“Nothing,” Spencer said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. We talk about her work, we talk about the kids, we talk about—I don’t know—Peruvian agriculture. But if I want to talk about the job, I talk to Andy. I don’t take it home.”
“Isn’t that . . . ?” Madison couldn’t find the word for it and didn’t want to use the wrong one.
“It is what we made it, and it works for us. Took my wife five years to get used to having guns in the house.”
“Thank you,” Madison said, and she meant it.
She went back to her desk with her chocolate milk. She and Aaron didn’t have kids and his work was interesting but wouldn’t sustain the scrutiny of constant conversation. Peruvian agriculture was a possibility. But when it came down to it, she wasn’t sure five years would be long enough for Aaron.
Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown had once been shot in the line of duty. When he was lying bleeding to death, all he wanted was to survive. When woke up in the hospital weeks later, his only focus was getting better and getting back to work. When he stumbled, when it seemed likely that he would never get back to the shield, he turned to Alice Madison and she helped him to come back to the job that was the spinal column of his life.
Since then, since that glimpse of his own mortality—everybody else’s he contemplated every day—he had concentrated on one thing: training Madison to make sure that, when his moment came, she would be in the best shape possible and ready to pass on whatever he had given her to the next generation.
Maybe it was arrogance on his part, maybe a long unbroken stint of safe convictions had lulled him into a false sense of his own worth. How could he have let it happen? Twelve people were dead because he got it wrong seven years ago. If he counted the innocent defendants in prison and the families shattered, the count rose to an unthinkable level.
If Brown were a drinking man, it would have been a grand time to get properly drunk—the kind of drunk that takes everything away except for maybe his name. Ever since that number had fallen from Saul Garner’s lips he had felt the knot getting tighter in his chest. When Madison had put up the lists next to the map, he had made one small addition in his own tidy handwriting: next to Henry Karasick, accused of Peter Mitchell’s murder, he had written deceased (suicide). Not thirteen fatalities, then, but fourteen.
He wanted to cry like children do, with neither self-awareness nor restraint, but that’s not how it works for adults. A thin, scrappy voice pricked his bubble of emotion. Yes, that was arrogant, very arrogant indeed. As if you were the only person who put Karasick in jail. As if the whole justice system of King County and—why not?—Washington State and the universe rested only on your shoulders. A little humility would go a long way right about now.
He hadn’t known about the real killer then, but he sure did today. And wounded pride and self-pity had no place in the investigation. There was too much he had to make up for. Briefly, before the voice told him to get over himself, he hoped that he hadn’t lost Madison’s good opinion forever.
Not Fynn’s, not anyone else’s, just Madison’s.
Tonight, he thought, he didn’t have the heart for Dickens but, sitting in his chair, the mere gesture of holding the book was a comfort.
Chapter 35
Homicides were allocated on a rota basis. When the call came on Wednesday morning, Detective Chris Kelly was up. He signaled to his partner, Tony Rosario, who downed a chewable tablet of vitamin C as he grabbed his coat, and they left the detectives’ room together. Vitamin C in November in Seattle was a sign of reckless optimism: outside it was raining hard, the temperature had dropped like a stone, and they were on their way to a double homicide.
The house was in northeast Seattle and Kelly assessed the road and the neighborhood as they drew near. The wide yard around the property was a stretch of mud marked by scraps of grass. Trees lined the two-story building on three sides and the closest neighbor was not close at all, Kelly noted. It was a starter home that had been well maintained and freshly painted.
Blue-and-whites were parked by the curb and uniformed officers were already setting up a perimeter. The first officer on the scene—an experienced man both Kelly and Rosario knew well—saw them pulling in and hurried to meet them.
“Detectives, I don’t say this to be disrespectful but I hope you haven’t had your lunch yet. I’ve got a probie there who took one look and nearly lost it.”
“We’re good,” Kelly replied in his usual clipped tone and threw a glance at Rosario.
They donned their protective clothing and walked in.
The first officer took them upstairs to the bedroom, entered, and stood aside to let them see. If at all possible he’d never look inside that room again and that night, at home after the shift, he knew he’d hug his kids longer and harder.
Kelly and Rosario stood on the threshold: blood reached into every corner. One body lay on the bed and the other was half hanging over the edge. Only the clothing told them which one was male and which was female.
“Beaten to death?” Rosario said.
“Looks like it,” the officer replied. “But God only knows what the ME is going to find under all that.”
It was going to be impossible to establish cause of death until the victims’ bodies had been cleaned, until the necessary rituals prescribed by respect and forensic medicine had been performed.
The man and the woman had been found by the man’s brother, who was sitting in a patrol car in shock. Their names were Gary Nolin and Eva Rudnyk. Nothing but their names could identify them now since the killer had taken everything else.
Kelly’s small, bright eyes searched the room and what he saw pleased him. No sign of drug paraphernalia, no weapons, nothing that wouldn’t be found in any bedroom in any house.
He thought about the map in the detectives’ room and how they were going to need another pin.
One hour later the Medical Examiner vans stood idling outside. The cordoned-off area had become much wider, and uniformed officers in their rain gear paced the perimeter and answered questions in short sentences that held as little detail as possible.
Brown and Madison stepped into the bedroom. It had been a pretty room twenty-four hours earlier. They had received the call and Madison had dialed Sorensen’s cell as they rushed out of the precinct. They had to make sure the Crime Scene Unit officers going to the scene had metal detectors. This was the first time they knew what to expect right from the start. Everything Madison dreaded seemed to have come to pass.
“It’s him,” Madison whispered.
The temperature in the room was cool and she was glad that the powerful lights had not been set up yet. Once they had, the scent would become unbearable: copper mixed with a rotten sweetness and human waste.
“We don’t know for sure,” Brown replied.
She knew it didn’t mean that he disagreed with her—in fact, the carnage she was looking at seemed intimately related to Matthew Duncan’s murder—rather that they had to look at the scene objectively and not make it fit the scenario they wanted. What would be worse, anyway? That it was him or that it wasn’t?
Kelly was briefing Fynn in the hallway.
Madison had not missed the greedy sparkle in his eyes because he had bagged himself the latest on the list. She trod carefully around the pools that darkened the floor and started her examination.
“Two victims. One man, one woman. The brother said they’ve been living together for eight months. The back door was jimmied—and it wasn’t a particularly good job. Could be someone wanted to make it look like an amateur did it. The intruder came in and found them already in bed. From their positions I’d say they were asleep and didn’t have a chance to react. I’m betting he went for the man first because he would have posed the greater threat, and his body is lying as it would have while he slept. The woman woke up—probably from the noise—and he . . .” Madison’s gaze followed the line of the body of the woman as she had clearly tried to flee.
“He incapacitated her as well.”
“And then?”
“And then he destroyed as much of their bodies as he could with what looks like a blunt object.”
“Do you think the point of this was the destruction?”
There and then it was difficult to think clearly and stay focused and Madison wanted very much to leave and go where there was only the sea, fresh air, and the sound of gulls screeching.
“Was this about destroying the bodies?” Brown asked her. His voice was kind, and the fact that kindness could even exist in that room was the tether that brought her back.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Look at the walls. We have cast-off patterns from the weapon here . . . and here . . . and there are impact patterns on the headboard too. He must have been standing in this spot for several minutes. This . . . this took time.”
Brown nodded. “What do the injuries tell you? Only a quick preliminary assessment before Dr. Fellman’s examination.”
Madison made herself look. Shards of white bone breaking through the skin like broken sea shells. She saw what he had meant.
“The weapon had to be a certain length in order to reach both victims from one side of the bed. And he had to be able to exercise enough force with it to do lethal damage with just one blow. He couldn’t risk either of them running off.”
“Yes,” Brown said. “And he needed width as well as length for maximum damage. A crowbar would have made a different kind of injury.”
“I see it. A baseball bat?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Time of death?”
“The brother says they spoke yesterday evening. I’d say it happened in the early hours of this morning.”
The floor was a pattern of clear wood and congealed blood. There hardly seemed to be any place to stand.
Madison shifted her feet cautiously. “This breaks his cycle,” she said. “It’s the first time the victims are so close together. Matthew Duncan was just over a week ago.”
“He must have had a good reason,” Brown replied. “He doesn’t do anything without a good reason.”
No, he doesn’t.
In the window, under the steady rain, two Crime Scene Unit officers walked the yard in a grid pattern, their metal detectors hidden by the comings and goings around them. It would take them fifty-three minutes to find what they were looking for—a cigar case wrapped in a sealed, clear plastic bag. Roughly at the same time that, across town, Frank Lauren and Mary Kay Joyce found a tobacco tin buried in Steve Gruber’s yard, now officially the killer’s second victim.
Once the victim’s brother could talk, the first thing he told Detective Kyle Spencer was that Eva Rudnyk’s estranged husband had made threats and had been generally harassing the couple for weeks. He didn’t know his name, but it wasn’t hard to find. And the same quick search told them that yesterday would have been their wedding anniversary.
The man was picked up at his place of work—a school where he was an administrator—and taken to the precinct. Chris Kelly interviewed him and it was obvious from the first second in the box that the man had absolutely no idea what the detective was talking about. He had been home alone the previous evening and no, there were no witnesses. Yes, he had been troubled after his wife had left, but he had sought counseling and things were slowly getting better. Yes, weeks earlier he had left a string of abusive voice-mail messages on his wife’s cell phone but, he said, he had been drunk at the time and he was much more careful now and wouldn’t let himself get out of control in the same way. No, he had not made or received any calls last night. In fact, he had gone to bed early and alone with a sleeping pill to make sure he’d sleep through.
In short, Kelly thought, he had no alibi.
When the detective told him why he was there, the man panicked and went into an anxiety attack that made him hyperventilate. At the same time that Kelly gave him a paper bag to breathe into, a patrol officer spotted a black plastic bag in a dumpster by a building site five minutes away from the suspect’s home.
The bag was wrapped around a baseball bat.
Madison felt out of herself after leaving the crime scene, as if she were watching the great police department machine at work from a great distance. Kelly was interviewing the man, but they all knew he hadn’t done it; Sorensen was personally processing the baseball bat as a rush job and had been able to tell them in minutes that the bat carried the fingerprints of the estranged husband and so did the plastic bag. But they all knew he wasn’t the man who had been wielding it over the victims’ bodies. It was a process that had to be followed. The line they walked was paper-thin: they had to appear to be doing exactly what the killer wanted them to do.
“How did he get the bat?” Spencer said.
“It was in a closet, behind a pile of clothes. It’s November and he knew the guy wasn’t going to use it anytime soon,” Madison said. “All he needed was to get in and grab it. Then he’d just walk into the kitchen, find the roll of trash bags and tear off the last one, which would carry the guy’s prints.”
“No alarm?”
“No alarm,” Brown replied.
“Is Sorensen going to work on the cigar case?” Spencer said.
“It’s not a cigar case.” Brown picked up a printed sheet and passed it to him. “I’ve just received some notes from the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI.”
Fred Kamen, Madison thought.
“They think it’s a time capsule,” Brown said.
The man watched the news as he sliced tomatoes for a salad. When the item about the double homicide came up he stopped what he was doing and gave it his full attention. The anchor concluded the segment by saying that a man who was known to the couple was already in custody.
“The wheels of justice . . .” he said out loud, and instantly regretted it because it had cheapened what was altogether a very pleasant moment and he deserved to enjoy it.
In spite of his decision not to go ahead with it the other night, when he had woken up yesterday he had felt a tingle in all the right places. He had put so much of himself into this—and it was their wedding anniversary, for Pete’s sake. How could he pass up the chance? The husband had been going on about it for weeks. How much he hated her, how much he loved her, how much he hated the new man, what he would say to her if he could, what he would do to them if he had the opportunity. On and on and on and on.
It was a real pity that the news cameraman couldn’t get inside the crime scene, could only stand close by while the cops talked about it. He would have loved to hear their conversation.
The man had no regrets. It had been a marvel, and when he thought back to it he visualized the lines that connected the couple to the husband and to him like the little model of the planets and the sun in the solar system he kept near his desk.
Those treasured minutes he had spent alone with them were embedded in his memory as if carved into it. He felt calm and at peace with the world: those minutes were already part of his DNA. When he left the house in the rain—the bat already in the bag—he had briefly felt as if he himself were one of the elements. And he liked that notion very much. After all, he didn’t really exist as a person; he was only what they made him.
Chapter 36
John Cameron laced up his boots and checked that he had everything he needed: while most people stopped at key, wallet, cell phone, he continued the list to cover two firearms—a .40 in his belt, tucked in the small of his back, and a .38 in an ankle holster—extra ammunition for both, and a knife. The weather was sunny and it looked as if it was going to be a glorious day, yet another glorious day in Los Angeles. Again, he couldn’t help thinking back to his brief visit to Newfoundland and was surprised by the piercing ache for that vast silence and the miles of nothing that separated forests and cities. It wasn’t really nothing, of course, it was merely a different kind of death chasing you: no cartel there, only the stark realities of a world without helplines and twenty-four-hour convenience stor
es. He would do well there.
The drive to his destination went smoothly; he had done the route a number of times as he prepared for this day. Sometimes the simplest operations need the most work.
The house was in Brentwood and it had taken weeks for John Cameron to find it. The target had bought it under an assumed name for the sole purpose of having a safe place to hide all the things whose presence he couldn’t quite justify in his regular life. It was certainly a problem having more money than could be explained to the Internal Revenue Service or having a whole load of weapons and ammunitions that were neither licensed nor legal in the country. A small but very high-quality amount of cocaine was also something that the authorities frowned upon and needed to be safely stashed somewhere private.
The two-bedroom stucco house surrounded by an overgrown yard with palm trees had been the ideal solution. It had also been a good investment for the owner, who would probably sell it in a couple of years and buy a bigger place on the same street. There was an elementary school at the end of the block and cafés where young mothers bought their juices after their morning runs. It was—in the Realtor’s words—a delightful place to live. The owner had bought it, installed a walk-in safe in the second bedroom, and never once slept in the house. He hadn’t been around to the cafés to taste the juice yet—and he wasn’t planning to anytime soon.
John Cameron parked in an alley behind the house. He wore jeans and a light jacket over a black long-sleeved T-shirt that covered the .40 in his belt. Most people didn’t know how to protect things: they shared secrets with the wrong people, they used guns where they should have used brains, and they built a safe in a house without walls. This house had walls, but barely—that is, they were there to keep out the weather, not someone with Cameron’s skills and motivation.
He checked his watch and looked left and right—the alley was empty and the trees from the gardens of the residences on both sides hung over the narrow stretch. He lifted himself easily over the six-foot wall and landed on the other side in a crouch. The yard was thick with shrubs and tall grass. No one had mowed the lawn for a very long time and wild flowers had taken over.
Blood and Bone Page 23
