He breathed deeply and realized not for the first time that grief felt like both a weight and a hollow in his chest. He went back to what he knew, thinking like an attorney, like the prosecuting attorney he once was. He closed his eyes and felt a familiar spark of anger. Good. Anger was better than pain.
The odds were against them: there was no statute of limitation for murder in Washington State. However, he could not remember a single case in which a defendant had been successfully prosecuted for a twenty-five-year-old murder without trace evidence, witnesses, or a confession.
The visiting officers had been reticent; they knew that the chances for any convictions at this late date were negligible. The best they could hope for was a name for the victim found in the forest. Breathe in, breathe out, ignore the pain. Still, a name could be a very powerful thing, even if it was all they had. A name was the beginning: five years after the children’s abduction a man had fallen and been impaled in what hunters call a trapping pit. His name was Timothy Gilman, and he had died as he had lived, the trapper now trapped. John Cameron had been about eighteen years old at the time.
For twenty years Nathan Quinn had believed that Cameron had killed Gilman—his first victim—because he had met him accidentally and recognized him as one of the kidnappers, maybe even the man who had given him his scars. Jack knew that there wasn’t enough evidence to successfully take Gilman to court and that that loss would surely kill Quinn’s family, as if David were to die each day again.
Quinn, then working in the prosecutor’s office, had learned of the trapper’s-pit incident entirely by chance, and one could say that any potential charge against Cameron would have to be based on circumstantial evidence alone. One could say that an eighteen-year-old boy does not spend days digging a hole in the snow and frozen earth to lure a man to his death. And so Quinn didn’t speak of it; the case stayed unsolved; life went on.
Distant sounds from the ward drifted into the room, voices and footsteps and the chiming of medical equipment. Quinn felt the weight of the blankets; his tall frame had become thin since December, and he was aware of every cell of his body struggling to heal itself.
He thought about fear: what it does to a man and what a man will do under its talons.
Chapter 7
Madison woke up at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, brewed herself a particularly strong cup of coffee, and drove to work with a box of peanut butter Granola Thins and a half-eaten banana beside her on the seat. She had stayed up late preparing her argument and hoped that getting to Lieutenant Fynn good and early, before his day became inevitably soured by reality, would help.
She nodded hello to Jenner, the desk sergeant, and quickly climbed the stairs to the detectives’ room. The previous tour was out, and her shift had not checked in yet. The room was a combination of beaten-up desks, worn gray metal filing cabinets, and new computer screens with cables winding under worktables.
Fynn arrived half an hour before the official beginning of the shift and noticed Madison at her desk. She gave him a couple of minutes and then knocked on his door.
“Thought you might want to speak to me about something,” he said, and he beckoned her in.
“I’d like to work the David Quinn case. I know it’s a case for the Cold Case team to handle, but they have a full plate, and I could start getting everything together and go over the original kidnap investigation. If the boy is not Quinn, I would still like to work the case. Aside from the remains, we have no new leads, and it’s going to be so low on Cold Case’s priorities, it will never get a thorough look.”
“Good morning, Madison. How was your weekend?”
“Very good.”
“This is when you ask me how my weekend was.”
“How was it, sir?”
“Not bad, thank you. Could have done with another one. What brings you to my office, Detective?”
“I’d like to work the David Quinn case.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes. I spoke with Willis from Cold Case on Saturday. They are up to here right now.” He drew an imaginary line across his chin. “And the remains are so old, they won’t give us much to work with.”
“I know.”
“Something else.” Fynn gazed steadily at Madison. “The one surviving witness is not exactly talking at the moment, and nobody wants to waste a trip to KCJC to sit in a cell with John Cameron and came away with bupkes.”
“I see. That’s why I get handed the case. Because Cameron and I do our nails and braid our hair together?”
“Pretty much. Do you care?”
“Not a bit. If they don’t want it, I’m happy to have it.”