“You were there,” Madison replied.
“Yesterday, sure. But before that you also went to speak to him in the hospital.”
It was a statement.
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you tell him about Lee and Gray? That we’re probably looking at the same creeps who killed his brother?”
“Yes, I did. They’re dead, and they’re not going to get any deader because Quinn knows.”
“This is an ongoing investigation, an open investigation, and you have shared information with a relative of a victim about our suspects. Not only that, I’m willing to bet you also told him about Vincent Foley and where he could be found. I’d be surprised if you didn’t give him floor and room number.”
“By all means, Kelly, share your thoughts, and don’t hold back. What’s troubling you?”
Kelly pulled up a chair and sat down.
“You’re way too close to Quinn and his client. What makes you think that information was safe to share? Why would you tell a victim’s relative anything about the suspect before we had a chance to cross the t’s and dot the i’s?”
“I told him because he deserved to know that we had found his brother’s gold chain. He’s very much part of what’s happening, and he needed to know about Lee and Gray. Quinn’s appeal on TV started the ball rolling, and—”
“And we’re left picking up the pieces. Did you know that Harry Salinger was declared legally insane?”
Madison moved back a fraction of an inch. A smudge of dirt and a slick of blood on Salinger’s shirt that night in the woods. “I didn’t know.”
“Yup, three separate independent experts—not that we needed them to tell us, by the way.”
Kelly let Madison absorb the news, then continued.
“Do you have any idea how fast the whole of Quinn, Locke is working to get John Cameron out of jail? And what do you think will happen when your pet serial killer is out on the street, fresh from incarceration, eager to get busy on the last surviving member of the gang who took him and beat his friend to death? What I don’t understand is whether you’re painfully naïve or simply too arrogant to follow police procedure.”
“Quinn needed to know, and the break-in at his home proved that point. He doesn’t know Vincent Foley’s name or where he was. I told him he was in a psychiatric institution and had been since 1985, and that’s all. And John Cameron is many things—most of them unfathomable to me—and I deal with him sensibly and cautiously, because that’s better than not dealing with him at all. Foley is not the last surviving person who was in the forest. Cameron was there, too, and I have to be able to speak with him about the case.”
“He will go after Foley the minute he’s on the street again, and we’ll be looking back at the good old days when all we had to protect him from was Conway’s crew.” Kelly stood. “You will screw this up. Sooner or later. And it will be measured in body bags.”
Madison let him have the last word, and he returned to his desk. No one else had heard the exchange, and she felt like punching a hole through a wall. She had to get busy and do something to cool off: traffic cams, reports, witness testimonies. There must be something that could engage her and keep her from letting Kelly’s words soak into her mind. Madison picked up the tapes from Traffic and checked the location/time tags. Still, the thin, dark voice spoke to her and whispered that Kelly was right, and, when it came down to it, body bags were the only measurement that mattered.
A black Subaru Outback had been picked up by three traffic cameras in quick sequence. At that precise time the only other options were a white pickup, a motorbike, a delivery van, and a supermarket-chain truck. The light reflecting off the windshield made it impossible to see who was sitting inside, but it had to be the Subaru. The car had a squeaky clean Oregon plate, and, given that that type of vehicle was one of the most common in Washington State, it was bound to be almost invisible.
Madison thought back: had she noticed a black Subaru on the grounds last night? No, she hadn’t, and uniformed officers had not been posted at the gates until later.
Dunne was in charge of tracking the car as far as possible using Automated License Plate Recognition technology. It was a standard tool, and Madison hoped for a quick result and a call to the Special Weapons and Tactics unit to be on standby.
In the meantime they still had Jerome McMullen, counting down to his parole date, and Leon Kendrick, sunning himself in California. Madison started reading: their files were inches thick and full of ugly. She felt a wave of tiredness wash over her, and she left the detectives’ room. She washed her face in the restroom, and her footsteps found the way to the outside of the building for a few moments of fresh air. The connections were there if only they could see them. The trail was there, ready to be found. That word trail made her think of Vincent Foley and his drawings. The trail is the wall, indeed, Vincent, she thought. Just give us a break, will ya?