The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(5)
Madison could have locked her off-duty piece in the safe at home and avoided the issue of checking it at the reception desk, but she was a cop. She carried a shield; she carried a piece.
She filed in with the others, a quiet, serious group with a few somber children.
A young woman in a delicately patterned dress made a beeline for Madison as soon as she entered the reception area.
“Detective Madison, if you have a moment, the deputy warden would like a word before your visit.”
Mid-twenties, soft-spoken, blond hair up in bun: she looked as if she could have been handing out books and lollipops in a children’s library.
“Sure,” Madison replied.
“I’m Karen Hayes.” The young woman led her down a corridor. “I assist both the warden and the deputy warden.”
Madison had never been in this part of the jail complex. It could have been any kind of corporate business: people typing in offices, carpeted floors, and water coolers. Still, about twenty-three locked metal doors away from the small geranium pot on Karen’s desk, men behind bars stood, paced, sat, and slept, men who had taken lives and even done things to their victims that made them wish for death.
These clerks and secretaries organized these men’s days—their dental checkups, their meetings with parole boards, and their menus—all in these brightly lit rooms scented with sandalwood and apple.
Madison, on the other hand, had reached into some of those men’s thoughts and followed them into dark alleys, and, in spite of the sandalwood, she felt their proximity like the touch of gunmetal between her shoulder blades.
“Detective Madison.” The deputy warden held his office door open for her. He looked like a benign high school principal, wearing a white button-down with a burgundy tie, his jacket hung on a coatrack.
“I’m Will Thomas, deputy warden at KCJC.”
He shook her hand once and waved her to a chair in front of his desk. “I thought we should—how can I put it?—open the channels of communication.”
Madison had no idea what he meant; she felt her own instant reaction to impending government-speak and hoped her natural courtesy would hold up.
“You are here to visit John Cameron.”
And there it was.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re not family, and you’re not a friend.”
“No.”
“You’re not his attorney, and you’re not here on police business.”
“No.”
“Yet you have visited him regularly since he was brought here at the end of December. He is quite popular with law enforcement. Alleged murderer of nine, charged with assault, and denied bail. Since he was apprehended, FBI agents from LA have come to interview him, as well as assorted officers from the DEA and the ATF, and I don’t know how many media requests we’ve had. He’s turned down every one of them. A popular guy apart from one thing.” Deputy Warden Thomas sat back in his chair and regarded Madison.
“He hasn’t spoken one word. Not to them, not to anybody. Except”—he smiled briefly— “to you.”
Madison flashed back to a clearing in the Hoh River forest in the early hours of the morning: Tommy freezing cold in her arms, Nathan Quinn covered in blood at her feet, and John Cameron standing before her as if he was made of the very night around them.
If you want to leave, leave now. If you stay, do not say anything to me or to anybody at all. Do you understand?
“Because Nathan Quinn was badly injured at the time, John Cameron chose to stay and face arrest, even though he knew the police were on their way. Quinn was injured saving my godson’s life. That’s why I’m here.”
“I see. How is Mr. Quinn?”
“Progressing.” Madison replied. “Slowly.”
“How is Harry Salinger?”
“I have no idea.”
Harry Salinger had torn through their lives and almost destroyed them all; Cameron had left him close to death on the riverbank that night. The judicial system might hold Cameron on a charge of attempted murder, but Madison could not put a name to what he had done to Salinger.
“Detective, I like to think of KCJC as a ship, a very large ship. Some people come and go, as you do today, but others, like Mr. Cameron, come to stay for a long time. A long journey, so to speak. I want to keep that journey as smooth as possible. For him and for everyone else here. You know he’s not in the general population, right?”
“I know.”
“Two days after he arrived, the incidence of violence among inmates went up ten percent. Just from knowing he was here.”
Madison knew that if Cameron was kept in isolation, it wasn’t for his own protection.