The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(41)

Back in the precinct, Kelly gone home and her legs stretched out under her desk, Madison picked up her camera and examined the photographs she had taken in Ronald Gray’s home. Details of his last hours on Earth and some from the mundane routine of his everyday life. They had found pay slips from his employer—a transportation services company—where he had been a booker for seven years. Kelly had knocked on various neighbors’ doors, but either people were at work or they didn’t know anything about him.

Madison sipped her coffee as the pictures scrolled in front of her. There had been no trace of a female visitor to the apartment—no clothes in the closet, no second toothbrush in the bathroom—and yet someone in his life was bound to miss him at some point. After twenty-four hours no one had claimed Ronald Gray. Madison looked at the picture of the dark, watery lump at the bottom of the saucepan. Tomorrow she would visit his employer and see what kind of person Ronald Gray had been and why no one had missed him yet.


Madison drove home, and even before taking off her weapon and holster she crouched by the fireplace, added two logs, prepared the kindling, and put a match to a long, rolled-up strip of paper. The fire took right away, the fluttering light so much gentler than lamps.

She toed off her boots by the sofa and sat back with a glass of Sancerre, while a dubious slab of leftover penne warmed up in the oven.

When she was done with her supper, she put her dish in the sink, made herself a cup of coffee, and spread all her notes and the newspapers clippings on the Hoh River case on the dining table. At the end of August and the beginning of September 1985 the press had still been full of speculation on the murder of a Washington State senator on one side and the Mariners’ records of eleven games won and seventeen lost in one month on the other, the lost New York Yankees games being particularly chewed on. Senator Newberry had been due to testify in a federal investigation about corruption and racketeering in the Seattle docks; he had disappeared at the end of June before the day of his testimony, and his body was found six weeks later in Lake Washington. Without his testimony, the case against the defendants, “family” men from the East Coast, had collapsed. The Hoh River boys’ pictures were laid out between the dead senator and Gorman Thomas in his Mariners uniform.

Madison smoothed out the clippings with her hand: there were lines that ran from the boys to their fathers and to the men who had taken the boys. After twenty-five years the lines might be almost invisible, and yet somehow Madison knew they had not been erased by time, because Edmond Locard was right: every contact leaves a trace.





Chapter 18





The television in Nathan Quinn’s hospital room was muted. He lay back on his pillow, and his black eyes tracked the figures on the screen. A reporter stood by the water towers on the corner between 35th Avenue SW and Myrtle Street. He pointed to where the murdered man on the chair, Warren Lee, was found days ago, the crime-scene tape even now in place. Quinn didn’t need to hear the words to know that the police had made little progress on the case.

Very slowly he pulled himself up to a sitting position and swung his legs off the side of the bed. He breathed deeply, wishing away the dizziness. Holding most of his weight on his arms, he gingerly edged himself forward and stood up, his bare feet on the cold floor.

The noises from behind the door had settled down into their night rhythm, and Quinn did not expect a nurse to come in and interrupt his work. He took one step, holding on to the side of the bed, and reached for the cane the physical therapist had left behind for him. His right hand—the good one—closed around it, and he put most of his weight on it. He took another step and another after that, the exertion depleting his energy faster than he was prepared to admit.

The partial splenectomy had been done with open surgery, and the incision was but one more wound that slowed down his recovery; in this hospital room he wore his body like a prison sentence he had to get past. He took another step.

They had told him that twenty-five percent of splenic preservation might be adequate to preserve its function. The doctors had left him forty-seven percent of his spleen, and so far infections had been kept at bay by medication and sheer stubbornness. He took another step.

On the screen, the photograph from Warren Lee’s driver’s license appeared for a few seconds; then the story cut to a car accident in Everett. Nathan Quinn walked inch by inch across the room and back, his gaze on the screen.

His thoughts, so unlike his body, had been traveling fast and moving back and forth in time as the memories had thickened around him like wild grasses. He didn’t offer any resistance as feelings he hadn’t experienced for years washed through him whether he liked it or not. The doctors had told him that the kind of trauma he had gone through was likely to affect his sense of balance, and not merely from a physical standpoint. They had warned him to expect rushes of emotions that might be unfamiliar to him as his body and his mind tried to give meaning to what had happened. The counselor from the psychology department had spent twelve minutes with him a few days after he had first woken up and then had left, never to return. She had very quickly, and quite correctly, come to the conclusion that Nathan Quinn was not the kind of patient who was eager to overcome his present difficulties with an open and frank discussion of his state of mind. Polite but frosty, she had written in her report.