The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  A mallard flew overhead, the sleek green head almost black against the sky.

  “Helloooo! Alice, grab my hand, quick.”

  Rachel.

  Rachel Lever, fourteen, wears an identical life jacket and helmet; her kayak slides alongside Alice’s from the opposite direction. Alice grabs her hand, and the kayaks stop so that the girls are facing each other, each in her own fiberglass canoe.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Rachel says.

  “I only just got here myself.” Alice knows why Rachel is late. Breakfast in bed and a Father’s Day card for Mr. Lever. He’s a nice man; he deserves breakfast in bed.

  Out of the blue she realizes that she has been waiting to tell Rachel for months.

  “I don’t know where my father is,” she blurts out. “And it’s probably a good thing.”

  Around them there is nothing but water and cool June air. “The summer I came to live here, I had run away from home. I was traveling for a week before the state troopers stopped me.”

  “A week?”

  “Yes.”

  “One whole week?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that was two summers ago! You were twelve two summers ago!”

  “I was.”

  “What happened? Was he mean to you?”

  “No, he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t like your dad, but he wasn’t mean, either.”

  “Then why did you run away?”

  “A few months after my mom died, we were living in Friday Harbor. He took my mother’s things, all we had left of her, and he used them to gamble. Poker.”

  “My dad plays poker. He has poker nights with my uncles.”

  “My dad plays in Vegas.”

  “Las Vegas?”

  “He’s a pro. He taught me.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  “Sheesh, Alice. And he gambled away your mom’s things?”

  “I found out, and I got so angry, I took my baseball bat and smashed pretty much everything in my room.”

  Rachel’s eyes are wide now. Alice presses on—it’s now or never.

  “Then I went into his room, and he was asleep. He had a switchblade knife. And I stood there with the knife in my hand until a dog barked in the yard next door. I stuck the blade into his dresser, as deep as I could, packed a bag, and left.”

  They were still grasping each other’s hands.

  “He didn’t put up a fight when my grandfather said he’d bring me here. We haven’t spoken since. And sometimes I dream about that night, about the knife.”

  There, it was all out now.

  The kayaks move gently in the tide. Rachel mulls it over. This is beyond her experience. Life in junior high, her brother’s bar mitzvah, and Uncle Harold’s divorce: those are things she understands. This is another world. Two things are clear: Alice has never told this story to anyone else before, and if Rachel chose to withdraw her friendship, Alice would accept that, and she’d slowly become just one more face in the school’s corridors.

  “He didn’t take very good care of you,” Rachel says finally. “He didn’t take very good care of your mom’s things.”

  Rachel lets go of Alice’s hand and flicks a drop of water off the fiberglass.

  “My cousin Aaron asked me if you’re going out with anybody,” she says, and she starts a gentle paddle toward the Point.

  “Which one is Aaron?”

  “Tall, skinny, hair like Taylor Hanson.”

  “He looks like Taylor Hanson?”

  “No, he thinks he looks like Taylor Hanson.”

  They continue paddling.

  “If you married him, we’d be cousins,” Rachel says. “Then again, you’d be bored out of your skull. All he does is look at his stupid hair and play on his stupid computer.”

  “I won’t marry him, then.”

  “Good. Don’t you think the water is pretty tranquil today?”

  The girls paddle and giggle.

  Chapter 11

  The cyclist was traveling south on 35th Avenue SW toward Myrtle Street, still warm from so recently being in the house but feeling the damp chill of the mist creeping in with every breath. The road was deserted. At first he didn’t notice the anomaly in the streetscape: the sun wouldn’t rise for another half an hour, and in the shadows of the reservoir water towers it was only an indefinite patch of darkness.

  When he saw it, he stopped, looped his bike around, and gave the object another pass without getting any closer. Even at that distance he knew that it couldn’t be a dummy, that it was a human body sitting on a plain kitchen chair, the top half covered by a black garbage bag and duct tape coiled around it like a snake.

  He climbed off the bike, let it fall on the wet grass, and called out softly, all the while getting his cell phone out—fingers ready on the first 9. He called out again as he advanced slowly. The figure on the chair was bent forward as if trying to get up; a puff of breeze brushed the black plastic, making it shudder, and the cyclist stumbled back two steps. He looked around—no one else on the street. He took one step forward, and the smell hit him straight on: both chemical and human, as if everything that’s usually inside a body had been dragged outside of it.

  He dialed and spoke hurriedly, breathlessly, the words getting tangled before they could come out in the appropriate order, and the first blue-and-white arrived within minutes. Two officers with heavy flashlights that cut through the gloom got him out of the way as their car radio crackled and more emergency vehicles arrived, red lights flashing, to surround the reservoir green and, at the center of it all, the man on the chair.

  Madison got the call while driving North on 509 and managed a sudden and inelegant exit to Westcrest Park to the displeasure of a number of drivers. She waved her hand in apology and hit Roxbury Street as fast as the Seattle Municipal Code would allow.

  Madison saw the crowd and knew she had found the crime scene. She saw hands in the air and knew that each pair of them held a phone with a camera, taking pictures and recording, ready for instant upload.

  She parked, took a pair of gloves from her kit in the trunk, and slipped her shield onto a thin chain around her neck.

  As she approached the crowd, she realized how unusually quiet it was. An outdoor crime-scene could get pretty loud, given the presence of press, neighbors, passersby, law enforcement officers, Crime Scene Unit people, medical teams. Everybody tried to do their jobs as well and as fast as they could before Seattle’s often-wet weather might dissipate any evidence. Here, however, nobody was talking: no chitchat with the officers who were keeping the boundaries, no gossiping among the locals. Madison walked through the silent crowd.

  “Detective, this way.” A uniformed officer she knew by sight waved her in past the yellow tape.

  “Thanks.”

  The ground crunched underfoot as she stepped onto the green. A knot of people—Detectives Spencer and Dunne and Dr. Fellman, the medical examiner, among them—stood under the water towers with their backs to the crowd, creating a kind of human screen. Madison had made it there fairly quickly, and the ME and the Crime Scene Unit officers must have only just arrived themselves. She looked for Amy Sorensen, the senior CSU investigator who had helped her turn around the Salinger case, and did not spot her—occasionally even Sorensen went off duty.

  The scene’s boundaries had been defined and secured, and CSU officers were already moving to protect the area and set up privacy screens. In the dim predawn light, the beams of small flashlights sought out facts and details.

  Madison breathed deeply. There it was, the simple rush that came with every call, as if all her internal systems had suddenly turned themselves fully on, because driving, eating, shopping, and regular human interaction only required a fraction of her attention, but this, this was where she lived. She turned on her flashlight.

  “What have we got?” she asked.

  The human shield parted, and she saw him. Her training clicked into place, and she found herself thinking, speaking, and taking
notes as if this was not something any human heart should turn away from.

  Madison saw a white male, early to late fifties—hard to be sure—sitting on a kitchen chair, his hands and feet tied to the chair’s back and legs with coils of what looked like picture-hanging wire. The top half of his body had been covered by a black garbage bag, duct tape wound around the chest also binding him to the chair.

  The bag had been slit open by the responding officers, who had checked for signs of life and found none; the victim was leaning forward, the head and neck out of the plastic and the skin raw and streaked with what looked like chemical burns. On his lips, dried-up gray froth. Madison was glad the man’s eyes were closed. He wore pale blue pajamas, and his feet were bare. At the moment of death—or possibly before—his rectum had let go, and the smell was foul.

  The first thing Madison knew was that they were looking at a secondary crime scene. This had not happened on the green under the water towers: the victim had been brought here after the attack. Somewhere—maybe not too far from where they were standing—was the primary crime scene. Whatever had happened to the vic looked painful—probably some kind of torture—and inflicting that kind of pain required privacy.

  Around Madison, the camera flashes from a CSU officer burst dazzlingly white at regular intervals.

  It was Spencer’s case, and he turned to the ME: “What do you say, Doc? Time of death?”

  Madison crouched next to the chair, close enough to make her own observations but far enough not to get in Dr. Fellman’s way. He placed the tips of his gloved fingers on the man’s jaw and delicately tested the movement range.

  “I’m not going to untie him here, but, judging from the head and neck muscle, I’d say three to four hours ago—rigor is only just starting—but we have to consider outdoor temperatures, as well.” He pushed up the man’s eyelids. “No petechiae.”

  The absence of petechial hemorrhaging meant no asphyxia or strangulation, and Madison couldn’t see any marks or bruises on the neck. The victim was wearing pajamas, no shoes. He had been in his home, maybe asleep, and someone had overpowered him and bound him to the chair. His own kitchen chair.

  “No drag marks,” she said, her flashlight beam trailing around the chair’s legs.

  “Nope,” Dunne said. “It would take at least two people to lift and carry, three if they have a driver.”

  Two, maybe three, people. The ground was frosty and hard underfoot; the winter had left the green threadbare, but it had kept no footprints for them to find, no tire tracks on the concrete nearby.

  She shone the flashlight on the thin silver wire around the wrists: there was blood there—he had tried to break free—but not so much as to suggest a prolonged captivity. She could not see any wounds on the parts of the body that were exposed, except the streaks on his face. The pajama fabric around the neck was wet, maybe with perspiration. Fear would have done that to him.

  “Cause of death?” Dunne asked.

  “Painful, I’d say, for starters,” the doctor replied, systematically going through his routine checks while his assistant carefully placed a bag over each of the victim’s hands.

  Dr. Fellman held up the man’s face. “I don’t want to say anymore out here, and I don’t want to cut the bag off just yet. Let’s just get him back where we can take a good look without every single piece of trace evidence blowing off in the wind. Wait . . .”

  He reached in, held the pajama top slightly away from the man’s chest, and undid one button. An inch below the clavicle, neatly affixed to the man’s chest with more duct tape, a Washington State driver’s license caught the light. Under its laminated surface was a name, a photograph, an address.

  Dr. Fellman pushed his glasses back on his nose.

  “Meet Mr. Warren Lee,” he said. “He was restrained for some time—look at the swelling in the wrists and the ankles there.” He pointed.

  “Woken up in his bed during the night, then strapped to the chair?” Spencer ventured as he knelt and checked the victim’s feet. “His soles are clean. We need to send a car to the address: maybe he wasn’t the only one held hostage.” Spencer stood and walked off, talking quietly into his radio.

  The man had been tagged and branded with his own driver’s license, and everybody looking at the picture wire wound tightly around his limbs likely hoped that Warren Lee lived alone.

  Madison focused on the raw skin on his face: someone had done that to him very deliberately. It could be violence-prone burglars out on a rob-and-violence kick, or it could be someone already in the vic’s life who had reason to be unhappy with him. If it was the latter, unpalatable as that might be, they had a much better chance of finding the culprits swiftly; if the attack was random, their search would be harder and the outcome much more uncertain.

  The ME’s people started to prepare the man on the chair for transport; a puff of wind brushed his graying hair. Madison zipped up her coat. Fellman was right: they needed to get everything they could out of the scene before it blew away. The CSU investigators lived their lives in a daily struggle to protect and preserve, and today was not going to be a good day.

  “Madison.” Spencer had returned. “Dunne and I are going to the victim’s residence. Can you go with the doc? Anything he finds, we need to know about it as soon as he finds it; we can’t wait for the final report.”

  “No problem.”

  The first responding officer crossed the green and nodded to Dunne, who knew just about everybody who carried a badge in King County.

  “So far no one saw anything,” he said to Spencer. “The only witness we have is the guy who reported it, and the medic had to give him a sedative.”

  “We need to know which of his neighbors got home the latest, who walked or drove past the house, or who looked out their own window and saw nothing. We need a time line of the perps’ movements,” Spencer replied.

  “Got it.”

  Madison looked around. It seemed to be getting darker—after a brief moment when it could have gone either way, the day had apparently decided to cloud over and stay as close to night as possible. The small rectangular screens held by the onlookers looked like pale, unimpressive flares. Nevertheless, Madison thought, it was worth keeping an eye on both those observers and whatever was uploaded to the Web.

  “Did we get footage of the crowd?” she asked Dunne quietly, her back to them.

  “Absolutely.”

  Spencer and Dunne left for Warren Lee’s house, to face only God knew what. Madison stood in the spot where the chair had been, feeling the chill and looking in the direction where Mr. Lee would have been looking had he been alive, and she wondered why if you kidnapped and killed a man in Rainier Valley, you’d then drive him all the way to Georgetown to leave him under two massive water towers due northwest.

  She was crossing the green when the first raindrop hit; nearby a CSU officer swore under his breath.

  Chapter 12

  After the ordered chaos of the secondary, outdoor crime scene, the autopsy room was all sanitized air and clean, sharp corners. Walter Lee was laid out on the table in a pool of glaring light. Metal instruments clanked against metal surfaces as Fellman and his assistant, both in appropriate hazmat suits and wearing goggles, went through the external examination. Fellman spoke into a mike suspended above the table; his commentary would become the official report.

  First they had cut through the garbage bag and the coils of duct tape, which together with the chair and the pajamas had been sent to the lab. Madison—in a disposable protective suit without the face and eye protection—stood at an appropriate distance.

  Lengths of wire were still taut around the man’s wrists and ankles. The assistant had snipped the ends off, careful to avoid knots and twists and documenting each step with multiple-perspective photographs.

  The doctor picked up the man’s right hand and peered at it through a magnifying lens. “No skin under the nails,” he said.

  He hadn’t had a chance to fight back, Madi
son thought.

  Fellman turned the hand over, examined the palm, then repeated the process with the other hand.

  “Nail marks?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Quite deep.”

  Madison leaned against the wall: nail marks in the palm meant the fists had been clenched. It meant a high degree of pain.

  The doctor reached for one of the movable lights and pulled it toward him until it hung above the man’s head. The assistant took various samples from the areas of raw skin and collected some of the dried gray froth around the man’s lips.

  “There was vomit on the pajama top,” Fellman said to Madison without turning.

  “I saw it,” she replied. “He threw up from the pain?”

  “Not sure,” Fellman said, bending close to the man’s face and sniffing.

  He picked up a small flashlight and opened the mouth. “The inside of the cheeks and the throat are very inflamed. I think he threw up because he was forced to ingest something. It smells chemical.” He straightened up and turned to her. “Smells like a cleanser.”

  Madison nodded. “I’m going to check in with Spencer about something.” She headed out of the room.

  She had found a message from Dunne on her voice mail as they were cutting off the garbage bag, reception being what it was in the morgue. It was good news: the residence was, indeed, the primary crime scene—specifically the bedroom and the kitchen—and there were no other victims as far as they could see.

  Spencer didn’t pick up, but Dunne did on the second ring.

  “You’re going to need to print all the household stuff in the kitchen, from the cleansers to the tools to what have you. The doc says they might have forced the vic to swallow some kind of detergent. Did they keep him in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, and the bed was a mess. Sheets yanked out—probably happened when they woke him and forced him to get up. The rest of the house was untouched except for the kitchen. We found sick on the floor, and they’re picking up all kinds of trace evidence.”

  “How did the perps get in?”