Although the rain made it impossible to see across Lake Washington, John Cameron was standing by the floor-to-ceiling window and looking out. He’d do a lot of that for a while, Madison thought. Even one afternoon inside a jail made her feel claustrophobic.
When he turned toward her, he was the man she had first met in her home, who had looked over the books on her shelves while she made coffee, before they’d talked about death and madness and how it had crept into their lives. Any trace of the convict was gone.
“Detective,” Cameron said. “Nathan had not told me about the break-in before we came back here today. What did you make of it?”
“They were looking for any evidence he might have that connected Timothy Gilman to the 1985 kidnapping. They wanted to find out if Lee or Gray had spoken to him and what they’d said. They didn’t find what they were looking for, and they left.”
Cameron nodded: it was a puzzle that he turned around in his hands, seeing how the different pieces fit together. By now she had seen him in her home, in the forest, and in jail, and still she was not used to his presence.
Good. Don’t get used to it. Never get used to it. One day down the line you’ll be glad you didn’t.
“What is your news, Detective?” Quinn said.
They sat around the table.
“We recovered a fingerprint from an item found with your brother’s medal. The print is Timothy Gilman’s,” Madison said. “If you ever questioned the validity of your original source, Mr. Quinn, or the legitimacy of that accusation, now you know it was valid.”
She managed to keep her tone flat. There was a beat of silence.
“I’ve never questioned the validity of my source,” Quinn said quietly, “but I’m glad you found the print.”
If something passed between the men, it was too subtle for Madison to notice.
“What other item?” Cameron asked her.
The question was always the same: how much can you give John Cameron and still keep the investigation safe and the suspects alive?
“I will tell you about the other item if you answer a question I have for you. And I can be as exhaustive about it as you wish, but I will expect the same in return.”
“That depends on your question.”
Madison was sure that the boy Cameron had once been had never told anyone the answer to what she was about to ask him, and by the time he was a young man, it would have been too late. “I need you to tell me exactly what happened the day of the kidnapping.”
“Why?”
“Because we have one of the kidnappers in custody, and I can’t tell whether what he’s saying is a result of the years in a psychiatric institution or if there’s something there—a thread I can grasp that will get me to the truth.”
Cameron didn’t look away; his gaze was as direct as always. “You’re asking a lot of me, Detective.”
“Yes, I am.”
Quinn, sitting between them, seemed to be barely breathing. If Madison was right, he had never heard the story of that day near the river, either.
Madison wouldn’t even guess what could sway John Cameron one way or the other: maybe that here they were, sitting pleasantly in Nathan Quinn’s living room, maybe because she had signed a statement that said she’d never seen the handgun he had pointed at Salinger’s head or the knife he had held against his brow. Maybe it was something else she couldn’t even begin to fathom.
“Okay,” Cameron said. And, minute by minute, he told them exactly what had happened on August 28, 1985. He began from the moment the blue van had turned up at Jackson Pond and continued up until his run onto the Upper Hoh Road at dawn, when a passing trucker saw him and stopped.
Madison listened, absorbing the story and creating a space for it inside herself almost as if it had been her own, although she knew that Cameron wasn’t really telling her; he was telling Nathan Quinn. After twenty-five years he was finally telling his friend the only story that had ever mattered to them.
Cameron had not held back any details, and Madison didn’t need to ask him any more questions. She had heard what she needed to hear.
“The other item recovered with the medal was a fragment of a photocopied yearbook photo,” she said. “The top corner of the page of a yearbook with David Quinn’s school picture. It was circled in pencil, and it had Timothy Gilman’s and Ronald Gray’s fingerprints on it.”
“For the kidnappers to identify him,” Quinn said.
Cameron nodded.
Madison had no doubt that John Cameron’s memories were as sharp today as they had always been; the worst moments of her own childhood had hardly lost their fine, bitter edge.