The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(17)

“Happy birthday.”


Madison brought the file back to her desk and the small pool of light from her Anglepoise. The room was blessedly quiet; her own shift was over, and her colleagues had dispersed to the lives they had when they were not there.

In his short time on Earth Timothy Gilman had managed to make few friends and many enemies: what had started as typical juvenile-delinquent behavior had quickly graduated to a range of felonies that spoke to Madison about a deep violent streak. Gilman had clearly cultivated it the way another man might work on his aptitude for numbers. Some hard time upstate for assault in the second degree was no doubt a pretty good accomplishment on his personal-achievements list.

Madison sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with a wraparound color picture of Mount Rainier—blue sky behind the gray rocky top and the glaciers. In the end, somewhere in the woods between Seattle and Mount Rainier, in a trapping pit, hikers had found Timothy Gilman’s body after the first spring thaw, impaled on long spikes. One night the previous winter he had walked out of his local bar and disappeared like so much dust in the wind.

Madison ran her index finger down the list of interviews that had followed: no one knew how he had gotten from the bar to the woods or even whether he’d fallen in by accident or by someone else’s design. She read the file twice from top to bottom, and all she could garner from it was that the life Gilman had lived had been infused with blunt destructiveness and willful harm. Despite that, there was no connection that she could see to the Hoh River abductions. The bulk of his issues with law and order had to do with the low-level enforcer work that seemed to fit so well his particular set of skills.

She made notes as she read, feeling that she was reaching back in time half-blind and trying to grasp something that might not be there at all. The thing she went back to—the only thing she had—was the knowledge that Nathan Quinn would not trifle with Gilman’s name just as he would not trifle with threats. One down, three to go. Quinn had something, and it sure wasn’t in those yellowed pages she had picked up from Records.

Madison wandered over to the office fridge and found her own contribution: an emergency strawberry Yoo-hoo left over from a late-night stakeout weeks earlier. She unscrewed the top and gulped it down to drown the taste of the percolated coffee. It actually tasted pink.

If Quinn knew the identity of one of the kidnappers, it made no sense that he had let go of the thread of evidence there, that he had not turned Gilman’s life inside out and upside down to get to the truth. Unless he had found out after Gilman was dead. In which case—Madison looked at the meager file—all Quinn had had was the same length and breadth of a life spent hurting people that she had and, like her, no answers.

Madison picked up her cell phone and speed-dialed.

“Doyle.” He answered on the second ring.

“It’s Madison. Sorry for the late hour.”

“No problem. I’m still in the office, and I bet so are you.”

“’Fraid so. Carl, I need to see him. The sooner, the better. Tomorrow morning would be good.”

“Do you have any idea how many media requests I’ve had since his appeal went out?”

“A good number?”

“Twenty-two. Do you know how many he has granted?”

“Zero?”

“Zero.”

“I’m not media, Carl. I’m on the David Quinn case.”

“I’ll speak to him in the morning.”

They said their good-byes, and Madison decided she was done with the day. The drive home went quickly, maybe too much so. The day’s work might be done, but there was something to be said for the feeling of suspension, for the deferral of any physical action or endeavor that only heavy traffic could provide. She wanted to keep driving to keep thinking.

She drove south past her exit and ended up making a loop around Normandy Park. The densely wooded area was a pitch-black pause amid the pattern of lights. It was a cold early-February night, and yet Madison rolled down her window a few inches to smell the salt in the air. Her cell phone on the passenger seat started vibrating just as she was looping back. She saw the caller ID and picked up.

“Sarge,” she said.

“Madison,” Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown replied. “Did you see it?”

“Me and everyone else with a screen.”

“You picked up Gilman’s file yet?”

Madison smiled. Brown might be on medical leave, but he was still her partner—her much senior partner—and she missed their conversations.

“Yup, pretty straightforward low-level muscle, some time in jail—not enough if you ask me—and a whole load of nothing regarding how his final hours went. Nothing at all linking him to the abduction—on the surface, that is. Quinn wouldn’t put his name out there unless it meant something.”