The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(125)

“They say it’s like being buried alive,” Conway said.

His body was burning, and his heart . . . Cameron grasped at one last thought and hung on to it in the thickening darkness: a stopwatch. Conway had a stopwatch. And my body lies on a distant shore . . . Cameron was drowning . . . at the end of the longest night. He wasn’t afraid, because he wasn’t anything anymore; he was out of that tomb of flesh.

Then something closed over his mouth, and Conway began to ventilate him with a bag-valve mask that pushed air back into lungs. It flowed in like water over scorched earth, and Conway kept the puffs steady and regular.

How many times has he done this?

After one minute, like some kind of miracle, Cameron blinked and twitched the fingers of his right hand.

“Easy come, easy go,” Conway said.

It took some time for Cameron to start breathing naturally; when he did, Conway pulled the mask away. There was no question of the prisoner even being able to sit up, let alone put up any kind of resistance. Conway stood back against a wall and studied Cameron as his body slowly came back to him.

After a while, when Cameron was able to stand, barely, Conway walked him to a bathroom in a corner of the basement. Cameron put his head under the cold tap and drank. He was too weak to take the opportunity to fight Conway, and the man knew it. He lay back on the stretcher, dizzy with the effort. Conway replaced the cuffs on his wrists and on his ankles, and this time Cameron’s hands rested on his front.

Conway left without a word.

How ridiculous, Cameron thought. How sad and pathetic and utterly ridiculous to die in a silly little cabin from the administration of a perfectly mundane drug used every day in every hospital by the hand of a complete stranger.

The death Cameron had dealt from his hand had been to men he had known well and who had known him. It was the only way it made sense to him. This, this was a bloodless death to satisfy the itch of a petty executioner.

Cameron turned his body to one side: his head pounded, and his eyes throbbed, but he was not in the least disoriented. He didn’t know how long he had before Conway came back or what would happen when he did: this was the basement of a hunter’s cabin, a place where men brought their prey to be gutted, bled, and skinned. Cameron sat up. Maybe this basement had been waiting for him for a long time, like the trapping pit had been waiting for Timothy Gilman.

It was dawn. Cameron heard it clearly now in the bird calls. He imagined it, seashell pale and freezing cold, unfolding over the cabin’s roof: the tips of the Douglas firs would be black against the glow, and the ground would crunch underfoot. The best time of day, his favorite.

Cameron stood up, his legs shaking a little. He raised his hands, tapped a bare bulb, and it swung its light into the darker half of the basement. Above him, heavy footsteps crossed the floor.





Chapter 61





Alice Madison stood in the observation box alone. Henry Sullivan spoke of what they had done and what Conway was about to do, and Madison was glad she was not in that room, glad she could not reach in through the glass, and sorry, so sorry, she had not shot Peter Conway through the window of the door in the Walters Institute. She could have lived with it if she had known what she knew now. At some point Dunne looked up and straight at Madison through the mirror; she nodded at him even if he couldn’t see her.

Madison met them in the corridor when they came out. Spencer and Dunne started on logistics; Klein and Bowen were quiet—attorneys had little to offer when it came to breaking down doors without warrants. There was never any question about what Madison would do.

“You should take my car,” Dunne said.

“Thanks, Andy,” she replied.

Spencer would brief Fynn and inform the state troopers and the sheriff’s office.


Dawn found Madison driving fast due north on I-5. Dunne’s car was a red four-wheel-drive Chevy S10 pickup truck—where Madison was going, her Honda Civic wouldn’t be much good. They had swapped keys in the parking lot after she had grabbed her emergency kit in its gym bag from the trunk.

Madison’s eyes were glued to the road, and yet she saw nothing. Her cell was on the passenger seat, and she forced herself to pick it up when Nathan Quinn called. She had to keep her voice neutral and calm: she should tell him about plans and contingencies and search groups. She should tell him about what they were doing, what they could do, and hope that he wouldn’t hear the shrill voice inside her that kept repeating that it was already too late, much too late.

“Where is he?” Quinn’s voice sounded scratchy.

“Sullivan doesn’t know for sure, but Conway had been setting up a safe house somewhere northwest of Seattle, a cabin in the woods, to take Cameron to. Sullivan didn’t know where, but he knew which rental agency Conway was using, because he glimpsed the name on Conway’s laptop.”