The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  Quinn stood with them. “I’ll drive myself. Did—did the neighbors see or hear anything?”

  “We’re still canvassing.”

  “Any signs of forced entry?”

  “Not obvious ones, no, but we’re still working the scene.”

  Quinn rubbed his temples with his index fingers. “Sergeant Brown, the number of murders in Seattle last year was twenty, the year before that, nineteen. Compared to other metropolitan areas, it’s a pretty safe place, and your department’s clearance rate is high. This was not a burglary.” Quinn looked from one to the other of them, taking measure of them as they had done of him. “I will meet you at the coroner’s office in half an hour,” he said. “I have to call Annie’s sister in Chicago.”

  “Of course.”

  As the doors of the elevator closed in front of them, Madison saw several people gather around Quinn and the expressions on their faces as he told them the grim news. The dumb animal shock, the pain.

  Back in the car, they checked the radio and found there was a message from Mary Kay Joyce. They were patched through, and Joyce’s voice crackled on the line; she was calling from the unit van.

  “We’ve found two halves of a torn check for $25,000. One half was in the study, the other in the kitchen bin. Do you receive clearly?”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Madison said.

  “The signature is only half written; it stops in the middle, but it’s very clear. The name is John Cameron. J-O-H-N C-A-M-E-R-O-N. You got that?”

  “I got it.” Madison looked up from her jotting. For a moment she heard only the static of the radio and the rain on the windshield.

  “I’ve called in Payne,” Joyce continued. “It’s his day off, and he was pretty pissed off. There are dozens of items to go through, but I’ll put the check on the top of the pile.”

  Bob Payne was the top man in Latents. Whoever had touched the slip of paper, he would find out.

  Brown was not an expansive man, but Madison liked how he wore his thoughts close to the chest. He wound down the window and took a couple of breaths, as if the air in the car had suddenly turned foul.

  “What do you know about John Cameron?” he asked her.

  Madison had heard many things over the years—hard facts bulked up by speculation, hearsay, and myth.

  “I know about the Nostromo,” she replied.

  “Then you know enough. If he is in any way involved in this thing, this piece of evidence might be gold.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He left five dead on the Nostromo. Two cops, three ex-cons. He slit their throats and let them bleed out.”

  “I remember.” Madison had been barely out of the Academy, and the case had been headline news for weeks. The boat and its grisly cargo had been found in the waters near Orcas Island. They had never managed to get all the blood off the deck—the wood had been black with it. Nobody had ever been charged with the murders.

  “We had nothing. No evidence, no eyewitness, no case. Snitches were afraid to even mention his name. But it was him, all right.”

  Madison remembered the pictures in the papers: standard department portraits for the cops, mug shots for the ex-cons.

  Brown drove toward the morgue. “Two years later we had the body of a known drug dealer bobbing up in Lake Union. His hands had been cut off, his eyes were missing, and he had been almost completely decapitated. A reliable informant said it was Cameron’s work, and we had a stampede of dealers leaving town. Next thing, the informant said he’d changed his mind, and we were left with nothing.”

  “How does someone like John Cameron know the Sinclairs? What’s the connection?” Madison said. “Sinclair was an attorney. A tax attorney. Very white-collar, very safe.”

  “Remember that we don’t know for sure that it’s our John Cameron. It could just be the same name.”

  “Maybe. Is there a file on him? Was he ever arrested?”

  “We never got that close. But he was printed once, drunk driving, when he was a kid. After that, nothing. The only reason we have his prints today is that he had a couple of cold ones when he was eighteen.”

  “Then we also have a picture.”

  “For what it’s worth, a twenty-year-old picture.”

  “We can get it computer-altered. See what he might look like today. And show it to the Sinclairs’ neighbors.”

  “Once we mention Cameron’s name, all hell will break loose. We need a definite link between him and the Sinclairs.”

  “Let me get started on it. We need his file and prints. I’ll catch up with you at the morgue.”

  “Madison, be discreet.”

  Brown had to stop in traffic, but they were near enough to the precinct that Madison got out and waded into the crowd.

  In the building that temporarily housed the office of the Medical Examiner and the Crime Lab, technicians came and went about their business. Sergeant Brown waited in the hall. Nathan Quinn was a difficult man to read, and Brown wanted to see how he would carry himself through the ordeal of the identification. He hoped he would learn something about the kind of man Quinn was and maybe one day that knowledge would be a resource they could count on.

  When the moment came Nathan Quinn stood by the viewing window. Brown knocked on the glass, and the blinds revealed the four slain bodies. Quinn looked from face to face, then turned and nodded once.

  In the parking lot, he sat in his car for a few minutes, then drove off at high speed. Brown looked at the space where the car had been and thought how Quinn’s right hand had been shaking, and he had put it in the pocket of his coat.

  Once inside, Brown got a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor and downed some Vitamin C with it. He cleared his mind, took out his notepad, and walked into the sanitized chill of the autopsy room.

  Chapter 7

  Madison stood by the printer in the Communication Center and hoped that the quality of the picture the Photo Unit was sending would be good enough for the age alterations to be successful, if it came to that.

  From the moment John Cameron’s name had been mentioned in the car, it had been in her head like a low-level buzzing she could not get rid of. Her mind flashed back to the blindfolded bodies on Blue Ridge.

  Like hunters of old, Madison felt her own need to see the eyes of the enemy, to get a sense of him. She tried to remember the details of the Nostromo killings.

  Little was known for sure about how the day went down. Every crook in every bar had a favorite version. Apparently the two cops, detectives from the LAPD, had had something nasty going on with the other three. Nobody knew how Cameron fit into that, but somehow he did, because the five men had decided that he would not be coming back from the trip.

  It was a glorious day in August, the sun reflecting off the gleaming deck and a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea.

  Whether he knew or not, when they started off, that they had decided to kill him, John Cameron did not run when he found out. The police recovered two 9mm Glocks and three revolvers near the bodies, all with a number of rounds spent, shell casings rolling with the swells. Yet no blood except for the dead men’s, no physical evidence that anybody else had ever been on the boat and no explanation of how he had left it.

  A fisherman on the dock had seen six men get onto the Nostromo, but he could give no description. Some said Cameron drugged them, then killed them one by one; some said that he got them to shoot one another. The one known fact was that, in spite of all the ammunition spent, the men had each been killed by a single incised wound to the neck.

  After that, John Cameron had disappeared. Very few even remembered what he looked like. For all you knew, the story went, he might be the guy at the end of the bar, the guy you’d just bitched with about the game.

  The machine started to hum.

  A couple of patrol officers she knew were walking toward her in the corridor; Madison tore out the sheet of paper with the name, stats, and picture emerging from the printer and, without looking at it, left th
e building and found her car in the parking lot.

  Sitting in her car, she turned the sheet over and looked at John Cameron, alleged murderer of six. It was the picture of a boy, a teenager with a soft face and longish hair that would have been in style twenty years ago. The charge had been drunk driving, but he did not look under the influence. He looked somber, and Madison held his gaze. Five eleven, dark and dark, the only distinctive marks noted, the scars on his forearms and the back of his right hand. She put the photograph in an envelope with the set of fingerprints and drove off in the light rain to see James Sinclair and his family one last time.

  In the four hours following the first item on television, the police switchboard received twenty-seven calls confessing to the murders: twenty-two men, five women, the closest in Spokane, the farthest in Miami. All had to be dealt with, and all had to be exonerated. It was a pointless task and a waste of man-hours, and everybody knew it would get a lot worse.

  The Seattle Times had given the murders the front page: a pretty photograph of the house and what little had been made public; it kept speculation to a minimum.

  The Washington Star ran the headline “Christmastime Slaughter” with a shot of Madison holding Andrew Riley by the elbow. It speculated on the nature of the murders and gratuitously mentioned a homicide that had taken place on Blue Ridge some years before, when a little girl had accidentally shot her neighbor.

  Under the spitting weather, people walked to the newsstands and went online: gradually, as if a storm was about to hit the city, windows were checked, back doors were locked, and children were told they could not play outside.

  Chapter 8

  Madison walked in just as Dr. Fellman completed the Y-shaped incision on the body of James Sinclair.

  Fellman had already completed an extensive external examination and removed the man’s pajamas. Livor mortis, the discoloration of parts of the body caused by the settling of blood, had shown that it had not been moved after death. Blood, urine, and hair samples had been collected, and oral and anal swabs taken. Nothing indicated that a sex crime had taken place, but in this kind of homicide Dr. Fellman was too experienced not to cover all the bases.

  Brown was leaning against the opposite wall with a view of the autopsy table. The doctor was dictating his notes into a hanging microphone; they would take final shape in his report. His voice was a steady monotone of details and instructions to Sam, his assistant, also in green scrubs and wearing a clear plastic eye-mask.

  “. . . Organs congested and slightly cyanosed. Presence of an old appendectomy. We found that the brain was swollen and engorged. The lungs appear similarly congested. Appearance consistent with prolonged inhalation of chloroform. Toxicology will confirm. See blindfold.”

  Madison tapped her envelope for Brown to see. “I’ve got it,” she said.

  “Any problems?”

  “No. I have the picture, a comparison signature, and prints. Have you seen the check?”

  “Yeah, Documents has it upstairs. It’s pretty creased up but workable. They’ll have to compare the signature before it gets dipped for prints. They’re waiting for you.”

  “What have they found?”

  “Chloroform.” Brown looked over at the notes he had taken as Dr. Fellman was talking. “There was bruising on the zygomatic bone under his left eye, probably from the butt of a gun. Enough strength to knock him out for a few minutes but no broken bones. I guess our killer then went on to do his business with the mother and the kids. When the father came to, he was tied up, blindfolded, and inhaling the poison.”

  “He struggled.” Madison could see the deep red marks around his wrists and feet from where she was standing.

  “Constraints almost cut through to the bone. He struggled till his heart gave out.”

  “Doctor,” Madison asked, “how long was he conscious?”

  It was something that had bothered her from the start, the difference in the manner in which the death sentences had been dealt out.

  “It’s difficult to say. It has been known to take up to fifteen minutes for chloroform to take effect. In this quantity and proximity, I’d say a few minutes definitely. With convulsions and severe pain.”

  Madison turned to Brown. “Several minutes of Sinclair thrashing around on the bed . . .” she said.

  “Yet the covers were neatly turned under the bodies when they were found.” Brown nodded.

  “The killer made the bed before he left.” She finished her thought.

  Thus Madison saw him for the first time—the intruder, waiting for his victim to grow still, watching over him as his life ebbed away, then gently smoothing the sheets under the bodies, slightly moving this or that, until the tableau was complete. She did not recoil from the image. In her mind, she stood silently by the door and watched him work and tried to see his face. Dr. Fellman was starting on gastric contents as she left.

  Fingerprint Identification and Disputed Documents were on the second floor of the drab concrete building. Madison had visited often during a stint in Robbery and was on good terms with the technicians.

  Bob Payne was in shirtsleeves and drinking rosehip tea. Madison had taken an extra course in Forensics, and that gold star went a long way with him.

  “How are you doing, Detective?”

  “Very well. I have the signature.”

  “Documents has a copy. I couldn’t wait.”

  Madison took out the set of fingerprints from the envelope and gave it to Payne. He looked at the name on the top of the page.

  “I see. I’ll run a parallel check for exclusion, as with the family members. Points of entry, the usual.”

  Madison remembered something. “Did you work the Nostromo?”

  “For what it was worth. It was clean as a whistle. It had been completely wiped down.”

  Madison could smell the strong, unpleasant, metallic odor of ninhydrin mixed with the overripe-bananas scent of amyl acetate. It was the best solution for dipping paper and would not cause the ink to run. She wasn’t sorry to leave the room.

  “When you see Brown, remind him this is my day off,” Payne called after her.

  Wade Goodwin in Documents pushed his glasses back on his nose. “Frankly, I’d be a lot happier if we had a number of genuine originals to compare this with. You’re not giving us very much to work with here, and this is a long way from standing up in court. Do you know about top-of-the-letter and bottom-of-the-letter comparisons?”

  “I do,” Madison replied.

  They were looking at two zigzag lines he had just drawn over the partial name.

  “Well, having said all that, I think the check signature was forged.”

  “Thank you,” Madison said. It was a beginning: five minutes ago they’d had nothing, and now they had a possible motive. Someone had forged a check; people had died.

  On Blue Ridge the neighbors were cooperative and concerned, but nobody remembered anything unusual about Saturday night or the days before it. Even though Brown knew that the King County Prosecutor’s Office wouldn’t hang a mad dog on eyewitness testimony, it paid to have it on your side.

  Bob Payne and his people were dusting and comparing prints from dozens of items. The process took the time it took—snapping at their heels would not make them go any faster.

  Dr. Fellman compared the angles of the entry wounds on the victims who had been shot and the bruising on the father’s face.

  “What do you think?” Brown asked as the doctor stepped away from the operating table.

  “I know what I think, and it’s too damn little to help.”

  “Go on.”

  “The victims were lying down when they were attacked; there was hair and blood on a door frame when he moved one of the children. I’d say he’s about five eleven to six one, or near enough. Right-handed and physically strong.”

  “Mr. Average. It fits. From the angle of the letters incised in the wood, they were probably carved with the right hand.”

  “There was no sexual ac
tivity of any kind, so no body fluids.”

  The internal telephone rang, and Dr. Fellman picked up. After a few words he replaced the receiver.

  “I found a few hairs in the ligature knot on Sinclair’s wrists.” He snapped off his gloves. “I had them checked.”

  “Whose are they?”

  Fellman smiled. “Unidentified adult male’s.”

  “We’ve got his DNA?”

  “The hairs are beautiful. Roots and everything. Couldn’t ask for more.”

  Dr. Fellman looked pale and drained, almost ghostly in his green scrubs. Brown shook his hand and left.

  For hours he had tried to reach Nathan Quinn on his cell phone. He wanted to ask whether James Sinclair had ever mentioned John Cameron. As he sat in his car, he tried again. No answer; the phone was still off.

  Brown was tired and hungry. The rain had turned to thin snow, and the air in the car was sharp.

  On the way to the precinct, he stopped for a chicken sandwich and a cup of coffee and had both as he drove.

  Chapter 9

  Madison told Brown about the forged signature on the torn check and then drove back to Stern Tower to interview some of Sinclair’s colleagues. Nathan Quinn had left the office hours before. Carl Doyle set her up in a conference room with thick pale blue carpets and a table that could seat twenty. In the window, the gray slab of Puget Sound. There was a carafe of water and glasses on a tray on the table.

  “Anything I can do to help,” Doyle said as he ushered in a young associate. The woman tried her best not to cry. She was using a tissue to dab her eyes, and the mascara left black marks on it.

  “I wish there was something I could tell you, but I just can’t imagine anybody doing such a thing,” she said. “This is so awful.”

  After a few unproductive minutes Madison let her go. “Thank you for your help. That’s all I need for the moment,” she said.

  She interviewed two more associates; they were all pretty much still in shock and had little more to contribute.