6:30 a.m. The offices of Quinn, Locke were still deserted. Nathan Quinn closed the door behind him and Tod Hollis. From a filing cabinet he pulled out a clear plastic envelope and passed it to Hollis. The envelope contained the anonymous notes.
Hollis wore a heavy coat with a black turtleneck underneath. He took the envelope and looked at it for a few seconds.
“Coffee?” Quinn asked.
“Thanks.”
Quinn left him in his office and went to the kitchen. From a box he took out a paper filter, shook some fresh coffee into it, and turned on the machine.
He knew Hollis would tell him to go to the police with the notes, that they’d have the resources to examine them quickly for prints and run a check on the paper. He would recommend they call the detective in charge and give them to him specifically. It made perfect sense, of course. Except Quinn was not ready to do that yet, not until he knew what the writer wanted.
Hollis would not be happy about it, but there was little he could do to change his mind: it all came down to a choice Quinn had made years before, for a time he had hoped would never come. Judge Martin would be waiting for him in a few hours, and everything else was nonsense. The coffee started to drip.
Quinn’s reward had brought in more than a hundred calls in twenty-four hours. All of them had been screened and logged, and none had had anything to add to the investigation.
Madison flipped through the sheets of calls while Brown was on the phone: a SWAT team was on standby to back them up if they got an address, telephone records could be accessed in minutes, and Crime Scene Unit officers had been warned of a possible quick-response situation. Depending on the outcome of the hearing, there might or might not be a press conference, in which the picture of John Cameron would be made public. The one thing Fred Tully did not already have.
“We never did understand why he retied the knot,” she said.
Brown looked up.
“The ligature,” she continued. “Cameron replaced the ligature around James Sinclair’s wrists. We found the hairs, but we still don’t know why he did it.”
“Do we need to know?”
Do we need to know?
“Quinn is going to blow a hole right through anything we’re unsure of,” she said.
Brown stood up, closed the door between them and the squad room, and sat back down.
“Okay, what do you need to know?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. We have four bodies, a motive, a suspect. We have physical evidence. What else do you need to know?”
“Everything,” she replied without hesitation. “If something happened, I want to know why. If it didn’t, why didn’t it?”
“Cameron does exactly what he needs to do. No more, no less. The murder of Erroll Sanders fits that principle. The murders of the Sinclairs do not.”
“Sometimes people break their own patterns—it depends on circumstance. With James Sinclair, the punishment was Cameron’s priority. It’s possible that killing him was entirely secondary, and knowing that his family was being slaughtered was more important than Sinclair’s own death.”
“Tell me this: why does it matter to you so much to know why the ligature was tied twice? Forget about the case in court, and tell me why we should be asking that question.”
“You know why.”
“You tell me.”
“It’s about behavior. The ligature is one tiny part of it. Like the prints on the glass.”
“What about the prints?”
“When we got the call that Payne had matched the prints to Cameron’s, you looked like that was bad news. I asked you why, and you said—”
“I was surprised.”
“You were disappointed.”
“Maybe you’re worrying too much about the small stuff.”
Madison leaned forward. “The glass the prints were recovered from was by the sink in the kitchen. I saw it before the CSU officer collected it: it was standing right next to a can of Coke.”
“Okay.”
“They did not recover any prints from the can. Why is that? Cameron, wearing gloves, pours himself a drink. Then he takes off the gloves, picks up the glass, and drinks from it. It’s sloppy, and he is anything but. There is no small stuff here.”
They regarded each other for a moment. It was the first time she had even half raised her voice with Brown.
“Why did you join Homicide?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not for the money, and I’m pretty certain it’s not for the glory.”
“Why are you asking me now and not five weeks ago?”
“If I’d asked you then, I wouldn’t have had any context in which to put your answer. Now I’ve seen you work. Why Homicide?”
Madison realized she had been waiting for him to ask her since they had first met. She heard herself say: “It’s the only place I wanted to be.”
He nodded slightly. Someday he might ask her again.
The press surrounded the courthouse. Brown, Madison, Kelly, and Rosario had to push through bodies, microphones, and cameras. Flashes went off, and nobody missed the significance of the primary detective on the Sanders case being present at a hearing for the Blue Ridge murders. For the occasion Kelly wore his court suit.
It was going to be Sarah Klein’s show. Away from the noise of the crowd outside, the courthouse was quiet, and people went about their business, this hearing only one of dozens.
Tony Rosario was still pale from his recent illness; then again, drained pallor might have been his natural state. It didn’t help that he was wearing a suit, shirt, and tie combination in shades of gray.
“Do me a favor and don’t lean against the wall; I’m afraid I’m gonna lose ya,” Kelly said.
“Gray is my signature color,” Rosario replied.
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out. Klein turned to them, her voice low.
“If you want to tell me anything during the hearing, write it on a piece of paper, and only if it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Can you ask him anything about the Sanders situation?” Kelly felt involved but only marginally. They had Cameron’s print on the underside of Sanders’s car, but it wasn’t enough even for a search warrant of Cameron’s residence. Not that a search had done Brown and Madison much good.
“No, it has nothing to do with this. I have to stick to whatever passed between Quinn and Cameron when they first met to discuss the murders. Anything after that is privileged. You’re a tourist, Detective Kelly—just enjoy the ride.” Klein walked into the courtroom, and they followed.
Madison had been in court a number of times, both as a witness and as a spectator. She had seen some juries get it right after the prosecutors did their worst and others get it wrong after they had done their best. She believed in the system because it was what they had and it was meant to change and develop as human beings did, in their wisdom and their flaws. She took a seat in the pew behind the prosecutor’s table; Brown sat down next to her, Kelly and Rosario behind them.
Brown took his glasses from their case and put them on. He was glad the hearing was closed to the public. Everybody wanted something out of it, and though his expectations might not be the same as everyone else’s, he knew he wouldn’t be disappointed. The night before he had spent an hour on the phone with Fred Kamen. He looked at Madison and hoped that by the end of this long day he’d be able to tell her about it.
Nathan Quinn took his place at the other table. He was representing himself, as Madison had imagined he would. He was alone, and if anything about the proceedings was troubling him, it didn’t show.
“Sarah,” he said.
“Nathan.” She nodded back to him.
The rest of them did not exist.
Judge Martin took her place on the bench, and Nathan Quinn was sworn in.
“Swift and to the point, Miss Klein,” the judge said. “There is no jury to impress, and we all know why we’re here. Mr. Quinn, you’re under oath now, and you know what that means.”
Quinn sat in the witness box, and Sarah Klein stood by her table.
“Mr. Quinn, would you please take us through the events that occurred last Monday from the moment Detective Sergeant Brown and Detective Madison came to your office and told you about the murder of James Sinclair and his family?”
“Detective Sergeant Brown told me that James Sinclair had been found dead in his house, with his wife and children. They had been murdered by an intruder. They asked me to identify the bodies, which I did.”
“What was the time frame?”
“By then it was early afternoon.”
“I called John Cameron.”
Klein looked up from the papers she was holding in her hands. It had taken them all of forty-five seconds to get there. Quinn held her eyes.
“For the record, who is John Cameron, and what is your relationship to him?”
“He is a friend and a client. I now represent him in legal matters, and we share a business interest in the property we inherited from our fathers. James Sinclair was part of it, too.”
“Why did you call Mr. Cameron after you left the office of the Medical Examiner?”
“I knew that reporters would be swarming the case, and I did not want him to find out that way. I thought I should tell him in person. I called his beeper number, and he called me back on my cell phone.”
The court stenographer finished tapping his keyboard, and there was a beat of silence. Something was wrong: Klein was getting what she wanted, and it shouldn’t have been that easy.
“Your Honor,” she began, “the purpose of this hearing is to make sure that Mr. Cameron—who, for the record, has an outstanding arrest warrant for four counts of murder—does not avail himself of the attorney-client privilege in order to escape capture.”
“We are very clear on that, Counselor,” Judge Martin replied.
“Mr. Quinn, how do you contact John Cameron when you need to?”
“As I said, I call his beeper, and he calls me back.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“The People request the number, Your Honor.”
“Are you going to object, Mr. Quinn?” Judge Martin asked him.
“No.”
Quinn gave them the number, and the stenographer took it down. So did the detectives. A beeper: Cameron had probably tossed it into the trash five seconds after Quinn told him about the hearing.
“When Mr. Cameron called you back, what did you say to him?”
“I told him it was an emergency and that we needed to meet straightaway.”
“Did you mention the nature of the emergency?”
“I did not.”
“Did he seem surprised?”
“He asked me what it was about, and I said I couldn’t tell him on the phone.”
“Right, the phone. Where did he call you back from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he have a cell phone?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is an old friend and a business partner, and you don’t know if he has a cell phone?”
Quinn turned to the judge. “The question was asked and answered, Your Honor.”
“Move on, Miss Klein,” she said.
“So, you called his beeper, and he called you back. How long did it take him to do so?”
“A minute, maybe.”
“Was he standing right next to a pay phone when you called him?”
“Possibly.”
“Miss Klein.”
The attorney half raised her hand in apology and moved on.
“You told him you couldn’t tell him on the phone. How did he react to that?”
“He just asked me where I wanted to meet.”
“Do you often have this kind of conversation when there are subjects you’d rather not deal with on the phone?”
“No.”
“In all your years as Mr. Cameron’s attorney—”
“Yes.”
Klein gave him a look.
“Who was it who brought up the location of your meeting?”
“I did.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him to meet me at my house.”
Klein’s only reaction was to lean back slightly against her table. Behind Madison, Kelly exhaled through his nose. Quinn’s house was a no-go: nothing to search, no witnesses to the meeting. It was the safest place Cameron could be.
“You didn’t go to him.”
“No.”
“Where was Mr. Cameron at the time of your call?”
“I don’t know.”
“He didn’t say?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Klein turned to Judge Martin. “I would like Mr. Quinn to be reminded that lying under oath is perjury, Your Honor.”
“You just have, Miss Klein. Do you know something we don’t?” Judge Martin asked her.
“No, Judge.”
“Then keep it moving. Mr. Quinn knows exactly what will happen to him if he lies in my courtroom.”
Klein nodded. “Did you go straight home after the identification?”
“Yes.”
“How long did it take you to get there?”
“About twenty-five minutes.”
“How long after your call did Cameron arrive at your house?”
“About an hour and a half later.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Quinn?”
“Seward Park.”
“So, it is reasonable to assume that wherever Mr. Cameron was at the time you called, he was within an hour and a half of Seward Park.”
“Yes. Then again, maybe he stopped for gas, he might have hit traffic—I don’t know.”
“Sure, that’s reasonable,” she said. “When he arrived at your house, what happened then?”
“Your Honor”—Quinn turned to the judge—“we are getting away from the communication initiated by me for a personal purpose and into privileged information.”
“We’re not quite there yet, Mr. Quinn. You may answer the question.”
“I told him about the murders,” he replied to the prosecutor.
“What was his reaction?”
“He was very upset.”
“Was he surprised?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say when you told him?”
“Nothing. There was nothing to say.”
“He said nothing at all?”
“He was in shock, and so was I.”
“Looking back on it, knowing what you know now about the evidence found in the house, was there anything off or untoward in his reaction?”
“No.”
“It was completely consistent with simple grief?”
“Your Honor—” Quinn’s eyes stayed on Klein.
“Asked and answered, Miss Klein.”
“Mr. Quinn, when John Cameron arrived at your house, did you notice what vehicle he was driving?”
“Your Honor—”
“A car is a car, Mr. Quinn, not privileged communication.”
Quinn turned to Brown and Madison. “He was driving a black Ford Explorer.”
Madison returned his look. They both knew that by now the vehicle would be sitting with the beeper in a remote ditch. However, even if that were so, it would have been driven there, and someone might have seen it.
“Is that the vehicle he usually drives?”
“I don’t tend to notice cars.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt that. I doubt there’s anything much you don’t notice, Mr. Quinn. Would it surprise you if I told you that DMV has a black Ford pickup registered to John Cameron?”
“No. He used to drive one a while ago.”
“Do you know what happened to it?”
“Let’s go back to the meeting at your house. What happened after you told him about the murders?”
“We spoke for a while, and then he left.”
“What did you speak about?”
“Your Honor—”
“Sorry, Miss Klein. Out of bounds.”
Klein nodded. “Would you describe Mr. Cameron’s appearance at the time you met?”
“His appearance?”
“Yes. Let’s start with his clothes—”
“Miss Klein,” Judge Martin interrupted her. “Is this relevant?”
“Your Honor, I understand that there are boundaries I am not supposed to cross, but in view of the seriousness of the case and the consequences of Mr. Cameron’s ongoing freedom, I am trying to gain as much information as possible within my power. I don’t need to remind the court that Mr. Cameron is also being sought in conjunction with the murder of Erroll Sanders—”
“I don’t believe there is a warrant out for the Sanders case, so you might as well not go there. I’m giving you a little latitude on the question of appearance.”
“That’s all I ask.”
“That’s all you have.” The judge motioned with her hand to continue.
“What was he wearing?”
“A black jacket with a fleece lining and moleskin pants—dark green, as I recall.”
From a file Sarah Klein took out the picture Records had altered.
“This picture was created working from an old arrest. How close is it to his appearance now?”
Quinn looked at it for five seconds. “It’s a reasonable likeness.”
Klein put it away. “As far as you know, does John Cameron own any weapons?”
Judge Martin was waiting for him to object.
Nathan Quinn thought about one night when they had been playing poker. He had dropped a chip under the table, and as he was retrieving it, he had noticed something around Jack’s ankle. It was dark; he didn’t see it clearly.
“No, not that I know of.”
“Counselor.” Judge Martin turned to Sarah Klein. “I feel you have exhausted the subject dealt with in the subpoena. Do you have any more questions?”
“Many, Your Honor. Unfortunately, not within these terms. We’re done for now.”
“Thank you. Mr. Quinn. You are free to go.”
Just like that, it was over.
Judge Martin left the courtroom, and the stenographer left after her. Only the prosecutor, Quinn, and the detectives were standing around.
“You thought fast last Monday, didn’t you, Nathan?” Sarah Klein said. “You might have been in shock, but you registered really quickly that sooner or later somebody would be asking you questions. You do not go to Cameron’s location, because someone might ask where he was, and you might have to answer. You make sure you don’t have his phone number, because someone might ask for it, and you might have to give it up. You have been so careful all these years, and still, here you are. This is not a drunk driving charge; you don’t fix this.”
Nathan Quinn started to leave. “You know, everybody in this room will get their fifteen minutes of fame if you collar my client, but that’s all you’ll get. You’re looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. Call me when you get your head out of the clouds.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Sarah Klein said.
Madison was disappointed. They had Quinn sworn in, and they were coming away with very little to show for it. They would work the car angle, sure, and check into the beeper thing, but those were crumbs. Quinn had been prepared for it all the second he had left the morgue; everything he did after that was a moat around his number one client. It took a pretty cold heart to get into that mind-set right after he had formally identified the bodies of his friends and their children. But that’s what he did for a living, Madison told herself, and that’s why he was good at it.
They left the courthouse from a back exit. It was time to get the media into the game, and John Cameron’s face was about to go platinum.
They drove toward the station house. Brown had alerted Lieutenant Fynn of the outcome of the hearing, and he was setting the wheels in motion.
“When Quinn identified the bodies, what was he like?” Madison asked Brown as they dove in and out of the lunchtime traffic.
“He was upset.”
“That’s what I would have expected. How could he not be?” Madison had to ask the next question. “Do you think he lied?”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
“Are you asking me if Quinn perjured himself?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think so. He gave us everything we wanted, only it turns out it’s not what we needed.”
“That’s what I’m thinking: he gave us everything because there was nothing there that could really hurt anyone.”
“Something bothering you?”
“Yes and no. I don’t think he lied, but, why go through all the trouble of being subpoenaed when he could have just told Klein in Judge Martin’s chambers? It’s a waste of energy, and Quinn doesn’t seem the wasteful type. He was all set with the right answers; he could have just given us the car and the beeper up front, and that would be that.”
“You think he held back?” he asked her.
“No. If he was caught in a straight lie, it would be a disaster. Klein asked him what he did after the identification, and he said he called Cameron. She asked him why, and he said to arrange a meeting . . .”
The first time they had met, Madison had seen Nathan Quinn deal with tragedy. He had kept his head and asked the right questions; his emotions had been well in check. They had left him to talk to Annie Sinclair’s family in Chicago and to his colleagues, and then he had met Brown at the Medical Examiner’s office.
Between the time they left him and when he had seen the bodies, something had shifted. Madison remembered he had questioned them about the burglary theory, but Quinn had not believed for one second that the murders were not premeditated. He was familiar with Seattle crime statistics, and if she had been in his place, she would have drawn the same conclusions: the Sinclair family had been targeted for execution.
“You want to stop for coffee?” Brown’s voice interrupted her train of thought.
“No, I’m good.”
The execution had been flawless except for one thing: evidence had been left at the scene. Evidence Nathan Quinn knew nothing about at the time he made his identification. In spite of that, he saw his friends’ dead bodies and made the connection with John Cameron—that somehow, somewhere, the whole big mess would come knocking at his door. The rest was just damage control.
Sometime in the past few minutes Brown must have switched on the car radio, because it was now droning on with world news.
The point that Madison seemed to get stuck on was that Quinn had wanted to give Cameron the news in person, that he could imagine what it would be like for him to hear about it between jingles and sports chat. At that moment, Quinn was acting as a friend, not as an attorney. Madison was sure he had not lied about that.
So at some point there had been a switch, and the legal counsel had taken over. Madison closed her eyes. There are some things you just shouldn’t say on the phone. She remembered the time in college when Rachel’s mother had called Alice because she couldn’t find her daughter, whose father had been in a car accident and was in intensive care.
Madison had called all their common friends. They did not have cell phones then, and after one hour of searching for Rachel, she had tracked her to Neal Abramowicz’s place, the guy who years later would become her husband. Madison remembered very clearly what she had said to Rachel: “I’m coming to pick you up; tell me how to get there.”
Christmas lights blurred in the rain behind the windshield wipers. Madison sat up. There it was: Quinn’s one moment of weakness that could have cost John Cameron his freedom. Quinn had come out of the morgue and called him straightaway. “I’m coming to see you right now; tell me how to get there,” he had said. And Cameron did. As he was driving to him, Quinn realized he was leaving deniability behind, and he called Cameron back and told him to meet him at his own house.
All he had to do then was hope that the question would never come up, but if it did—as it had, because Klein was not born yesterday—Quinn would fight for attorney-client privilege every step of the way, even get subpoenaed for it.
Once he got them all believing that they were fighting for every answer, he would give them the “safe” version, and they would think they had scored a victory and come away with bupkes.
Klein had not asked how many times they had spoken, and Quinn had not lied. The first time, he had called with his heart; the second, with the chilling knowledge that he might be talking to a murderer.
The news had turned to the weather: a cold front was going to hit the city in the next forty-eight hours, and a hell of sleet and snow was about to be unleashed over Seattle.
No surprise there, Madison thought.
They stood in Lieutenant Fynn’s office. He was too mad to sit down at his desk and was leaning against the back wall. Brown and Madison stood next to the door and left the middle of the room to Sarah Klein, who was pacing it for all it was worth. Judge Martin’s voice crackled through the speakerphone.
“I thought we had an understanding when we spoke in my chambers. The circumstances were extraordinary.”
“Your Honor, he is still under oath.”
“Did he perjure himself?”
“Not exactly.”
“Don’t get cute. Yes or no?”
“No, but—”
“Do you have any new evidence not in your possession two hours ago?”
Klein looked at Madison. What they had was best described as a hunch.
“No, Your Honor. If I may, I’d like to explain our concerns regarding Mr. Quinn’s testimony.”
“Miss Klein, if you asked the wrong questions, that is entirely your problem; you don’t get two bites at the apple. Now, let’s be done with this, and find me someone to indict for real.”
Judge Martin hung up, and the line went dead. Fynn turned the speakerphone off.
“That went well,” he said after a beat, taking his coat off the rack. “I’m going to the briefing now: get me a license plate for the Explorer by end of shift, or leave town.”
He opened the door, and the squad room fell silent. He ignored everyone and left.
“I’m sorry,” Klein said.
“Shit happens,” Brown replied. “Let’s get over it and move on.”
Madison picked up the receiver and dialed Cameron’s beeper number. It connected, but there was no message, just an open line and a beep.
John Cameron was now officially a fugitive, and as such he had just made the Ten Most Wanted list—before him a man who had shot his parole officer dead, after him a serial rapist who operated in the towns along I-5. The briefing went as predicted: the media lapped it up, and the evening papers changed their front page. A hotline was already in place for any tips from the public, as well as Quinn’s reward, which had been intended for information that would lead to the arrest of the killer, not specifically Cameron. A subtle difference there, Madison thought, that might escape the general public.
A sandwich still in its wrapper sat on a corner of Madison’s desk. She had been online for a while, tapping quietly and making notes.
Once the initial rush of understanding how Quinn had played them was gone, failure was a heavy knot deep in her chest.
“Do you know how many Ford Explorers are registered in the State of Washington?” she asked Brown without taking her eyes off the screen.
He had just put the phone down. In the first forty-five minutes after they had posted Cameron’s picture, the hotline had received seventy-five calls. The good ones were starting to trickle through.
Brown knew the place where Madison was standing very well indeed; he had been there himself a number of times. Some of those times had had consequences.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You made the right connections.”
“Sure, razor-sharp me. If I had been ten minutes earlier on that train, right now we’d be searching his real location.”
“Maybe, and if the Sinclairs had a dog, they might be alive today.”
Madison turned to face him. Sometimes she did not like him all that much.
“You don’t have time to be sorry. The difference with Quinn is that now we know, and that is a good thing,” he said. “How many?”
“What?”
“Explorers.”
“One hundred and six thousand,” she replied flatly.
“Okay.”
“We can eliminate all those in colors other than black, those registered to women or men other than Caucasian or older than, say, fifty.”
“We’ll take it from there. Quinn was told about the hearing yesterday morning, so Cameron might have dumped it in the last twenty-four hours. You have a car you want to get rid of, somewhere it’s not going to attract attention and nobody’s going to come looking for the owner. Somewhere a car is expected to be sitting unused for a while.”
“Long-term parking.”
“We’ll check downtown and the airport first.”
Calls were made, and a good number of people whose job was to sit in a booth and watch the world go by had to get up fast and reluctantly join in the general rush.
A couple of hours later, Dunne put his head around the door.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Madison replied.
They had wheeled a small television with a video player into the room, and Madison sat at her desk, flanked by a tall pile of tapes. Something played on the monitor, a black-and-white shot that didn’t seem to change. Madison stared at it.
“What’s up?”
“Security tapes from Sea-Tac. I’m going backward from the most recent to—I don’t know—as far as the pile goes.”
Dunne picked up a copy of Cameron’s photograph from her desk and looked at the screen. In it, people were coming and going, with and without bags and cases, some with hats, some with hats and scarves.
“You think you can see him in the middle of all that?”
“I might. Thing is, I’m actually hoping I don’t. If he managed to get a plane out, it will be ten times more difficult to get him back.”
“You’re looking for someone, but you hope not to find him.”
“Pretty much.”
Madison kept her eyes on the screen. When there was no one in the frame, she would fast-forward it until there was someone walking past.
“Sounds like fun,” Dunne said.
“You bet,” she replied.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked her.
“I’ll be sitting right here with a turkey sandwich in one hand and the remote in the other. How about you?”
“I’m going to see my folks in Portland.”
Madison pressed the Fast-Forward button, stopped, and pressed it again.
“You’re going to miss the big snow,” she said absentmindedly.
“In any way I can,” he replied. “Where’s the sarge?”
Brown was not at his desk.
“Around.” She looked up. “He’s checking out some calls from the hotline.”
Madison stopped the video, stood up, and stretched. “What are you guys up to?”
“We’re going to get roped in the hotline, I think. Did you hear about OPR?”
“They managed to get Tully to admit that he had received the information from an anonymous source and that no money had changed hands.”
“They believe him?”
“If you take away the money, what else is there?”
“I know.”
Madison went back to the tapes. Nobody looked even remotely like the man they were after. Somehow that was a good thing.
Somewhere in the fourth hour, she began to see stories unfolding: the couple arguing, the guy who tried to jump the security queue, the kid who got lost. She also saw a woman who tried to steal another woman’s wallet and got caught, and a guy who lifted a briefcase, who didn’t.
It was sometime past the end of the shift and before the depths of night when Brown came in and put a pizza box on her desk. They each took a slice—it was olives and anchovies. Anchovies were something Brown and Madison had always been in agreement about.
Brown’s desk phone rang, and he picked up. He listened and then took down a number.
“Try this,” he said, and he passed Madison the piece of paper. “It’s a black Explorer—the sticker says it’s been in Sea-Tac long-term parking since yesterday afternoon at about 2:20 p.m.”
He saw her thoughts in her eyes. “It doesn’t mean he’s gone; he could have just left it there.”
“I hope so,” she said, and she went to work on her computer.
It took her two minutes to find that the owner of the car was one Mr. Roger Kay of Bellingham, a Caucasian male.
Brown stood behind her, looking at the screen. “Right age, right color. Doesn’t look anything like him.”
Roger Kay had limp brown hair and a face you instantly forgot. Both Brown and Madison leaned into the screen.
“The eyes are half closed, and the mouth looks different,” he said.
“The chin and the jawline are different, too. We can call the number we have for Mr. Kay, but if his car is in long-term parking, chances are he won’t be home.”
Madison dialed. It rang for a while, and nobody picked up.
“See if he’s got a record.”
It took her a minute.
“Nope,” she said. “No rap sheet.”
“Okay. What’s his home address?”
“It’s in Bellingham.”
Brown sat at his desk. “I’m going to keep a man on the Explorer while we get someone to check the residence.”
“I’ll get going on the warrant,” Madison said. Judge Martin was off the clock, but Judge Kramer, also known as Dial-a-Warrant, was on call. Lucky for them.
Twenty minutes later Brown’s phone rang. It was a uniformed officer from the Bellingham Police Department.
“I’m standing right in front of the address,” he said. “It’s an empty warehouse. Door’s been boarded up. Nobody lives here but rats.”
“Okay,” Brown said after he replaced the receiver. “You want to register your car to someone other than yourself, what do you do?”
“Fake driver’s license?”
“It’s too easy.”
Madison took another slice of pizza. “It’s just a few dozen dollars, a birth certificate, ID, and a couple of letters from the bank for proof of residence. To get a birth certificate, just check the records for a child death, find someone who would be your age now, and pay your dollars online. Way too easy.”
She tapped on her keyboard. “Let me try something,” she said.
“What?”
“Social Security Death Records. If Roger Kay is an assumed identity, and Cameron got it going through records of infant deaths—if, for whatever reason, the original death was registered—then it would turn up in there.”
“Why?”
“Say his parents were receiving benefits or something.”
“Lord, I hope they were.”
Madison waited for the answer to come back on the screen. The pizza was getting cold, and she wished she had a Coke to go with it. There was a beep.
“I got him. Roger Kay died when he was eight years old.”
“I’ll call the Crime Scene Unit,” Brown said, and within five minutes they were out and driving.
Two men in airport police uniforms paced up and down and stomped their feet to keep themselves warm. When Brown and Madison drove up, one of them came to their car and checked their badges while the other stayed with the Explorer.
Brown thanked them both and made sure they were glad they had helped out. “Either one of you touched it?” he asked without making a thing of it.
“I might have when I was looking to see if there was anything in view inside,” one of them replied.
“Okay, we’re going to have CSU here in a few minutes. Your prints will already be on record. Thanks for the heads-up.”
The men left.
Madison wore gloves and had a heavy-duty flashlight in her right hand. The car looked spotless on the outside. She got close and shone the beam of light around the seats. Brown did the same on the other side. They moved from the front to the back.
Madison crouched a little, cutting her light sideways. The beams crossed and parted as they checked the black-carpeted floor.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing.”
Brown turned off his flashlight.
“We don’t know it’s him yet,” he said to her quietly. “Not for absolutely sure.”
“It’s him,” Madison replied.
“That a hunch?”
“Yes. I’m on a roll today.” She kneeled by the back and shone her light on the underside.
The Crime Scene Unit van arrived, and Madison was pleased to see Amy Sorensen shrug into her jacket and snap her gloves on.
“Sorry I missed the scene on Monday,” Sorensen said as she joined them. “Had my appendix out, and they put me on forced bed rest. A waste of time, if you ask me. What have we got?”
Amy Sorensen was a striking five-foot-eleven redhead in her forties. Her father had been a cop, her husband was a cop, one of her two younger sisters was a detective in Vice, the other had just made plainclothes. The family was a legend in the department. She had a mind you could cut glass with and the dirtiest laugh in King County. Madison knew she could use both right now.
They briefed her quickly, and she went to work. Her partner was a junior officer Madison had seen around a few times. They set up a couple of strong lights and busied themselves around the Explorer.
“It’s been here since yesterday afternoon,” Sorensen said as she examined the concrete around the tires. “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to take a peek at what the inside has to offer, with minimal intrusion: I don’t want to disturb any trace evidence we might find. Then we’ll take it back and do things properly.”
Her partner called the truck that would move the Explorer off the lot while Sorensen got the driver’s door open in less than twenty seconds.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Brown said.
“Best in town,” she replied. She picked up a portable lantern and shone it around and above the seats.
“Smell it?” she asked them. “Wood polish and that flowery crap they put in Dustbusters.”
She checked the mirrors and under the steering wheel. She clicked the glove compartment open and peered in, the bright light reaching into every corner. It was empty.
She shook her head. “Okay, the longer it stays here, the bigger the chance it might get contaminated.”
“It’s a dump job,” Brown ventured.
“Oh, yes, and someone had a pretty good go at detailing it.”
“Too clean for trace evidence?” Madison asked.
Once the tow truck arrived, they maneuvered the Explorer onto it. After they drove off, Brown and Madison stood in the empty space where John Cameron had been only eighteen hours before. Without the lanterns, it had gone back to a chilly gloom.
“I want to check the hotline,” Madison said, tapping her cell phone.
“Wait,” Brown said. He was only a few feet away, his back to her, looking at the rough, uneven concrete. “There’s something I want to run by you.”
Madison put her phone away and sank her hands into her pockets. Brown examined the oil-stained surface.
“What is it?” Madison asked.
“What do you think we’ll get from the car?” Brown asked her.
Madison was getting used to his habit of leading her into a new thought by asking her a question about something entirely unrelated.
“Sorensen will find something—if there’s anything there to find. How much closer that will get us to Cameron, I don’t know, but everything counts. He doesn’t know that this identity is blown; he might use it again. Something is going to shake loose.”
“And the evidence will lead us to him,” he said.
“Sooner or later. The sooner the better.”
“We have four bodies in the morgue. Sanders makes five. We have a lot of how and what; we have almost zero why. Explain that.” He said it as if it was a mathematical issue. Brown seemed entirely unaware of the cold, the late hour, and the desolate place they were standing in.
Madison’s eyes felt gritty. “That’s what they told us at the Academy: you get a lot of one, you’ll get none of the other. Murphy’s Second Law. So, we have a possible motive for the Sinclairs but not for Sanders. We have evidence that Sinclair stole from Cameron but not why. Cameron left the drugs and the money in Sanders’s house but no trace evidence. We’ve got plenty of that at the Sinclairs’ but nothing to match it to with the Sanders scene.” Madison could see that was not what Brown had in mind.
“We need to stand back and see the whole picture.”
“He’s been two steps ahead of us all the way,” she retorted. “How much further back do we need to be?”
“Right now, how far are you prepared to go to find the man who killed those children?”
“As far as necessary. What exactly are you saying?”
“We’ll find him when we see what he sees.”
“For crying out loud!” Madison heard herself say, suddenly losing her brain-to-mouth filter. “Are you holding back on me? Because this Yoda-in-a-raincoat thing is not working.”
A beat of silence passed between them. Madison did not know what to say—she was as surprised as he was. Then, slowly, like some rare geological event, Brown smiled.
“I don’t know any more about this than you do,” he said quietly.
His phone rang: it was Fynn. As Brown briefed him, they got into the car. The people they needed to interview at Sea-Tac would be back with the morning shift.
Madison sat looking straight ahead, not knowing exactly what her next words should be. Brown drove fast toward the lab. After he ended his call, he was still smiling.
The night shift was going about its business and didn’t give Brown and Madison a second glance as they wandered down the quiet corridors, their “visitor” badges hanging on their coats.
The vending machine had drinks and snacks. The neon light above was unforgiving, and a wave of tiredness hit Madison like a load of bricks. She chose a can of Coke and hoped the caffeine would kick in before she fell asleep on her feet. She popped the top and drank and paced.
Brown drank from a bottle of water. Sorensen’s office door was open, on her desk a copy of the New York Times. He picked it up and sat on a bench in the corridor, adjusted his glasses, and started reading. After a couple of minutes of Madison’s pacing, he looked up.
“Will you sit down already?”
She obliged. He went back to the paper.
“What I said before . . .” she said.
“The Yoda thing,” he said crisply, still reading.
“Funny,” he said.
After that, they sat in silence for a while, Brown turning the pages from time to time and Madison leaning her head on the cool wall behind them, her eyes closed. It was past eleven when his phone rang, and they both knew there was just no way it was going to be good news.
It was a long call, and for most of it, he listened. Then it was done, and the only sound around them was the soft hum of the vending machine.
“That was Detective Finch, LAPD Homicide. They were called to a crime scene today—the house of a known dealer. Vice had him on their wish list for years, but nothing ever stuck. Anyway, they get there and find three bodies: the dealer and two bodyguards. Looked like an assassination. Good news for the civilized world, but they still have to work the case, so they look into friends and associates and check out who might want him gone.”
Brown paused.
“The guards died of blood loss from knife wounds to the neck, and the dealer was shot with his own gun. Shot through the right eye. The Los Angeles ME puts the time of death sometime on Tuesday. No prints. No witnesses. No trace evidence so far. But it turns out the guy had an associate in Seattle, name of Erroll Sanders.”
He let that sink in.
“And when they checked on him—”
“They’re looking at Cameron for it?” Madison said.
“They have nothing that links him to the dead men, except for Sanders and how the guards were killed. They’re going to e-mail Kelly the details of the blade for a comparison with the knife that cut Sanders.”
“It happened sometime on Tuesday,” Madison said.
“Yes.”
“That’s before Sanders was killed.”
Brown nodded. Madison thought about it for a moment. There must be a chronology to this mess. “Cameron is here on Saturday night—we have the Sinclairs’ time of death to confirm it. He waits for two days. He meets Quinn Monday afternoon. On Tuesday he’s in LA; he takes care of business there. In the early hours of Wednesday he’s back here for Sanders. He speaks with Quinn after the first hearing, and yesterday at 2:20 p.m. he drops the Explorer at the airport.”
“Busy week,” Brown said.
Sorensen emerged after a while. “We have the partial of a thumb from inside the trunk; it’s smudged as if a hand print got cleaned off. It might not be strong enough for court. The outside and underside are spotless. No surprise there.” She took a sip from a paper cup. “We have a couple of hairs from the backseat, but don’t get excited—they were shed, not pulled. So, no follicle and no DNA. Also from the backseat, a very small amount of fibers that could be cotton or wool, black. But, best of all, there was a drop of blood under the steering wheel. Could be a cut to the palm of the hand. We’re comparing it to the DNA from the Sinclair crime scene. Now, I beg you, go home.”
They walked out into the night, and Madison looked forward to her drive home, alone in her car, the music loud enough to go right through her bones.
Billy Rain had spent the rest of Wednesday in the garage, thinking about Tully’s article and George Pathune lying dead on the concrete floor of a prison laundry. More than actually thinking about it, he had been in a state of constant recall. It had come between his brain and his hands, and he had cut himself twice. Something that had never happened before. His brother-in-law had noticed.
“Don’t bleed on the seats,” he told him.
The day inched on, and at the end of his shift Billy left with the newspaper tightly folded in his coat pocket. He needed a bar where he knew no one and no one knew him. He found one off Fairview. A dim local enterprise one flick of the broom away from sawdust on the floor.
He finished his first beer, sitting in a corner booth, the paper untouched next to the bowl of peanuts. He ordered a second beer, took a sip, and opened the Star. He read Tully’s piece twice, feeling each time the same cold dread but getting through it nevertheless.
By the time he was starting on his third beer, he felt a little more in control. Enough to know that he needed to switch to ginger ale if he wanted to think straight.
He deliberately had not revisited that day since he’d been paroled; he had tried to leave the memory of it in his cell. No one knew, because he had never told. He had never needed to: the body of George Pathune had been added unofficially to the tally of a convict called Edward Morgan Rabineau who was already doing time for two counts of murder, and nobody was particularly surprised at his notching up a third.
Billy reflected briefly about the prison laundry on that day three years ago, and, if he had to be perfectly honest, he couldn’t say whether the person he had seen was Rabineau. He was familiar with the man, sure, but they had never spoken; they moved in different circles, and within the prison hierarchy they were about as far apart as they could be and still belong to the same species. With one major difference now: Rabineau was still in jail. Billy was sure of that.
Tully’s piece identified the prime suspect as someone called John Cameron. A name he had not heard in a long time and had seriously hoped not to hear again.
Billy drained his ginger ale. Something else he was pretty sure of was that no one named Cameron had been in jail at the time Pathune was killed. Which meant Tully might be wrong. It had nothing to do with Billy, of course—none of it had.
He ordered some food and ate watching the sports on TV. He went home to his one-room rental—he hadn’t sufficiently proven himself to go back and live with his family yet; he just had dinner with them a couple of times a week—and he watched television till he fell asleep in his chair.
By Thursday morning, the news of Nathan Quinn’s reward was in all the major papers.