The Gift of the Darkness by Valentina Giambanco Read Free Book Online Page A

moment. He would tell the police things to help them do their job, Madison saw that in him, but Nathan Quinn would not unfold the lives of his friends and lay them open for strangers to take apart.
    “They were law-abiding citizens and devoted to each other.”
    “I think that’s it, for the moment, except for the formal ID. Can we drive you to the morgue?” Brown said, standing up. Madison followed suit.
    Quinn stood with them. “I’ll drive myself. Did—did the neighbors see or hear anything?”
    “We’re still canvassing.”
    “Any signs of forced entry?”
    “Not obvious ones, no, but we’re still working the scene.”
    Quinn rubbed his temples with his index fingers. “Sergeant Brown, the number of murders in Seattle last year was twenty, the year before that, nineteen. Compared to other metropolitan areas, it’s a pretty safe place, and your department’s clearance rate is high. This was not a burglary.” Quinn looked from one to the other of them, taking measure of them as they had done of him. “I will meet you at the coroner’s office in half an hour,” he said. “I have to call Annie’s sister in Chicago.”
    “Of course.”
    As the doors of the elevator closed in front of them, Madison saw several people gather around Quinn and the expressions on their faces as he told them the grim news. The dumb animal shock, the pain.
    Back in the car, they checked the radio and found there was a message from Mary Kay Joyce. They were patched through, and Joyce’s voice crackled on the line; she was calling from the unit van.
    “We’ve found two halves of a torn check for $25,000. One half was in the study, the other in the kitchen bin. Do you receive clearly?”
    “Yes, go ahead,” Madison said.
    “The signature is only half written; it stops in the middle, but it’s very clear. The name is John Cameron. J-O-H-N C-A-M-E-R-O-N. You got that?”
    “I got it.” Madison looked up from her jotting. For a moment she heard only the static of the radio and the rain on the windshield.
    “I’ve called in Payne,” Joyce continued. “It’s his day off, and he was pretty pissed off. There are dozens of items to go through, but I’ll put the check on the top of the pile.”
    Bob Payne was the top man in Latents. Whoever had touched the slip of paper, he would find out.
    Brown was not an expansive man, but Madison liked how he wore his thoughts close to the chest. He wound down the window and took a couple of breaths, as if the air in the car had suddenly turned foul.
    “What do you know about John Cameron?” he asked her.
    Madison had heard many things over the years—hard facts bulked up by speculation, hearsay, and myth.
    “I know about the Nostromo ,” she replied.
    “Then you know enough. If he is in any way involved in this thing, this piece of evidence might be gold.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He left five dead on the Nostromo . Two cops, three ex-cons. He slit their throats and let them bleed out.”
    “I remember.” Madison had been barely out of the Academy, and the case had been headline news for weeks. The boat and its grisly cargo had been found in the waters near Orcas Island. They had never managed to get all the blood off the deck—the wood had been black with it. Nobody had ever been charged with the murders.
    “We had nothing. No evidence, no eyewitness, no case. Snitches were afraid to even mention his name. But it was him, all right.”
    Madison remembered the pictures in the papers: standard department portraits for the cops, mug shots for the ex-cons.
    Brown drove toward the morgue. “Two years later we had the body of a known drug dealer bobbing up in Lake Union. His hands had been cut off, his eyes were missing, and he had been almost completely decapitated. A reliable informant said it was Cameron’s work, and we had a stampede of dealers leaving town. Next thing, the informant said he’d changed his mind, and we were left with nothing.”
    “How does someone like