Spencer pointed. Someone had been coming and going and had left a number of tracks on the floor.
Madison examined her surroundings: it might have been the middle of the day outside, but inside the empty warehouse the world existed in a state of perennial gritty dusk. Time had stopped the day the workers had left, and it wasn’t by chance that the young man had ended up in that alley and found that broken pane. He had intentionally gone back there. The notion that this desolate, abandoned building might be somebody’s “safe” place was more than a little troubling.
Madison’s train of thought was interrupted because they had reached the other side. The only way forward was through a single door, and a stairway that led to the floor above. Natural light flooded in through frosted windows. They put away their flashlights and peeked: the tall shaft that went all the way up to the building’s roof was deserted.
Madison and Brown started climbing the metal stairs, with Spencer and Dunne bringing up the rear. Their weapons were unholstered and pointing at the ground. Let him come easy, Madison pleaded silently, let him come without fuss. Behind them and back in the alley Madison heard the crackle of police radios.
Let him come easy.
They reached the landing and something moved beyond the door into the main room. Madison made sure she took the first step inside and her piece was half raised.
“Seattle Police Department,” she said, loud and clear. “Come on out now.”
Spencer and Dunne were on her left, Brown on her right. Madison’s eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom when a timid cough rang out from the other side of the room.
“It’s okay,” a soft voice said from inside the dimness. “It’s okay.” Feet shuffled toward them and a woman appeared with her gloved hands raised. “It’s okay,” she repeated.
She was wearing layer upon layer of clothing, and her graying hair was shorn close to the scalp. And then it hit them: the scent of stale sweat and unwashed human beings. The woman’s skin was flushed pink and her bright-blue eyes were the only points of light. Even bundled up, as she was, she was tiny compared with the detectives. Madison instinctively put her Glock away and tied the safety strip. She raised her hands so that the woman could see them, so that she could see she meant her no harm.
“Where is he, ma’am?” Madison said.
“He’s a good boy,” the woman said.
I’m sure he is.
“Where is he?” Madison repeated. She was aware that the others had lowered their pieces but had not put them away.
“Come,” the woman said, and she turned.
They followed her into a room that a long time ago had been an open-plan office—some desks and chairs were still piled in the middle, some had been broken up, and Madison could see the evidence of small fires that had been lit to keep out the worst of the cold. They crossed the wide room all the way to the opposite side of the building.
“Oh boy,” Dunne whispered.
The group had huddled against the far wall and created a kind of fort with the discarded furniture, the sort a child might make out of sofa cushions. Ten, maybe twelve, figures reclined and sat on the vinyl flooring; some were bundled up in clothing, others wore cheap shelter blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They all looked at the detectives with fearful, startled eyes. Someone had pushed discarded food wrappers, empty bottles, and cups into a corner in an attempt at straightening up.
The woman pointed and, behind an upturned table, the young man they had followed lay with his arms around his knees, rolled up into a ball and covered with an old coat. His eyes were squeezed shut. I don’t see you, you don’t see me.
There were loud steps behind them and four uniformed officers flanked the detectives. The two groups eyed each other.
“Tommy, is that you, man?” one of the officers said, and headed straight for a shape sitting against the wall.
At first, bundled up as they were, Madison couldn’t even tell their gender, let alone their age.
“I haven’t seen you around in months,” the officer continued, crouching next to the man. “Where have you been?”
“On vacation,” the man croaked, and he chuckled. “On the Riviera.”
“Who got hurt?” Brown asked the patrol officer next to him.
“Scott Clarke from downtown, broken collarbone. He was checking out a public disturbance call and his student officer took his eyes off the ball for a second. Told us enough before going to the Emergency Room, though, and he,” the officer pointed at the young runner on the ground, “didn’t do anything except look scared and scamper when his pal went nuts.”
“It’s okay,” the woman said to no one in particular.
No, Madison thought, it’s really not.
Chapter 3
Madison edged herself out of the broken door and was grateful for the rush of fresh air. She had been a uniformed officer in the downtown precinct at the beginning of her career in the Seattle PD, and she was familiar with the drill. Fifty percent of the day-to-day calls the patrol officers in the warehouse dealt with were more social work than policing. Someone had already called the Mobile Crisis Unit, and they would come and help with temporary accommodation and whatever ongoing medical treatment each homeless person might need. Her own field-training officer, Monica Vincent, had known the name of every down-and-out on her beat, their histories, and their conditions, and Madison was glad that at least one of the police officers at the scene had been able to put a name to a face.
At the time, Officer Monica Vincent had been everything Madison had wanted to be as a cop. She was capable, kind, and compassionate; she had chosen to stay downtown, chosen to deal—day in and day out—with the realities of homelessness, shelters, mental illness, and the plight of the conveniently forgotten. It was an unremitting tide of misery, and the joys it brought were subtle and elusive. After a while Madison had moved on, but the frontline work was still there—if anything, the front line had become visible at almost every corner.
Only a few minutes from the warehouse, Kobe Terrace stretched its green walkways over a hill with a view of the city. Monica Vincent had taken Madison there the first day they were working together. It was March and the cherry trees were in bloom, heavy with pale-pink petals on their curved branches. Madison had gone back at least once every year to sit under those trees. As they left the alley she looked up, but a few buildings were in the way—and it was too early in the season, anyway. It felt as if winter had decided to dig in and bring its friends. Madison made a mental note to call Monica that night; she couldn’t remember the last time they had spoken.
“No rest for the wicked,” Spencer said to the group, tucking his portable radio back in his inside pocket. “The boss wants us all back, ASAP.”
“Do we have time to go back and pick up our lunch from Grand Central?” Dunne asked him.
“Sure, the boss said to take the scenic route and stop to pick up wildflowers too.”
Their boss, Lieutenant Fynn, was in charge of the Homicide Unit, and when he said ASAP, he meant Teleport yourselves back to the precinct this instant.
They drove, barely stopping for red lights, and once there, they found Fynn angry enough to chew glass.
“Go wait for me in the conference room, please,” he said, the last word clearly meant to reassure them they were not the reason for his foul mood.
Madison was glad of a couple of minutes’ reprieve as she was still metabolizing what she had seen in the warehouse. She looked around the conference room—a pale-green spartan space that would never win any prizes from Martha Stewart. It seemed that the whole shift was sitting around the table: Detectives Spencer and Dunne, Kelly and Rosario, and Brown and herself.
Spencer and Dunne spoke quietly among themselves, and Dunne let out a snigger like a teenager before class. He was Irish red and the complete opposite of Spencer, who was second-generation Japanese and the calm core at the center of their long partnership. Both men had welcomed Madison into the team when she had joined
just over two years earlier; since then they had been through enough that she considered them more than good friends, and when Dunne had gotten married three months previously, Madison had been the only woman at his bachelor party.
Detective Chris Kelly studied his nails and scowled at the world in general: he was not a friend, any kind of friend, and never had been. Madison and Kelly worked together because they had to, but it was painful for both. Their dislike had been immediate and had not improved on further acquaintance: at first Madison thought that Kelly might be an old-style cop who was wary of newbies, but she soon realized that he was merely a bully with a streak of aggression a mile wide and the social skills of a skunk.
As an unfortunate consequence of their mutual loathing she had not had a chance to exchange more than a few words with Tony Rosario, Kelly’s partner, and had no idea what kind of person he was—aside from the fact that he was mostly mute, often on medical leave, and his usual color seemed to be an unearthly pallor. He was leaning back in his chair now, utterly still, with his eyes closed; Madison was relieved to see his chest rise and fall.
Brown passed her a bottle of water and she nodded thanks. Madison’s partner, Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, had been the shining light of her time in Homicide. He ran a hand through his red-silver hair, pushed up his glasses, and looked over the front page of the Seattle Times spread on the table. He was in his early fifties—twenty years older than Madison—and liked to get his news on paper. She could take a thousand Kellys as long as she had one Brown.
The door opened and Lieutenant Fynn hurried inside, followed by four detectives from another precinct Madison had never met, two investigators from the Crime Scene Unit, and a tall, dark man in an immaculate suit who drew the gaze of all the police officers in the room.
“Let me get straight to it,” Fynn said as they took their seats. “I presume you all know each other. If you don’t—quite frankly—I don’t care, let’s deal with that later. Right now time is of the essence. I need to have an answer for the chief within the hour. Mr. Quinn . . .”
The tall man looked around the room and Madison noted that two of the detectives from the other precinct were giving him the classic cop stare that is supposed to make regular people break into a sweat and trip over their feet. Nathan Quinn was not a regular person, and he ignored them. His voice was quiet because he knew he didn’t have to shout.
“In case we haven’t met before, my name is Nathan Quinn and I work for the US Attorney for the Western District of Washington.”
Quinn had been a criminal defense attorney for many years before taking up this latest post, and chances were the detectives who were looking daggers at him had met him in court and come out the worse for it. Madison knew the feeling. Quinn had been lethal when he was working for the defense and had made many enemies.
“I was contacted this morning by the Office of the Governor regarding a situation in Colville County,” Quinn said.
Fynn sighed at the blank stares around the table. “Anyone who can find me Colville County on the map gets a cookie,” he said.
“Somewhere northeast?” Dunne ventured.
“Somewhere northeast,” Fynn conceded.
“Between Stevens and Pend Oreille County, squashed against Canada,” Brown said softly, to save the day.
“Teacher’s pet,” Dunne whispered.
Quinn continued: “Colville is a small—very small—county in a mountainous area with more deer than people, and their law enforcement is not equipped to deal with the present situation. Generally a case could be turned over to the state police or the county sheriff, but in this particular instance they need the skills represented by the people in this room. The state police are up to their necks and cannot take the time needed to deal with it properly.”
“And we can?” Kelly said.
“Deal with what exactly?” Brown asked.
“Murder,” Quinn replied. “The first murder ever recorded in Colville County.”
There was silence around the table. The first murder ever. Madison found it almost impossible to get her mind around that simple point. How could it be possible? The statistics for Seattle were what they were, and still they were better than many other larger urban areas in the country. More deer than people, she thought. That figures.
“They need help,” Quinn said simply. “They need a team of Homicide investigators to support their local force, and they need a crime scene officer with extensive experience of murder scenes to examine their evidence and help them collect, preserve, and analyze.”
“How many do they have working it?” Spencer asked.
“The whole force,” Quinn replied. “That is to say, one person. One full-time police officer, two part-time.”
Seattle, Madison knew, had over one thousand officers.
“I need volunteers, people,” Fynn said before Quinn’s words could sink in, “and I need them fast. Because you’re going to have to leave tomorrow morning, early—before the crime scene is blown away to all hell.”
“The Eastern District has Spokane and Yakima,” said one of the detectives Madison hadn’t met before—a skinny man with eyes like a bloodhound. “They have police departments. It’s their district. Why don’t they help out?”
“Yes, they have departments. And yes, they deal with major crimes,” Fynn said.
Madison knew that Spokane had a pretty healthy crime rate—in many ways higher than Seattle, which had three times the population.
“But,” Fynn continued, “right now Spokane PD has got its hands full and can’t offer the necessary support. There’s no point in sending somebody over to Colville County next month when they need warm bodies on the ground tomorrow. The next time, it might be Spokane’s or Yakima’s turn.”
It was Brown who picked up on that particular turn of phrase. “The next time?” he said.
“The next time a murder happens in a town with a police department of one, yes,” Quinn replied. “There are nearly eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies in the US, and half have fewer than ten officers; three-quarters have fewer than twenty-five. Small-town police departments are closing down all over the place, and policing is being kicked up to state and county level. This is a nationwide initiative to create a core of investigators who can support and train the officers of the smaller agencies, if and when the need arises.”
“Would save the state and county a bunch of time and taxpayers’ dollars if they didn’t have to get involved,” Spencer said.
“You want us to go and train them?” Kelly snorted and, in spite of her feelings about him, Madison could see that he had a point: how could they teach someone in a matter of days what it took them years to learn on the street, and what kind of standards of training were they going to find?
“You behind this, Boss?” Dunne asked Fynn.
Fynn looked beyond frustrated. “I’m behind getting some help over to Colville County right now, this minute, before any chance of catching the murderer is completely lost. The rest I’m still thinking about.”
“The issue of jurisdiction—” Madison started.
“We’re still working on that,” Quinn said.
Their eyes met for an instant, and he looked away.
“What about warrants?” Spencer said.
“The first set for home and place of employment are already in the works. They will be delivered to the investigators on-site.”
“What about the evidence?”
Madison turned and smiled. Amy Sorensen was one of the Crime Scene Unit’s chief investigators, a redhead in her forties with a dirty laugh and the skills to break into any car in under twenty seconds. In all the years they had worked together Madison had been able to appreciate both.
“By that I mean, whose signature and whose responsibility in court is it going to be when this little learn-on-the-job experiment goes spectacularly wrong and blows up in everyone’s face?”
“We’re still working on that too,” Quinn replied, unperturbed. �
�The idea is that those of you who go will take the local officers through the investigation as you would do it here, and the next time something similar happens they will do better because they will know more.”
“They’re going to love us, for sure,” Kelly said. “Who wouldn’t want a complete stranger to travel across the state just to tell them they’ve been doing their job all wrong?”
Nathan Quinn’s black eyes glowed with little warmth as he regarded Kelly. “Detective Kelly,” Quinn said, and Madison noticed that the detective had no idea that Quinn knew his name, “a man was killed and his body burned inside his car. There was enough blood on the snow to show that he might have been tortured before being killed. At this stage we have no witnesses, no motive, and no clear cause of death. What we do know is that he lived in a place where the most violent crime their police department had to investigate was a bar brawl two years ago when someone got a broken nose in front of fifteen bystanders. Would you like me to tell the man’s wife and children that the murderer will, in all probability, never be found because you just do not have the time today to look over the file?”
Kelly opened his mouth but no words came out.
“I’ll go,” Sorensen said, and sat back in her chair with her arms crossed. “Madison, how many extra units in criminalistics have you taken? Four or five? I forget.”
Sorensen was often joking that Madison, who believed in evidence as truth as fervently as she did—and had taken extra courses in the subject for the sheer pleasure of it—should drop the whole Homicide Unit gig and come to work with her instead, where the real investigating was done.
“Five,” Madison replied, sensing trouble.
“Perfect,” Fynn declared. “Madison, you could help out with the evidence too.”
Madison knew a trap when she saw one, and this one had already snapped shut around her ankle. Never mind that she was going to volunteer anyway. If she was going, though, she wouldn’t be going alone; she turned to Brown and he straightened his newspaper, sighed, and nodded once.
Sweet After Death Page 2
