The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(118)

He should have known that she would work out what had happened to Gilman, that she wouldn’t give up until she did. One day, if Jack continued his life on the path he had chosen, Detective Madison would be the most serious danger he would face. But not today and not about Timothy Gilman. In the same night she had managed to be both a threat and a source of comfort.

He stayed awake in the darkness for a while, then got up and went to the living room.

Cameron was staying in the guest bedroom: the door was open, and the room was empty. As soon as they’d arrived home from the courthouse, he had altered the alarm system so that Jack could come and go without him. His Ford Explorer had been parked in Quinn’s garage.

Quinn didn’t need to check to know that the car was gone, too.





Chapter 55





John Cameron drove fast on the deserted road due east toward the neighborhood of Admiral above Alki Beach. One of the advantages of a ride at 2:30 a.m. was that a tail would be easy to spot. After leaving the house, he had spent forty minutes making sure that he was not trailing any unwanted parties. Once he was sure he was not being followed, he took a turn and headed for his destination.

About twenty-four hours earlier he had been running around in the main yard of a jail with the red dots of rifle scopes dancing on his back. The guards might even be there tonight, looking down from their towers at the empty yard and aiming their rifles at the shadows. We all have our jobs to do, Cameron thought as he breathed in the salt air and the pine trees.

He keyed in the entry code for an unassuming gate and waited until it swung open, drove in, and waited again to make sure that it would shut properly behind him.

There was a lot of land around the house, a simple three-bedroom on the top of Duwamish Head—probably more land than usual for lots in the area. Cameron had bought it in another man’s name, and no person alive or dead knew of its connection to him.

He put his key into the door and turned off the alarm. His hand hovered above the light switch, and he decided against it. In a few steps he was in the living room, and there was the real reason he had bought the house: one wall was entirely glass. Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle, the lights glimmering in the distance in spite of the early hour. The cloud cover was still hugging the city close, and it reflected back a sickly orange glow. The room itself was bright with it.

Cameron went to work: he needed to pack a bag and pick up a few items without which he felt underdressed. The clothes went into a soft leather weekend bag. The rest needed holsters and sheaths. A slim knife with a six-inch blade found its place next to his inner arm, a snub-nosed Glock .38 into an ankle holster by his foot, and a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic .40 in its holster went on the bottom of the bag among the clothes, together with extra ammunition for both weapons.


The drive back to Seward Park went just as smoothly. Cameron disarmed the alarm system and went to his room. When Quinn woke up a few hours later, Camero had already made coffee.





Chapter 56





Alice Madison sat at her desk at 7:00 a.m. and started her day with takeout coffee and a granola bar. She read through the overnight reports in case any witnesses had suddenly and unexpectedly come forward. None had.

She composed an e-mail to Fred Kamen at the FBI and attached Henry Sullivan’s arrest file.

We have this man in custody. He’s part of Peter Conway’s crew and has been involved in at least three murders and an arson attack on a psychiatric clinic. We know him as Henry Sullivan; he’s lawyered up, and he’s not talking.



The reply came back in minutes:

I’ll let you know if he’s been active around here.



Madison didn’t hold out much hope, but they had to spread their net as wide as possible: just because Sullivan was not in the system, it didn’t mean someone wouldn’t recognize his face from somewhere. People have lives: they live in neighborhoods, shop at supermarkets, and gas up their cars. Someone somewhere must know his real name and where on this Earth he called home.

Madison thought about the man she had observed from behind the mirror and his behavior with Spencer and Dunne. How much of Conway’s brand of evil was in this man? And how much did Sullivan know of Conway’s plans?

At 8:00 a.m. Dunne brought donuts and good news: Sullivan’s room had been booked on a credit card registered to a Peter Curtis, a fictitious resident of Missoula, Montana. They could trace each payment on the card and see where it would lead them, and even though it had not been used from the moment Conway had been warned off coming back to the Silver Pines, it was their first proper lead.

The weather had gone from grim to morose, and under the drizzle the detectives split the credit card payments and began to check each one, traveling from gas station to diner to outfitters and piecing together the movements of Conway and his men. Some of these establishments had closed-circuit cameras, and some of those cameras worked.