The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(111)

“You seem to remember that business very clearly, though it was twenty years ago.”

“It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in that dump. I’m not ungrateful for that job, you understand, but I was really glad to move on when I did.”

“I understand. My questions are mostly to do with the witness statements that were taken at the time.” Madison had gone through the testimonies in the precinct and knew what she had not found. It was no more than a hunch. “I didn’t find the statement from a kid—dark hair, late teens, sheepskin jacket. You remember him?”

The man blinked twice. “I’m telling you what I told the other guy: the kid was hanging around the bar for weeks before that night, and then nothing. I never saw him again. They didn’t take his statement, because I had no idea who he was; he was just a kid with a fake ID. It’s not like we’d never had one of those before.”

Madison’s brain had latched on to the first thing the man had said. “What ‘other guy’?”

“A few weeks after they found Gilman’s body, this fella turns up at the bar, and he asks me the same questions you’re asking, so I give him the same answers.”

“What did this fellow look like?”

“Tall, dark hair, suit and tie. I’d say lawyer if you’re asking me, and I’m not usually wrong about those things.”

Madison nodded and somehow found a small smile to go with the nod. “Say, I have some pictures with me. Would you mind having a look? See if anyone looks familiar?”

“Pictures of the guy? I’m good with faces, but I only saw him the once.”

“No, not the guy. The kid.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Madison took out a brown envelope from her knapsack and laid ten photographs on the table. She had spent some time printing just the right kind: the young men were all of a similar age.

Morris Becker leaned forward as his eyes moved from face to face. “Him,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“No question about it. He’s even wearing the same jacket he wore in the bar.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Look, Detective, I can even tell you about his hand thing.”

“What hand thing?”

“All the time he came to the bar, one of his hands was always in his pocket. I figured there was some kind of problem with it. Twenty years later I can still remember what anybody used to drink, and he drank beer or coffee with bourbon.”

His finger tapped John Cameron’s picture.


Madison wanted to be nowhere specific doing nothing in particular. She needed to think the way she could when she was little, sitting in the backseat of her grandfather’s car and watching the landscape flow by. Her thoughts would come up and float past in the same way.

She drove to Pier 52 and boarded the ferry to Bainbridge Island, left her Honda on the car deck, and found a spot by a window. The return journey was one hour and ten minutes, not as much time as she needed but as much as she had.

Her legs were stretched out under a table, and a cup of coffee steamed before her. She felt as if she’d been hit by a boulder. She reached for her cell and was almost ready to speed-dial Brown when she stopped. She couldn’t drag him into this; this was for her and her alone to know and to decide.

Now she had the answers that Nathan Quinn had refused to give her: why he trusted his source and why he would not tell her how he had found out about Gilman. The truth, however, had given her more answers that she had even thought to ask, and she wondered what kind of world John Cameron and Nathan Quinn had lived in these past twenty-five years, what had been the real cost of justice bought by a trapping pit dug by a boy?

The rain had not stopped as the ferry began its return journey. Water above and water below and Madison in between, making a decision that could change the lives of all involved and would define her forever as a police officer and a human being.





Chapter 52





The hearing was closed to the public, and, considering the kind of ghoulish interest the case had produced in the media, no one was surprised at the fact.

John Cameron had arrived at the courthouse earlier and had changed into the clothes that Nathan Quinn had provided for him. He felt very much like himself wearing black pants and a cashmere roll-neck, and that was a good thing and a bad thing: a good thing, because, looking in the mirror, he saw a free man out of the KCJC jumpsuit, a man who could do as he pleased and go where his will might take him; a bad thing, because he had no intention of wearing that jumpsuit again, and—should Nathan fail—he would have to take some extreme measures to ensure that he would not.