The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(61)

He’s a relative of a victim, she told herself, and she was glad for the sudden scents of the hospital and the paltry distraction they offered.


The door was closed, and she knocked.

“Come in.”

Madison pushed the door open, and Nathan Quinn stood to meet her.

“Detective . . .” he said.

The scars were dark red lines that traversed his fine features. So pale. Tall and thin with stubble on his cheeks.

“Counselor . . .” she replied, looking and not looking at the same time.

“Carl just let me know you were coming.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth, Lieutenant, but as little of it as I can manage. What I don’t tell him, he will guess.”

“I didn’t know I was coming until then.”

“No matter. I’m always home,” he said with a small wave at the hospital room.

Madison took it in: her university apartment hadn’t been as large or as smart. Quinn wore linen—a charcoal shirt over navy blue drawstring pants. He was barefoot and leaned on a cane he grasped with his right hand. The room smelled of the fresh flowers arranged in a vase on a table—Carl Doyle’s work probably.

“Not always,” she pointed out. Doyle’s gatekeeping in the worst days had been fierce.

“No,” he conceded.

“Things are happening, Counselor,” she said. “Things are happening fast, and I need your help and your advice. Shall we sit?”

He nodded, and there was the smallest amount of relief in his expression as he sat in one of the chairs; Madison pretended not to notice it. She wondered briefly if he was on painkillers and whether they would affect his focus and his concentration. Don’t underestimate him. Bare feet and a linen shirt don’t make him any less dangerous.

In their acquaintance she had never lied to him, but her honesty had been dearly bought. She wouldn’t lie today, and the truths she had brought were blades sharp at both ends.

“Something has happened,” she started. “We have new information about the men who took the boys.” Madison let him absorb that; she didn’t need to explain what she meant.

He was very still.

“I need you to tell me what you know about Timothy Gilman.”

Quinn sat back. “This ‘thing’ that happened, was it because of my appeal on TV?”

“Possibly. We can call it an ‘appeal’ if you like, but we both know you put a bounty on their heads.”

Quinn’s eyes held hers.

“Did it work?”

Madison hesitated. “We still don’t know,” she replied. “At this stage we are building the case, making the connections.”

“What can you tell me?”

A little pool of gold surrounded by small print in a Bible. “I can tell you that we found David’s St. Nicholas medal,” she said.

A pause. It was the first item ever recovered that had belonged to his brother, and it would likely be the last.

“Where?”

“It was left for us to find as part of another investigation.”

“Another cold case?”

“No.”

Quinn nodded. “The ‘something’ that happened because of my appeal?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“That’s why we need all you have on Gilman. We need to put him in the forest twenty-five years ago. Nothing in his record suggests his involvement.”

Quinn said nothing.

“Who told you about him?”

Quinn said nothing.

Gee, doesn’t this bring back memories?

“Mr. Quinn, this is how I see it: your ‘appeal’ was like a hand grenade—you had to throw it hard and far to get things moving. But Gilman, Gilman was the pin of the grenade. You put a bounty of over a million dollars on the heads of the men who killed David, and you’re just a brother doing what he can to bring murderers to justice. You say Gilman, and the people who did it, and those who paid them to do it, know you’ve got something real. And they scatter.” Madison took a deep breath. “You wouldn’t waste that opportunity with a name that wasn’t gold, which means you had full confidence in the information. Gilman died twenty years ago. If you had found out while he was alive, you would have crucified him—figuratively speaking—and that means you found out after he died.”

Quinn didn’t seem in a hurry to join in the conversation, and she remembered another day, in another conversation, John Cameron speaking to her and Quinn listening at her grandmother’s table. She knew his silences.

“How did you find out about him?” she pressed.

“I just did. How that came to be is irrelevant.”

“How can I verify the information?”