The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  Madison drove toward downtown, her brain making a list of what they had and her body reminding her that it was past lunchtime. Kelly sat next to her, looking ahead, observing the traffic flowing around them as if words and language had not been invented yet. Madison realized that they had not spoken since leaving Fynn’s office: Kelly had wandered through the warehouse, fixed the body with his small blue eyes, listened to the medical examiner, and taken his own notes. More than anything he was an absence sitting next to her in the car, and Madison regretted her desire to reach out and talk to him, start the conversation, get him talking. She reminded herself of every single instance when he had been condescending, aggressive, or quite simply yard-dog rude, and her desire to make peace was slapped down by her appreciation of his silence: a quiet Kelly was someone she could work with.

  There were some facts in the case—not many, but enough to get them started. They had an ID, they had a primary crime scene and the ticket to Vancouver. They had who, how, and where; what they did not have was a reason for the attack or any clue to the number or identity of the attackers. Madison wanted to let the evidence guide her thinking and was wary of giving a meaning to the packing of the suitcase, a meaning that might mislead her reasoning. Her gut told her that Ronald Gray was on the run; her head told her to wait and use the suitcase to confirm a scenario, not to create one. The man had been found in a corner, curled up and trying to shield himself from two bullets to the head; he might not have been afraid when he was packing, but he sure had been in that warehouse. Why had he been beaten and then killed when nothing on his person had held any interest for the murderer? Was it all about the violence itself? Madison wondered, and her gaze brushed past Kelly. There were reasons police officers worked in pairs: you need a partner to back you up and to talk things through with. But more than anything you need a partner because, otherwise, you spend your days asking yourself those questions. Was it all about the violence itself? Was that seventeen or eighteen blows before the guy was shot twice in the head? Madison saw a gap in the traffic and hit the accelerator.

  The bus station downtown was housed in an unremarkable building the color of milky coffee. Madison and Kelly walked through the glass doors, and Madison eyed the CCTV cameras fixed at various angles. It was just as shabby and depressing as the last time she had been there. At any time of day there was a constant stream of travelers arriving and departing through the dank hall; if there had been witnesses to anything, they might very well be halfway across the country by now.

  Madison was instantly aware that the second they had come in, four homeless men had gotten up from their metal seats and discreetly left, two guys had stopped talking and moved to different parts of the room, and one woman had made her way speedily toward the restrooms. You couldn’t exactly be incognito with Kelly—the man shouted cop. The crowd had practically parted in front of them, and she knew without looking that Kelly had enjoyed it like an iced drink on a hot day.

  Madison showed her badge to one of the security guards, and in less than five minutes they had established that last night’s 8:50 p.m. bus to Vancouver had left without a hitch and arrived when it was supposed to. Madison had taken a picture of Ronald Gray’s driver’s license photo on her cell phone, and she showed it to all the personnel who had been on duty the previous night. None of them remembered him.

  “How about CCTV footage?” Madison asked the head of security, a lanky thirty-something with a diamond stud in his right ear and a short, untidy ponytail.

  “We have everything you need. What time are you interested in?”

  “Let’s start with immediately before boarding time and go backward. We know our man didn’t make it onto the bus, but he might have been here. Can you see on your records how and when the ticket was bought?”

  “I’ll just need a minute.” He set them up with two chairs in front of a monitor. The office was not elegant, but at least it didn’t smell as bad as the ticket hall, and she didn’t feel as if she had to sanitize the chair.

  The quality of the CCTV footage was grainy black-and-white; somehow the technology at the terminal had stopped evolving around 1972. It was a four-way split screen: two angles of the main ticket hall, one of the restrooms corridor, and one of the exit to the buses. It was entirely possible that Gray had not even made it to the station, Madison thought. She sat on the edge of the chair as the time code flew backward and the previous evening unfolded in front of them. Kelly sat slumped in his chair, blinking at the rapidly moving images and missing nothing.

  They saw him at the same time and for an instant forgot themselves and exchanged a look.

  “There,” Madison said, and she froze the image. Ronald Gray, wearing his coat, sat on a metal seat, his suitcase by his feet. He was looking at his wristwatch. Madison suddenly remembered it; it was still on his left wrist.

  “I’m going back to the beginning,” she said, as if there had been any kind of conversation between her and Kelly.

  She rewound the tape until the moment when Ronald Gray came into the frame at 7:47 p.m. He had sat down and waited; every so often he would look at the main entrance, then look away. He seemed exhausted—edgy and exhausted. Around him people came and went, sitting and standing, and no one paid him any attention.

  They were running the footage at normal speed, and it was maddening: something was about to happen, and Madison could do nothing to stop it. A little after 8:20 p.m. Ronald Gray stood up and wheeled his case out of the frame just as a small commotion around one of the vending machines had started. He was picked up by the camera facing the restrooms corridor. For a few seconds nothing happened; then two men walked into the restroom behind him. Two minutes later two men walked out, walking fast and close, one almost propelling the other forward. Then a third man came out wheeling Gray’s suitcase, except that it wasn’t Gray. He was taller and broader and made sure the camera didn’t get a good shot of his face.

  Madison rewound the tape. The two men who had walked in after Gray were wearing dark winter clothes: hat, scarves, gloves, coats. Their faces were indistinct; they had been looking away from the camera. The two men who came out were also bundled up.

  “Shoes,” Madison said.

  Kelly grunted.

  Both men were wearing black boots going in, but on the way out one of them was wearing black shoes with Velcro straps. The guy who came out with the case wore boots.

  Madison sat back in the chair: they had forced him to go with them. Actually, though, nothing on the screen told her with absolute certainty that Gray had left against his will. For all she knew, he had voluntarily decided against going to Vancouver, decided that maybe Seattle was the place to stay, after all. Madison snorted. That moment frozen on the screen in front of her—that was when Ronald Gray’s life had ceased to belong to him.

  Madison played it again. On the way out the man with the boots had placed one hand in the middle of the back of the man with the Velcro straps, the other hand gripping his arm above the elbow. When the third man appeared, wheeling the case, he cut through the crowd, and just before reaching the glass doors he turned. Madison appreciated for the first time in her life the subtle and timeless beauty of a four-way split screen: the instant the man had turned and looked across the ticket hall, the guy who had created the commotion kicking the vending machine had somehow calmed down, raised his hands in apology, and made his way out. The guards had just stood there, managing to look both menacing and relieved, totally unaware they had just witnessed a kidnapping.

  It was a lot of energy to expend on a man like Ronald Gray: at least three men in the station and—Madison could have sworn to it—one waiting in a car outside, motor running, eyes on the rearview mirror. Four men to grab an unarmed, unremarkable, fifty-year-old guy, take him to a deserted warehouse, beat him with a piece of wood they found there—Sorensen had called to confirm the find—and then shoot him in the head twice. A lot of energy, Madison considered. She did not try to shape the facts into a story; for now all sh
e had was a sequence of events—the story would come later.

  She got busy with station staff again, this time with pointed questions and the position of each of them as the kidnapping had occurred. Kelly did the same.

  Practically all the people in the ticket hall had been watching the exchange between the guards and the guy with a grudge against the vending machine. His actions had been perfectly calibrated: enough noise to draw attention but not enough damage that the guards would attempt to hold him when he wanted to leave. And when that moment had come, he had made it out of the terminal very swiftly. A black baseball cap and turned-up collar had made sure his face was not identifiable.

  Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce arrived with their kit; they were Sorensen’s best and brightest. As they stepped through the glass doors, Madison went to meet them.

  Lauren didn’t bother with greetings. “Please tell me it’s not the restroom,” he said to Madison.

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” she replied.

  “Oh, man. Is it the ladies’ restroom, at least?”

  “Nope.”

  They sighed. Madison led them down the corridor; she was already wearing a double layer of gloves. She pushed the door open with the toe of her boot; so far she had managed not to touch a single surface except with her shoes, which she might have to burn at the end of the shift. Lauren and Joyce, already wearing their hazmat suits, snapped on face-protecting masks. Ancient dirt and grime coated every inch of every surface, as if mops and scourers had barely brushed against the tiles and no detergents had ever crossed the threshold. The smell was indescribable.

  “Of course, you realize we’re going to pick up everything and anything here. The last time they cleaned this place—we’re going to pick up Jimmy Hoffa’s prints off that sink over there.”

  “I know. We don’t know what the kidnappers touched or if they touched anything, but whatever you can find would be gold.”

  “Gold ain’t what we have here, Detective,” Joyce replied.

  Ronald Gray’s apartment was downtown, a 1930s building with some but not much of its old charm. The super let them in, a short man in his early thirties with a neat blond buzz cut and pale eyelashes. He had started working there only ten days earlier and didn’t know anything about Ronald Gray except that he lived on the fourth floor, at the back. The super wore very bright T-shirts in layers, was glad to help and sorry for the reason they were there. Climbing the stairs, he ignored Kelly’s bulk and directed his conversation to Madison. She could see he was pleased to leave them by the threshold.

  The light on the landing was not enough for their needs: she shone her small flashlight on the lock and around it. Untouched. No one had come visiting after Gray had left.

  Madison turned the key in the lock, and they walked in.

  The apartment—one bedroom, living room, kitchen, and a small bathroom to the side—had been left in haste. Kelly wandered from room to room, but Madison stayed by the front door and took it all in. The dishes had been washed—white china with a fine green line; the plain blue cover on the bed had been pulled up over the pillow; the surface of the dining table—beech, big enough for six—was not polished but clean and dust-free. A broom closet held domestic cleaning products, some white paint with a brush, and a roll of wallpaper. In spite of all that, or maybe because of it, it felt as if a gust of wind had spread things all over the place, things that normally would have been tidied away: bills, letters, a couple of picture frames with no pictures, two drawers that had not been shut properly and stuck out a couple of inches. Then there was the smell. The smoke alarm was high in a corner of the room, quietly manning its post. However, the scent hung in the air, acrid and sharp.

  “Do you smell it?” Madison asked.

  Kelly grunted.

  The kitchen was an IKEA knockoff, and Madison found what she was looking for on the stove: a tall saucepan, the kind used to cook pasta. She lifted the lid and found the source of the pungent smell: floating in a few inches of grayish water, a black, ashen mass with something fused to it, something plastic that had melted into burning paper.

  Ronald Gray didn’t have a fireplace; he had a smoke alarm in the living room and a kitchen stove. If he needed to burn something, he didn’t have many options. Madison looked at the pattern of disarray in the rooms. Part of it had been generated by packing the suitcase as quickly as his hands would allow him; part of it had been the result of his searching for something, maybe a couple of items, which, once found, had ended up in the saucepan and been set alight. Once he had achieved the required level of destruction, Gray had poured in the water to douse the burning and replaced the lid.

  Madison pulled out a cheap digital camera that she kept in her bag and started taking pictures. There was a trail—she could almost sense it—in Gray’s frantic comings and goings from room to room. It might tell her what he was trying to obliterate. It was the first thing she had in her hand that whispered motive.

  It didn’t take long to go through the apartment, and nothing else held Madison’s interest as much as the saucepan and its contents. As she was locking the door, Lauren and Joyce walked up the stairs.

  “How did it go?” Madison asked.

  “As predicted,” Joyce replied.

  Madison handed her the keys. “The saucepan on the stove. He used it to set fire to something very recently.”

  “You owe us breakfast, Madison,” Frank Lauren said as the detectives were leaving. “In a place with cloth napkins.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Madison knew just how good they were, and how undaunted by circumstances: if there was something useful to the case in that restroom, Lauren and Joyce would have found it, no matter how many layers of crud they had to go through to collect it.

  The afternoon had slid into an early night, and the road was slick with rain. It was past the end of their shift, but Madison wanted to go to the morgue to see what the autopsy had revealed. She turned to Kelly, sitting in the passenger seat, his face barely lit by the streetlights’ orange glow.

  “I’m going to see Fellman,” she said. “Would you like me to drop you off at the precinct first?”

  Kelly turned. It was their first conversation of the day. “Why?”

  “Because it’s past the end of our shift, and I’m not familiar with how you like to work.”

  Kelly nodded. “So you can tell the boss you stayed on and I clocked off?”

  “No, I couldn’t care less about the hours you keep. I will miss you, but I’ll survive,” she replied. “Honestly, Kelly? I don’t care. We made it through the shift without killing each other, maybe due to the fact we exchanged three words in total, and in my book that’s an achievement. So far, so good. I’m asking you again, do you want me to drop you off? It’s not a trick question.”

  Kelly thought about it for a second. “Let’s go to the morgue.”

  “Wonderful.”

  They found Dr. Fellman in his office, still wearing his scrubs and typing a report.

  “Nineteen blows to the body,” he said, “including three to the head. The lab has the piece of wood they used. It was about this wide.” He held his fingers three inches apart.

  “We saw the men on CCTV; they picked him up at the bus station. We saw three; we think four on the whole.”

  “It would make sense. There was bruising on the arms where they restrained him; the way the fingers were splayed, I’d say large hands. At least two people, plus another who was doing his work with the wood.”

  Madison tried not to think about how Ronald Gray must have felt, how terrified he must have been. She tried to keep it a sequence of events, and still there was something about fear, about that sheer, overwhelming panic that she had seen in his home, that kept coming back to her.

  “What can you tell from the blows?” she asked.

  The doctor sighed. “They didn’t want him unconscious—this much I can tell you. The blows were designed to hurt but not to kill: his internal organs were intact, and
there were no breaks except for his nose. There was dirt and grit under the fingernails—he dragged himself into that corner with the last shreds of energy he had. He would have survived if not for the GSWs.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He had Vietnamese soup before they grabbed him.”

  “There’s a restaurant just by the bus station.” Madison nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Back in the precinct, Kelly gone home and her legs stretched out under her desk, Madison picked up her camera and examined the photographs she had taken in Ronald Gray’s home. Details of his last hours on Earth and some from the mundane routine of his everyday life. They had found pay slips from his employer—a transportation services company—where he had been a booker for seven years. Kelly had knocked on various neighbors’ doors, but either people were at work or they didn’t know anything about him.

  Madison sipped her coffee as the pictures scrolled in front of her. There had been no trace of a female visitor to the apartment—no clothes in the closet, no second toothbrush in the bathroom—and yet someone in his life was bound to miss him at some point. After twenty-four hours no one had claimed Ronald Gray. Madison looked at the picture of the dark, watery lump at the bottom of the saucepan. Tomorrow she would visit his employer and see what kind of person Ronald Gray had been and why no one had missed him yet.

  Madison drove home, and even before taking off her weapon and holster she crouched by the fireplace, added two logs, prepared the kindling, and put a match to a long, rolled-up strip of paper. The fire took right away, the fluttering light so much gentler than lamps.

  She toed off her boots by the sofa and sat back with a glass of Sancerre, while a dubious slab of leftover penne warmed up in the oven.

  When she was done with her supper, she put her dish in the sink, made herself a cup of coffee, and spread all her notes and the newspapers clippings on the Hoh River case on the dining table. At the end of August and the beginning of September 1985 the press had still been full of speculation on the murder of a Washington State senator on one side and the Mariners’ records of eleven games won and seventeen lost in one month on the other, the lost New York Yankees games being particularly chewed on. Senator Newberry had been due to testify in a federal investigation about corruption and racketeering in the Seattle docks; he had disappeared at the end of June before the day of his testimony, and his body was found six weeks later in Lake Washington. Without his testimony, the case against the defendants, “family” men from the East Coast, had collapsed. The Hoh River boys’ pictures were laid out between the dead senator and Gorman Thomas in his Mariners uniform.