The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(122)
“Do you think I care about an illegal-possession charge? I just need to know what he might have had on himself, if anything,” she said. “I think we can safely assume he had at least a knife and that he used it.”
They were crossing too many boundaries for Quinn to keep track of, or to care. He had to trust the detective now or possibly regret it forever. His words were measured: he was giving Madison enough ammunition to get him disbarred.
“Before the patrol cars arrived, I removed a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic .40 in its holster. It was in the bag of clothes,” Quinn conceded.
He had hidden from the police a potentially illegal weapon whose serial number likely had been filed away, a gun that could have been used in any number of felonies.
“Where is it now?”
“In the attic, in a box.”
“With ammunition?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Do you know if he wore an ankle holster with a backup piece?”
“This conversation is surreal.”
“Yes, it is. Did he wear an ankle holster?”
“In the bag there was also ammunition for another weapon. Why does it matter?”
“Because Conway is very experienced, but he has never dealt with anyone like Cameron, and we don’t know how he’s going to negotiate this particular situation. And Cameron does not make for the ideal hostage, especially if he’s armed.”
“He will never give them what they want,” Quinn said. “And they will not be able to make him . . . afraid, like the others.”
Madison nodded. And, if Conway was the sadist he seemed to be, being visibly afraid was the worst thing Cameron could do.
A detective from the South Precinct arrived to take Quinn’s statement, and Madison let her get on with it. She watched Quinn as he spoke without emotion and gave the detective the details she asked for. Madison could see the shadow of his fear: he was keeping that door locked and bolted, but she felt the weight pressing against it. He spoke with the detective, but his dark eyes stayed with Madison.
Madison drove to the Seattle jail without taking much notice of the road. She stopped at the right times and started at the right times, but her mind was elsewhere, and her heart was in the Hoh River forest, by the pit that had held the body of a child. Now the hidden man wanted to finish the job that he’d started twenty-five years ago, and Madison would not—could not—let him.
She had considered—briefly—a phone call to Fynn or Spencer or maybe Brown; then she’d realized that she couldn’t drag them into this.
She showed her badge and asked the custody officer on shift to bring out Henry Sullivan. Whether he wanted to wait for his attorney to speak to her was up to him—Madison didn’t care one way or the other.
Thirty minutes later, Richard Bowen trudged through the door. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Sorry, Richard. This couldn’t wait.”
“What couldn’t wait?”
They entered the room. Sullivan was already there; his small eyes went to Madison. They had not met before. Bowen sat down heavily next to the prisoner, and Madison took her place on the other side of the table.
“What is this about?” Bowen started. “We have already had interviews with Detectives Spencer and Dunne.”
“That was before,” Madison said.
Thirty minutes waiting for the lawyer were all that she’d had and all that she’d needed: thirty minutes on a wooden bench in a corridor to focus and find the voice of the lost: the voice Henry Sullivan would recognize, the only voice he would hear.
“Mr. Sullivan’s colleagues have kidnapped a man,” she said to the attorney. “It is possible that one of the abductors was fatally injured; however, what we have here is a kidnap that your client knew was going to happen but did not nothing to help us prevent.”
“You don’t know that he knew—”
“He knew. It was planned, and they were just waiting for the victim to be within reach to snatch him.”
Henry Sullivan didn’t react. Madison knew he wouldn’t: he had been well trained and had probably seen more horror working with Conway than even the worst jail could conjure up.
“Here’s the thing,” Madison said. “We have evidence to place you at the crime scene and connect you to a murder, possibly two. We have the criminal-possession charge for that small arsenal we found in your hotel room. But none of this has made a dent. Is that right, Richard?”
The attorney was not sure where the wind was blowing.
Madison sat back in her chair and thought about the years she’d spent watching her father play poker: with poor players, with good ones, and with great ones—the ones who flow with the game as if it’s white water.