know yet. We find
who
, we find
why
.”

Days ago, hours ago, she had been in that office with Brown, talking about poker nights and knives. The air smelled stale and cold, the air conditioning turned off since the early afternoon. Quinn pulled metal file cabinets open, and his fingers ran through index cards.

“The last thirty months?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

Madison didn't have the list of parolees in the weeks immediately after Pathune's death, but she could get that tomorrow. The date of his murder was a good starting point.

Quinn sighed. “They're in alphabetical order. We have to check every single one.”

“Thanks, but I'm going to make copies and get on with it by myself. I don't need your help.”

“No, you certainly look like you're doing just fine. Let's go into the kitchen.”

Madison hesitated. “If I find what I'm looking for, what guarantee do I have you are not going to share that particular piece of information with your client?”

“You have the word of an officer of the court,” Quinn replied without sarcasm. “Or you can come back whenever you can find a judge willing to sign a warrant.”

They grabbed a bunch of cards each, moved into the kitchen, and spread them on the immaculate steel work surface in the middle of the room.

They started by eliminating all the women; that cut the number down by about a third. He picked up a card and flipped it over; she did the same.

“Have you told him about this?”

“What do you mean?”

Quinn knew exactly what she had meant.

“Cameron.”

“Are you asking me about my communications with my client?”

“I'm asking whether before or after you told him to get his ass off the boat you happened to mention that the killer worked here.”

“The subject didn't come up.”

“It didn't?”

“No.”

Thirty months is a long time in the life of a busy restaurant with full-time and part-time staff; each card had references and contact details, not necessarily in the most useful order.

They scanned them, found what they needed to know, and put them on the no-good pile; there wasn't a second stack so far.

“How did you know he didn't do it?” Quinn kept his eyes on the paperwork.

“I read about a photographer being beaten up, and I remembered a picture I saw of Cameron when he was a boy.” Too late Madison realized it was Quinn's brother's funeral she had just casually mentioned; she looked up. “I'm sorry,” she added quickly.

Quinn ignored it. “Go on.”

“I think that last Monday, sometime after he met with you, Cameron assaulted Andrew Riley because he had tried to photograph the bodies of James Sinclair and his family. It just reminded me of what had happened before.”

“That's all?”

“Yes.”

“That's what turned you around?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not surprised you couldn't sell it to your boss.”

“Were you hoping I had some secret piece of evidence?”

“I was hoping you would have had more than a hunch by now.”

“You and me both.”

“What was he like?”

“Who?”

“The man who shot your partner.”

“He is strong and fast and determined to do his thing. He was comfortable impersonating a cop and had no problem shooting one.”

Madison pushed a card toward Quinn. “Dicky Boyd,” she said. “In prison at the time of Pathune's death. He started working in the kitchen here eight months later and resigned last June. Do you remember him?”

“Boyd? Yes, vaguely. I don't think we ever talked, though.”

“What does he look like?” Madison's memory flashed back to the man dressed as a police officer who had met them at Cameron's house.

“About six foot, dark hair, built like a heavyweight. What did he do time for?”

“Fraud. And the man who shot Brown was much lighter.”

“It's a big step from fraud to murder.”

“Do you remember any details about him?”

“Nothing.”

Madison put Boyd's card to one side, and they went back to the pile on the table. An hour later they had two more names, Owen Burke and Paul Telling.

“Is that it?” Madison asked him as she pushed her last card onto the no-good side.

“That's it.”

“Burke is Chinese-American, and Telling is five foot five. Both of them with drug-dealing offenses. Neither of them sounds anything like the guy I met.”

Madison had been so convinced she would find the name in that kitchen that it hadn't even occurred to her that she might be wrong. Nathan Quinn went to one of the fridges, took out two bottles of water, and handed one to her.

“Thanks. I'm going to go through them again; we must have missed someone,” she said.

“Maybe we didn't.”

He picked up the receiver on the wall phone and pressed one of the speed-dial keys.

“Donny, it's Quinn.”

Donny O'Keefe, Madison thought. The chef of The Rock was one of the regulars at the poker nights. He had offered them clam chowder. Madison stood up and stretched and took a few steps into the long, narrow galley to get herself ready for the second pass.

“Donny, I have some names in front of me. I'm looking for a guy who worked in your kitchen fresh out of jail. He would have started here about three and half years ago.” Quinn looked at Madison. “Six foot, slim build. I have Boyd, Burke, and Telling, but they don't fit.”

Quinn listened for a beat. “No, I can't tell you why. Thank you. I'll call you tomorrow.” He replaced the receiver.

“What did he say?”

Quinn stood there with one hand still on the phone.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘What about Salinger?'”

Madison blinked. “Who's Salinger? I haven't seen a Salinger card.”

“No,” Quinn replied. “Harry Salinger worked here until a few months ago, and when he left, he must have taken his employment records with him.”

“Harry Salinger.”

It felt good to be able to call the man by his name. Madison took a deep breath and flipped open her cell phone. “This is Detective Madison, Homicide. I need to run a check on a name. Salinger, Harry. I'll hold.” Madison opened her notebook, clicked her pen, and silently prayed that she would have something to write down.

Thirty seconds ticked by. Madison couldn't sit or stand still. Quinn waited with his eyes closed.

“I'm here,” Madison said into her phone. She straightened up and jotted something down.

“Yes, dates please.” She looked up at Quinn and nodded once. “And the address. Great, thank you.” She hung up. “Salinger was released three days after Pathune was murdered; he was doing time for an assault charge.”

She slapped her notebook shut.

“There is a series of things that need to happen,” she said. “One, I need to put Salinger at the crime scene. Two, I need to convince
Klein and the Prosecutor's Office. Three, most important, you must get your client to sit tight for a few hours. You can tie him to a chair, right?”

Madison started to gather her things. “And you cannot, must not, give him the name.”

“How are you going to put Salinger at the crime scene?”

“Cameron attacked a police officer, and that's not going away—I'm just putting it aside for the moment. It's the difference between being investigated for four counts of murder instead of eight. I wouldn't want you to break open the champagne.”

“Salinger,” Quinn said crisply.

“I don't know. Klein is not going to want to listen. He's left us a bread-crumb trail, and he's been very meticulous: all prints recovered and checked for matches were the victims', aside from the glass, and
that
came from right here in this kitchen. The more I think about it, the more I feel he must have visited the Sinclairs' house before—he's not the type to go in blind. Can you remember any occasion he might have been there?”

“A few months ago there was a party at the house. I know James borrowed glasses from the restaurant. Maybe someone from the staff took the cases over; someone must have gone to pick them up. It's a possibility.”

Madison wrote down some telephone numbers from the employees list. People who worked together day in and day out had to know something.

“Do you remember him?”

He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he said, and Madison believed he was glad he didn't; the memory of the killer standing close, talking to the children, would have been almost too much to bear.

“Thank you for this,” Madison said, awkward and already halfway out the door. “It made a difference to—”

“I have your voice on tape,” Quinn interrupted her.

“What?”

“I have your voice on tape warning me to get Cameron off the boat.”

Madison turned to face him and hoped she would look and sound suitably unconcerned. “How?”

“By chance. I've been recording calls as a matter of course. I wasn't expecting you to call; I wasn't expecting you to give me the perfect reason to go to Judge Martin and bury the case.”

“Is that what you're going to do?”

“Isn't that what any reasonable attorney would do?”

“Probably.” Madison thought about it for a second. “But the tape changes nothing; they got ready to discredit me the second I told my boss. They'll put it down to PTSD: I couldn't handle my partner being shot. They can dress it however they want; what it means to you is that my words or my actions are not going to damage their case. They knew you'd try to use me to contest the warrant.”

“They didn't know you were going to call me and throw the arrest. Would they put that down to PTSD too? You've been with Homicide less than five weeks; you have a promising future. How do you think they'd like you now?”

“What do you want from me, Quinn?”

“Tell me why I shouldn't go to the judge tonight.”

“I'm not in the mood to ask you for special favors, Counselor.”

“Not even to save your career?”

“Not in a thousand years. I'll lose my badge, and you'll lose the one person who believes your client is innocent. You can take that to the judge.”

“I have Salinger's name.”

“It's not enough.”

Quinn smiled, and there was no joy in it, only the embers of a thought Madison couldn't begin to fathom.

“Nothing is ever enough, Detective, but we do what we can with what we have.”

“I agree. Use the tape, don't use it—I don't care.”

“Yes, you do,” Quinn said. “Not about the job, but about being able to do the job. You care very much indeed.”

At that moment Madison knew just how dangerous Nathan Quinn could be. She'd rather call Fynn and tell him herself.

“This name has bought you a little time, Detective. Use it well, because one way or the other I'm going to get that warrant scrapped tomorrow. And one more thing.” Quinn's voice was barely a whisper. “Don't be a fool and call your boss and tell him all about your phone call. I can see you're tempted. Don't. Consider what it is that you hate the most, me holding that tape or Harry Salinger getting ready to finish the job on your partner.”

Madison wished the anger away from her voice. “I will do what I need to do. If I don't have a badge, it might slow me down some, but it won't stop me.”

“I never thought it would,” Quinn replied quietly as her steps were already receding through the main dining room.

Alice Madison sat in her car, engine turned on and windows fogging up. She could deal with her anger, but she couldn't afford to worry about the future.
If I don't have a badge
. Quinn had let her look at the employment records to find a name to take to the judge; that was the only reason he had agreed to meet her. Well, good for him; he had what he wanted. Then again, so did she, and the only thing she regretted was that she could not tell Brown.