The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(142)

When he told Cameron what he had decided to do, his friend had smiled.

“You understand the implications of this,” Quinn continued. “I will never be able to represent you as an attorney again.”

“I know, but it’s where you should have always been,” Cameron said.

“There won’t be any attorney-client confidentiality, Jack.”

“We’ll just have to take it as it comes. When do you start?”

“In June.”

“Good. The sooner, the better.”

And that was all that had been said between them on the matter.

Nathan Quinn picked up one of the nautical compasses that had belonged to his father and slipped it into the pocket of his dark suit.


David Quinn’s funeral took place under a soft rain on a March afternoon, the sky unsure of itself and occasionally letting sunshine through, anyway. Rabbi Stien spoke of a boy who had been a bright light for all who had known him, and he spoke of hope. Four people were present: Nathan Quinn, John Cameron, Alice Madison, and Carl Doyle. It was a brief ceremony, and at the end Quinn placed their father’s nautical compass on David’s coffin, and his hand rested there for an instant. John Cameron stood by his side.

Madison hung back a little and thought of the baseball mitt and the Sonics jersey; she thought of the seashells in the cardboard box. When Rabbi Stien hugged Quinn, she looked away.

Around them the cemetery was deep green and lush as they walked through quietly, and none of them noticed the photographer with the telephoto lens.


Andrew Riley, heart pounding, took twenty pictures in mere seconds, got back into his car, and drove away. One of the photographs would be sold by his agency and make most of the front pages the next day. Some would print it next to the one from twenty-five years ago. It was a sweet victory for Riley, who would make enough to move out of his studio apartment. This one, he reflected with his professional eye, was probably not as dramatic as the old one, but it was infinitely more interesting. Attorney Nathan Quinn, brother of the victim, flanked by a killer on one side and a cop on the other.


After the funeral, all except Carl Doyle went to The Rock, where Chef Donny O’Keefe had given the staff the rest of the day off and for once enjoyed the run of the empty kitchen.

Madison went to grab a breath of fresh air on the deck, sharp salt almost crackling in the breeze and the wide sky over the water.

She turned, and Cameron was there. They had not been alone since Whatcom County.

“One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you, Detective,” he said.

“Ask away.”

“That night, you were never going to let me get on that plane, were you?”

It felt like a lifetime ago. Madison had made her decision on the drive up to the field, and it was the reason she had not picked up Quinn’s call.

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let them take you alive. If there was no other way . . .”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence.

“I knew you wouldn’t.” Cameron leaned on the rail.

“Why did you trust me?”

“Because you couldn’t come back and tell Nathan you’d lost me.”

So it was, Madison thought, and she was glad Cameron didn’t say any more about it.


In the deserted restaurant, the three of them around a table, Madison told them that Amy Sorensen’s computer had separated all the fingerprints from the scrap of paper, but none were Conrad Locke’s. It was one piece of evidence they were not going to have. She still believed that every contact leaves a trace, even if it’s not the trace one expected. In the end Locard always won, beyond computers and software and all their analysis.

“Vincent Foley,” she said, “carried the message that his brother had coached into him, word for word, even if he didn’t understand what the message was.”

“Vincent Foley,” Cameron repeated.

All their ghosts had names now. These men’s lives had grown and formed around a single event, like pearls around a piece of grit, and Madison felt that the very air in their world had changed.

“When are you going back to work?” she asked Quinn.

“I’m not,” he replied. “The junior partners will take over and change the firm’s name. I was offered the position of Special Counsel to the US Attorney of Washington State, and I said yes.”

“You’re going back to being a prosecutor?”

The clock was going back twenty years, and the men’s friendship was about to test new boundaries.

Just then O’Keefe came back from the kitchen with drinks and coffee. “Since we don’t know when you gentlemen will be in the same neighborhood again, we should have our game now and let it see us through the long night.”