The social worker was quiet for a moment. Madison was about to make sure that she was still on the line when the woman spoke, and her voice was different.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he wrote to us and I picked up the case and started a file.”
“What does that involve?”
“It means that he sent us the details of a potential child abuse situation, and I investigated.”
“You investigated? You visited the Tanner farm?”
“I cannot give you the name of the family in question.”
Madison’s mind raced to find a way to make the conversation work; somehow, she sensed that the woman wanted to tell her something. “I completely understand and I value your ethics, ma’am. Let me just rephrase it . . . and you only need to say yes or no . . . am I on the right track here?”
A beat of silence. “Yes, you are.”
“Thank you. Without compromising anybody’s rights, what can you tell me about the letter and about your visit?”
The woman sighed. “The e-mail mentioned a local resident and his children. It was not unusual in any way. That’s how we find out about most cases.”
“When did the e-mail arrive?”
“About two weeks ago, and the implications were extremely serious. I scheduled a visit as soon as I could.”
“You called the family?”
“They don’t have a telephone. I drove up to the home of the family in question.”
Suddenly Madison wanted to hug the woman. “You just went?”
There was a grim chuckle. “Yes, I just went.”
“Did you see the kids?”
“No, I saw a few young men and women—in their twenties—but no minors.”
“Did you speak with Jeb Tanner—I mean, with the father?”
“Oh yes, we spoke all right. He told me that his children were not the state’s business, that he had all the paperwork for the school testing in order, and that he didn’t welcome the government’s interference in his family’s life.”
“That’s it?”
“No, he also told me to leave and never, ever come back.”
“What’s next?”
“I’ve started a file on the family and I’ve sent a report to my line manager. The man didn’t threaten me—he didn’t need to, and wasn’t stupid enough to. I can’t force him to let me meet his kids, because there’s no proof of abuse or neglect. And there is no proof, because no one has ever seen them. Lord knows if they even exist. Even the doctor’s letter could only say that he feared for the kids. Between you and me, I think there was something more, but he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Another reason to contact you?”
“Yes, but he didn’t explain. If he’d had any kind of evidence—if he’d seen a child himself, or someone else had—he would have told me.”
“Something had pushed Dennen to seek help for the kids,” Madison said, after she had briefed Brown and Lynch. “Something happened, but we don’t know what—or when.”
“We need to see his office,” Brown said.
Lynch stood up. “Sure, but you cannot have access to his files—his patients’ files.”
Brown—ever the diplomat—nodded. “Of course, at this stage we’re just trying to understand the big picture.”
Forget the big picture, thought Madison, who was inclined to get right into the meat of the files first and comply with the relevant warrants later—warrants that would inevitably require a conversation with Nathan Quinn, and possibly another chat with the US attorney.
Robert Dennen’s office was identical to his colleague’s. His remains had lain only yards away, and when Madison crossed the threshold she could not help thinking about the body bag and what had been inside it.
There was a desk, one chair behind it, and two more for the patients. An examining bed stood in a corner and posters covered the walls.
“The last time Dr. Dennen was here, it would have been on Wednesday. Is that correct?” Brown said.
“Yes,” Lynch said. “On Wednesday we finish at 7 p.m.” He hovered by the door and appeared reluctant to leave them alone in the room.
The whole place was a gigantic patient confidentiality trap: from the doctor’s planner on the desk, to the drawers that might contain any kind of medical test result, to the brand-new computer crammed full of information that Brown and Madison were not intended ever to see.
In the meeting with Lieutenant Fynn in Seattle, Nathan Quinn had told them that he was working on the warrants that would allow them enough access to do their job without tramping over the Hippocratic Oath. However, without a signed warrant in their hands, they couldn’t so much as open the first page of the diary. Anything they found and any progress in the investigation that was not backed up by a warrant would be considered fruit of the poisoned tree and would get them kicked out of court. But not before the defense attorney and the judge had a good laugh.
They couldn’t touch, but they could observe. Brown turned to Eric Lynch.
“Doctor, take a look around. Is there anything that feels out of place to you?”
The room had been sealed off first thing on Thursday morning, after the body had been found. Chief Sangster had sent Deputy Hockley to stick a length of crime scene tape over the door, and no one had been inside it since then.
Lynch took a cautious step into the room. Madison could see that he did not want to be there. It wasn’t about confidentiality and it wasn’t about sorrow. One step inside the room was one step closer to whatever had killed his friend.
He looked around and his gaze trailed over the objects, the furniture, and the oatmeal carpet.
“Take your time,” Madison said. “You know this room. You know what’s normal for this room. Has anything been moved from its usual place? Has anything been removed or added?”
Lynch frowned with the effort of finding something. To Brown and Madison, Robert Dennen’s office looked neat but not obsessively so. It was the workplace of someone who thought he’d get back to it the following day, to his orange Post-its on the edges of the computer monitor and his pens in a desk organizer.
Lynch looked all the way around the room, then stopped suddenly and took a step forward.
“That,” he said, and pointed.
Brown and Madison followed his eyes. At first, neither could see what he had noticed.
“What is it?” Brown said.
“The wastebasket.”
All three stood over the plain metal-mesh basket with a single paper tissue scrunched up in it. The tissue was white and looked clean.
Lynch looked at Brown and Madison, as if it were obvious. “The cleaner comes in around 8 p.m. and empties all the baskets. I remember thinking how sad it was that he had wiped away all traces of Robert from this room before we knew he’d never come back to it.”
The tissue lay in a wastebasket that had been empty at 8 p.m. the night Dennen had been murdered.
“We need the cleaner’s name and phone number,” Brown said.
“We need the warrants,” Madison muttered. Without the warrant the tissue would, for the rest of eternity, remain in the basket.
She left the room and for the second time that morning dialed Nathan Quinn’s number in Seattle. It went to voice mail. “It’s Detective Madison. We need those warrants. We might have found something, but Sorensen isn’t going to be able to do anything about it without the warrants. If they have to be signed by the pope, could someone please tell His Holiness to shake a tail feather and get a move on?”
Madison ended the call. She was still annoyed that she’d had to brief the US attorney on the hoof, and in an oblique way she blamed Quinn.
Keep me posted . . . those had been his parting words.
Sure thing, Counselor, I’ll keep you posted when you get me my warrants.
“Brown just checked and the cleaner had emptied the basket, as always, at around 8 p.m.,” Madison told Sorensen on their way back to the town center.
“Someone was in the
victim’s office in the middle of the night?” Sorensen was still at the car crime scene.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Where are my warrants, Madison?”
“I know, I know. I’m chasing them.”
“Tell your friend to hurry up, he’s the one who sent us up here.”
“Quinn is—”
“You know what I mean. You worked with him on enough cases to push him when needed and, believe me, it’s needed.”
“I got it.”
“Madison?”
“Still here.”
“The ME called me. He recovered a bullet. The body shielded it from the heat. Someone will drop it off at the station.”
“Good news.”
“I’ll see you in the square. My homeboy Kupitz here is going to drive me.”
Chapter 18
Traffic in town was definitely busier than it had been since the detectives arrived the previous day. People walked down Main Street with a definite purpose, almost hurrying toward the square. They were coming with candles and flowers. Some carried small stuffed animals. Children, he had taken care of children.
Madison was surprised by how familiar the place felt after having been there for barely twenty-four hours. Some of the faces she had seen in the diner, others she had walked past once or twice. In a group she recognized the woman she had bumped into at the pharmacy earlier that morning.
The weather was on their side: cold but clear, the sun as high as it would get on that late February day, and the air was still.
It was a vigil and it would also be another occasion for an appeal for information—it had been decided that Chief Sangster would do it. Madison felt a rush of unease without knowing why; she watched as the crowd gathered in the open space, and something inside her bristled.
Lee Edwards stepped out into her backyard. It was time to go to the square, but she wanted to try one more time.
She took a deep breath and hollered. “Tucker!” She waited a few seconds. “Tuckeeeeeeer! Here, boy!”
There was no movement around the shrubs or by the trees, and it was the darndest thing. Tucker would never leave; he just wasn’t that kind of dog. He wasn’t one of those fancy huskies who—soon as you let them off the leash—run off to join the wild packs and you never see them again. No, her Tucker was a sweet dog who stayed close to home.
She called out again, but there was no answer, and Lee Edwards felt that the weight on her heart, not knowing where her darling boy was, would never lift. She was in her late sixties, her grandkids lived in South Carolina, and that little dog meant the world to her.
She went back inside and her husband, Ty, gave her a brief hug. They left the house for the short drive and all along the road she looked out for the poodle.
When Madison and Sorensen widened the perimeter around the car crime scene, they had made it difficult for the locals to have a place where they could leave their tokens of remembrance and sadness in the mourning of their doctor. The gazebo in the town square had filled that need, and since Madison had walked past it that morning, flowers, candles, and notes had been left on the gazebo’s steps and all around it. A trestle table had been set up on one side and volunteers were handing out coffee and hot chocolate to the milling crowd from large metal pots. The mood was muted, the talk was hushed.
Chief Sangster had briefed his deputies and the Seattle investigators in his office and they all knew what they were doing: six of them in all to keep an eye on a crowd of a few hundred, and people kept arriving.
Brown and the chief would be by the gazebo, with the mayor and the family, while Madison, Sorensen, and the deputies would mix with the crowd. Both Madison and Sorensen had checked their cameras and were already taking discreet pictures.
“Do you think he will come?” Kupitz asked Sorensen.
“I think it’s likely. Not a certainty, but a definite possibility.”
“What . . . what do you want me to look out for?” he whispered, as if Sorensen was now the highest authority in his own private hierarchy and the chief’s instructions were important but secondary to hers.
Sorensen hadn’t missed this. “Do what the chief said,” she replied. “Look out for anything that feels wrong to you, and especially if you see any lone strangers.”
Kupitz nodded and went off.
Sorensen looked around: too many people and too few warm bodies to cover them. Just then the crowd parted and she saw a woman with a baby in her arms and two young children by her side. They walked by the flowers without seeing them; there was no question about who they were.
Randall Gibson, the mayor of Ludlow, had replaced his bright red parka for a subdued smart black coat. When he tapped on the microphone that had been set up in the gazebo, the crowd moved closer. They want to hear, sure, Madison thought—unlike the deputies this was not her first vigil—but they want to look just as much.
She stepped to the side, out of the main body of the crowd, sweeping her eyes over the faces turned to the mayor: four hundred people, maybe more. As Randall Gibson began to speak, the silence in the square was a heavy, tangible object pressing down on all of them. She saw Dr. Lynch with someone who could have been his wife; she saw the lady from the diner; and Polly, the chief’s secretary, her gray hair tightly permed and her hands busy with a handkerchief.
“We are here today. . . ,” Gibson started.
But Madison was not listening to him. She was looking for something, anything, that would catch her attention, and she knew that Sorensen, on the other side of the crowd, was doing the same.
Kevin Brown didn’t really want to listen to the mayor, and he sensed that the small, dapper man in the black coat would have been quite happy to do all of the talking during the event.
Brown’s main concern was the crowd: How many of them were there? Three, no, at least four hundred. Inside the gazebo they were a few feet higher than the ground, and as much as Brown hated being on show, it gave him a far better view of the square. He went into a sequence: his eyes searched for Madison and then Sorensen, then he scanned the first few rows of watchers, checked the position of the deputies, scanned the back rows of onlookers, and went back to Madison.
Brown hoped for something unequivocal, like a crazy stranger who would begin to rant about doctors and medical insurance—someone they could cuff on the spot and interview at leisure in the police station. Then again, he doubted they—or the town—would be that lucky.
Alice Madison was vaguely aware that the mayor was talking about Robert Dennen and how much the town owed him. And yet, like a hunter, her attention stayed fixed on the mourners. A look, a gesture, a smile at an inappropriate moment, body language that spoke of unease, of repressed anger: the list went on and on—though when it came down to it, it meant that Madison had to follow her gut and question anything that felt out of step with the event.
Her gut, Madison considered, was clenched hard, and as the crowd stepped forward to hear the mayor’s words more clearly, she understood why: if there were 450 people at the vigil, it was more than two-thirds of the whole town’s population in one place at the same time. She wasn’t sure why this should be a concern, but there it was. Nothing like this ever happened in Seattle, where even CenturyLink Field could seat only 67,000 in a town with ten times that number of residents.
Madison observed and took note. Most of the people present had dressed in similar fashion: a lot of dark colors, coats, baseball caps, and woolen hats, many hooded tops under jackets, and boots. The age range covered all generations. It made for a homogeneous mass that Madison was finding difficult to keep distinct.
Some stared at her, some glanced and looked away. Her Seattle PD gold badge was on a thin chain around her neck. They knew who she was and it was a good thing. She wanted to be visible. If anybody was nervous about Madison watching the crowd, she wanted to see it in their eyes.
The mayor had moved on to the values held dear in the heart of our community, and Madison moved down the side o
f the throng, taking pictures on a small camera that fit neatly in one hand. A woman with a toddler in her arms was weeping silently as she bounced the little girl. A couple of teenage boys in the back pushed each other and giggled. Someone threw them a harsh look and they fell silent.
Betty Dennen was not going to speak. Madison had seen the lost, haunted look of someone still deeply in shock too many times to count, and she was pleased to see that the widow had her family and friends around her. She would have found it hard to breathe, let alone to speak coherently, in front of a crowd. Mostly she just sat—thank God someone had organized chairs—and nodded.
The crowd stirred, and from the front a group of teenagers stepped out and lined up by the bunches of flowers. It was the Ludlow Goldfinch Choir and their voices rang out in the square. They sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” a cappella, and they sang it with more emotion than talent. Though they wouldn’t make it onto Glee, Madison felt a knot in her throat: they were singing for a man who had lived and died among them.
A movement to her right and Madison was suddenly aware of the camera operator filming. No prizes for guessing who’d end up in the news—the dull mayor or the cute kids singing.
“What’s going on?” a voice said to her, and she turned.
An older man fixed her with a piercing glare and repeated his question. “What’s going on? You’re one of the Seattle detectives, right?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Nobody’s telling us anything. The local news is useless and all we know is that there was a fire and the doctor was found dead in his car.”
“Yes, he was.” Madison’s eyes shifted between the man in front of her and the people behind him. The last thing she wanted was to talk to him.
“Well?” He was getting into his stride. “It’s been two days already. What’s going on? The chief is usually really up front and straight up, and that’s why we like him around here, but he’s told us diddly-squat about this and the community is feeling . . .”
Madison would never find out what the community was feeling. The song was coming to an end and Chief Sangster moved to the microphone to speak.
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