Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  “Mrs. Walker,” the nurse said, “these are Detectives Spencer and Dunne from the Seattle Police Department.”

  They sat down and the nurse left them.

  “Took your own sweet time, didn’t you?” Mrs. Walker said.

  “Excuse me?” Spencer replied as his automatic courtesy kicked in.

  “Call me Edith. All this Mrs. Walker stuff makes me feel like people are talking to my corpse—which, considering I’m eighty-seven, they probably are.”

  “You look pretty damn good for eighty-seven, Edith,” Dunne said.

  The old lady’s eyes—pale blue and clear—crinkled with her smile. “I have good days and bad days and this is a good one. Lucky you.”

  “How can we help you?” Dunne continued, and Spencer could see he had gone straight into his Nanou-mode.

  Her smile went away. “Will he know that I’ve spoken with you?”

  “Who?”

  “The man. The man in the picture. Will he know?”

  “No, he won’t. And if you need to be protected, we will protect you. Do you know who this man is?” Dunne took out a copy of the sketch and smoothed it out for her.

  Edith Walker’s eyes gazed at the picture. Her mind chased after a memory and a name from another life. “I think it’s the boy who lived next to my daughter,” she said.

  “Your daughter’s neighbor? Where?”

  “Where I used to live. In Ballard.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “The family was called Burrows or Bryant or Burns—something with the letter B.”

  “And his name?”

  “I can’t remember his name. It was twenty years ago.”

  “Twenty years ago?” Dunne’s voice was gentle, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  “He was a boy then.”

  “A boy?”

  “Yes, and the boy had fox’s eyes. He was always watching everything that was going on in the street. Nobody noticed, but I did,” she looked from one to the other. “Because I was watching too.”

  “How long were you neighbors?”

  “I was staying with my daughter and her family in Bellevue for maybe six months.”

  “I thought you said you were in Ballard.”

  “I meant Bellevue.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not really, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

  “Okay. Six months, twenty years ago?” Dunne said.

  “I had broken my foot. All I did was sit by that window. I can’t tell you the day of the week or who the president is, but I can tell you that the neighbor’s kid could be this man.”

  “How old was he then?”

  “I don’t know. A teenager, I guess. A tall, gangly thing.”

  After a few more cursory questions, they took down her daughter’s details and stood up.

  “Thank you very much, Edith. It was a pleasure to meet you,” Dunne said and shook her hand.

  “Thank you for your help,” Spencer said.

  “Siete due bravi ragazzi,” the old lady said, gazing at both.

  “You speak Italian, Edith?” Dunne smiled.

  “Apparently,” she replied with a mischievous smile.

  The nurse was already coming back to help the old lady to her dinner.

  “It was worth a try,” Dunne said as they walked back to the car.

  Spencer looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, Edith is a nice lady, but—”

  “I mean with you. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Dunne shrugged.

  “Are you worried about tomorrow?”

  “No, it’s going to be a great party. Everything’s ready. It’ll be great.”

  For the first time since Dunne had asked him to be best man Spencer wondered if his friend was nervous about his wedding. In the last months he had seemed to embrace his new life. And yet, somehow, in the last few days—as the fog of the bachelor party had cleared—a restless gloom had settled in.

  “Andy . . .”

  “It’ll be a great party,” Dunne repeated, but his eyes were serious and did not meet Spencer’s.

  “Sure it will,” Spencer said.

  Dunne nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it, even with Kyle. If Stacy knew he was having jitters she’d be heartbroken.

  “What’s next?” he said and flipped open his notebook.

  By the time they returned to the precinct Spencer and Dunne had spoken to a number of potential witnesses and had statements to confirm and sightings to verify. Nothing like a murder investigation to keep a man from his own personal woes.

  Chapter 30

  Madison drove home late after a long round of calls trying to put a name on the guy that Brian Baines had remembered. There was a man out there who looked exactly like any other man and yet was capable of such evil that words could barely contain it.

  What was Saul Garner going to find? She tried not to imagine the list of names, of victims, of defendants, of injuries and autopsy photographs. She saw for a moment Casey Duncan’s eyes—his brother’s eyes—and again was grateful that he’d come to meet her. She had watched some of the home movie and seen the person who had been destroyed in death very much alive, and the thought of spending the following day at a wedding seemed absurd when there was so much to do, when people needed to be protected, when even as she drove home to polish her boots the killer might be getting ready to harvest more sorrow, more grief, more indescribable pain.

  Madison pulled into her driveway and was glad that Aaron would be coming for her in the morning. Tonight she needed the space to be alone with ugly thoughts and, under all that horror, the single notion—like a short, poisoned dagger—that others might be right and she would fail both the living and the dead.

  She had barely turned on the lights in the living room when her cell phone vibrated. It was an unknown number.

  “I understand it’s late, but would you mind taking a walk down to your pier?”

  The voice was certainly not unknown. Quinn.

  “I’m not alone,” he added.

  Madison kept her voice neutral. “Right now?”

  “No, Detective, at some indeterminate point in the future,” Quinn sighed. “Yes, right now, if you please.”

  She let him hang there waiting for a long, quiet moment. “Okay,” she said finally.

  Madison slid open the French doors and walked onto the deck. The salty chill was raw and it became sharper as she made her way down to the water. Her steps were soft on the hard ground and she trod lightly, her hands deep in her pockets.

  As the lawn began to slope she cut to the rickety stairs that led to the narrow cobbled beach. A glimmer of silver from the sky illuminated two dark silhouettes by the pier.

  I’m not alone. She approached the men. There was something terribly familiar about this and it was equally welcome and worrying.

  “Mr. Quinn, Mr. Cameron,” she said pleasantly. “I thought we were past the clever entrances.”

  “Be that as it may,” the tall shadow that was Nathan Quinn replied. “This was necessary.”

  “Good evening, Detective,” John Cameron said.

  Madison’s instincts kicked in: they might have played Texas Hold’em together until the sweet light of dawn, but Cameron’s voice still carried something that curled up like a knot of ice at the pit of her stomach.

  For a moment there was just a murmur where the water met the beach, then John Cameron spoke: “You are under investigation. The Office of Professional Accountability has been investigating you for the last four months.”

  Madison’s brain staggered, caught itself, and started racing. “I’m . . . what?”

  Later, when she thought back to that moment, she realized that not even for a second had she entertained the idea that Cameron might be wrong.

  “OPA is investigating me? Why? What in the sweet name of—?”

  “I’m afraid it is because of our acquaintance. The push came from the DEA in Los Angeles. They sug
gested it.”

  “I joked about it with those two bozos I met with a week ago and they took me seriously? This is a joke.” Madison started to pace the thin beach.

  “No, it isn’t, and they have been keeping an eye on you for months, not since last Saturday.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “I have contacts.”

  “Inside OPA?”

  Cameron did not reply. He didn’t need to. Madison figured he probably had contacts who could tell him what each OPA officer had for breakfast if he cared to know.

  “There’s worse,” Quinn said.

  For a bizarre moment he sounded to Madison like a doctor about to give a patient the shittiest news. “OPA investigating me is not the worst you’ve got?”

  “No . . .” Quinn took a deep breath. “Someone close to you is talking to them.”

  He was right. He knew her well enough to know that this was worse. “Someone I work with?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “This comes from your contact too?” she asked Cameron.

  “Yes. They are very skittish about this informant and it’s kept under about five different code names. But it’s definitely someone close to you and they want to protect this person from you—and, quite reasonably, from me—ever finding out.”

  Madison could have paced the hell out of the small beach. She understood now why they had to meet there and why they wouldn’t drive up to her door.

  “This is nuts. What do they think I’ve done? How can they possibly justify an investigation?”

  “They think you might be feeding me inside details about the cartel deaths.”

  “How? I don’t know anything at all about the cartel—except for what Agent Parker himself told me.”

  “You have gone to great lengths to save my life when others might not have done.”

  “Yeah, well, I knew that one would come back to bite me.” Madison felt anger and adrenaline taking over and stomped on both. She needed to think—and think clearly.

  “Tell her,” Nathan Quinn said, and his voice was low, his fury neatly contained.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Two years ago the cartel put a wiretap on Nathan’s home phone to monitor our calls. They were after me, but without much success, and they hoped they’d get some valuable information that would lead them to my safe house. Two years ago,” Cameron repeated.

  Madison followed the trail of his words. Two years ago. She remembered a frantic drive in foul weather, a madman stalking the city, a last-minute phone call to Quinn’s home to save the lives of a SWAT team about to storm Cameron’s boat.

  “They have my call?” she said. Her voice came out strong even if her heart was thundering.

  “Yes,” Quinn replied.

  It had been one crazy moment in a long series of crazy moments, but Madison had warned Quinn that the police were about to break into Cameron’s boat and told him that he should give himself up, and she had assured him that she could prove his innocence of a hideous crime. She could not bear the thought of innocent lives being lost and knew that Cameron would not let himself be taken down easily. If that tape were made public, her life as a police officer would effectively be over. OPA would rule the day; the King County Prosecuting Attorney would have plenty of grounds to charge her with anything and everything they wanted—except maybe jaywalking—but all that didn’t really matter anyway because no cop would ever serve by her side again.

  Cameron continued, and his voice reached her through a fog of anguish.

  “The DEA has dozens of agents working against the cartel. But the cartel, as I do, has its own contacts inside the DEA. For a long time, the cartel didn’t know there was anything useful in the wiretap recordings because Nathan and I were always careful.”

  Madison snorted: at the time they’d had to subpoena Quinn to break attorney–client privilege and all they’d come away with was the color of Cameron’s pants.

  “However,” Cameron continued, “someone who knew what they were doing listened to the recordings properly and realized they had an SPD detective on record warning a fugitive’s attorney of a raid.”

  “Why have I not been arrested?”

  “Because OPA doesn’t know about the call.”

  “But—”

  “It’s leverage, Detective,” Quinn interrupted her. “The cartel is not interested in the legalities of it. They want to make sure you are put under stress—and when the investigation becomes public, you will be. And at the right time they will come to you with the tape and ask you for a favor in return for its disappearance.”

  “And the favor will be to help them to get to you,” she said to Cameron.

  “Most likely,” he replied.

  Something clicked and resettled in her mind. “The office of the therapist I visited after the Salinger case and after the shooting in Whatcom County was burglarized a few days ago and it looked like the thief was particularly interested in my file.”

  “Did they find it?” Quinn said.

  “No, it wasn’t there to find.”

  “That’s not how OPA works,” Cameron said.

  The ice in her gut turned into corrosive acid. “I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t have time for this,” she managed to spit out. “I have a serial killer who beats his victims to death and a list of fatalities that could stretch back years. I don’t have time to worry about some OPA investigation, your damn cartel, and an informant who—” Madison stopped abruptly. There was one thing she knew. One thing in that horrid mess that had just spilled out on the pebbles that she was sure of without any doubt.

  “I know who’s talking to OPA. I know exactly who in my unit is talking to them.” She looked at Nathan Quinn and John Cameron through the darkness. “Chris Kelly,” she said. And it really wasn’t a surprise, come to think of it—not after the many arguments and the deep, mutual loathing. “It’s Chris Kelly,” she repeated.

  “Are you sure?” Cameron’s voice was silk-wrapped danger.

  “Yes, I am.”

  The moon came out from behind a scrap of clouds, then hid again. The breeze picked up and, somewhere out on the water, invisible in the gloom, something leaped and splashed.

  “Well,” Madison said after a while with a levity she did not feel. “At least I won’t be losing any friends over this. Kelly and I already hate each other’s guts.”

  “What are you going to do?” Quinn said.

  “About what? About OPA? About the tape? Nothing. I’m going to do absolutely nothing because there’s nothing I can do and my energies are better employed elsewhere. Once we have Matthew Duncan’s killer I’m going to have what will no doubt be a short, sharp conversation with my boss and tell him about the tape myself. Because I’m not going to hang around while a bunch of vicious, subhuman, sadistic drug dealers in their landscaped gardens decide my future.”

  “You will do nothing of the kind,” Quinn said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Because you care about your job, about being able to do your job. We’ve already talked about this, remember?”

  Madison flashed back to an argument between them two years earlier on exactly the same subject. “I told you to shove it, Counselor. They would get the same answer.”

  “We’re looking for the recordings,” Cameron said quietly as he picked up a small pebble and skipped it into the dark water.

  “What?”

  Cameron turned to Madison and she caught a sparkle from his eyes.

  “We’re looking for the recordings and we’ll shut down that part of their organization. Tonight’s conversation was just a courtesy visit so you’d be prepared in case anyone approaches you, so you’d know you might be under surveillance. We have work to do and, by the sound of it, so do you. Have fun with your murderer, Detective, and let me know how it turns out. Good night.”

  There was hardly a whisper on the stones as Cameron moved away and disappeared, and Madison was suddenly alone with Quinn.

  �
�Shut down the cartel?” she said.

  “By any and all legal means,” Quinn replied, and he moved closer to her. “Watch your back, Detective, and I advise you not to do anything foolishly noble that we would all deeply regret.”

  Just then he was near enough that she could feel his body warmth. Madison started to speak, but the moon came out and she realized that she was alone on the beach.

  Madison went inside and lit a fire. She was cold and her hands trembled as she struck the match. They might be quivering out of cold or anger or frustration. She couldn’t tell which was which, and she poked the logs in the hearth as they hissed and crackled.

  Sitting cross-legged in front of the fire she brushed and polished her black boots with an energy bordering on ferocity. By the time she was done her mind had reached a plain truth that she couldn’t shake off: OPA, directly or not, was investigating her for something she had indeed done.

  And Chris Kelly—obtuse, brutal, and a bully—was right about her: her mistakes would be measured in body bags.

  Nathan Quinn had not yet said a word, but John Cameron knew him too well to try to crowbar any conversation out of him. Cameron drove fast in the latest of a long line of black Ford Explorers he had owned and waited for his oldest friend to return from wherever he was.

  Quinn stared into the darkness ahead.

  In the last two years there had been a shift between them: not so much because Quinn was no longer Cameron’s attorney but because, for the first time, Quinn had seen with his own eyes his best friend’s handiwork—the pictures of a man Cameron had maimed. Did it matter that the victim was a homicidal maniac? That this maniac had slaughtered innocent people? It did and it didn’t. There are things that cannot be unknown and they change you in ways you cannot predict. John Cameron was grateful that his bond with Quinn had not been severed over the long years of their acquaintance. Nevertheless, he was careful about how much of his life he would share. His friend had not turned away from the worst of him, but there was a subtle edge to their friendship. Sometimes it felt like the cold blade of a knife resting casually against his skin.