Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  “It will be too late by then. I’ll know too much.”

  They were still holding hands.

  “You would never forgive me if I was the one who brought him in,” she said.

  “You forget I’m an officer of the court. I know who he is, what he’s done. I know what he is.”

  “He’s your brother in every way but blood, and I don’t want you to feel you ever have to lie to me about it,” Madison said. “Not about anything.”

  “I never have.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you went after him I’d be worried about you.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “I know that but—believe me—you’re not in the same league. And I thank God for that.”

  “I’m not asking you to choose. I’m saying this is how things are. You will always want to protect him and I’m one of the things you need to protect him from.”

  “You saved his life.”

  “And I’d do it again.”

  “But you’d pursue him if you have to.”

  “I would, if I could.”

  “Then he would be in some serious trouble.”

  Madison sighed. “We’d just have to see how it plays out.”

  Quinn stood up and Madison followed. He looked so pale in the early light and there were livid shadows under his eyes. He laid his cool hand on her cheek and they were close enough to embrace, close enough to kiss.

  “I can hardly think straight,” he said, and his voice was a hoarse whisper. “I’m going to wash my face and then we’ll get some coffee and talk this over and sort it out. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Quinn nodded and let go of Madison’s hands.

  She padded into the kitchen and closed her eyes. There was nothing to talk about; there was nothing to sort out. She heard the front door open and close and three seconds later the sound of Quinn’s car starting. She didn’t go to look; she listened as the car crunched the gravel on her driveway and then faded into the distance.

  The pain was sudden and physical and lacerating. Months later, Madison couldn’t remember the rest of that day, of that week. It had been a blur of hours when she was supposed to be asleep, but was awake, and days when she wasn’t really present except during her shifts.

  She had felt Brown’s eyes on her but had not confided in him. She had told Rachel eight months later, when she was becoming adjusted to a life that was somewhat less and would always be less. Madison ran dozens, hundreds, of miles in those months, especially on Alki Beach, and not once did she notice the tall, dark man who would park at the end of the lot and watch her run.

  Then, about one year after that day, she had bumped into Carl Doyle, Quinn’s assistant from his private practice, and casually asked him about his former boss. And that’s how Madison had learned that Nathan Quinn was engaged to his college girlfriend, Erica Lowell, herself an attorney—her father had founded Greenhut Lowell. She had come back to Seattle after many years in Boston and—wouldn’t you know it?—they’d run into each other six months earlier.

  Madison had managed to nod and react in all the right places and had driven herself home. She’d even stuck some leftovers in the oven to warm them up for dinner. In the end, though, she had fallen asleep on the sofa with her food untouched and Some Like It Hot playing muted on the TV.

  When Aaron had asked her out on a date three days later, Madison said yes.

  Chapter 39

  John Cameron sat at the table and spread out an old Seattle Times on the polished wood. He unwrapped the leather straps from his shoulder holster and took out the Smith & Wesson .40. There was something very relaxing about fieldstripping and cleaning it.

  It had always helped him to think.

  John Cameron’s home was a modest house in the Admiral neighborhood above Alki. It had been bought years earlier in another man’s name and no other living being had been inside it since. There were no photos in frames and not a scrap of paper with his name anywhere. He had made sure it would stay entirely blank—not so much a safe house, more of a doorway to nonexistence. Even Nathan Quinn didn’t know about it and, if John Cameron died unpredictably—either there or somewhere else—the utilities would be paid by a competent lawyer in Tacoma who knew him as a businessman who often traveled abroad.

  There was something of a dark fairy tale there, Cameron thought, because if he died suddenly his body would not be discovered for years—or possibly ever. As the house ticked over, with or without him, maybe enough time would pass for the trees and the shrubs in the wide garden to take over the house completely and reclaim the land. There would be tall grass instead of the oak floors, and branches would break through the glass panes in the windows. His body would slowly dissolve and become mulch for the roots to feed on, and nothing could ever prove that he had lived there. His weapons, of course, would not dissolve. They would remain under the leaves, the toiling insects, and the damp earth—rusty but whole.

  In the pool of light from a desk lamp John Cameron removed the magazine from the pistol, emptied it, and lined up the fifteen shells precisely on the newspaper. He checked the handgun’s chamber and made sure that it was empty. Then he pulled back the slide, pushed the lock, turned the switch on the side, and when he squeezed the trigger the slide came off. The man who taught him to do it had said that ten idiots every year forget to check that the chamber is empty beforehand, pull the trigger to release the slide, and shoot a family member—did he want to be that idiot?

  Dawn was just about skimming the tops of the skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Cameron glanced at the glass wall and saw streaks of gray and blue as though the day had not decided yet which way it was going to go. He removed the spring and the barrel from the slide and sprayed some Remington oil into the lid of the can. He only used small pure cotton cloths and slim brushes, which glided perfectly inside the barrel, and where they couldn’t reach he used Q-tips that he dipped in the oil. First he worked on the inside and then on the outside. As he was wiping he squeezed the trigger a couple of times to see how smoothly the mechanism moved.

  He was done with California for a while: he had no further interest in the people there and had reason to believe they had no further interest in him. Then again, he would just have to wait and see. Those kinds of things don’t run on schedule.

  John Cameron clicked the slide back and replaced the full magazine. He got up, poured himself a mug of coffee, and sat in the leather chair by the glass wall. There was enough light to see the city coming to life and he never tired of the view. If he died there and then, the handgun—freshly cleaned and oiled as it was—would happily hold its own against the rain and the Pacific Northwest storms. And that, he considered, was a comforting thought.

  He took a sip of coffee and wondered what kind of death Special Agent A.J. Parker would choose. The world was full of possibilities.

  Alice Madison woke up on Thanksgiving and her thoughts ran to her grandmother and her usual words on that day. Remember to give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way. It was a Native American saying and it had stayed with Madison. Unknown blessings.

  She hoped there was a whole load of those coming her way because she sure needed them.

  Her cell pinged and she grabbed it—given how early it was, it could only be bad news. Please no more bodies, no more victims. She saw the caller’s ID.

  “Madison,” she said as she picked up.

  “Just thought you’d like to start the day with a happy thought,” Nathan Quinn said.

  “Haven’t had many of them lately.”

  “I know. I saw the news. Klein told me the two victims were his work.”

  “Yes, he’s been busy.”

  “Getting worse?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Who’s the primary on it?”

  Madison rolled her eyes. “Chris Kelly,” she replied.

  “Is he going to be able to work with you on this?”

  “He has no choi
ce. Although I don’t expect he’s going to share any big epiphanies he might have, he wouldn’t do anything that would hurt the case—not with everyone watching.” Madison pulled herself up and rested her back against the headboard. “I think the way forward is to look at the people the killer framed for his crimes. The most difficult part of his work would have been to find someone specifically right to set up.”

  “His work?”

  “You know what I mean. He’s been doing it for so long and has put so much into it, into what he does—whatever you want to call the horrors he produces for everybody involved—that it’s become his real work. What he does for money and to keep a roof over his head is entirely secondary.”

  “Could be,” Quinn said. “He hacked into the HVAC company, didn’t he? Could that be his day job? Not hacking, but something to do with computers?”

  Madison knew in her bones that it made sense. “Yes, if you’re that good at something—and our Cybercrime section says he is—I bet that’s his regular job. He’s probably some kind of freelance consultant—the FBI had it in their profile.”

  “How’s it going with the buried tins?”

  “We call them ‘time capsules’ now: they’re his calling card and how he injects himself into the whole operation. And yes, we found the first two he buried after Mitchell.”

  “Two down, nine to go.”

  “I’m aware of the numbers, thanks,” Madison said. “Sorensen’s people are working as fast as they can.”

  There was a beat of quiet on the line and it struck Madison as truly remarkable that a single instant of silence could be simultaneously awkward and utterly comfortable.

  “It might be a good time to share some useful news,” Quinn said. “The wiretap recordings have been, let’s say, collected. They’re in my possession—all of them, including your call—and I’m about to destroy them, just as I destroyed the original tape I’d made.”

  Madison rested her head back against the wall.

  “Madison?” Quinn said.

  She had not realized how tightly that band had been strapped around her chest for days. Her voice would not come at first, but then it did. “I’m here,” she said and took a deep breath. The cartel could not come after her; she wouldn’t have to go to Fynn and resign; she could stay right where she was and do what she did. “How?” she asked.

  “Cameron,” Quinn replied. “The cartel’s informant in the DEA was Parker. And he was also the one who told them where they could find Jack when they took him.”

  “Agent Parker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Cameron . . . ?”

  “No, he hasn’t harmed him. I’ll explain in more detail another time, but Agent Parker needed to bow out gracefully and Jack let him do that.”

  Madison wasn’t sure what that meant—except that Agent Parker had probably learned more about John Cameron than he had ever wished to when he was provoking her in their meetings.

  “Jack’s contact at OPA said that their investigation of you is still open and is very much dependent on what their informant is going to dig up. But you’re not under any surveillance at present. Apparently, they can’t justify the expense of tailing and recording you.”

  Madison smiled. “Well, thank God for the cuts in departmental budgets.”

  She knew that he was smiling, even though she could not see him.

  It seemed that Alice Madison owed the fact of her remaining in Homicide to John Cameron. It was—as most things were in their acquaintance—surreal.

  “Quinn,” she said, “what Cameron did, it was a big help to me. It made a very big difference.”

  “Jack does what he does for his own reasons,” he replied. “But I’ll tell him that you appreciated the gesture.”

  Unknown blessings.

  Madison and Quinn hung up without mentioning Thanksgiving or their respective plans. Those were not things they talked about anymore.

  Brown and Madison stomped their feet and tried to keep warm in the uncharacteristically freezing November day. It was overcast, and the wind blowing in from Lake Union brought a harsh cold that reached under their clothes with icy fingers.

  Henry Karasick’s younger brother worked on a building site near the water and had agreed to meet them on his break. He was stocky, in his late thirties, and wore a hard hat and high-visibility yellow jacket.

  Brown and Madison had debated whether she should go alone because the man might very well nurture a degree of animosity toward the cop who had put his brother in jail. But Madison had been firm: Brown had to come; it had been his investigation and he had done nothing wrong. He had to come because he had nothing to hide.

  “We do have something to hide,” Brown had said in a brisk tone. “We’re not telling him it was a serial killer.”

  In spite of his reservations, Madison had managed to convince him. They waited next to a hot dog stand, by some wooden benches, in a draft of briny air and fried onions.

  The younger Karasick clocked Brown and regarded him with instant wariness. Then again, he had been in court every day and he knew how solid the case against his brother had been.

  “There was more to it,” Madison said and cut straight to it. “We think there was another man involved and we need to make sure we follow that trail too.”

  “Another man?”

  “Yes.” Madison took out the sketches for him to see. “Have you ever seen this guy? Maybe with your brother, in a bar, in a friend’s house?”

  This was not what he had expected at all. “Seven years later you discover there might have been another guy?”

  “Yes, and we’re looking for the whole truth—however many years later. If this man was the reason your brother ended up in prison, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “No, I’ve never seen this guy before,” the man said.

  “Are you sure?” Madison asked. “Try to remember all of the social situations your brother might have been in. By the way, do you know who gave him the weed he smoked on the night of the murder?”

  The younger Karasick blinked a couple of times.

  “I couldn’t care less about the dealer. But this guy,” she pointed at the pictures, “might have liked to know that your brother was getting high on that particular night. Please try to remember.”

  The man shook his head. “There was this place he used to go to. And sometimes, when he was worked up about something—when he was upset—well, there was a fella behind the bar who knew how to get you the weed.”

  “I need the name of the bar and the name of the bartender.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Please think. Henry must have said something to you about it . . .”

  Brown stood quietly to one side. The other man stared at a speckled corner of concrete, searching for the memory of a word, of a moment. Madison knew not to interrupt. The hot dog stand was getting busy with office workers and a steady stream of builders from the site, talking and eating as the weather got steadily worse.

  “It was Kitty’s Tavern in Northeast Seattle,” the man said finally with a mixture of relief and regret. “And the guy was Roy or Ron or something.”

  “Thanks,” Madison said. “Thank you very much.”

  The wind had picked up and even the birds were quiet. The woman began and her voice filled the emptiness outside and inside.

  “My name is Katherine Angela Duncan. Everyone calls me Kate. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. I went to college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and then at UW, where I met my husband. I work for a pharmaceutical company. I enjoy running and cooking and spending time with friends. When I was little, I had a dog named Jimbo—a golden Lab, the best dog in the world . . .” Her voice caught.

  They drove under the spitting rain and hoped that somebody at the tavern would remember Henry Karasick. Madison didn’t want to think about how many lucky stars had to line up for it to happen: they needed someone who knew about Karasick and who could tell them about Roy or Ron or whoever the gu
y was. But, of course, what they needed more than anything else was someone who would recognize the man in the pictures.

  Kitty’s was the kind of establishment that barely changes as the decades roll on; generation after generation of drinkers and bartenders had come and gone as the red banquettes and the wooden tables had been seasoned by a few nicks and scratches.

  “I think they call this vintage,” Madison said, looking around as they stepped inside.

  “No,” Brown replied, “it’s just plain old.”

  Still, it was warm and welcoming, in a scruffy sort of way, and certainly better than standing around the hot dog cart. Madison bought them a ginger ale and a Coke and asked the bartender—a young woman who looked like she would have been in primary school seven years earlier—whether there was anybody in the tavern who was around back then.

  The owner—and Madison found it hard to believe—was a woman actually named Kitty and she joined them in a booth in the corner. She was in her late fifties, a tall blonde with a voice made by cigarettes and other substances Madison couldn’t fathom. Her eyes were pale green and misty, and she eyed Madison with curiosity and good humor.

  “I wish I could help you,” Kitty said. “I remember Henry. He was a troubled boy but sweet—if you know what I mean. He got into fights sometimes and I had to throw him out, but he would always come back and apologize, and even bought me flowers a couple of times.”

  Madison didn’t dwell on what Kitty meant by troubled and sweet. She had seen Karasick’s sheet and his wife’s restraining order was not about flowers. Nevertheless, she nodded as if she agreed that the world had seen too many of these sweet, troubled boys.

  “Did Henry have a friend here? Someone he confided in?” Brown said.

  “There wasn’t anybody special, just a long line of guys at the bar drinking and talking like guys do—one quarter funny, one quarter serious, and half of it bull.”

  “Kitty,” Madison said, “someone sold Henry some weed. We’re Homicide, we’re not Vice, we don’t care about a bag of pot from seven years ago. But we need to talk to the guy who sold it to him.”