Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  “In the sense that the cases he built against his scapegoats were more complex just as the violence became worse. If, and I’m still saying if until we know for sure, he is responsible for all these deaths, for all these innocent people going to prison, then he has created evidence and manipulated it in a way that was practically impossible to detect. The Mitchell case is a perfect example, and he’s had no slipups since.”

  Madison blew out some air from her cheeks. “Okay, eleven. Are they all King County?”

  “No, they’re spread throughout Washington State. I’ve counted only seven in King County. The others are all over the place. Mostly cities. Some rural.”

  “What’s the strike rate?”

  Garner consulted his notes. “Eleven cases in seven years: if you include the Duncan case it works out to be a murder every seven to eight months.”

  He let the numbers sink in. “I don’t do the profiling thing the FBI does. But looking at what I’ve got here I’d say the time between the murders is not getting shorter, but the crimes themselves are becoming more complex.”

  “Great,” Madison said. “He wants to challenge himself.”

  “So it seems,” Garner replied.

  A flicker of sunlight illuminated a shaft of dust in the room. Madison’s mind kept latching onto one word. Eleven.

  “How are you going to be sure?” Garner said. “How will you know?”

  “The crime scenes,” Brown said quietly. “Do the houses have backyards?”

  Things had to happen in a certain order: the right people needed to be briefed and the system for checking had to be put in place. Brown and Madison agreed that the priority was to verify the cases Garner had given them.

  There was one sure way to do it.

  “Tell me this is not a wild goose chase I’m sending them on,” Sorensen said to Madison on the phone. “I don’t have enough warm bodies to send on nonessential trips.”

  “Actually, I’d love to tell you that it is. But I don’t think so. I think they’ll find exactly what we’re looking for.”

  “Eleven?” Sorensen said.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do about the ones that are not King County?”

  “We’ll work with the local jurisdiction. I’m sure everyone will be thrilled to be told they screwed up.”

  “Looks like we screwed up more often—and worse—than anyone else.”

  “That’s the angle I’m going to give them, if they’ll take my call.”

  “How’s Brown?”

  “I don’t know . . . angry, upset, impatient, frustrated, distressed. Take your pick. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t all his cases—his was the first.”

  “So it seems. Are you mailing me the names?”

  “I’m about to send you them. When can Lauren and Joyce start?”

  “The earliest I can send them out is tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks, Sorensen.”

  “Some of those cases were mine, you know.”

  “I know.”

  When Madison looked up, Brown was still on the phone with Fred Kamen from the FBI. The sandwiches they had bought on the way back from Garner’s office lay untouched on the edge of her desk.

  Madison unfolded a page of the map of Washington State and pinned one corner to the top of the board. When it was secured she spread out the rest of the map and pinned the other corners too. It was the largest that she had been able to find and she had pushed and slid the board so that it rested near her desk and Brown’s.

  She looked at the map and then picked up a bunch of colored pins from a plastic container on her desk. She needed thirteen pins. She had typed out a chronological list and stuck it to the board and now, in the same order that he had followed, she began to chart his work.

  The first as far as they knew, Peter Mitchell, had been in Seattle. Madison stuck in a pin. The second, provisionary until confirmed by Lauren and Joyce, had also been in Seattle—a man named Steve Gruber. Another pin. The third was in Spokane and the fourth—and the first woman—was in Olympia. Another two pins. The fifth was back in Seattle. Madison continued with each name on the list until she reached Matthew Duncan’s name—the thirteenth pin—and then she stood back. Thirteen names, thirteen horrific deaths.

  Something occurred to her and she went back to her desk. She typed out a second list, checking Saul Garner’s notes, and when she was done she pinned it next to the first. The initial name on the second list was Henry Karasick, the neighbor convicted of Peter Mitchell’s murder. Each name on the first list had a matching name on the second, except for Matthew Duncan. The scapegoat for his murder was still an unknown quantity. Madison had no doubt that it wouldn’t stay unknown for long. A fall guy would have been prepared for them to find and, Lord Almighty, he’d better be ready for the storm about to hit.

  Why, Madison reflected, hadn’t it yet?

  Her gaze stayed on the lists.

  Lieutenant Fynn was an expert at handling detectives. He had spent his working life getting the best out of people who dealt with the worst humanity had to offer. But he also had a boss to answer to and, since citizens of his city had become notches on a bedpost, he had a compelling need to see his team achieve something more at the end of each day than getting a day older. And Madison had had little to show so far. In fact, she seemed to be able to generate questions where they badly needed answers. In a near future when each decision he made was going to be significant, when it might mean the life or death of the next victim, nothing was more important than deciding whether to keep Madison on point or not.

  Fynn respected her—he liked her and he thought she was an asset for the team—but if this was going to be a multijurisdictional nightmare with a maniac plying his trade statewide, he needed the best person for the job. And it just might not be her.

  They were alone in his office now. The door was closed and Fynn was standing behind his desk.

  “Madison, tell me something I don’t already know.”

  Briefing the lieutenant on Saul Garner’s report had not been one of Madison’s happiest moments in the unit. None of the new King County murders had happened on Fynn’s watch, but that was of little comfort.

  Madison knew what he’d meant was: Tell me why I should keep you as the primary of this gosh-darned mess. Fynn was talking to her alone because he was about to replace her.

  She saw the map with the pins and the columns of names. She saw the pages of Saul Garner’s notes and the Homicide reports they had recovered from the archives. Those pages held patterns and shapes and forms. They even held the killer’s shape—as if each fact in the hundreds of pages contributed a single dot to his profile, like forensic pointillism.

  Maybe Fynn would take her off the case, maybe he wouldn’t. In the end it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hunt.

  “Madison?”

  “He started in his late twenties or maybe early thirties,” she began, “which puts him in his late thirties now. He is mature enough to be incredibly thorough and organized but has the physical strength to take on someone like Matthew Duncan. He’s a Seattle man who feels most comfortable in the city but has pushed himself to perform out of town as well. Sorensen’s people just got back to me about the hacking of the server of the HVAC company. Do you remember? He hid the visit of the fake engineer by hacking into their booking system. Well, they found nothing except for what they call a ‘clean scar.’ That is to say, he got in, did his business, and got out without leaving them a trail to follow. This man is good with computers; he’s very good. He wasn’t working a menial job at Peter Mitchell’s warehouse. If he was there at all he would have been doing something in IT and he would have been slumming it.

  “This rules out the guy Brian Baines remembered who used to hang around Mitchell. The person we’re looking for is someone exceptionally sophisticated, not a laborer, not someone who stumbled on all these situations and took advantage. He sought out the victims and built a . . . a story around the c
rimes. A story we have believed in each and every case. It started with Mitchell—I think—because it was the one where we found the hair in the victim’s wound and we haven’t found any other DNA evidence since. Except for the blood in the drawer in the Duncans’ bedroom, which was well away from the victim’s body and entirely accidental.

  “And he made a mistake. Something went wrong with setting up the scapegoat for Matthew Duncan’s killing because in every other case we had the fall guy within forty-eight hours of the murder and it’s been more than a week since Matthew Duncan was beaten to death.”

  Madison took a deep breath. “And a mistake makes him vulnerable because, I guarantee you, he’s going to try to fix it somehow. He’s not just going to let it go. He knows we won’t. And he has to produce a fall guy, and soon. Last night . . . I don’t know about last night on the ferry. But I tell you what, the CCTV is pretty fuzzy. It shows figures and silhouettes, but it wouldn’t have been enough to identify someone who was wearing a hood and dark clothes. There was simply no way it would stand up in court if someone was charged with stealing from any of the cars there, and a thief would know that. And yet whoever was on that deck stayed the hell away from the camera, which means he didn’t want to be seen at all. As if he wasn’t there.”

  “Are you sure someone was there?”

  “I think that’s exactly the question he wanted us to ask, sir.”

  Fynn measured Madison’s words.

  “If he started with Mitchell,” she continued, “if his pleasure is . . . is what you saw on the autopsy pictures, then things were already pretty bad in this man’s life. He would have had issues; he might have escalated to murder, just like his violence escalated once he started killing. He might have gotten himself into trouble with the law before Mitchell. I’m thinking court-ordered anger management courses, maybe temporary restraining orders from his nearest and dearest. And then, when he found out what he could do to let off steam, he just got on with it and there was no more trouble. I’d bet he lives a very quiet, neat life and manages his own working hours.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He visited the Duncans in the middle of the day, on a weekday. What he does takes time, effort, and attention. He needs to be able to take off and do his thing whenever necessary and a nine-to-five job would mess around with his schedule.”

  Madison had been pacing around the office, incapable of being still as her thoughts tumbled out. In the silence after her last words, she stopped. Somewhere in the outer office a telephone was ringing and no one was picking up.

  “What would your next step be?” Fynn said.

  “Patterns,” Madison replied. “We need to verify the cases as soon as possible and then we start building patterns of behavior.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Have you looked at the map, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the question has to be, how does he find his victims? How did their paths cross? How did he meet them?”

  “They could be random.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Mitchell wasn’t random. He had an ongoing quarrel with his neighbor, which made him a perfect target, and apparently Mitchell never shut up about it. Lots of people heard him talk about Karasick, and one of them had to be our man.”

  “Patterns?”

  “Patterns.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Madison turned to leave. “Lieutenant, the longer we can keep this away from the press the longer we keep the advantage. The minute he understands that—”

  “I know, Madison. The minute he understands that we are after him for Mitchell, the whole game changes. What about the public, though, have you thought of that? How are we going to protect the public if they don’t know what’s going on?”

  Madison did not have an answer. So far the only vaguely promising lead had been the sketch of the fake engineer—and that had not exactly brought starry results.

  “Look,” Fynn said, “the second we involve other jurisdictions we have to consider that something might get leaked. It happens. It’s practically inevitable.”

  “How long do we have?” Madison said.

  “I’m already in touch with Spokane and Thurston County.”

  Madison nodded. The best way to make sure something ended up on the evening news was to ask fifty people to keep it a secret.

  Madison emailed Sarah Klein in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office the list of new cases—her mind knew that they were still waiting for final confirmation, but her gut told her Garner was right—and Klein emailed back a single word: an expletive that perfectly encapsulated her feelings on the subject. It was Klein’s job to tell Ben McReady, the Prosecuting Attorney, and in this particular case it also involved telling Nathan Quinn—since the investigation had officially gone statewide. Seven minutes later, Madison’s cell pinged.

  “You were right about going through the appeals,” she said as she picked up.

  “Eleven?” Nathan Quinn replied.

  “No, it’s thirteen in total. That’s the number we should remember.”

  “How long can you keep it out of the papers?”

  “Not long. Too many people involved and the hacks will sniff after it like hounds.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “Am I still on point? So far, yes. But Fynn is watching me closely.”

  “How about Public Affairs?”

  “No press conferences, no new releases about the Duncan case, not a peep until we’ve recovered what we can from the crime scenes.”

  “Years-old crime scenes?”

  “Absolutely. How much do you want to bet that if we went public some bright spark would go digging up whatever the killer has left for us?”

  Quinn sighed and Madison wished the conversation would stop right there. She wished it would stop and she wished it would continue.

  “Klein is on top of things for King County,” Quinn said. “But if you need anything else for Thurston or the others you call me and I’ll get it done. Quickly.”

  “Good, thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Klein only sent me names and case numbers. I haven’t seen—”

  “You don’t want to see the pictures,” Madison replied, and her eyes traveled unconsciously to the pile on her desk. There was a small private nightmare contained in each one.

  “How bad?”

  “As bad as you can imagine. He’s been turning them out like clockwork. Each one worse than the one before.”

  “Remember that you were the one who found Salinger.”

  “That was different.”

  “No, Detective, it wasn’t.”

  It was too easy to be honest with Quinn.

  “I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t stop him,” she said.

  “You do realize that you’re not the only person looking for him in the whole of Washington State?”

  “I know, I know . . . but if you saw what he’d done to Matthew Duncan. The rage, the evil.”

  “That kind of destruction is usually associated with something personal.”

  “I agree, but not for this guy. I really don’t think he knew all thirteen victims personally. He only wanted them for what he could do to them, for the thrill of the violence.”

  “What happens if Fynn puts someone else on point?”

  Trust Quinn to beat around the bush.

  “Well, anyone could read it as proof that he doesn’t trust me to lead.”

  “And are you okay with that?”

  Madison mulled it over for a moment. “Frankly, I don’t care. Hey, sure, it would sting. But I’m looking to catch a guy, not to raise my profile. Say that Brown or Spencer were put in charge of the unit, I’d still go after him with all I’ve got.”

  “I don’t doubt that you would,” Quinn said, and there was something there that neither acknowledged. “The unit,” he continued pleasantly. “How is the unit? Are you watching your back?”
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  Madison’s eyes found Chris Kelly at the other end of the room, talking with Rosario. His color was high and his tie undone. She looked away before he turned.

  “I am,” she replied.

  “Good,” Quinn said. “Keep watch, Detective.”

  He was gone and Madison realized that, without noticing, she had left her desk at the beginning of the conversation and had gone to stand by the window, where it was quieter and more private. Annoyed with herself, she returned, picked up the second file in chronological order, and dove back into the killer’s life’s work.

  What would happen if Chris Kelly were put in charge? How would she feel if he were given Matthew Duncan’s case—her case?

  Shit. If it has to happen, let it not be Kelly. Anyone but Kelly.

  It was past nine o’clock in the evening and most of the shift had left for the day. Brown had been immersed in the files for hours. Madison was in the middle of her usual routine of standing in front of the open fridge and wondering why she hadn’t brought anything more useful than a carton of chocolate milk. Spencer joined her and picked up a neatly wrapped bundle of carrot and celery sticks from a shelf.

  “Spence,” Madison said. “Can I ask you something?” The thought had just occurred to her.

  “No good thing ever follows that question but, sure, go ahead.”

  “When you’re home, do you ever talk about all this? About what happens here?”

  It was not the question he had been expecting. He regarded Madison as if appraising her.

  “Let me see,” he replied. “A fairly new relationship—I remember him at the wedding on Sunday, a tall, blond, handsome fella—here we are up to our elbows in cases and you’re wondering how much you can tell him without freaking him out.”

  “You’re the only one who’s married and Dunne just married a cop, so he doesn’t count. I’m assuming your wife knows what you do for a living.”

  “Kelly and Rosario are married,” Spencer said.

  “Well, good for them, but it’s you I’m asking.”

  Spencer wasn’t going to give her a joke answer, which was why she had asked him. Patrol was different, plainclothes was different. All they had in Homicide was death.