The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  Brown paused again.

  “Then he went back to James Sinclair, blindfolded him, and tied him up with strips of leather. Neck, hands, feet. When the man came to, he couldn’t have moved if he tried. And he did. Sinclair knew his family had been attacked, and he fought like hell. The ligatures cut right through his muscles.”

  Quinn was completely still.

  “The intruder carried the bodies of the children and placed them between Sinclair and his wife. Sinclair is still trying to get himself free but can’t do it. Finally, the man pours a few drops of chloroform onto his blindfold, then waits for a few minutes for it to work. James Sinclair dies of cardiac arrest. The intruder leaves.”

  Quinn looked at the folder. “Are those your crime scene photos?”

  “Yes.” Brown pushed the file toward him and opened it, revealing a wide shot of the bed and the four bodies. Quinn looked at it, then closed the folder and moved his hands away from it.

  “That was what we know,” Brown continued. “This is what we have: we recovered a glass in the kitchen by the sink—the prints on it didn’t match any of the victims. Maybe the killer got himself a drink before he left. We also found a torn-up check; the signature on it appears to have been forged.”

  “Someone forged James’s signature?”

  “No. Sinclair signed for somebody else. Only his prints are on it,” Brown replied.

  “No. James would never forge anything. He’d simply handled the check at some point, and someone else, wearing gloves, forged a signature.”

  “We matched the name he forged on the check to the prints on the glass,” Brown continued. “The prints are John Cameron’s.”

  Quinn sat back in the chair, holding both of them in his level gaze.

  “No,” he said again, slowly and clearly. “John never would have done anything like that.”

  “How do you know?” Madison asked.

  “I know the man.”

  “How do you know what someone is doing twenty-four hours a day? You have to admit, he could have done it. Sinclair handled Cameron’s affairs. Does John Cameron have a key to the Sinclair house?”

  Quinn didn’t reply; his eyes went to the closed folder.

  “You don’t have to believe us,” Brown said. “You just have to believe the evidence.”

  “Neither of those prints mean anything. John’s likely been inside the Sinclairs’ house dozens of times. Can you prove they’re from the time of the murders?”

  “We’re pretty sure they are. How well do you know John Cameron?” Brown flipped the folder open to the first page, the first photograph.

  Quinn reached toward the folder without looking and closed it.

  “Cheap shots don’t suit you, Detective,” he said.

  “When was the last time you saw Cameron?”

  Quinn didn’t answer.

  “Yesterday,” Madison said. It had just occurred to her. “You saw him yesterday, when you told him.”

  Both men turned to her.

  “You didn’t want him to find out on the news.” She knew she was right, and she drove the point all the way in. “How did he take it?”

  Quinn’s eyes held Madison’s, the silence a tangible shape stretching between them.

  Abruptly he got up and walked to the window. It looked out on the parking lot, just a lot of cars and thin rain. He stood with his back to them, and when he spoke, the words held no emotion.

  “I am John Cameron’s attorney. Anything he has said to me is, therefore, privileged. You may not ask me about it or about anything else regarding our relationship.”

  “Well, what do you suppose we should do about that? Your silence won’t make you or your client or your late partner look very good. There you sit, right between both men, possibly withholding useful evidence. Doesn’t that strike you as a pretty serious conflict of interest right about now, too?”

  Quinn took out his cell phone. “I’ll prepare an affidavit and pass on all the duties of the Sinclairs’ estate to Bob Greenhut, at Greenhut, Lowell. He can be the executor until a judge deems that there is no further conflict of interest. Then, and only then, it will revert to me. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “If that’s what you want,” Brown said.

  “I assure you, none of this is what I want. I’ll call Bob right now and start on the paperwork. Then we can talk about what you want from my client.”

  Quinn dialed the call, and Brown and Madison left the room.

  “So much for their partnership,” Madison said.

  Brown shrugged. “He made his choice. We need to get Klein in for the rest of the interview. By the way, how did you know he’d seen Cameron?”

  “It’s what I would have done.”

  “Quinn didn’t tell us how Cameron ‘took the news,’ but you got him thinking about it.”

  Lieutenant Fynn took their news less than well when they got to his office. “We haven’t picked up the guy yet, and you got him lawyered up already?”

  “I’m only sitting in to make sure you all play nice.” Sarah Klein, the Assistant County Prosecutor, leaned back in her chair as she addressed the group of four.

  “You don’t have enough to indict my client; you don’t have enough to pick up my client. You try to sneak into his house again”—Quinn looked straight at Madison—“you’ll get slapped with a suit. This is me being nice, Sarah.”

  Thank you very much, Mr. Clyde Phillips. Way to be neighborly, Madison thought.

  “Cameron needs to come in,” Brown said. “I mean today. Along with his prints, we have DNA from the crime scene. He gives us a blood sample for comparison, and we can all go home. If you’re so sure of yourself, you’ll get on the phone to him right now.”

  There was a knock on the door. The department PA passed a message to Madison. It was from Detective Spencer. She read it and passed it to Brown. She must remember to buy Spencer a drink tonight—his timing had been perfect.

  Brown read the message and put it to one side.

  “We now have a witness. A neighbor saw a black Ford pickup truck parked by the Sinclairs’ house in the early hours of Sunday morning. What does John Cameron drive, Counselor?” Brown turned to Klein. “Enough?”

  She nodded.

  They had more than they needed to proceed, and Quinn knew it.

  “We’re done here.” He stood up and gathered his papers.

  “Nathan.” Sarah Klein was also standing now. “He’s going to be arrested, and you know the grand jury will indict. If you are withholding information, if you know where he is—”

  They were all aware of the legal consequences.

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “And if you knew . . .” Brown continued.

  “You’d be my first phone call, of course.”

  “Where did you meet him yesterday?” Madison asked.

  Quinn stopped with one hand on the doorknob. “You put a tail on me or tap my phones, and we’re going to have us a fun day in court. Good to see you, Sarah.”

  He left.

  That response was nowhere near good enough for Madison. She caught up with him on the stairs.

  “Mr. Quinn.”

  One plainclothes and one uniformed officer were coming up; she let them pass.

  “You were in the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office once. You were a prosecutor.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “I’m interested. With the evidence you know we have, how would you investigate and prosecute this case?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I think there’s a world of things about it you’re not willing to share with us. It’s a shame, but there you have it. Still, you do have a personal interest in seeing the killer caught, don’t you?”

  She wasn’t sure why she had come right out and said it, but she believed it was the truth.

  “Impossible as it might seem to you now, there is one thing much, much worse than finding out John Cameron did this,” he said as they exited the building.
r />   “What’s that?”

  “Knowing that he didn’t. As for my personal interest in this case, Detective, I do what I have to. My reasons are not for your files.”

  His car was parked not far from the entrance to the precinct. As he drove past her, Madison couldn’t tell whether he was already speaking on his cell phone. Her instincts told her that between legal wrangles and his wall of silence lay some half-truth, and she would rather find it than let it disappear with the fading daylight.

  Detective Sergeant Brown and Assistant County Prosecutor Sarah Klein were in Lieutenant Fynn’s office. Madison joined them. They needed a judge to sign off on a warrant to arrest John Cameron and another to search his house.

  Klein was keen to go absolutely by the book. In her words, if you got screwed in front of a jury by inadmissible evidence, it wasn’t pretty to see, and they never forgot it.

  “Then there’s the question of Quinn,” Brown said to Lieutenant Fynn.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, he might very well have information that would get us our guy; he’s just not telling. There might be things that fall outside attorney-client privilege.”

  “What do you mean?” Klein asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean subpoena Nathan Quinn?” Klein said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think a judge is going to go for that?”

  “If you push for it, explain the circumstances, maybe.”

  “Black-letter law is pretty clear on privilege,” Madison said. “No judge is going to jump at the chance to make history with this.”

  “I know. But Quinn clearly met with Cameron recently, and I’m betting the house he’s on the phone to him as we speak.”

  “Point taken. As long as we all know that it’ll never work, and the judge will likely throw me out just for trying, I’ll run it by my boss,” Klein said. “About Cameron’s house, make sure you’re clear about what you want. You’re looking for telephone bills, travel itineraries, the works, so specify small spaces, drawers, shoeboxes. Whatever.”

  “A murder weapon would be nice,” Lieutenant Fynn said to no one in particular.

  “I’m on that.” Madison knew what Sarah meant: they were looking for anything that might give them a clue about Cameron’s recent activities. If they didn’t specifically mention the smallest item on their wanted list, their search warrant might be limited to what was in plain view. Which, if his house was as tidy as the crime scene, might be nothing.

  Somehow, between hearsay and myth, that was how Madison imagined Cameron’s life—tidy and out of sight.

  Chapter 15

  The uniformed police officer pressed the boy’s right index finger onto the ink pad, careful not to brush his own shirt cuff against it. He got him to roll the finger gently left to right on the index card, leaving a perfect imprint.

  He felt a little sorry for the boy; he hadn’t been completely innocent of driving with a cold one himself when he was his age. Most other drunk teenagers would give him a certain amount of lip while they were being printed, just to prop up their failing courage, but this one had been polite and courteous. Hard to believe he had been found half soaked in beer, with an empty bottle in his hand and a car that wouldn’t start.

  “You got your phone call?” he asked the kid.

  “Yes, thank you,” John Cameron, eighteen, replied.

  The officer saw the scars on the back of his hand. Somebody had really gone to work with a blade there, but they looked years old.

  “Ever been in trouble before?”

  “No, sir.”

  John Cameron took a tissue and slowly rubbed the ink off each finger in turn. It didn’t do much good. He looked around and took in the room. Four-thirty in the morning, four officers. Two picking at slices from a pizza, another by the door, one on the phone. A man sitting up on a bench, cuffed and asleep.

  There were chemical smells beyond the alcohol that hung on him like a cloud; there was a flash from the camera taking his mug shots. He could still feel the white light on his face moments later.

  They took him to a holding cell. Bleach had been used there recently; a bucket and a mop still stood in a corner at the end of the corridor. A lightbulb flickered through the glass of a closed door as the whole building seemed to struggle to stay awake.

  The holding cell was square and had bars on two sides; the floor was concrete. Two men were sleeping on the bunk beds; they had covered themselves with their coats and snored softly. Another was sitting on a bench, leaning back against the wall.

  “You be good now, Larry,” the guard said, pointing his finger at the man.

  When the metal door slammed shut behind the boy, Larry straightened up and took a long, measured look at the kid in the sheepskin jacket. Cameron could smell him from where he was. The man was about six foot and heavy, not much muscle there but a lot of extra weight. His eyes were glazed from drink.

  Cameron walked across the cell and leaned against the bars on the opposite side, crossed his arms, and looked at the round wall clock. Minutes inched forward.

  Larry stood uncertainly and staggered close enough to slap his mitten on the boy’s shoulder. “Hey,” he croaked.

  Cameron looked up. It had been the second-longest night of his life, and whatever it had left in his eyes, the man didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like it at all.

  The man’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. No, he didn’t like this kid at all. Something fluttered in his throat. Larry wiped his hands against the sides of his jeans and took one step back. He found his seat, never turning his back on Cameron, and sat down. He looked suddenly sober and thirsty, the worst combination.

  “Jack.”

  The guard opened the metal door. Nathan Quinn, David’s older brother, stood there, his coat open over the clothes he’d thrown on after the phone call, a couple of snowflakes melting on the bill of his baseball cap.

  Cameron walked out of the holding cell, and Quinn grabbed him in a quick hug.

  “What the hell!” He led him to a table where they could talk. “Thanks, Jeff,” Quinn said to the guard.

  “No problem.”

  They were left alone.

  “Are you all right?” Quinn took off his coat and put it on the table. Cameron noticed he would need to shave again soon, and his curly hair was getting too long for the County Prosecutor’s Office.

  Quinn was talking to him, but John Cameron was still breathing in the icy air in his car, waiting for the patrol officers to pick him up on the side of the road. The cold burned in his chest. Blurred lights from oncoming traffic washed over the windshield, and his hands were so frozen, he couldn’t grip the steering wheel. He popped the top off the bottle, took a long swig, and spat it out. Spilled some on the front of his mountain jacket and a few drops on the empty passenger seat. He pulled the choke and flooded the engine.

  The beam of the policeman’s flashlight found him as he was trying to start the car for the hundredth time. Finally.

  “What happened?” Quinn looked concerned now. Then again, he always did, Cameron thought. “You’re going to be arraigned at night court. Bernie Rhodes from the Public Defender’s office is coming over—he owes me one. You’ll plead ‘not guilty,’ and I’ll bail you out.”

  Quinn’s kind, dark eyes swept over the boy. He was going to take him home to get him straightened up, or John’s mom would have a fit.

  “What happened?” he asked again.

  “It’s done now.”

  “How much have you had to drink?”

  “Enough,” Cameron said. “It’s done, Nathan. It’s over.”

  “You’re going to be all right.”

  Bernie Rhodes approached them, the guard holding a cup of coffee and laughing at the end of a knock-knock joke.

  Cameron leaned toward Quinn, his voice hollow and cracked. “It’s done.”

  Quinn put his hand on Cameron’s shoulder. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

 
It took a few months for Quinn to understand what Cameron had meant. By then, spring had gone to work on the winter snow, and it was too late for everybody.

  Chapter 16

  They rode in two cars. Brown and Madison first, already wearing their vests, the warrants in Brown’s jacket pocket. Spencer and Dunne followed.

  By the time they got there, it was early evening, and Laurelhurst was getting ready for dinner. Brown stole a sideways glance at Madison; she wore the Kevlar over her shirt and under her blazer. The vest’s outside layer was midnight blue, the texture coarse. Madison rubbed the side of her thumb against it, the rest of her utterly still.

  Windows were lit in Clyde Phillips’s place. Across the street, Cameron’s house sat in complete darkness. They left the cars by the curb before the turn into the driveway; a few trees stood between them and the house. A patrol car was parked, lights off, fifty yards away. When they saw the detectives, two uniformed officers approached on foot.

  “No one went in or came out in the last hour.” Officer Buchman was short and wide, all shoulders and cropped hair. His partner, Officer Glaiser, nodded hello to Dunne. There were maybe five people in the whole of the Seattle Police Department Dunne didn’t know well enough to say “hey” to.

  “There’s no sign of life in the house,” Brown said. “But I want standard operating procedure anyway. We’re going in ‘as if.’”

  “I’ll cover the back,” Madison said. “I was there earlier today. Give us three minutes to get into place.”

  Madison was glad she had seen the house in daylight. Followed by Spencer, she walked into the deeper shadows under the trees and quickly found herself by the small heap of leaves. Spencer sniffed the air.

  “What in the name of—” he whispered.

  “Dead cat,” Madison replied, and she unholstered her weapon.

  They reached the side of the fence. She peeked. All was as she had left it, doors and windows shut and dark. It was much quieter now that they had left the main road. Her heart was drumming a little, but that was normal.