The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(12)

“We’re talking about John Cameron here.”

“Who has no priors and did not resist arrest.”

“Nathan, have you looked at Salinger’s medical sheet?” Newton asked. “Have you seen what Cameron did to him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you call that simply ‘reckless endangerment’?”

Quinn did not know what to call it, and he realized that that notion applied to much of Cameron’s behavior. “You don’t want to take this to trial,” he said.

“I’ll do what I have to to keep John Cameron inside for as long as the law will allow me.”

“Good luck.”





Chapter 5





The man stood by the tall window in the white recreation room and watched as the sun dipped below the trees. Each minute brought a new shadow and the familiar tightening of fear in his narrow chest as the line of darkness stalked the red-brick building. He watched and waited. Soon it would be time, and he would be alone until the sun rose again.

He felt the room emptying, the television on the high bracket tuned to the news, and the footsteps behind him.

“Somebody’s coming,” he said without turning around.

The view didn’t let him go until he felt the hand on his arm, and slowly, reluctantly, he turned.

“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We should go; we shouldn’t stay here.”

“Time for bed.”

“We shouldn’t stay when it’s dark.”

“Yes, I heard you, same as yesterday and the day before. Come on, my friend, time for bed.”

“It’s not personal; it’s business.”

“Sure, it is.”


He stood by the bed in his room, plain walls around him and a three-drawer chest for all he owned in this world.

From the top of the dresser he picked up the stump of a gray crayon and raised his hand; he closed his eyes and drew a long, shaky line along the white wall; it joined dozens of similar gray lines all over the small cell. Up and down the walls, wherever he could reach.

The authorities found it easier to let him do it than take the crayon away and go through the horrendous fits of terror that plagued him.

He brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas. They were white cotton and hung loosely on his thin shoulders. He washed his hands; the nails were cut to the quick and yet grimy with garden dirt. He attempted to scrub them clean and sat down.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,” he started, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

He slid under the heavy blankets, and the shivering started almost immediately.

A quick knock on the door sounded before Thomas stuck his head into the room.

“All set for the night?” he asked.

Vincent Foley, forty-eight, shook his head. “Somebody’s coming,” he whispered, and he rolled himself up into a tight ball.

Thomas Reed, a psychiatric nurse at the Seattle Walters Institute, turned off the light and closed the door. A soft click told Vincent that the door was locked. Then again, what was a simple wooden door against what was coming for him?

He hurried to finish his desperate prayer. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

In the room, shadows and light began to move over the walls as if the lines he’d drawn in crayon were themselves shifting. Vincent squeezed his eyes shut; all through the night, above and around him, the drawings crept and crawled.





Chapter 6





In the relative gloom of his hospital room Nathan Quinn listened to his own breathing. Regular and steady. It was still a surprise to him that he was alive; he had fully expected to die. Instead, he had woken up to a different world: Jack was in jail, and David had been found.

The Jefferson County officers had taken a swab of the cells inside his cheek for DNA-comparing purposes, a swift and routine procedure they had completed in seconds. Now all there was to do was wait.

His waking hours were a combination of pain, boredom, and sheer, unadulterated fury. His temper, disciplined by years in the courtroom, seemed to elude its usual filters. His body was a prisoner of his injuries, but his intelligence was not, and he had argued with the doctors to reduce the painkillers as much as possible, because he could cope with the pain, but the slow, thick dullness that coated his mind was not something he could bear much longer.

All he knew at that point was that he needed to think and think clearly: the results from the DNA test would come in in the next few days, and then the world would change again, shift on its axis as it had done at least twice before in his life. This time, though, he would be ready.

If the remains were not David’s, if another boy had been lost out there in the woods, would that make things better? Quinn didn’t know how to feel about the question or what to wish for. To have David back would mean that his little brother had experienced that dreadful blow that had ended his life. If not, then another child had gone through that horror; another family had been torn apart.