The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(121)

I am calm, Cameron thought. I am serene.

They lifted his body with some difficulty and strapped him to a stretcher. One of the men groaned as they carried him off the van. Probably the man he had injured, Cameron thought. Under the blindfold the air was sharp and clean and felt miles away from the city. Trees whispered in the breeze, and the rest was silence.

They brought him indoors and down some steps into what could be a basement. He would know soon enough. He relaxed on the military-style stretcher: he wasn’t afraid to die, even if his pragmatic nature told him it was a real possibility. The men had already made a few mistakes, and they were bound to make more. In his company, even one could be fatal.

Someone ripped the tape off his mouth and removed the blindfold, and he saw them. The leader was in his early forties, about six feet tall and skinny. Dead eyes in a sallow, hawkish face. The other was a little younger, just as tall, and built like ropes of muscle wrapped around bone. A large makeshift bandage on his side told Cameron where his blade had made contact.

The basement was one large room with a dirt floor; a dank, coppery scent permeated the air. A few hooks hung from the ceiling, and in a corner stood a table next to a large sink. A hunter’s cabin, rented by the day or the week, deep in the wilderness. Men came here to do their hunting and their killing.

A few bare lightbulbs had been strung up, which made their half of the room brighter than the other. The younger man approached Cameron and wiped the blood of their dead partner off Cameron’s face with a wet wipe. His eyes were blank and did not meet the prisoner’s.

The leader took out a cell phone from a pocket of his black cargo pants and pointed its camera at Cameron. He walked around him, and Cameron realized he was not taking photographs but shooting video. The man made sure he had footage of his prisoner front and back; then he grabbed a ski mask from his colleague, pulled it on, turned the camera toward his own covered face, and said: “Alive and in full working order.”





Chapter 59





Alice Madison stood over the glossy pool of blood by the gate. Under powerful lights Frank Lauren from the Crime Scene Unit was collecting some of it with a swab to compare it against John Cameron’s DNA. He had already picked up the Taser gun and placed it in a paper bag.

The vehicle—Madison and everyone else assumed it was a van, though they didn’t know for sure—had disappeared, and so far no witnesses had come forward with a description. The motorbike of the fake delivery man had been abandoned—it would probably turn out to have been stolen somewhere in the county. The bags with the takeout food containers had been collected and tagged.

Madison had decided to avoid platitudes altogether. Quinn wouldn’t thank her for clichés, and such words felt awkward on her lips, anyway. He knew what was going on; he knew who had John Cameron. The only thing that mattered was to find him before his name was added to the list of the dead. Just then Madison wished she hadn’t been present at Warren Lee’s autopsy and seen firsthand Peter Conway’s handiwork.


“How do you read the scene?” Quinn asked her.

They were in the living room, and Tod Hollis had just arrived, too.

“The vehicle was hidden behind the brick wall,” Madison replied. “One of the abductors was dressed as the deliveryman, and his job was to Taser Cameron while he had his hands full of takeout. My guess is he badly underestimated Cameron, and it was the last thing he ever did.”

Quinn nodded. He had reached the same conclusion but wanted to see the blood test results, anyway, even if the difference between Cameron captive and healthy and Cameron captive and seriously injured was but a few degrees of awfulness.

Madison didn’t know what to make of the Taser gun: it had not been used on the other victims, and it would leave Cameron intact after a bad shock. The notion that they wanted him in one piece to accomplish what they needed was not a reassuring one. She didn’t need to express the thought; she could see the same one in Quinn’s eyes.

Normally a kidnap might involve a ransom call, for money to be offered in exchange for a life. No one in the room expected such a call. To anticipate the next event, all they had to do was look at the pattern of Peter Conway’s past actions. And that told them that the next thing that would happen was the recovery of a body.

Hollis went outside, and Madison approached Quinn. The front door was still open, with police officers coming and going.

“Where did you put his things?” she asked him quietly.

“What things?”

“Mr. Quinn, there were detectives in Cameron’s room, and all they found was a bag of clothes.”

She could see he was debating within himself—ever the defense attorney.