The picture held for a moment, then went to black and cut back to the news anchor sitting at his desk and clearly thinking that a degree in communications had not prepared him for this.
The squad room erupted with sound, voices overlapped, and someone muted the television. Madison was still inside the voice and inside the words. It was not an appeal; it was a warning. Quinn had pitched it hard, and somewhere out there several men had heard the words and understood the message. And who on Earth was Timothy Gilman?
It was a chemical change. A catalyst dropped into an otherwise inert solution. My name is Nathan Quinn. In offices, in homes, in bars, in television window displays, on ferries, online, everywhere with a screen. People stopped, people looked, and people wondered. After a while it wasn’t even necessary to hear the words. Quinn raising four fingers of one hand, then the index finger of the other. The scars on those hands said something about the man that words could not. And in some of those places where people watched television—places where the tourists didn’t visit and the bartenders knew each customer by nickname and felony type—a few of those customers began to scan the usual crowd and ask themselves who among them had been around twenty-five years ago who would take three children into the woods and bury one in a shallow grave.
Today is a good day; today there are one million and six hundred thousand reasons to be curious.
Carl Doyle, back in his office at Quinn, Locke, had watched the news with the rest of the staff. The camera and lights were back in the stockroom, and Benny Craig was telling his tale for the nth time to a pretty young secretary with a blond ponytail.
Doyle didn’t want to answer any questions and had closed the door behind him. Now he knew why Tod Hollis had disagreed with Nathan’s decision. He understood Quinn’s need to give his brother the justice he had been denied; who wouldn’t? What Doyle couldn’t even begin to describe was what it was like to stand four feet away from Quinn while he’d spoken those words. Benny was young; he was a sweet-natured if slightly dull young man who had little or no real understanding of what he had witnessed. But Doyle did, and he picked up a pile of paperwork and began to file, sort, and organize, because he needed to fill his mind and his hands with the ordinary and the mundane, and because the steel in Quinn’s voice had been sharp enough to cut his breath in two.
Dunne, still holding his paper cup, came close to Madison and spoke quietly. “You asked the boss for the Quinn case, right?”
“Yup.”
“Nice one. Have you looked at the initial report from Jefferson County?”
Madison turned her back to the room so that her words were for Dunne alone. “There was nothing at the scene. Just the remains and the hole in the dirt they came from.”
“No trace evidence of any kind?”
Madison shook her head.
“Medical examiner?”
“I’m waiting for Fellman’s report. And the forensic anthropologist’s—if we can get one.”
Dunne ran a hand through his hair, exasperated by the seemingly inexhaustible ways the world could find to make their work impossible. “What is Quinn thinking, putting out that kind of reward twenty-five years after the event? About a tenth of it would have been enough to get any information there was to have. All that money is just a beacon for every greedy loser from here to Miami, and each one of them will call us to claim it.”
Madison did not reply: everything Quinn did had reasons behind reasons.
“Do you know anything about this Gilman guy?” she asked Dunne.
“No, never heard of him. Twenty-five years ago my biggest problem was who to take to prom and how to afford a limo.”
Madison looked around: the room was emptying out, everybody back to their duties, Dunne’s cake reduced to a few sticky crumbs on a plate.
“Where’s the boss?” she asked him.
“With the Chief of Ds. Can’t wait for his delight when he hears about the appeal.”
“Do you call that an appeal?”
“No, I call that a mistake. A big juicy one, too.”
Dunne shrugged on his jacket. “Spence and I are going to Jimmy’s for a quick drink before my birthday celebration with the heavenly Stacey Roberts from Traffic. Are you coming?”
Madison smiled. “Thank you but no. I need to find out about Gilman before I can go to Quinn and have an argument with him about it.”
“Have fun.”
“Counting on it. Dunne,” she said to his back. “By the way, Stacey has three brothers the size of boulders. Not that she needs them—she shoots competitively.”
Dunne tightened the knot in his tie and smiled. “Nothing like a date with a woman who can shoot out your tires, right?”