Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  George Goyer made sure the Cessna was safely tucked inside the hangar. He was Ludlow’s main pilot, and his runs to Spokane and Seattle supplied whatever the town could not produce and whatever eighteen-wheelers could not deliver. The little red Cessna was his baby, and it had never let him down. You take care of me and I take care of you.

  George had left his car in the parking lot behind the hangar the previous night and spent a night in Seattle on Ludlow’s dime to be ready to set out early from Boeing Field. The hotel had cable and he had fallen asleep with a room-service tray on the bed and Jimmy Kimmel on the screen.

  Now his eyes were gritty and he felt the familiar postflight energy crash: it hadn’t been as choppy as three weeks earlier—when he’d had brief, frantic thoughts of emergency landings and calling his mother in Florida to say good-bye—but, nevertheless, it had taken a chunk out of his natural reserves. All he wanted from the day at that point was coffee and pie, and possibly a little conversation too. He was a man with fresh news in a town that couldn’t wait to hear.

  The moment he walked into the Magpie Diner on Main Street he knew he was good for an extra slice of pie on the house. Joyce Cartwell, the owner, waved him over to the counter and poured him coffee from a pot even before he had settled on the red leather stool. Some customers turned and looked; a couple of them stood and joined him at the counter.

  “So?” Joyce said as she reached for George’s favorite—key lime pie.

  “Three. One man, two women,” the pilot replied. “The guy looks like he could be in charge—he’s, what, fifties?—but it’s hard to tell. They had some heavy cases. Brought all sorts of fancy equipment, I bet.” George took a bite of pie.

  “I saw them drive past.”

  Everyone had seen them drive past.

  “Yeah, I heard them say they were going to the car first.”

  “Did you see it—the car? Before they covered it up?”

  George nodded. A crowd had gathered around the burned-out wreck. Thank the Lord, the body had already been moved to the medical center.

  Joyce leaned forward on the bar. “I have seen car wrecks before, and that’s not what we’re talking about here,” she said quietly.

  Buck Ahlberg, who had found the car and had seen the body in it, had not stinted on the details: the whole town knew Robert Dennen had been sitting in the passenger seat and it looked like his hands had been tied. No one thought it was anything other than murder.

  The pilot was quizzed in detail about the Seattle detectives, their conversation during the flight, and any scraps of information that might be gleaned about what kind of people they were and what they thought about the case. He enjoyed the attention, and he didn’t turn down a second slice of pie when it materialized on his plate as he did his best to satisfy their curiosity.

  New customers came into the diner; the same questions were asked, and the same answers duly repeated. Still, nothing could change the fact that George knew much about the weight of the detectives’ luggage and little of the substance of their minds.

  Chapter 7

  Madison looked up at the sky and saw nothing but waves of sheet-metal gray hurrying purposefully toward them. The chief had explained that Ludlow’s inclement weather was due to its position at the bottom of a long, narrow valley surrounded by mountains, which acted as a funnel for the icy winds coming from Canada.

  “Things can change quickly around here—generally not for the better.”

  “How long do we have?” Madison asked.

  Sangster’s eyes measured the heavy blacks and grays at the mouth of the valley. “Ten, fifteen minutes, tops.”

  “Pictures in a grid,” Sorensen said, and she pressed a camera into Madison’s hands. “Snap one and move on. No art, I beg you.”

  Madison nodded and started.

  “I know you’ve already covered the scene, Chief,” Sorensen said. “But this way we’ll know if anything was significantly altered in the last twenty-four hours.”

  And we’ll catch whatever you missed. Madison adjusted the aperture and the focus on the Nikon.

  The car was under the relative protection of the tent. If a storm was about to hit, the most vulnerable area was going to be the perimeter around it. Madison scrutinized the ground: the killer had walked through it, stood on it, shed epithelials and other DNA material; perhaps he had even gifted them a nice chunk of fabric that could be matched to his blood-spattered clothing. Madison smiled behind the camera. A Crime Scene Unit officer is an optimist trapped inside the body of a pessimist, Sorensen had told her once.

  While Madison was taking pictures, Sorensen bent over the blood stains and scraped the substance into various containers, labeling them in her neat script.

  Brown took Chief Sangster to one side to speak to him in private and, more important, to get him out of Madison’s way without seeming to be doing so.

  If Robert Dennen had been murdered in Seattle, if Brown had been working the case from his own desk at the precinct instead of out in God-knows-wheresville, he would have put in motion the SPD machine many hours earlier. Instead, he had to hope that Chief Sangster had remembered what he had been taught at the academy.

  “So,” Brown started, “on a regular homicide investigation—not that such a thing exists, but bear with me—we would have started a canvass straightaway to find potential witnesses and would have taken statements from whoever was the last person to see the victim alive. We would have spoken to the spouse and worked a time line for the last hours of the victim’s life. Considering that you had to deal with everything yourself—as well as organizing our visit—how far along are we?”

  “I’ve spoken with Betty Dennen and with the Jacobsens, and their accounts match.”

  “Did they sign their statements?”

  “No, they’ll be coming to the station later.” Sangster gave Brown a crooked smile. “I thought you’d want a pass at them, anyway. The time lines make sense: the victim had dinner with his wife, everything was A-okay, and they went to bed after The Late Show. Then the call wakes them up, and it’s not the first time—the Jacobsens’ little girl gets these attacks once a month or so. The victim drives straight there—departure and arrival time checked—stays with them, takes care of the baby, and leaves after 3 a.m. Then . . . nothing. This,” Sangster waved his gloved hand, “is not the way home, and there’s no reason why he would come by here instead of taking Dutton Road back to his place. It makes no sense why he would be here.”

  “Nobody called him while he was with the Jacobsens?”

  “No.”

  “And—”

  “Yes, I checked his cell, and there were no calls at all since late afternoon, when he called his wife to tell her he was going home.”

  Brown pondered the question of Dr. Robert Dennen’s state of mind. What does a man think about at 3 a.m., after trying to get a baby to breathe? Something occurred to him. “Do you have CCTV in Ludlow?” he asked.

  “Not in the streets. In the stores, sure, some do have it, but not in the streets.”

  “It can be useful.”

  “Maybe, but you’ll find people around here don’t like the idea of surveillance quite as much as city folk seem to.”

  Brown smiled. “Doesn’t surprise me one bit.” Then the smile faded. “Is someone staying with Mrs. Dennen?”

  “Her sister drove up from Republic.”

  “Good,” and he added, “how did Mrs. Dennen take it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Chief.”

  The statistics of spousal homicide were unforgiving, and every cop knew it.

  Sangster zipped up his coat to the collar with more vigor than needed. “She was devastated. She was in shock. She puked up her coffee right in front of me.”

  Brown nodded. He was going to meet everyone and speak to everybody again anyway—he didn’t care how many witnesses would throw up on his shoes.

  He had not formed an opinion about Chief Sangster yet, and
his next words were more about the officer than the victim. “Did you know Robert Dennen?”

  Sangster took so long to reply that Brown thought he had not heard him. At length, the chief met Brown’s eyes. “A little. The way you can know people in a town like this without being close friends. Once, when Dr. Foster was away, he prescribed some antibiotics for me for a throat infection and we chatted for a while. He was active in the community, knew most people’s business around town, and was a volunteer firefighter. Last week, if you had asked me the same question, yes, I’d have said I knew him as well as anybody in town, and he was a good man. Today, if you’re asking me if some part of his life people don’t talk about at PTA meetings suddenly turned up and left him in that burned-out car . . . maybe, I don’t know, and I sure couldn’t tell you.”

  Madison worked fast and it wasn’t until she had been taking pictures for a few minutes that she realized just how much she was enjoying it. Her bare fingers were numb in the chill and her back ached from crouching over the ground, and yet there was something satisfying in the repetitive movements and the utter focus the job demanded.

  The dirt ran in shades of brown and gray streaked with snow, and Madison’s world shrank to the height and breadth of the camera frame as she took a picture, advanced one step, and took another picture. The Nikon D7100 was a good camera, much better than the one she had learned on—Madison wasn’t entirely sure the Nikon was not Sorensen’s own. However, as it had been drilled into her, a tool was only as good as the person using it. A fair warning, she thought as she scanned the edges of the frame to make sure she was following the grid pattern, and then moved forward.

  Suddenly the light changed and the drizzle became icy needles on her cheeks. Damn.

  Deputy Kupitz’s cruiser rumbled around the bend and stopped on the side of the road. The young officer jumped out and hollered to his colleague, who ran to help him. Together the deputies quickly assembled a tent that went over and around the burned-out car and its current meager covering. No one offered to help them, as it was obvious they were much more efficient working by themselves. Judging by the grim set of their expressions, it seemed that putting up that tent under the worsening rain was their one contribution to the progress of the investigation and it would not be wrested away from them without a fight.

  After the first was dealt with, a second tent—smaller but still sizable—was set up near the cruisers and everybody took shelter. The inside of it smelled of warm rubber and cotton candy. Madison shook the rain off her coat and a few drops found their way inside her collar. One thing remained to be done to mark their territory.

  After a moment, Madison took the CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS tape from her coat pocket and went back out into the rain. Hockley and Kupitz followed her.

  Madison hurried down the road, and they kept up in long strides. Once she felt she had created a wide enough perimeter around the tents she knotted one end of the tape around the trunk of a fir and unrolled it at waist height as she crossed the street. She took out her folding knife from her back pocket, sliced the tape off clean, and tied the other end around a portable STOP sign. The blade caught the light. Stepping through the trees in a wide circle with the car at its center, they taped off the crime scene section by section: the wilderness owned every shadow in the forest, but the small island within the boundaries of the tape was theirs. The deputies scrambled after Madison under the lashing rain as she worked without speaking.

  That night, when Hockley was tucked up in his bed and warm under the comforter, he would remember how the Seattle detective had handled that knife and how her hands had moved easily around the patterned steel blade.

  Chapter 8

  In the time it took for the small procession to leave the crime scene and reach the medical center—a squat redbrick building at the end of Main Street—the rain had turned to sleet, the mountains had all but disappeared, and the sky hung low. Even the wind had picked up, and Madison tried not to think about landing a puny little plane in those conditions—the red Cessna as slight as a child’s toy against the rocky crags.

  The room where the remains of Robert Dennen had been kept was at the back of the center, past the cheery waiting room with the kids’ drawings tacked on the corkboard. Madison wondered what it would be like to live a life meted out in this building: to come for croup as a baby, for a skinned knee from a skateboard fall as a teenager. It was a gentle place where residents took care of lesser injuries because nothing bigger than a bloody nose had ever been inflicted in Ludlow and adults could get a lollipop from the nurse if they asked nicely.

  A pretty young woman with her arm in a sling was leafing through a magazine as they filed past; she looked up and Deputy Kupitz nodded to her. He might have winked too—Madison wasn’t sure.

  The nearest funeral home was in Sherman Falls, and the medical center had the facility to keep two bodies; it was a recent addition to the doctors’ offices and very useful, especially in winter when the snow might block the roads for days and the odd, unexpected natural death had to be dealt with. Chief Sangster explained this as he unlocked the door, led them into the room, and closed the door behind him. “Bobby’s office is across the hall,” he said.

  They would go through it, by and by, and no one missed the absurdity of it.

  There was nothing left to say. Madison had seen a few arson deaths and she knew what to expect—that is to say, she knew that knowledge would not help her one bit in the face of what lay inside the fridge locker.

  “All right then,” the chief said, and he pulled out the drawer.

  Samuel took off his boots: his socks were as cold and damp as the rest of him, and the wood stove was all the way on the other side of the room. He would have gladly climbed inside it to warm up just then—even at the cost of turning into kindling. The weather had shifted too quickly for him to make it back to the farm before getting soaked and, since he wore third-generation hand-me-downs, nothing he owned would keep him warm or dry quite as well as it was supposed to. He peeled off his socks and rubbed his feet with a thin towel.

  “Where did you go today?” The man’s voice cut through Samuel’s musings.

  The boy started, as if ice water had been poured down his back. “Up toward the creek, sir, all the way to the pass and back around the old mine trail.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing, sir. They’re keeping away.”

  “They’d better,” he said.

  Samuel did not reply.

  The man walked off and the boy went back to trying to get some warmth into his feet. He hadn’t told him that he had seen the town plane—and on a day he did not expect to see it. More important, he hadn’t told him about the beautifully clear paw print he had seen up near the pass. It had been pressed into clean dirt—four and a half inches long, three and a half wide—the claws peeking out, and enough weight behind it to have been an adult male. So pretty. Samuel turned the image around in his mind. The pass was far enough from the farm that it didn’t matter—and if the pack stayed put, there was no reason to tell anybody where they were. Samuel had run his fingertip inside the indentation—four wide toes and a central pad—and he could still feel the packed earth against his skin.

  The detectives had looked at the body for as long as it was useful and were happy to pull up the zipper on the black bag and return Robert Dennen’s remains to the fridge locker once they were done.

  Madison had seen more dead bodies than most people ever would in their lives, and that was understandable and the way it should be, she considered, because she had chosen to be in that line of business—the business of hunting killers. And yet there was something particularly awful about arson, about someone setting a fire that would consume a human being. It spoke of the complete destruction of the victim, and there was something repulsive about it that struck everybody who investigated those cases—officers who were, if not used to, at least prepared to witness the worst human beings did to one another. In other times, in times of savag
ery of the mind and of the heart, human beings had been burned at the stake for their sins, both real and imagined. In Madison’s times, fire was still seen as the force that would purify a body in death, and inevitably it would also obliterate every trace of the killer on the victim. Why had the killer set fire to the car? Why had he or she made sure that Robert Dennen would be almost totally obliterated inside it? Was it purely to conceal the circumstances of the murder, or was there a deeper meaning behind it?

  Even with the victim back in the locker the stench still permeated the room, and they were all eager to leave.

  “We have a space where you can set up,” Chief Sangster said. “I’m afraid the police station is too small, but the community hall across the road should be all right. Usually it’s used by seniors to visit and do their art classes—this week they’ll be using one room in the elementary school. And Polly, my secretary, has been preparing the guesthouse for you.”

  “The guesthouse?” Madison asked.

  “We have a few motels about a ten-minute drive out of town, but they’re closed for the winter. The guesthouse is around the corner from Main Street and a short walk from the hall. Edna Miller, the owner, is in Florida until March; I called and she said, sure, to go ahead and use it since we kept a set of keys. Polly has turned on the furnace in the basement this morning because the house has been empty and cold since November. It’s not the Hilton, but it’s the best we could manage.”

  The detectives were quick to assure him that it would be fine, and in the flurry of thanks and necessary courtesies they left the medical center. The deputies, Madison noticed, had kept quiet; however, their eyes had never left Sorensen while she had taken samples from the body, and—as pale as the young men had been—neither had turned away.

  The senior center was a bright, wide room with the scent of dried flowers and freshly sharpened pencils. It smelled like the first day at school, minus the teenage perspiration. Dried lavender sat on the shelves next to how-to books that ranged from watercolors to whittling your own buttons. It was spotless, and the linoleum floor had been recently swept. Madison knew without checking that one of the doors in the back would lead to an orderly cupboard with cleaning products and detergents, and there would be a roster on the wall so that everyone would be aware of their day to make sure the place was left clean for the next class.