Nathan Quinn’s house in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle had been decorated with much care by its owner, who hardly spent any time in it and, in the last week, had been all but blind to the views of Mercer Island and Lake Washington.
In his study, on the mahogany table, sealed inside clear plastic envelopes, were the anonymous notes. Quinn expected a third note within the next forty-eight hours, and his guts told him it wouldn’t be a request for money.
This wasn’t blackmail: the first note had been delivered on Monday morning before the murders were public knowledge, before the case had come to rest at John Cameron’s feet. For reasons known only to himself, the killer had chosen to communicate with him, and Quinn believed that, once you know what someone wants, the thing they need above all else, anybody can be gotten to. Anybody can be dealt with.
The news on KIRO said that it was 9:00 a.m. Quinn checked his watch automatically—he’d been up for two hours, mostly talking on the phone with Tod Hollis. The private investigator had little to report since their last call the previous evening. The morning call was about the ambush on the detectives and what he had managed to gather from his police contacts.
Quinn had listened while Hollis told him about Detectives Brown and Madison. Footage of Northwest Hospital had been on each news cycle, and they even had a flash of Madison being driven away in a blue-and-white, her face misty through the glass. The same brand of evil that had visited his life had quite probably crossed theirs.
He sat at the kitchen table and continued reading the Los Angeles Times, a well-informed piece on the murder of a local drug dealer and his two bodyguards. Quinn scanned the story for what he knew he would find, and there it was, in the last paragraph—the name of his most reclusive client.
The telephone rang, and he picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Is this Nathan Quinn?”
An unknown voice.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“You’ll have my name when I give it to you.”
Quinn gently replaced the receiver in its cradle. He waited. Five seconds later the telephone rang again.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Who is this?”
A long silence, traffic in the distant background. A pay phone, Quinn thought; not on a street but nearby—in a restaurant, maybe.
“My name’s not important.” The attitude was gone. “You have a reward out for information about those murders.” It was a statement.
“This is not the right number to call. I can give you the right number.”
“I’m not going through the police—”
“They’re the ones screening the calls and doing the checks.”
“They also have a warrant out for your client’s arrest, and what I have they wouldn’t want, believe me.”
“What do you have?”
“Something that would help the case for the defense.”
“I’m listening.”
“We should meet. It’s not something I want to talk about on the phone.”
“You might want to give me something now, or we might not meet at all.”
“Okay, what if I can prove to you that the person who killed the family had killed before? What if I could tell you where and when?”
“That would be worth a conversation.”
“I want two things from you: first, your guarantee that my name will never be made known. Second, the minute the cops drop the charges on your guy, that’s cash in my hands. Are we clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Pier 52, the ferry to Bainbridge Island, today at three. Walk on, don’t bring your car. Be on the upper deck. I’ll find you.”
Quinn was about to confirm the instructions, but the line had gone dead.
He started to dial Cameron’s new beeper number, but his eyes fell on the LA Times, and he replaced the receiver. He had no idea where John was anymore; he only knew for certain where he’d been.
In downtown Seattle, Billy Rain, standing next to a pay phone, shivered in the pale morning.
Nathan Quinn paced around in the house for a few hours, found nothing that would hold his attention for more than fifteen seconds, and went to the office. He parked his car in the underground garage and took the elevator to the ninth floor. When he came out, he gave a brief wave to the security guard on the first floor who had picked up his movements on the security cameras.
The offices were deserted. He deactivated the alarm and let himself in, turned the lights on, and headed for his office.
Carl Doyle had been doing a great job of keeping everything running smoothly in the past week. He had left a small stack of files on his desk for Quinn to look at. There was a world where those files mattered, and court dates, and judges’ decisions. Quinn sat down and flipped open the first one.
He worked his way through the pile, glad for the distraction but gladder still when it was time to go. He left the car in the garage and walked down Pike Street, then turned onto Second Avenue and left onto Seneca to the waterfront.
It was too cold to snow, the sky and the water the same shade of pewter.
He walked onto the ferry, unarmed and alone, knowing full well that he had probably already been noticed and was being followed. Fine with him—he hoped the man he was to meet knew what he was getting himself into.
He looked around: the ferry was vast, one of those that carried a couple of hundred cars and at least a couple of thousand passengers. Today, it was quiet. The journey to Bainbridge Island would take thirty-five minutes. By the time it started to move off the pier, Quinn had bought himself a tea and found an empty bench on the upper deck, by a window.
The air was warm with the scent of reheated food. There was an old couple a few benches down, a woman alone twenty feet to his left, and a family of four, small children running around. Quinn was sitting with his back to the wall; he sipped his tea and missed nothing.
He saw the tall man approach and read him like he would a prospective juror in a trial. Late thirties, maybe early forties, with fine lines around the eyes. He was wearing a red Gore-Tex jacket over jeans and work boots. Hair short, clean-shaven. The hands were too rough for a white-collar job, but there was a kind of grace about the man. He slid onto the bench across from Quinn, a table between them.
“Billy Rain,” he said.
“Nathan Quinn.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get this done.”
“Okay.”
Rain had baby-blue eyes; he looked out the window. His fingers drummed lightly on the table. His hands, Quinn noted, were scrupulously clean.
“We are clear my name is going to stay out of it.”
“And the other thing.”
“Mr. Rain, I wish nothing more than for you to be right about this.”
“I know I’m right. Three and a half years ago. Upstate.”
“McCoy.”
“I was doing three to five in the Bones.”
The Bones was what everybody called the McCoy State Prison. It probably started from some Star Trek fan enjoying a stretch of hard time, but nobody knew for sure.
“I saw something that was very . . .”—he hesitated—“similar to what happened to the family.” Billy Rain’s eyes moved quickly beyond Quinn’s shoulders.
“A guy got killed in the laundry. The man who did it left him tied up, hands at the front, blindfolded. And he drew . . .”—Billy Rain made the sign of a cross on his brow—“in blood.”
Nathan Quinn nodded. A prison killing.
“You were a witness.”
“I saw it. I was no more than ten feet away.”
Quinn could see where this was going. “But you didn’t tell anybody.”
Rain gave him a look. “Have you ever done time? Ever spent any time around cons on the inside?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll get back to your question when you have.”
“What happened after they found the body?”
“It ended up on the tab of a con called Edward Morgan Rabineau. He was doing life for two counts already. They pinned it on him—I don’t know what evidence they had. I didn’t see anything when I—when I walked past the body. Anyway. Thing is, Ted Rabineau is still inside. And my guess is, he always will be.”
Billy Rain wished Quinn would speak; there was something unnerving in the man’s silence.
“Let’s take a walk,” Quinn said, and he stood up. The rest of the conversation he’d rather have outside.
They turned up their collars and leaned on the railing. Bainbridge Island was approaching fast.
“Tell me as much as you remember about it,” he told Billy Rain, and Billy did.
It had been quick and to the point—no accident there. The man had come ready with a blindfold and a ligature for the man’s hands. That in itself was unusual: in prison, if you’re going to take someone down, you put a shiv between his shoulder blades or in the soft tissue under the sternum. Then you walk away.
“Who was the victim?”
“An arsonist called George Pathune, young guy. Had been inside maybe three months.”
“The man you saw with him was Rabineau?”
Billy Rain looked at the water. Time and time again in his mind he had tried to see the face of the man. It had been seconds, and fear had pretty much wiped out the details.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If my life depended on it, I still wouldn’t know. Maybe Rabineau was taller and heavier. Anyway, it’s not like he’s the kind of guy you would normally look at, you know what I mean? I’m not sure I’d recognize him today.”
“Sure you would.”
“Whatever.”
“Why would Rabineau want the guy dead?”
“I have no idea.”
“The man you saw was not Rabineau?”
“I don’t know. I know what the body looked like after he was done with it. If your client didn’t do it, and Rabineau didn’t do it, somebody else did.”
John Cameron had never seen the inside of a state prison, and Edward Morgan Rabineau had not seen the outside of one for many years. There was a trail there, at the very least a glimpse of one.
“Why didn’t you take this to the police?”
“They’d have ‘lost’ the call. They want your man so bad, they can taste it. I’m on parole, anyway; I don’t see them working hard on something I give them.”
“I see. What were you in for?”
Rain shrugged. “Which time?”
They were almost docking.
“You should know,” Rain said, “I’ve written an affidavit, and my attorney will receive it on Monday. Anything happens to me now, or you try to get out of our financial agreement, and he’ll deal with it.”
“You should know,” Quinn replied, “that I believe what you told me is the truth, but if I ever find out you lied to me for money or held back anything that might have helped, I’ll rip your life apart.”
Rain nodded. “As long as we know where we stand.”
“Absolutely.”
Billy Rain was glad to get off the ferry—his hands were shaking. Nathan Quinn watched the waves slapping against the hull. Now the summer’s in its prime with the flowers sweetly bloomin’.
Nathan Quinn went back inside, bought another tea, and sat on the same bench. A prison killing. It made sense: the details never would have made the papers. No one would have made a connection between that and the slaying of a family in a wealthy suburb.
The connections. Blindfolds and leather strips and blood on the pillows. Quinn drank the tea and wished he’d poured a measure of bourbon into it—a double measure.
Tod Hollis would work the prison angle: they needed as much as possible about George Pathune’s murder. The report of the investigation must still be in the prison’s records.
Quinn dialed Hollis’s number and told him about Billy Rain.
“I’m telling you right now, they’d rather cut off less useful parts of their own bodies than show us the records.”
“I know, but we need to get there. What chances have we got?”
“There’s a guy I can talk to, informally. He owes me one. Billy Rain—I’m going to look up his sheet. You think he was being straight?”
“I think that whatever he saw scared him enough that he wouldn’t have picked up the phone if money was not involved.”
“You think someone set up Rabineau.”
“Yes.”
“The same person who set up Cameron.”
For a beat all Hollis could hear was the open line and a voice on the ferry’s PA system.
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“Are you going to tell him about this?”
“Tod—”
“I read the papers—that’s all I’m saying.”
“I understand. You’ll let me know when you know, right?”
“Yes.”
They hung up.
There was a world of things Nathan Quinn and John Cameron had never talked about and never would. Those boundaries had been set a very long time ago. If in the last few years Quinn had truly believed that the rules had become unnecessary, this week three men in LA and one in Seattle could say otherwise. Still, it was time to throw away the book. He dialed a number on his cell phone, punched in a code, and hung up. Two minutes later, it rang.
“We need to talk,” he said.
It was after sunset by the time Quinn got home. He picked up his car at the office and drove back. He would forget for hours at a time, and then, out of the blue, he’d remember that Jimmy was dead, and Annie and John and David. All dead. Nothing more would ever happen for them. It was a kick in the stomach, and in those moments Nathan Quinn understood about rage and the God of the Old Testament. But that was not where he lived his life. His home was in a privileged neighborhood, and his work was done among rules, bound by law and protected by it. Still, the entire Sinclair family was gone, and no judge’s ruling could bring them back.
He unlocked the door and walked in, punched in the alarm code in the near darkness, and stepped into the kitchen. He put the bag of groceries on the table, took from it a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, and twisted the cap.
“Want to keep me company?” he asked.
“Thank you,” John Cameron replied.
The blinds were drawn, and the pool of light on the table was the only brightness in the room. Cameron sat on the leather settee in the corner. He wore a black turtleneck over dark brown pants, his hair was back to its natural color, and the goatee was gone.
Quinn poured two generous measures. Cameron stood to take one of the glasses, and, under the light, the scars on his hand glistened. Quinn didn’t usually notice them. Tonight, though, he saw them pale against his skin.
Quinn’s home had always been one of the few places in the world where Cameron would feel completely at ease. They sat down at the table, because that was where they had always come together, and their silence was comfortable.
“How was your day?” Cameron said, taking a sip.
Quinn smiled. Above the rim of the glass, Cameron’s eyes were a couple of shades darker than amber.
The last time they had sat at the table, Quinn had told him their friends had been murdered. They raised their glasses and drained them. Cameron poured another round.
“I have a witness to a homicide with very strong similarities,” Quinn said.
Cameron nodded slowly.
“McCoy State Prison. Three and a half years ago. They put it on a lifer who’s still inside, but the witness has doubts.”
“Ex-con?”
“Yes. He never reported it.”
“What’s his name?”
“Billy Rain.”
“Billy Rain.”
“You two ever met?”
“No, but I know of him.”
“He read about the reward and came forward. He thought, correctly, that I might act with more urgency than the police on this matter.”
“He’s not lying?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hollis is going to follow it up.”
“Hollis?”
“We’ll do what we have to.”
A beat between them.
“Tell me about the prison killing.”
Quinn told him everything. Cameron listened. Neither touched their drink.
“He was in jail one hour away from here,” Cameron said when Quinn was done.
“The detectives must have put it through VICAP but came up empty. A homicide inside a jail, where they’re already holding the culprit, isn’t going to make it into the database. We’re going to narrow the parameters by what kind of crime our man would have been doing time for and when he was paroled, and we’ll find him.”
“I’d like to talk to Hollis.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nathan—”
“We’re going to take it to the judge and get them to drop the case against you. That is my priority.”
“I understand. Do you know why this guy went after Jimmy?”
Quinn didn’t reply.
“To get my attention.” Cameron paused. “Do you know why he went after the detectives?”
Quinn didn’t reply.
“To give them a murder weapon. As we speak, I’m pretty sure Ballistics is matching the casings to the ones they found in Jimmy’s house. And, just like that, I have shot one cop, maybe even fatally, and assaulted another. You can take that to the judge.” Cameron took a sip. “I think you should get out of town for a while.”
“No.”
“This man I want to meet so badly will surely come after you. We don’t know what’s going to happen when the thirteen days run out.”
“He hasn’t told me what he wants yet. He’ll finish what he started with the notes.”
Quinn got them, then placed them on the table between them.
Cameron did not touch the plastic. He followed the contours of the notes, one by one. He spoke quietly, looking at the cards.
“I think you should leave town for a while,” he repeated.
“I’m not in any danger.”
“Jimmy didn’t think he was, either. He wants you here, Nathan. He wants you where he can get to you.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’ll have to do.”
Cameron knew better than to try to change Nathan’s mind. He stood up. “You want something to eat? I’ll cook.”
A few minutes later Cameron put two steaks on to broil, medium rare, a streak of red in the middle.
“Who’s taken over the case?” he asked Quinn.
“Mike Fynn, Homicide. He’s the shift commander of the two who were hit.”
“You know him?”
“No. I only dealt with the detectives.”
“I saw the woman—you know, at Jimmy’s.”
“Detective Madison. When?”
“Tuesday night late. I went by the house.”
Quinn put down his knife and fork. “You went by the house? When every officer in Washington State has your picture tacked on their dash?”
“Yes, and you would have done the same.”
“You were inside the house?”
“Yes.”
Quinn had seen the crime-scene photographs and the devastation contained within the glossy white borders of Jimmy and Annie’s bedroom.
“What was she doing?”
“She was watching their home videos.”
“Why?”
“She was probably looking for pictures.”
“Pictures of you?”
“Most likely.”
“Did she find any?”
“Nothing useful, I’m sure.”
“Tuesday night late,” Quinn said. “Where were you on Tuesday?”
Cameron wiped his mouth with the white linen napkin.
“I was in LA. What do you want to know?”
“Is there anything I need to know?”
“I had some good sushi, and the weather was lovely.”
“What did you do in LA?”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s not polite to talk about business at the dinner table. My mother was always quite firm about that.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed three men. The bodyguards were in the garden, watching a soap on one of those tiny TV sets.. The dealer was in the house—he didn’t have much to say for himself except that he’d shake the hand of the man who put any friend of mine under the ground. I could argue self-defense, but, when it comes down to it, they just needed killing.”
Quinn held his gaze. “What about Erroll Sanders?”
“Erroll. Erroll liked black Formica tables and white shag carpets. Erroll was a preemptive strike, in case he’d developed any misguided sense of loyalty to his boss. I’m sure the world is a darker place now that they’re not in it anymore.”
Cameron folded his napkin and put it on the table. He stood up. “Check the windows, and set the alarm. It was good to see you, as always, and thank you for dinner.”
He walked out the front door, and the lock clicked shut behind him. After a few minutes, Quinn heard a distant car start and drive off. It might have been Cameron’s, it might not.
The first day of law school they teach you that you never, ever, question your client about guilt or innocence. It would affect your defense, and you might find yourself suborning perjury. Quinn hoped his client would still be alive come the end of the month; perjury was the least of his concerns.
He took the plates to the sink.
“Nathan?”
Some twenty years earlier, Nathan Quinn’s office in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s had been tiny: files were stacked on his desk, and books crammed the shelves. He was a deputy prosecutor in the Criminal Division, and, in spite of appearances, there was a kind of order in the paperwork covering every surface. He had never lost anything—not a file, not a case.
He looked up. John Cameron, eighteen years old, stood by the door. Quinn checked his watch; he had no idea where the morning had gone.
He stood up and reached for the jacket on the back of his chair. “I’m starving. Let’s go.”
Every couple of weeks they would have lunch together. Jack would come over to the courthouse, and they would grab a bite nearby. In the past two months the boy’s moods had darkened. Quinn knew that to ask a direct question would have been pointless. If Jack wanted to talk about something, he would do so.
They slipped into the corner booth of a deli on Second Avenue, an old-fashioned establishment that had never heard of the ongoing battle against cholesterol. They ordered reubens.
“How’s classes?” Quinn asked.
Jack rolled his eyes. He had started at the University of Washington in the fall, and it had not been an immediate success. “I’ve got the tickets,” he said, and he clinked the ice cubes in his glass.
“You’re kidding.”
“Courtside. Dad’s guy got them somehow.”
“Jack!”
“I know.” They had been looking forward to the ball game for weeks, unsure if they’d make it.
They devoted themselves for a moment to the plates that had been placed in front of them.
“Are you still on the homicide?” John asked.
Nathan looked up. “Yeah.”
They were about to go to trial against a twenty-one-year-old woman who had shot her boyfriend. She had suffered years of abuse from her parents, left home, fell in with the poorest excuse for a human being ever, and one night, after watching the news with the abusive slob, she had taken his revolver from its drawer and put three bullets into his chest. The neighbors hadn’t heard any noises beforehand, and she had admitted they had not fought that evening; the bruises on her arms were turning yellow, and she said she had just had enough.
The public defender had tried to plead the charge down to manslaughter, but, given that her alleged attacker was asleep at the time she shot him, that hadn’t really made a dent in the prosecution’s case.
“Trial starts in a couple of weeks,” Quinn said.
“Tough case?”
“Yes and no. She shot the guy—nobody questions that. The defense is going to argue that she was provoked by years of abuse; we’re going to argue that it wasn’t self-defense, that she could have walked right out.”
“But she didn’t.”
“She shot him while he was asleep.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
Nathan Quinn wiped his hands on a paper napkin. It wasn’t the first time he had ever had this kind of conversation with Jack, about fairness and justice and, from time to time, about the absence of either.
“She’s going to do some hard time.”
“Are you going to ask for the death sentence?”
“No. There are mitigating circumstances.”
Around them, the lunchtime clatter continued. Somebody dropped a tray of glasses, and customers whooped and clapped. Cameron seemed oblivious to all of it.
“Under what circumstances would you ask for the death sentence?” Cameron took a bite of his sandwich.
“Why the sudden interest?”
The boy shrugged, but his level gaze stayed on Quinn.
“Well, if you have a homicide with malice, where there was a clear intent to kill or cause great bodily harm. With premeditation, when the person thought about it beforehand. Or if a homicide happened during a dangerous felony, like robbery or arson.”
Or kidnapping. The word hung for a moment between them, unsaid.
“What if you didn’t have enough to convict?”
“What are we talking about here?”
“What if you didn’t even have enough on the woman to charge her, but you knew she’d done it?”
“Then you go back to the drawing board, and you find the evidence you need.”
“Still, sometimes you don’t.”
“Sometimes you don’t.”
“What would you do then?”
“In this case?”
“Yes.”
Cameron picked up his glass. Quinn wasn’t sure what they were talking about, exactly.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he meant it. “Sometimes, however hard you work the case, it just doesn’t happen.”
“What about eyewitness testimony?”
“In theory?”
“In theory.”
“Without physical evidence?”
“Yes.”
“It would still be very difficult. A good defense attorney would tear the witness apart.”
Cameron nodded.
“But we’re the good guys; we wear the white hats, and we put away the guys with the black hats. That’s pretty much my job description. You read about the case in the papers?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re interested in seeing how things work, you could come to court sometime.”
Cameron smiled a little. “Thank you. It’s just that in the papers it looked like there were some reasonable grounds for her to do what she did.”
“Reasonable grounds? That’s very well put, but here’s the thing: she could have walked out. She could have called any of the numbers for the victims of domestic abuse. She didn’t have to kill him.”
“Maybe she thought she had to.”
“I think it’s a tragedy what happened to her in her life, but it’s also a tragedy that a man is dead. One doesn’t cancel the other.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
Quinn finished his drink. He had never talked to Jack like he was a kid, even when he was one. “What are we talking about here?”
“What do you call it? A justifiable homicide?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“In legal terms, a court-ordered execution is a ‘justifiable homicide.’ Everything else is murder.”
“A ‘court-ordered’ execution.”
“Yes.” Cameron smiled.
“What brought this on?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Sure, you do.”
“I don’t.” Cameron shrugged.
“Okay.”
As they left the deli, Cameron turned up the collar on his sheepskin coat. The rain was thin at sea level, but it would be snow higher up, a few inches deep over the hard ground.
Fewer than forty-eight hours later, Nathan Quinn would bail him out of a police lockup.