After a couple of hours anyone who could be interviewed had been spoken to and the composite had been shown. Madison nodded to the minivan parked in the driveway of the house next to the Duncans.
“They’re back,” she said.
Brown rang the doorbell and a tall, dark-eyed woman opened it a few moments later. She smiled, then recognized them from earlier in the week and the smile faded a little.
“Mrs. Anderson, I was wondering if we could talk very briefly with your son.”
“Paul?” She unconsciously looked toward the living room. “Sure, but why? I already explained we weren’t here when . . . it happened.”
“I understand, but your son plays in the yard from time to time and if someone was being nosy around the Duncans’ home he might have seen this person in the last few weeks.”
“He doesn’t know it was a murder,” she said, her voice low. “We told him it was a robbery and it’s awful enough for him to consider that someone could get into our home.”
Privately Madison thought that if the boy had been anywhere near the news or a paper he would know. However, she didn’t remember watching the news when she was that age and so just nodded. “We’re not going to tell him.”
Mrs. Anderson mulled it over: the idea of Homicide detectives having anything to do with her little boy was not pleasant.
Madison smiled reassuringly. “It will only take a moment.”
She led them into the living room where Paul was watching television curled up on the sofa. He was little and skinny, with his mother’s dark eyes. On an ottoman by his feet there was a plate of chopped-up carrots and celery. It was untouched.
“Paul, sweetheart,” his mother said, “this lady and this gentleman are police detectives and would like to ask you a question. It’s about the robbery in Kate and Matthew’s house next door.”
“Hi, Paul, may I speak with you?” Madison said.
The boy nodded and sat up straight.
“Do you play in the yard sometimes?”
He nodded again.
Brown leaned toward the mother and said quietly, “May I show you the picture of a potential suspect?”
She turned to him and Brown reached for the composite in his pocket.
Madison perched on the edge of the sofa as the sound from cartoons the boy was watching washed over the room. She dropped her voice. “Paul, have you ever buried anything in the yard, in the space between your home and the Duncans’?”
The kid’s eyes flew to his mother’s back.
“It’s okay, I know about the tin with the chocolate wrappers. I love Hershey’s Kisses too.”
He gaped at her.
“I mean something else. Have you ever buried anything else around there?”
Paul looked at his mother again, but she was talking with Brown, looking at something.
“No,” he whispered. “Just my tin. Am I in trouble?”
“No,” Madison smiled. “You’re absolutely not in trouble.” And she took out the picture. “Have you ever seen this man anywhere near here?”
His mother had turned back to them. He looked at her and he looked at the picture. He shook his head.
“When you were playing in the yard did you ever see anybody hanging around outside the Duncans’ home who didn’t look quite right to you?”
There was a copy of the Seattle Times on the dining table and the boy’s gaze went to it. The kid knew it wasn’t a robbery, Madison thought.
“Anything at all that seemed out of the ordinary?” Madison repeated gently.
“No,” the boy said and he looked very small then and afraid.
Madison stood up and said, “Thank you very much, Paul, we really appreciate your help.” She put out her hand formally and he shook it, a shadow of a smile crossing his features.
Brown and Madison returned to their car.
“Carrots and celery?” Brown raised his eyebrows.
“Kid’s smart, he’s made sure he’s got his own stash of goodies squirreled away.”
“Did you?”
“No, but I had a tree house with a pantry.”
“A pantry?”
“Well, a cooler box.”
At thirteen Madison and her friend Rachel had been too old for little kids’ games and yet the tree house had been perfect for those conversations that needed the absence of grown-ups.
“Speaking of food . . .” Brown said.
Chapter 15
Fauntleroy was mercifully close to California Avenue SW, and Brown and Madison were pulling up in front of the Husky Deli in minutes on their way downtown. They sat at the old-fashioned counter while their sandwiches were being prepared and watched the shoppers and diners around them.
“I used to come here with my grandfather,” Madison said out of the blue.
Brown turned to her. “Really?”
“Yes, it was a Saturday treat. Ice cream cone. Maple walnut, mostly, with occasional ventures into mocha.”
Brown knew that her mother had died when she was twelve and five months later Madison had run away and spent seven days alone on the road. Then she had moved to Seattle to be brought up by her grandparents. They hadn’t spoken about her father much.
“Chocolate,” said Brown, who was Seattle born and bred. “Mine was chocolate and strawberry.”
“Together?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Madison frowned.
“The heart wants what it wants,” he said, and picked up the sandwiches—chicken cashew for Madison and his own Italiano.
The heart wants what it wants. Emily Dickinson was right, Madison considered as she ate her food and for a few minutes tried to think of nothing at all.
Sorensen was waiting for them. She was pacing in her office and looked relieved when they stepped out of the elevator.
“Did you interview every single man, woman, and child in Fauntleroy?” she said.
“As many as we could find, yes,” Brown replied.
“Well, good for you. Come with me and don’t dillydally. I’ve already sent Lauren and Joyce back to the house with metal detectors.”
Sorensen was walking fast, headed to the main lab, and they followed her.
“What was it?” Madison asked her.
“Easier to show you,” Sorensen said over her shoulder and led them to a bench in the corner.
It rested on a clean white sheet under a powerful lamp: a short metal tube whose lid had been unscrewed and placed next to it.
“This is a stainless-steel cigar case. The dimensions are eight inches with a sixty-ring gage. It had been wrapped in this plastic bag. As you can see, it’s your basic resealable bag—you’ll find a box of these in every pantry.”
Brown and Madison stood and watched: it was Sorensen’s show.
“Whoever put this inside the plastic wanted to make sure the contents would be dry and preserved for as long as possible. And this is what I found inside the cigar case.”
Sorensen picked up a tray from a nearby shelf and placed it under the lamp. Brown and Madison leaned forward.
“No touching, please. It’s going to be hard enough to get anything off them and I’m trying to handle them as little as possible myself.”
Seventeen strips of paper rested on the tray. They were all about half an inch wide but varied in length. Some were dense with typing and others had snatches of color; some were almost blank and others were nothing but a plain strip of paper. Sorensen had extracted them carefully with her tweezers and they lay in parallel lines, more or less crumpled, waiting to go through an onslaught of tests.
Brown pushed his glasses up on his nose and Madison swiped a magnifying lens from a table nearby and bent closer.
“I can tell you this much,” Sorensen continued. “This is not the kind of thing that a shredder does. Shredders produce a much thinner strip of paper. From what I can gather after a first superficial examination, the strips have been cut by a very sharp razor blade and intentionally made this width—see, there’
s a tiny pencil mark on the top of the page there. It’s almost invisible.”
“Page,” Madison repeated. “They’re pages cut from somewhere and short ends of something we haven’t identified yet.”
“That’s what I think,” Sorensen said. “Books, magazines, leaflets, receipts—I don’t know yet. What we know is that they were purposefully sliced off, placed in the tube, and buried in the Duncans’ yard in a place that was not immediately obvious but would have been at hand if someone was watching the house from that spot.”
“Prints?”
“Nothing on the bag and nothing on the cigar case.”
That was it. Lack of prints on a surface that by all accounts should have been covered in them could only be explained if someone had deliberately wiped them—and the cigar case positively gleamed under the lamp.
“Before you get too excited about tracing the case, you can buy them on Amazon at fifteen dollars a pop. Unless there is something markedly unusual about it—and I don’t think there is because everything about it says plain—it won’t be much use to you.”
“We need to know exactly what books or magazines—or whatever—these came from,” Madison said. “And it’s a priority. In fact, could we have copies made so we can—”
Sorensen whipped up a sheaf of papers from a table and offered them to Madison. “Here you go. Knock yourself out.”
Each one had a magnified copy of a single strip.
Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce had worked in much worse places than the Duncans’ backyard on a cold, sunny November day.
They were suited and booted and their headphones were plugged in and ready.
“Grid?” Joyce said.
“Grid,” Lauren replied.
They switched on their metal detectors and each started to work on their section of the imaginary grid, the detector swaying like a cumbersome, unsightly extension of the human arm.
Later, after more canvassing—which caught the people who had been at work earlier but held the same meager result—Madison briefed Lieutenant Fynn on what they had so far, including Sorensen’s discovery and the hacking of the Gleneagle HVAC company server.
The detectives’ room was still busy. Spencer and Dunne were huddled by their desks, going over a case, and Kelly and Rosario were both on the phone. Brown took Madison to one side. She had been turning things over in her mind since they had visited the lab. There was something they needed to do, but she needed Brown to bring it up, and as he approached her she allowed herself to hope.
“I don’t know what you think, but maybe Sorensen should send some metal detectors over to the Mitchell house tomorrow. See if we find anything buried there too.”
Madison nodded. Thank you, Sarge.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll call her now.”
Sorensen confirmed that Lauren and Joyce had not found anything more of interest to the investigation in the Duncans’ garden and told Madison that she had just been waiting for the go-ahead from her before going to the Mitchell place.
“Did he bring it up?” she asked Madison.
“Yes, he did.”
“Good man.”
The last job of the day was a quick visit to Kate Duncan.
She held the picture the artist had sketched in both hands and stared at it. A mixture of dread and incomprehension played on her face. She gazed at it for a full minute and then, almost disappointed with herself, shook her head.
And no, she said, neither she nor her husband had ever buried anything in the yard.
Brown and Madison had not really expected a different result.
Madison parked her Freelander in the usual spot by Alki Beach. It was dark and she couldn’t see the water of Puget Sound; she could only see the points of light suspended in the distance—Bainbridge Island, Elliott Bay—and before them thick, black nothing.
She had changed in the precinct’s locker room and the fresh salt air felt good. She leaned on the car with one hand and with the other she pulled one foot high behind her. She repeated the stretch on the other side.
Madison started running and tried to empty her mind of every single thought except for the sound of the tide on the pebbles. She kept going back to the briefing, to Fynn’s face as she charted their progress—her progress—with the case. Did he trust her to bring it home? Yes, he did, otherwise he would have hauled her off the case faster than a whip crack, so fast there would have been a small sonic boom.
That’s what Madison told herself as she ran, and she smiled a little, but she did not want to think about it too deeply. Instead, her thoughts went to chocolate and strawberry and Emily Dickinson’s heart.
Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown lived alone in a house in the Ballard neighborhood. He had always lived there alone and he was used to it—the way a person is used to the sound of one’s own voice. He had recovered from small injuries and serious injuries there—and injuries he could not see but which had threatened his future in the only thing that had real meaning in his life—being a Homicide detective.
Brown poured himself a measure of the Isle of Jura Prophecy his sister had brought him back from Scotland the previous summer. Tomorrow, by the time he came back to the house at the end of the day, he might know for sure if a man was dead and a killer was still breathing free air as a consequence of his actions seven years earlier.
Brown sipped the Prophecy and went back to the book he was reading—even though, for all he tried, he could not remember the last paragraph he’d read. It was Bleak House, an old favorite and often reread in times of trouble.
Brown went back to the first page.
Madison rested on the sofa with her eyes closed, listening to Hitchcock’s Notorious on a DVD, slowly falling asleep and thinking about Ingrid Bergman being poisoned by a bunch of Nazis. The real killer there was Claude Rains’s mother, Hitchcock’s masterpiece of evil.
Madison wrapped herself tightly in the tartan blanket. Her thoughts seemed to disperse as sleep took hold and the fabric of the blanket brushed against her cheek.
Black Watch. Madison’s last thought drifted past. The name of the tartan fabric was Black Watch. Wasn’t it what they did all day in Homicide?
They were the Black Watch.
She fell asleep.
Chapter 16
Jerry Lindquist’s eyes snapped open. For the last two years of his life there had been no mellow awakenings and that day wasn’t any different. He took a deep breath: he knew his heart would start racing, and it did. He closed his eyes and waited for it to slow down as sounds began to filter through and the memory of his dream ebbed away. He had dreamt of the house he used to live in; he had walked barefoot on the pier out onto Lake Washington and felt the warm wood under his feet.
Twenty years ago he had graduated from college, ten years ago he’d gotten married, eight years ago he’d started his accountancy firm, and three years ago he had woken up in his garage after an alcoholic blackout and found his wife dead in their bedroom.
His neighbor yelled out a man’s name and from somewhere down the corridor that man responded with a holler. The King County Justice Complex had been Jerry Lindquist’s home for the last two years and there was nothing mellow about it. He had been woken up by a man’s bellow and in all probability he would fall asleep to the sound of another man’s shout. He had become used to it—or so he told himself every day. In fact, what had happened was more akin to walking deeper and deeper into a cavern. And the only real living and thinking that he did was now far away from the mouth of the cavern, where the calls of his companions in C Wing rang out.
Jerry Lindquist got up and stretched and, as he often did, he asked himself why he hadn’t spent all the time of his life outside running and being outdoors and throwing things and hitting things—or whatever it was people called sports. He had not anticipated that he would miss physical activity so much. But there it was, right there on the list of unexpected things he missed the most.
On the outside he was by trade an accountant who
had never so much as kicked a football, inside he was a wife-killing accountant who had notched up another kill the second week of his sentence. An inmate had lunged at him with a shiv at yard time and, with a mixture of luck and intent, he had dodged him. There had been a scuffle and the guy had tripped and fallen; the shiv had cut an artery and that, the prison doctor had said, had been that. Now Jerry Lindquist carried a two-inch scar on his cheek and a reputation that no one had as yet attempted to challenge. His real luck had been that the whole episode had been caught on the yard CCTV and his attorney had been able to prove self-defense. He was still inside, of course. But it’s the thought that counts, he had joked to himself darkly.
Jerry got himself ready for his breakfast of powdered eggs and the bagged lunch that he would receive on his way out of the mess room. He was not tall or wide, but his fellow inmates knew what he was there for and what he had done since, and they let him be. He nodded hello to a couple of fellas he occasionally chatted with—Eduardo (murder in the first) and William (robbery/homicide)—and went to his usual table.
It was Friday, and the previous day—and for as long as his good behavior continued—he had helped out in the bookkeeping class that a volunteer held in a room off the central C Wing hall. Some of the guys who came to the class could hardly count let alone deal with the double entry system. Still, it was a change from the routine and any change was welcome.
He was working on his eggs when William sat down next to him. If Lindquist was average size William was minute: he was wiry and pale with a thin face and tattoos all the way up his arms—not gang tattoos, just ugly prison art born out of boredom.
William did not belong to a gang or a specific faction; he spoke to everyone and disseminated information. His nickname was “Western Union.” If there was money or intelligence—or both—to circulate he was the man for the job.
“I have something for you and I’m giving it to you for free,” he said quietly.
“Is it my birthday?” Lindquist replied.
“Maybe,” William said. “But all I want you to do is keep eating your chow and look cool.”
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