The Gift of the Darkness by Valentina Giambanco Page B

switched the television off and dragged herself upstairs and into bed.
    At 5:46 a.m., Madison got up and walked to the kitchen in her bare feet, turning on lights as she went. She poured water into the bottom half of the Italian stove-top percolator, measured coffee for the middle filter, screwed the top back on, and put it on the ring.
    She could perform those actions automatically and without being fully conscious; indeed, she had done so many times, getting up for a tour after two hours’ sleep. By 6:30 a.m. Madison had left the house.
    She drove to Blue Ridge and pulled in next to the blue-and-white parked by the Sinclairs’ front door.
    The two uniforms looked up, the long, cold hours all over their faces. She had never seen them before. Madison rolled down her window and showed her badge.
    “Madison, Homicide. How are you doing?”
    The older of the two just nodded.
    “Quiet night?”
    “A couple of jerks tried to steal some crime-scene tape.” He pointed at the yellow ribbon on the ground by the side door.
    The house already had an empty look to it, as if people hadn’t slept and cooked and walked around inside it for a long time.
    Madison hit the commuter traffic driving into town; in the thin sunlight, glass, metal, and water shimmered in the distance.
    She turned the car radio on, instantly regretted it, and turned it off. It hadn’t been such a good idea to stop by the house. She had felt almost compelled to go in and make her way through it, top to bottom, attic to basement. Now that search would have to wait for hours.The killer had chosen the house to set his stage; that stage was how he would reveal himself to them.
    Nathan Quinn would not be pleased: they were going to need a warrant to sieve through Sinclair’s financial affairs, work files, cases. He probably took work home—half the check had been found in the study.
    There it was: a paltry $25,000 had likely cost four people their lives and was likelier going to bring down, once and for all, a pretty nasty piece of work who should have known better.
    The rec room was cramped, but it was the only private space that would contain all of them at the same time. The detectives sat around the table. The case file, between the polystyrene cups and notebooks, was already inches thick.
    Brown was running the briefing, with Madison to back him up. He checked his watch. Spencer and Dunne had brought in the blackboard with floor plans of the Sinclairs’ house. Lieutenant Fynn had come in with copies of the morning papers wedged under his arm: in two hours he was going to meet a woman from the department’s Public Affairs Office. He’d rather have a root canal.
    They had Spencer, Dunne, and Kelly for another forty-eight hours. After that, Brown and Madison would be on their own—the others would move to new cases and help with the legwork whenever they could.
    Madison noticed that Chris Kelly was wearing his dark blue suit, tight across his ex-linebacker shoulders but still smart, and a garish purple tie. It was his court outfit—they were going to lose him in the afternoon to a year-old robbery-murder just come to trial.
    They had all been at the Sinclair crime scene, had smelled the thirty-six hours dead on their clothes. Brown went straight to the point.
    “We have the ME’s preliminary autopsy notes. I’ll get to those in a minute. While you gentlemen were getting trench foot on the canvass, Lauren and Joyce found half of a torn check in the seat of a chair in the study, the other half in the kitchen bin.”
    Madison, her legs stretched long under the table, sipped her coffee and waited for Brown to drop the bomb. Fynn had already been told.
    “The check is a dud,” Brown continued. “The signature is a forgery, the prints on it are Sinclair’s, the forged signature name is John Cameron .”
    Any rustling of paper, feet-shuffling, or note-taking stopped dead right then. Kelly put down his pen.
    Dunne smiled wide. “I guess this is what some