Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

“Excellent.” Fynn stood up. “Thank you all for coming, and have a great day. Brown, Madison, and Sorensen, I’m calling the chief now and will speak with you in my office when I’m done.”

  Nathan Quinn was already out of the door with neither thanks nor good-byes.

  One of the detectives from the other precinct nodded in his direction and muttered to Madison and Brown, “Once a shit, always a shit.”

  Madison was about to reply, but Sorensen cut in. “I’m going to give you a list of personal equipment to pack,” she said. “We have no idea what we’re going to find when we get there. I mean gloves, evidence bags, everything you normally keep in the trunk of your car, extra batteries, the whole thing.”

  “Batteries? Colville County is still mainland USA.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  Fynn had lucked out, and he knew it. He couldn’t force any of the detectives to volunteer for the assignment and the fact that he had ended up with the most senior of his investigators and two bright stars meant that, for once, his midafternoon ulcer wasn’t burning as red-hot as usual.

  “If we are going to do our jobs fast before things get lost or—worse—contaminated, we won’t always be able to worry about stepping on people’s toes,” Sorensen said.

  They were having the conversation standing up because Fynn wanted to keep it short and to the point.

  “You do what you can to make it as easy as possible for everybody involved,” Fynn replied. “The last thing we need is for the whole project to implode because of a personality conflict.”

  “What conflict?” said Sorensen, who, as Madison was well aware, was technically not under Fynn’s command. “I’m delightful, as long as people do what I ask them to do.”

  Brown, however, had heard what Fynn had meant. “This thing has been in the air for a while and Colville County is the trial run?”

  “Yes, we didn’t know when the right case would come along, and now it has.”

  Madison didn’t need to look at Brown to know what he was thinking: the powers that be had just been waiting for that poor sonofabitch to get himself killed in a manner that was sufficiently exotic and mysterious to satisfy the criteria of the trial and get the ball rolling.

  “How do the local police feel about us going over?” Madison asked Fynn.

  “It was the mayor who called us, and he made a point of saying that the local officers are absolutely on board. Looking forward to meeting you.”

  Madison smiled. They all needed a good joke, and it was the funniest thing Fynn had said all day.

  Madison finished her paperwork, filed it, and turned off her computer. She wouldn’t be at her desk tomorrow, she wouldn’t be at her desk for a number of days. Madison had only been a police officer in Seattle; she had applied to the academy right after her degree in psychology and criminology from Chicago, because being a cop was all that she had ever wanted—and being in the Homicide Unit had been the ultimate goal. Madison wondered about the life of the part-time officers she was about to meet and how they could be part-time when being a cop had imbued every aspect of her life for years. She knew the answer, though: a small town that couldn’t afford more than one full-time officer, and a community with low rates of nonviolent crime.

  Until now.

  “Pack for a week,” Fynn had said. “We’re going to have to play this by ear, but I’m going to need a report every day. And pack for cold weather: they have ice rinks in July in Colville County.”

  “See you in the morning,” Madison said to Brown as she shrugged on her coat. “Bright and shockingly early.”

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Sure, why?”

  “You seemed pretty mad after the meeting. I thought maybe you changed your mind about going.”

  Madison had been plenty ticked off after the meeting, but it was not something that she could explain to Brown. She shrugged. “Nah, just a moment of . . . whatever,” she said, and hoped that he would buy it.

  “You realize we might be back in twenty-four hours,” he replied.

  A dead man in a burned-out car with the real possibility of torture, and no witnesses.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Nope. Do you?”

  “Not for a second.”

  He nodded. “See you at the airport.”

  Madison left and Brown went back to his report. Whatever had been on her mind was not something he could pry out of her, and yet something had shifted in his partner in the last couple of months, something had changed. Brown had seen it in Madison like you see a sail catching a new wind.

  Chapter 4

  Traffic was slow coming out of downtown, and Madison got stuck with everyone else who was traveling southwest. Rush hour in Seattle was ten lanes of headlights inching toward a release that might possibly never come.

  By the time she had reached Alki Beach the sun had set, and across Elliott Bay the city was a box of lights over the black waters of Puget Sound. It always surprised Madison how traffic seen from across the bay was almost soothing, like a distant stream of fireflies, as opposed to the exasperating experience of actually being one of the fireflies.

  Madison parked her Land Rover Freelander in the usual place; she had changed in the locker room at the precinct and her Glock and the backup piece were locked inside a metal box in the trunk. It was such a relief, after the day she’d had, to feel the sand under her feet, to let the briny air fill her lungs and the clean cold seep into her bones.

  After graduating Madison could have gone anywhere and done anything, and yet this city by the water had already claimed her: at college Madison had badly missed the line of blue mountains in the distance and the silver water at dawn; she had missed the wide sky and the changing colors in the seasons. And so she had come back to become a cop and hunt the worst that humankind had to offer.

  Two men in their twenties were packing up their kites and their harnesses, and they stared as Madison bounced on the spot and got the blood flowing.

  Don’t you go stretching first thing when you’re as cold as death and twice as ugly, her high school coach used to say. Madison rolled her shoulders a couple of times and then took off.

  Madison ran at the end of a good day and at the end of a bad one—and working in Homicide, the difference between them was stark. She ran because, somehow, the constrained energy in her body needed the air and the salt and the water. And that long, slow burn in her muscles helped her process whatever was going on in her life. Running on a treadmill in a gym—surrounded by tiny screens on mute and sealed in by concrete walls—would have been unthinkable.

  Brown had been right: Madison had been angry—no, she had been furious—but she couldn’t talk about it with him yet, and even turning the tight ball of rage around in her mind was not going to help. She sprinted and slowed down, sprinted and slowed down until her breath was coming out in puffs of white and her lungs burned.

  Alki Beach—a strip of sand wrapped around West Seattle and Duwamish Head—had been part of Madison’s life since she arrived in Seattle, age twelve, to live with her grandparents. The life of the neighborhood was an intricate mosaic, and Madison added to her knowledge of it with every run. She wiped the perspiration off her face with a sleeve: there it was, the old bungalow decorated with floats and shells, getting more and more decrepit every week; and the café next to the bicycle-rental place, the owners chatting on the pavement; and two dog walkers with their odd, tiny charges. She ran past them and the little dogs yapped their annoyance. Madison didn’t have a problem with dogs, but she thought that they should, at the very least, be as big as cats—otherwise the world made no sense.

  The sharp edges of her day softened with every step, and by the time Madison returned to her car she was already working through a list of what she needed to pack and which bag to use. Sorensen was right: they didn’t know what they were going to need once they got there. All they had was the certainty that something awful had happened and people expected them to find the truth.
She climbed back into her car and cranked up the heat.

  No pressure then.

  “No, that’s not what I said.” Amy Sorensen passed her cell phone to her left hand and with her right she picked up a pack of latex gloves from a pile on the table and put it in a large box.

  It was getting late, but her regular duties at the Crime Scene Unit had not been put on hold just because she had to prepare for the trip, which is why she was having an argument with her younger daughter on the phone instead of having it face-to-face in the kitchen as she fixed dinner.

  “No, I never said you could go. What I said was that we would think about it.” Sorensen picked up another pack of gloves and then moved on to the brushes. How many would they need and how could she cover every base? Her daughter’s voice was rising in pitch according to her displeasure.

  “What I meant was that your dad and I needed to think about it because it’s a party with college kids—which you’re not—and they will have the legally validated freedom to do what they please, including drinking—a freedom that you don’t as yet have—and they will exercise their prerogative to its natural consequences.”

  Five regular powder brushes, two fiberglass latent print brushes.

  “Of course we trust you.”

  One white feather duster, one black feather duster.

  “That’s not true: you went to Katie’s party, and you went camping with the Campbell kids.”

  Black latent powder, white latent powder.

  “It’s not you, honey, it’s the situation. It’s very easy for things to get out of hand when there’s a big group of you and—”

  Her daughter had cut in. Sorensen remembered having variations of the same conversation with her two older children—more than once.

  “I know you don’t, but others do, and it’s tricky when you’re all together and you don’t want to be the only one who says no to the beer or the punch or the wine.”

  Black magnetic powder, white magnetic powder.

  Sorensen sighed. “Can we talk about this when I get home?”

  She surveyed the table and counters covered in all the equipment she still had to pack.

  “Soon, honey, soon . . . I hope.”

  Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown lived alone in a town house in Ballard. When he got home, he called his sister in Vancouver to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it there for the weekend as planned, and then he packed a neat suitcase as per Sorensen’s instructions. He was taking some socks out of a drawer when he paused, his mind flashing back to the moment he had squeezed into the opening in the alley to get into the empty warehouse. Something in him wished that things had played out differently. He paused, closed his eyes for a second, and then went back to his socks and Sorensen’s warnings.

  As few clothes as you can get away with. They have washer-dryers in Colville County, and we need payload weight for the equipment, not for your fashion choices.

  Brown grilled some salmon and threw some rice from the day before in the pan with it. He ate dinner with a glass of Riesling and a book propped open on the table, but his thoughts kept finding their way back to the job and all its unknowns.

  Were they going to be the harbingers of all that was to follow? Now that the county had had its first murder, how quickly would it catch up with the rest of the state in its darkest statistics? Perhaps they could draw a line under it. Perhaps they could take that number and freeze it, as it was, for all time.

  One murder. Surely that was enough for such a small county.

  After dinner, Brown made sure he had watered every plant in the house.

  Alice Madison lived in Three Oaks, a green neighborhood on the southwestern edge of Seattle. She lived in her grandparents’ home, the home where she had grown up, and even though they had passed away a few years earlier—and it was her name on the deeds—it was still, and always would be, her grandparents’ home.

  The stone-and-wood house sat on a lawn that rolled into the water, edged by a narrow beach and across from Vashon Island. Madison went into the kitchen and dropped the bag of groceries on the counter: dinner would have to be simple—steak and salad—and would take only minutes to put together. She had stopped by Trader Joe’s in Burien and stocked up on food that wouldn’t turn to mush while she was away. She didn’t know how long that would be—and that not-knowing was like a tiny cut that kept catching, whatever she did. And yet, in spite of that, Madison was curious. She had wanted to go, had wanted to put her name forward, and was relieved when Brown had agreed. Madison didn’t care for advancement and promotions: the best cop she knew had been a sergeant for years and didn’t care about becoming a lieutenant or a captain. If it was good enough for Brown, it was good enough for her—no offense to Lieutenant Fynn. Still, this was an opportunity Madison didn’t want to miss.

  She opened the French doors and walked out onto the deck. She could hear the waves lapping at the beach, even though she could not see them, and the tall firs on either side of the lawn murmured in the breeze. Would the darkness be different where they were going? Where you’re going, the darkness has teeth, a small, reedy voice whispered. Just because it is the first murder, it does not mean that creatures don’t kill and get killed every day there, and that’s as it should be.

  Madison went back inside and lit a fire in the hearth. She grabbed a backpack from the utility room and packed quickly. She knew Sorensen well enough to know that she was not above asking—no, demanding—that she and Brown ditch part of their luggage on the tarmac if they had brought too much.

  Then Madison peeled off her sweats, stuffed them into the laundry hamper, and took a long, hot shower.

  The fire in the living room was crackling when Madison came back with her hair still damp and wearing a terry cloth robe. She checked her cell for messages—a smile came and went—and then proceeded to set the table for two.

  Chapter 5

  Samuel looked up. The clouds were rolling in and the air smelled like rain. He frowned: he might just have enough time to do what he had set out to do before the heavens opened wide, right over his head, and he got soaked to the skin. He didn’t like to be wet in the freezing cold, but a job was a job. He was on wolf duty—looking for fresh scat and tracks, in case the pack had wandered too close to the homestead. For Samuel it meant time alone on the mountain, following streams and trails and getting pleasantly, willingly lost for a few hours. Sometimes those hours of freedom ran away from him and he returned to the farm later than expected. No problem, he’d say to himself, they were worth the occasional hiding.

  Samuel left the clearing and took the path that would lead him north, toward the denser forest, and soon the sounds from the cabin where he lived were behind him. Next to the barn and at the edge of the clearing stood a hut, a small structure with a tin roof and worn planks nailed together for walls. Samuel had skirted it and hurried to the path without looking. No one liked to walk too close to the little hut: in the winter it was the promise of nightmares to come, and in the summer it carried the scent of rotting meat and fear.

  Samuel quickened his step. He had already fed the chickens, collected the eggs, and done his share of milking. Someone else was on firewood duty, and the others had their own chores to attend to. No one gets a free ride, not in this world.

  He wouldn’t have minded tracking the wolf pack for a while. Three times he had seen them in the far distance, and each event was scorched into his memory: scattered gray-and-white shapes moving gracefully behind the trees; skinny legs and long muzzles. Each time he had been with his brother Caleb, and now Cal had left the farm and Samuel hadn’t seen the wolves for a long time. Maybe the wolves would leave too, maybe he would never see them again either. Finding droppings felt too much like a tease. He knew they were there, he could hear them sometimes, and yet that was all he got from them—a dried-up piece of scat full of animal fur.

  Samuel had always lived on the farm and he knew to be wary of wolves, but Cal had told him how smart they were, how they prote
cted one another and cared for their wolf family. And since he had nothing left of his older brother, he clung to those memories and looked for scat. One day, as soon as he was old enough, Samuel would leave too. He would find Cal and forget about everything else.

  The boy’s eyes scanned the ground: the spots where shade had lingered the longest were still covered by a skin of snow. He crouched and pulled off a glove; his hand was a boy’s hand, with a grown-up’s thickened skin and nails bitten to the quick. He broke off the end of a fallen branch with a snap and poked a dark object that looked like a curved cigar half covered by dry grass. It crumbled under his stick and the boy let out a breath. Frozen dirt. It figures. Samuel put his glove back on, shifted the rifle on a strap around his shoulder, and kept walking. These excursions were as good as it got. The mountain was his home: the cabin was just the place where he slept and ate and where, night after night, he listened to the fire in the stove crack and hiss.

  On the mountain, ravines and gullies lurked under the thick vegetation and a distracted walker could get lost, or much worse. For Samuel, though, everything above him and around him was alive and he never felt truly lost: when his step faltered, he would just wait for the mountain to find him and put him back on the right path.

  After almost an hour of meandering, the light around Samuel changed and a sharp wind picked up. The boy stilled. He was nearly there. He lengthened his stride and fought his way through thick shrubs to reach a small glade that backed against a rock face. He paused for a moment and listened. The notion that one of the others might have followed him was too awful to contemplate; he could hear only his own ragged breathing.

  Samuel hurried across the clearing and reached for a bundle inside his pocket as the first drops of rain tapped on the brim of his hat. He opened the square of white cloth, and in it lay a small piece of bone carved in the shape of a snake’s head, a chunk of cooked meat, and a slice of cornbread from last night. He had survived the previous day’s dawn run with nothing more than a few scratches, and the mountain deserved his thanks. His most treasured possession—a single lustrous raven feather—was his talisman, and the one thing he could not give. His offering—the foodstuff, at least—would be gone in minutes.