They turned off the lights, locked the office, and took the elevator down. Doyle left at street level; Madison, Quinn, and Cameron came out in the underground parking lot. Their cars were among the few still there. There would be statements to the police, sworn declarations, and the documents left by Ronald Gray to be authenticated. The page of the yearbook would be officially matched by Sorensen, and the recording of Quinn’s conversation with Locke would be entered into evidence. But all that was for another time. Even talking about what had just happened seemed too much. Quinn’s eyes held Madison’s. “Would you join us for a drink, Detective?”
She saw through the old-fashioned courtesy: he was exhausted.
“Rain check,” she said. “How’s the . . .” She indicated Cameron’s injured side.
Cameron shrugged—a boyish gesture that told her how far from themselves they all were.
They nodded to one another and got into their cars, Madison trying to make sense of the last few hours, and Quinn and Cameron of the last twenty-five years.
Madison drove. She was numb and watched herself park and walk into Husky Deli. She bought a bowl of French onion soup and a chicken cashew sandwich. At home, she ate both sitting on the sofa, her feet on the coffee table, the television muted. She wanted to speak to Brown and to Rachel, but she just couldn’t, not yet. She would call them in the morning.
Her one call was to Maryland. “Detective Frakes, I have some news . . .”
For as long as she lived, Madison would never forget the moment she had seen David Quinn’s picture of Conrad Locke and Senator Newberry in the woods, and then finding buried in the file the fact that Locke had represented Timothy Gilman. She hoped Quinn would manage to sleep tonight; she hoped she would never again see that hurt on the face of another human being.
Madison fell asleep remembering the soft rain in the forest as she’d walked with the ranger to the place where a child had been buried. Among the sorrows of the day, she had fulfilled her promise.
Ronald Gray looked around at his untidy apartment. He had done what he could: the acrid scent from the stove was evidence of it. He glanced at the bookcase. Five times in the past twenty years—each time he had moved house—he had done the same thing. When he first started, memory sticks didn’t even exist. At least he’d gotten better with the wallpaper.
With each letter he had written, the words had changed a little, as he had gotten older and the landscape of his life and his heart had changed. He didn’t feel proud of what he was doing, as he wasn’t proud of what he had done. It had started as a way of protecting Vincent and himself and had ended up as a mission.
Time to go, he thought as he closed the door. He had a bus to catch.
Chapter 68
Nathan Quinn woke up in the darkness and knew without looking at the clock that it was hours to go before dawn. Sleep had been hard to come by and brittle once there.
He slipped out of bed and padded downstairs. Jack was sitting in one of the armchairs—with the lights off, looking out into the gloom toward where Lake Washington would be.
Quinn sat down in the other chair. They had hardly spoken since they had returned to Nathan’s home, and neither had been able to stomach any food. Cameron had been driven back after his own hospital visit to find a different world, and since then things had moved too fast to take stock of.
Quinn was glad to see that his friend was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and had not been out for one of his night drives. So much between them was still unspoken.
“Are you in any pain?” Quinn asked him—Cameron’s bandage was visible under the cotton fabric.
His friend shook his head and stood up. “Drink?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Cameron poured them a double measure of bourbon each and then, without asking, went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a carton of eggs. He was his father’s son, Quinn thought, and he stood to get out a couple of plates while Cameron scrambled six eggs and served them golden and still soft, his hands nimble at the stove.
They had them at the breakfast bar, because the table was covered in papers, and neither mentioned the things that Quinn had told Conrad Locke about Jack. It was the truth, and it didn’t need explanations.
Once back in bed, Nathan Quinn closed his eyes, and the music came back to him as it often did on the verge of falling asleep, and for the first time since that night in the forest he knew that it was Detective Madison’s voice, cradling the boy on one side and holding his hand in hers through the bars of Salinger’s cage. Blackbird.
Chapter 69
The hush that had begun in the offices of Quinn, Locke & Associates pushed itself into the crevices of other lives during the following days. Madison spoke to Kevin Brown and to Rachel Abramowicz—the rocks, the anchors, at the opposite ends of her life—but she didn’t read or watch any news and generally kept to herself except for the obligatory meetings and debriefings.