The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  “I think I should take you back to the hospital. It doesn’t look like you were ready to leave yet, miss.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I’ll be all right in a second,” she said with her head still down, waiting for the waves of nausea to stop.

  As she straightened up, the driver saw the leather holster and her weapon in it.

  “You’re the cop on TV.” He was leaning on his car door with his arms crossed as if they had stopped to look at the view. “You ought to get some time off—you don’t look so good.”

  “Yes, well, thank you.”

  When they got to her destination, she gave him a big tip for almost throwing up in his cab.

  Madison spent less than five minutes inside the precinct. She got her mail from the pigeonhole: two letters reminding her of court appearances in the next few weeks and one large envelope addressed to Brown—with luck, the Academy records he had requested.

  Madison didn’t have a bag with her, so she folded the larger envelope around the smaller ones and left. Not a great moment for the sanctity of the postal service, but she didn’t think twice about it—Brown would have kicked the whole thing off the wall, had it been necessary.

  She walked a few blocks and felt her stomach settle a little. She found a coffee shop as it was beginning to rain. Tiredness had started to fray her concentration: caffeine would help, at least for a while. She sat on a stool by the window; the pane steamed up, and she took a couple of sips. The shop was busy with downtown shoppers and tourists; nobody paid any attention to her.

  Madison tore open the flap of Brown’s envelope. There it was: a list of names going back years. It did not give details; the specifics of the rejections were confidential. Still, if any of those names had even the slightest connection to Cameron, it was well worth pursuing.

  Madison scanned the list; there must have been over two hundred names. She rolled her eyes—a needle in a haystack would have looked pretty good at that point.

  She tried to lift the cup with her right hand, and the wrist wouldn’t work. Her left would have to get busy, Madison thought, stretching it wide and closing it into a fist. There was something she must do, the sooner the better.

  She finished her coffee and walked out, the startling chill finding every ache and pain in her body. Madison’s thoughts were already elsewhere, though, and she moved fast through the crowd with her head down.

  Underground, surrounded by near-darkness, her left hand held out before her, Alice Madison put three quick shots into the target provided by the firing range. She focused on the concentric circles that had taught her to shoot: the innermost was the center of a man’s chest; go up a foot and a half, and you’re aiming for the head.

  The air coming from the ventilation system was cool, the same temperature all year round, the same low lighting between the cubicles. Nobody on her left, nobody on her right. Madison liked to do her shooting alone. It was a place where she had always found it easy to get out of herself, to clear her mind and let her hands and eyes do the work.

  She slowly squeezed the trigger, her front sight clear, her rear sight and the target appropriately blurred. The kick traveled back up her arm like an electric crackle. She lowered the .45 and took off the goggles. The grouping was good but not good enough. She wriggled the fingers almost covered by the splint, passed the weapon into her right hand, and started to extend the arm in front of her. The pain was not unbearable, but there was no way she would even hit the target that way.

  She breathed deeply, left arm extended, and squeezed on the exhale. And again. And again.

  The man had been tall. Madison remembered his voice in the deserted street as she was getting out of the car with Brown. Officer Mason, he had said. Just over six foot. Wiry, with a plain face. Hair, Madison couldn’t remember—he had been wearing a cap. Would she recognize him if she saw him again?

  Breathe in and exhale and shoot. Lower the weapon, and do it over.

  Madison had reported the ambush in detail but had not spent much time with the memory of it herself. It almost made her smile that she had chosen to go back to it now, as she emptied her weapon into the target. I must remember this for the counseling session, she thought. She would be obliged to attend one before returning to duty—it was a rule.

  Madison pressed the switch to collect the target and replace it with a new one. It came to her, what was left of it, and she put it aside. She pressed the switch again, and a blank target slid down the line back into position forty feet away. Then she reloaded, resting the .45 against the palm of her right hand.

  The first shot felt as good as the jolt through her arm after swinging a baseball bat, when the wood makes contact with the ball. It tore a neat hole at the center of the target. Madison looked at it. Pretty good by anybody’s standards. Still, a day late and a dollar short, her grandfather used to say.

  It would be difficult to identify the man in a lineup, true, but there was something she knew for sure. They had not been looking at Cameron: the plain face with the small mouth and the straight nose was not John Cameron’s.

  Ballistics might very well say that the .22 used against Brown had shot three members of the Sinclair family—she couldn’t argue with that—but eyewitness testimony was a whole different ball game. She couldn’t identify Cameron as the shooter—in fact, she could positively exonerate him. It was definitely worth a conversation with Spencer.

  Lieutenant Fynn would be unhappy, of course. He had asked her to keep her thoughts to herself, try not to give Quinn ammunition to contest the integrity of the warrant, and she had lasted less than twenty-four hours.

  Madison took off the spent target, the center of it now almost nonexistent, and put a new one in place.

  Her body remembered the fight, sudden and quick. They prepare you for the worst in training; what they cannot do is give you a sense of the fear and the shock of being physically attacked. Had she been afraid? Goddammit, yes, Madison thought. Had it stopped her thinking and reacting? Madison lowered the .45. I can ask Brown the next time I pop in to see him.

  By the time she was done, there was a small pile of spent targets at her side, and her left hand was shaking with fatigue. Madison took off her earphones and goggles and turned to find J. B. Norton, her gunnery instructor, leaning against the wall behind her. He was a welcome sight—a quiet man who looked like a librarian and had taught generation after generation of law enforcement officers.

  “J. B.”

  “They told me you were down here, and I thought I’d bring you a present.” He threw it, and she caught it—a squeeze ball to strengthen her left hand.

  Madison smiled. “Thank you. I need it.”

  He didn’t ask her how it had gone—he picked up the target sheets and examined them. He considered the progression from the first to the last.

  “We don’t see you around here as often anymore,” he said without looking at her.

  “I know. I’m sorry. The last few weeks have been pretty full.”

  “Look, Madison, all I wanted to say is that you can shoot if you have to, right-handed or not.” He picked up the last target with two fingers; the inside circle was all but blown out. “And you’ve got good judgment—not like some of the cowboys who pass through here. Have you ever aimed your piece at another human being and pulled the trigger?”

  “No.”

  “A lot of cops never do, but you never know.” His glasses glinted in the half light. “If you have to, aim for the middle of the chest. It will bring a man down before he does the same to you.”

  Under her sweater, the tiny hairs at the back of her neck stood up. It was a terrible notion. She nodded, and Norton left.

  Madison gathered her things and found the exit. Her hands smelled of gunpowder as she dialed the precinct’s number.

  Lieutenant Fynn always stood during conversations that tested his patience. He was standing now. His office door was shut, and Madison, also standing, had come in to make a bad day worse.

  “Run t
hat by me again,” he said.

  “I’m going to tell Spencer,” she replied. “The description of our shooter, the man who called himself Officer Mason, exonerates Cameron. Whatever Ballistics says, Spencer ought to know that much.”

  “Twenty-four hours you couldn’t keep it to yourself?”

  “I should have told him last night at the hospital. I was wrong not to.”

  “You mean I was wrong.”

  “I was wrong. My description of the attacker was vague at best, but I can tell you for sure who he was not.”

  Lieutenant Fynn knew that Madison had told him first out of courtesy and respect. At that moment, though, he’d rather be dealing with an idiot without manners who did what he was told.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked her with his hand on the doorknob. There was a grim note to his voice that meant consequences.

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot physically stop you from talking to him, but I can and will do whatever I can to prevent you from compromising this investigation. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He opened the door and called out. “Spencer, Dunne, get in here now.”

  Spencer and Dunne had not slept for two days; they had been home for a couple of hours when they were called to the ambush crime scene, and since then they had been on their feet. They came in punchy and tired, but Fynn’s bleak expression woke them up fast. Spencer was the primary, and Dunne was his partner; if one knew, they both knew.

  “Madison’s got something to say. You might want to sit down.” Fynn crossed his arms and leaned against the closed door.

  Spencer and Dunne looked from one to the other. Madison began; she kept it simple and quick. When she was done, no one said anything.

  Dunne ran his hands over his face. “What the hell,” he said after a while.

  Spencer’s reaction was more difficult to gauge. His eyes stayed on Madison. “You have absolutely no proof of this?”

  “No, I’m working on that.”

  “You’re working on dismantling your own case?”

  “I know the man who shot Brown was not Cameron.”

  “You barely saw him. Your description said ‘a plain face,’ no distinctive characteristics. You don’t know for sure it wasn’t him; the guy might change his appearance every day of the week—you know that?”

  “I’ve been looking at his picture for days. I’m telling you, it was somebody else.”

  Fynn didn’t say a word.

  “And Brown agreed with all this?” Dunne butted in.

  “Absolutely.”

  Fynn stepped into the middle of the room. “That’s what he was ‘looking into’; we don’t know what he would have said today. He might very well have decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to support this angle. Actually, there isn’t any evidence to support it at all.”

  Madison opened her mouth to interrupt.

  “Let me finish. We don’t know he wouldn’t have let this go. You don’t know, Madison.”

  “No way. He was about to come to you himself.”

  “But he didn’t.” Fynn sighed. “I have looked at the file again, I have reread every word of it ten times, and I do not see even the beginning of doubt. Madison, you’ve been through something awful in the last twenty-four hours. Isn’t it possible that you’re stuck on this out of loyalty to Brown? He’s a great cop, he was checking every angle as he should, but he would have moved on by now.”

  “What are you saying, exactly?”

  “You were attacked, and your partner got shot, and your judgment is out of whack. You feel guilty because you think you didn’t watch his back, and you’re obsessing about something he said that he probably would have taken back today.”

  “You think I’m doing this because I’m stressed?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time it happened.”

  “All due respect, sir, but that’s a crock.”

  “You are on medical leave, Detective. I suggest you go home and rest.”

  “And that will make it all better?”

  “You might also want to rethink the attitude.”

  Spencer and Dunne stood transfixed by the exchange.

  Fynn turned to them. “I want to have a few words with Detective Madison, in private.” They left.

  Madison lowered her chin and got ready for the fight.

  “How long?” he asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long do you think it will take for that conversation to filter through to the whole precinct?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not long,” he continued. “It means anything you do now is going to be tainted. It means that, as per my recommendation, you will not be allowed back on duty until you have undergone a psychological evaluation.”

  “That’s just—”

  Fynn raised his hand. “It means anything you say or do now can be used by Quinn to contest the warrant.”

  Madison stopped midsentence.

  “It’s called ‘deniability,’ and it’s not a gift,” Fynn continued. “It’s going to be on your record.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  As she was leaving, she turned to him. “Brown wouldn’t have changed his mind, you know.”

  “Go home,” he said, not unkindly.

  Spencer was waiting for her. He motioned for her to follow, and they went into the rec room.

  “What was that about?”

  “You heard me. That’s as much as I know.”

  Spencer was a calm thinker. If Madison had any hope to get through to anybody, it would be him.

  “You really believe this?” he asked.

  Madison felt suddenly exhausted. “He tied the ligature twice so he could leave the hairs for us to find.”

  “But you don’t know why.”

  “No.”

  There was a moment of quiet between them. Spencer opened the fridge, took out a small carton of juice, and pressed the tiny straw through the hole. It was the kind of thing a child might drink. He was making up his mind about telling her something or holding back.

  “We’re following a lead from Harbor Patrol,” he said. “You were right about the boat thing.”

  Madison was glad and sorry to hear that. “I need some time to work through this.”

  “I don’t know how long you’re going to get.”

  “What can you tell me about the lead?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think my telling you anything is a good idea right now. You go home and do what you do. We’ll see who’s going to get there first.”

  Outside, the sun had decided to call it quits, and the sky was white with snow. Madison grabbed a cab. Once at home on her sofa, she dialed the phone and lay back with her eyes closed.

  “Rachel, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be very good company tonight. I’ll come over another time. Thank you anyway.”

  “I’ll drop something off if you like, so Tommy can see you for just a minute.”

  Rachel brought lasagna in an oven dish. They popped open a couple of beers, and while Rachel was busy with the microwave, Tommy examined her injuries. He was a bright six-year-old who knew about running around and getting his knees scraped.

  He put his finger lightly on a stitch in Madison’s brow. “Does this hurt?”

  “Not really.” Actually, it was just beginning to hum.

  Gently, he turned her arm around to see the splint. He touched her fingers to make sure they still worked. He took a step back. “You don’t look too bad,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “Did you sing ‘Blackbird’?”

  After every cut and graze. Rachel had sung the Beatles’ “Blackbird” to him ever since he was a baby. Magical healing.

  “Yes, I did,” she said.

  “Did it help?”

  “It did.”

  He was only one year younger than the younger Sinclair boy, David. One wee
k ago at that moment, David Sinclair was likely having dinner with his parents and brother. In a few hours, a man would walk into his bedroom and shoot him in the head as he slept.

  Rachel and Tommy left. Madison hugged the boy tightly before they strapped him into the backseat and was glad she had washed the gunpowder off her hands and changed her clothes. He smelled of cookies.

  Madison waited for their car to disappear up the drive and down the road. Back inside, she went into her bedroom and retrieved the holster and the .45 from the safe. She felt stronger after the food, and restless.

  The Sinclair house was deserted—the patrol cars that had been posted there earlier in the week had received other assignments. When Madison remembered that she still had the keys, she knew she had to go back.

  The neighborhood was quiet, and the walk there was brief. She put the key in the door and let herself in. In the hall, she stood and looked around. Nothing had been moved since the last time she had been there; only her own world had been turned upside down. The Sinclair house was a clock that had stopped a week ago.

  Kamen had said that she had to see Cameron as a victim: if Madison could see how he had been chosen, it would get her one step closer to the killer. Now, given that Cameron was not available, the Sinclairs were the next best thing.

  Madison breathed in to get used to the smell more quickly; seven days after the fact it felt old and unpleasant, just bad enough to be a distraction.

  She would go upstairs. She knew she had to, but not right away: the upstairs had everything to do with the Sinclairs’ deaths, and Madison hoped to learn something about their life. If they had been chosen to carry the weight for Cameron, somewhere, somehow their paths and the killer’s must have crossed.

  Madison sat on the sofa. It was comfortable, and she sank into it, feeling the last twenty-four hours in her bones, replaying in her mind the conversation with Kamen, reminding herself that she had to try Sorensen at the Crime Lab for the third time. In a corner, a small table lamp threw a patch of light onto the wooden floors.

  Madison told herself that she was going to close her eyes only for one minute. One minute and she would open them. One minute. Out of utter weariness she fell into a deep, heavy sleep without dreams or movement or sound.