Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  “I think it’s safe to say you can’t see me,” she said.

  “But you can see me?”

  “Yes, perfectly.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” She smiled and lifted her left middle finger.

  “Thought you were raised better than that,” Madison commented.

  “Never mind my manners. Take yourself out without doing damage. We should process that area. Ways in and out, the whole thing.”

  Sorensen didn’t press Madison to be careful not to spoil or contaminate the spot. Madison knew better than to mess with her crime scenes.

  Brown had found nothing of interest on the other side of the house. The view had not been as clear and, most important, the intruder would have been more exposed.

  Sorensen’s team was starting to work on Madison’s discovery when Brown turned to her. “We have a date with Dr. Fellman,” he said. “Before or after lunch?”

  Madison checked her watch. The morning had disappeared as they walked every inch of the house.

  “Before?” she replied.

  Two years into their partnership there was no pretense that what they saw in the morgue did not affect her, and Brown rewarded her honesty with his own.

  “Good,” he said.

  Just because they had made their peace with it didn’t mean it wasn’t something they had to force themselves to endure each and every time.

  Brown and Madison slid into a couple of window seats in Kafe Berlin on Ninth Avenue with their lunch—two turkey-and-apple salads, one Coke, one ginger ale. They ate in silence, watching the passing traffic and the shadows getting longer so early on a winter’s day.

  Brown pushed away his empty plate. “Andy’s back from the bachelor party today,” he said.

  “Is he? You spoke to him?”

  “Yes.” Brown smiled a little. “He’s in one piece. A little frail perhaps.”

  The wedding was going to be on Sunday: a massive Irish affair with relatives flying in from all over, without mentioning the contingent from the department in full dress uniform—Brown and Madison included. Dunne’s family was very involved in their local church and had managed to secure the unusual Sunday wedding—Madison wouldn’t have been surprised if the Pope himself paid a visit on the day.

  “Aaron coming?” Brown asked.

  “Yup, I thought I’d get him to meet everybody all at once, while we’re all dressed up and armed, so he won’t feel at all awkward and intimidated, you know.”

  Brown chuckled. “Had to happen at some point.”

  Madison didn’t ask him if he was bringing a plus one. In spite of all they had gone through together—including gunfire and near death—Brown’s romantic life was still uncharted territory in their conversations. Madison was too shy to ask and Brown was happy not to share.

  Just over a year ago their shift commander, Lieutenant Fynn, had beckoned her into his office one morning when Brown was in court giving evidence. Fynn had closed the door and Madison’s alarm bells had chimed quietly.

  “How is he?” he asked her, getting to the point without preamble.

  Madison’s brain had caught up fast: Brown had been injured the year before and his return to active duty had not been without issues.

  “He’s fine,” she had replied without hesitation.

  “That’s what I think,” Fynn had replied, “but I need to hear it from you, and I need you to be frank—loyal, sure, as I know you are—but frank most of all. For his sake.”

  Madison had stood there, feeling disloyal just by contemplating the notion of Brown’s fitness for duty. For his sake. She had been watching him closely from the day he had come back—she couldn’t deny that, not to herself. She pondered the question.

  “He’s fine,” she repeated. And she couldn’t begin to tell Fynn how glad she was deep in her heart that she didn’t have to lie.

  A couple of weeks later, as they were leaving the precinct at the end of the shift, Brown had caught her off guard. “Fynn check in with you about me yet?”

  She had felt about ten years old then and she had blushed. You don’t lie to Brown. Not ever.

  “Yeah, he did, couple of weeks ago.”

  “What did you say?”

  She thought it over. “That you are a danger to yourself and the public, and they should take back your badge and your weapon lickety-split.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Brown and Madison left the café and drove to the Harborview Medical Center and Dr. Fellman’s home-away-from-home, where Matthew Duncan had been patiently awaiting their visit.

  Madison had tried not to think about it too much—whether the medical examiner would have finished the autopsy and the sheet would have been pulled up over the body’s head or whether they’d find the pathologist still in the middle of things. Madison was not squeamish and she did not get queasy. She had seen a lot—much of it in the last two years in Homicide—and certainly more than most people had ever seen. And yet there was something about what had been done to this one victim that spoke to her of an insidious evil, something twisted and murky whose pleasure had been to leave a man’s body intact and yet destroy his face so completely that none of it was left. In order to find that person, to catch that person, Madison had to stand close and breathe air from the same world as that person, and she knew herself enough to know that such ugliness was hard to shake off and impossible to completely forget.

  She had heard the saying enough times and knew it to be true: cops and doctors and nurses and firemen marry each other because no one else has seen up close what they’ve seen and they can’t go through life alone and in silence.

  The doors swished open and Brown and Madison walked into the autopsy room in their coveralls. It was chilly—it was always chilly there. The scent hit them at the same time and they both breathed in deeply: the sooner they deadened their sense of smell, the better. Dr. Fellman was still working on the body with one of his assistants. Under the heavy lights everything was open, revealed and exposed: outside, inside, and everything in between.

  The assistant—Sam or Glenn, Madison couldn’t remember; they all wore masks and never spoke—lifted the victim’s liver out of the thoracic cavity and placed it on a set of scales on a metal side table.

  Dr. Fellman spoke into a hanging microphone in a soft monotone, dictating the notes that would become his final report. In his position as the King County Medical Examiner Ernie Fellman would perform or oversee well over one thousand autopsies a year; he had stopped keeping a personal tally a long time ago.

  Madison kept her eyes on the doctor’s back and away from the table. When he realized Brown and Madison were standing behind him, leaning against the bare wall, he turned to them.

  “Aside from a couple of old fractures he was in good—no, excellent—health,” he said. “I’ve taken X-rays of every nook and cranny and aside from two broken fingers and a broken ulna from years ago he was in great shape. He was an athlete, right?”

  “Yes,” Brown replied. “There were some trophies around the house. He played college football, which might explain the fractures—we’ll ask his wife.”

  “Doc, what can you tell us about the sequence of injuries?” Madison said.

  Fellman continued his procedure as he spoke. “First blow was to the back of the head—enough to give him a concussion, possibly enough to render him unconscious. If that was all he’d had he would have survived this. From the neck down the body was untouched. From the angle of that first blow I’d say the killer was right-handed.”

  “Height?” Madison said.

  “Difficult to say. It depends on how the killer wielded the statuette.”

  Brown and Madison waited for his next words. The doctor’s hands worked quickly; the steel instruments dinged against the table.

  “You can look at the X-rays on the viewer,” Dr. Fellman continued. “I’ll have to study them myself quite carefully when I’m finished here. But from what I can see I’d say between ten and twenty
blows. Sorensen emailed me a picture of the murder weapon.” The doctor turned. “This is the worst maxillofacial trauma I have ever examined. The bones were crushed, the soft tissue destroyed.”

  Madison’s eyes traveled over the X-rays.

  Dr. Fellman looked ghostly pale in his scrubs. “Do you understand what you’re dealing with here?” he said.

  By the time they walked out into the dusk the streetlights were on and the sky was streaked red with thin, harmless clouds. It would turn pitch black in minutes.

  “She can’t see him as he is,” Madison said as they got to their car. “There’s nowhere for her to look.”

  “It’s her choice.”

  Madison nodded. She didn’t want to think about what she would have done in that situation; she didn’t want to think about that at all.

  Brown and Madison met Kate Duncan at the precinct. She had come with her friend and seemed to be drowning in the dark coat she was wearing. She gave them a sworn statement and answered all their questions about the house, the neighborhood, where and when she had last worn the stolen jewelry. She was ashen and yet answered each question painstakingly as if each insignificant detail about their life was the most important clue to the insanity that had taken place in her home.

  Afterward, they took her to the Harborview Medical Center.

  “I need to see him,” she had said simply.

  Dr. Fellman had covered the body of Matthew Duncan with a sheet. His hand and forearm on the side of the viewing window were exposed: they were smooth and flawless and a thin white band showed where his wedding ring had been.

  Kate Duncan was shivering. She leaned her forehead against the glass partition and stood there until her friend put her arm around her.

  Back at her desk, Madison uploaded pictures of the pearl necklace and the other items that the insurers had been able to provide. The killer would want to sell his spoils as quickly as possible, and she would be ready to follow the trail straight back to the hellhole from which he had crawled out.

  Brown had only just left and Madison found herself standing by the open door of the barren office fridge as Aaron’s text arrived; it was after 10:00 p.m. “Still in the office? Wld you lk takeout?”

  Madison smiled. Aaron texted like a teenager. In many ways he was just as he had been when she first met him as a kid—except now he had kids of his own.

  Not just cops, doctors, nurses, and firemen, Madison mused. She texted back. “Yes, please.”

  He brought pizza that they ate out of the box on her sofa as they watched television. He didn’t ask her about her day: she had told him what case she was working and he’d rather she forgot about her day altogether. As they were about to fall asleep, she stood and took his hand and led him to bed. They were too exhausted for anything more than a long, soft kiss and Madison drifted off with Aaron’s heavy arm around her.

  In her dreams she saw a house surrounded by the woods on the side of a hill. The house was made of glass and every room shone impossibly bright against the pressing night. As she watched the house and the tiny, distant people moving inside it, Madison realized—aware, as she was, that she was dreaming and with neither fear nor surprise—that her body was gone and that she herself was the night.

  Madison slept through and when she woke up, just before dawn, she turned to Aaron’s warm shape next to her. He had long blond eyelashes, like a boy’s, and a small nick on his cheek where he had cut himself shaving. Madison felt blindingly grateful that he was there and he was whole, and that they had met again.

  Chapter 8

  Over thirty-six hours had passed from the murder of Matthew Duncan. Thirty-six hours. Madison drove toward the precinct in the early-morning light thinking about how little progress they had made in those hours. The neighborhood had been canvassed twice already and no one had seen anything unusual. In fact, no one had seen anything at all. No strangers’ cars, no deliveries from unmarked trucks, no strangers of any kind. The Fauntleroy commuters had driven home from work with their eyes on the road and stepped inside their lovely homes without lifting their gaze once.

  All of which left Madison without witnesses. The family who lived next door to the Duncans—the Andersons: father, mother, and a little boy, eight years old—had come back home from dinner at their relatives’ just before 9:00 p.m. and could testify to nothing. Every single one of the people who lived on the street and had known the Duncans by name or by sight had been left in various degrees of shock and, without fail, everyone had attested that they were a nice couple and wasn’t it awful. Madison had gotten to the point where she knew within twenty seconds of talking to someone whether they had anything to contribute to the investigation. So far she had a pile—yea high—of statements but no useful facts.

  Waiting at the traffic lights on Fourth Avenue Madison checked her cell, which she had thrown on the passenger seat.

  No messages.

  At some point a trickle of results from the Crime Scene Unit would begin to flow her way and she couldn’t afford to miss it.

  Thirty-six hours.

  Madison walked into the detectives’ room with two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder and the Seattle Times under her arm. She put one mug on Brown’s desk and scanned the headlines while sipping her coffee. Something was trying to get her attention from way back in the last couple of days but she couldn’t quite grasp it. Something to do with the media. There had been nothing striking in the reporting in the Times. And yet . . .

  Madison went online. It took her three minutes to find it. It had been posted late the previous night. The helicopter—she had forgotten about the helicopter. The footage from the news helicopter had been downloaded and it was outrageous: in one of the low swoops at the back of the house the cameraperson had managed to get a shot of the body with Madison and Brown standing next to it. There had been a frantic zoom and they had caught a few frames of the victim’s ruined face. Only a few frames—nevertheless, it would be enough to feed the grubby appetite of a certain section of the population. Could they get it taken offline? And if they did, where did the First Amendment stand on lurid reporting?

  She closed the webpage. The Forefathers had not established a clear and undisputed defense of the freedom of speech to allow the last shreds of dignity of a murdered man to be bartered online. Madison finished her coffee and slam-dunked the empty cup in the recycling bin. The Forefathers, in all their wisdom, might have had to create a whole new world but at least they didn’t have to deal with it online.

  When Brown arrived he let Madison rant about the news helicopter for a few minutes, until her frustrations and her worries had played out and she had run out of expletives. He knew what she knew: thirty-six hours.

  Brown and Madison spoke to Matthew Duncan’s colleagues at the architecture firm where he had worked, to get a fuller picture of the man. He had been very well liked and no one had a bad word to say about him. In fact, they had very few words to say about him because he had been a quiet, gentle man whom everybody had been fond of without knowing him very deeply. His family in Oregon was devastated; a brother was traveling to Seattle to see Kate.

  No one, either at work or in his family, could imagine anyone wanting to hurt Matthew Duncan or any reasons for someone to want to end his life.

  “Something is bothering me,” Madison said to Brown as she was going over the records of recent burglaries to find similarities.

  “Just one thing?”

  “Let me rephrase that . . . A multitude of things bother me, but this one is right at the front. Are we looking for a burglar who gets his kicks out of extreme violence, or a killer who decided to round off his evening with a robbery?”

  Brown pushed his glasses up on his nose.

  “Because I’m telling you,” Madison continued, “I’m going through the records of southwest Seattle—what with burglars being territorial and all—and I’m not finding anything remotely like this. And city-wide it’s the same story. The occasional violent burglary, but the
violence is always a means to an end. And every single homicide we’ve had on the roster so far this year has been drugs, money, drugs, sex crimes, gang violence, drugs, what have you. This,” Madison tapped the file, “is something else.”

  “I should speak with Kamen,” Brown said.

  “Definitely,” Madison replied.

  Fred Kamen worked at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. He headed the Behavioral Analysis unit 4 (crimes against adults) and worked with ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a database of cases that covered the full spectrum of human awfulness over the fifty states. He was a friend of Brown, who was the Seattle Police Department contact person for ViCAP. The last time Madison had spoken to Kamen it had been to hunt down a sadistic killer who worked for the mob.

  Brown picked up the phone—he wouldn’t email unless he had to—and Madison went back to check the list of jewelers and pawnbrokers who had been given pictures of the stolen items.

  There were no messages from Sorensen in her inbox.

  The call came through a while later.

  “Am I speaking with the detective who’s working the murder case, the robbery/murder in Fauntleroy?”

  “Yes, this is Detective Madison. Who am I speaking to?”

  “This is Ryan from the Seattle Pawn Company, downtown branch.”

  Madison lifted a hand to stop Brown, who was about to walk out of the detectives’ room.

  “What’s your surname, Ryan, and how can I help you?”

  “Clifford, name’s Ryan Clifford, and I have one of the rings you’re looking for. Gold ring with a ruby. A dude just came in with it.”

  Madison stood up. “Mr. Clifford, Ryan, I need you to give me a physical description. Height, hair, eyes—everything you can remember.”

  She scribbled on her notebook and passed it to Brown, who got on the phone to dispatch.

  Madison wrote down the details and spoke them out loud so that Brown could pass them on to patrol. “Male, Caucasian, six feet tall, thirty years old or so, dark hair, blue eyes, about one hundred and fifty pounds. Wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black coat. What kind of coat, Ryan?”