The Gift of the Darkness (43 page)

There are weapons in the house: some he will carry on his person, and some he will leave behind. Whether he will get to be in this room ever again, watching strangers driving in the distance, he really could not care less. In the end, it will be speed more than strength or ammunition that will get the job done. Speed and the will to do it. The hunter's instinct was rarely far from the surface, and right now he feels that what little human decency he has carried around in the last few years is fast unraveling into nothing. He hopes Detective Madison will not get in the way, but he knows she probably will.

He crumples the arrest sheet, lights a match, and watches it curl up and burn to ash in the empty fireplace.

Chapter 43

Thursday morning. Madison sat at her desk, cradling the receiver on her shoulder and making notes. A fleeting thought pulled at her just as Dunne burst through the door.

“They're going through the test again for confirmation. One set of remains matches Salinger's DNA.”

Madison managed a polite if extremely quick “thank you and good-bye” and hung up.

“Salinger's DNA?”

“Fynn has gone to get the warrant signed. The first round of tests confirms that a complete set of human remains from Salinger's house matches his DNA and the bit of coagulated blood found at the Sinclair crime scene.”

Madison's hand was still on the receiver. “We need to see with our own eyes that the brother's body is still in its grave. We need to know for sure.”

“Grab your coat. I've never been happier to go to a cemetery.”

Madison stood to follow, her hopes and her fears a single weight pressing against her chest. She hoped to be wrong; more than anything she hoped to be wrong.

Farmer Joe's in Burien was Tommy's favorite shop because it had strawberry freezer pops. He loved squeezing the chilled fruit onto the tip of his tongue and the way his fingers would go a little numb from the cold. Heaven.

He looked up at his mom; they were in the canned fruit and vegetable aisle, and it held absolutely no interest for him at all.

“Just a couple more things, sweetheart,” Rachel said, and she let go of his hand to pick up a tin of peaches to put in her basket. She checked the ingredients for the sugar content.

Tommy knew where the freezer pops lived—they were a couple of aisles back. He was under strict instructions not to go wandering off by himself, but that was not wandering; that was shopping, like his mom did. He took two steps toward the end of their aisle.

“Tommy, stay where I can see you, baby.”

“Yes, Mommy,” he replied. Tommy looked around: few things in his life were more boring than shopping for groceries. A police officer in uniform stood a few feet away by the end of the cereal aisle, holding an empty basket, a long coat folded on his arm. Auntie Alice was a police officer, too. The man turned and looked at the boy.

The rain found them under umbrellas on Queen Anne Hill. It was a gentle slope, and the water ran downhill through the patches of thin snow—Madison was glad she was wearing boots. Fynn, Spencer, Dunne, Kelly, and Rosario, their shoulders and trouser hems already soaked, spread out wide and went from stone to stone looking for Michael Salinger's grave. Within those forty acres they had a rough idea of where it would be. Under other circumstances it could have been a lovely walk, evergreens and a neat lawn, the universal markers of eternal rest. Still, when it came down to it, they were there to dig up a casket, and Madison looked around for visiting mourners, hoping to find none.

A cemetery official in a long gray parka did his best to keep up with them and reply to Lieutenant Fynn's questions. No, there had been no vandalism in the last three years, no disturbance of any kind; the maintenance crews checked the grounds regularly. Madison half
listened as she crouched and ran her fingers over worn marble. The wrong name. She straightened up and walked on.

“Here!” Kelly hollered, and he raised his arm.

The official spoke quietly in his walkie-talkie to give the digger directions. They clustered around a granite headstone, identical to the two stones next to it. No angels, no ornaments. Only the dates told them it was a child's grave. It was stark, and yet twenty-five years of Pacific Northwest climate had bought it a softness and elegance that money had not.

Two Crime Scene Unit officers in all-weather gear joined them; Sorensen had stayed back at the lab, fighting her own private war with the pile of evidence.

Madison crouched down, and a few raindrops found their way into the back of her collar. The ground around the headstones was intact; there was no visible mark that told them anyone had touched, disturbed, or even visited the three Salinger graves. One CSU took pictures; the other held a small video camera.

The digger arrived, an efficient machine that could do the work faster than men would.

“Here we go, then,” the driver said, and the engine came to life.

Madison stood back and sank her hands into her pockets.

She couldn't say how long it took; at some point the driver stopped and used a shovel to clear off the last of the dirt. Nobody spoke.

The CSU officers had already set up their lights; they blazed a circle around the hole. One of the men dropped into it and disappeared. There was little room to move, and the other stayed above ground, the video camera held at eye level.

Fynn's cell phone rang; he flipped it open and stepped away from the lights.

Madison closed her eyes and raised her face; the rain had almost stopped, and she let the veil of moisture settle on her brows.
Be dead and be gone.

Fynn's voice brought her back. “It was the ME. The tests are confirmed. It's Salinger, the body they recovered—the DNA matches.”

“The seals are intact!” The officer inside the pit had to yell above the voices all talking at once.

“Are you sure?” Madison yelled back.

“I'm looking right at them. They would have had to twist and break them in four places. The original seals have not been messed with since this thing went into the ground.”

Madison dropped to her knees on the edge of the hole; around her she could hear the others move and talk and speak on their own cells.

“Open it up already,” somebody said.

Madison could not look away. The CSU man made short work of it, tools releasing the seals on all sides. When they shifted the lid, everybody crowded to the edge of the pit. The human remains inside the casket wore the threadbare rags of what had once been clothes. The body, such as it was now, was there, every bone in its place.

The cemetery official looked them over. “Happy now?” Nobody replied. “Lieutenant, I'd like to put everything back just as it was as soon as possible. I'm sure you understand.”

Madison stopped listening. Harry Salinger was dead. She had to tell Quinn; she had to tell Brown. Harry Salinger was gone, blown to hell by his own hand. She felt Dunne's light slap on her shoulder; he was smiling. Even Rosario, his nose still under a bandage and nearly as pale as the dead, was smiling. A group of people standing around an open grave as if it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. It was over.

Madison said her good-byes and started walking down the hill; her world had just shifted, and she needed to adjust.
Quinn
, she thought. She reached for her cell phone inside her coat just as it started ringing.

“Tommy's missing!” Many voices crowded around Rachel's, and she was speaking and trying to keep her sobs down and breathe. “Tommy's missing.”

Madison froze. She turned and saw the CSU lights at the top of the hill.

“When did this happen? Where are you?”

She hoped to God that her training would slam into place, or she would be no good to her friends at all.

“Farmer Joe's. I was taking something from a shelf, and he was there, and I turned and he was gone. I told him so many times—Alice, I looked everywhere in the store and outside. I don't understand—”

“You called the police?”

“Yes, they came, and we've all been looking. Everybody has been looking. Everybody. Where did he go? How could he—”

“How long ago did you notice he wasn't with you?”

“About thirty minutes.”

“Rachel, sweetheart, put the police officer on, please.”

“Alice—”

“I know,” she whispered, hoping that it would convey what Rachel needed to hear. “Officer? This is Detective Madison, SPD Homicide. Who am I speaking to?”

“This is Officer Clarke, Burien PD.”

“Officer Clarke, the missing boy is my godson. Have you been given a complete description? His mother usually carries a picture in her wallet. It's a recent one. Has she given it to you?”

“She has.”

“Good. Have the store's cameras been checked?”

“Yes—no good. We went through the footage. You see them coming into Farmer Joe's, and that's it. Next thing the mother comes tearing out the door and calling for the boy. Nobody left with a child in the time between, and the staff door was locked and monitored. You need a swipe card to get to the back and the staff exit.”

“I hear what you're saying, Officer, but a six-year-old boy doesn't just walk off and disappear.”

“I know. Nobody saw him leave alone or with anybody else, but he is not here. There are officers checking every corner.” Officer Clarke lowered his voice. “And every trunk of every car in the parking lot. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I understand.”

“We're working through the criteria for an Amber Alert. I have to go now.”

Madison gave him her cell number.

“Alice?” The expectation in Rachel's voice was heartbreaking.

“I'm on my way. I'll be with you as soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

“They're doing all the right things.”

“Okay.”

“We are going to find him.”

“Okay.”

Madison rang off. Her eyes had never left the CSU lights on the top of the hill, still blazing in the falling dusk.
Salinger is dead.

She hit the trail at a dead run, and her tires peeled off a layer of rubber as she skidded out of the cemetery parking lot and streaked south.

“Spencer, it's Madison. I have a family emergency.” She had gone straight to voice mail. “My godson is missing. Six-year-old boy. It's a possible abduction. It's just happened, and we don't know anything yet. You can reach me on my cell.”

Madison had worked cases of missing children before, and she knew the statistics: almost seventy-five percent of children who were abducted and murdered were dead within the first three hours from the moment of the abduction. Tommy was not a statistic. Tommy was a six-year-old boy who liked to wander off.
He is safe, and we will find him
.

She was torn between reason and a howling wind in her chest screaming the worst possible scenario. Logic and reason told her over and over again that the original seals were intact and the DNA was a match, and yet the memory of the scent of chloroform filled her nostrils. Nothing, not even the icy air rushing through the open windows, could wash her clean of it.

She picked up her cell from the passenger seat and speed-dialed a number.

“Detective Madison calling for Dr. Fellman. I know he's busy. I appreciate it. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't an emergency.”

A long silence as her call was put through. Minutes rolled by.

“Detective, I'm in the middle of—”

“Dr. Fellman, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have a possible child abduction on my hands, and I just need to ask you something.”

“What abduction?”

“A six-year-old boy connected to the Salinger investigation.”

Fellman took that on board. “Ask away.”

“You harvested the DNA from one of the bodies found at the Salinger house. Was it a complete set of human remains?”

“It was.”

“And you tested it yourself. Twice. And twice it came back a match to Harry Salinger?”

“Yes, we used mitochondrial DNA, because it was all we could recover, and it was a match. It survived the high temperature and the destruction of soft tissue.”

“Mitochondrial—that's DNA only from the mother's line?”

“Exactly. We could harvest enough for a match. Tested twice, confirmed twice. What is this about, Madison? I thought you guys would be popping corks tonight.”

“Salinger has a pattern of manipulating evidence and going after family members. The missing boy is my godson.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. But not even that murdering piece of—not even he could alter DNA at will.”

“I'll let you get back to work.”

Madison almost missed his last words as she rang off.

“Good luck.”

Chapter 44

Madison sliced through the rush-hour traffic. There were questions to be answered, and she envisioned a police officer going through the list, following procedure, not knowing whether he was dealing with a wandering child, an abduction, or a parent who had intentionally harmed her six-year-old boy.
Has this happened before? How often? How long before you noticed? Was the boy upset? Show me again where it happened . . .
They didn't know Rachel Abramowitz, but Madison did. She ran through the options: Tommy was lost; he had gotten distracted and wandered away from his mother, then got tired and curled up somewhere under or behind something in the store. Possible but unlikely. The police had looked everywhere. All the other possibilities led into darkness.

Madison had felt before the random cruelty of the world flutter against the edge of her life; you can't work law enforcement and not feel it brush past you every so often. Today, it had found her and woven its way inside.

Brown had asked her why she wanted to be in Homicide. The OPR detectives had asked her the same thing. In the end, it all came down to a dog barking twenty years ago.

She tried and failed to forget the long lines of shrubs and trees close to the store, the dense patches of green where it would be so easy to
hide the body of a little boy. She tried and failed to forget that Burien, like anywhere else, likely had a long list of registered sex offenders. There were very good reasons justice was not left in the hands of a victim's relatives. The cell kept its silence, and Madison drove on, mile after mile.

She rounded a corner, and there they were: a motley crowd and the sweeping beams of flashlights. Tommy was still missing, and even the thin comfort of daylight was gone.

Madison pulled into the parking lot of the Five Corners Shopping Center and quickly scanned the groups for Rachel and Neal. She spotted them talking to a police officer by Rachel's car; their boy had been missing for over an hour now, and they looked as if they had not drawn breath since. Around them Christmas carols played softly from invisible speakers.

Rachel's voice on the phone had broken Alice's heart, but their faces, gray with shock and fear, were a fresh new hell. Neal had his arm around his wife, both listening to the officer as if he was the path to salvation. Others streamed around them like a river, searching and calling out, under cars and over hedges; some were checking inside the Dumpsters.

Madison strode up to them and took Rachel's hand; her friend grasped it in both of hers. She hoped her eyes would tell her what words could not.

“Officer Clarke.” Madison read the name on the Burien PD tag. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Detective.”

Clarke was thickset and short, an army haircut and cheeks that would need to be shaved in another couple of hours. He registered who Madison was—there had been enough news reports in the last week—but he made no comment.

“Has the Amber Alert been broadcast yet?” she asked.

“We don't know enough to be sure it was an abduction. If it doesn't fit the criteria, we can't send it out.”

“What about regular television and radio news?”

“We're taking care of that. As well as the rest.”

“What's
the rest
?” Neal's voice cracked.

Madison and Clarke exchanged a look, and he left it to her to fill in the details. She tried to offer a possible scenario. Nothing she could say would sound reassuring. “Say that someone here saw Tommy, and he had tripped and fallen; however minor the injury, they might have taken him to a hospital. The police will check the hospitals for a boy who looks like Tommy and has just been brought in.”

“But I don't understand. He didn't leave the store—we looked at the film, and he never came out. He should still be here.” There was anger and pleading. Rachel was trying to keep calm in a world that made no sense.

“I'm going to watch the CCTV myself,” Madison said.

“Go ahead, but there's nothing of value on it. Shame, though. An SPD uniformed officer was in the store at that time, and he might have seen something. We've called around but haven't been able to raise him yet.”

“A Seattle Police Department officer?” Madison repeated.

“Yes.”

“Okay, I'll be right back,” she said, and she squeezed Rachel's hand. She didn't want her friend to see her face and remember that it had been a man wearing an SPD uniform who had put her partner in the ICU. She didn't want her friends to see her face at all.

The guy would probably turn out to be five foot six, heavy, and balding; he could have stopped to buy groceries for dinner and that was that. A uniform meant nothing.

Personal courtesy and a badge got Madison in front of the monitor in seconds.

The teenager who had shown her in smoothed her pink Old Navy sweatshirt, the same color as her nails. “Is it true you know the boy?”

“Yes,” Madison replied without turning.

The girl hovered as Madison ran the footage back to find the moment Rachel and Tommy had arrived. The teenager had finished her shift and changed out of the store Hawaiian shirt; in the back
room Madison could smell her freshly applied perfume, something flowery named after someone famous, and wished the girl would leave.

“I have a little brother the same age.”

Madison didn't reply: there they were, walking into the store, Rachel holding Tommy's hand. Her heart thumped. Tommy. The man came in a few seconds afterward; he wore the uniform cap and looked down, away from the camera. He was tall and wiry, striding into the store with purpose and grabbing a basket almost as an afterthought. Madison froze the image; her world became that one single frame. She couldn't bring herself to say it even in the privacy of her mind, not when she had stood by an open grave proving the opposite only hours earlier.

The man carried a bulky parka on his arm, and he never looked up; his gaze was glued to the floor tiles. A few minutes later he came into frame again—no shopping basket, the coat thrown over his shoulder now—and he just walked out. He hadn't bought a thing.

Madison played the same few seconds over and over again.

“What are you looking at?” The girl was still there.

Madison did not reply.

“You're looking at the police officer.”

“Yes.”

“I saw him.”

Madison turned. “You remember him?”

“Yes.” The girl looked embarrassed.

“What is it?”

The girl looked away, then back at Madison. She hesitated for a moment and then stepped closer. When her voice came, it was whisper-low. “He smelled. It was really bad, like an animal smell. I saw a goat once, and that's what he smelled like. That, mixed with some kind of chemical. He walked right past me, and he smelled something awful.”

“What kind of chemical? Cleaning fluid? Soap? Bleach?”

“No, he smelled of goats and hospital. You know what I mean?”

Madison knew what she meant and ran the footage again. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”

The girl nodded. “Yes. I broke my arm last year, and I went to Harborview.”

Madison watched the man leave, the bulky parka thrown over his shoulder, and Rachel running to the checkout counters seconds later, calling out for her son.

“It's Hayley, right? Hayley, tell me everything you remember. Where were you when you first saw him?”

Madison pulled out the other chair from the monitor table, and the girl sat down, their knees touching in the close space. Her eyes were baby-blue and made up with much more care than Madison had ever been capable of when she was seventeen, or even now.

“I was standing by the coffees and checking on the stock, because it was getting low. I guess people buy more coffee at Christmastime. I had been back and forth all day.”

“Go on.”

“I looked up, because he was walking fast—I mean, faster than most customers walk around the store, you know? And he just walked right past me. That's when I smelled him.” The memory was enough to make her scrunch up her nose.

“And then?”

“Nothing. He got to the exit and left. I thought he forgot something and was in a hurry, that's all. He hadn't bought anything.”

“Did you see him on his way in? As he came into the shop, maybe walked around?”

“No, I didn't. I only saw him on his way out.”

“How clearly did you see his face? Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

Hayley bit her lip; she wanted so badly to say yes. Madison saw that, and it was obvious that the answer was no.

“Maybe.” The girl drew out the word. “He walked real fast. I don't know.”

Madison looked at the image on the screen: the checkout counters, Rachel in frozen panic.

“Hayley, think back for me if you can. After the police officer left, what did you do?”

When Hayley thought with any degree of intensity, a little crease appeared in her perfectly smooth brow. It appeared now.

“I finished with the coffees?”

“After that?”

“Well, there was the lady looking for her boy, and we all went to the front of the shop and then back into the aisles to see if he was there, but he wasn't.”

“Did you call out to him?”

“Sure. We all did.”

“Did you go where his mom had seen him last?”

“Yes. It's like he was there and then he was gone. I went all around that aisle, like, four times.”

“Give me as many details as you can remember.” Madison was dreading what the girl would say next.

“Someone had left a basket in the next aisle. I picked it up.”

“An empty basket?”

“Yup. Someone just dropped it on the floor in the middle of the aisle. People, you know.” Hayley shrugged.

Goats and hospital.
The air had gone out of the room, and the world made no sense.

Madison sat back in the plastic chair. After a minute or so of her silence, the girl started to squirm in her seat.

“Was that the wrong thing to do?” she asked.

“No, you did great,” Madison replied, her mouth full of ash, and checked her wristwatch.

The girl smiled wide.

Madison splashed water on her face in the staff restroom. She had taken Hayley to Officer Clarke, and he had taken her statement, even though he did not fully understand why that would be of any use in finding the SPD officer.

Madison found out there were no working CCTV cameras that covered anything beyond the entrance of Farmer Joe's, not even the closest parking spaces. The moment the man in uniform had left the store, he had turned to smoke. The footage from local traffic
cameras on 509 and 160 Street could be pulled, but if you didn't know what car you were looking for, you were pretty much wearing a blindfold and spinning in circles.

Madison ran cold water over her wrists. The officers had gone through the storeroom inch by inch. Madison knew they would find nothing, just as she knew the hospital checks and television and radio alerts would not help. There had been no witnesses; in fact, apparently there had been no crime at all.

Back outside, the sky was clear, and stars lurked beyond the orange glow of the city. It had been hours—long past the time for harmless misunderstandings, long past Tommy's bedtime. Rachel and Neal were searching on foot beyond First Avenue South; it seemed more likely that Tommy could have walked in that direction than crossing 509.

Madison checked her watch. She was glad they were not there, glad they would not see her leave. If she went too early, it would upset the plan, and the consequences would be unthinkable; too late, and what brittle hope she held would simply crumble away.

Logic had no place here; she had nothing more to go on than the fleeting impression of a girl who couldn't even identify the man. It was less than nothing, and yet it was everything. It was the trail that would lead to Tommy. Madison had held the ransom note in her very hands and not known; it had been sent and received days ago, when Tommy slept safely in his bed. It had not looked like a ransom note; then again, the world had tilted, and nothing was quite right anymore.

The memory of Tommy in Rachel's arms was like a blade being drawn out of her flesh. Nathan Quinn had returned Tommy's baseball with one hand; in the other he was holding the last card from Salinger, the promise of a hell none of them had foreseen. The last piece of the ransom note.

Madison left the girl with Burien PD; it would have taken too long to explain to them something that was more instinct than reason. Instead, she looked around for the best potential place to park if she wanted to hit 509 as fast as possible after the snatch. The spaces were empty now, and the ground held nothing for her; her breath puffed out white close to the concrete as she searched for evidence.

It was almost time to go. She looked in the direction where she knew Rachel and Neal had gone and hoped to God that they were right and she was wrong. She hoped that it would be someone else who would find Tommy, safe and unharmed, and that she would not find him where she was going. She hoped.

Madison turned back toward her car just as a black Ford Explorer pulled in next to it. She stopped suddenly where she was, and a volunteer with thermoses in her arms bumped into her, apologized, and kept going.

Nathan Quinn stepped out of the Explorer and looked around the lot. Their eyes met, and Madison let out the breath she was holding. She would not need to explain. They already knew. John Cameron got out of the vehicle and crossed his arms, watching her.

Quinn wasn't wearing a tie. The pale, smooth skin in the open collar made him look oddly vulnerable. He came halfway toward her, and Madison closed the distance.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I knew you'd be on your way soon. We have to make the ferry at Edmonds.”

“You shouldn't be involved in this. Neither one of you.”

“It's the other way round, Detective. You shouldn't have been involved in this, neither you nor the boy. But it's time, and our ride is faster.”