Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  Cameron straightened the white coat that he had procured for himself from the doctors’ locker room. He cocked his head like a bird and studied the small fake pregnancy bump that gave him a belly and changed his body shape. He looked like a man who didn’t do much more than hit a golf ball once a month. He did miss the familiar weight of the Smith & Wesson .40 he usually wore in a shoulder holster, but it would have been too visible under the coat. Still, the snub-nosed .38 was by his ankle and a six-inch knife had disappeared under his shirtsleeve. He hooked a pair of glasses he didn’t need on the breast pocket of the coat. All he wanted was a cup of coffee and he was ready to go. His heartbeat—although some acquaintances might be surprised that he had one at all—was slow and it wouldn’t rise much even during battle. He gave himself one last check in the mirror.

  When John Cameron had killed his first human being he was indeed seeking a sense of justice that could not have been achieved in any other way. Since then, however, he knew himself well enough to know that he did what he did because he enjoyed it—and had survived this long because he was good at it.

  On his way into the hospital he had passed the chapel and in a sudden impulse he’d gone inside. His ancestry was Scottish—Catholic—and he had no doubts about the kind of fate that his parents’ faith predicted for a man who’d done the things he’d done. The chapel was bland and he wished for a touch of glorious over-the-top Catholic flair—a Madonna wrapped in heavenly blue or possibly a Christ with eyes raised to the next world. From somewhere he remembered that in the fourteenth century the Vatican had passed laws to restrict the use of the very expensive and magnificent color blue so that the Virgin Mary would be the only blue mortal eyes would ever glimpse. This chapel had no blue at all but only a sense of polite, dutiful belief and Cameron had left.

  He was not afraid of the next world, he considered. All in all, he had already used up his share of fear a long time ago in this one.

  Half an hour later John Cameron, holding a metal clipboard with fake patients’ notes, traveled to the fifth floor in an elevator with visitors, patients, and other staff. The hospital was so large and busy that a new face in a white coat went completely unnoticed. Sharp chemical scents rose as the doors slid open, together with the regular hospital fixture of equal parts hope and despair.

  He knew where he was going and headed for a corridor on the left. It was late morning and the life of the modern hospital was in full flow. He stopped by the vending machine and patted his pockets for change. He inserted the necessary amount and pressed the keys for a black coffee. It poured out into a plastic beaker and he picked it up gingerly and took a sip. It was horrendous. He walked on and then his feet tripped over something; it was only a tiny little jolt, but the coffee went all over his coat and the floor.

  “Darn it,” he swore under his breath and then looked at the two men standing by a patient’s room and smiled an apology. There was a paper cloth dispenser within reach and he grabbed a few and started to wipe the spill on the tiled floor.

  The two men standing by the closed door watched him because there was nothing else to look at in the corridor. They were tall, broad, and Latino.

  “Aside from anything else,” Cameron said pleasantly as he balled up the paper towels, “it’s possibly the worst coffee in the world. Have you tried it?”

  One of the men snorted. Clearly the vending machine coffee was way below their standards.

  Cameron straightened up and wiped at the stain on his coat. “Are you visiting Mrs. Rojas?”

  “Yes,” the older one said with a heavy accent.

  They both wore leather jackets on a warm day because, Cameron knew, they both had semiautomatic weapons tucked into the back of their trousers. Had they known who he was his life expectancy would have been measured in nanoseconds.

  “A nice lady,” Cameron said, his smile respectful and sad because they would know, as he did, that Mrs. Rojas was terminal.

  He threw the paper in a trash can and, as he turned to leave, he nodded good-bye to the men. They nodded back.

  John Cameron went back into the elevator. The coffee really was terrible. However, other than that, the day was swell.

  Chapter 14

  There was a lot of naval imagery and turns of phrase going around in the Gleneagle Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning Company and, sure, it was a bit of a joke between the guys—and one woman—who worked in the field because the boss was ex-navy and still had the attitude and the slang. The result though was that when a call came in from the Seattle Police Department with regard to whether one of their engineers had visited a specific address in the Fauntleroy area, they were able to find out quickly when he had last been there to check the air-con system, how the devices had performed in the maintenance test—checks-5–0’s, all of them—and how long he had spent in the Duncan home.

  Tony, who booked all the engineers’ visits, picked up the phone and dialed. “Hey, Bobo,” he said when Robert Miller picked up. “I have to double-check something. You’re in the middle of a test?”

  “No,” Bobo replied with his usual grace. “I’m picking wild flowers. Yes, I’m in the middle of a test. What do you want?”

  “Seattle PD is asking me the last time we checked the systems at a residential address in Fauntleroy. That’s the place the guy was murdered in the burglary.”

  Bobo Miller took a moment for an attitude shift. “I saw it on the news, I recognized the house.”

  “Right, I’ve got here you were there last Thursday. Can you confirm that?”

  “No, I haven’t been there for months. Not since last spring.”

  “The previous appointment I have down was in March.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, last Thursday morning I did two houses near Alki Beach and then I had a dentist appointment.”

  “But the log—”

  There was a rustling of clothes and Miller’s voice came back. He read out two addresses on Alki beach. “This is where I was last Thursday, it’s on my PDA. You can call them up and check.”

  “That’s not what I’ve got here. My records show that you haven’t been in the Alki Beach addresses since last November.”

  “Well, your records are wrong. Call them up and check.”

  Tony ended the call and did just that—because if you can’t trust a log, what can you trust?

  One call went to voice mail but the second one did not.

  Yes, the man replied, a Gleneagle HVAC engineer had come around the previous Thursday.

  “The HVAC engineer hasn’t been around since last March,” Madison said to Brown with the receiver cradled against her shoulder. “But the log in the server says he was there last week.”

  “He hacked the company computer?”

  “Looks like it. He changed the record to show he’d been there and canceled the real appointments. If the booker hadn’t checked with the engineer we wouldn’t have known.”

  “He’s gone to a lot of trouble for a burglary,” Brown said quietly.

  “Sorensen’s computer people are going to want to look at that server.”

  He nodded.

  They were both slightly in shock: this was horrible news. A little reconnaissance from the killer might be expected—especially in the case of a burglary—but nevertheless, hacking into a company server to wipe any trace of that recon was more than a regular burglar would have, and could have, accomplished.

  Neither said anything and yet both realized that the investigation had just turned a corner.

  Seattle City Light and Puget Sound Energy had already confirmed a visit to the house just as the housekeeper had told Madison. The Gleneagle HVAC engineers wore navy-blue trousers and white shirts with the company name emblazoned on a pocket: the uniform wouldn’t have been difficult to reproduce, Madison thought. It would have been easy for a man to gain entry into the Duncan home and walk around, from room to room, scoping out the place without hurrying as the
housekeeper gave him a guided tour.

  Madison called Lisa Waters. “We need you to come back to the precinct, Mrs. Waters. We need you back now to work with a sketch artist.”

  The woman didn’t need Madison to explain. One of those men she had let into the house . . . one of those men she had made coffee for and chatted with pleasantly, as a welcome interruption to her day. One of those men.

  She replied that she’d be right over and Madison heard in her voice the shadow of guilt and shame. She would have to tell her that there was nothing she could have done and no way she could have known. And yet a part of Madison worried only that Lisa Waters might not have twenty-twenty vision and flawless memory.

  There was also another issue, and Madison did not need to bring it up with Brown. If they had a half-decent composite drawing of the man who had lied his way into the Duncan home, they could also use it to jog the memories of anybody who had lived around the Mitchell house seven years earlier.

  Brown had not tried to rehash the details of the Mitchell case or in any way rationalize and justify what had happened. He had taken on board Madison’s single comment: “We need to take a look at this.” And he’d gotten down to work. There would be time for recriminations later; today they had to hunt a vicious killer who might have killed more than once. The Mitchell case had been seven years ago and Brown didn’t want to think how the killer had entertained himself during those long winters and summers and what he’d done to relieve his boredom.

  The forensic artist sat with Lisa Waters as Madison paced and spoke on her cell phone in the corridor.

  She had tried to sit in with them, but forensic art was craft and patience, and a look from the artist told Madison that if she couldn’t show a measure of the latter she should remove herself from the room.

  Amy Sorensen stood in her protective suit by the front of the Duncan home. The pallid sun had blessed them again and the air was soft with an underlying chill. Good weather for hunting evidence, she said to herself. Dry and bright and still. She didn’t have all day but she had some time to go over ground that had already been covered. She had found the time because of Madison’s words. There might not be any trace evidence, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t been there. Sorensen wasn’t going to let it go: if there was a chance they could find the place from which the killer had kept an eye on the house—and with the wide glass side there was no way he hadn’t—then she’d sieve every bit of ground like a prospector before she’d consider it properly covered.

  The left side was a mess of shrubs and too exposed—exactly what Brown and her own officer had said. Sorensen struggled through the bushes for a few minutes then returned to the top and started back on the other side. She walked the dense, wooded area in a grid with her eyes first at normal level—to pick up on alterations and breakages in the branches—and then with her eyes on the ground.

  It came down to the same result: the spot under the tree in the ditch was the best place to hunker down and play spy—even the little kid next door had worked that one out. Sorensen did just that. She squatted and rested with her back against the roots and looked up. The light slanted through the limbs of the fir and filtered in patches onto the ground. It bounced off the small rocks covered in moss that were scattered about. Some rocks were slightly bigger than the others and her eyes fell on one roughly the size of a football. She noticed it because she was sitting there as sunlight fell on the rock and she could see that the pattern of moss didn’t match the ones next to it.

  Sorensen leaned forward and her hand closed on the stone.

  They had a likeness. They had the face of a man on a piece of paper. He had worn a navy-blue baseball cap and Lisa Waters wasn’t positive about the hair but she wanted to say dark and short, certainly above the ears. Dark hair and blue eyes. He was tall—just over six feet—with slim, high cheekbones and a straight nose.

  “Are you sure you’re not mistaking him for any of the other guys who came over? I don’t want to doubt you, Mrs. Waters, I just need to make sure.”

  “I know what you mean and I don’t mind you asking. I remember him best because he was the one who spoke the most to me.” Her voice faded a little there.

  I just bet he did, Madison reflected.

  They drove back to the house in a two-car convoy—Lisa Waters first, followed by Brown and Madison in their unmarked car. They pulled in to the driveway behind a single Crime Scene Unit van, which stood locked up and deserted. Someone, thought Madison, was still in pursuit.

  Brown paused before they filed in. “What you’re doing, Mrs. Waters—Lisa—is of great help to us. Never forget that. And I know it’s going to be hard and what you’ll see will be things that are very hard for anybody to see. So just do your best to remember, that’s all we can ask. We’re with you.”

  The woman nodded.

  Madison wished that she had thought about comforting the witness herself. Brown had said the right thing at the right time, and Lisa Waters, however pale, took her first step inside.

  The impact was immediate and Madison saw it in the woman’s face: the house even smelled wrong.

  She took a big breath and started. “I answered the doorbell and there he was,” she said and closed her eyes. She saw the white shirt, the hat; he wasn’t wearing a coat.

  “What time of day was this?” Madison asked her.

  “Morning . . . it was morning, because I usually get here at nine. I couldn’t tell you more than that.” The woman looked around: she needed to see and she didn’t want to look.

  She told them about his easy chatter and how he had asked her to show him into each room so that he could check each unit in turn. She turned and walked to the living room, following the path cleared by the Crime Scene Unit crew. She wanted to deal with the worst first.

  The sunlight through the glass reached into every corner. She stopped and stared; her eyes took in everything. It was the strangest thing: violence and evil revealed through all the blood spatter and yet each splash had been tidied up by a number on a card.

  After a moment she nodded and turned to the detectives. “He wanted to see the bedroom first. He definitely asked me to show him in there first because he said there had been a problem in the past,” she said. “And I took him.”

  The man had been very thorough, probably making a mental map of the place as they went along.

  “Did you ever leave him alone?”

  She nodded. “Yes, the telephone rang and I went to answer it. He must have been alone for a minute or so.”

  “Who was it?” Brown asked. “On the phone. If you remember.”

  The woman blinked a couple of times, her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall as she went back to the day.

  “No one. There was nobody on the line when I got there. I remember now that I made a joke when I went back to him—something about call centers.”

  “Where were you when the phone rang?”

  “In the bedroom. He was standing by the thermostat over the bedside table and I was by the door.”

  “When you came back to the room, where was he?”

  “He was over by the window. Made a comment on the view.”

  The dresser, Brown and Madison noted, was next to the wide window.

  It took them half an hour to trail Mrs. Waters around the Duncan house. Being there had helped her and more memories had floated up to the surface. It gave Brown and Madison a good picture of the man who had been so at ease with her, so calm and collected as he took the measure of his prey.

  They said good-bye to her and, as much as she had been glad to help, it was obvious that she was even happier to leave.

  Sorensen found them on the doorstep. She had come out of the side of the house and looked like the terrier who’d gotten the rat. She held up a clear plastic evidence bag inside of which there seemed to be another smaller plastic bag. And inside that . . .

  Madison screwed up her eyes to see.

  “It’s a stainless-steel cigar case,” Sorensen said. “I
t was buried close to the spot and deliberately hidden under a rock. And I’m willing to bet the kid didn’t put it there.”

  “Can we—?”

  “No, Detective, shame on you. We’re not going to open it here for all the contents to blow away or get contaminated. You want to see what’s inside, you come to my lab and ask nicely.”

  “How long had it been there?” Brown asked.

  “Difficult to say, but probably a few weeks, judging by how grimy the bag is. Not a long time though. The kid’s tin had seen more weather, and it wasn’t wrapped in plastic either.”

  “We need to show the neighbors the artist’s sketch first, then we’ll come over to the lab,” Madison said. She couldn’t begin to imagine why anyone would bury a cigar case.

  A picture began to form in Madison’s mind: it was the angle of the eyes from the artist’s drawing and the memory of the man’s voice—local, educated, lower register—from the housekeeper’s testimony. It was the fact that he was tall and unafraid to go in without a mask, to show his face to a potentially devastating witness, and capable of hacking into a protected server.

  “He’s confident,” Madison said to Brown as they watched Sorensen’s van drive away.

  “Yes,” he replied. “He is an extremely capable man.”

  “He risked going to the house with practically no disguise except for a baseball cap. Why do that when it was likely we’d interview the cleaner?”

  Brown shook his head. He wasn’t going to give Madison a wild guess when they had so little to aid their guessing. She didn’t push him.

  They each took one side of the street and started knocking on doors. Many people were out at work, but some were at home. Most were eager to discuss the murder even if none had anything to contribute. No one had seen the man in the picture or noticed him that morning. Apparently, Madison thought, he had simply materialized on the Duncans’ doorstep and vanished after his visit.