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

John Cameron know the Sinclairs? What’s the connection?” Madison said. “Sinclair was an attorney. A tax attorney . Very white-collar, very safe.”
    “Remember that we don’t know for sure that it’s our John Cameron. It could just be the same name.”
    “Maybe. Is there a file on him? Was he ever arrested?”
    “We never got that close. But he was printed once, drunk driving, when he was a kid. After that, nothing. The only reason we have his prints today is that he had a couple of cold ones when he was eighteen.”
    “Then we also have a picture.”
    “For what it’s worth, a twenty-year-old picture.”
    “We can get it computer-altered. See what he might look like today. And show it to the Sinclairs’ neighbors.”
    “Once we mention Cameron’s name, all hell will break loose. We need a definite link between him and the Sinclairs.”
    “Let me get started on it. We need his file and prints. I’ll catch up with you at the morgue.”
    “Madison, be discreet.”
    Brown had to stop in traffic, but they were near enough to the precinct that Madison got out and waded into the crowd.
    In the building that temporarily housed the office of the Medical Examiner and the Crime Lab, technicians came and went about their business. Sergeant Brown waited in the hall. Nathan Quinn was a difficult man to read, and Brown wanted to see how he would carry himself through the ordeal of the identification. He hoped he would learn something about the kind of man Quinn was and maybe one day that knowledge would be a resource they could count on.
    When the moment came Nathan Quinn stood by the viewing window. Brown knocked on the glass, and the blinds revealed the four slain bodies. Quinn looked from face to face, then turned and nodded once.
    In the parking lot, he sat in his car for a few minutes, then drove off at high speed. Brown looked at the space where the car had been and thought how Quinn’s right hand had been shaking, and he had put it in the pocket of his coat.
    Once inside, Brown got a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor and downed some Vitamin C with it. He cleared his mind, took out his notepad, and walked into the sanitized chill of the autopsy room.

Chapter 7
    Madison stood by the printer in the Communication Center and hoped that the quality of the picture the Photo Unit was sending would be good enough for the age alterations to be successful, if it came to that.
    From the moment John Cameron’s name had been mentioned in the car, it had been in her head like a low-level buzzing she could not get rid of. Her mind flashed back to the blindfolded bodies on Blue Ridge.
    Like hunters of old, Madison felt her own need to see the eyes of the enemy, to get a sense of him. She tried to remember the details of the Nostromo killings.
    Little was known for sure about how the day went down. Every crook in every bar had a favorite version. Apparently the two cops, detectives from the LAPD, had had something nasty going on with the other three. Nobody knew how Cameron fit into that, but somehow he did, because the five men had decided that he would not be coming back from the trip.
    It was a glorious day in August, the sun reflecting off the gleaming deck and a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea.
    Whether he knew or not, when they started off, that they had decided to kill him, John Cameron did not run when he found out. The police recovered two 9mm Glocks and three revolvers near the bodies, all with a number of rounds spent, shell casings rolling with the swells. Yet no blood except for the dead men’s, no physical evidence that anybody else had ever been on the boat and no explanation of how he had left it.
    A fisherman on the dock had seen six men get onto the Nostromo, but he could give no description. Some said Cameron drugged them, then killed them one by one; some said that he got them to shoot one another. The one known fact was that, in spite of all the ammunition spent, the men had each been