The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  Brown took out a six-by-four color picture.

  “There he is,” he said, and he passed it to Madison.

  Records had done some nice work: they had taken the mug shot of a teenager and turned it into a man. Even if something had been lost in translation, Madison felt a cold shiver, not of fear but of recognition. There he was.

  “We should ask Quinn if it’s a good likeness.”

  “That’s probably privileged,” Brown replied.

  Lieutenant Fynn put his head in the door. “The chief is calling me every fifteen minutes. Where are we at?”

  “I was on the phone with Gertz,” Brown said. “Patrol is going to get the picture, as well as State, County, Port Authority, and airport police. I’m going to make sure all the little runways who charter to the islands have them, too. The photo and the details will be passed on to VICAP and the FBI. The truck we’re not going to get—he’s probably already ditched it. And tomorrow morning, which is not coming one minute too soon, Klein has Quinn in front of a judge.”

  “We should sell tickets,” Fynn said. Then he paused for a moment. “Cameron has been out there doing his thing for years: now I want him visible. I want his picture on the news. I want his face on the front page. They want him, let them have him. He shouldn’t be able to buy a pack of smokes without being spotted by twenty-five people.”

  A beat of silence followed as Fynn looked from one to the other.

  “I don’t know,” Madison said. “The public should be aware, sure, and they are. But this is a woods and mountains state, and the citizens have the right to bear arms. You just know some idiot is going to start something ugly in the 7-Eleven.”

  Fynn turned to Brown.

  “Let’s hold it back,” Brown said. “Until we know what Quinn is going to give us.”

  “It’s another twenty-four hours Cameron can move around as he pleases.”

  “Not exactly. Every law enforcement agency in the state is looking for him. He won’t be able to rent a car or buy a ticket anywhere. All he can do is stay put.”

  “After Quinn, he’s on the lunchtime news.” Fynn took a bite from an apple. “Any luck with our regulars?”

  “No.” Brown shook his head. “Every snitch in Seattle has gone out of town for the holidays.”

  “Wish I could do the same,” Fynn said, and he left.

  “We’re working on the assumption that Cameron’s still in Seattle,” Madison said. “He could have left after seeing Quinn on Monday.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t, either. Be nice to know how he took the ‘news,’ though.”

  “I know a place on Alki Beach.” Brown got up and shrugged on his jacket. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

  When you hit a wall, give it a couple of kicks, just to see if anything shakes loose. Madison was a great believer in that truth.

  Alki Beach. The Rock was built on a pier out of wood and glass; it hovered above the water as if trying to get away from the beach. The long windows shimmered in the December gray and caught the clouds in the sky and every flicker of light they let through.

  Madison stepped out of the car, glad for the salt in the air and how it felt in her lungs. The ferry to Bremerton had just gone past; seagulls followed in its wake, a thin white line in the still waters, and at the end of it, across Elliott Bay, the skyline of downtown Seattle.

  Madison didn’t know whether John Cameron ever visited the restaurant, but in any kitchen at any time two things will be happening: cooking and yakking. Who did what to whom and what they said when. If Cameron had been by, there had to be talk. And maybe someone might have noticed what vehicle he was driving. Madison hoped that the people here would feel some kind of loyalty toward James Sinclair and his family. She hoped they would remember his children.

  The manager greeted them and took them to his office. Jacques Silano, French-Canadian, mid-thirties, five foot nine, stocky with dark, Mediterranean looks. He spoke with a slight accent and was dressed immaculately in a pinstripe suit and burgundy tie. The office, small and cramped with files, invoices, and three different calendars on the walls—deliveries, staff holidays, and block bookings—was just as neat and scrupulously tidy. They sat down.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked them.

  Madison had the feeling they wouldn’t get much small talk out of him. None of the “I still can’t believe it” and “It’s so awful” they’d had from other acquaintances. Jacques Silano was all business.

  So was Brown. “John Cameron is one of the owners of the The Rock. We’d like to know about any dealings you might have had with him since you’ve worked here. Starting from when you last saw him.”

  It took them only two minutes of back and forth to get him there.

  “The last Friday of the month,” he said. “Quinn, Sinclair, and Cameron. They come late, after the kitchen has closed. There’s a private room at the back. The kitchen and the floor staff would have left by then.” Silano smiled briefly. “Poker night.”

  “Go on,” Brown said.

  “They’ve been playing since before I came here. I was invited to join them maybe three years ago. We’d start late and play till dawn. Then I’d go home, but often they’d stay on and have breakfast.”

  “And Cameron would be there?”

  Silano nodded.

  “Every time?”

  He nodded again.

  “What can you tell us about him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The first time I met him, I’d had the job for one week. He had dinner here with Sinclair and Quinn. We were introduced; I didn’t know who he was. Months later I heard two of the chefs talking about him. Just gossip of things he was supposed to have done. I told them I didn’t want to hear that kind of talk in the kitchen, and the head chef backed me up. Donny’s been here longer than me. Donny O’Keefe. Quinn and Sinclair come every couple of weeks for lunch or dinner, but Cameron always comes late in the evening. After a couple of years or so, they asked me to join the card game. Donny was already in it. It was a private thing, and I was glad to be asked.”

  “Was it a good game?” Brown asked him.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Nothing personal.”

  “And Cameron?”

  “Same as everyone else.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?”

  Silano smiled. “If I had a really good night, I might win three hundred bucks; I might lose the same if I had a bad one. Nobody ever got rich or poor here.”

  “Was Sinclair into it? Do you know if he gambled anywhere else?”

  “Gambled? He never even bluffed.”

  “When was the last game?” Madison asked him.

  “The last Friday in November.”

  By then Sinclair had been scamming Cameron for months, she thought.

  “Was anything different?”

  “No.”

  “What time did the game start that night?”

  Madison felt reasonably confident that a guy with that kind of order in his work life would have a pretty good memory for detail.

  “After midnight, as usual,” he replied.

  “Who got here first?”

  Silano got his memories together for a second.

  “Quinn and Cameron had dinner here. James arrived a little later.”

  “What’s the routine?”

  “The routine is, everybody else is gone for the night. We get set up in the private room, and we play till sunup. That’s all that ever happens.”

  “Anybody else join the game?” Brown asked.

  “No.”

  “No one dropped in to say ‘hi,’ grab a beer, that kind of thing?”

  “No. It was always just the five of us.”

  “Did you ever argue? Anybody ever cheat?”

  “With those guys? You’ve got to be kidding me.” Silano smiled. “No. Nobody ever cheated. We teased Sinclair a lot, be
cause you could see his hand in his face, like the time he got dealt a full house. You know, what are the chances of that?”

  “Six hundred and ninety-three to one,” Madison replied without thinking.

  “Right. Well, he managed to make maybe ten bucks out of it. That was Sinclair. Quinn and Cameron, you just wouldn’t know. And Donny? I heard he put one of his kids through college playing poker.”

  “Let’s go back to Cameron. I would like you to think very carefully about the last game,” Brown said.

  “It was a good night.” He closed his eyes. “Quinn had brought some very expensive cigars for us to try. I won ninety bucks.” He opened his eyes.

  “Was there any tension between Sinclair and Cameron? A look? Anything different in the mood?”

  “No.”

  “What did you all talk about?”

  “The usual. All the games kind of blend together, if you know what I mean. There was nothing unusual that night.” Silano sat back in his chair. “I read the paper this morning, and I know what you are asking me, but no, there was nothing weird going on, and there has never been any kind of argument. Not ever. Not about anything.”

  After they were done, Brown stood up. “We’d like a complete list of your employees, going back one year, if you have one handy, with addresses and numbers.”

  “I have one here,” he said, and he produced some printouts from one of the files.

  “We’re going to ask the staff a few questions now.”

  Silano nodded. There wasn’t much else to say.

  “Ever noticed what Cameron drives?” Madison asked as she stood up, knowing in her blood what the answer would be.

  “A black Ford pickup,” Silano answered without hesitation.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Brown put his hand on the doorknob.

  “One night,” Silano mused aloud, “months ago, we were in the kitchen getting the food together, and, behind me, I hear a crash, like something’s fallen, and Donny starts swearing. I turned around. There was blood everywhere. One of the kitchen knives had slipped, I don’t know how, and Cameron’s hand is pumping blood all over the floor. Sinclair and Quinn come in and start getting towels to wrap around it. Cameron just looks at it; he even opens his hand to see. Everyone else is trying to help out, slipping on the wet floor. He didn’t want stitches; he wrapped it tight and let it be.” Silano paused. “With all the shouting and the yelling, Cameron, he never made a sound.”

  Silano shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  They found Donny O’Keefe having a cigarette on the deck. The kitchen’s back door opened onto a small platform with stairs to the beach. He leaned on the wooden railing with his back to them. There was a stiff breeze coming in from the sea, and the sky was already darkening. O’Keefe was wearing only chef’s whites: if he was cold, he didn’t show it.

  “Mr. O’Keefe,” Brown said.

  He turned around. A wiry man in his late forties, his hair gone white and cut short. No taller than five foot six but with enough going on in his eyes that likely no one had ever picked on him.

  After introductions were made, he regarded Brown and Madison for a moment. His sleeves were rolled up, and they saw the old prison tattoo on his right forearm: an eagle surrounded by barbed wire. He looked down at it.

  “Upstate, twenty-three years ago. I kept it to remind myself I was once young, cute, and as dumb as dirt.”

  He took one last puff and killed the butt in a small ashtray he balanced on the railing.

  “How can I help you?”

  “You know why we’re here?” Brown said.

  “I heard the news this morning. I figured sooner or later you’d come by.”

  “How long have you worked at The Rock?”

  “Three years sous-chef. Seven years head chef.”

  “That’s a lot of poker nights.”

  O’Keefe smiled.

  “A lot of chat over the table.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t sit across the table from a man for years without knowing a little about him,” Brown said as he put his hands on the railing and looked out at the beach. A couple was walking a small dog.

  “Sometimes you do. Sometimes the more you see someone, the less you know them.”

  “What the paper wrote—you don’t think he did it?” Madison said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You don’t think he could do it.”

  “I don’t think he would do it.” O’Keefe stuck his hands into the pockets of his apron.

  “You asked me about him, and I’m telling you. Do you think we all gathered around, over chips and beer, and asked him how he did the guys on the boat?”

  “We think he killed a man and his family,” Madison said, her voice soft against the noises from the kitchen, metal on metal. “A man who’s been in your life for a very long time. You might know things that will help us find his killer.”

  “You think I wouldn’t want to find the piece of shit who did this?”

  “Talk to us.”

  “You don’t understand. Cameron turns up for the game once a month: that is all we know about him. What he does in between? Nobody asks. Where he lives? Nobody asks.”

  He took a pack of Marlboros out of his chest pocket, shook one out—no takers. He lit it and drew on it deeply.

  “In there, I have a chowder that would make a grown man cry. Anything beyond that, I just don’t know.”

  Brown took out one of Cameron’s photos from Records and showed it to him.

  “Does he look anything like this?”

  “Sure,” he said, which sounded more like, “Not really.”

  Brown pointed at the kitchen. “We’re going to ask around, in case anyone remembers anything worth the trip here.”

  “Be my guest. Would you guys like a bite to eat?” O’Keefe crossed his arms and leaned back, squinting slightly.

  “Maybe some other time,” Madison replied. “By the way, twenty-three years ago, what did you do time for?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He pulled on the cigarette until the end glowed brightly. “Grand theft auto. The car belonged to a cop. They found me in three hours.”

  He seemed to find it amusing, as if it had happened to someone else.

  “Smart move,” Madison said.

  “Dumb as dirt,” O’Keefe replied.

  They left him out there.

  Five men—three Hispanic, two Caucasian—also in chef’s whites worked in a long, narrow, spotless kitchen. They stood at their stations, chopping, slicing, cleaning, and getting ready for the evening rush and the Christmas bookings. Brown and Madison walked in, and the chat stopped dead.

  Everybody knew who they were and what they wanted. It took Brown and Madison forty-five minutes to interview them one by one. The waiters and busboys had already gone home at the end of their shift.

  When they came out, cars were driving past with their headlights on. It wouldn’t be long before dark. Brown ticked the names off the list Silano had given them. Madison just wanted to get moving and call the precinct: patrol officers had been checking with car rental places in case Cameron had ditched the pickup and stopped by his nearest Hertz.

  What she would have done, she thought, was have a clean car ready. One with local plates, paid in cash, and unconnected to her. And she would have done that days before the murders.

  There were also the security cameras at the airport: someone ought to go down to Sea-Tac with the photo from Records and check at least the first twenty-four hours after the crime. A slim chance, assuming he had not altered his looks too much. Madison used the standard black police notepad with the rubber band around it. She took it out of her jacket’s inside pocket, leaned against the roof of their car, and wrote two words: Poker night. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she was sitting up high, looking at her father’s hand over his shoulder. She could have learned a lot about Cameron if she had watched him play even once.

 
Brown was a few steps behind her, already on the phone. It was late afternoon, Madison was hungry, and that chowder had looked pretty damn good.

  “That was Kelly,” Brown said, after he snapped his phone shut. “He’s at a crime scene up on Genesee Hill. He said we should go over.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “White male, knife wound to the neck.”

  Madison nodded. Kelly was far from being one of her favorite people, and she knew from experience that he would be even less adorable if he was the primary on a case.

  “You play poker?” Brown asked her out of the blue.

  “I used to know people who did.”

  Brown drummed his fingers on the roof of the car. “Right,” he said. “We could go via Husky’s.”

  Husky Deli. Now, that was a happy thought.

  The press was already there. They had followed the scent and stood in groups, cameras poised, ready and waiting.

  “They always know,” Brown muttered under his breath.

  Three blue-and-whites blocked the entrance to the drive. Camera flashes started as they approached. Brown showed his badge, and they were waved through.

  The house was large, built on the most expensive part of Genesee Hill. The front lawn had been fenced, and Madison spotted a small security camera mounted by the top of the gate. The Crime Scene Unit van was parked next to an ambulance by the main door.

  Chris Kelly came out just as Brown and Madison stepped out of their car.

  “Just in time,” he said. “I wanted you to see him before he’s moved.”

  Kelly’s partner, a skinny malcontent called Tony Rosario, was just back from sick leave. He nodded hello and went to his car. Of course, Madison thought, it was perfectly possible that Rosario was really the nicest guy: you spend twelve hours a day with Kelly, it’s got to do something to you.

  Kelly walked them through to the living room. Forensics people were already deep into the scene. It was a modern house, the inside matching the outside in a vague attempt at minimalism, a style Madison deeply disliked. The living room was furnished in black and white. A massive black suede sofa and a knee-high glass table dominated the space; the rest was sharp edges and hardwood floors.