The Gift of the Darkness (37 page)

Chapter 36

Monday morning. Madison, startled out of a deep sleep, turned to switch off the alarm clock and found herself not in bed but still on the sofa, her phone ringing on the coffee table. She reached for it.

“Madison.”

“It's Nathan Quinn.”

It was enough to wake her up.

“What happened?”

“I just spoke with Jack. He knows. You don't have much time.”

Shit
. It was bad news. It was horrible news. Cameron would move fast: unlike her, he didn't have to deal with legal technicalities.

“What did you do?”

“I didn't tell him, if that's what you're asking. When are you going to talk to Sarah Klein?”

“I'm going to see if Salinger's DNA from his records can be matched to anything found in the Sinclair home. Then, and only then, I will call Klein. Sit on your client if you have to, because today any cop will shoot him on sight.”

“Fine, but get to it fast.”

After the last week, there was very little left of Madison's natural goodwill; she felt the anger rise.

“Does he know him?”

“No.”

“How did Cameron find out?”

“He figured it out like you did. Just do your job, and we can all go home.”

It was too early in the day, and Madison hadn't even had her first cup of coffee. She stood up, and the words flew out of her mouth.

“When you wake up in the morning, Quinn, your only thought is ‘How can I make it possible for my client to get away with it today?' That's your job. And then you cross your fingers that he won't kill somebody else. Don't tell me how to do my job; you can kid yourself that you are serving the law, that you're
an officer of the court
. All you really do is hide behind the small print and hope for the best, like a cheap used-car salesman with a good suit.”

The harshness of her own words shocked her into silence. Quinn didn't reply for a few seconds. Madison closed her eyes.

“Eloquent and to the point. I'll bear that in mind, Detective,” he said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

Madison started to speak, but the line had gone dead, and she suddenly felt awful. She ran a hot shower and stood under it till all her cuts and bruises had stung for long enough. All things considered, it might very well be her last day as a cop.

She was drying herself when the telephone in her bedroom rang.

“Detective Madison? This is Ellen McCormick.”
Brown's sister.
Madison didn't have time to think the worst. “I'm calling to say they took Kevin off the ventilator this morning, and he's breathing on his own.”

Madison smiled. She couldn't remember the last time anything had meant so much.

“That's great news,” she said, even though it didn't begin to describe how she was feeling.

“I know: one hour at a time, one day at a time. How are you doing?”

It struck Madison that, with everything going on at the hospital, it was a little strange that Brown's sister would choose to call her herself instead of letting one of the detectives do it.

“I'm okay, given the circumstances. If I may ask, how are you dealing with it?”

“I'm wondering what's going on. I saw the news last night: they almost had him, and he got away, and I'm concerned that this . . .” She searched for the right word, but nothing seemed appropriate. “This man might come after him again.”

Madison wished she could be entirely honest with her; maybe in a few more hours she would be able to.

“I don't think that Brown—Kevin—has anything to worry about from the man they went after yesterday. He's on the run; he's not looking to get jammed up in a hospital surrounded by cops.” Madison was reasonably sure that applied to both Cameron and Salinger.

Ellen McCormick had seemed a rather good judge of character, much like her brother, in fact. Madison was glad they were not face-to-face and very glad there was still an armed guard on Brown's room. She would want it there until they had Harry Salinger in leg irons.

She got dressed, took her coffee out onto the deck, and dialed Sorensen.

“Amy, it's Alice. Do you have a minute?”

“I'm reconstructing a pane of glass that has shattered into roughly a billion pieces on the off chance I might get a print off it. One minute is all I have.”

“I'll be quick. The heads-up you gave me yesterday, the name of the convict who died—it was a solid lead. The man's body was posed in the same way as the Sinclairs, down to the cross drawn in their own blood. At the time John Cameron was not in prison, but someone else was—a man who was paroled days after the murder and went to work in the restaurant that Cameron owned with Quinn and Sinclair. Are you with me so far?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Was there any trace evidence from the Sinclair crime scene that wasn't matched to the victims or Cameron? I mean anything: hair, skin cells, fibers, anything that was put aside because we didn't need it at the time?”

A print was out of the question: he was an ex-con. If Salinger had left a latent anywhere near the bodies, it would have been picked up and identified straightaway.

“There was a massive amount of specimens collected, and not all of them were processed.”

“He must have left something behind.”

Sorensen was quiet for a second.

“There was a small amount of talcum powder on the bathroom floor,” she said. “It was the same brand as the one in the Sinclairs' cabinet, so it didn't raise any flags.”

Talcum powder
.

“Amy, talcum powder is used under latex gloves, and he had to take off his bloodied gloves and put on a pair of clean ones when he planted the hairs in the ligature knots.”

“We also found something else with it—a very small amount of coagulated blood.”

“A scab?”

“That's what it looks like.”

“Test it. Run it as a priority.”

“We have a billion—”

“It's
his
blood. He's been in jail—we have his DNA. Test it as soon as you can.”

“Okay. I'll let you know.”

It was a crisp, clear morning; one hundred feet out a couple of kayaks broke the surface of the water. What Madison would have liked to do was get her own kayak from the garage, wipe the dust of weeks off it, and spend a couple of hours with nothing more on her mind than the sound of the paddle slicing the waves. She picked up a couple of flat pebbles and threw them in, one after the other, with her good hand. They skipped across the glassy surface and sank with a satisfying
plop
. It was easier to breathe outdoors.

Harry Salinger, born with a twin brother who died when he was a boy; his father was a cop; his mother died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose.

As she threw more pebbles harder and harder into the water, Madison felt a stab of nausea. She was as much a part of his fantasy as Cameron and Quinn; otherwise she'd be lying next to Brown.

If everything so far had gone according to plan, he had never meant to harm her more than he had managed to during their fight. It was only his way of testing her, getting a little closer, a little more personal, and Brown was the uninvited guest.
Thirteen Days
. Madison shivered. Salinger wanted more. The horror in the Sinclair home had pleased him, sure, but his real goal must lie elsewhere. He needed more from them. Madison suddenly stepped back from the edge of the pier: four days to go till the thirteenth day from the murder of the Sinclair family, the worst was still to come.

She had wrapped herself up against the cold, but the weather was turning, and in some patches of the lawn she could see the dirt under the thin layer of snow. The sky was deep blue, and Madison wished she could feel that beauty again: the colors of earth and water that had pulled her back to Seattle after college, when the world had been wide open before her.

Back inside, she picked at her breakfast and thought about Harry Salinger, and she wasn't sure anything would ever feel right or beautiful again. Salinger had done his time for an assault charge; how did that progress to the murder of George Pathune in jail and the Sinclairs after that? By all accounts the first kill had not been self-defense. Pathune was a firebug who was just trying to get by in prison. The Sinclairs were part of a much bigger plan to destroy John Cameron for some reason, and Brown and she were somewhere on the same drawing board—maybe right next to Cameron, if she thought about it.

Madison flipped through her notebook and the pages she had written while talking with Salinger's prosecutor and his public defender. She remembered that Salinger's father had been a cop and she wondered what he thought of his son's accomplishments. Maybe someone in the precinct would remember him. The doorbell rang, and she jumped.

Madison wasn't expecting any visitors; she put down the plate and the coffee and unhooked the leather strap on her holster. She realized how tense she was by how long it felt to walk to the front door. She
collected herself, and her left hand rested on the butt of her piece as she looked through the peephole.

The man stood ten feet back, and there was ex-cop, maybe even ex-army, written all over him; he held a brown envelope in his right hand, and Madison guessed the heavy coat could easily accommodate a shoulder holster on the left.
Private dick
.

She unlocked the door.

“Detective Madison, Tod Hollis,” he said, showing her his private investigator's badge. “I have something for you from Nathan Quinn.”

They stood in the living room, and Madison knew Hollis was taking in every detail: the table covered in her notes and sketches of the crime scene, the paperwork she had managed to get out of the precinct, and, on top of it all, the printed photo from Harry Salinger's driver's license.

It wasn't a social visit, and he got right to it. “I've been looking into the black pickup truck that was spotted near the Sinclairs' house on the night of the murders.”

Madison had to think for a second. “Yes, a neighbor saw it, and it was the basis for the arrest warrant issued against Cameron last week.”

“You might want to take a look at this,” he said, and he handed her the envelope.

Madison undid the flap and took out a sheaf of papers. The letterhead said
ALAMO
. It was the rental agreement for a black pickup truck from three days before the Sinclair murders to the Monday after, the day the bodies had been discovered. The name on the agreement was Peter Welsh; the photograph in the photocopy of the driver's license was Harry Salinger's. Madison looked up.

“It took me a while to go through all rental agencies this side of Washington State, and, frankly, until we had a name, there was nothing I could match it to. He just got himself fake papers and rented the truck for the week, put a bit of mud on the license plate, should your witness have really good eyesight, and that was that. He was hoping that someone somewhere would see it.”

“How long have you been working on this?”

“I started looking the second the warrant was out.”

“It's the Alamo at Sea-Tac.”

“He's local. He figures enough people coming and going, and no one will pay much attention.”

“If the truck hasn't been rented to anybody else, we could get the Crime Scene Unit to go through it, even though he's probably cleaned up after himself.”

“The truck hasn't been rented.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I paid a nice chunk of change to the guys there to call me if anybody wanted it, and so far nobody has.”

“They can't hang on to it forever. I need to go to my boss now.”

Hollis made to leave.

“I know that you're looking for Salinger, and I am very grateful for this.” She held up the papers. “But don't forget what he is: don't attempt to make contact, and don't let him see you.” She gave him a card with her cell number.

His hand was already on the doorknob when she remembered. “Were you on the force in Seattle?”

Hollis turned. “At one time.”

Madison had seen a flash of the holster under the coat. Hollis carried himself as if he had put his regular twenty on the job and then some.

“His father was a cop—uniformed officer, I think. Ever run into him?”

Hollis thought about it for a moment. “Not that I know of. He must be real proud of his boy, though.”

Madison left the house ten minutes after Hollis. She paged Sorensen and left a message on her machine, then called the precinct to make sure Lieutenant Fynn was in his office. Sarah Klein's voice mail told her that the prosecutor would be in court until 4:00 p.m. Madison checked her watch; she wanted Klein there when she talked to the others. She tried her cell phone.

“It's Madison,” she said when Klein picked up. It sounded as if she was still in the courthouse, loud voices around her.

“I was glad to hear you gave as good as you got.”

“Thank you. Brown is off the ventilator.”

“I know—news travels fast around here. For once it's good news.”

“I'm on my way to the precinct. I'm going to see Fynn, and you ought to be there, too.”

“Madison, I've already drawn a line across your name on my Christmas list.”

“I'll give you the short version: the pickup truck that Cameron's arrest warrant was based on was rented with a fake ID by the man who shot Brown. He has killed before and posed the victim like the Sinclairs; his job put him in contact with them and with Cameron. His name is Harry Salinger.”

Madison could hear Klein walking away from the noise and finding a quieter spot.

“Can you put him at the scene?”

“The Crime Scene Unit is working on it; they have DNA. Likely he left it at the scene when he took his gloves off.”

“Do you have a motive?”

“Not yet.”

“What about Cameron?”

“He's innocent.”