The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(103)

“No hits on AFIS yet,” the uniformed officer told them when they arrived; it meant that so far the fingerprints collected and put into the system for identification had drawn a blank, and for the time being Henry Sullivan would have to remain Henry Sullivan. “He hasn’t said one word, by the way,” the officer added as he left them at the door of the interview room.


Madison was glad to be the only person in the observation box. At a different time of day there might have been someone else there, even—God forbid—Kelly, and for what she had to do, she preferred privacy and no distractions.

Henry Sullivan sat at a metal table screwed to the floor. He was cuffed, and an orange jumpsuit had replaced his jeans and T-shirt. Madison watched him. Her eyes, unseen from the other side, found his—dark, birdlike—and stayed there. He was calm and uncommunicative, almost bored-looking. It was quite possibly an act; then again, maybe not. He would be aware that he had not been identified and all they had on him was what they had found in Room 237. If the bullet that had killed Thomas Reed in the Walters Institute turned out to have been fired from his Beretta, it would be an unexpected bonus for the case, although Madison—without a logical reason for it—believed that it had been Conway’s work.

What was Sullivan thinking? Madison studied the small, bright eyes. He probably realized that an arrest with everything that went with it implied a considerable change in lifestyle. Whatever happened here tonight and whatever charges would be laid against him, his days in Conway’s crew were over. The latter had been fanatical about keeping himself out of the reach of law enforcement, and he had largely succeeded by making sure he worked with men who would not turn up in AFIS or CODIS searches—once prints and DNA were in the system, a man was useless to him. Madison blinked; that was something worth remembering.

Spencer was talking, and she tried to pay attention to that, but her focus was on Sullivan’s hands, on the way he held his shoulders, on the involuntary eye movements that followed Spencer’s words. Sullivan stared at the mirror and ignored the two detectives in front of him.

He didn’t reply to a single question and seemed utterly unconcerned about the proceedings.

To Madison he looked like a guy who’s holding a great hand in a hard game: he knows it, and everybody else at the table knows it, but they all play on because they want to see what in the sweet name of everything holy he’s holding.

Sullivan drummed his fingers once on the table. It was all the movement he had allowed himself.

After an hour, Spencer and Dunne stood up.

“I want a lawyer,” Henry Sullivan said. His voice was Brooklyn with a hint of Jersey.

The processing officer had told them that Sullivan had turned down the standard offer of a phone call, even though he was cut off from his people and drifting in dangerous waters. When the detectives left the room, his behavior didn’t change, and his gaze remained on the mirror.


Madison arrived home at 3:00 a.m. She had been up for twenty-four hours straight, and the darkness she had left in her windows looked exactly the same. A hot shower relaxed her, and she wrapped herself in her comforter as her mind wandered through the last hours of this long day. They had upset Conway’s plans for sure when they broke up his crew; nonetheless, so far he’d followed a clear plan, and nothing said that his systematic destruction of everything and everyone connected to the Hoh River case would stop just because he had one fewer pair of hands to do his killing for him.





Chapter 46





Madison woke up at 7:00 a.m., not exactly late enough for a restorative sleep. Well, it’s the thought that counts. She made coffee and promised herself a trip to the supermarket—a real store, not a deli, with wide aisles and freshly washed produce. She could survive without food in the house, but a lack of ground coffee for her countertop machine was an eventuality that she could not face.

The sun had decided to toy with Elliott Bay, and dawn was making promises it might not intend to keep. Madison dressed quickly and badly missed her Glock in the shoulder holster. She wrapped the strap around the holster and carried it with her to her dining area. Her backup piece was in place, but her body felt strangely unbalanced.

She finished her coffee looking at the notes she had made on Timothy Gilman, the pages still spread on her dinner table. Conway would have finished Gilman with the same ease with which he’d finished the others. The latter was a sadist and a bully who enjoyed hurting little children, and the former was a cold-blooded murderer who killed for money. Out of curiosity Madison checked the date Gilman had last been seen alive. He would have been a boy somewhere on the East Coast at the time. That is, if he had ever been a boy.