Free The Gift of the Darkness by Valentina Giambanco Page A

reading. The Times was the first: an unemotional piece, economical with the gory details. She read it twice.
    On August 28, 1985, three boys had been kidnapped while they were fishing in a wooded park in Ballard. Their names were David Quinn, 13; James Sinclair, 13; John Cameron, 12.
    David Quinn .
    Four men in a blue van had approached the boys at Jackson Pond. They used chloroform on rags, bundled them into the van, and left. There were no witnesses.
    When the boys did not come home in the afternoon, the parents started to worry, and a search party was organized. Their bicycles were found at the bottom of the pond. The families started to panic. Relatives and friends searched every inch of the area surrounding Jackson Pond and knocked on every door of the neighborhood. Night came and brought no news. The boys had vanished.
    At 5:30 a.m. on August 29, Carlton Gray was driving along the Upper Hoh Road. A boy, later identified as John Cameron, came out of the woods and almost got himself run over as he stopped the truck. The boy had difficulty explaining himself, but Gray could see that he was in a highly emotional state and wanted to lead him somewhere.
    At that point Gray had noticed that the boy’s arms were covered in blood. The sleeves of his T-shirt had been repeatedly slashed. Theywalked in the woods for maybe fifteen minutes and then reached a clearing.
    There, tied to a Sitka spruce, Carlton Gray found James Sinclair, alive but in shock. He freed the boy and took both children back to his truck, from which he radioed for help. The State Police and the paramedics arrived quickly. Mistakenly assuming that all three boys had been found safe, they had alerted the parents.
    What had happened in the previous twenty-four hours was not completely clear. The authorities were able to gather the following facts: the children had been driven there, and each had been tied to a tree. Then things became confused: blindfolded, his friends had heard David Quinn gasp and choke. After a while, silence. A few minutes later the men had left and taken Quinn with them. The other two were abandoned in the forest.
    David Quinn. Madison got up and went to the window. She finished her Coke and threw the can into the librarian’s recycling bin. She looked at her watch: Brown would want to know. She dialed his cell phone.
    “The third boy. The one who died in the woods. It was Nathan Quinn’s younger brother.”
    “I guess we have our link.”
    “Yup.”
    “You’re going home soon, right?”
    “I’ll just finish up here.”
    Madison wanted a strong cup of coffee really badly, but the stuff from the dispenser downstairs was like thin, bitter mud. Instead, she splashed her face with freezing-cold water and went back to her desk.
    The Post-Intelligencer had run pretty much the same story as the Times . The sad conclusion for both was that there had been no discernible motive for the kidnapping, and no one had ever been held accountable.
    The tabloids didn’t offer any further facts. However, they did have photographs. Madison held the page up to the lamp. School pictures, one for each of the boys. Her eyes went to John Cameron’s: he was the youngest and looked smaller than the others. James Sinclair was grinning, andDavid Quinn was wearing a Mariners shirt; his hair was fair and curly, and he had just combed it for the photograph.
    Madison turned the pages. David Quinn was never found, but there was a picture of his family after the boy’s memorial service, no doubt the work of an enterprising photographer who had sneaked into the ceremony the way Andrew Riley had sneaked into the Sinclair crime scene.
    It was an outrageous breach of their privacy in their most painful moment. It was a stunning picture.
    Black and white; it must have been overcast that day, no shadows from anything or anybody. In the foreground a man and a woman wearing black, surrounded by family and friends, their faces stunned beyond grief. A close group of maybe