The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(81)

“I came home late this morning, I noticed something, and the records from the alarm company agreed with my theory.”

The first thing Madison registered was that Quinn had been discharged from the hospital—he had finally been discharged; the second thing was that no one in that house should touch anything; better still, he should wait in the car while she called the crime lab and they processed the house from top to bottom.

“I’m on my way,” she said. “And—”

“I know. I’ll try not to wreck the scene.”


Detective Kelly buckled his seat belt and sighed; he could have stayed behind at the precinct, but he had come, Madison knew, mostly out of curiosity. He had lifted a solitary eyebrow when she called Sorensen at the lab, and he had expressed his doubts that this was any of their business—an attempted burglary; the intruders had been disturbed and left before taking anything. However, a chance to look at Nathan Quinn and his quarters up close was not to be wasted, and so there he was: a silent, surly presence that Madison tried her level best to ignore.

It wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t an interrupted burglary, and it wasn’t Father Christmas coming late to Seward Park. It was Peter Conway and his crew paying Quinn’s house a visit because of a single piece of information they did not have: how did Quinn know about Timothy Gilman?

Madison drove fast through a haze of rain. She couldn’t bear to think about what might have happened if Quinn had been discharged a day earlier.


Seattle was surrounded by water: the long strip of Puget Sound to the west and the large expanse of Lake Washington to the east; salt water and fresh water holding a ribbon of land between them.

They arrived in Seward Park just as the sun broke out of the cloud cover, and the sudden light found every last raindrop on the thick stretch of green that surrounded Nathan Quinn’s house. Madison parked next to his Jeep. She had never been to his home before: their dealings had been mostly in courts, precincts, and dark woods in the middle of the night. A home was almost too mundane.

At the bottom of the sloping garden Lake Washington lapped at the lawn, and a long pier jutted toward Mercer Island.

Stone and wood, seasoned by the Pacific Northwest: though there were other, much larger houses on the same road, there were probably none as quietly striking.

The door opened and stayed open.

“You’ve met him since?” Kelly asked as they got out of the car.

“Yes, once,” Madison replied.

Kelly grunted something that she didn’t catch.

In spite of the brief sunshine, the ground was still soaking wet after days of rain; they wiped their shoes on a mat and walked inside.

Quinn met them in the hall; he was talking on the phone and said good-bye to someone.

“Thank you for coming, Detective,” he said.

They dispensed with the introductions as quickly as courtesy would allow—Quinn had never met Detective Kelly—and moved on to the intricacies of breaking and entering into a house with a top-of-the-line alarm system.

“When did you notice something was not right?” Madison asked Quinn.

“The telescope had been moved from its usual place,” he pointed. “And two small objects on a bookshelf in my study.”

“That’s all?”

“It was enough.”

“While you were in the hospital, only Carl came over?” Madison turned to Kelly. “Carl Doyle is Mr. Quinn’s assistant,” she explained.

“Just Carl,” Quinn replied. “And he didn’t even go near the telescope or the study.”

“What about the alarm company records?” Madison was aware of Kelly’s eyes taking in Quinn and the dark red lines that crossed his features, watching him as if he were some kind of exotic creature.

“They were good,” Quinn replied. “The intruders erased the record of the entry, but it had already been registered on the central database at company HQ.”

“What time were they here?”

“Between three and four last night.”

“You’re positive they didn’t take anything?”

“They didn’t take anything—I’m sure.”

“Left anything?”

“Hollis swiped the whole house and found nothing.”

Madison nodded; she remembered Tod Hollis from the Harry Salinger case. If the Quinn, Locke investigator had swiped the house and found no bugs, it meant there were no bugs to be found. It also meant that another person had been in the house to add to the trace evidence that the Crime Scene Unit would have to process. They were standing just inside the living room door now, trying to limit the contamination of the scene.

“Is that why you waited to call us?” Kelly asked. “You got the house swiped first and called it in after?”