The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(38)

The bus station downtown was housed in an unremarkable building the color of milky coffee. Madison and Kelly walked through the glass doors, and Madison eyed the CCTV cameras fixed at various angles. It was just as shabby and depressing as the last time she had been there. At any time of day there was a constant stream of travelers arriving and departing through the dank hall; if there had been witnesses to anything, they might very well be halfway across the country by now.

Madison was instantly aware that the second they had come in, four homeless men had gotten up from their metal seats and discreetly left, two guys had stopped talking and moved to different parts of the room, and one woman had made her way speedily toward the restrooms. You couldn’t exactly be incognito with Kelly—the man shouted cop. The crowd had practically parted in front of them, and she knew without looking that Kelly had enjoyed it like an iced drink on a hot day.

Madison showed her badge to one of the security guards, and in less than five minutes they had established that last night’s 8:50 p.m. bus to Vancouver had left without a hitch and arrived when it was supposed to. Madison had taken a picture of Ronald Gray’s driver’s license photo on her cell phone, and she showed it to all the personnel who had been on duty the previous night. None of them remembered him.

“How about CCTV footage?” Madison asked the head of security, a lanky thirty-something with a diamond stud in his right ear and a short, untidy ponytail.

“We have everything you need. What time are you interested in?”

“Let’s start with immediately before boarding time and go backward. We know our man didn’t make it onto the bus, but he might have been here. Can you see on your records how and when the ticket was bought?”

“I’ll just need a minute.” He set them up with two chairs in front of a monitor. The office was not elegant, but at least it didn’t smell as bad as the ticket hall, and she didn’t feel as if she had to sanitize the chair.

The quality of the CCTV footage was grainy black-and-white; somehow the technology at the terminal had stopped evolving around 1972. It was a four-way split screen: two angles of the main ticket hall, one of the restrooms corridor, and one of the exit to the buses. It was entirely possible that Gray had not even made it to the station, Madison thought. She sat on the edge of the chair as the time code flew backward and the previous evening unfolded in front of them. Kelly sat slumped in his chair, blinking at the rapidly moving images and missing nothing.

They saw him at the same time and for an instant forgot themselves and exchanged a look.

“There,” Madison said, and she froze the image. Ronald Gray, wearing his coat, sat on a metal seat, his suitcase by his feet. He was looking at his wristwatch. Madison suddenly remembered it; it was still on his left wrist.

“I’m going back to the beginning,” she said, as if there had been any kind of conversation between her and Kelly.

She rewound the tape until the moment when Ronald Gray came into the frame at 7:47 p.m. He had sat down and waited; every so often he would look at the main entrance, then look away. He seemed exhausted—edgy and exhausted. Around him people came and went, sitting and standing, and no one paid him any attention.

They were running the footage at normal speed, and it was maddening: something was about to happen, and Madison could do nothing to stop it. A little after 8:20 p.m. Ronald Gray stood up and wheeled his case out of the frame just as a small commotion around one of the vending machines had started. He was picked up by the camera facing the restrooms corridor. For a few seconds nothing happened; then two men walked into the restroom behind him. Two minutes later two men walked out, walking fast and close, one almost propelling the other forward. Then a third man came out wheeling Gray’s suitcase, except that it wasn’t Gray. He was taller and broader and made sure the camera didn’t get a good shot of his face.

Madison rewound the tape. The two men who had walked in after Gray were wearing dark winter clothes: hat, scarves, gloves, coats. Their faces were indistinct; they had been looking away from the camera. The two men who came out were also bundled up.

“Shoes,” Madison said.

Kelly grunted.

Both men were wearing black boots going in, but on the way out one of them was wearing black shoes with Velcro straps. The guy who came out with the case wore boots.

Madison sat back in the chair: they had forced him to go with them. Actually, though, nothing on the screen told her with absolute certainty that Gray had left against his will. For all she knew, he had voluntarily decided against going to Vancouver, decided that maybe Seattle was the place to stay, after all. Madison snorted. That moment frozen on the screen in front of her—that was when Ronald Gray’s life had ceased to belong to him.