“You’re looking for someone, but you hope not to find him.”
“Pretty much.”
Madison kept her eyes on the screen. When there was no one in the frame, she would fast-forward it until there was someone walking past.
“Sounds like fun,” Dunne said.
“You bet,” she replied.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked her.
“I’ll be sitting right here with a turkey sandwich in one hand and the remote in the other. How about you?”
“I’m going to see my folks in Portland.”
Madison pressed the Fast-Forward button, stopped, and pressed it again.
“You’re going to miss the big snow,” she said absentmindedly.
“In any way I can,” he replied. “Where’s the sarge?”
Brown was not at his desk.
“Around.” She looked up. “He’s checking out some calls from the hotline.”
Madison stopped the video, stood up, and stretched. “What are you guys up to?”
“We’re going to get roped in the hotline, I think. Did you hear about OPR?”
“No.”
“They managed to get Tully to admit that he had received the information from an anonymous source and that no money had changed hands.”
“They believe him?”
“If you take away the money, what else is there?”
“I know.”
Madison went back to the tapes. Nobody looked even remotely like the man they were after. Somehow that was a good thing.
Somewhere in the fourth hour, she began to see stories unfolding: the couple arguing, the guy who tried to jump the security queue, the kid who got lost. She also saw a woman who tried to steal another woman’s wallet and got caught, and a guy who lifted a briefcase, who didn’t.
It was sometime past the end of the shift and before the depths of night when Brown came in and put a pizza box on her desk. They each took a slice—it was olives and anchovies. Anchovies were something Brown and Madison had always been in agreement about.
Brown’s desk phone rang, and he picked up. He listened and then took down a number.
“Try this,” he said, and he passed Madison the piece of paper. “It’s a black Explorer—the sticker says it’s been in Sea-Tac long-term parking since yesterday afternoon at about 2:20 p.m.”
He saw her thoughts in her eyes. “It doesn’t mean he’s gone; he could have just left it there.”
“I hope so,” she said, and she went to work on her computer.
It took her two minutes to find that the owner of the car was one Mr. Roger Kay of Bellingham, a Caucasian male.
Brown stood behind her, looking at the screen. “Right age, right color. Doesn’t look anything like him.”
Roger Kay had limp brown hair and a face you instantly forgot. Both Brown and Madison leaned into the screen.
“The eyes are half closed, and the mouth looks different,” he said.
“The chin and the jawline are different, too. We can call the number we have for Mr. Kay, but if his car is in long-term parking, chances are he won’t be home.”
“Try anyway.”
Madison dialed. It rang for a while, and nobody picked up.
“See if he’s got a record.”
It took her a minute.
“Nope,” she said. “No rap sheet.”
“Okay. What’s his home address?”
“It’s in Bellingham.”
Brown sat at his desk. “I’m going to keep a man on the Explorer while we get someone to check the residence.”
“I’ll get going on the warrant,” Madison said. Judge Martin was off the clock, but Judge Kramer, also known as Dial-a-Warrant, was on call. Lucky for them.
Twenty minutes later Brown’s phone rang. It was a uniformed officer from the Bellingham Police Department.
“I’m standing right in front of the address,” he said. “It’s an empty warehouse. Door’s been boarded up. Nobody lives here but rats.”
“Okay,” Brown said after he replaced the receiver. “You want to register your car to someone other than yourself, what do you do?”
“Fake driver’s license?”
“It’s too easy.”
Madison took another slice of pizza. “It’s just a few dozen dollars, a birth certificate, ID, and a couple of letters from the bank for proof of residence. To get a birth certificate, just check the records for a child death, find someone who would be your age now, and pay your dollars online. Way too easy.”
She tapped on her keyboard. “Let me try something,” she said.
“What?”
“Social Security Death Records. If Roger Kay is an assumed identity, and Cameron got it going through records of infant deaths—if, for whatever reason, the original death was registered—then it would turn up in there.”
“Why?”
“Say his parents were receiving benefits or something.”
“Lord, I hope they were.”
Madison waited for the answer to come back on the screen. The pizza was getting cold, and she wished she had a Coke to go with it. There was a beep.
“I got him. Roger Kay died when he was eight years old.”
“I’ll call the Crime Scene Unit,” Brown said, and within five minutes they were out and driving.
Two men in airport police uniforms paced up and down and stomped their feet to keep themselves warm. When Brown and Madison drove up, one of them came to their car and checked their badges while the other stayed with the Explorer.
Brown thanked them both and made sure they were glad they had helped out. “Either one of you touched it?” he asked without making a thing of it.
“I might have when I was looking to see if there was anything in view inside,” one of them replied.
“Okay, we’re going to have CSU here in a few minutes. Your prints will already be on record. Thanks for the heads-up.”
The men left.
Madison wore gloves and had a heavy-duty flashlight in her right hand. The car looked spotless on the outside. She got close and shone the beam of light around the seats. Brown did the same on the other side. They moved from the front to the back.
Madison crouched a little, cutting her light sideways. The beams crossed and parted as they checked the black-carpeted floor.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing.”
Brown turned off his flashlight.
“We don’t know it’s him yet,” he said to her quietly. “Not for absolutely sure.”
“It’s him,” Madison replied.
“That a hunch?”
“Yes. I’m on a roll today.” She kneeled by the back and shone her light on the underside.
The Crime Scene Unit van arrived, and Madison was pleased to see Amy Sorensen shrug into her jacket and snap her gloves on.
“Sorry I missed the scene on Monday,” Sorensen said as she joined them. “Had my appendix out, and they put me on forced bed rest. A waste of time, if you ask me. What have we got?”
Amy Sorensen was a striking five-foot-eleven redhead in her forties. Her father had been a cop, her husband was a cop, one of her two younger sisters was a detective in Vice, the other had just made plainclothes. The family was a legend in the department. She had a mind you could cut glass with and the dirtiest laugh in King County. Madison knew she could use both right now.
They briefed her quickly, and she went to work. Her partner was a junior officer Madison had seen around a few times. They set up a couple of strong lights and busied themselves around the Explorer.
“It’s been here since yesterday afternoon,” Sorensen said as she examined the concrete around the tires. “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to take a peek at what the inside has to offer, with minimal intrusion: I don’t want to disturb any trace evidence we might find. Then we’ll take it back and do things properly.”
Her partner called the truck that would move the Explorer off the lot while Sorense
n got the driver’s door open in less than twenty seconds.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Brown said.
“Best in town,” she replied. She picked up a portable lantern and shone it around and above the seats.
“Smell it?” she asked them. “Wood polish and that flowery crap they put in Dustbusters.”
She checked the mirrors and under the steering wheel. She clicked the glove compartment open and peered in, the bright light reaching into every corner. It was empty.
She shook her head. “Okay, the longer it stays here, the bigger the chance it might get contaminated.”
“It’s a dump job,” Brown ventured.
“Oh, yes, and someone had a pretty good go at detailing it.”
“Too clean for trace evidence?” Madison asked.
“We’ll see about that.”
Once the tow truck arrived, they maneuvered the Explorer onto it. After they drove off, Brown and Madison stood in the empty space where John Cameron had been only eighteen hours before. Without the lanterns, it had gone back to a chilly gloom.
“I want to check the hotline,” Madison said, tapping her cell phone.
“Wait,” Brown said. He was only a few feet away, his back to her, looking at the rough, uneven concrete. “There’s something I want to run by you.”
Madison put her phone away and sank her hands into her pockets. Brown examined the oil-stained surface.
“What is it?” Madison asked.
“What do you think we’ll get from the car?” Brown asked her.
Madison was getting used to his habit of leading her into a new thought by asking her a question about something entirely unrelated.
“Sorensen will find something—if there’s anything there to find. How much closer that will get us to Cameron, I don’t know, but everything counts. He doesn’t know that this identity is blown; he might use it again. Something is going to shake loose.”
“And the evidence will lead us to him,” he said.
“Sooner or later. The sooner the better.”
“We have four bodies in the morgue. Sanders makes five. We have a lot of how and what; we have almost zero why. Explain that.” He said it as if it was a mathematical issue. Brown seemed entirely unaware of the cold, the late hour, and the desolate place they were standing in.
Madison’s eyes felt gritty. “That’s what they told us at the Academy: you get a lot of one, you’ll get none of the other. Murphy’s Second Law. So, we have a possible motive for the Sinclairs but not for Sanders. We have evidence that Sinclair stole from Cameron but not why. Cameron left the drugs and the money in Sanders’s house but no trace evidence. We’ve got plenty of that at the Sinclairs’ but nothing to match it to with the Sanders scene.” Madison could see that was not what Brown had in mind.
“We need to stand back and see the whole picture.”
“He’s been two steps ahead of us all the way,” she retorted. “How much further back do we need to be?”
“Right now, how far are you prepared to go to find the man who killed those children?”
“As far as necessary. What exactly are you saying?”
“We’ll find him when we see what he sees.”
“For crying out loud!” Madison heard herself say, suddenly losing her brain-to-mouth filter. “Are you holding back on me? Because this Yoda-in-a-raincoat thing is not working.”
A beat of silence passed between them. Madison did not know what to say—she was as surprised as he was. Then, slowly, like some rare geological event, Brown smiled.
“I don’t know any more about this than you do,” he said quietly.
His phone rang: it was Fynn. As Brown briefed him, they got into the car. The people they needed to interview at Sea-Tac would be back with the morning shift.
Madison sat looking straight ahead, not knowing exactly what her next words should be. Brown drove fast toward the lab. After he ended his call, he was still smiling.
The night shift was going about its business and didn’t give Brown and Madison a second glance as they wandered down the quiet corridors, their “visitor” badges hanging on their coats.
The vending machine had drinks and snacks. The neon light above was unforgiving, and a wave of tiredness hit Madison like a load of bricks. She chose a can of Coke and hoped the caffeine would kick in before she fell asleep on her feet. She popped the top and drank and paced.
Brown drank from a bottle of water. Sorensen’s office door was open, on her desk a copy of the New York Times. He picked it up and sat on a bench in the corridor, adjusted his glasses, and started reading. After a couple of minutes of Madison’s pacing, he looked up.
“Will you sit down already?”
She obliged. He went back to the paper.
“What I said before . . .” she said.
“The Yoda thing,” he said crisply, still reading.
“Right.”
“Funny,” he said.
After that, they sat in silence for a while, Brown turning the pages from time to time and Madison leaning her head on the cool wall behind them, her eyes closed. It was past eleven when his phone rang, and they both knew there was just no way it was going to be good news.
It was a long call, and for most of it, he listened. Then it was done, and the only sound around them was the soft hum of the vending machine.
“That was Detective Finch, LAPD Homicide. They were called to a crime scene today—the house of a known dealer. Vice had him on their wish list for years, but nothing ever stuck. Anyway, they get there and find three bodies: the dealer and two bodyguards. Looked like an assassination. Good news for the civilized world, but they still have to work the case, so they look into friends and associates and check out who might want him gone.”
Brown paused.
“The guards died of blood loss from knife wounds to the neck, and the dealer was shot with his own gun. Shot through the right eye. The Los Angeles ME puts the time of death sometime on Tuesday. No prints. No witnesses. No trace evidence so far. But it turns out the guy had an associate in Seattle, name of Erroll Sanders.”
He let that sink in.
“And when they checked on him—”
“They’re looking at Cameron for it?” Madison said.
“They have nothing that links him to the dead men, except for Sanders and how the guards were killed. They’re going to e-mail Kelly the details of the blade for a comparison with the knife that cut Sanders.”
“It happened sometime on Tuesday,” Madison said.
“Yes.”
“That’s before Sanders was killed.”
Brown nodded. Madison thought about it for a moment. There must be a chronology to this mess. “Cameron is here on Saturday night—we have the Sinclairs’ time of death to confirm it. He waits for two days. He meets Quinn Monday afternoon. On Tuesday he’s in LA; he takes care of business there. In the early hours of Wednesday he’s back here for Sanders. He speaks with Quinn after the first hearing, and yesterday at 2:20 p.m. he drops the Explorer at the airport.”
“Busy week,” Brown said.
Sorensen emerged after a while. “We have the partial of a thumb from inside the trunk; it’s smudged as if a hand print got cleaned off. It might not be strong enough for court. The outside and underside are spotless. No surprise there.” She took a sip from a paper cup. “We have a couple of hairs from the backseat, but don’t get excited—they were shed, not pulled. So, no follicle and no DNA. Also from the backseat, a very small amount of fibers that could be cotton or wool, black. But, best of all, there was a drop of blood under the steering wheel. Could be a cut to the palm of the hand. We’re comparing it to the DNA from the Sinclair crime scene. Now, I beg you, go home.”
They walked out into the night, and Madison looked forward to her drive home, alone in her car, the music loud enough to go right through her bones.
Billy Rain had spent the rest of Wednesday in the garage, thinking about Tully’s article and George Pathune lying de
ad on the concrete floor of a prison laundry. More than actually thinking about it, he had been in a state of constant recall. It had come between his brain and his hands, and he had cut himself twice. Something that had never happened before. His brother-in-law had noticed.
“Don’t bleed on the seats,” he told him.
The day inched on, and at the end of his shift Billy left with the newspaper tightly folded in his coat pocket. He needed a bar where he knew no one and no one knew him. He found one off Fairview. A dim local enterprise one flick of the broom away from sawdust on the floor.
He finished his first beer, sitting in a corner booth, the paper untouched next to the bowl of peanuts. He ordered a second beer, took a sip, and opened the Star. He read Tully’s piece twice, feeling each time the same cold dread but getting through it nevertheless.
By the time he was starting on his third beer, he felt a little more in control. Enough to know that he needed to switch to ginger ale if he wanted to think straight.
He deliberately had not revisited that day since he’d been paroled; he had tried to leave the memory of it in his cell. No one knew, because he had never told. He had never needed to: the body of George Pathune had been added unofficially to the tally of a convict called Edward Morgan Rabineau who was already doing time for two counts of murder, and nobody was particularly surprised at his notching up a third.
Billy reflected briefly about the prison laundry on that day three years ago, and, if he had to be perfectly honest, he couldn’t say whether the person he had seen was Rabineau. He was familiar with the man, sure, but they had never spoken; they moved in different circles, and within the prison hierarchy they were about as far apart as they could be and still belong to the same species. With one major difference now: Rabineau was still in jail. Billy was sure of that.
Tully’s piece identified the prime suspect as someone called John Cameron. A name he had not heard in a long time and had seriously hoped not to hear again.
Billy drained his ginger ale. Something else he was pretty sure of was that no one named Cameron had been in jail at the time Pathune was killed. Which meant Tully might be wrong. It had nothing to do with Billy, of course—none of it had.
He ordered some food and ate watching the sports on TV. He went home to his one-room rental—he hadn’t sufficiently proven himself to go back and live with his family yet; he just had dinner with them a couple of times a week—and he watched television till he fell asleep in his chair.
The Gift of the Darkness Page 19