The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(126)

“Somewhere in the northwest?”

“I know it sounds feeble, but we’re tracing the payments on Conway’s credit card to tell us where he traveled, where he pumped gas and bought groceries.”

“How are you going to find him?”

“They’re sending me the details of the agency’s rentals, and we’re going to be working with local law enforcement and checking each cabin. I’m on my way there now. Spencer’s waking up the agency’s booker and getting what information he can out of him.”

Quinn might have been exhausted, but his mind worked as well as it always did. “I don’t understand. Why is he going to all this trouble? Why is he taking Jack to a cabin hours away from Seattle when he took care of the other men quickly and locally?”

Madison held the phone close to her. “Conway wanted a cabin that would be close to an abandoned airstrip—there’s a whole bunch of them from the 1940s and 1950s dotted all over the state. He didn’t kidnap Cameron to get information out of him and eliminate a witness—that was only the starting point.” Madison didn’t know how to say the words. “Peter Conway is going to sell Cameron to the gang of drug dealers Cameron cheated and some of whom he murdered in California. Last December Cameron killed three of them in LA from the same cartel and Errol Saunders here, and years ago there was the Nostromo.”

Quinn didn’t say anything.

“When Conway got the details of the Seattle job,” she continued, “he realized that Cameron was much more valuable to him alive than dead, and he made a deal with the gang. They’re coming to fly him out. That’s why they used a Taser gun: he needs to deliver Cameron in one piece.” Madison regretted her words immediately, because she knew what Quinn would think. So they can rip him apart.

For a beat there was no sound at the other end of the line. Madison kept the cell close and drove on.

“I’m coming with you,” Quinn said finally.

“No, you’re not. I need you in Seattle going over everything you have, because McMullen could be getting paroled very soon. I’ll keep in touch.”

“Are you alone?”

“I won’t be. The locals will be involved, too, but I’m the only one who has seen Conway.”

“I’m coming. I’ll help with the search.”

“Quinn, listen to me. I need you to stay put. I need you to be where I know you’re safe.” As far from Conway as humanly possible, she wanted to add.

Quinn didn’t reply. Madison hoped his common sense would kick in: the man walked with a cane, for Chrissakes.

“Keep in touch,” he said.

And then it was just Madison alone in the car flying through the gray early morning toward Bellingham, the mountains, and a promise of death.


If Madison had noticed the landscape, she would have seen flat fields leading to water on her right, the beginning of rolling hills on her left, and a lot of pallid sky—a huge dome pressing down on everything within sight. Small knots of housing developments and warehouses streaked past, neither urban nor rural, suspended in a charmless land-planning limbo.

She crossed the Skagit River at Mount Vernon, and the hills on the left were a bluish smudge in the distance as if in training to become real mountains. She took Exit 255 and East Sunset Drive to get to the 542; after Deming and the turn into the Truck Road she pulled into a small rest area with a pretty diner. The woods were thick on both sides of the road, and the air felt sharper. A handful of cars were parked by the wooden building, including a white Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office unit. A deputy climbed out when he saw the red pickup. It was midmorning, and the last hours had passed in a blur.

The deputy carried a thick wad of papers and a plastic bag. He was tall and skinny with a short blond buzz cut under the hat, and he didn’t look a day over nineteen. Madison would have preferred someone with more than a couple of weeks’ experience and possibly the ability to grow a beard.

“We were sent these by one of your people,” he said after introductions were dealt with.

Madison spread the printed sheets on the hood of the patrol car: a list of addresses for the cabins and pages of maps with the location of those cabins and of local airstrips and the stores where Conway’s card had been used.

The deputy followed the line of Highway 542 with one gloved finger. “Far as we can see, we have addresses spread out in three counties: some are here in Whatcom County, but then you have a bundle in Skagit, which is south, and even a handful in Okanogan all the way west. And we have the border with Canada just a stone’s throw from here.”