“You can’t.”
“But you’re betting the house on it?”
“Your assessment was right on the money. Would I use that name unless I was completely sure?”
“‘Completely sure’ is very nice, but it won’t really cut it with the King County prosecutor’s office unless we have proof.”
“Then you might have to go another way.”
“There is no other way, and you know it. Gilman would have been the leader; he would have been the one giving the orders. If I can’t prove Gilman’s involvement, I can’t get to the people who paid him to take the boys.”
Quinn leaned forward, and Madison knew that, painkillers or not, his focus was as sharp as ever.
“Be . . . creative,” he said.
“I can only work with what I have.”
“All evidence to the contrary. You believed that John Cameron was innocent in spite of all the evidence you had.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one. What can you tell me?”
“Ask me, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“Was it an informant who told you about Gilman?”
“No.”
“Did you find out yourself?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He shook his head.
“What makes you absolutely sure it was him?”
“It was him.”
“Was there an informant at any stage? Are you protecting someone?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions, Detective.”
“Then you tell me, what are the right questions?”
“Someone left the medal for you to find?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps one of the two men found murdered in the last week?”
What she wasn’t saying he would guess. She chose her words carefully and gave him what truth she had.
“Mr. Quinn, I didn’t come here to tell you that there is a very strong chance that two of the men who took the boys are dead. That’s what I think, yes. And it’s the trail I’m following. But I have no solid proof, and you are the last person on this planet to whom I would ever say anything like that if I couldn’t back it up.”
“You went to the place where they had buried David?”
Madison didn’t even know how he could bear to say it, and Kevin Brown’s former description of Quinn came back to her: That man is made out of some kind of metal we don’t even have a name for.
“Yes, I went there. It was about a mile from the clearing.”
One day, when he left the hospital and could walk without that damn stick, Madison was certain he would find his way there, too. Maybe by then Vincent Foley would have given up his secrets.
“Warren Lee and Ronald Gray,” Nathan Quinn said quietly.
“That’s what you wanted,” Madison said. “You knew we had less than nothing to work David’s case: no new evidence, no new witnesses. Still, if the men who gave the order felt sufficiently threatened by your ‘appeal,’ they might very well decide to tidy up all the loose ends, and in the process they would give us something real to pursue. New evidence, new leads, and new bodies,” she said. “And somehow we’d follow the trail back to David.”
“Not everyone, no. Just you. I knew you would follow the trail back to David.”
Madison didn’t know what to say to that.
“I’m only a brother doing what he can,” Quinn said.
“Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“Do you have new leads?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Nathan Quinn said, his voice coming from a dead place, “it worked.”
“Two men were killed. Another might have been hurt.”
“I regret that. I had hoped for lifelong imprisonment, one wretched day after the other.”
“Not a death sentence?”
“Have you ever tried maximum security with a child-killer sign around your neck?”
“We don’t know for sure yet that they were involved, and I still need Gilman.”
“Gilman is long dead.”
“Yes, and I’m sure we all regret his early demise. I still need to find out about him, though.”
“I can’t help you there, Detective.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Does it matter in the end?”
“Are you willing to stake the success of all this, finding those men and bringing them to justice, on that single piece of information you will not share?”
His eyes were bright—maybe it was fever, maybe not. “Absolutely,” he replied.
What we choose to say, what we hold back, how the cards are held in the player’s hands: Madison had been to countless poker games by the time she was old enough to realize there was something unusual about it. She didn’t know exactly what she had now that she didn’t have before; however, something in her gut told her that Nathan Quinn had inadvertently given her a small truth. Maybe the larger one would follow later.