Frank Lauren stood in the middle of the upstairs study in the Sinclairs’ house and took it in. His partner, Mary Kay Joyce, snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. They had been collecting evidence. The windows had been dusted for prints, and the powder now stained the glossy white sill. On the leather armchair in front of the desk a book lay open facedown, a hardback edition of Isak Dinesen’s Letters from Africa. Joyce picked it up, slid it, still open, into a plastic bag, sealed it and fixed the sides with two small clamps, tagged it, and signed the label, Lauren scribbling his signature under hers. They worked the room methodically and in complete silence.
Joyce was running her hand around the seat of the chair behind the desk, to check whether there was anything trapped in the cushion. Her fingers dislodged a thin strip of pale green paper. She picked it up with a pair of tweezers and held it against the light.
Madison was organizing her notes as Brown drove. They had found the name of the ICE contact in Sinclair’s wallet and repeated—for the maid’s benefit—on a pad on the kitchen wall. In this case more than others it was important to talk to the in-case-of-emergency contact as soon as possible, as the house was probably already on the news, with all its gory significance.
Lieutenant Fynn would soon release a statement promising “swift justice,” but no details of the victims or the crime had yet been released. Madison wrote a note to remind herself to ask Dr. Fellman about the time of death of the father compared to that of the others.
“So something else is going to happen,” she said. “Thirteen days from the victims’ death. Sometime between the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth? Chistmas Eve, even? Thirteen is only eleven days away from Saturday night.”
“Two hundred and sixty-four hours and change, to be precise,” Brown said.
The car pulled up to the curb, the traffic slow and the crowd of shoppers a sluggish river around them as they got out. Madison saw a mother yank her toddler back to her side just as he was stepping in front of a car.
“Have you met him before?” Brown asked as they got into the Stern Tower elevator.
“No. But I have seen him in court. He can make things pretty nasty for a prosecution witness.”
“Yeah, well, most cops would rather stick pins into their eyes.” Brown smoothed down his tie with the flat of his left hand.
They stepped out on the ninth floor and entered the offices of Quinn, Locke & Associates, where they showed their badges and asked to see Nathan Quinn. They were directed to a waiting area and asked if they wanted anything to drink, which they declined, and were told Mr. Quinn would see them in a few minutes. Madison looked around at the expensive art on the walls and remembered pictures in the papers of charity events Quinn had attended.
They were shown to his office, and Nathan Quinn stood to greet them. He was somewhere in his forties; his eyes appeared black with the same grave quality Madison had noticed in court. Up close, he didn’t have the manner of detached affluence one might expect from a partner in a successful law firm with corporate clients. He looked like a man who would take somebody apart with whatever the legal system gave him, and, failing that, he’d simply use his bare hands.
“Sergeant Brown. Detective Madison. What can I do for you? Please sit.”
This was a man who was used to dealing with the police, and Madison realized that he probably thought they were there because of a case he was working on.
“Mr. Quinn, is James Sinclair an associate in this firm?” Brown asked.
Quinn sat back in his chair. “He’s been a partner for the last four years.”
“How long have you known him?”
“What is this about?”
“I’m sorry,” Brown said. “I have some very bad news.”
Quinn pulled himself back.
“There is no good way to say this. James Sinclair was found dead this morning in his home. Murdered. His family . . .” Brown paused. “His wife and children, too.”
“Annie . . . and the boys?”
“Yes.”
“What—what happened?”
“An intruder. We think sometime on Saturday night.”
Nathan Quinn leaned his elbows on his desk and rested his brow on his hands. For maybe a minute the only sound was the clicking of a computer keyboard somewhere nearby. When his gaze finally rose to meet theirs, he spoke again, his voice steady. “Where are they now?”
“If you think you’re up to it, we’d like you to make a formal identification at the coroner’s.”
“I understand.”
“There are some questions we need to ask you—to ask the people who worked with Mr. Sinclair.”
“Whatever I can do.” Quinn hesitated. “How did they—”
“We’ll know more later on,” Brown said, avoiding the word postmortem.
“Was it a burglary?”
“You said you had questions you’d like to ask me . . . ?”
“We’d like to get a clear picture of the family. You knew them well?”
“Yes, very.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“I saw James in the office on Friday. He left at about five, five thirty. I left a little after he did.”
“Did you notice anything strange, anything unusual in his behavior in the last few weeks? Did he seem worried or concerned about anything?”
“No. Everything was normal.”
“How well did you know Mrs. Sinclair?”
“As I said, quite well.”
“Did you also meet the Sinclairs outside of work?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did you visit their home?”
“Yes.”
“As far as you know, did they have any enemies, someone who might want to do them harm?”
“Absolutely not. James is a tax lawyer, and Annie teaches in primary school. They are—they were—decent and kind and generous. They had no enemies.”
“Nobody from an old case?”
“No.”
“You understand, Mr. Quinn, there are some personal questions we have to ask, as well.”
“Go ahead.”
“To your knowledge, were either James or Anne Sinclair having an affair, or were they engaged in any illegal activities?”
“No,” Quinn said.
“Would you know if they had been?” Brown asked gently.
Quinn’s eyes held Brown’s for a moment. He would tell the police things to help them do their job, Madison saw that in him, but Nathan Quinn would not unfold the lives of his friends and lay them open for strangers to take apart.
“They were law-abiding citizens and devoted to each other.”
“I think that’s it, for the moment, except for the formal ID. Can we drive you to the morgue?” Brown said, standing up. Madison followed suit.
Quinn stood with them. “I’ll drive myself. Did—did the neighbors see or hear anything?”
“We’re still canvassing.”
“Any signs of forced entry?”
“Not obvious ones, no, but we’re still working the scene.”
Quinn rubbed his temples with his index fingers. “Sergeant Brown, the number of murders in Seattle last year was twenty, the year before that, nineteen. Compared to other metropolitan areas, it’s a pretty safe place, and your department’s clearance rate is high. This was not a burglary.” Quinn looked from one to the other of them, taking measure of them as they had done of him. “I will meet you at the coroner’s office in half an hour,” he said. “I have to call Annie’s sister in Chicago.”
“Of course.”
As the doors of the elevator closed in front of them, Madison saw several people gather around Quinn and the expressions on their faces as he told them the grim news. The dumb animal shock, the pain.
Back in the car, they checked the radio and found there was a message from Mary Kay Joyce. They were patched through, and Joyce’s voice crackled on the line; she was calling from the unit van.
“We’ve found two halves of a torn check for $25,000. One half was in the study, the other in the kitchen bin. Do you receive clearly?”
“Yes, go ahead,” Madison said.
“The signature is only half written; it stops in the middle, but it’s very clear. The name is John Cameron. J-O-H-N C-A-M-E-R-O-N. You got that?”
“I got it.” Madison looked up from her jotting. For a moment she heard only the static of the radio and the rain on the windshield.
“I’ve called in Payne,” Joyce continued. “It’s his day off, and he was pretty pissed off. There are dozens of items to go through, but I’ll put the check on the top of the pile.”
Bob Payne was the top man in Latents. Whoever had touched the slip of paper, he would find out.
Brown was not an expansive man, but Madison liked how he wore his thoughts close to the chest. He wound down the window and took a couple of breaths, as if the air in the car had suddenly turned foul.
“What do you know about John Cameron?” he asked her.
Madison had heard many things over the years—hard facts bulked up by speculation, hearsay, and myth.
“I know about the Nostromo,” she replied.
“Then you know enough. If he is in any way involved in this thing, this piece of evidence might be gold.”
“What do you mean?”
“He left five dead on the Nostromo. Two cops, three ex-cons. He slit their throats and let them bleed out.”
“I remember.” Madison had been barely out of the Academy, and the case had been headline news for weeks. The boat and its grisly cargo had been found in the waters near Orcas Island. They had never managed to get all the blood off the deck—the wood had been black with it. Nobody had ever been charged with the murders.
“We had nothing. No evidence, no eyewitness, no case. Snitches were afraid to even mention his name. But it was him, all right.”
Madison remembered the pictures in the papers: standard department portraits for the cops, mug shots for the ex-cons.
Brown drove toward the morgue. “Two years later we had the body of a known drug dealer bobbing up in Lake Union. His hands had been cut off, his eyes were missing, and he had been almost completely decapitated. A reliable informant said it was Cameron’s work, and we had a stampede of dealers leaving town. Next thing, the informant said he’d changed his mind, and we were left with nothing.”
“How does someone like John Cameron know the Sinclairs? What’s the connection?” Madison said. “Sinclair was an attorney. A tax attorney. Very white-collar, very safe.”
“Remember that we don’t know for sure that it’s our John Cameron. It could just be the same name.”
“Maybe. Is there a file on him? Was he ever arrested?”
“We never got that close. But he was printed once, drunk driving, when he was a kid. After that, nothing. The only reason we have his prints today is that he had a couple of cold ones when he was eighteen.”
“Then we also have a picture.”
“For what it’s worth, a twenty-year-old picture.”
“We can get it computer-altered. See what he might look like today. And show it to the Sinclairs’ neighbors.”
“Once we mention Cameron’s name, all hell will break loose. We need a definite link between him and the Sinclairs.”
“Let me get started on it. We need his file and prints. I’ll catch up with you at the morgue.”
“Madison, be discreet.”
Brown had to stop in traffic, but they were near enough to the precinct that Madison got out and waded into the crowd.
In the building that temporarily housed the office of the Medical Examiner and the Crime Lab, technicians came and went about their business. Sergeant Brown waited in the hall. Nathan Quinn was a difficult man to read, and Brown wanted to see how he would carry himself through the ordeal of the identification. He hoped he would learn something about the kind of man Quinn was and maybe one day that knowledge would be a resource they could count on.
When the moment came Nathan Quinn stood by the viewing window. Brown knocked on the glass, and the blinds revealed the four slain bodies. Quinn looked from face to face, then turned and nodded once.
In the parking lot, he sat in his car for a few minutes, then drove off at high speed. Brown looked at the space where the car had been and thought how Quinn’s right hand had been shaking, and he had put it in the pocket of his coat.
Once inside, Brown got a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor and downed some Vitamin C with it. He cleared his mind, took out his notepad, and walked into the sanitized chill of the autopsy room.