Warren Lee had never married and didn’t have a criminal record; he had driven unremarkable cars all his life and held jobs that had paid enough to live on if you didn’t like expensive things. His drugs had been paid for by the medical insurance his job provided—stock keeper for a hardware company. Madison realized that the picture wire he had been tied with was probably made by the people he worked for.
She left the report on Spencer’s desk, her shift long finished, and clicked off her desk lamp.
Alki Beach was deserted. The sun hadn’t even made an appearance that day, and the air carried a bite that easily found the spot between her shoulder blades that tightened her whole back.
Madison started running. A sense of falling and the coppery scent rose up immediately, and she ignored both. She pushed through the sensations, sped up, and inhaled the sharp air as deeply as she could to wash out the faint apple smell from the autopsy room.
Back home she put a steak on the grill pan and had it with some leftover potato salad. She went over her notes from the David Quinn file and sought out the names of the men Detective Frakes had mentioned. Men who would take an interest if your business was successful. Protection. There were three names: Eduardo Cruz, Leon Kendrick, and Jerome McMullen. Madison circled each name.
Chapter 13
John Cameron lay on his bunk and focused his attention on a tiny crack in the ceiling. Folded on the wall-mounted table was a two-day-old copy of the Seattle Times sent by Carl Doyle from Quinn, Locke. The front-page headline was Bounty on the Heads of Kidnappers: $1,600,000 to Solve a Cold Case.
In the last forty-eight hours Cameron had felt the atmosphere in the jail change the way a wild animal senses winter’s imminent arrival. Those inmates who did not have television privileges or did not read had heard about Quinn’s appeal from their visitors, and the news had spread like an oil spill. The guards, who had so far treated him with wary caution, seemed even more watchful.
John Cameron had known Nathan Quinn all his life: the time before, when he was a boy, and the world had been a bright shining thing, and the time after, when the colors had changed, and he had thought he would drown in his own rage. And, miraculously, the time after that, when Quinn had not turned away from who, or what, he was. Cameron had never entertained any doubts about his own nature, but he was glad and grateful that the link with Quinn had never been severed.
Quinn’s television appeal had not surprised him; he understood what his friend was doing more than anyone else on Earth. The one thing that had interrupted his train of thought like a stone tossed against a window was that name. Because Quinn should not have known; knowledge of the name should have been Cameron’s, and Cameron’s alone, to carry. That had been the deal that he had made with himself when he was eighteen: Timothy Gilman would die because he was the man who had taken them into the woods, who had cut him up, and who was responsible for David’s death. He would die by Cameron’s hand because there was no way they would ever be able to get him into a courtroom.
Still, Quinn had known. For how long, Cameron couldn’t be sure. He thought back to a conversation in a diner, eating pie, and how young he had been and willfully deaf to what Quinn was trying to tell him. A few weeks after that day Quinn had left the King County Prosecutor’s office and set himself up in private practice, criminal defense. He had never told him he knew; he had simply waited all those years for a time when Cameron would need him, as his nature had always fated that he would.
When two guards came to escort him out for his yard time, the drumming sound started almost immediately. He barely noticed it.
The metal door clanked open, and John Cameron was hit by a sudden rush of cold air, air that was not channeled through pipes and conduits. It was damp and gritty and felt wonderful.
Cameron was in protective custody, which allowed one hour twice a week in a human version of a dog run: a structure in every way similar to a cage, eight feet wide with closely interwoven bars, in a yard that contained a number of such structures. Inside it, he could walk—five long strides—stretch, exercise, or do whatever he pleased while being simultaneously outdoors and separated from every other inmate.
In a jail—a world within a world—yard time was precious: it was a brief opportunity to socialize, strike alliances, and establish boundaries among the groups. Inmates at risk in the general population or those being disciplined for any number of offenses would have their yard time in the cages.
Cameron had been to a dog kennel when he was a kid: a not altogether different setup, he thought.
He looked up: a dark sky, heavy clouds rolling in from the west, but no rain.