The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  “Awake?” one asked.

  “Don’t think so,” the other replied.

  The smell of lighting fluid was unmistakable: Cameron heard the match and the first flames lapping the body of the dead man. It didn’t take long for the sweet and acrid smell to hit; soon the remains would be consumed beyond recognition.

  A few minutes later the men came back; one of them lifted the sheet and felt the pulse in Cameron’s carotid with two fingers. Cameron didn’t move. His heartbeat kept its slow, steady rhythm. The man measured one minute and then left; the door slid shut, and the engine came back to life. They were traveling again.

  John Cameron lost track of time. The only thing he knew for sure was that by that point his kidnappers had spent a lot more time with him than they had with either Warren Lee or Ronald Gray. If they wanted from him the same kind of information they had asked of the others, there were plenty of places that didn’t require traveling and would do just fine.

  The van stopped, and this time he couldn’t fake unconsciousness, or they’d know. The voices were whispering, and John prepared himself to meet his abductors. Someone lifted the sheet.

  “I can see you’re awake.” The voice was East Coast, not a mile south of Jersey. “We’re going to stretcher you out of the van, and if you try to move, try to speak, try for anything but complete immobility, I will Taser you again, and this time it will be much worse. Do you understand? You stay calm, and we stay calm.”

  I am calm, Cameron thought. I am serene.

  They lifted his body with some difficulty and strapped him to a stretcher. One of the men groaned as they carried him off the van. Probably the man he had injured, Cameron thought. Under the blindfold the air was sharp and clean and felt miles away from the city. Trees whispered in the breeze, and the rest was silence.

  They brought him indoors and down some steps into what could be a basement. He would know soon enough. He relaxed on the military-style stretcher: he wasn’t afraid to die, even if his pragmatic nature told him it was a real possibility. The men had already made a few mistakes, and they were bound to make more. In his company, even one could be fatal.

  Someone ripped the tape off his mouth and removed the blindfold, and he saw them. The leader was in his early forties, about six feet tall and skinny. Dead eyes in a sallow, hawkish face. The other was a little younger, just as tall, and built like ropes of muscle wrapped around bone. A large makeshift bandage on his side told Cameron where his blade had made contact.

  The basement was one large room with a dirt floor; a dank, coppery scent permeated the air. A few hooks hung from the ceiling, and in a corner stood a table next to a large sink. A hunter’s cabin, rented by the day or the week, deep in the wilderness. Men came here to do their hunting and their killing.

  A few bare lightbulbs had been strung up, which made their half of the room brighter than the other. The younger man approached Cameron and wiped the blood of their dead partner off Cameron’s face with a wet wipe. His eyes were blank and did not meet the prisoner’s.

  The leader took out a cell phone from a pocket of his black cargo pants and pointed its camera at Cameron. He walked around him, and Cameron realized he was not taking photographs but shooting video. The man made sure he had footage of his prisoner front and back; then he grabbed a ski mask from his colleague, pulled it on, turned the camera toward his own covered face, and said: “Alive and in full working order.”

  Chapter 59

  Alice Madison stood over the glossy pool of blood by the gate. Under powerful lights Frank Lauren from the Crime Scene Unit was collecting some of it with a swab to compare it against John Cameron’s DNA. He had already picked up the Taser gun and placed it in a paper bag.

  The vehicle—Madison and everyone else assumed it was a van, though they didn’t know for sure—had disappeared, and so far no witnesses had come forward with a description. The motorbike of the fake delivery man had been abandoned—it would probably turn out to have been stolen somewhere in the county. The bags with the takeout food containers had been collected and tagged.

  Madison had decided to avoid platitudes altogether. Quinn wouldn’t thank her for clichés, and such words felt awkward on her lips, anyway. He knew what was going on; he knew who had John Cameron. The only thing that mattered was to find him before his name was added to the list of the dead. Just then Madison wished she hadn’t been present at Warren Lee’s autopsy and seen firsthand Peter Conway’s handiwork.

  “How do you read the scene?” Quinn asked her.

  They were in the living room, and Tod Hollis had just arrived, too.

  “The vehicle was hidden behind the brick wall,” Madison replied. “One of the abductors was dressed as the deliveryman, and his job was to Taser Cameron while he had his hands full of takeout. My guess is he badly underestimated Cameron, and it was the last thing he ever did.”

  Quinn nodded. He had reached the same conclusion but wanted to see the blood test results, anyway, even if the difference between Cameron captive and healthy and Cameron captive and seriously injured was but a few degrees of awfulness.

  Madison didn’t know what to make of the Taser gun: it had not been used on the other victims, and it would leave Cameron intact after a bad shock. The notion that they wanted him in one piece to accomplish what they needed was not a reassuring one. She didn’t need to express the thought; she could see the same one in Quinn’s eyes.

  Normally a kidnap might involve a ransom call, for money to be offered in exchange for a life. No one in the room expected such a call. To anticipate the next event, all they had to do was look at the pattern of Peter Conway’s past actions. And that told them that the next thing that would happen was the recovery of a body.

  Hollis went outside, and Madison approached Quinn. The front door was still open, with police officers coming and going.

  “Where did you put his things?” she asked him quietly.

  “What things?”

  “Mr. Quinn, there were detectives in Cameron’s room, and all they found was a bag of clothes.”

  She could see he was debating within himself—ever the defense attorney.

  “Do you think I care about an illegal-possession charge? I just need to know what he might have had on himself, if anything,” she said. “I think we can safely assume he had at least a knife and that he used it.”

  They were crossing too many boundaries for Quinn to keep track of, or to care. He had to trust the detective now or possibly regret it forever. His words were measured: he was giving Madison enough ammunition to get him disbarred.

  “Before the patrol cars arrived, I removed a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic .40 in its holster. It was in the bag of clothes,” Quinn conceded.

  He had hidden from the police a potentially illegal weapon whose serial number likely had been filed away, a gun that could have been used in any number of felonies.

  “Where is it now?”

  “In the attic, in a box.”

  “With ammunition?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Do you know if he wore an ankle holster with a backup piece?”

  “This conversation is surreal.”

  “Yes, it is. Did he wear an ankle holster?”

  “In the bag there was also ammunition for another weapon. Why does it matter?”

  “Because Conway is very experienced, but he has never dealt with anyone like Cameron, and we don’t know how he’s going to negotiate this particular situation. And Cameron does not make for the ideal hostage, especially if he’s armed.”

  “He will never give them what they want,” Quinn said. “And they will not be able to make him . . . afraid, like the others.”

  Madison nodded. And, if Conway was the sadist he seemed to be, being visibly afraid was the worst thing Cameron could do.

  A detective from the South Precinct arrived to take Quinn’s statement, and Madison let her get on with it. She watched Quinn as he spoke without emotion and gave the detective th
e details she asked for. Madison could see the shadow of his fear: he was keeping that door locked and bolted, but she felt the weight pressing against it. He spoke with the detective, but his dark eyes stayed with Madison.

  Madison drove to the Seattle jail without taking much notice of the road. She stopped at the right times and started at the right times, but her mind was elsewhere, and her heart was in the Hoh River forest, by the pit that had held the body of a child. Now the hidden man wanted to finish the job that he’d started twenty-five years ago, and Madison would not—could not—let him.

  She had considered—briefly—a phone call to Fynn or Spencer or maybe Brown; then she’d realized that she couldn’t drag them into this.

  She showed her badge and asked the custody officer on shift to bring out Henry Sullivan. Whether he wanted to wait for his attorney to speak to her was up to him—Madison didn’t care one way or the other.

  Thirty minutes later, Richard Bowen trudged through the door. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Sorry, Richard. This couldn’t wait.”

  “What couldn’t wait?”

  They entered the room. Sullivan was already there; his small eyes went to Madison. They had not met before. Bowen sat down heavily next to the prisoner, and Madison took her place on the other side of the table.

  “What is this about?” Bowen started. “We have already had interviews with Detectives Spencer and Dunne.”

  “That was before,” Madison said.

  Thirty minutes waiting for the lawyer were all that she’d had and all that she’d needed: thirty minutes on a wooden bench in a corridor to focus and find the voice of the lost: the voice Henry Sullivan would recognize, the only voice he would hear.

  “Mr. Sullivan’s colleagues have kidnapped a man,” she said to the attorney. “It is possible that one of the abductors was fatally injured; however, what we have here is a kidnap that your client knew was going to happen but did not nothing to help us prevent.”

  “You don’t know that he knew—”

  “He knew. It was planned, and they were just waiting for the victim to be within reach to snatch him.”

  Henry Sullivan didn’t react. Madison knew he wouldn’t: he had been well trained and had probably seen more horror working with Conway than even the worst jail could conjure up.

  “Here’s the thing,” Madison said. “We have evidence to place you at the crime scene and connect you to a murder, possibly two. We have the criminal-possession charge for that small arsenal we found in your hotel room. But none of this has made a dent. Is that right, Richard?”

  The attorney was not sure where the wind was blowing.

  Madison sat back in her chair and thought about the years she’d spent watching her father play poker: with poor players, with good ones, and with great ones—the ones who flow with the game as if it’s white water.

  “This is what I’ve been thinking about—we’ve never met before tonight, but I watched you with Detective Spencer from the observation box,” Madison said. “And I asked myself, What is this man afraid of? What does this man want?”

  Henry Sullivan didn’t speak, but she had his full attention.

  “You haven’t asked for a deal to make things easier for you. Why is that? A little information to keep the King County prosecutor’s office happy would go a long way to keep the needle from your arm. It’s a long list: Warren Lee, Ronald Gray, Jerry Wallace, Thomas Reed.”

  “Detective—” Bowen interrupted.

  Madison stood up and made to leave. “I just wanted to tell you that tomorrow morning every single media outlet will carry an item to the effect that Henry Sullivan—not your real name, but who cares; Conway will know it’s you—is helping the Seattle Police Department with our investigation, and, in fact, you are being so cooperative that we are considering giving you immunity for all your charges. And if your lawyer denies it, it will only look as if you’re trying to protect him from the only thing you’re afraid of: Peter Conway.”

  “You cannot do that,” Bowen said.

  “Maybe I should not do that, but I sense that the time of should and shouldn’t has come and gone. Do you have a family, Mr. Sullivan? By that I mean, do you have a family Conway knows about? A wife, children, old and vulnerable parents, perhaps? Once he’s done here, once he’s finished what he started, where do you think Conway will go next? What if your family becomes his next project?”

  “Stop right now.” Bowen stood up.

  Madison thought of the eyes that had stared at her in the burning building and sought to find that place in herself without humanity or regret. She spoke again, and her voice was low and her words distinct.

  “I will find their pictures, their addresses, the place where your kids go to school and your wife does her hair, and I will put it all in your file. Protected, yes, but not so well that someone with a will couldn’t find a way. And if, by any chance, you’ve kept your private life hidden from Conway, in the end he will know so much about you, you’ll think you have a twin. Prison will not protect you, and anybody else in your life—well, that’s just collateral damage.”

  “Stop talking right now, Detective. This interview is over.”

  Henry Sullivan blinked.

  “You have one hour to decide. I want the place where they’re holding John Cameron and the name of the man who paid you to do this. I want everything you know, and God forbid you hold anything back and I find out about it. A trial by jury is the last thing you should worry about. One hour,” she repeated, and she left the room.

  Richard Bowen followed her into the corridor. “Have you lost your mind? You can’t—”

  “Go back in there, Richard, and convince your client that the sane thing to do is to share every little scrap of information he has with us.”

  “You’ve just threatened his family.”

  “I don’t even know whether he has a family, but Jerry Wallace had a daughter, and he’s dead. Thomas Reed had two daughters, and he’s dead. I’ll be happy to forward you the autopsy reports for Warren Lee and Ronald Gray. Your client’s not afraid of anything we wave in his face because the man he works for is much, much worse than anything you or I or a maximum-security prison can ever do to him. And that man’s holding a live hostage right now, this minute. Do you want to keep playing legal tic-tac-toe, or do you want to help me get the hostage back alive?”

  “I want to protect my client’s rights.”

  “If you want to help your client, tell him to talk to us.”

  Bowen shook his head and went back in.

  Madison leaned against a wall: she had found the voice, all right. Or maybe it was the other way around, and the voices of the lost had found her. A wave of clammy coldness rose in her gut, and she barely made it to the nearest restroom just a few feet away.

  Madison splashed water on her face and drank from the faucet, and when she went back down the hall, Bowen was waiting for her.

  “Some things he knows, some things he guessed, and others Conway just kept to himself, because that’s how he works.”

  Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Sarah Klein walked through the doors of the Seattle jail a few minutes after midnight. Madison was waiting for her. Klein looked the way she always did: whatever hour of the day or night, Madison knew that she would be immaculate in silk and Italian wool. Klein was sharp and crazy enough to dare argue against attorney-client privilege in front of Judge Martin and win one for the team. Madison was glad to have her on board.

  “Tell me you didn’t threaten the suspect’s family,” Klein said as they stepped into the elevator.

  “I didn’t,” Madison replied. “I told him that if he didn’t give us what we needed, I’d tell the media that he was helping us. What happened after that would be out of my hands.”

  “And were you prepared to go through with it if he didn’t?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re glad you don’t have to make that decision.”

  “The
re was never going to be a decision. What we know of the kidnapper is that, by this point, his hostages are usually dead, after torture and evil we can’t even imagine. There was no time for subtlety: Henry Sullivan has seen it happen, and he knows what some so-called human beings are capable of. I just used it against him.”

  “Well, jeez, he sure believed you well enough, because he doesn’t even want you in the room when he tells us.”

  “Here.” Madison passed Klein a list of questions. “Something to start him off.”

  The elevator’s door opened.

  “Bowen said you called his family potential collateral damage.”

  “I did.”

  The words had come out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

  “Well, whatever you said . . . here we are, though I wouldn’t expect a medal for it. I think Bowen needed a change of pants.”

  They had reached the room where Sullivan was waiting. Madison went into the observation box.

  Richard Bowen sat with his client on one side of the table; Spencer and Dunne sat on the other side. Sarah Klein took a seat at the head, and her eyes found Madison’s on the other side of the mirror.

  Chapter 60

  John Cameron breathed through the blindfold: the bindings were tight around his wrists and legs, and his body needed to shift position. They had left him in the basement, lying on the stretcher, and he had taken stock of the house around him, following their heavy footsteps above him as he became familiar with their gait, their bearing, and the weight and speed behind their movements. The younger man limped a little on the side where he was hurt; the older one moved lightly and with purpose.

  Cameron had kept track of time as best he could: it must have been just before dawn, judging from the bird calls. He didn’t think about what the future might bring; he thought only of the present and of this man who had not yet revealed to him the turn of his soul and the bend of his heart.