“Don’t take this lightly, Counselor.”
The view was lovely, the water reflecting the bright sky for those brief moments when the sun was showing itself, while they spoke of the ugliest things a person could do to another. A small sailboat with three young sailors in bright red life jackets bobbed past; their voices floated up to the deck.
“This is how it works, Detective,” Quinn said, his dark gaze following the boat. “You have to kick the tree to see what falls out of it.”
“That you did, Counselor,” Madison said.
For a moment it was all right just to stand out there in silence.
“How’s your partner?” Quinn asked after a while.
“He’s . . . he’s getting better. Slowly.”
A text message pinged on Madison’s cell. She read it twice; it was from Spencer. Jerome McMullen could be out on parole in seven days.
“McMullen,” she said to Quinn. “He’s up for parole.”
It meant that the last thing McMullen wanted was for a twenty-five-year-old kidnapping gone wrong to flare up and demolish his chance at freedom; it meant motive.
A burst of laughter from the small sailboat drifted up and died away.
Chapter 37
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur as the detectives tried to connect Jerome McMullen to the murders and continued the hunt for Peter Conway’s crew. Madison concentrated on finding a connection between Timothy Gilman and the soon-to-be-released convict; she examined records of past convictions, addresses, known acquaintances—everything and anything that makes up the lives we lead, that connect us to the people we know. The fact that Jerome McMullen had a potential motive to want the David Quinn kidnap/murder to disappear forever was absolutely no good to them if they could not prove he had ordered it, paid Gilman to carry it out, and, twenty-five years later, made sure that Peter Conway and his men wiped out anyone still alive who could testify against him.
Madison stood up and reached for her coat: she would nip out and grab a coffee nearby and bring it back to her desk. The detectives’ room was peaceful, as her team had left, and the current shift was out in their daily duty to serve and protect.
Her cell started vibrating.
“Madison,” she said as she shrugged on her coat.
“Are you still in the precinct?”
Kevin Brown. Madison smiled.
“Yup, one of those days. How’s it going, Sarge?”
“Swell,” Brown replied. “If you’re still kicking around in the precinct, do you want to meet at the shooting range?”
“Can think of nothing better.”
“See you there.”
Madison slipped her cell back into her jeans back pocket and gazed out the window. It was pitch-black. Detective Sergeant Brown had called her late enough in the day that she might have already gone home or made other plans, maybe hoping she had, and still he had reached out to her.
Madison had no illusions about the situation: if Brown didn’t get his shooting up to the level required by the examining board, he would have to hand in his badge, and that would be that. He wouldn’t be a civilian on the force; he wouldn’t finish his last ten or however many years pushing papers from one side of his desk to the other. He would be gone. Madison took a deep breath and rubbed her hands over her face. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
The shooting range was quiet and blessedly deserted when Madison and Brown arrived. J. B. Norton, the chief instructor, had already left for the day, and Madison was grateful for that small mercy. Norton was the kindest soul who had ever taught human beings how to shoot one another, but Brown needed privacy.
The cool air whispered through the pipes as Madison lifted her Glock in the Modified Isosceles stance. She aligned the sights—the gun in a comfortable, two-hand grip—and listened to her breathing. At the end of the exhale she squeezed the trigger, and the shot ripped through the silence. She allowed herself two breaths with the weapon lowered and then repeated the sequence. Her six rounds found the center of the target and demolished it.
She wasn’t there to show off, and she almost put one round out of the target’s core on purpose. She turned to Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, her partner, who was leaning against the wall behind her, who weeks earlier had been her main ally in the war against Harry Salinger and her main support in the small daily battles of a rookie detective in a Homicide unit.
He looked as he always did: a crisp shirt and a smart tie, even his ever-present raincoat folded neatly on a chair nearby. His ginger hair had a touch more gray in it—that was all the change the past few weeks seemed to have brought. Madison knew better, though: the fear of not being allowed to do the one thing you are truly good at would have been overwhelming, like an oil slick that reached into every corner of a person’s thoughts. She understood and didn’t dwell on it, and, thus, they both ignored the actual reason they were meeting at the range and instead talked about the case, about the joys of partnering Detective Chris Kelly, and about the latest from John Cameron’s jail.
This was her second set; she had gone first, then Brown had taken her place, and now that she was done, it was his turn again. Madison watched him and assessed him carefully.
There’s always more to an injury than the physical side of it. How has pain changed us? How has it changed the way we live inside our bodies and in the world at large?
Brown’s shots tore through the range. Her gaze had followed the line of his shoulders, his grip on the weapon—he favored a MI stance, as she did—and she saw his chest rise and fall with each breath.
They took turns for a while. Brown had taken the obligatory remedial lessons after his two fails.
Madison examined the target still in place: Brown’s score was on the narrow line between failure and success. If tonight he had barely made it, a hairsbreadth difference on test day would mean he failed again—no doubt about it.
“What do you think?” he asked her, the directness of the question almost startling.
This was not the time for the cosmetic version; Madison pressed the button that retrieved the target, and in the half gloom the paper cutout flowed toward them like an ungainly spirit.
“The technique is there,” she started. “And so is strength and breathing. However, just before you shoot, you lock your shoulders and become rigid.”
Brown nodded. “Go on.”
“There’s a small flinch there when you get locked, and sometimes it’s not so small, and it affects your aim.”
“It’s been improving but not fast enough.”
“Yes, I can see that. Also you peaked a couple of turns ago, and now you’re tired, and it’s getting worse.”
They both leaned against the wall, their ear mufflers around their necks and the eye-protectors back on the shelf. The smell of cordite was sharp in their nostrils.
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
Madison didn’t want to cheapen the moment with some half-assed psychobabble—she’d run away from that kind of thing herself—and yet the answer was not straightforward or merely physical.
“It’s not about how you’re holding the weapon or the angle of your feet,” she started. “You are controlling your breathing without holding it, and you’re doing everything right.”
“Except that . . .”
“You’re overthinking it. You’re not using your muscle-memory. Every shot you take, it’s like the first one you ever took, and it’s using up all your energy to make sure every single element is right. Which it is. But the tension is pulling your body apart, and you’re barely making the score.”
Madison took a breath. Their relationship had always been about honesty, and Brown would not have asked her the question if he didn’t want the answer. His eyes were still on the target trembling in the air-conditioning.
“What do you suggest?” he asked again after a moment.
“How good are you at mental math?”
Brown snorted. “Let’s just say I’ve never been to m
ath camp.”
“Perfect. What you need to do, Sarge, is occupy your rather large and complex brain with some six-digit additions while letting your muscle-memory do the job it’s there for and hit the darn target.”
“Additions?”
“Multiplications, if you prefer. Anything that’s going to keep your mind from becoming too involved in shooting could work.”
“You ever use this trick?”
“All the time.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. When I was competing, I’d get very nervous, and J. B. suggested it.”
Neither needed to say that the reality of the street was different from a competition. Harry Salinger had not given them time to add or multiply anything when he had attacked them in near darkness.
Madison clicked the release, and the loader slipped out of her Glock—such a familiar gesture. They were working on a B-27 target—a human silhouette in black, with the elliptical target areas in white. In the past Madison had also trained on a G-64—a human silhouette with every organ clearly marked and assigned points for importance. She had done it a couple of times, then stopped and never used it again.
“I’ll come back tomorrow, fresh and full of numbers,” Brown said. “Do you have time for a beer?”
“Absolutely,” Madison replied.
Jimmy’s was a cop’s bar with a meat loaf that had had nourished and raised the cholesterol levels of generations of cops. It wasn’t meat-loaf night, but the cook found them two chicken salads and piled them high with extras, just to let them know how pleased he was to see them there after so long.
Brown and Madison sat in a booth a little off from the main area, eating their sandwiches and drinking chilled longnecks from a local microbrewery. It could have been the end of a normal shift.
Madison enjoyed their silences as much as their conversations. Brown wasn’t the chatty type, and she didn’t mind. On the Salinger case he had kept his thoughts close to his chest and had let her reach her own conclusions. In the end they had both arrived at the same theory— roughly fifteen minutes before Brown had been shot in the head.
“I met Jerry Wallace in 1987,” Brown said after a while. “There were good reasons he did what he did and didn’t get involved in anything heavier than information. He was a little guy with a talent for speaking to anybody on any side. One of Conway’s crew could have just carried him out under one arm.”
Madison took a sip of her beer. “This thing, it goes all the way back to August 28, 1985, and every time I feel I’m getting close to seeing the shape of it, something else happens, and it morphs into a different animal.”
Her frustration was evident. Brown was silent for a beat.
“Do you know how they measured the Great Pyramid?” he said finally.
“What?”
“Do you know how ancient Greeks would have measured the Great Pyramid? In essence, how would they measure an inaccessible object?”
Madison was struggling to find a connection.
“There were objects that could not be measured by conventional means,” Brown continued, “because their shape or size made it impossible.”
“I don’t know how they’d do it.”
“Shadow reckoning,” Brown said. “They’d measure the shadow the object cast, how far and how wide the shadow would reach.”
Madison nodded. Shadow reckoning. It was the only way she could measure that single day in August and the impact it had had on all those lives. The darkness coiled inside, that shadow had stretched out for decades and killed or somehow maimed everyone it had touched.
Chapter 38
Nathan Quinn listened to the wind disturbing the trees around the house. He hadn’t heard it for weeks. From the hospital room he couldn’t see the waters of Lake Washington darken and still. It was a specific kind of sensory deprivation, in which the only sounds allowed were the ticks and beeps of health-monitoring machines, and even the silence had an antiseptic quality. He breathed in the chilly air out on the deck, and his eyes tracked the indistinct shape of Mercer Island. He was home.
The break-in—not even twenty-four hours earlier—was only one more sign that the right people were feeling pressure and making mistakes. He welcomed their mistakes, and should they decide to visit his house again, he’d be so very glad to meet them in person.
After Detective Madison and the Crime Scene Unit had left, Tod Hollis had returned with an acquaintance who dealt in biometric-technology-based alarm systems, and the house had been wired up. The alarm worked on a combination of iris and fingerprint recognition, and by the time the technicians left, it was probably easier to break into Bill Gates’s mansion on the other side of the lake.
Nathan Quinn had never had a firearm license in his life, and there were no weapons in the house. He was not afraid, and, looking at the healing scars on his hands, he couldn’t imagine ever being afraid again.
Inside, Quinn poured himself an inch of bourbon—the first alcohol he had touched in weeks. He took the glass with him as he climbed the stairs to the second floor and then to the attic. Step after step. It wasn’t as easy as he would have wished, and he was exhausted by the time he reached the top of the house. He leaned on the door frame, took a deep breath to steady himself, and turned on the light.
He hardly went up there; it was a whitewashed room under the eaves filled with stacks of boxes and a couple of tables and armchairs under sheets—his parents’ chairs.
He had the first sip of bourbon and placed the glass on a table; the warmth in his chest was as sudden as it was welcome.
The box he was looking for was on top of a pile; he put his arms around it and lifted. Every muscle in his body was aware of the movement as he placed it carefully on the table. It was the only box in the attic that had not been marked by a black scrawl to identify its contents, because it didn’t need it. Quinn took another sip. The last time he had opened it, John Cameron and James Sinclair had been by his side. David’s things.
He pulled the string connected to the bare lightbulb above the table. He didn’t even know why he was there except that, without the morphine, he couldn’t see David, and the idea that he existed in this world only as remains kept in a morgue’s refrigerated drawer was unbearable.
He removed the box’s lid. Everything was present and accounted for: the baseball mitt with the ball still cradled in it, Jack Sikma’s Sonics jersey with the number 43, the yearbook, the camera, four seashells, a strangely shaped piece of wood from Ruby Beach collected when he was ten, and more objects and more memories than he could handle just then. He replaced the lid and began the long climb down the stairs. The house creaked around him, small noises as familiar as his own heartbeat. The alarm had been set for the night, and a tiny red light pulsed on the box beside the front door.
July 4, 1985. The sun was still high in the sky, and the voices of the guests splashing around in the pool were competing with the music from the speakers in the garden. David Quinn had appeared out of the wooded area and made a beeline for Nathan, who was talking to one of the Locke cousins, a blond girl about his age. Now they were inside, the pretty girl was gone, and Nathan—still feeling generally guilty for months of neglecting his little brother—was trying to change the roll of film in David’s camera.
“It’s stuck,” David said. “I tried to do it myself, but I thought I was breaking it . . .”
“Don’t worry—let me see. Do you have a new roll?”
“Here . . .”
The roll was, indeed, stuck, and Nathan was doing his best to look as if he knew what he was doing.
“Tell me,” he said, hoping to distract David from his own clumsy hands. “What pictures did you take? Did you change the shutter speed like we talked about?”
“Yes. I took a bunch of Jack diving, and lots of other people, too: Mom talking with a lady, Dad talking with Mr. Locke, Mr. Locke and another man, Bobby being an idiot, and a whole bunch of squirrels in the woods. I got two deer, too, over by the east-s
ide fencing.”
“Sounds good.” Nathan’s fingers managed to finally remove the roll of film. He offered it to David with a flourish and deftly inserted the new one in the camera. It clicked shut with a pleasant snap, and he gave it back to his brother. “All done,” he said.
David took it and held it. “If there was something . . .” he started. “If there was something serious, something big, and I told you about it, would you promise not to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Yes,” he said. “But if it was really serious, then you would have to tell them. Is it about school? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No, it’s not me. It’s just something . . . I don’t know . . .” He shrugged. “It could be nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
David looked around: there were too many people about, and anyone could walk in on them at any time. “I’ll tell you later.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup.”
“Okay.”
David left, and Nathan went back to find the pretty blonde. He left soon after to join some friends back in Seattle; he missed the fireworks by the lake and never had a chance to talk to David about the phone call James had overheard. By the following morning he had left for a one-week vacation in the San Juan Islands.
Nathan Quinn lay down on his own bed and closed his eyes. He had placed the walking stick aside. In the books he had read as a boy, a walking stick might hide a dagger or a sword. The one leaning against his chair had been made in China and held nothing more than cheap manufacturing and mass production. If he was going to keep using the darn thing, he’d have to buy himself something more suitable. Something with a concealed sword, maybe. Quinn sighed and hoped sleep would come soon, deep and empty. He felt the blackness take hold and drifted toward it: as always there was the memory of singing, the memory of a hand holding his through the pain. And for an instant there was only the song; then all was darkness.
The Dark Page 23