The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  Madison registered the blood on the walls even before she realized what she was looking at. She saw it and knew it and felt the adrenaline spike kick in. Her eyes followed the red spray as it rose and fell, a fine mist covering the white cushions. No one could lose that much blood and live.

  The man was slumped against the back of the sofa; you wouldn’t have seen him unless you’d gone around it. You wouldn’t have seen him from the door unless you had noticed the blood.

  Madison couldn’t tell what color his shirt had been—maybe pale blue, maybe white. Blood had drenched it and his denim pants. It had pooled in the creases of his clothes and around him on the wooden floor. His hands were lying at his sides, already bagged up, slick with red.

  He had been a big man: around six foot six and wide to match, his hair dirty blond with a receding hairline he had tried to hide. He looked fit, and if there had been a struggle, he would have been a dangerous opponent. But he lay there now with a deep gash under his throat that ran almost from ear to ear and his mouth open as if in surprise.

  “The girlfriend found him; the paramedics had to sedate her,” Kelly said. “The main door has four locks, what with my man here being so keen on security and all. When the girlfriend opened the door with her keys, all four locks were in place. The windows haven’t been touched, and the back door has another three locks to get through before you can come in. All were in place. No signs of forced entry anywhere. And here’s the kicker: in the main bedroom there’s a safe you can actually take a walk in. Wide open. And enough white in it to build a snowman.”

  “A dealer,” Brown said.

  “Erroll Sanders.”

  The name rang a distant bell with Madison.

  Brown sat on his heels and peered into the wound.

  “Mr. Sanders. Long time no see.”

  “You know him?” Madison asked.

  “He’s been as quiet as a mouse for a few years.” Brown straightened up. “Roughly since one of his boys bobbed up in Lake Washington minus eyes and hands.”

  There were French doors on one side; the other three walls had been painted in dazzling white. Madison looked around: aside from the dark spots of blood in rising arches, there seemed to be no immediate evidence of a struggle. There were a couple of vases on a mantelpiece near the door and lamps on two smaller tables by the sides of the sofa. Nothing had been disturbed.

  “He got him from the front,” Kelly said, looking down at the body.

  “Yes.” Brown examined blood spatter on the right-hand wall. He pointed. “This here came from the knife as it moved away, after the cut.”

  His finger traced a fine, straight line of droplets, their tail indicating the direction they had come from. His arm moving slowly, as he worked out where the killer had stood.

  The wound was very deep, and, given Erroll Sanders’s height, it was unlikely that his killer could get him in a lock from behind and cut his throat in that manner.

  Madison sat on her heels: the wound was deeper on the right side and slightly slanted up toward the left. The killer had been fast and incredibly strong; one quick slash and Sanders would have had only seconds before he lost consciousness from blood loss.

  “He cut him right to left,” Brown said. “He’s right-handed.”

  “CSU has been dusting for prints for hours.” Kelly seemed strangely pleased with himself. “They’ve found diddly. He had a piece in an ankle holster, for all the good it did him, and a .45 on his nightstand—looks like he had just taken that off. It’s still there, untouched. There’s about $5,000 cash next to the white. This wasn’t about drugs; this wasn’t about money. I think we have a Nostromo-type situation here.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Brown said. “How about the security camera outside?”

  “I’ve checked: the tape is missing. There’s a couple of glasses in the kitchen sink, washed up. This doesn’t mean that Sanders had a drink with our man, but if he did, the killer cleaned up after himself.”

  The glass table would have been a perfect surface to retain prints, and that’s where they could have put their drinks.

  “Nothing there,” Kelly said. It had already been dusted and found spotless.

  The violence had started and ended with Erroll Sanders. Nothing else in his life had interested his killer aside from the taking of it in one quick, devastating blow.

  “What about time of death?” Madison asked.

  “Probably between four and six this morning.”

  It was one of the pleasant quirks of their relationship. If Madison asked Kelly a question, he usually gave his answer to Brown. For a second there Madison wondered if it was worth her time and effort to have a word with him in private one of these days and put him straight. Not now, she thought. Not here.

  “Can we take him?” A paramedic had been standing behind them.

  “Go ahead,” Kelly said, and Erroll Sanders was carefully lifted off the ground, zipped up into a body bag, and carried away.

  For a few moments the only sound was the Crime Scene Unit officers collecting and preserving.

  “We don’t know if he found the intruder already in the house when he got back. Whether the man followed him in. We don’t know why, and we barely know when,” Brown said.

  “What do you mean?”

  It was suddenly clear to Madison that Kelly would be pretty pleased if Cameron turned out to be the doer.

  “I’d love to know how he got in,” Kelly said.

  “You might want to make sure they dust the victim’s car for prints. Maybe it was a Trojan horse. Mind if we have a look around?”

  Kelly thought about it for a second, not a Homer reader but definitely familiar with the idea.

  “Go right ahead,” he said, and he went to find Rosario.

  Brown glanced at Madison, who was trying to work out the sequence of events by the blood-spatter patterns on the walls. Ultimately, the way she dealt with people like Kelly would be as important in being a cop as her gifts as an investigator. It was something she would have to find out by herself. That day Kelly would wish he hadn’t gotten out of bed.

  “We have little, but we do have something,” Madison said. “We have Sanders, and we have the bodies on the Nostromo. I want to check the postmortem reports and the description of the wounds.”

  “Kelly’s the primary.”

  “I know. But Cameron has been lying low for years and now, within a few days, we have five murders.”

  “And you’re looking for a connection?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Brown rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “All five men on the Nostromo had their throats cut by a right-handed man. Three from behind, cut left to right. Two from the front, right to left. Judging from Sanders’s height and the high angle of incision of his wound, that puts his killer at about five eleven. The blade on the Nostromo was a non-serrated, razor type, sharp enough to cut your breath in two. Same as what did this.” He pointed at the dark spots on the walls.

  “The knife is a close-up weapon,” Madison interjected. “And it’s dangerous because you have to get that much closer. Kelly was right: someone was so ticked off with Sanders, he didn’t care. He was so angry, he had to get him up close and personal.”

  Madison was struck by that point.

  “With all the blood on Sanders and around him, the killer would have been covered in it when he left.”

  Brown nodded. “I’m sure Kelly has got them checking the garbage cans in the street.”

  “No, he’s too smart for that.” Madison started looking on the floor by the sofa, close to where the body had been found.

  “He knew that once Sanders was hit, he was going down,” she continued. “The danger for the killer is over. He can just relax and enjoy the show.”

  She found what she was looking for.

  “Look.”

  On the hardwood floor, three feet from where Sanders had fallen, was a slightly curved line of blood drops. The drops were large and roun
d and had fallen perpendicular to the ground. They didn’t come from the spray that had hit the wall.

  “He wore a long coat. A rain slicker. The blood hit it and slid to the ground. Once Sanders is dead, he takes the coat off—and whatever he had put over his shoes—and that’s all. Stuffs it in a bag and goes home. Clean.”

  “What about the bag?”

  “A thin rain slicker burns easily; you don’t want to leave that kind of thing around.”

  “A rain slicker.”

  “One of those clear plastic ones.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Neat.”

  “I’d say.”

  They walked through the hallway and the kitchen and the pool room and the bedroom with the vast open safe—the drugs and the gun gone by now—just to get a sense of the victim and possibly a reason for his death.

  The house told them nothing except that Erroll Sanders had lived with poor taste and little judgment, and one December morning either one or the other had caught up with him.

  Back at the precinct, the Nostromo file, thick as it was, offered little help. It confirmed all the details Brown had remembered earlier and nothing more.

  Erroll Sanders’s former employee, the late Joe Navasky, had been in Lake Washington for days before they found him. By then it was difficult to judge whether the near-decapitation and the mutilation of his eyes and hands had been postmortem or not.

  Madison liked consistency: the Nostromo, Navasky, Sanders. She could see the similarities there: the manner of death and the obliteration of trace evidence and prints. She went back to her own notes on the Blue Ridge murders.

  The weapon of choice, the mode of death, the use of chloroform on the blindfold, the involvement of the wife and children, and even the evidence recovered on the scene: nothing matched.

  She thought of the boy’s room in John Cameron’s house and the baseball bat in the closet. The lab had told her that the blood and bone splinter were at least fifteen years old.

  Brown had hardly said a word to her since they had gotten back from the Sanders crime scene. Madison had learned to negotiate her course around his silences, but this time Brown had been reading the same page for half an hour. Assistant County Prosecutor Sarah Klein arrived to prepare for Quinn’s hearing, and the moment passed.

  Just as Klein left, Kelly put his head in the door.

  “Sanders’s car was spotless, almost. They found the partial of a thumb on the axle.” Kelly twinkled. “It’s half wiped off, but there’s nearly enough points of similarity to stand up in court. What time is the hearing tomorrow?”

  It was good. Good that Cameron was still in town and had gotten a little sloppy. Good that there was a lead in the Sanders case. Good and bad for Madison, who sat reading the Hoh River clippings for an hour until Brown stood up and put his jacket on.

  “Go home,” he said. “We’re done for the day.”

  “Quinn’s younger brother,” Madison said. “Why did the kidnappers take the body if he was dead?”

  “At the time it was impossible to prosecute a case without a body. The other two boys were blindfolded and couldn’t testify to anything.”

  After Brown left, Madison tried to read old interviews, but her concentration was off. She wasn’t quite ready to go home yet and wandered into the main squad room. The usual comings and goings and the usual smells of takeout.

  Someone had left a copy of the Seattle Times on a table. Madison picked it up and turned to the second page to avoid reading about the case. A few lines near the bottom caught her eye: the photographer she had ejected from the Blue Ridge crime scene had been attacked and left unconscious in an alley. In his statement Andrew Riley had said that somehow the police might be behind it—that some officer, meaning herself, might have it in for him after what had happened at the Sinclairs’.

  Madison blinked. She had completely forgotten about him. It took her two phone calls to find the detective who had the case.

  “He’s a weedy little shit, but he was knocked around some,” Detective Nolan said. “Now he’s locked up in his apartment like someone’s out to get him. Actually he mentioned you.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “We’re not taking that seriously. Still, he must have pissed off somebody somewhere.”

  “It wasn’t a robbery?”

  “No, nothing was taken, though a camera was destroyed. He was in Jordan’s, off Elliott Avenue, got a call at the bar, no one on the line. Minutes later, he comes out, and someone punches him. Badly enough that he passes out. And the guy destroys his camera. There was hardly anything left on the strap to tell you it was a camera.”

  Madison drove home with her windows rolled down. Andrew Riley had slammed into a wall of bad luck, but nothing seemed to connect him to the Sinclairs except for his presence on the crime scene.

  Two things stuck out: one, the phone call had been made to identify him in the bar. Which meant the attacker had been standing right there to see him get the call. Two, the attacker had looked for his camera and destroyed it. In fact, he had made a point of destroying it.

  He had sought out Riley in a crowded bar and, without explanation, without any threats or warnings, he had attacked him and smashed his precious camera out of existence.

  Whichever way you sliced it, someone had taken offense at Riley’s line of work. So had Madison, for sure, and she knew for a fact that if it had been her own loved ones Riley had tried to photograph, her reaction might not have been as contained.

  The Sinclairs’ closest contact, apparently, was Nathan Quinn, but Madison couldn’t see him waiting in the dark for Riley—it wasn’t his style. Quinn would never lay a finger on him. If he wanted Riley punished, she figured, they might never even meet, and yet things would happen, and Riley would never sell another picture in his life. And Quinn would make sure Riley knew why. How far she herself might have gone was something Madison did not dwell on.

  The Sinclair house was a dark shape beyond the trees. Madison drove past slowly, catching a glimpse of the patrol car parked out front. In a flash she remembered that she had not returned the keys to the tree trunk. They were still in the inside pocket of her blazer. She braked gently. She was about to put the car into reverse, her hand already on the clutch.

  Not yet.

  She slipped the car into first and drove on.

  Hours earlier, Erroll Sanders had driven back to his house. Maybe Cameron was in the car with him, maybe not. Whatever. At that point Sanders had, perhaps, half an hour to live.

  Madison drove past her own driveway and toward Rachel’s house. She hadn’t done that in a long time, not since the months after her grandfather’s death. She pulled up before the turn.

  The only light was above the front door; a wreath was pinned to the knocker. Two cars were parked on the side, and the curtains were drawn. Madison turned off her engine. It did not worry her that sometimes, after a day of blood and random evil, she would come here and sit in her silent car for a few moment, where she could feel Rachel’s life inside the house, Rachel’s family inhabiting a world that overlapped with her own only in part; theirs was safe and loving and as distant as it could be from the horrors she knew. It was a comfort beyond description.

  After a couple of minutes, she left and made her way home.

  Nathan Quinn locked the glass door behind him as the office alarm beeped softly. He said good night to one of the cleaners who was pushing his cart along the ninth-floor landing and called the elevator. In his right hand he carried his briefcase, in his left a small stack of correspondence he had not yet had a chance to look at. He pressed the button for the underground car park and flipped through the envelopes.

  Fourth from the top, Quinn recognized the heavy cream paper before his mind could tell him what it was. He tore it open and took out a card that matched it. On it, five numbers were printed in black ink:

  82885

  The elevator’s doors opened. Quinn looked up as if a voice had spoken.

  H
e went back to his floor, punched in the code for the alarm, and went straight for his office without turning any of the lights on. He flicked the switch for his desk lamp and pulled open a drawer in the filing cabinet behind him. It was the first one in the file; he had placed it there himself on Monday. The same paper, the same card, only the message was different. He put the two cards next to each other on his desk.

  There was no doubt in Quinn’s mind that the same hand that had written the words and these numbers had taken the lives of James and his family.

  He picked up the receiver, punched in a telephone number, and replaced it on its cradle. After maybe thirty seconds his cell phone rang, and he picked it up.

  “Jack,” he said.

  Chapter 22

  Harry Salinger sits at the workbench in the basement of his house. He looks at a shard of glass through his jeweler’s lens; he holds it delicately between his right thumb and forefinger and turns it around until he is pleased with what he sees.

  In a corner the fruit of his hard work has taken shape: the base was easy to fix, considering he had to keep it light and portable, but he knows it will be the metal bars that will make or break his masterpiece. He stands up and slips on his welding goggles.

  Lynne Salinger was thirty-nine years old when she found out she was expecting a child. She cried for hours: the precarious routine of her life was about to be shattered, and within her rigid Catholic background an abortion was out of the question.

  Her husband, Richard Salinger, forty-one, a uniformed officer with the Seattle Police Department, bought a few rounds of drinks in the bar and at the end of the evening was driven home by his partner.

  It was widely known within his precinct that his bullying temperament had cost Richard Salinger a promotion many times over. He had never hit his wife because he did not need to: he did his manhandling out on the street but kept his darkest moods for the home.

  Lynne Salinger gave birth to twin boys, Michael and Harry, and immediately sank into three years of undiagnosed postpartum depression; the week after their third birthday she took her life with an overdose of sleeping pills and died as she had lived, with very little fuss.