Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  “We shouldn’t have told her about the recordings,” Quinn said.

  “She needed to know.”

  “She’s not going to wait around for someone to blackmail her. She’s going to blow this thing wide open as soon as—”

  “She’s not going to jeopardize her case. You agree with that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we have some time. And I hope Detective Madison has a shred of self-preservation left under all that fire.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it. She was ready to give up her badge to hunt down the man who had shot her partner.”

  The road was a blur of orange streetlights punctuated by black patches of vegetation.

  “I think it would be quite something to be on the hunt with Detective Madison,” Cameron said after a while. “Don’t you?”

  Quinn did not reply.

  The car pulled into his driveway in Seward Park. The house was dark and still—wood and stone weathered by the Pacific Northwest looking over the waters of Lake Washington.

  For a moment there was just the sound of the engine ticking over. The sky was nothing but heavy clouds: the moon long gone, the stars extinguished.

  “Drink?” Quinn said. He felt edgy and tired and he was not entirely sure that his friend’s company was what he needed. But there was no one else he could talk to about this. If they didn’t have their secrets, what was left between them?

  “Thank you but not tonight,” Cameron replied, and then added, “I guess that means Erica’s not inside.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “When am I going to meet her?”

  “Soon,” Quinn replied and got out. “Good night, Jack.”

  Nathan Quinn let himself inside—past the locks and the alarm with biometrics access. On the living-room table that day’s copy of the Los Angeles Times had been left open to the page that reported the death of a Jaime Rojas while visiting his mother in the hospital. The postmortem had not been performed yet. However, the LAPD was treating the death as suspicious. How perspicacious, Quinn thought. The article was sparse on facts and generous with speculation. Quinn did not need to speculate.

  Almost six months earlier, John Cameron had appeared on his porch. They had not seen each other for a while and, although Quinn had some ideas about what his friend had been doing, he had not been prepared to hear what Cameron wanted to tell him and the details of the deal he wanted to strike. But he had agreed in the end—as Cameron had known he would—and he’d gotten to work on his side of things. Now the whole mess was moving faster than they wanted and in directions they had not expected.

  Nathan Quinn poured himself a measure of bourbon and stood by the French doors looking up at the overcast sky. He took a sip. How far was he capable of going in order to protect the ones he loved? He hoped he’d never have to find out, because the answer was quite simply terrifying. He was an officer of the court, sworn to uphold the law—it was almost funny, when he thought of it in those plain terms. But most of all—and it stung that the State Attorney had been right on the money about it—he was a wartime consigliere. He had looked for his own war and found it, not the other way around.

  Quinn knocked back the rest of the bourbon. He would not allow himself to think of Detective Alice Madison and their awkward proximity in the darkness of the beach. He would not allow himself to think of her.

  Nathan Quinn went to bed and the sheets were cool on his skin.

  He would not allow himself to think of her at all.

  Chapter 31

  The church was a sea of blue. The first notes of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” trembled high in the chilly air, sung by one of Dunne’s young cousins, and rain lined the stained-glass windows. Dozens of police officers in dress uniform crammed both sides of the aisle in the Blessed Sacrament Church in the University District. Every bench and every pew had been taken and Madison stood between Aaron and Brown, behind a group of Andy Dunne’s Irish relatives.

  The bride and the groom stood by the altar—she with a train that had required three bridesmaids and he looking as pale as the freshly dead. Stillness had been tipped into the church and held every person in their place. It wasn’t Madison’s first Catholic wedding, but it certainly felt the most Catholic—if that were possible.

  Aaron had arrived good and early that morning, wearing a charcoal suit with a dark purple tie, and found her already in her smart blues, sidearm in place and boots shining. Her eyes, though, told him about a bad night with little sleep, so he had offered to make breakfast.

  In the end Madison had made pancakes for both of them because she needed to be distracted by something, anything, and cooking might just do—at least for a few minutes.

  “Is it the case?” Aaron had asked her.

  “Yes,” she had replied, since it was certainly part of the truth.

  “Maybe you can take a few hours off,” he had said. “From everything. Just enjoy the day.”

  He had meant well and she had put her arms around him and hugged him without speaking. Chris Kelly would be at the wedding, and enjoying the day might be a tad beyond Madison’s capabilities.

  They had run into Brown on the church steps and introductions were made. For a brief, bizarre moment Madison had felt like a teenager bringing home her first boyfriend. Of course, that had never happened in the reality of her life. Brown, who had come by himself, had shaken Aaron’s hand with warmth and they had joined the crowd. Aaron had looked around with something akin to bewilderment. She had warned him that there would be a lot of cops. Nevertheless, the experience was something else and she had noticed his eyes taking in the uniforms, the decorations, the weapons worn with the familiarity of everyday objects. She was used to it, he was not. She had slipped her hand into his and squeezed it.

  Now Schubert held them all and the boy’s voice rose above the carved crucifix, above the high altar and the wood-paneled sanctuary. And Madison felt raw, as if the music had somehow peeled off a layer of skin, of protection, and left her vulnerable to everything and to everyone, and to those vows that promised a life. There was such hope in those words and they shot straight through Madison’s core.

  “Do you take this man . . . ?” the priest said.

  A wave of emotion swelled and caught Madison’s breath; she was glad that most of Dunne’s family seemed to be struggling with handkerchiefs. She blinked and lifted her gaze up to the west window above the altar: there were six panels of stained glass and, in the leftmost pane, the top symbol was a scale to represent the virtues of justice. Justice. Madison looked away. She turned to her side and noticed Chris Kelly, who must have been pushed into the bride’s side of the church, shifting in his seat. She was out of herself and so preoccupied that she didn’t even realize he had turned until their eyes met.

  He was a blank. He could have been standing in the middle of a parking lot or maybe a particularly disappointing department store. His gaze slid over Madison and returned to the front, devoid of expression.

  A pinprick of anger pierced her and she hung on to it. Anger was better than that blinding sorrow. Anger she could handle—with or without Schubert.

  Then the groom kissed the bride. Madison exhaled and wiped her cheek where a tear had fallen. They had witnessed something; they had been part of something.

  When the guests came out under the rain, the wind whipped their coats. The photographer attempted to take some pictures on the steps, but no one really expected the happy couple to come out. Madison spotted Dunne’s red hair as he climbed into a limo among cheers and hollers, surrounded by other red-haired people under black umbrellas.

  The inside of Aaron’s car was steamed up as he leaned over and kissed her softly. “I like weddings,” he said.

  A small part of Madison was still in the church, trying to make sense of the ragged pain in her chest.

  They drove in a convoy to Ray’s Boathouse in Ballard for the reception. Aaron looked Madison up and down as he steered through the traffic.

  “I
like you in your dress blues,” he said. “A little stern perhaps, but we could make it work.”

  “I hadn’t realized you had a thing for uniforms,” Madison said.

  “That’s because I’ve never seen you in one before.”

  “Stop smiling already.”

  “I can’t.”

  They parked in the restaurant lot just in time for a frail sun to come out and shine wanly on the slick piers around it. Madison remembered that it was lucky for the bride to have rain on her wedding day. Good for Stacey, she thought. The water, like a bright sheet of metal, caught every shard of light and bounced it back.

  Hours later—after canapés and champagne followed by more food than Madison thought possible—Aaron stepped outside for a quick call to his children and she found herself alone, sitting next to Brown.

  “Sarge,” she said, aware that she’d had a couple of drinks and her thinking might not be as straight as it should be. “What would you do if you couldn’t do this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If something prevented you from being a cop.”

  They both knew that he had come dangerously close to it in the past—when he’d had trouble passing the firearm test after being shot, nearly two years earlier. Brown looked at Madison: this was about something else.

  “I didn’t want to think about it at the time. I suppose I didn’t want to believe that it could happen for real. So I guess the answer to your question is that I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t do this.”

  Madison nodded; she had thought as much. The notion of Brown not being a cop was inconceivable.

  “What has brought this on?” he said.

  Madison wanted so very badly to tell him. See, OPA is investigating me for something that—however I want to dress it up—I have done. And Chris Kelly, right there at the table in the corner having a slice of wedding cake, is keeping an eye on me for them. She wanted to tell him because he already knew about the call to Quinn—she had told him at the time—and the idea of keeping something like this from him went against everything they had built during their relationship.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  If she told him, she would be dragging him into the chaos that she had created for herself. And one day—under oath, as he was likely to be—he would have to admit that yes, she had known she was under investigation and yes, they had talked about it. If she told him, she would be taking away his deniability—and that, Madison reflected through the blurry focus given by two glasses of champagne, would not do. She would not have Brown interrogated by some grasping punk about every exchange they’d ever had and all that she’d told him about John Cameron. When a cop is under investigation, his or her partner more often than not has to weather the shit storm. If they’re clean, why had they not noticed the rot taking hold right next to them? And if they’re not clean, well, it just goes to show that it’s never only the one bad apple, is it?

  “I think about it sometimes, that’s all,” Madison lied. “What I would do if I couldn’t do this.”

  Brown saw the lie—even if she had kept her tone light enough for the question not to really matter, and her eyes on something happening with the bride at the other end of the room—but he didn’t challenge her. He didn’t know anyone less likely than Madison to leave the force and get into something else.

  “If you had to,” he said carefully. “If, for whatever reason, you couldn’t do this any longer, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  Her eyes traveled around the room. Lieutenant Fynn was talking to Kyle Spencer, their wives deep in conversation themselves. Dunne was considerably less pale, though still surrounded by family; he saw Madison and winked at her. Tony Rosario, Kelly’s partner, was chatting with the father of the bride and—for once in his life—not looking as if he were about to succumb to a slow and painful illness. Madison knew most of the people wearing blue in the large room—she knew them the way you know someone when you stand with them on the street, doing a job that often meant danger, even death. It was not the way other people might know each other from the office. Like it or not, these were her people.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated.

  Kyle Spencer joined them. His best-man speech had been appropriately funny and touching, more so because he didn’t have any brothers himself and Andy had applied for and gotten that job many years earlier.

  Spencer drained his beer and leaned in. “Any news from the Release Project lawyer?” he said.

  “He’s going through his files,” Madison replied. It was just the three of them at the table and she felt free to talk. “We gave him some parameters yesterday and he’s going to do some digging for us.”

  “And he’s not going to the media with it?”

  “I don’t think so. Looks like he really wants to help.”

  Spencer dropped his voice. “I’ve read the Duncan autopsy report. Eighteen blows to the face. Some of the bones almost pulverized.” He shook his head.

  Spencer was an experienced Homicide detective and didn’t spook easily. Brown and Madison had seen the pictures and the real thing. They had felt the presence in that room of the man who had done this to Matthew Duncan; they had seen him standing over his victim.

  “He’s going to do it again,” Madison said. “He thinks we have no idea about how he works, and he’s going to do it again. And somehow it’ll be even more horrific, because he’s not going backward. Eighteen blows will become twenty-five. One victim at a time will become two. It’s a game and he’s going to push it as far as he can go.”

  “We do have a very limited understanding of how he works,” Spencer conceded.

  “We know what turns him on: extreme violence, blood, and manipulation,” Madison said. “And that—”

  “Aaron, come join us,” Brown said suddenly.

  Madison realized that he had been standing behind them and, judging from his face, he had unwittingly heard quite a bit of their conversation.

  “I’m . . . I’m going to get a fresh drink,” Aaron said. “Alice?”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

  He left for the bar and Spencer stood up to return to his own table.

  “Do you talk much to Aaron about what we do?” Brown said to Madison.

  “Surprisingly, not a lot, no,” she replied. “Would you?”

  She found Aaron at the bar drinking a Coke as some young children played tag around the room and bumped into the grown-ups.

  They both cheered when Andy and Stacey left in the limo—with a crooked JUST MARRIED stencil stuck on the trunk—and Madison said, “Let’s go home, let’s light a fire and forget about everything for a little while.”

  They lit a fire once they got home, but didn’t do more than collapse on the sofa—Aaron’s long legs stretched out toward the hearth and Madison’s head leaning on his shoulder. They watched the flames and soon they were asleep in the glow of the coals.

  The drive back had been quiet. Madison hadn’t asked him about what he’d heard and he hadn’t brought it up. They woke up around midnight and made it to bed, shedding clothing on the way and wrapping themselves in the cold duvet. They held each other for warmth and went back to sleep.

  Madison’s last thought was stained-glass windows high above her and a memory of music.

  Saul Garner’s Sunday had not been one of his best. He had spent the morning with his family and then returned to work—his shirt still sporting the trace evidence of a cooked breakfast. A paper bomb had exploded in his office and files covered every surface. A paperless world was all very well, but that was not the world he lived in.

  His meeting with the detectives on Saturday had been a shock to the system: by the time he got involved in a case the victim had often been in the ground for years. Today he was in the office because the case was still open and the victim might be the last in a long daisy chain of the dead.

  The software that could do what he needed to do did not
exist yet; it was a matter of patience, thoroughness, and determination. Garner slumped into his chair and picked up the first file of the day—a six-year-old homicide. His eyes scanned the preliminary investigation report, the detectives’ notes, and then the autopsy report. There were pictures too. He looked quickly and then covered them with a folder. He was not squeamish—he had spoken to vicious, brutal human beings in detail about their crimes—but even Saul Garner had a finite capacity for cruelty, and these last twenty-four hours had severely tested it.

  He went back to the report and then skipped to his own notes to decide whether the man might fit the criteria. Had he pleaded not guilty?

  The lawyer sighed and went back to the photographs and the description of the murder weapon—a crowbar. Yes, the defendant had pleaded not guilty.

  Saul Garner was alone in the empty building with his reports and his pictures. The egg stains and orange juice on his shirt—discovered once he was already in the car and driving—were a comfort and a talisman of normality.

  Chapter 32

  Monday morning dawned in all its gray splendor. Madison woke up with a headache without actually having had the pleasure of being even remotely drunk the night before. The rest of the day was a perfect match for her headache: they talked to as many witnesses from the Mitchell case as they could find; they studied the strips in the tins left by the killer; and all the while they received no news of any kind from Amy Sorensen at the lab, Saul Garner at the Release Project, or Fred Kamen at the FBI. The identity of the man Brian Baines had remembered was, after sifting through the company records with the Internal Revenue Service, still unknown.

  Sipping her first coffee of the day Madison had decided that she would simply not think at all about Chris Kelly, the OPA investigation, or the drug cartel. She just couldn’t. Her brain could not compute all the different variations of dung about to hit the fan. And any time spent trying to consider all the faces of that particular Rubik’s Cube was time spent not thinking about Peter Mitchell and Matthew Duncan—two men whose paths had crossed someone who’d been ready to lay waste to their lives.