The Gift of the Darkness (44 page)

Police all around, and her ride was a murderer and his best friend. Madison held Quinn's eyes for a moment and then started walking toward her Civic. She gathered a few things quickly from the backseat and the trunk and shoved them into a gym bag. Cameron climbed into the back of the Explorer—Quinn would drive. Madison got into the front passenger seat without looking back: her car would remain in the parking lot of the Five Corners Shopping Center, together with all of her life up to that point, and if she was lucky, she might be able to get back to pick up one or both.

The Explorer had been on 509 for a few miles when Quinn broke the silence.

“How did he do it?”

Madison stared straight ahead. “He wore the SPD uniform he has, walked into the store, chloroformed and wrapped Tommy up in his coat in the nanosecond his mother wasn't looking, and walked right out.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

Madison shook her head. “Couldn't tell them. The CCTV was not conclusive, but a witness smelled chloroform. That's all I have. If I'm wrong—I couldn't let the parents think he has him. How did
you
know?”

“SPD released the news that Harry Salinger had been confirmed dead in a fire at his house. The item after that was the missing boy in Burien—they showed a picture.” Quinn turned to Madison. “He's fooled the cops before.”

The landscape was a streak of orange lights and concrete. Madison counted the miles on the street signs that blurred past. She made an inventory of what was in the gym bag at her feet, how much ammunition she had, the last time she had cleaned and dry-fired her piece. As if any of that mattered. Something actually relevant struck her out of the blue.

“We need to stop at a drugstore. I need to get—I need to have things in case Tommy's hurt. First aid, bandages, hypothermia blanket.”

The words were almost too much.

“Everything is in the back,” Quinn replied.

“You carry hypothermia blankets and splints in your trunk?”

Quinn didn't reply, and, after a moment, Madison understood.

“You would have gone anyway. You would have gone to meet him even after SPD said he was dead.”

“He's fooled them before,” Quinn repeated.

“Why go to him?”

“To finish this, once and for all.”

Behind them, John Cameron was stretched out on the backseat. He had not said a word since they had come for her, a piece of the same darkness that had crafted Harry Salinger, lying behind her with his eyes closed.

Madison knew without asking that he carried a piece, probably more than one, maybe even the knife that had killed Erroll Sanders.
And she wondered in what world she lived now, where that was both a threat and a comfort.

“Tod Hollis has been looking into Salinger's assault case,” Quinn said. “Into his trial.”

Something in his voice made Madison turn.

The MV
Puyallup
left its dock at Edmonds as per schedule: the journey to Kingston would take thirty minutes. The late hour meant an almost empty ferry. Once the other passengers had left the car deck, they each took a row of parked cars and went slowly and silently from one to the next, looking inside as they walked past, listening for any sounds above the thrum of the ferry engine. As they expected, none of the vehicles seemed suspicious. Salinger would have traveled hours earlier, his cargo bundled in the parka in the back; he would have stood among the commuters and day-trippers, the SPD uniform already in a bag on the floor of his car.

The white interior of the passenger deck was almost too bright for Madison; she narrowed her eyes and went to the small food stand. She was not hungry, she could not imagine ever being hungry in her life again, but she had to keep her mind busy and her body functioning. She piled something onto a plate—she didn't even see what—paid, and sat down in one of the booths. She forced in a mouthful that tasted like cloth and swallowed it with a gulp of water.

Quinn sat down on the other side of the table. He had bought a black coffee that he was not drinking, and he didn't speak. Madison was grateful he hadn't offered platitudes. She wasn't going to get a
He'll be all right
from him, and she was fine with that. Salinger had killed children before; they both held that knowledge on their skin.

Small groups of people and lone travelers were dispersed in the wide space; five teenagers, crammed in a booth a few steps away, suddenly exploded into laughter. Madison flinched and stood up. “I'm going outside.”

Quinn nodded and let her be. Madison pushed open the doors and was hit by the cold. She took out her cell and dialed. She had to make the call but hoped it would go to voice mail.

When it did, she thought of the words she had prepared and found them pitifully inadequate.

Truth be told, there were no words for what she had to say. “Lieutenant Fynn, this is Madison. I'm on the Edmonds–Kingston ferry . . .”

She spoke for a minute and then rang off. The outside deck was deserted, and in the clear night Kingston was a few lights scattered somewhere ahead. Beyond it lay the bridge to the Olympic Peninsula and Highway 101, a ribbon that looped around the Olympic National Park. Its heart was mountains and glaciers, and somewhere deep in those woods Harry Salinger was holding Tommy.

So much had already been lost in those woods: tonight some of what had been stolen away in David Quinn might be returned in Tommy.

There were stars in the west, right above the Hoh River Valley. Maybe he could see the same stars.
We're coming to get you, Tommy. Be strong. We're coming.

The Explorer came off the ferry ramp with a thud and sped off on 104 toward Port Gamble and past it. They hit 101 and raced along the side of Discovery Bay. Quinn had been right—he drove faster than Madison would ever have been able. She wondered briefly how many times he had visited the place where his brother had died.

After Port Angeles, the woods closed in on both sides, and the canopy of firs in the headlights was a tunnel they were shooting through. The road rushed up to them in winding turns; at times it would open unexpectedly onto an expanse of moonlit water, only to dive back into the pitch-black a moment later.

Quinn took the exit onto the Upper Hoh Road. They shot past the Hard Rain Café, in the direction of Willoughby Creek, and after a few minutes he pulled up to the side of the road.

The air was damp and had a bite to it. Cameron settled a small backpack on his shoulders.

“Jack's going to approach on foot,” Quinn said to Madison. “He'll get to the clearing from the north side.”

Cameron wore black from head to toe. Madison was sure he could be standing next to her, and she wouldn't know.

He turned to Quinn. “I have your word,” he said.

Quinn nodded.

“Your word,” Cameron repeated.

If there ever was a moment when John Cameron seemed human, it was in the instant he took his leave, too fast for Madison to be sure, and yet something had passed between the men. There was barely a whisper through the green as he disappeared into the forest.

“It's not far now,” Quinn said.

“Wait.” Madison reached inside her gym bag and dug around for something. When she found it, she walked around to Quinn's side.

“Put this on,” she said, and she pushed a ballistic vest into his hands.

Quinn looked down at the stiff navy-blue garment with SPD printed in yellow lettering.

“No,” he replied simply.

“I wasn't asking.”

“Do you really think this thing will be sorted with bullets?”

“I don't know. What I do know is that I will handcuff you to this car if you do not wear it, and I'll continue on foot. Put this on.”

Quinn snorted. All he heard was a small clink as the metal closed around the car door handle, and the feeling of cold around his wrist. For the first time in their acquaintance, Nathan Quinn was speechless. Madison took three steps back.

“I have to go now, so either you do as I say, or I'll leave you here. I have no idea what we'll be facing, and it would make my life a good deal better to know that you, unarmed as I think you are, have this small and in all likelihood inadequate protection. If he wanted me dead, he could have shot me a thousand times.”

After a beat he nodded. Madison released the handcuffs.

“It goes under your jacket,” she said.

Quinn slipped on the vest, heavier than it had felt, and adjusted the lateral straps.

“They need to be tighter,” Madison said, and she found the buckles on his side. Her hands shook slightly as she secured them. Quinn
saw them tremble, and she didn't care: it could have been the chill, the adrenaline coursing through her body, her rage, or her terror that it was already too late. She only cared whether the tremor would affect her aim.

“Thank you,” he said.

They got back into the car and drove on. Madison checked the digital clock on the dash.

It was time.

Chapter 45

The mouth of the thin trail was almost completely hidden. Quinn pulled in a few yards short of it as if he had done it a hundred times. Madison zipped up her jacket, checked her piece, shoved a few items into her backpack, and shrugged it on.

Once they were ready, Quinn turned off the car lights, and complete darkness swallowed the world around them. They kept the beams of their flashlights low and close; Quinn went ahead, Madison followed.

After a few minutes he stopped and turned to her, his voice a whisper. “We're going off the trail. Watch your step, and don't fall behind.” He started moving before she could reply. Quinn's progress was quiet and confident; Madison had no doubt it had been bought by years of visiting the place where his brother had last drawn breath.

Around the edge of her light Madison could see the twisted roots of firs and spruces covered in moss and the ferns in between. They were walking under trees they could not see, but Madison perceived their height and breadth above them, just as much as Salinger's proximity. He was there; he was waiting.

Abruptly they stepped into moonlight and froze: the overgrown path had opened into a meadow. They both instinctively took a step
back into the gloom and clicked off their flashlights. A breath of wind brought the sweet scent of resin and a rustling high up in the trees.

Across the meadow and into the thicket, the light of a torch flickered in the distance, then a second, then a third. The glow of the flames quivered in the breeze, and Madison's heart thumped.

“Stay behind me,” she whispered. She unhooked the leather strap on her holster and drew her piece.

They kept to the tree line as they closed in, away from the open and in the shadows.

The first torch was fixed with a metal grip six feet from the ground on the trunk of a massive spruce.

As they came closer, they realized that the torches marked a path: the points of light were spaced evenly every twenty feet.

Quinn touched her shoulder. He pointed slightly to the left of the path. “The clearing where my brother died is two minutes farther
that
way.”

Madison nodded. Salinger had gotten something wrong, finally.

He had laid out the invitation: all they had to do was follow the lights. They passed the first, then the second torch; the warmth of the flames came and went on her cheeks. She felt Quinn by her side when they passed the third, and they stopped dead, shoulder to shoulder, when the voice rang out in front of them.

“You're here,” it said, and there was delight buried deep in the words.

All the hours spent watching men playing out their lives at a card table, and she sensed it straightaway, tinny and shrill, the thread that had connected them from the beginning: hope.

“Let me see you,” Madison said to the darkness.

“Where is Cameron?” the voice asked.

“Where is the boy?” she replied, more gently than she would ever have thought possible.

Harry Salinger stepped out of the gloom and faced them. Tall, wiry, a shirt, and no jacket—the man in the CCTV, the man who had shot Brown and slaughtered the Sinclairs. Pointed at the ground and close to his body, he gripped a .45; the muzzle caught a flicker from
the flames. His pale eyes slid over the cut above her left eye. “Where is John Cameron?”

A puff of breeze brought Madison a fetid animal smell.

John Cameron came into the light. He had gone all the way around and now stood twenty feet to the right of Salinger, who had to turn his head to see him. Cameron's piece pointed straight at the man's head. Madison had not heard him at all.

“You brought me what I needed,” Salinger said, and Madison noticed the fresh, shiny stains and spatters on his clothes, over his chest and arms, a small tear in his shirt by the shoulder. It looked like blood and dirt.

“Where is Tommy?”

“He's nearby.”

Keep your head, engage, connect, get him to tell you where he is.
“What do you want, Salinger?”

“I heard you in the Sinclairs' house. You spoke about what I did with such clarity, such understanding.”

Quinn's arm shivered against her shoulder; she prayed he would keep his mouth shut. Cameron was a statue barely visible except for his face, his .22 in line with his dead eyes.

“Cameron for the boy. John Cameron dead by your hand, and I will take you to the body. It's more than Quinn's brother ever had. It's safe—I've put it under ground for you.”

It took them all a moment to absorb what Salinger had just said.
Shiny blood and dirt on his shirt.

“No!” It wasn't a human sound. Madison lunged forward as Salinger lifted his piece and pressed the trigger three times in rapid succession. His gun jammed. Cameron was already moving, almost there. Salinger, eyes wide, spun and disappeared out of the circle of light.

Madison scrambled behind him, yelling to Cameron over her shoulder.

“You can't shoot him! You can't kill him!”

Cameron was beside her. “Better catch him before I do.”

Out of the torches' reach, they plunged into the murky undergrowth. Madison's eyes adjusted to it, and soon she was running.

Harry Salinger sprinted across a small patch of moonlit dirt. The pine needles barely had time to settle back onto the ground when John Cameron and Alice Madison flew one after the other in close pursuit.

He was fast—God, he was fast. Madison had holstered and secured her piece in her first steps and switched to running mode in the space between heartbeats. She was chasing hard the rustling sounds ahead, Cameron slightly to her left. Even with eyes adjusted to the gloom, they were all running through near-complete darkness.

Her foot caught on a root, and she went sprawling, found her balance, and sprang forward again. Her breath came out in bursts, and her heart thundered. A couple of times she slammed into low-hanging branches, and her cheeks stung with tiny cuts.

Salinger was working on his advantage; she heard him crash through with great speed and little desire to cover his tracks. She dashed between huge trunks, slipped on moss, straightened up, and became aware they were going down an increasingly steep decline.

Cameron was close, sometimes in front, sometimes to her side; she couldn't see him. They were both running as fast as they could and making hardly any progress. The ground dropped abruptly from under her feet, and Madison was sliding downward on a bed of wet leaves; she found purchase on the trunks of fallen trees and kept her balance. Cameron swore as dry branches splintered and snapped.

Salinger's feet hit the soft ground, and he let his body's memory guide him and stir him in the direction he needed. It was a relief. He had shed his jacket as he heard them approach and had already warmed up, as he knew he would. Seven years ago, wearing scrubs and sitting in the room that smelled of bleach with his public defender, the door had opened, and the tall, dark man had come in. Salinger's lawyer had sworn under his breath.

“Mr. Quinn, good of you to join us,” the prosecutor said.

“It's not my case, Mark; it's Peter's. I'm only keeping an eye on things. I'm not even in the room.”

Nathan Quinn never looked at Salinger and never said another word, and yet he was very much in the room.

In the end they had gone to trial, both men pleading innocent and the bartender still in the hospital. It all came down to
reasonable doubt
.

The morning of the last day his attorney had turned to the other lawyer. “Nathan Quinn wrote your closing argument, didn't he?”

The jury provided the answer: forty-eight months for Harry Salinger. The other man paid a fine for the broken glassware and walked free. It might have been someone else who had delivered the closing statement, but Salinger knew who had written it, who had planned the other man's defense, who had given the jury the reasonable doubt they needed and the sinner they wanted. The bartender was still in hospital, and someone had to pay that bill.

The forest was a blur; his pain was a blur. Forty-eight months. He remembered each scar and who had given it to him; he remembered each day in jail and who had given it to him. Rabineau would never leave the Bones: killing Pathune had seen to that, and the cross on his brow had sealed it. And next, Quinn.

It had been easy to be hired at the restaurant, but that first night, in a waiter's uniform, Salinger had looked at the two men sitting next to Quinn, and he had understood in a moment of dazzling clarity that this was bigger than his own pain, bigger than anything he had ever contemplated. This had
meaning
. And he was standing there, blinded by that complete awareness, with his most recent injury still under a bandage, because that was where he was always meant to arrive. Everything in his life had led to this moment, and he was merely an instrument as the universe corrected his axis and everything Quinn had ever touched and tainted would turn to ash.

Alice Madison's voice, indigo, had expanded and filled up every bit of his consciousness that wasn't taken up by running. He could have done this blindfolded, but that would have been showing off. How long would be long enough?

The terrain leveled out under her feet, and Madison splashed through water inches deep, pale stones on a bank only just visible. Salinger had changed direction, and she followed him through the shallows, up on the other side, and back into the undergrowth.

She ran, stumbled, and smashed through anything in her path as she tracked him. At times she smelled the putrid, decaying smell and almost retched. Blood and dirt. A searing pain burned in her chest, and she almost lost her breath, but they were suddenly on a trail, thin light in patches and clear ground, and Madison picked up speed.

Salinger was in sight. Cameron tore onto the trail and started gaining on him. Madison dug for everything she had and pushed forward; they were side by side and their target only seconds ahead.

It was a long stretch. Salinger pounded on, almost within reach of her outstretched hand. A sudden rushing of water and, one after the other, they burst onto the Hoh River bank. The moonlight was shockingly bright. Salinger staggered and lost his footing on the rocks; they fell on him and pinned him to the ground. It took Madison a couple of seconds to notice that he wasn't struggling; he was breathing almost normally while Cameron held his left arm and leg and she held his right, both out of breath. Her brain fought for oxygen; it faltered on the memory of his last words.

“Tommy. Where is he? What did you do to him?” She spat out the words, aware that the muzzle of her gun was jammed against the tender flesh under his jaw but not sure how it had gotten there. The point of Cameron's knife rested lightly against Salinger's cheekbone.

He was limp under them, his eyes looking to the sky above, his face so devoid of fear, of that most basic human reaction to imminent death, that Madison paused, too shaken for clear thinking but wary that something was wrong. Definitely and irreversibly wrong. Cold sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.

“You brought me what I wanted,” Salinger rasped, and his eyes flicked toward the forest.

“What
did
you want, you sick fuck?” Madison's voice cracked.

“Quinn,” he whispered.

Madison and Cameron looked at each other, both realizing at the same time that Quinn was not with them, that he had stayed behind alone.

“Quinn,” she said.

“Yes.” Salinger turned to Cameron. “He won't be able to get you out of this one, will he?”

Pieces of understanding clunked into place, and the horror uncoiled itself.

“Where's Tommy? What did you do to him?” Madison stood up, and Cameron reached over to keep Salinger down. The man was utterly still.

Salinger had not made a single mistake in the last twelve months; he had not misjudged where Quinn's brother had died. He only wanted for Quinn to be alone when he got there. Madison bent over, her hands on her knees, dizzy with the notion.

“Tommy is alive, isn't he?”

Salinger allowed himself a small smile.

Madison turned to Cameron. “Pierce County,” she said. It was all she could manage. She started back toward the woods and ran—she ran as if the devil's wail was behind her.

“No!”
Madison howled, springing toward Salinger, and in an instant the three of them were out of sight. Nathan Quinn heard the sounds of the pursuit fading in the distance, and then there was only the sputtering of the torches around him and the forest's deeper silence.

He walked back the way they had come, and when he reached the final torch, on the edge of the meadow, he lifted it easily from the metal bracket—something almost medieval, his brain registered.

Quinn stepped out. No need to stay hidden in the shadows; the trees around the field created a circle of stars in the open sky. He looked up, and the breeze chilled the perspiration on his face. He had read Hollis's report, and he knew why Salinger had sent the notes to him. He barely remembered the case and his own part in it. In his mind he had gone back to it, and to the restaurant, a hundred times in the last day to try to see Salinger. There had been no recognition when he had come out to meet them. He hadn't known seven years ago whether Salinger or the Quinn, Locke client was guilty, and he didn't know today. The only thing he knew was that James and his family were dead and a little boy, Tommy, had been taken because
his words
had been better than another lawyer's on a given day. And because once, twenty years ago, his life had turned left instead of right.

The notes had specified the clearing, and, so far, Salinger had not made a single mistake.

The path that would lead him to the place that he had visited at least once every couple of months in the last two decades was before him. He had never been there at night, but if he closed his eyes, he could see it clearly. He let his memory take over and followed it out of the meadow and into the undergrowth, holding the torch away from low-hanging branches.