Brown had three neat piles of paperwork on his desk, and he referred to them as he was talking on the phone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his tie still tightly knotted.
“No. Thought not. The blood work isn’t in yet.”
Madison came in the door with notebooks under her arm and a cardboard holder with two coffee cups in it. They had taken over the third interview room. Members of the public came up to talk to detectives from time to time, and the large open-plan room was an inappropriate location for their crime-scene photos.
Madison put a cup on the corner of Brown’s desk and took out the pad with her interview notes.
“Thank you,” Brown said. He put a hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Kamen.”
Fred Kamen was one of the bright lights of the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, the section once called Behavioral Science. He had taught one of Madison’s classes at the University of Chicago. It was at the time of the Goulden-McKee kidnapping, and she remembered that he would always leave with another agent at the end of the sessions and spend the rest of his waking hours trying to get the teenager back to his family. It had given a sense of urgency to the classes, and they had all felt somewhat involved. When the boy had been found safe and unharmed after four weeks, Madison and her classmates had cheered.
“Yes, I know. It will be posted on the hotline. Tomorrow. Bye.”
Brown adjusted the reading glasses on the bridge of his nose. On top of the piles of interviews lay four pictures, one for each victim as they had been found. On the windowsill, unread and untouched, was Brown’s copy of Moby-Dick. For a second there Madison saw him as a clerk in some unearthly office.
“It will take a few hours to get an answer from VICAP, but Kamen has never personally encountered this kind of staging before, and he doesn’t think cult, either. He doesn’t like the ‘thirteen days’ thing, though—there’s a timeline here we know nothing about.”
“Any news from Prints?”
“Nothing unusual. Payne called half an hour ago—they were done for the day. They found a whole load of the family’s, some of the maid’s, some small ones in the kids’ bedroom— friends, probably. But no Cameron.”
Madison was talking and typing. “If we did find any, a good attorney could argue he’d left them there on another occasion.” She stopped typing and looked up. “How many people know about the possible Cameron connection?”
“You, me, Fynn, Payne, Lauren, and Joyce.”
“I mean, what are the chances of this being just a coincidence, and the name on the check is actually a doctor in Tacoma whose taxes Sinclair was doing?”
“I’d say pretty close to zero.”
“I don’t remember any message left on the Nostromo or on the drug dealer’s body.”
“No, that’s a first.”
Madison went back to typing, the words coming out in a rush while her mind was somewhere else.
“You did good today,” Brown said.
She looked up, but Brown was holding a blood-spatter chart against the light and did not meet her eyes.
“This case, whatever is going to happen with it, we are going to build it from the ground up. Piece by piece. The check is only one brick. Don’t let that close off any other possibilities,” he continued.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, keep an open mind.”
“I intend to.”
“I know, but cases can have a momentum of their own. This one is likely to start running very soon.” He was still looking at the chart. “Don’t let that affect your judgment.”
Somebody else might have found his tone condescending; Madison thought it over for a second. He was trying to teach her something—every other consideration was irrelevant. She finished the paperwork and added it to Brown’s.
“First thing tomorrow we are going to dig up the Hoh River file,” he said. “If that’s how they once knew each other, that’s where we start.”
“I want to get going on that.” Madison put on her jacket. “I’m going to the library.”
Brown looked out the window. It was pitch-black.
“I have a friend,” she explained as she straightened a couple of pencils on her desk. “The papers must have run the story at the time. I’ll see what I can find.”
Madison, driving north toward Fourth Avenue, pulled in at an all-night grocery store and punched a number into her cell phone.
“Mr. Burton, it’s Alice Madison. Is it all right if I come by tonight?”
The store didn’t have much in the way of patisserie, but manners dictated that you didn’t go visiting empty-handed. She remembered her last visit and picked a rich chocolate cake. There was no traffic, and, for no reason at all, she drove past the library and down Sixth Avenue. The ninth floor of Stern Tower, the offices of Quinn, Locke, lay in shadow. She looked up, drove around the block, and then made a loop back to where she had come from. She parked only a few yards from the service entrance of the Public Library and pressed the buzzer lightly. The metal door sprang open almost immediately.
A few years before, Ernie Burton’s sixteen-year-old daughter had gotten herself into some minor police trouble. Madison had made the trouble go away, and that had bought her a lifetime all-hours pass at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. Burton was the head night guy, as they called him, and he had wasted no time extending privileges to her and making sure his colleagues did the same.
She found him and three others in the thick of a card game. They were all men who had come to security work after a life doing other jobs and who welcomed, as well as the salary, the opportunity to escape their retirement and their wives. Madison looked at the table for less than three seconds and knew who was winning, who was losing, and who was glad of the interruption.
“Look who’s here.”
“Jeez, Detective, I thought we’d never see you again. I was all heartbroken.”
“How’s your wife, Ronnie?” Madison asked with a smile.
“Still alive. You married yet?”
“What, give up the chance to come down here and flirt with you guys?”
They cut the cake and ate it with some terrible instant coffee.
“I know you’re here to do your work; we don’t want to be holding you up,” Ernie said.
“I’d better get going,” Madison agreed.
The four men went back to their card game, and Madison found her way through the familiar building.
When Burton had first given her the pass, it was the most he could do to repay a kindness; he couldn’t have imagined that in Madison’s eyes his gift far outweighed what she had done for him. It had taken her less than fifteen minutes to make things right with her boss and Social Services, in exchange for which she now had the keys to the toy store.
Most of the times she had come looking for something in particular, but after her grandfather passed on, she would drop by once a month or so and spend a couple of hours reading in the vast room, after midnight, until the cleaners turned up.
Madison stopped by the Humanities Department on the first floor to check on a file-card index the date on which the articles had appeared in the local papers. The reader-printers for the microfilm of the Newspapers Department were on the second floor, and it took her fifty minutes to get together what she had come for.
The story had been covered extensively, and she made photocopies of every single article. She organized the sheets roughly in chronological order, giving precedence to serious reporting over tabloid hacks. The large rectangular room was dimly lit; the sounds of the men playing cards downstairs didn’t reach that far. There was a sign by the librarians’ desk: No eating or drinking on the premises.
Shortly after 11:00 p.m. Madison sat at her usual table, took out of her bag a can of Coke and a yellow legal-size notepad, had a sip, and started reading. The Times was the first: an unemotional piece, economical with the gory details. She read it twice.
On August 28, 1985, three boys had been kidnapped while they were fishing in a wooded park in Ballard. Their names were David Quinn, 13; James Sinclair, 13; John Cameron, 12.
David Quinn.
Four men in a blue van had approached the boys at Jackson Pond. They used chloroform on rags, bundled them into the van, and left. There were no witnesses.
When the boys did not come home in the afternoon, the parents started to worry, and a search party was organized. Their bicycles were found at the bottom of the pond. The families started to panic. Relatives and friends searched every inch of the area surrounding Jackson Pond and knocked on every door of the neighborhood. Night came and brought no news. The boys had vanished.
At 5:30 a.m. on August 29, Carlton Gray was driving along the Upper Hoh Road. A boy, later identified as John Cameron, came out of the woods and almost got himself run over as he stopped the truck. The boy had difficulty explaining himself, but Gray could see that he was in a highly emotional state and wanted to lead him somewhere.
At that point Gray had noticed that the boy’s arms were covered in blood. The sleeves of his T-shirt had been repeatedly slashed. They walked in the woods for maybe fifteen minutes and then reached a clearing.
There, tied to a Sitka spruce, Carlton Gray found James Sinclair, alive but in shock. He freed the boy and took both children back to his truck, from which he radioed for help. The State Police and the paramedics arrived quickly. Mistakenly assuming that all three boys had been found safe, they had alerted the parents.
What had happened in the previous twenty-four hours was not completely clear. The authorities were able to gather the following facts: the children had been driven there, and each had been tied to a tree. Then things became confused: blindfolded, his friends had heard David Quinn gasp and choke. After a while, silence. A few minutes later the men had left and taken Quinn with them. The other two were abandoned in the forest.
David Quinn. Madison got up and went to the window. She finished her Coke and threw the can into the librarian’s recycling bin. She looked at her watch: Brown would want to know. She dialed his cell phone.
“The third boy. The one who died in the woods. It was Nathan Quinn’s younger brother.”
“I guess we have our link.”
“Yup.”
“You’re going home soon, right?”
“I’ll just finish up here.”
Madison wanted a strong cup of coffee really badly, but the stuff from the dispenser downstairs was like thin, bitter mud. Instead, she splashed her face with freezing-cold water and went back to her desk.
The Post-Intelligencer had run pretty much the same story as the Times. The sad conclusion for both was that there had been no discernible motive for the kidnapping, and no one had ever been held accountable.
The tabloids didn’t offer any further facts. However, they did have photographs. Madison held the page up to the lamp. School pictures, one for each of the boys. Her eyes went to John Cameron’s: he was the youngest and looked smaller than the others. James Sinclair was grinning, and David Quinn was wearing a Mariners shirt; his hair was fair and curly, and he had just combed it for the photograph.
Madison turned the pages. David Quinn was never found, but there was a picture of his family after the boy’s memorial service, no doubt the work of an enterprising photographer who had sneaked into the ceremony the way Andrew Riley had sneaked into the Sinclair crime scene.
It was an outrageous breach of their privacy in their most painful moment. It was a stunning picture.
Black and white; it must have been overcast that day, no shadows from anything or anybody. In the foreground a man and a woman wearing black, surrounded by family and friends, their faces stunned beyond grief. A close group of maybe fifty people, mostly adults, some children.
All the men wore yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcap worn during prayers. A man had put his hand on the father’s shoulder; he was saying something. Next to him the two surviving boys, John Cameron’s right arm in a sling. They looked lost. Standing by them, Nathan Quinn, a few years older, probably already in college. He was looking at his mother, raising his left hand as if to touch her.
A chill shook Madison as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, a wave of nausea and a sense of falling. She slapped the folder shut and left her palm on it.
She let a minute go by, just sitting in the gloomy silence, then gathered her things and left.
She turned the engine on in her car, and out of nowhere she smelled the sweet air of the day in March when her mother had been buried. There were cherry blossoms in the breeze. Madison wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. Her father had stood behind her, the weight of his hands on her shoulders.
She let the engine turn over and closed her eyes, waiting for the car to warm up.
It was always the same funeral, over and over. Madison had gone to cops’ memorials, men and women she barely knew, but it was her mother’s grave she would be standing by in dress uniform while the flag was being folded.
Her grandparents had arrived in Friday Harbor that morning, and they would leave shortly after the service. She hadn’t seen them in years. In their anguish they kept looking at this young girl who was so much like their dead daughter yet was a stranger to them.
Five months later, Alice woke up in the middle of the night. Her Mickey Mouse clock read 2:15 a.m., and the full moon shone in her open window. Her room looked neat in the pale light, the efforts of a twelve-year-old girl who had a stack of school counselors’ telephone numbers and bereavement support groups’ notices pinned to her bulletin board and had not talked to any of them.
Alice made her own lunches and got good grades. She’s a fighter, her class teacher had said. She’ll pull through. So she covered her schoolbooks in plain brown paper and lined up her bunny slippers when she went to bed, and that somehow got her through the days; inside, though, she was drowning.
Alice heard the steps in the hall and knew it couldn’t be her dad, who wouldn’t be home till morning. She grabbed her baseball bat and waited, the adrenaline making her chest hurt.
When the intruder’s steps had receded down the hall and out of the house, her relief tasted like copper from a bite on her lip. She waited for a minute, then slid out of bed and peeked out the window to make sure the man had really left: way down the road, half in gloom, she saw him, walking fast and away from her. He passed under a street lamp, and, even at that distance, Alice knew it was her father. She dropped her baseball bat and stood there feeling stupid. Sugar! Why didn’t he turn the darn light on? She’d almost had a heart attack.
Turning the lights on as she went, Alice padded into the kitchen. Still unsettled and a little out of herself, she ran water from the tap and into a glass. As she was walking back, the door to her parents’ room—her father’s room—was ajar, and she saw that the top right-hand drawer of the dresser was sticking out a couple of inches. Her mother’s private drawer. They hardly ever opened it; it contained her mom’s jewelry box, and Alice allowed herself to hold her things only very rarely, every one of them a memory too sharp and sweet.
She stood by the dresser now, and everything in her soul told her to close the drawer and go back to bed. Nothing good could possibly come of it, that pinprick of doubt that would make her feel too guilty to look her father in the eye for days. She rested her forehead against the dresser; she had to look, and she knew it.
She pulled the drawer open and lifted the black velvet jewelry box; the small latch in the shape of a hook was undone. The inside was lined in red silk. Alice ran her fingers over the smooth fabric: her mother’s rings were gone, her pendant earrings, the necklace with the S-shaped clasp, and the diamond butterfly.
Alice did not know how much they were worth, but she knew they were gone, and her father had not turned on the lights. She stood there for a minute, then gently replaced the box where she had found it, went back to her bedroom, and picked up the baseball bat.
She had never felt such clarity before—it was dazzling. The first blow hit the bookshelf; she swung hard, and it came off the wall. The desk was next. Alice worked her way methodically around her room until her arm ached too much to lift the bat; by then she had cut herself on the glass from her mirror, and she was out of breath. Her father would be home before dawn. She picked her way carefully back to her bed and lay on top of it, still gripping the bat. She was going to close her eyes for just a moment, she would rest for just a second, and when he got home, she would make him take her to whoever had her mother’s things now. She fell asleep with the streaks of dry tears on her cheeks.
Her eyes snapped open, and the Mickey Mouse clock read 6:47 a.m. She looked around the room and shivered. Everything broken, everything torn. She slipped her bare feet into her sneakers and padded to the door, then opened it a little. She could hear her father’s deep breathing in his room.
He lay on his front under the sheets, his clothes in a pile by the bed. Alice knelt by the shirt and the jeans as she went through his pockets. She found $12 in small bills and a switchblade knife with an ivory handle she had not seen before. She put them back.
His breathing was slow and steady. She went back to the dresser and checked the jewelry box. For a moment, as her hand was reaching for it, she allowed herself to hope. Nothing happened this time, no tears, no rage, no pain. In the cold light of day she knew enough about the world to know that what had been lost would stay lost, and that was all there was to it. She sat in the wicker chair and watched her father’s back rise and fall. She sat and watched him until every good memory of him had drained away; it didn’t take long.
The tip of the handle of the switchblade knife stuck out of the jeans back pocket. Alice reached for it, and the blade came to life. She stood over her father. It seemed as if there was nothing at all between his back and the blade in her hand. She was empty, and the one thing that made any sense was that he should not draw another breath. Nothing else mattered much, not the brown paper on her schoolbooks or her solid grades. Let’s see the counselors get me out of this one, a thin, dark voice said inside her.
Then, like a gunshot, loud, the dog in the yard next door barked, twice, and Alice saw the room and herself in it, every detail so sharp, it felt drawn on her skin.
Her father would wake up late on a heavy August morning, the house empty and his daughter gone, the switchblade knife buried two inches deep into his bedside table.
One week later, when the state troopers found a little girl hitchhiking north of Anacortes, they were surprised that her father didn’t seem to be in a rush to get her back home. In fact, he looked downright relieved when her grandfather took her off his hands. “She looked like a nice kid,” one trooper said to the other afterward, “but you never know.”
Her grandparents watched her from the kitchen window as she sat for hours looking at the water and Vashon Island; they watched her on their quiet hikes up Mount Rainier.
“Let the girl be,” her grandfather said. “The only thing that matters is that she’s finally safe, and she knows it.”
Madison didn’t know whether she had adopted the city or the other way around; all she knew was that the dark woods around it had accepted her as their own. It didn’t bother the mountains and the rivers that she had almost killed her father—they granted her safe passage and whatever peace she would allow herself.
Madison put the file on the passenger seat and the engine into gear, and she drove home. The answering machine was flashing red. “Hey, Alice, it’s Marlene. You’re not ducking out of our reunion dinner this time. We should be celebrating your gold shield and that Judy made it out of Traffic, if you can believe it. Call me, before I put an APB out on you.”
Fifteen minutes later Madison was asleep on the sofa, wrapped in the white comforter from her bedroom, a half-eaten tuna sandwich on the coffee table and Some Like It Hot in the DVD player.