The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  “He’s got a boat.”

  Brown held her eyes; he nodded. “Yeah. That’s what Quinn was protecting.”

  They stood there, Chandler’s Cove stretching out before them, pier after pier, more boats than they could count in the damp, salty dusk.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Brown said.

  A boat was bad news, and Madison was suddenly annoyed with herself for not having considered the possibility before. A boat in Seattle meant he could go anywhere and not be anywhere. On the water he was practically invisible. The numbers were unforgiving: in the Seattle King County area there were many thousands of licensed boats.

  They had no solid proof yet of his boat ownership, but they knew as if they had seen him with their own eyes, walking out of the hotel, making sure the cab had gone, stepping lightly over to the pier where his boat was moored. It could have been anything—Chandler’s Cove fuel dock could take up to sixty-five-footers, it was open twenty-four hours a day, and from Lake Union he could get into Lake Washington or maybe out to Puget Sound and on to wherever. The journey to Vancouver Island, Canada, would have been really pretty.

  Madison looked around; hardly anybody else was on the piers, and they were going to be short on witnesses. The Ford Explorer had been registered to a different name, Roger Kay—that was very likely standard operating procedure for Cameron, which meant the boat could be registered to a whole different identity. Keep them separate, keep them safe. He hadn’t lasted that long without being careful. He probably had several well-maintained identities for separate purposes—driving license, boat, properties, airline tickets. Madison was deep in thought when she realized Brown was talking.

  “Do you know anything about boats?”

  “I have a kayak, if that counts.”

  “Well, let’s put it this way: you have to moor them, put in fuel, maintain them through nine months of rain. Just think of taking one of these forty-footers out, and you’re already burning money.” Brown’s gaze moved over the sleek sails and the heavier motor boats with their well-appointed cabins. “Cameron doesn’t mess around; if he has a boat, he’s got himself a nice piece of nautical engineering, and someone somewhere must have seen him on it. I don’t care what he did to his hair.”

  Madison put her hands in the pockets of her coat and looked up at the purple sky.

  “We have eight square miles of water against eighty-four of land.”

  Brown turned to her, about to say something, then changed his mind. The boats bobbed up and down, bumping gently against one another.

  Back in the precinct, Madison opened the fridge in the rec room and examined its contents. She had promised herself many times that she would keep something in her desk or in their makeshift kitchenette for occasions such as this.

  The fridge was nearly empty and could have done with a cleaning. The same carton of chicken soup had resided at the back of the second shelf since Madison had joined Homicide. Next to it, half a bagel with something green in it that Madison could only pray was salad. Something yellow and sticky had spilled at the bottom—maybe a soft drink, maybe soup. Never mind OPR, she thought; the World Health Organization would shut them down in a nanosecond.

  Andrew Dunne walked over in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. He stood next to her, and they both stared at the desolation. His red hair stuck out a little at the back, and he was pale under the freckles.

  “I heard you got boat trouble,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “I’ve got a buddy in the licensing office, if that helps.”

  “Thanks, but it’s just going to be a paper-cuts job.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Anything from Sea-Tac?”

  “No. Except Kelly was ticked off he wasn’t with you at Boeing Field. He came right back and kinda yanked the cab driver away from the sketch artist.”

  Nothing much Madison could say to that; she simply raised her eyebrows. That had been exactly why Brown had phoned in the news about the driver and not taken Kelly with them.

  Dunne shut the fridge door with the tip of his index finger.

  “It’s meat-loaf night at Jimmy’s.”

  Jimmy’s was a cop bar three blocks away; if they knew you and they weren’t too busy, they delivered. Dunne had their number on speed dial. Twenty minutes later six Friday-night specials appeared.

  Madison’s first instinct was to pick up her carton and go back to her desk, where a small mountain of printouts from Sea-Tac airlines and the Washington State Board of Vessel Licensing were waiting. Instead, she sat on the edge of Spencer’s desk and spent a few minutes not being antisocial. Kelly ignored her, Rosario read his paper, Dunne and Spencer talked about tattoos, and Brown sat quietly, picking at his food and going over the fax LAPD had sent them earlier.

  Madison took a bite of meat loaf. It was glorious; her grandmother would have approved.

  After a while she returned to her desk. The paperwork was arranged in neat piles. She was holding a cup of coffee; to make room for it, she picked up a file. It was her notes from the library, her research on the Hoh River kidnappings, and the background on Cameron, Sinclair, and Quinn. Madison opened the file and quickly scanned her own writing—four more dead since then.

  The newspaper articles had the photographs of David Quinn’s memorial service—the crowd picture and one of John Cameron Madison didn’t remember. One arm was in a sling, and with the other hand, he was grabbing the camera off the neck of a photographer. The men and women around him hadn’t noticed the intrusion, except for Nathan Quinn. The photographer’s face was a flash of surprise, Cameron’s pure hatred. The man, much taller and heavier than the boy, was stumbling back to get away. Cameron looked completely unafraid: something more powerful than his small body had washed over him.

  Madison blinked. When she had moved the file, she had glanced at a page under it—another article she had cut out. Now she reached for it. It was the report on Andrew Riley’s attack in the alley behind the bar—he who had been so cocky when he tried to take photos of the Sinclairs’ bodies at the crime scene. She remembered how the detective had described him after the attack on him: the fear, the shock.

  Madison blinked. Somewhere far outside her immediate attention, Brown was by the door with Spencer. She looked up at him, hearing nothing. Brown met her eyes, Spencer still talking to him. Madison looked down, in one hand Cameron’s picture, in the other Riley’s article. And the notion was there, clear and unavoidable and utterly compelling. Because one moment ago she didn’t know, and now she did.

  She looked up, and Brown held her eyes; he said something to Spencer, and Spencer left. Brown closed the door of their temporary office and leaned against it.

  “Cameron attacked Riley,” she said, still stunned.

  “Yes,” Brown replied simply.

  “‘Yes’?”

  He nodded.

  “Because he had tried to take pictures of his dead friends.”

  Madison paused. Everything she knew was being reshaped and renamed.

  She lifted her hand. “Give me a minute.” Her eyes could not rest on anything. The Sinclair crime-scene report, the pictures, Nathan Quinn’s interview notes, Sorensen’s preliminary on the Explorer. Everything she had seen, everything she had done.

  “Dammit!” Madison slapped the wall with the flat of her hand. She felt as if she could have punched a hole right through it easily enough, but when she turned to Brown, her voice was controlled and her anger in check.

  “You knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you chose not to share that thought with me?”

  “If I told you, it would have been worth nothing to you. I trusted that you would get there. If we have to sell this to Fynn or anybody else, I can’t be worrying that you only half believe it yourself. You had to see it with your own eyes.”

  “What if I hadn’t?”

  “I’d have put in a request for a new partner.”

  A look pas
sed between them.

  “I need you to think straight now,” Brown said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay,” he replied.

  They sat down.

  Out of all the implications and consequences of what Madison had just discovered, the first and most important was the one she was almost reluctant to articulate. After all the hours spent on the hows and whys. She had to say it out loud.

  “If Cameron was punishing Riley for his insult to the dignity of his friends, the logical conclusion is that he is not responsible for their deaths.” The words felt strange in her mouth. “If he were, he would have welcomed the exposure: that would have fit nicely with arranging the crime scene and positioning the bodies. He would have wanted the world to see it.”

  “I don’t think he did it.”

  “When did you start to doubt?”

  “When Payne called us about the glass.”

  “Last Tuesday morning during the briefing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Last Tuesday?”

  “I know.”

  “You haven’t mentioned this to anybody else?”

  “I talked about it with Fred Kamen.”

  “The glass was the last straw?”

  “Something like that. At that point we had the torn check with the forged signature and the hairs in the ligature knot. It was too much good fortune for us. If you look at what we think was Cameron’s previous work, the Sinclair crime scene shows a completely different pathology.”

  “We still have all that evidence that needs to be accounted for.” Madison liked evidence; she relied on it. It stung her pride that someone had taken advantage of her beliefs and she would never have known if not for chance and a cup of coffee.

  In her mind things were clicking and finding their place.

  “If Cameron didn’t kill the Sinclairs, somebody else did. The LA dealer and Sanders were involved, and Cameron found out.”

  “Do you really think that’s their style?”

  “Let’s go back a second here. You started to think about this on Tuesday. Since then we’ve had an arrest warrant out on Cameron, we tried to get Quinn to talk, we’ve been wading through rivers of paperwork, all with one single objective—to find Cameron. And the kicker is, he’s the wrong guy. How, in the name of everything holy, did you not tell anybody?”

  “I have zero proof; this is a hunch. A guess I happen to believe I’m dead right about. The only possible way to do this is to work both ends at the same time: we follow the trail the killer has left us to get to Cameron, and we back up on it to get to the killer himself.

  “This thing wasn’t thrown together at the last minute: the killer knew what we would be looking for, and he gave it to us. How he has chosen to lay the trap and build the setup tells us about him and how he thinks and what he wants out of this. Something else: Cameron might not have killed the Sinclairs, but three men in LA and one in Seattle are dead probably because he decided they should be. If the killer is close enough to Cameron, he can give him to us on a silver platter. And I’m not saying no.”

  Madison chewed on that for a moment.

  “Let’s look at the Sinclairs again,” Brown said. “We can start with manner of death.”

  “The wife and the children were shot; the husband was tied up and died of a heart attack brought on by inhalation of chloroform. We had concluded that the difference meant that the killer wanted James Sinclair to know his family was being slaughtered. It was his punishment for stealing from him.”

  “What happens if we take Cameron out of the crime scene?”

  “The killer still wanted Sinclair to die after everybody else. For Sinclair’s death to be slow and painful while he saw what was happening to his family.” Somehow it was even worse than their first conclusion.

  “Yes. And that doesn’t look like something our LA friends would do.”

  Madison sat back on her chair. “Thirteen Days is a warning to Cameron? And the guy is still out there.”

  Brown nodded once. She knew he was right, and something cold snaked down her back. Retribution was swift in the circles Erroll Sanders moved in; they were low on detail work and high on ammo. This was something else.

  Brown picked up the Crime Scene Unit report and flipped it open.

  “From the moment Payne said we had Cameron’s fingerprint on the glass, it was all about evidence. Evidence is how the killer is revealing himself to us. He used DNA and fingerprints to tie his target to the scene and constructed a motive using forgery and embezzlement.”

  “Saltzman has finished with the tax records?”

  “Yes. He found nothing that indicated Sinclair ever acted inappropriately.”

  “We have the check and the money going in and out of his account.”

  “How easy do you think it would be for me to open an account tomorrow in a different name? You spent some time at Sinclair’s house. What was your gut feeling? Did the guy need extra cash?”

  “No.”

  “What about any other gut feelings?”

  Madison shook her head. All that time spent watching their home videos: she had had a gut feeling and pretty much ignored it. Something came to her out of the blue.

  “The ligature. You said that the amount of blood and cells on the ligature was not consistent with Sinclair’s injuries, that there should have been a lot more, given the fight he put up. So we had the question of why did the killer retie his hands.”

  “Now we know.”

  “He did it to place the hairs in the knot. He couldn’t have done it when Sinclair was alive and struggling.”

  Madison was beginning to get a sense of the madman they sought. To find him, she needed to understand him. To fight him, something else would be called upon: something she was not altogether sure they taught at the Academy.

  Her cell phone rang, and she jumped. She checked the time on the small screen: it was 10:45 p.m. The number was unknown.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, is this Detective Madison?”

  Adult male, over twenty and under fifty years old, local.

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “My name is Greg Phillips. You spoke with my father, Clyde, a few days ago in Laurelhurst. His house is opposite John Cameron’s.”

  The old guy with the shopping bags.

  “Yes, of course. Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine, thanks. You left him your card, and, well, we just called 911. Someone was trying to break into Cameron’s house. My dad said to call you, that you might be interested.”

  “Yes, absolutely, thank you. We’re on our way.”

  Madison shut her phone and stood up, reaching for her jacket. “Somebody’s breaking into Cameron’s house.”

  Brown grabbed his coat.

  Chapter 26

  They shot through the station, all the other detectives gone out or off shift. The traffic was light, and they made good time toward Laurelhurst. The temperature had dropped, and anybody with any sense had stayed home.

  “What did Kamen say?” Madison asked once they were on Twenty-third Avenue.

  “He picked up on the use of DNA and fingerprints; he said we should look into someone with an affinity for police work. Possibly someone who applied to the Academy and got turned down, who frequents cop bars and strikes up conversations. That kind of thing.”

  “What if he applied to the Academy and didn’t get turned down?”

  “What he did to that family, I’m hoping something might have come up in the psych eval. That was not his first piece of work; he’s had time to practice his swing.”

  “Can we get the records from the Academy?”

  “We should have them by tomorrow. I asked Payne to go over the glass again, check if it had been treated chemically in any way. Sorensen is looking at the hairs. It might tell us how he got them and stored them.”

  Madison was still getting her bearings. First there was one, now there was another. Brown knew exactly what she was feeling. “
Right this minute, Lieutenant Fynn is asking you the question, what do you say?”

  She puffed her cheeks and blew out some air. “You know those pictures that are actually a composite of two images, like a trick of your eyesight? The thing is, you can’t have both at the same time. You can see one, but you lose the other, and vice versa. I just know it was Cameron who beat up Riley, but if I see that, then I lose the bigger picture.”

  He nodded.

  “We still don’t know why,” she continued.

  “We’ve been dealing with why all week, and see where it got us. Today I’m just going to be happy with how and who.”

  Madison shifted her holster a little and relaxed in the seat. “We had surveillance on the house.”

  “Not enough hot bodies. They put the numbers into canvassing, and a patrol car would look in on the house every hour or so.”

  “The chances of this being a casual B&E are pretty slim. Someone wants to have an eBay Christmas.”

  “It could be a reporter getting a little too close; breaking and entering ain’t what it used to be.”

  “You know we’re going to have to tell Fynn soon, right?” she said.

  “Tomorrow. We’ll catch him nice and early.”

  “After his first cup of coffee.”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  They found Laurelhurst quiet and still, the residential streets already turned in for the night and a light mist softly rising. Brown hung a right into Cameron’s street and slowed down. Left and right, cars were parked in their driveways.

  One Seattle PD uniformed officer stood in the middle of the street, opposite Cameron’s house. He saw them approaching, a flashlight in his left hand. Brown parked and identified himself and Madison as they exited the car. The beam of the flashlight swept over their feet. The air had a bite to it.

  Cameron’s house stood deserted, just as they had last seen it. Madison noticed a couple of windows still lit in the Phillips home across the road.

  “My partner and I responded to the 911 call; the owners are not on the premises.” Officer Mason was tall and wiry, a plain face under his cap.