The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(60)

“He digs . . .” Dunne said.

“The pit in the forest was dug under a western hemlock and a shrub of Dicentra formosa.”

Spencer sighed. “Bleeding Heart.”

“We have to prove the connections,” Fynn said. “Who gains from the vics’ deaths? Who stands to gain from Lee’s and Gray’s everlasting silence? We need to work both ends of the case: find out who gave the order to kidnap those boys twenty-five years ago, and we find who ordered Lee’s and Gray’s executions last week.”

Picture wire and the Book of Revelations.

“What was that about the hands?” Fynn asked Madison as she was almost out the door.

She turned to him. “The cuts on John Cameron’s hand,” she said. “Foley saw it happen—he saw it all.”





Chapter 28





Madison sat at her desk. The life of the shift flowed around her—phone calls and conversations and computer clicks—but she heard nothing. The notion that she had been standing two feet away from one of the men who had done that dreadful thing, that awful act that had changed so many lives in the space of a single missed heartbeat—it was almost too much to bear, because where Vincent Foley was, he could not be reached, he could not be taken down by the law, he could not be touched. What did you do with that? How did you begin to live with that?

Madison reached for her phone; there was so much she needed to tell; there were people who deserved to know what was happening.

Not now, not yet.

She straightened the Ronald Gray file, aligning the edges of the various reports inside it with the tip of one finger, then tackling the small pile of notes and paperwork that seemed to have taken up residence on her desk. She straightened her pens, pencils, and orange Day-Glo marker. She straightened her pale pink eraser and the pencil sharpener. And finally, when everything was at a ninety-degree angle—even the yellow square Post-it pad—the sounds from the world around her found their way back into her consciousness, and Madison flipped her notepad open and began to write.

The details of the people involved might change—their motivations, the particular twist of their heart; however, the questions asked remain the same: who did this? Why did they do it? There were two bodies in Dr. Fellman’s morgue, and the questions had to be answered, and answered quickly.

They did not have all the links yet, but they were working on it, because Nathan Quinn had been right: four men had taken the boys, and one man—or a group of men—had given the order. Where were they today?

Twenty years ago a man named Timothy Gilman fell into a trapping pit and died. There is reason to think he was one of the four kidnappers.

Madison grabbed her coat.

She dialed the call as she was leaving the precinct. “I’m on my way now, and it’s not a social visit,” she said.

She remembered from Gilman’s file that he was already in his early forties at the time of the kidnapping. Neither Lee nor Gray had a record; in 1985 they would have been no match for Gilman, who had already done a stretch upstate for assault in the second degree. He had to be the ringleader, and he would not have taken orders from some fresh-faced twenty-year-old or someone like Vincent. There is reason to think he was one of the four kidnappers. Madison drove automatically and found herself pulling into the parking space before she knew it. She turned off the engine and gathered herself. The streaks of rain on the windshield shielded her from anyone’s view.

What had happened that night in December in the Hoh River forest had left some kind of impression on her core not entirely unlike the whorl of a fingerprint on a lump of soft clay; she knew it was there, even though she had hardly begun to understand it or measure its reach inside her. She couldn’t even fathom the mark it had left on Nathan Quinn. Some religions believe that pain—physical and spiritual—has a purifying effect on the soul; Madison believed that pain was pain, and you got out of it only what you brought in, and Nathan Quinn had had bagfuls of it.

It was only the belief that there was no way she would ever feel entirely ready for this particular meeting that got her out of the car.

Madison knew where she was going; she knew the floor and where the room was on the corridor. She knew, because she had come every day when the cuts and grazes on her face and hands were still healing, when Tommy Abramowicz was recuperating in his mother’s arms, and when Nathan Quinn slept peacefully in the blank, empty darkness of a medically induced coma.

Nathan Quinn had been many things: the attorney who protected an alleged murderer; the man who held a small plastic cassette recording with the potential to kill her career; he was the brother who had buried the memory of a thirteen-year-old boy in an empty grave. He had been many things, Madison thought as the elevator doors slid open, and she didn’t know what he was now.