Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  Lindquist ate his eggs; they tasted like cardboard.

  “Right, I’m telling you this,” William continued, “because there’s going to be money flying around and I’m betting on you, brother, and I don’t want you to be standing with your pants down and a smile on your face when it happens.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your self-defense shiv from two years ago? The guy’s brother just got through reception in C Wing. He’s got a different last name from your man, but it was his brother all right. Now the powers that be don’t know or don’t care about it, but he’s going to be mighty interested in you, and money’s already changing hands.”

  Jerry Lindquist kept eating his eggs. “What’s his name? What does he look like?” he said finally.

  “C’mon, man . . . I can’t tell you everything, otherwise where’s the fun?”

  “You don’t know his name.”

  “I know everything there is to know about everyone.”

  No, Lindquist thought, you don’t. “You’re all heart,” he said.

  “I’m what the world made me, brother,” William said with a crooked smile.

  Lindquist looked around: the canteen was the usual combination of inmates and guards, concrete, bars, and cameras. Sounds bounced hard on the walls and the noise was suddenly harsher and nastier.

  William was eyeballing him and he couldn’t look scared. He straightened up. “Is that it? Is that all you wanted to say to me?”

  “Yeah, just wanted to say don’t get yourself shivved. Watch out and earn me some money.”

  William left and Lindquist finished his eggs, stood up, and picked up his bagged lunch on the way back to his cell.

  He wasn’t feeling cool. He was feeling terrified. The guy two years ago had been pure luck. And he had never laid a finger on his wife. He was a double-murderer who in fact had killed no one at all and he felt as vulnerable and exposed as he had the first week in KCJC.

  His thoughts scurried like mice. He needed to call his lawyer. He needed to call him and get them to move him or the guy to another wing. Except that, if Lindquist was relocated, surrounded by cons he didn’t know and who didn’t know him, he would lose whatever cred he had managed to build in the last two years.

  How had he gotten here? How in the name of Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph had he gotten here?

  He was an accountant. He was—had been—a husband. But if there was one thing he had been on the outside more than anything else, he had been a drunk. And chances were he would be again, if he ever got out—which, that day, seemed increasingly less likely.

  He hardly ever allowed himself to think of her and yet there she was now. Jennifer. And the only comfort he had in the black pit of his desperation and his sorrow was that he knew he had never harmed her and the case the cops and the prosecution had built was nothing but circumstantial evidence, the absence of an alibi, and one single spot of her blood on his shirt in the basket.

  When it came to it he had been a good accountant and a terrible husband. But he wasn’t a killer.

  Jerry Lindquist’s grief was an abyss of anger and helplessness—and yet in that moment, alone in his cell, he slipped her picture out of the Bible he had been given and gazed at her and wondered when it was all going to end.

  Chapter 17

  Kate Duncan rolled over to one side and noticed the strips of light shifting on the wallpaper—tiny rosebuds and green leaves. The feeling of drowning that had started on Monday evening had not let her go and she wondered if you could drown in air, if you could gasp and not be able to breathe, your chest frozen in panic. Everything was all right, she said to herself, she was safe at Annie’s and the detectives were looking for the man in the picture. God bless Lisa and her memory.

  Her mind went back to the man in the Botanic Gardens. He had stared; he had looked at her with such intensity that she could still feel her skin crawling under his scrutiny. Annie and the detectives could say what they wanted, but in her heart of hearts she knew that he wasn’t just a curious passer-by. And she had to be ready, she had to be ready for anything if he came again. Her whole life was a cursed game of ifs.

  She got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She had to keep it together. She had to be strong. The sounds from the house reached her and comforted her—the voices of the children, Annie calling out to them. She had met with Matthew’s brother the previous day and would see him again today. It was almost too much to bear and she squeezed her eyes shut.

  She had to keep it together. She had to be strong.

  Kate Duncan pulled on a terrycloth robe and went downstairs to join the others.

  Madison woke up early and a sense of dread seemed to find her straightaway, even before she’d had a chance to make herself a cup of coffee. This was not going to be a good day.

  She pulled on jeans and boots, wondering how long it would take to search the Mitchell yard. Suddenly, for a brief surreal moment, she remembered that her dress uniform had to be ready for the wedding on Sunday. Her eyes scanned the hanging clothes in her closet and found the dry cleaner’s bag with the navy-blue trousers, the jacket with the gold buttons, and the white shirt. For her sins, she had a hat to go with it too. Madison did not enjoy wearing the dress uniform but, for once, it was nice to be able to wear it at a joyous occasion and not a funeral.

  Aaron was meeting the guys for the first time, and she hoped they’d be on their best behavior—although, knowing Dunne, it was doubtful. Then again, she wasn’t exactly sure what best behavior meant. There would be shop talk, there was always shop talk. And Aaron, who seemed slightly uncomfortable at the sight of her firearm, would be surrounded by them.

  She closed the closet door and her thoughts turned again to Brown, to Sorensen—and to Peter Mitchell’s backyard.

  Amy Sorensen beckoned Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce into her office and sat them down. She went through with them how they were planning to walk the grid in the yard with their metal detectors. She did not need to tell them what was at stake.

  It had been Amy Sorensen who had matched the prints on the hammer to Henry Karasick’s; it had been Amy Sorensen who had matched the blood on the hammer and on the rag to Peter Mitchell’s. Her test results had been correct and, even though no one was questioning them, Sorensen knew that if another metal tube was found, it meant that she had played a part in somebody’s game and that she had been used.

  One of the other officers had the bad idea of interrupting them during the briefing and Sorensen asked him briskly to come back for her later.

  Madison showed the artist’s composite to Matthew Duncan’s colleague Dean.

  He shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” he said.

  The architectural practice was based in Kirkland, across Lake Washington, and it was housed in a beautiful early-twentieth-century building that had once been a firehouse.

  On the other side of the hall, through a glass wall, Madison could see Brown asking the same questions of another colleague. Brown looked grim and had been quiet when they’d met at the precinct.

  “How long did you know Mr. Duncan?” she said.

  “Four, five years at least,” Dean replied. He was about the same age as Matthew Duncan.

  “Did you socialize outside of work?”

  “Not really. I mean, sure, we might have gone out for the firm’s dinners and we sometimes ate lunch together at the café opposite, but we’ve never met after work.”

  “You’ve known him a few years: did he look worried or concerned about something in the last weeks?”

  The man hesitated. “Matthew worried about everything. He was a really nice guy; the clients loved him. If anything he was too soft, too kind, and he always worried about every little detail. Everything had to be perfect all the time. But no, nothing specific, nothing big. Just the usual—where do we put the windows, where do the kitchen cabinets go?” He shrugged.

  Madison nodded, but her eyes kept wandering back to the round clock in
the hall.

  Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce’s arms moved in perfect synchrony. They traveled right to left and back just ahead of them as they walked the grid of what used to be Peter Mitchell’s backyard. The house had changed hands twice in the previous seven years and the present owner—a woman who worked for the county—had been a little baffled but accommodating when the two Crime Scene Unit investigators had turned up on the doorstep of her clapboard house as she was leaving for work.

  They told her that they needed to check her yard for evidence left by a fleeing felon. Sorensen had been clear: do not get caught in a lie, but do not mention the Mitchell case. The last thing they needed was for the media to sniff a connection between the two investigations.

  As the sallow sun progressed along its path Lauren and Joyce worked Sorensen’s brief to the letter: first an overall, thorough sweep of the ground then a second one, paying particular attention to all the spots where it might have been easy for a person to conceal what they were doing from the neighbors.

  Lauren and Joyce had worked together for five years; each knew where the other was without needing to look up from the barren grass. Through their earphones the beeps and squeaks of the detectors mapped the world around them. Some neighbors noticed them, most didn’t. They worked all morning and their time was measured not in minutes but in steps as they searched for something they hoped they would not find.

  Brown and Madison had just left the firehouse and were comparing notes when her cell started vibrating. Sorensen’s name flashed on the small screen.

  “They found something,” she said.

  “What? Where?” Madison replied and she felt dizzy with the implications. She had known that it was a possibility. However, this was Sorensen holding the evidence in her hands.

  Madison turned to Brown. He exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath for days.

  “It was buried at the back of the house, behind some bushes. About a foot deep,” Sorensen continued.

  “What is it, Amy?”

  “A container.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  They climbed into the car and Madison was about to say something, but Brown cut in.

  “We’re going to go through the case again and I need you to call it like you see it. Do you understand? If I see you showing any kind of regard because it was my case, if you hold back anything on my account . . .”

  “I won’t,” Madison said as Brown accelerated between two cars and beat the traffic light.

  “I mean it. You can’t—”

  “I won’t,” Madison repeated with finality.

  Going across the floating bridge was the usual traffic nightmare and they kept to their own thoughts.

  “I have to tell Klein,” Madison said and picked up her cell.

  Chapter 18

  The part of the building that housed the Crime Scene Unit worked within its own atmosphere of rarefied industriousness—Madison had noticed this on various occasions. They were the evidence gatekeepers and yet there was a calm and purposefulness to the mood of the place that was very different from the detectives’ room on a bad day. The Crime Scene investigators were neutral in their findings: they pursued and analyzed, but science and technology worked as a filter while cops on the street dealt with the outcome of their discoveries.

  When Brown and Madison walked into the lab there was no hush—and no sense that something ominous had happened. Investigators and technicians went about their business, stopping to chat and to exchange pleasantries. Madison, however, felt like a screw had tightened her chest by one turn.

  They found Amy Sorensen standing by her work bench examining an object they could not see under a powerful lamp. She turned and they caught a glimpse of bright red. It was not a cigar case.

  Madison leaned forward.

  A red vintage tobacco tin sat on the clean white paper sheet that covered the bench. There was an American eagle in the oval in the center, on the front, and “Union Leader” was spelled in gold above it. It was small and a little rusty in patches with a couple of tiny bends. Next to it a grimy, soil-encrusted plastic bag had been laid flat. The lid of the tin had been removed and so had its contents, which were balled up and crushed on a tray nearby. The detectives did not need to be told what they were: thin strips of paper of various lengths waited patiently for Sorensen to begin separating and analyzing them.

  “It’s four and a quarter inches long by three inches, with a depth of seven-eighths. Your regular Union Leader smoking tobacco tin,” Sorensen started without a greeting. “It was buried a long time ago—don’t know when yet, hopefully the contents will tell us—in a resealable plastic bag. Someone wanted to keep things inside clean and dry and actually wrapped this around the lip of the lid to make sure.” She pointed at a thin strip of white camera tape that was curled up by the lid. The edges of the tape were caked in specks of dirt and anything that had managed to find the adhesive surface and stick to it.

  “It’s going to take us some time to separate the strips of paper. But judging from these four slivers here you can see that they’ve been sliced with a sharp razor and the width matches the strips recovered at the Duncans’ house.”

  Sorensen concluded her description, leaned on the edge of the bench, and crossed her arms.

  “I have no reason to believe—at this stage—that the cigar case and the tobacco tin were put in the ground by two different people,” she said. “There are no fingerprints on the tin. When it went into the plastic bag it was spotless.”

  Brown nodded. “All your Mitchell case evidence safe and accounted for?”

  “Everything. I went to pick it up myself this morning.”

  “Good. I don’t want you to get caught up in the shit storm,” Brown said.

  “Never mind the shit storm,” Sorensen said. “By every little bit of evidence recovered it was a solid case—concrete solid.”

  “We didn’t have eyewitness testimony and we didn’t have the clothes Karasick wore when he killed Mitchell.”

  “We had a murder weapon with the victim’s blood and his prints on it.”

  “It was his hammer. His prints were always going to be on it—”

  “What else could you have done?” Madison interjected. “You had two guys known to be arguing all the time and one with the murder weapon with prints and blood and no alibi.”

  “And a rag he had cleaned himself with, stained with the victim’s blood,” Sorensen added for good measure.

  Brown did not reply.

  Sorensen nodded at the white camera tape. “I like tape. In fact, I love tape. Tape brings us all that’s good and true in this world because the douchebags don’t know what they’re giving us is a present. I’ll work that tape and I’ll work those paper strips and if there is anything to find—if there is one micron worth of epithelials—I will find it. Now, let me tell you about the strips from the cigar case and what we know so far.”

  Chapter 19

  The offices of the Release Project Northwest could not be described as stylish or well designed. They could, at best, be considered tasteful—if one had a taste for spartan furnishings and ’80s wallpaper. This, Saul Garner reflected as he walked in, was because all their money went toward getting their innocent clients out of jail and therefore—usually here a mild sense of smugness crept in—smart tables and art on the walls took a second place to justice. He had the same thoughts every time he visited some law school friend in his classy office downtown, but the thoughts evaporated as soon as he sat at his desk and got busy.

  He held his briefcase in one hand and a cardboard holder with two coffees in the other. He pushed the door open with his shoulder, trying not to lose the paperwork he’d stuck under his arm.

  His secretary, who also held the title of receptionist and office paralegal, was on the phone. He placed one of the coffees on the edge of her desk.

  She smiled a thank-you and mouthed, “D-o-C.”

  They spent hours of their already hectic lives on t
he phone with the Department of Corrections. He nodded and went into his office.

  The Release Project Northwest, or RPN, took on cases where a defendant had been convicted on DNA evidence, false confessions, or perhaps a shaky and inadequate defense counsel. They tried to get a retrial—if not a complete dismissal of the charges—and worked mostly with volunteers from law school supervised by certified attorneys. Their caseload was spectacular because, sooner or later, every innocent inmate would come knocking.

  Saul Garner dropped into his leather chair—a present from his father who’d said that, in the long run, a good chair was more important than an elegant briefcase—and turned on his computer.

  His secretary put her head around the door. “I have Jerry Lindquist on the line.”

  Saul frowned as his mental Rolodex flipped to the name “Lindquist”: the case, the sentence, and the state of the appeal. He was not expecting a call from Jerry and, in his experience, a sudden call from a prison was never good news.

  This would be the fifth in the last two weeks: everybody wanted out and they all had someone about to shiv them in the back.

  “Put him through.”

  The red light flashed and he picked up.

  “Jerry, what’s wrong?”

  After a few minutes of quiet conversation Jerry Lindquist returned to his cell.

  Saul had to give it to him: he was keeping it together in the best way he knew how for an accountant who’d never so much as run a red light.

  And yet, much was wrong.

  If the brother of the man who had attempted to kill Jerry had his way, the state of Jerry’s appeal would not make a blind bit of difference.

  Chapter 20

  The elevator doors opened on the fifth floor of the Holy Pilgrim Hospital and John Cameron stepped out. It was late morning—the same time as the previous day—and he wore the same white coat and carried the same clipboard. By the door of Mrs. Rojas’s room stood the same two men wearing leather jackets and—Cameron assumed—carrying the same weapons.