The Gift of the Darkness

by Valentina Giambanco

  A front door, a side gate on the right, the color faded to a pale green. Madison felt the sun edging out of the cloud cover: not even heavenly blue skies could have made this house pretty. She fit the key in the lock and stepped inside.

  Her eyes adjusted to the gloom—“No electricity,” the Realtor had reminded her. Madison held a heavy-duty flashlight in her left hand. The sunshine was fighting its way in through the dirty windows, and she stood the flashlight upright by the door.

  The smell was chemical lavender over dust; someone had left plastic air fresheners in every room that she could see. They had swept the floors and removed all the furniture, all of Salinger’s possessions, all curtains and carpets. Madison paused and listened; the outside sounds barely registered.

  She walked from room to room, looking for something that would give her a sense of the family who had lived there first, then a father and two boys, a father and his surviving son, and ultimately Harry Salinger alone. All Madison saw was a bare house that told her much about low-income lives and little about murder and obsession.

  She climbed the stairs and found the bedrooms. The largest would have been the parents’, the bed gone, as was everything else. The wallpaper was blue, small flowers that looked like monkshood in orderly rows. Madison looked out the window into the yard and the tall firs that lined it on all sides. The grass was overgrown; there was a time when it probably would have been Harry Salinger’s job to cut it.

  Madison was painfully aware that she was looking for significance where there was none by now. She had not felt any connection between this place and the horrors visited on the Sinclair family and the John Does in Pierce County. It was a sad wreck of a house with large patches of damp where the windowsills met the walls, but all the traces of the lives inside it had been washed out with economy-size bottles of Clorox.

  She looked around. Had Salinger continued sleeping in his childhood room after his father died? Had he locked the man’s old room and thrown away the key?

  She turned and instantly felt a floorboard creak and shift underfoot. The wood was a darker color; a rug must have rested there for years, protecting it from the sun. With the tip of her boot Madison tested the floorboard again. There was definite movement there, more than its neighbor was allowed.

  Madison dug into the back pocket of her black jeans; she flicked open her grandfather’s pocketknife and eased the tip into the narrow gap at the short end of the floorboard. It was stuck. She knelt on the floor, careless of the dust and splinters, and tried to get a look through the gap at the space under the floorboard. Too dark to see. She ran downstairs and retrieved the flashlight. With the full blast of the beam on it she could see it—a shoebox. Her heart thumped once. She put more pressure on the knife, but it did little except dent the wood.

  This could be nothing. This could be nothing at all. But whatever it is, it’s coming out.

  She straightened up, went back to her car, and took out a crowbar she kept next to the jack. She threw her leather jacket in, slammed the trunk shut, and looked around. The road was deserted.

  Back in the bedroom she carefully pushed the crowbar into the gap. She started pushing slowly and quietly as if the floor wasn’t really supposed to notice, and one short thrust later the board came off, falling sideways onto the floor.

  Madison took out a crumpled pair of gloves from a pocket and put them on. She snapped open her cell phone and took a couple of pictures, the flash harsh against the muted light through the panes.

  She placed her fingers around the shoebox and tested its weight. It came up easily, a dirty gray that would once have been white, a string tied around it.

  This was it—all that remained of Salinger’s life that had not been thrown out, sold off, or incinerated. The string had been tied in a bow, twisting around the box as if it was a gift. She took each end between her thumb and index finger and pulled delicately, and the bow came apart. For two full breaths Madison waited, and then in one movement she lifted the lid. The handkerchief was deeply stained with dark brown that Madison knew to be blood, wrapped around a large irregular shape. She lifted the corners of the fabric, avoiding the blood, and laid them over the sides of the box like petals. There were dozens: different sizes, textures, colors, small pretty ones and cheap worn-out ones. Pet collars, both cats’ and dogs’, encrusted with blood and grime and fur. Red velvet and thin, shiny leather, little tags with names and telephone numbers. Dozens of them. The sudden scent was copper and offal. Madison half slipped and half sat down on the floor. How long? How long did it take him to kill them all?

  In the fading light Madison spent a couple of hours testing floorboards and looking for hiding places, but the house had already given her everything she would find there. From the kitchen door, opened with a key found on a nail and a shoulder push, she measured the garden and wondered how many small shallow graves the boy Salinger had dug in the soft earth.

  Madison locked the front door and walked back to her car, the shoebox and its contents in an evidence bag in her trunk. She drove back to the station with all her windows down.

  The young associate at Quinn, Locke had been speaking for a few minutes, briefing Nathan Quinn on the latest developments in Headley vs. ClearGen Ltd. Quinn had stopped listening pretty much immediately, and his eyes found the digital clock on the mantelpiece of the conference room: 6:07 p.m. Less than forty-eight hours. Less than two days to a moment that might never even happen.

  He realized that the young man had stopped talking. “Thank you, Mark. I’ll look over the file later.”

  Mark Rosen gathered his papers and left. Carl Doyle came in—he had obviously been waiting outside the room. Quinn didn’t need to ask the reason for the thunder in his face.

  “Given what happened, it’s a necessary formality,” he said.

  Doyle was clearly not in the mood for letting things go.

  “What do I need to know?” he said politely but with an edge that Quinn had come to recognize over the years.

  “It’s a straightforward change. Nothing to worry about.”

  Carl Doyle sat in a chair and ran one freckled hand through his hair. This was anything but straightforward. If he was kept in the dark, he wouldn’t be able to protect Quinn and the practice in the only way he could, by doing his job right and may the rest go to hell.

  “What do I need to know?” he repeated.

  Quinn let the sun disappear entirely into Puget Sound, then walked to the door and closed it.

  “Let me tell you a little about this,” he said.

  Doyle left the conference room ten minutes later. He went to the restroom and kept his wrists under the cold water tap until the chill had spread to his whole body.

  After a short run through the neighborhood and a hot shower, Madison heated up some stew from the previous evening. She had resisted the impulse to call Sorensen and Dr. Fellman to check on their progress. Everyone had her cell number in triplicate.

  She started watching The Apartment and fell asleep on the sofa before Shirley MacLaine got her heart broken.

  In his house above Alki Beach, John Cameron sits in darkness and studies the lights of downtown Seattle framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass, pinpoints of headlights gliding on the Alaskan Way Viaduct across the Sound. He knows there will be no peace to be gained from the view; he has been reading a copy of Salinger’s original arrest sheet and all the information Tod Hollis had gathered about the case. Understanding has come late in the game, but it has come, and he swears under his breath.

  There are weapons in the house: some he will carry on his person, and some he will leave behind. Whether he will get to be in this room ever again, watching strangers driving in the distance, he really could not care less. In the end, it will be speed more than strength or ammunition that will get the job done. Speed and the will to do it. The hunter’s instinct was rarely far from the surface, and right now he feels that what little human decency he has carried around in the last few years is fast unraveling i
nto nothing. He hopes Detective Madison will not get in the way, but he knows she probably will.

  He crumples the arrest sheet, lights a match, and watches it curl up and burn to ash in the empty fireplace.

  Chapter 43

  Thursday morning. Madison sat at her desk, cradling the receiver on her shoulder and making notes. A fleeting thought pulled at her just as Dunne burst through the door.

  “They’re going through the test again for confirmation. One set of remains matches Salinger’s DNA.”

  Madison managed a polite if extremely quick “thank you and good-bye” and hung up.

  “Salinger’s DNA?”

  “Fynn has gone to get the warrant signed. The first round of tests confirms that a complete set of human remains from Salinger’s house matches his DNA and the bit of coagulated blood found at the Sinclair crime scene.”

  Madison’s hand was still on the receiver. “We need to see with our own eyes that the brother’s body is still in its grave. We need to know for sure.”

  “Grab your coat. I’ve never been happier to go to a cemetery.”

  Madison stood to follow, her hopes and her fears a single weight pressing against her chest. She hoped to be wrong; more than anything she hoped to be wrong.

  Farmer Joe’s in Burien was Tommy’s favorite shop because it had strawberry freezer pops. He loved squeezing the chilled fruit onto the tip of his tongue and the way his fingers would go a little numb from the cold. Heaven.

  He looked up at his mom; they were in the canned fruit and vegetable aisle, and it held absolutely no interest for him at all.

  “Just a couple more things, sweetheart,” Rachel said, and she let go of his hand to pick up a tin of peaches to put in her basket. She checked the ingredients for the sugar content.

  Tommy knew where the freezer pops lived—they were a couple of aisles back. He was under strict instructions not to go wandering off by himself, but that was not wandering; that was shopping, like his mom did. He took two steps toward the end of their aisle.

  “Tommy, stay where I can see you, baby.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” he replied. Tommy looked around: few things in his life were more boring than shopping for groceries. A police officer in uniform stood a few feet away by the end of the cereal aisle, holding an empty basket, a long coat folded on his arm. Auntie Alice was a police officer, too. The man turned and looked at the boy.

  The rain found them under umbrellas on Queen Anne Hill. It was a gentle slope, and the water ran downhill through the patches of thin snow—Madison was glad she was wearing boots. Fynn, Spencer, Dunne, Kelly, and Rosario, their shoulders and trouser hems already soaked, spread out wide and went from stone to stone looking for Michael Salinger’s grave. Within those forty acres they had a rough idea of where it would be. Under other circumstances it could have been a lovely walk, evergreens and a neat lawn, the universal markers of eternal rest. Still, when it came down to it, they were there to dig up a casket, and Madison looked around for visiting mourners, hoping to find none.

  A cemetery official in a long gray parka did his best to keep up with them and reply to Lieutenant Fynn’s questions. No, there had been no vandalism in the last three years, no disturbance of any kind; the maintenance crews checked the grounds regularly. Madison half listened as she crouched and ran her fingers over worn marble. The wrong name. She straightened up and walked on.

  “Here!” Kelly hollered, and he raised his arm.

  The official spoke quietly in his walkie-talkie to give the digger directions. They clustered around a granite headstone, identical to the two stones next to it. No angels, no ornaments. Only the dates told them it was a child’s grave. It was stark, and yet twenty-five years of Pacific Northwest climate had bought it a softness and elegance that money had not.

  Two Crime Scene Unit officers in all-weather gear joined them; Sorensen had stayed back at the lab, fighting her own private war with the pile of evidence.

  Madison crouched down, and a few raindrops found their way into the back of her collar. The ground around the headstones was intact; there was no visible mark that told them anyone had touched, disturbed, or even visited the three Salinger graves. One CSU took pictures; the other held a small video camera.

  The digger arrived, an efficient machine that could do the work faster than men would.

  “Here we go, then,” the driver said, and the engine came to life.

  Madison stood back and sank her hands into her pockets.

  She couldn’t say how long it took; at some point the driver stopped and used a shovel to clear off the last of the dirt. Nobody spoke.

  The CSU officers had already set up their lights; they blazed a circle around the hole. One of the men dropped into it and disappeared. There was little room to move, and the other stayed above ground, the video camera held at eye level.

  Fynn’s cell phone rang; he flipped it open and stepped away from the lights.

  Madison closed her eyes and raised her face; the rain had almost stopped, and she let the veil of moisture settle on her brows. Be dead and be gone.

  Fynn’s voice brought her back. “It was the ME. The tests are confirmed. It’s Salinger, the body they recovered—the DNA matches.”

  “The seals are intact!” The officer inside the pit had to yell above the voices all talking at once.

  “Are you sure?” Madison yelled back.

  “I’m looking right at them. They would have had to twist and break them in four places. The original seals have not been messed with since this thing went into the ground.”

  Madison dropped to her knees on the edge of the hole; around her she could hear the others move and talk and speak on their own cells.

  “Open it up already,” somebody said.

  Madison could not look away. The CSU man made short work of it, tools releasing the seals on all sides. When they shifted the lid, everybody crowded to the edge of the pit. The human remains inside the casket wore the threadbare rags of what had once been clothes. The body, such as it was now, was there, every bone in its place.

  The cemetery official looked them over. “Happy now?” Nobody replied. “Lieutenant, I’d like to put everything back just as it was as soon as possible. I’m sure you understand.”

  Madison stopped listening. Harry Salinger was dead. She had to tell Quinn; she had to tell Brown. Harry Salinger was gone, blown to hell by his own hand. She felt Dunne’s light slap on her shoulder; he was smiling. Even Rosario, his nose still under a bandage and nearly as pale as the dead, was smiling. A group of people standing around an open grave as if it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. It was over.

  Madison said her good-byes and started walking down the hill; her world had just shifted, and she needed to adjust. Quinn, she thought. She reached for her cell phone inside her coat just as it started ringing.

  “Tommy’s missing!” Many voices crowded around Rachel’s, and she was speaking and trying to keep her sobs down and breathe. “Tommy’s missing.”

  Madison froze. She turned and saw the CSU lights at the top of the hill.

  “When did this happen? Where are you?”

  She hoped to God that her training would slam into place, or she would be no good to her friends at all.

  “Farmer Joe’s. I was taking something from a shelf, and he was there, and I turned and he was gone. I told him so many times—Alice, I looked everywhere in the store and outside. I don’t understand—”

  “You called the police?”

  “Yes, they came, and we’ve all been looking. Everybody has been looking. Everybody. Where did he go? How could he—”

  “How long ago did you notice he wasn’t with you?”

  “About thirty minutes.”

  “Rachel, sweetheart, put the police officer on, please.”

  “Alice—”

  “I know,” she whispered, hoping that it would convey what Rachel needed to hear. “Officer? This is Detective Madison, SPD Homicide. Who am I speaking to?” />
  “This is Officer Clarke, Burien PD.”

  “Officer Clarke, the missing boy is my godson. Have you been given a complete description? His mother usually carries a picture in her wallet. It’s a recent one. Has she given it to you?”

  “She has.”

  “Good. Have the store’s cameras been checked?”

  “Yes—no good. We went through the footage. You see them coming into Farmer Joe’s, and that’s it. Next thing the mother comes tearing out the door and calling for the boy. Nobody left with a child in the time between, and the staff door was locked and monitored. You need a swipe card to get to the back and the staff exit.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Officer, but a six-year-old boy doesn’t just walk off and disappear.”

  “I know. Nobody saw him leave alone or with anybody else, but he is not here. There are officers checking every corner.” Officer Clarke lowered his voice. “And every trunk of every car in the parking lot. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand.”

  “We’re working through the criteria for an Amber Alert. I have to go now.”

  Madison gave him her cell number.

  “Alice?” The expectation in Rachel’s voice was heartbreaking.

  “I’m on my way. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re doing all the right things.”

  “Okay.”

  “We are going to find him.”

  “Okay.”

  Madison rang off. Her eyes had never left the CSU lights on the top of the hill, still blazing in the falling dusk. Salinger is dead.

  She hit the trail at a dead run, and her tires peeled off a layer of rubber as she skidded out of the cemetery parking lot and streaked south.

  “Spencer, it’s Madison. I have a family emergency.” She had gone straight to voice mail. “My godson is missing. Six-year-old boy. It’s a possible abduction. It’s just happened, and we don’t know anything yet. You can reach me on my cell.”