Madison stood by the printer in the Communication Center and hoped that the quality of the picture the Photo Unit was sending would be good enough for the age alterations to be successful, if it came to that.
From the moment John Cameron’s name had been mentioned in the car, it had been in her head like a low-level buzzing she could not get rid of. Her mind flashed back to the blindfolded bodies on Blue Ridge.
Like hunters of old, Madison felt her own need to see the eyes of the enemy, to get a sense of him. She tried to remember the details of the Nostromo killings.
Little was known for sure about how the day went down. Every crook in every bar had a favorite version. Apparently the two cops, detectives from the LAPD, had had something nasty going on with the other three. Nobody knew how Cameron fit into that, but somehow he did, because the five men had decided that he would not be coming back from the trip.
It was a glorious day in August, the sun reflecting off the gleaming deck and a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea.
Whether he knew or not, when they started off, that they had decided to kill him, John Cameron did not run when he found out. The police recovered two 9mm Glocks and three revolvers near the bodies, all with a number of rounds spent, shell casings rolling with the swells. Yet no blood except for the dead men’s, no physical evidence that anybody else had ever been on the boat and no explanation of how he had left it.
A fisherman on the dock had seen six men get onto the Nostromo, but he could give no description. Some said Cameron drugged them, then killed them one by one; some said that he got them to shoot one another. The one known fact was that, in spite of all the ammunition spent, the men had each been killed by a single incised wound to the neck.
After that, John Cameron had disappeared. Very few even remembered what he looked like. For all you knew, the story went, he might be the guy at the end of the bar, the guy you’d just bitched with about the game.
The machine started to hum.
A couple of patrol officers she knew were walking toward her in the corridor; Madison tore out the sheet of paper with the name, stats, and picture emerging from the printer and, without looking at it, left the building and found her car in the parking lot.
Sitting in her car, she turned the sheet over and looked at John Cameron, alleged murderer of six. It was the picture of a boy, a teenager with a soft face and longish hair that would have been in style twenty years ago. The charge had been drunk driving, but he did not look under the influence. He looked somber, and Madison held his gaze. Five eleven, dark and dark, the only distinctive marks noted, the scars on his forearms and the back of his right hand. She put the photograph in an envelope with the set of fingerprints and drove off in the light rain to see James Sinclair and his family one last time.
In the four hours following the first item on television, the police switchboard received twenty-seven calls confessing to the murders: twenty-two men, five women, the closest in Spokane, the farthest in Miami. All had to be dealt with, and all had to be exonerated. It was a pointless task and a waste of man-hours, and everybody knew it would get a lot worse.
The Seattle Times had given the murders the front page: a pretty photograph of the house and what little had been made public; it kept speculation to a minimum.
The Washington Star ran the headline “Christmastime Slaughter” with a shot of Madison holding Andrew Riley by the elbow. It speculated on the nature of the murders and gratuitously mentioned a homicide that had taken place on Blue Ridge some years before, when a little girl had accidentally shot her neighbor.
Under the spitting weather, people walked to the newsstands and went online: gradually, as if a storm was about to hit the city, windows were checked, back doors were locked, and children were told they could not play outside.