The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  “We have the ME’s preliminary autopsy notes. I’ll get to those in a minute. While you gentlemen were getting trench foot on the canvass, Lauren and Joyce found half of a torn check in the seat of a chair in the study, the other half in the kitchen bin.”

  Madison, her legs stretched long under the table, sipped her coffee and waited for Brown to drop the bomb. Fynn had already been told.

  “The check is a dud,” Brown continued. “The signature is a forgery, the prints on it are Sinclair’s, the forged signature name is John Cameron.”

  Any rustling of paper, feet-shuffling, or note-taking stopped dead right then. Kelly put down his pen.

  Dunne smiled wide. “I guess this is what some people might call a ‘lead.’”

  Brown checked his watch again. “So far, so good. Sinclair and Cameron go way back—they were two of the Hoh River boys.” There were flashes of recognition around the room. “We know they knew each other. If Sinclair tried to steal from Cameron, anything’s possible.”

  “For years I’ve been waiting for that piece of shit to resurface. I swear to God, I knew he would,” Kelly said as he played with the knot in his tie.

  “What have we got?” Lieutenant Fynn asked.

  “We have hairs from the ligature knot around Sinclair’s hands. Fellman is working on them; he says he can get DNA. It looks like they might belong to the intruder,” Brown said. “Toxicology confirmed chloroform on the father’s blindfold.”

  Madison felt the shift in perception around the room like an icy draft: five minutes ago James Sinclair was the victim of a brutal murder; now he was quite possibly a greedy son of a bitch who’d gotten his family killed.

  Brown took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

  “Let’s all hang on a minute here. One, we do not have a murder weapon—and, by the way, Ballistics says it was a twenty-two. Two, we don’t even have an entry point yet.”

  “Doors and windows?” Spencer asked.

  “Locked and clean. No footprints around the outside and no forced-entry marks.”

  “What, he beamed in?” Dunne said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “What about ‘thirteen days’?” Spencer asked.

  “Nothing solid. If it’s a message, we don’t even know who the message is for. We can presume it was for us to see, but as for its meaning, nothing yet.”

  The telephone rang, and Brown picked up. It was Bob Payne. They talked for less than a minute. When Brown hung up, he stared at the receiver for almost as long.

  Around him, Dunne was asking Madison about the meeting with Nathan Quinn, while Lieutenant Fynn and Spencer went over the newspapers’ headlines.

  Madison’s eyes met Brown’s across the room. He looked as if he had just been told that the sun would rise from the west from now on.

  “What?” she mouthed to him.

  Brown blinked twice and came back to himself.

  “That was Payne. The glass found in the kitchen by the sink. He made a match. John Cameron’s prints are on it. Three prints, twelve points of similarity.”

  Juries had convicted with less. There was a moment of silence in the room. Madison, who had been to countless Sonics games, when there were games, thought they collectively looked like the guy from the audience who’s just been told he’s going to shoot the basket at halftime. It’s a great opportunity, and, sure, he could win some serious goodies, but he’ll be shooting from the middle of the court, everybody he knows in the world will be watching, and nobody will ever forget he missed.

  Lieutenant Fynn had enough to help him survive his meeting with the PA person. He stood up, said a few private words to Brown, and left everyone to get on with their job, which in this instance, as Dunne put it, was pretty much like nailing Jell-O to the wall.

  There was much to do. Madison vaguely remembered that they still had not interviewed Anne Sinclair’s colleagues at the primary school. It was strange: from the first moment she had stepped into the crime scene, it had felt as if the energy of the intruder had been centered on the father. Twenty-four hours on, given the evidence they had, nothing had yet contradicted that first impression.

  “Have you seen Klein?” Brown asked her.

  “She’s in the building; I saw her earlier.”

  “I’ll page her.”

  Sarah Klein was the Assistant County Prosecutor on call. Not exactly Madison’s favorite—that was Georgia Wolf, a litigious attorney in her mid-thirties with an attitude to match her name.

  Madison started a system search for any DMV records she could dredge up on John Cameron: all the vehicles he’d ever owned, all the addresses he’d ever lived at. Her right hand bet five dollars with her left that they would find nothing more recent than what they had on that twenty-year-old arrest sheet. Say what you like, Madison considered. You’ve got to hand it to him; the creep had been careful.

  Sarah Klein leaned on Madison’s desk. She had dark, shiny hair in a boyish cut and a sharp gray suit with a silk shirt. Madison always expected her to wipe a surface before leaning on it, but Klein never had.

  “I heard you picked a real winner,” she said.

  Madison brought her up to speed, and Klein listened in silence.

  “The hairs are good only if Fellman can get DNA from them,” Klein said finally.

  “He said he can,” Madison replied.

  “I trust him. The check and the glass together—you’ve got something there, but you’re on thin ice.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The glass gives you a name. The check might link the name to a motive. Forget the personal relationship between them, and follow the money. You have probable cause to believe there was financial impropriety.”

  “I’m calling the IRS next.”

  “It’s a start. If Sinclair was Cameron’s tax lawyer, you can probably get a warrant to go through his file. But his firm is not going to make it easy for you.”

  “Brown is working on the affidavit right now.”

  “Which judge?”

  “Hugo.”

  “Not today. I spoke with him earlier; he’s in a foul mood.”

  “Then Martin.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Once we find Cameron”—Madison let herself be optimistic about it—“what are our chances to get a court order for a DNA comparison with the hairs from the scene?”

  “With what you have right now, short of getting him to bite you or spit on you, pretty much nil.”

  “Great. Next, the house.”

  “What about it?”

  “We need the whole structure considered ‘crime scene.’ We don’t know where the intruder might have been. We need access to every scrap of paper in every drawer in every room.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Every nail in the garage, every box in the attic.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Every file in Sinclair’s computer in the study.”

  “Everything but his work files.”

  “That is less than helpful.”

  “I don’t make the rules.”

  “Something else: Sinclair’s ICE, possibly the executor of his will, is Nathan Quinn.”

  Klein sighed.

  “Tell Brown to make that warrant tighter than airtight. So tight it practically squeaks. Quinn is not going to be delighted to find out one of his tax attorneys might have been an embezzler. Clients tend to resent that.”

  “They were old friends.”

  “Whatever. Money’s what brought down Capone.”

  “Taxes?”

  “Taxes.”

  Klein turned as she was leaving. Madison had already picked up the receiver to dial out. The attorney held out her right thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart.

  “Thin ice,” she said.

  “I know,” Madison replied.

  Neither of them was thinking about warrants.

  Ten minutes later Madison returned to her desk with the printout from the DMV. H
er eyes went to the photograph first: as old as the one on the arrest sheet—a serious-looking young man in a sheepskin coat.

  There was an address, the same they already had from his drunk-driving charge. How good that was going to be twenty years later, they would soon find out. Apparently John Cameron had owned a series of identical black Ford pickup trucks. Brownie points for loyalty there.

  Madison dropped the pages onto Brown’s desk—he was on the phone. Before him, the affidavit was almost complete.

  The clerk from the IRS called Madison back. By the time they finished talking, she realized she had filled three pages of her notebook.

  “Things are a tad more complicated than we thought,” Madison said.

  “Did the IRS come through?”

  “It sure did. Except that now we have more questions than answers.”

  “Go on.”

  “Sinclair was Cameron’s tax attorney. And quite scrupulous, too. He filed a tax return for him every year since forever.”

  “How very proper of him. Where, exactly, is Cameron’s income coming from?”

  “That’s the kicker. Their fathers owned a restaurant together, The Rock, on Alki Beach, and some real estate around it, and they left it to their sons.”

  “Left it to Cameron and Sinclair.”

  “Nope. To Cameron, Sinclair, and Quinn. Their fathers started the restaurant together in the early 1960s. I checked with the State Licensing Board; they hold the license. Somebody runs it for them, but they still own it.”

  “And pay taxes on it.”

  “Like clockwork. They’re going to send us a copy of the file.”

  “Well, what do you know.” Brown stood up and picked up the affidavit. “Judge Martin is in chambers now; let’s go ruin her day. Where’s Quinn?”

  “In court all morning.”

  As they walked past the desk sergeant downstairs, he motioned Brown with his head, his hand covering the receiver.

  “Fred Tully from the Star,” he said.

  Brown shook his head.

  “Sorry, Fred, he’s not in the building.” Jenner rolled his eyes. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Third time today,” Brown said.

  Outside, the sunlight was unsure of itself. A photographer, waiting on the steps for somebody else, recognized Brown and Madison from the recent television footage and snapped them once, the flash brighter than the sun.

  Chapter 13

  Judge Claire Martin signed the warrant for Sinclair’s tax files with a flourish and a look that said, Don’t mess this one up.

  They were waiting for the elevator when Brown stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his raincoat and looked at Madison.

  “Something came up at the lab. That’s what the call was before. It might be nothing; it might be something. Fellman is checking it out.”

  “Please tell me it’s not the DNA.”

  “It’s the ligature from the man’s wrists.”

  “He had deep cuts and bruising.”

  A couple of lawyers were lingering by the water cooler. Brown waited until they walked past, their heels clicking on the tiles.

  “That’s the problem. The blood and cells on it are not consistent with Sinclair’s injuries.”

  The elevator arrived, and they stepped in, grateful that they had no company on the ride down.

  “In what way?”

  “The cuts went deep into muscle tissue, but there’s relatively little blood on the ligature. Not enough for the fight Sinclair put up.”

  “We found him tightly bound. Hands behind his back.”

  “I know. Even so, given the friction, there should have been more wearing of the leather, too.”

  They came out of the King County Courthouse on Fourth and James. Fresh drizzle carried the roar of I-5, more like a veil of dampness they breathed through than real rain.

  Madison leaned her elbows on the roof of their Ford sedan.

  “Are we actually saying that the perp replaced the ligature after Sinclair died?”

  “I don’t know what we’re saying yet. But that’s what it looks like.”

  Madison got into the passenger seat; nobody ever drove Brown around.

  “He changed the ligature,” she repeated.

  “Lucky for us. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have his DNA.”

  “After,” she said, more to herself than to Brown. It was a half-remembered thought, not even a question yet. Somewhere in Madison’s mind a small round pebble dropped into a pool.

  There was a coffee place on Cherry Street; they pulled up to it and got a few cups to go.

  Brown had been watching Madison for weeks: how she had walked into the squad room the very first day, the way she had handled herself at crime scenes. Two nights ago, the kid in the grocery store—Brown knew she had had to decide quickly whether the girl was going to take a shot at him or not. Her judgment had been sound, and they were all still alive and well.

  Madison sipped her coffee without any apparent need for conversation. Brown liked that about her. Whatever had happened in the four weeks since she had joined Homicide, it was just a prelude to this: driving in the slow Christmas traffic, their Kevlar vests in the trunk, on their way to John Cameron’s house.

  They drove north on Fourth Avenue and east on University Street, got stuck like everybody else at the Convention Center, and finally joined I-5. They sped past Lake Union and Capitol Hill, through Eastlake’s new commercial developments, and into the university district.

  Madison saw nothing they passed. She was back on Blue Ridge, trying to fathom the mind of a man who had thought it necessary to change the ligature on a dead human being, who had dipped his finger into his victim’s blood to draw a cross with it.

  There was a straight line that connected the victims to the motive and the evidence to the suspect. It was simple enough. However, walking into their bedroom and seeing the slain children between their parents—that was beyond description.

  This wasn’t just payback; it was vengeance of inhuman proportions. The sins of the fathers visited upon the children, an example to fear and remember for all those who would ever deal with the man.

  Madison knew that the address they were going to visit in Laurelhurst was on John Cameron’s driver’s license and his tax returns. It was the house where his family had moved after he had been kidnapped as a boy and that, years later, he had inherited from his parents.

  It was his only legal address. Madison had no doubt in her mind that he did not live there, any more than he actually drove the black pickup truck that was registered to him. But it was his house nevertheless, the place where they might pick up the scent. Of course, they didn’t have a warrant to enter the premises as yet.

  When she was in uniform, Madison had apprehended many suspects climbing out a back window while her partner was knocking on the front door. This was not going to be one of those times.

  Laurelhurst was a wealthy neighborhood with well-kept houses and lawns. The Parent-Teacher Association meetings were as wild as it ever got in the community, and that’s just how the residents there liked it.

  They turned into one of the smaller streets, trees lining both sides. The houses there were not as big or as far from one another. Christmas decorations were discreet, and there were a fair number of cars in the driveways. Not everybody was at work.

  Cameron’s house stood halfway down the street: wood and brick, a sloped roof that probably concealed an attic with a skylight in the back. There was no car parked in the driveway; Brown pulled up to the curb.

  The curtains were drawn, and there was no light from behind the glass panel in the front door. Brown turned off the engine, and for a minute they both sat there, still and quiet. It wasn’t that different from her grandparents’ house, Madison thought, and in spite of herself she was glad of the weight of the holster on her right hip.

  “If we sit here any longer, someone’s bound to call the cops on us,” Brown joked, and he got out of the car.

  Mad
ison stepped onto the lawn and felt the frosted earth crack slightly under her feet. She inhaled deeply—the air was cold and clean. Thin smoke from some of the neighboring chimneys twisted up into the pale sky. Pretty as a picture. Her fingers brushed the speed-loader on her belt.

  They walked up the concrete driveway. The garage was wide enough to accommodate a pickup truck and one other vehicle, if necessary.

  They got to the front door and looked at each other—for one crazy second Madison expected it to open. Brown rang the bell, just as if he had been dropping in on any old friend. They waited. No sound or movement at all from inside. After about one minute, Brown rang the bell again. Nothing.

  “I’m going to look around,” Madison said. She stepped back and examined the front of the house. There were three windows on the second floor and not a flicker from the cream-colored curtains. On the right side of the house the garage extended out, flanked by red maples. On the left was a six-foot wooden fence with a gate. She took the right side.

  Hours before, driving past it, the Sinclairs’ place, empty for fewer than a couple of days, had felt desolate. Here, before the arrest, before the Nostromo, before all the other unthinkable deeds, John Cameron had come back after a day at school, sat down, and done his homework like any other kid. Madison felt his presence like a trick of the light.

  The bushes, about shoulder height and barren, grew quite close to the garage wall. She squeezed by them and stood on tiptoe to look inside the narrow window—it was safely shut and shaded. Madison kept walking, close to the wall. Her jacket got caught on a branch, which snapped off sharply.

  Suddenly, there was a shuffle above her and to the side, behind a maple. Madison froze. The smell hit her, and she knew instantly what it came from.

  She stepped forward. The bushes were behind her, and she was standing by the long side of the house. There were no windows there; on the far corner the fence started and carried on till the bottom of a garden. There was about ten feet between the wall and the trees.

  The putrid smell was distinct even in the winter chill. Madison saw the wing of the gull behind the tree roots; it shuffled out of sight, and its feathers rustled against dry leaves. She walked around the tree and saw it. The gull squawked. The cat was dead—it must have crawled there after being hit by a car, or maybe it had just been old or sick. She couldn’t tell. The gull had been feeding on it for a while—the fur had once been gray and black.