The Gift of the Darkness (42 page)

Her eyes watered, and she wiped them with a sleeve. In a couple of minutes she reached the clearing and the crime-scene tape; beyond that point all the snow had melted, dirt showing through like a ragged gray carpet. A deep flush of anger surprised her: his home, but he was not there; his work, but nothing she could reach through and grab with both hands. Madison walked the perimeter of the tape. A few men in full protective gear were sifting through the ruins, slowly and carefully. Every so often one would pick something up with his gloved hand and place it in an evidence bag.

In the distance, on the other side of the house, Madison saw Dunne in conversation with a fireman. He noticed her and lifted his right hand, the thumb folded in and four fingers straight up.
Four sets of human remains
. Madison nodded, message understood. The count had gone up to four.

In her limited experience of house fires and arson, Madison did not know whether her body's reaction to the physicality of the place was due to her own filter or if it was exactly what was to be expected. There was something toxic and foul hanging over the ruin. Her eyes swept the trees around the back of the house: darkness had already pooled under the heavy branches. Somewhere in there Cameron had stood and watched them work; maybe he was there still—she couldn't tell.

“They found traces of heavy-duty accelerants,” said Dunne next to her. “And some gas canisters exploded. Seems like he was doing metalwork in the basement. There's a whole mess that can't be easily identified but is definitely not furniture.”

“What about the bodies?”

“Some of the remains were intact, others were in parts. Four human skulls have been found in total. Whatever it was, the fire burned hot and fast. I'm saying, if the fire engines were already at full speed up the drive when the first explosion kicked in, they still wouldn't have been in time to stop it.”

Chapter 41

Deep underground, in the concrete bowels of the range, Madison's left hand shot a tight grouping of rounds into the middle of the target. The ear-protectors took away the worst of the explosions, but the pain in her right arm rang out with every recoil.

She paid no attention to the other shooters: she reloaded, changed targets, and efficiently shot the center out of the new one, glad for the rhythm of the action and the respite from her own thoughts.

Her key was in the front door when her cell rang.

“Madison,” she said.

“There was a new card in my mail today. I just found it.”

Quinn.

Madison stood in the hallway and didn't turn on the light.

“This morning's mail?”

“Yes. I got to it only about an hour ago.”

“It would have been sent—”

“Before the fire.”

“The last thing he ever did or just one more step in his plan.” Madison blew out the air in her cheeks. “Okay, what does it say?”

“I could show it to you in about five minutes.”

“That's fine.” She turned around in the dark hallway, the house quiet and still.

“Just out of curiosity, is Cameron already here?” Her voice was dry, her hand on her holster.

“He's with me,” Quinn replied.

In all her years as a police officer, Madison had always taken off her weapon as soon as she was home, then washed her face and hands of crime-scene residue. Tonight her left hand rested on the butt of her piece as she leaned against the back of the sofa, her eyes on the front door. They were coming to her home, bringing a small piece of horror crafted out of cream paper. She should be glad she'd get another shot at Cameron, never mind that it would be around her grandmother's dining table.

She lit the fire.
Be dead,
she thought, her hands scrambling with tinder a matchbook.
Be dead and be gone. Let your cold, dead fingers trail behind you while you're on your way to hell.
Then the warmth of the fire was on her face, and Quinn's car was pulling into her driveway, doors opening and closing. Madison stood aside as the two men walked in.

It was Cameron who heard them first, soft footsteps on the wet ground; he turned and put his body between Quinn and the door. Rachel came out of the darkness with Tommy on her hip and a brown paper bag in her hand.

“She's my friend,” Madison said quickly—too late to stop Rachel, already smiling hello, from coming in.

“Hi.” Rachel stepped inside. “My mom dropped by, and you know what she's like.” She paused as she saw the tall, dark men standing by Madison, her best friend since she was thirteen. She paused, because their photographs had been in the newspapers for days, and Rachel suddenly clearly knew exactly who she was looking at: an alleged killer and the attorney who represented him. The news might have been full of reports on Harry Salinger, but John Cameron and his past were still fodder for the goriest appetites. Rachel hugged Tommy tightly.

“It's okay,” Madison said gently, standing close. “We're working on this thing together. They're here to talk. I can't ask you to stay to visit right now.”

Rachel nodded. She held her boy and passed Madison the bag.

“You smell funny,” Tommy said.

“I've been near a fire, sweetheart.”

“I like bonfires,” Tommy said, and just at that moment he wriggled in his mother's arms and dropped the baseball he was holding. It rolled on the wooden floor and stopped at Quinn's feet. Quinn picked it up with his left hand, in his right a clear plastic folder, a cream envelope inside it.

“Here,” he said, and he extended his hand toward the boy. A look passed between Quinn and Rachel; his hand paused for a heartbeat, then shifted only inches to let the ball fall into her hand.

“Thank you,” Madison said, and she ushered Rachel back out into the cold.

“Are you sure you're all right?” Rachel had paled.

“Funnily enough, yes. I'm perfectly safe with them.”

“I don't understand.”

“Neither do I, but I have to work with them to finish this.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

She found the men in the living room, at ease in her home, and for a moment Madison wondered about Nathan Quinn, who had given Rachel the baseball because he had seen the flash of contempt in her eyes, that nothing from his hand should touch her son. He had not looked away. The slight rested uneasily against Madison's skin until she saw the envelope, and all other thoughts went away.

“Let's see it,” she said.

She found the tweezers in the small kit tucked in her bag. “Did you touch it with your bare hands?”

“Gloves and a letter opener,” Quinn replied. “But the receptionist probably left it on my desk.”

John Cameron sat in a chair by the fire, eyes closed, as if what lay on the table had nothing to do with him.

Madison slid the card out slowly and placed it next to the envelope. Same black ink. Same small font.
3:00 a.m.
She checked the other side. That's all there was.

She reached for her notebook and ripped out two pages. With her pen she wrote in capital letters
THIRTEEN
DAYS
on one page and
82885
on the other. She placed them on the left side of the cream card and stood back. For maybe two minutes the only sound was the crackling of the fire. Quinn had had some time to think about it, and, if she was reading him right, he had already reached a conclusion.

“You know what the cards mean, don't you?”

Quinn nodded. He pointed at the first one. “On the thirteenth day after the murder of James and his family”—he pointed at the second card—“in the place where my brother died on the twenty-eighth of August 1985”—he pointed at the third—“at 3:00 a.m. Day, place, time. It's an invitation to meet him.”

He was right. Everything in Madison's bones told her that Quinn was right on the money. Salinger had taken his time to make sure he had Quinn's attention, but those were definitely instructions to meet.
82885
was keyed to Quinn's brother's death; no one would have understood the meaning of that sequence of numbers except for Nathan Quinn and John Cameron, and that date would be forever tied to the clearing where the Hoh River boys had met their destiny.

“That means this Friday,” she said. “And he would have sent it at least twenty-four hours before the fire, before his face was on every news bulletin on every channel. They're working on DNA identification as fast as they can, but it will take some time. At least four bodies at the last count, not all of them intact. We might not know before Friday. When he sent this last card, he thought you would be alone in this, trying to protect your client from us and failing, and Cameron racking up the body count.”

“You overestimate me,” Cameron said into the fire.

“Not for a second. Salinger knew what you would do, just as he knew that, things being as they were, Quinn here would have gone to meet him on Friday to save your life, whether you liked it or not.”

“Do you think I need saving, Detective?”

“I think it's not over, not until I see Salinger's DNA-certified skull on the coroner's table.”

“You are more gothic than I would have given you credit for.”

“It was a figure of speech.”

Cameron turned and held her with eyes the color of warm honey. “I don't think so.”

Madison returned his gaze, then picked up the card and placed it carefully back in the plastic sheet. “I'm going to drop this at the lab tonight. They're pulling triple shifts, and the sooner we get this looked at, the better.” She looked from one to the other. “We have two days between now and Friday; whatever he meant to happen on that day, it's been blown to hell. His cover is ruined, and his plan is shattered. If there has not been positive DNA identification of any of the remains as Harry Salinger's, we will be there, on Friday, at the appointed time. On the off chance that he is crazy enough to be where he pretty much told you he would be, the area will be covered by SPD detectives, State Troopers, Park police, and SWAT. You will not be there, neither one of you.”

“Two days is a very long time,” Cameron said. “Who knows where any of us will be come Friday?”

There was much to discuss but nothing more to say for the night. As they went to their cars and she drove north toward Seattle, it occurred to Madison that, between them, they had finally and definitively dispensed with the niceties of polite interaction. There had been no greetings or good-byes, and the headlights of Quinn's Jeep had simply disappeared from her Honda's rear window as he took the South Michigan Street exit off 509.

Madison dialed Lieutenant Fynn's cell and let him know that she was on her way to the lab and why; he didn't like the meaning of the cards any more than she did but had to agree that Quinn was probably right, that Salinger had given him directions to meet him. Both silently thought the same thing: there was a chance that this world around them contained Harry Salinger only as remains in a morgue vault.

“Sir, one last thing,” she said.

“I'm only surprised you haven't brought it up before.”

“We have to do it. We have to check.”

“I know. Judge Hugo will sign the warrant first thing tomorrow morning. I want to get an early start.”

“Do you already know if any vandalism has been reported in the last few weeks?”

“Not that we know. We'll speak with the caretakers on site. The ground is going to be frozen; it's not going to be a breeze to get down there.”

“Makes me think if he's done it, he's done it a while ago, when it was softer and easier.”

“Maybe. It's not like he threw this thing together at the last minute. Anything to report on Quinn and his client?”

“Cameron was very quiet tonight. He's waiting for something to shake loose, whatever that might be. Quinn? I don't know. But I can say without a doubt that he would have gone to the meet. If we were still after Cameron, Quinn would have kept his mouth shut about the cards and gone to the meet armed with a sharp wit and a law degree. Maybe that private detective of his would have been in the bushes with a sniper rifle. I couldn't swear one way or the other.”

The traffic was light, and so was the rain; it turned to wet snowflakes every so often, then forgot itself and reverted to rain. Madison found Sorensen in the lab, on a sofa in her office with her arm over her eyes.

A while later Madison lay in her bed, after showering and soaping until she was sure the acrid scent of the fire was gone. Her last thought, one breath away from sleep, stilled, then popped like a bubble.
Be dead and be gone.

Chapter 42

Madison woke up before her alarm, feeling not quite inside herself. She was waiting: waiting to hear, to breathe properly, to gather her weapons and go into battle again. Just waiting. Waiting for Brown to wake up. Nothing much to do about any of that except roll up her sleeves and tick items off her list, while a sound like a kettle whistle blew right through her and scattered her thoughts.

There was much of the same going around the station. Lieutenant Fynn had gone to get the warrant signed that would authorize them to dig up Michael Salinger's coffin. They would open it with the appropriate tools and reluctance and check carefully whether any of the remains had been removed to be placed at the house before the fire. No one had forgotten that Michael and Harry Salinger had shared the same DNA.

The other detectives were also out, probably glad to have found avenues to pursue that would keep them driving, walking, talking, and not looking at the clock.

At her desk, Madison organized her notes into small piles. Her arm felt better, good enough to lift a cup of coffee if not yet ready to shoot a gun.

She sent off a quick e-mail to Fred Kamen, letting him know about the latest card and their meaning and added every detail she could
about Quinn and Cameron's second visit. She wasn't sure what she expected him to do with that information; it was sort of like talking to Brown—less acerbic, equally sharp, and extremely useful in unexpected ways.

The Salinger file had grown a couple of inches overnight with all the interviews from the previous day; Madison read through it quickly, hoping for a thread she could pull at and finding none. His co-workers at the restaurant had barely any memories of him, and if not for Donny O'Keefe, they would still be days behind.

His prison file had also been checked. No visitors and no mail, but regular stays in the jail's medical center. His time there had been as hard as they come. Harry Salinger had existed in an utter void of human relations. Madison's index finger ran down the SPD Training Academy letter, looking for and finding the date she wanted: three weeks after his father had died of post-op complications, Harry Salinger had applied to the Academy; two days after his rejection from the Academy, he had been arrested for assault.

A knock on the door frame startled her. Kelly stepped in and leaned on the wall, a mottled green tie and his usual light gray Barneys suit. Not a court day.

“I have to ask,” he said. “With all that's been going on, it's easy to lose sight of what's what.”

“Go right ahead.” Madison settled back into her chair and felt, literally
felt
, her hackles rising.
What do you know? Humans do have hackles after all.

“Am I right in thinking that Quinn gave you the last card yesterday evening at your place, that he came calling like the gentleman he is, and that Cameron was with him?” Kelly paused. “Like he came the night before, and Cameron, too?”

“That's right.”

“Let me get this straight. This guy, this guy we have wanted in our crosshairs for longer than you've been polishing your shield, comes and goes from your own home, and you don't think it would be a good idea to give us a heads-up, stick a tail on him, and try to find out
where he lays his head at night? You met him twice, and all you can say is that he favors turtlenecks?”

Madison thought of all the information she had just sent off to Kamen and her own private notes. What would Kelly make of those?

“You're right,” she said, and she enjoyed the nanosecond of surprise on his face. “If it had been anybody else and any other situation, I would have alerted you. But not on this, and not Cameron. The man is—I don't know what he is. But he would have known, and all I've got going for me right now is a little bit of trust on their side. I lose that, and I lose both of them. I can't risk that.”

“I hope it's worth it,” Kelly said, clearly thinking it wasn't, and turned to leave.

“Cashmere,” Madison said, already back to her notes.

“What?”

“Cashmere turtlenecks, actually. Blue.”

If Kelly answered, he did so in the privacy of his own mind.

It was frustrating. Madison felt as if they were grabbing at smoke. They had all of Harry Salinger's life statistics, and no living human they could interview who would give them more than the vaguest sense of the man. The aunt in San Diego had spoken for hours to local detectives who had relayed Fynn's questions. All well and good, but she had not seen him for decades. All she had said of any importance was that the father had been a source of terror for his young wife, and in all likelihood she had taken her own life. What the life of the boys had been like since then, she could barely guess.
The Waltons
it was not, that's for sure.

Madison saw Fynn slice through the middle of the detectives' room. He shouldn't have been there. She approached cautiously and found him already on his phone. When he saw her, he put a large hand on the receiver. “Judge Hugo said no. He said to get back to him if there is a positive identification; he doesn't want to put the cart in front of whatever. Anything at your end?”

“Not yet.”

She left him to his call and went back to her desk. Somewhere in her notebook she had made a note of the Realtor who was dealing with Salinger's childhood home. That one had definitely not burned down. One hour later, with Fynn's blessing and a key from the agent who had come to meet her, she was standing at the front door.

The agent had given her the key before getting back into her silver Camry. “I'll be honest with you, I don't think we're going to move this unit any day soon. I mean, look at it. Thirty years of neglect, and it wasn't much to start with. After this, it will be the weirdos and the crazies breaking in to steal the wallpaper to sell on eBay. Keep the key—we have a bundle.”

The house had already been checked by patrol officers as soon as Salinger had been identified. They had made sure that there were no signs of forced entry—the house had been repossessed while Salinger was in jail and the locks changed—and no illegal dwelling.

The agency that had repossessed the house had itself gone under, and thus the Realtors found on their hands a property they didn't want and couldn't sell; in a few years' time, she said, they might as well blow on it, and it would surely collapse on itself like the ruin that it was.

A front door, a side gate on the right, the color faded to a pale green. Madison felt the sun edging out of the cloud cover: not even heavenly blue skies could have made this house pretty. She fit the key in the lock and stepped inside.

Her eyes adjusted to the gloom—“No electricity,” the Realtor had reminded her. Madison held a heavy-duty flashlight in her left hand. The sunshine was fighting its way in through the dirty windows, and she stood the flashlight upright by the door.

The smell was chemical lavender over dust; someone had left plastic air fresheners in every room that she could see. They had swept the floors and removed all the furniture, all of Salinger's possessions, all curtains and carpets. Madison paused and listened; the outside sounds barely registered.

She walked from room to room, looking for something that would give her a sense of the family who had lived there first, then a father
and two boys, a father and his surviving son, and ultimately Harry Salinger alone. All Madison saw was a bare house that told her much about low-income lives and little about murder and obsession.

She climbed the stairs and found the bedrooms. The largest would have been the parents', the bed gone, as was everything else. The wallpaper was blue, small flowers that looked like monkshood in orderly rows. Madison looked out the window into the yard and the tall firs that lined it on all sides. The grass was overgrown; there was a time when it probably would have been Harry Salinger's job to cut it.

Madison was painfully aware that she was looking for significance where there was none by now. She had not felt any connection between this place and the horrors visited on the Sinclair family and the John Does in Pierce County. It was a sad wreck of a house with large patches of damp where the windowsills met the walls, but all the traces of the lives inside it had been washed out with economy-size bottles of Clorox.

She looked around. Had Salinger continued sleeping in his childhood room after his father died? Had he locked the man's old room and thrown away the key?

She turned and instantly felt a floorboard creak and shift underfoot. The wood was a darker color; a rug must have rested there for years, protecting it from the sun. With the tip of her boot Madison tested the floorboard again. There was definite movement there, more than its neighbor was allowed.

Madison dug into the back pocket of her black jeans; she flicked open her grandfather's pocketknife and eased the tip into the narrow gap at the short end of the floorboard. It was stuck. She knelt on the floor, careless of the dust and splinters, and tried to get a look through the gap at the space under the floorboard. Too dark to see. She ran downstairs and retrieved the flashlight. With the full blast of the beam on it she could see it—a shoebox. Her heart thumped once. She put more pressure on the knife, but it did little except dent the wood.

This could be nothing. This could be nothing at all. But whatever it is, it's coming out.

She straightened up, went back to her car, and took out a crowbar she kept next to the jack. She threw her leather jacket in, slammed the trunk shut, and looked around. The road was deserted.

Back in the bedroom she carefully pushed the crowbar into the gap. She started pushing slowly and quietly as if the floor wasn't really supposed to notice, and one short thrust later the board came off, falling sideways onto the floor.

Madison took out a crumpled pair of gloves from a pocket and put them on. She snapped open her cell phone and took a couple of pictures, the flash harsh against the muted light through the panes.

She placed her fingers around the shoebox and tested its weight. It came up easily, a dirty gray that would once have been white, a string tied around it.

This was it—all that remained of Salinger's life that had not been thrown out, sold off, or incinerated. The string had been tied in a bow, twisting around the box as if it was a gift. She took each end between her thumb and index finger and pulled delicately, and the bow came apart. For two full breaths Madison waited, and then in one movement she lifted the lid. The handkerchief was deeply stained with dark brown that Madison knew to be blood, wrapped around a large irregular shape. She lifted the corners of the fabric, avoiding the blood, and laid them over the sides of the box like petals. There were dozens: different sizes, textures, colors, small pretty ones and cheap worn-out ones. Pet collars, both cats' and dogs', encrusted with blood and grime and fur. Red velvet and thin, shiny leather, little tags with names and telephone numbers. Dozens of them. The sudden scent was copper and offal. Madison half slipped and half sat down on the floor.
How long? How long did it take him to kill them all?

In the fading light Madison spent a couple of hours testing floorboards and looking for hiding places, but the house had already given her everything she would find there. From the kitchen door, opened with a key found on a nail and a shoulder push, she measured the garden and wondered how many small shallow graves the boy Salinger had dug in the soft earth.

Madison locked the front door and walked back to her car, the shoebox and its contents in an evidence bag in her trunk. She drove back to the station with all her windows down.

The young associate at Quinn, Locke had been speaking for a few minutes, briefing Nathan Quinn on the latest developments in Headley vs. ClearGen Ltd. Quinn had stopped listening pretty much immediately, and his eyes found the digital clock on the mantelpiece of the conference room: 6:07 p.m. Less than forty-eight hours. Less than two days to a moment that might never even happen.

He realized that the young man had stopped talking. “Thank you, Mark. I'll look over the file later.”

Mark Rosen gathered his papers and left. Carl Doyle came in—he had obviously been waiting outside the room. Quinn didn't need to ask the reason for the thunder in his face.

“Given what happened, it's a necessary formality,” he said.

Doyle was clearly not in the mood for letting things go.

“What do I need to know?” he said politely but with an edge that Quinn had come to recognize over the years.

“It's a straightforward change. Nothing to worry about.”

Carl Doyle sat in a chair and ran one freckled hand through his hair. This was anything but straightforward. If he was kept in the dark, he wouldn't be able to protect Quinn and the practice in the only way he could, by doing his job right and may the rest go to hell.

“What do I need to know?” he repeated.

Quinn let the sun disappear entirely into Puget Sound, then walked to the door and closed it.

“Let me tell you a little about this,” he said.

Doyle left the conference room ten minutes later. He went to the restroom and kept his wrists under the cold water tap until the chill had spread to his whole body.

After a short run through the neighborhood and a hot shower, Madison heated up some stew from the previous evening. She had resisted
the impulse to call Sorensen and Dr. Fellman to check on their progress. Everyone had her cell number in triplicate.

She started watching
The Apartment
and fell asleep on the sofa before Shirley MacLaine got her heart broken.

In his house above Alki Beach, John Cameron sits in darkness and studies the lights of downtown Seattle framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass, pinpoints of headlights gliding on the Alaskan Way Viaduct across the Sound. He knows there will be no peace to be gained from the view; he has been reading a copy of Salinger's original arrest sheet and all the information Tod Hollis had gathered about the case. Understanding has come late in the game, but it has come, and he swears under his breath.