The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(7)

They sat. Madison gathered her thoughts. He waited. This visit was going to be different.

“I just spoke with Carl Doyle.” She closed her eyes for a moment and recalled the details. “Blood pressure normal; the swabs were clear—no infection; PT is progressing, with difficulty. Eye test was positive—no sight loss. They want to reduce the antibiotics for the spleen gradually and see how it will behave. No temperature, blood work okay.”

John Cameron held her eyes. His gaze was very direct, and Madison wondered what he had learned about her during these visits and how he might use it one day, out of this cell.

“Thank you, Detective.” He stood up and was almost at the door in one swift, silent movement.

“There’s something else.”

He turned.

They had never spoken about it, and as far as Madison knew, the boys had barely spoken about it at all themselves at the time.

“About a mile from the clearing . . .” There was no need to clarify where that was, not to this man. She continued. “Park police found human remains. A child. Male. Possibly buried over twenty years ago.”

Something came and went in Cameron’s eyes. A thought, maybe hope. Madison couldn’t tell yet; his focus on her was almost tangible.

For twenty-five years everyone, including the Hoh River boys themselves, had believed that the death had been accidental. They had been wearing blindfolds; they had heard him struggle for breath, then suffocate. As if that day hadn’t borne enough misery.

“There was blunt-force trauma to the head, enough for cause of death,” she continued.

John Cameron stood quite still. There were memories there—Madison was sure of it.

“They have just taken a fresh DNA sample from Nathan Quinn,” she finished.

There was no need to say anything else, and before she could draw breath, Cameron was at the door, and the lock was clanging open. Visiting hours were over.

Madison sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, steel mesh below many layers of concrete. Way to spend your day off.


Deputy Warden Thomas looked at his watch. Detective Madison’s visits were invariably brief, and he wanted to make sure that he had given the correction officers enough time to escort John Cameron back to his cell. And he’d give them some extra time, too, before he ventured to the secure wings for a routine walk-through.

There was something he had not told Detective Madison. It had started the third day Cameron was there. Another inmate in the same wing saw him walk past and started pounding on the bars of his cell, a quick pulse, like a cymbal’s. Others had joined in—a whole wing, two darned floors of it, hammering the bars with everything they could get their hands on in a steady, hypnotic march that increased in volume and spread like an ill wind from wing to wing.

Every day since, every time John Cameron had left his cell—to go to the yard, to see his lawyer, to the showers, to meet this cop—every single time the wall of sound would start, and the inmates would not stop until every shred of energy they had had been burned out. No voices, just the drumming.

The guards had been trading shifts among to avoid being on duty when Cameron was taken out of his cell, and Will Thomas would fuss over paperwork and look at his watch and dawdle.

Unlike the inmates, the sound would go where it pleased, finding the spot where a guard’s nerve was thinnest and piercing deep into the bone.





Chapter 4





Madison called Doyle from her car.

“How was he?” he asked her.

“Are you honestly asking me what the man thinks or feels?”

“No, my mistake.”

Madison wanted to ask him how Quinn had taken the news of the body’s discovery, but she didn’t. She only passed on the medical report. She had despised and been wary of Nathan Quinn in equal measure from the moment they had met. Still, Tommy would have a birthday soon.

Madison didn’t ask how Quinn had felt about the possibility that his brother might have been brutally murdered. He didn’t need her concern, and she didn’t know what else to do with it.

She checked her trunk for basics—latex gloves, flashlight, batteries, rain gear, and boots—and took off north on 509: it would take, maybe, three hours to get there. The body might not officially be David Quinn’s yet, but she had to see it for herself—the place where the piece of hell John Cameron carried with him had come from.


Somehow Madison managed to make the 12:05 Edmonds-to-Kingston ferry. She grabbed a cup of coffee and found a seat by a window for the thirty-minute journey. The boat was busy and loud with families, groups, and single travelers scattered in the booths and on the white chairs with navy blue trim, food and drinks spread on the wide armrests like spoils of war.