The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(72)

“We’re going to order takeout,” he said. We was always understood to mean Spencer and himself. “Are you in?”

Madison realized she couldn’t even remember whether she had eaten that day.

“Definitely,” she replied.

“Pizza?”

“Extra anchovies.”

“Got it.”


By the time Madison left the precinct, the evening had settled into an uneasy chill that carried neither rain nor a clear sky. The low clouds reflected back the orange glow from the city, and the only patch of true black was the expanse of water before her on Alki Beach.

Madison had already changed into the sweats she kept in a gym bag in her trunk. She leaned on her car with one hand and stretched one leg behind her, shook the tightness off her shoulders, and repeated the process with the other leg.

Her first steps were stiff, and her muscles felt like heavy rope, cold and unyielding. She pressed on, running along the edge of the water and waiting for the running to trigger the memory of the forest. It first came to her as a change in the ground under her feet: the sand gave way to a slippery trail, rocky under the thin dirt. Then came the scent—resin and the layers of damp leaves. Here we go.

For an instant Madison felt the warmth of Harry Salinger’s flashlight on her cheek, and then she lunged forward, running through the empty darkness, her body existing on the beach and in the forest at the same time.

Her feet found purchase on the unsteady ground, and she pressed forward, and again she sensed the man running ahead of her, and she hastened her step. Now Madison could smell the forest around her and feel the low branches brushing her face. Her heart was punching its way out of her chest, and a coil of fear wrapped itself tightly around her gut. The chase was almost done, and she knew what would happen, because that was what always happened, and neither Stanley Robinson, PhD, nor anyone else could stop it.

She caught up with Harry Salinger, who had just told her that he’d killed Tommy Abramowicz, and she fell upon him, both of them rolling onto the pebbled bank of the Hoh River. John Cameron was nowhere to be seen, and Nathan Quinn was far away, back in the clearing, slowly dying inside a metal cage.

The knife was in her hand before she knew how it got there, and it fit her hand so well because it was meant to be there. There was nothing else to do and no one else to do it. With neither joy nor anger, Alice Madison ran the blade under Salinger’s throat and saw the dark line of blood widen, and the man become nothing but a blurred pool of red that covered her hands.

Madison woke up with a start and sat up in bed, tears streaking down her face. She choked as she ran to her bathroom and threw up whatever was left of the pizza dinner she had had hours earlier with Spencer and Dunne. She waited a few seconds to see if another heave was coming; then she went to the sink, filled it with cold water, and dunked her face into it.

Her heart was still racing, and yet she could already feel it going back to normal. Was this her normal? Was this what she should expect for all her time to come?

She thought about her conversations with Dr. Robinson. He was a good man, but he’d gotten things the wrong way around: her PTSD episodes were not about being a victim; they were about being the killer. And she was pretty sure they didn’t let you keep your detective badge once you told your shrink you had nightmares about killing suspects.

She looked up, water dripping off her face, and though her heart had slowed down, her eyes were still wide with fear.

Madison slipped on a pair of thick socks she had found on the floor by her sneakers and went to the kitchen, turning on lights as she went. The ice-cold milk in the fridge was as soothing as her throat was raw; she drank from the carton. Her gaze fell on the kitchen chairs by the nook, and with 4:00 a.m. clarity, when the thin, dark voice speaks too clearly to ignore, she knew why Warren Lee, tied as he was to a kitchen chair, had been left under the water towers between 35 Avenue SW and Myrtle Street, with his driver’s license taped to his chest.

She headed for the living room and the cupboard in the bookcase that her grandfather had stocked with all kinds of maps. Madison knew what she was looking for and found it easily. The dining table was large enough to accommodate it. She unfolded the map, and her fingertips found the intersection of the two roads. Warren Lee had been carefully positioned facing due northwest: she could still picture him clearly and had stood right there where he had been to see what he would have seen had he been alive. Now, she knew: had Warren Lee been alive, he would have been looking—from miles away—at the exact spot where, twenty-five years before, the Hoh River boys had met their destiny.

The message had been clear to anyone who knew anything about the event. Your silence or your life: don’t even think about Quinn’s reward money. However you’ve come to know about what happened, this is where it ends. This is where everything ends. And Ronald Gray had understood the message.