The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(110)

She sautéed a chicken breast in a pan with some garlic and crushed chili and had it on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, watching The Fortune Cookie on DVD.

She had gone for a run, which had at least partially done its job, and yet as long as her brain was still capable of thought, all thinking flowed in one direction. What did she know today that she didn’t know yesterday? Well, for one thing, Jerome McMullen was a creepy piece of work, and she had no doubt that he would manage to weasel his way through the parole board and out the other side. And Conway was getting antsy, if the destruction inside Ronald Gray’s apartment was anything to go by.

Madison took a sip of her beer. Timothy Gilman was lucky that all he got for his troubles was a fall into a bear’s trapping pit: whether he fell or he was pushed, his death would have been instant, according to the autopsy report. God knows what Conway would have come up with for him had he been alive today; still, Conway was all the way on the other side of the country, and he had been just a kid at the time. Madison closed her eyes, and there it was: the notion that a kid could take on Gilman and use a bear’s trapping pit as a weapon against a man who was bigger, stronger, and infinitely meaner. A boy. A young man who had never before done anything remarkable or been in any kind of trouble with the law.

Madison stood up too quickly and felt rather dizzy with it—or perhaps it was the idea, the sudden understanding. And it wasn’t about the mechanics of it; it wasn’t about the plain sequence of events. It was dark shapes changing and shifting and locking into one another to form something so big, she could hardly conceive of it.

Madison flipped through her notes on the table. There it was: the last time anyone had seen Gilman alive, in a bar in his neighborhood. Madison already knew that date; she had been staring at that date for days last December when John Cameron was the prime suspect for the murder of James Sinclair and his family. It was the date on Cameron’s arrest sheet for drunk driving. It went with his picture: a somber young man with longish hair wearing a sheepskin jacket. For a long time it was all she’d had of Cameron to imagine what he’d look like, and she remembered now what she’d thought then: he didn’t look drunk; he looked serious—deadly serious.

Could a boy do such a thing? The questions wound around the idea faster than any of the answers. That boy with the sheepskin jacket—what had he done? What in God’s name had he done? No, not in God’s name, but in the name of a child who never got to see his fourteenth birthday.

Madison checked the time, and it was too late to go visiting. The bar where Gilman had done his final night’s drinking did not exist anymore; however, the bartender was still alive. What he might remember twenty years after the fact Madison could not find out until morning, and morning seemed a very long time away.

She dragged herself to bed and lay there wishing for sleep like a blanket of nothingness that would stop the questions at least for a while.





Chapter 51





Madison walked into the detectives’ room at 7:00 a.m. and went to work on what she needed. She studied the Gilman file and found what she expected to find; a quick Internet search confirmed her suspicions. By the time she left an hour later, it was still early but a decent enough time of day to call her only witness and invite him out for a cup of coffee.

She had taken four hours of personal time—considering the sheer number of days off missed and unpaid overtime, it was not a problem.

The bartender had not been a bartender for many years. Morris Becker was fifty-three years old and ran a sandwich bar on Mercer Island. The coffee would be on him, he said.

The previous day’s sunshine had been a blip: the day had dawned dark and stormy and apparently meant to continue that way. Madison drove under heavy rain to the address he had given her, and they sat at a table in the window, the pane already steamed up.

“I kinda thought someone would show up sooner or later,” Morris Becker said. “After I heard that name in the news, after the lawyer’s appeal on TV.”

“Why did you think that?” Madison said.

“The way things were left—as far as I know—no one was ever charged with his murder. Someone was bound to start asking the same questions all over again.”

“You think it was murder?”

“You never met the man himself, did you? No, you’d have been too young to be on the force then, but he was the kind of person who looks for trouble and brings trouble to your door. Whether you like it or not, whether you’re ready or not. I was sorry to hear he’d died that kind of death, sure, but surprised? Not really.”