The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(94)

Vincent looked at the bowl as if he had never seen anything like it before. After a minute, he picked it up and ate the ice cream.

The round clock on the wall said it was 1:00 a.m. The boys were still in the forest, Ronald thought. The plan had been that Gilman would make an anonymous call after the message about payment for protection had been delivered, and the kids would be found before nightfall. Three kids. No harm done. Except that had never really been the plan, had it?

Ronald waited until Vincent went to bed; he waited until he could hear his slow, regular breathing. And then he laid it on the table—the thing he had saved from the van as it caught fire.

“Hold it, Tim. I’ve left my jacket in there.”

“Make it quick.”

He had noticed Gilman stuff the piece of paper under the rags and had left his jacket in the back on purpose. He now placed the scrap of paper on the cracked Formica table. He had known what it would be, and it didn’t surprise him: a photograph of the fair, curly-haired boy circled in pencil.

He opened his hand, and a golden chain with a medal unraveled and pooled next to the picture. He had seen it come away from the boy as they were lowering him into the grave, and he had pocketed it, his mind already jumping ahead to guilt, blame, and consequences.

He wanted a drink so badly, his eyes kept wandering to the fridge where three cold ones were waiting for him. Yet he couldn’t—wouldn’t—take a sip until he had managed to make sense of what had happened and had made a plan, because as things were, Ronald thought, looking around their simple kitchen, they were well and truly screwed.

I’m no child killer. Still, three boys had been grabbed, and one had been murdered. Washington State had the death penalty, and there was no question where the blade of justice would fall. He could very well repeat, We were only told to scare them, like a mantra all the way down the corridor to the electric chair or whatever they were going to use. It wouldn’t matter. People would line up from Seattle to Walla-Walla to cheer their stupid, miserable deaths.

Gilman had made sure they’d thought it was no more than a bit of work on a summer day, no more than putting the fear of the everlasting into some rich kids who’d tell their daddies to pay up and shut up.

He knew they were no child killers, none of them, and the only way it would work was if they all thought it was an accident. They’d keep their silence, and Gilman would have his hit.

Ronald stood up, went to the fridge, and opened it. The beer mocked him, but he grabbed a bottle of cream soda and drained it where he was standing. He was horrified at what had happened and at his part in it. He felt sorry for the kid, sure—no one should die like that—but he had bigger problems of his own now, and his priority was protecting himself and Vincent. Vincent. Ronald took a deep breath in the stifling heat.

There were things that he could and should do, things that would protect them in case the worst happened, things that would allow him to make a deal with the King County prosecutor’s office and keep them both out of the chair—if it came to that.

Ronald had no illusions about why Timothy Gilman had chosen the three of them for the job: they had done similar intimidation work before, didn’t balk at using a little muscle when necessary, and they were cheap. And yet Gilman had been chosen, too—someone had given him a picture of the kid and said, “This one, not the others, just this one.”

Ronald knew where Tim Gilman lived and where he drank his beer. He would follow the man like the shadow of hell that Gilman was and find out who had ordered the hit. Whatever he’d done, that kid’s father must have really pissed off somebody who didn’t forgive or forget.

It would be an early start, and Ronald checked the clock: 2:17 a.m. The ice cream in his bowl had turned into pink goo. He took one bottle of icy cold beer from the fridge and twisted off the cap.





Chapter 41





“Cameron, your lawyer’s here,” Officer Miller said, and John Cameron regarded him through the bars.

He had not received any visitors since he had turned down Detective Madison’s conversation days earlier, and she had not been back. He knew enough from their meetings to know that petulance wasn’t a natural part of her makeup: if she had not visited, it meant she was busy and the case was progressing.

A lawyer—indirectly—was an emissary of Nathan’s.

Cameron stood up and approached the door to his cell.

Officer Miller took a step back. Their 4:00 a.m. walks through the silent jail and Cameron’s yard time in the middle of the night might have become routine, and yet he didn’t let himself get too comfortable and risk being like the trainer who gets mauled by his favorite big cat because he forgot himself and what he was dealing with.