Madison was not in the mood for lunch; as she had done almost every day since December, she wished her partner, Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, would hurry up and heal and get himself back to work. They spoke often and had met at least once a week, but it would have been invaluable to have his perspective today, stalking a twenty-five-year-old crime scene.
She had almost lost him to two gunshot wounds—something she tried not to think about. At the time they had been working together only a few weeks—her first in Homicide—but it felt like a lot longer now and her life before it further away. Brown had been one of the cardinal points as Madison navigated her course in her new department: she had decided she would learn from him whether he liked it or not. Then Harry Salinger had happened.
With any luck, one of the park rangers at the Hoh station would be able to give her the exact coordinates where the remains had been found, and her GPS would get her there. The fact that there had not been a formal identification yet, and, thus, the case still belonged to Jefferson County made her nothing more than a hiker with a badge. She hoped it would be enough.
Madison finished her coffee—the scent so much better than the taste—and ventured out onto the deck.
Did you think about the forest incident? I mean, longer than for a few seconds during your day.
No.
Madison zipped up her jacket, narrowing her eyes against the rush of the wind. It wasn’t the first time she had gone back into those woods, and one day, she knew, they would be just woods again—old-growth trees and a canopy so thick, even the light was green—but not yet.
She leaned against the rail, hands deep in her pockets, her gaze already past Kingston, past its pretty main street with the charming cafés, drawn to the line of shadow that marked the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula and their secrets.
John Cameron lay on his bunk. Slowly, one inmate at a time desisting, the clanging sound had died away after he had returned to his cell, and the usual calls and shouts now bounced back and forth against the concrete walls.
He wrapped himself back in his own personal silence. The outside world represented no more than an occasional interruption; his eyes followed the faint crack on the ceiling above him, and he ran the tip of his index finger against the rough texture of the blanket. He fell into the memories as if into bottomless waters.
August 28, 1985. Fishing with David and James at Jackson Pond. The blue van and the dirty rags reeking of chloroform. Waking up blindfolded, tied up with rope. It’s not personal; it’s business. Then the awful choking and gasping, and the intruders had left, taking David’s body with them. David. His gasps had sounded like dying, and the men had believed he had; James, too, had believed it, and so had he.
He thought about a vicious man falling into a pit five years later, the spikes Cameron had sharpened going through his body. He thought that it wasn’t over, never had been, and Nathan had to go through it all over again, only this time it was even worse. He thought this cell would hold his rage only for so long.
He knew as if he could see her that Detective Madison would be going where David’s body had been found. He would be there, too; his eyes remained on the tiny crack until it was all he could see.
Shouts from the next cell no longer reached him; the guard looked in, looked away, and walked on.
Madison hit Highway 101 at the full legal speed. The weather was bright; the sun had retreated behind a veil of thin clouds. She looked ahead and asked the deity in charge of crime-scene analysis for as much light as could be spared. The local forensics unit would have already swept the area, but Madison needed her own sense of it, even if time had washed away everything except the boy’s name.
A time would come when she would, officially, ask John Cameron about that the events of that day in the Hoh River forest. Then she wondered whether that would actually ever happen, whether the remains that had been discovered, collected, examined, and tested would hold enough truth to launch a proper investigation. Madison’s background in forensics was strong, and her belief in evidence was sacrosanct. If this had been any other case, she would have said that the chances of a prosecution after twenty-five years of Pacific Northwest weather and wilderness were nil. Yet when she saw heavy clouds coming in from the west, she almost slammed her foot down on the accelerator, weaving around a slow-moving tourist RV with Idaho plates.
She was here because it was not any other case, and whatever trace evidence had been left, Madison suspected it could not be put in a bag and tagged but would be measured in ways she couldn’t even comprehend yet.
She pulled into the parking lot at the Hoh River park rangers station, mercifully close to empty at this time of year, and dug in the trunk for her walking boots and wet-weather gear. The forest was damp, and it breathed a shroud of moist air whether it was raining or not.