“I met Jerry Wallace in 1987,” Brown said after a while. “There were good reasons he did what he did and didn’t get involved in anything heavier than information. He was a little guy with a talent for speaking to anybody on any side. One of Conway’s crew could have just carried him out under one arm.”
Madison took a sip of her beer. “This thing, it goes all the way back to August 28, 1985, and every time I feel I’m getting close to seeing the shape of it, something else happens, and it morphs into a different animal.”
Her frustration was evident. Brown was silent for a beat.
“Do you know how they measured the Great Pyramid?” he said finally.
“What?”
“Do you know how ancient Greeks would have measured the Great Pyramid? In essence, how would they measure an inaccessible object?”
Madison was struggling to find a connection.
“There were objects that could not be measured by conventional means,” Brown continued, “because their shape or size made it impossible.”
“I don’t know how they’d do it.”
“Shadow reckoning,” Brown said. “They’d measure the shadow the object cast, how far and how wide the shadow would reach.”
Madison nodded. Shadow reckoning. It was the only way she could measure that single day in August and the impact it had had on all those lives. The darkness coiled inside, that shadow had stretched out for decades and killed or somehow maimed everyone it had touched.
Chapter 38
Nathan Quinn listened to the wind disturbing the trees around the house. He hadn’t heard it for weeks. From the hospital room he couldn’t see the waters of Lake Washington darken and still. It was a specific kind of sensory deprivation, in which the only sounds allowed were the ticks and beeps of health-monitoring machines, and even the silence had an antiseptic quality. He breathed in the chilly air out on the deck, and his eyes tracked the indistinct shape of Mercer Island. He was home.
The break-in—not even twenty-four hours earlier—was only one more sign that the right people were feeling pressure and making mistakes. He welcomed their mistakes, and should they decide to visit his house again, he’d be so very glad to meet them in person.
After Detective Madison and the Crime Scene Unit had left, Tod Hollis had returned with an acquaintance who dealt in biometric-technology-based alarm systems, and the house had been wired up. The alarm worked on a combination of iris and fingerprint recognition, and by the time the technicians left, it was probably easier to break into Bill Gates’s mansion on the other side of the lake.
Nathan Quinn had never had a firearm license in his life, and there were no weapons in the house. He was not afraid, and, looking at the healing scars on his hands, he couldn’t imagine ever being afraid again.
Inside, Quinn poured himself an inch of bourbon—the first alcohol he had touched in weeks. He took the glass with him as he climbed the stairs to the second floor and then to the attic. Step after step. It wasn’t as easy as he would have wished, and he was exhausted by the time he reached the top of the house. He leaned on the door frame, took a deep breath to steady himself, and turned on the light.
He hardly went up there; it was a whitewashed room under the eaves filled with stacks of boxes and a couple of tables and armchairs under sheets—his parents’ chairs.
He had the first sip of bourbon and placed the glass on a table; the warmth in his chest was as sudden as it was welcome.
The box he was looking for was on top of a pile; he put his arms around it and lifted. Every muscle in his body was aware of the movement as he placed it carefully on the table. It was the only box in the attic that had not been marked by a black scrawl to identify its contents, because it didn’t need it. Quinn took another sip. The last time he had opened it, John Cameron and James Sinclair had been by his side. David’s things.
He pulled the string connected to the bare lightbulb above the table. He didn’t even know why he was there except that, without the morphine, he couldn’t see David, and the idea that he existed in this world only as remains kept in a morgue’s refrigerated drawer was unbearable.
He removed the box’s lid. Everything was present and accounted for: the baseball mitt with the ball still cradled in it, Jack Sikma’s Sonics jersey with the number 43, the yearbook, the camera, four seashells, a strangely shaped piece of wood from Ruby Beach collected when he was ten, and more objects and more memories than he could handle just then. He replaced the lid and began the long climb down the stairs. The house creaked around him, small noises as familiar as his own heartbeat. The alarm had been set for the night, and a tiny red light pulsed on the box beside the front door.