Free The Gift of the Darkness by Valentina Giambanco

start.”
    “I want to get going on that.” Madison put on her jacket. “I’m going to the library.”
    Brown looked out the window. It was pitch-black.
    “I have a friend,” she explained as she straightened a couple of pencils on her desk. “The papers must have run the story at the time. I’ll see what I can find.”
    Madison, driving north toward Fourth Avenue, pulled in at an all-night grocery store and punched a number into her cell phone.
    “Mr. Burton, it’s Alice Madison. Is it all right if I come by tonight?”
    The store didn’t have much in the way of patisserie, but manners dictated that you didn’t go visiting empty-handed. She remembered her last visit and picked a rich chocolate cake. There was no traffic, and, for no reason at all, she drove past the library and down Sixth Avenue. The ninth floor of Stern Tower, the offices of Quinn, Locke, lay in shadow. She looked up, drove around the block, and then made a loop back to where she had come from. She parked only a few yards from the service entrance of the Public Library and pressed the buzzer lightly. The metal door sprang open almost immediately.
    A few years before, Ernie Burton’s sixteen-year-old daughter had gotten herself into some minor police trouble. Madison had made the trouble go away, and that had bought her a lifetime all-hours pass at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. Burton was the head night guy, as they called him, and he had wasted no time extending privileges to her and making sure his colleagues did the same.
    She found him and three others in the thick of a card game. They were all men who had come to security work after a life doing other jobs and who welcomed, as well as the salary, the opportunity to escape their retirement and their wives. Madison looked at the table for less than three seconds and knew who was winning, who was losing, and who was glad of the interruption.
    “Look who’s here.”
    “Jeez, Detective, I thought we’d never see you again. I was all heartbroken.”
    “How’s your wife, Ronnie?” Madison asked with a smile.
    “Still alive. You married yet?”
    “What, give up the chance to come down here and flirt with you guys?”
    They cut the cake and ate it with some terrible instant coffee.
    “I know you’re here to do your work; we don’t want to be holding you up,” Ernie said.
    “I’d better get going,” Madison agreed.
    The four men went back to their card game, and Madison found her way through the familiar building.
    When Burton had first given her the pass, it was the most he could do to repay a kindness; he couldn’t have imagined that in Madison’s eyes his gift far outweighed what she had done for him. It had taken her less than fifteen minutes to make things right with her boss and Social Services, in exchange for which she now had the keys to the toy store.
    Most of the times she had come looking for something in particular, but after her grandfather passed on, she would drop by once a month or so and spend a couple of hours reading in the vast room, after midnight, until the cleaners turned up.
    Madison stopped by the Humanities Department on the first floor to check on a file-card index the date on which the articles had appeared in the local papers. The reader-printers for the microfilm of the Newspapers Department were on the second floor, and it took her fifty minutes to get together what she had come for.
    The story had been covered extensively, and she made photocopies of every single article. She organized the sheets roughly in chronological order, giving precedence to serious reporting over tabloid hacks. The large rectangular room was dimly lit; the sounds of the men playing cards downstairs didn’t reach that far. There was a sign by the librarians’ desk: No eating or drinking on the premises.
    Shortly after 11:00 p.m. Madison sat at her usual table, took out of her bag a can of Coke and a yellow legal-size notepad, had a sip, and started