The bedroom was plain and only one bedside table had anything on it. For an instant Madison mentally ran through the list of people Burnette had killed: mostly men, but there were some women too, though there had never been a sexual element to the murders. Small mercies.
The guest bedroom looked like it had been lifted straight from an IKEA catalog and felt like no one had ever so much as sat on the single bed.
Madison followed the voices of the other detectives to the back bedroom. She stopped at the threshold. Books on the walls, a framed star chart, a telescope by the large window.
Here you are, Joe.
Madison tried to ignore Spencer, Kelly, Rosario, and the lieutenant, who were all discussing something over by the desk. The star chart was quite beautiful. She looked at the scattering of planets over the black velvet background. It was not that dissimilar to the murder locations map she had by her desk. Suddenly it did not seem so lovely.
There were three monitors on the desk and a number of hard drives. Madison was computer literate, but it merely served her purposes—this was a different league. She scanned the shelves: there were some fiction classics, many tomes on astronomy and stargazing, a lot of titles she believed were to do with software design but couldn’t really tell. A rack of magazines stood to one side. Somewhere among those pages they would find the sources of the strips in the time capsules.
With her gloved hand Madison pulled open a drawer and then a cabinet door in the bookcase. One held spare lenses for the telescope and other business paperwork. The ordinary, the everyday, the utterly useless.
The Cybercrime techie had gone to work on the passwords. Apparently, everything was protected by so many layers of encryption that the guy must have been as paranoid as North Korea. The investigator did his hunting digitally while everyone else took a room and gloved up.
Madison crouched by a trunk behind the study door. It was locked and when she leaned her weight against it, it felt heavy and packed full. It was two feet high and four feet long, and there were no obvious keys for it anywhere.
“Anyone have a penknife?”
Madison had lost hers months earlier and never replaced it—it had been her grandfather’s.
“Here,” the techie said, passing her his without turning around.
It took Madison thirty-two seconds to pick the lock. If it was that easy, it couldn’t possibly be protecting anything valuable. She lifted the lid. Clearly, she thought, there are different interpretations of “valuable”: inside the trunk Joe Burnette had stored enough top-of-the-line audio and video recording equipment to launch his own surveillance business. Then again, wasn’t that what they had been saying all along? Killing was his business, and these were the tools.
She rested the lid against the wall—the Crime Scene Unit would descend on it soon enough.
Madison shifted her attention back to the bookcase: there were no geographical or road maps that she could see. No paperwork on the desk, or notebooks, or anywhere he might have jotted down notes. But there was the star chart.
“Sarge,” she said to Brown. “What if he took her to a place he already knew, and knew well? We’ve been thinking about the murder locations map, but that’s not all he did for fun.” Madison pointed at the astronomy books and the telescope. “I bet you anything he goes out to special places to look at the stars. And those are places away from city lights and, this time of the year, pretty deserted.”
“Along I-90?”
“Must be. He was driving back toward the city, so it must be east of where the accident was.”
“We don’t know how long he stayed with her.”
“No, but it had to be long enough to build a wall.”
“He only needed to brick up a door.”
“True—a few hours, then.”
“We’re talking about an area reached by up to two hours driving eastward at full speed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Madison knew Brown would arrive at that question and hoped her answer would be good enough. “Because it would please him,” she said. “The next time he goes off to see a meteor shower, or whatever he goes out to look at, he can think of her nearby. And she’ll be there just for him.”
They found Lieutenant Fynn in the basement. It was full of boxes, some of which might even have predated Burnette.
“That’s quite a way away,” he said, after Madison had explained.
“I know, but it would make sense to him. It would bring his . . . his two interests together.”
The I-90 shot out of Washington State and reached deep into Montana after cutting through Idaho, but Burnette had only had so much time to spend with Kate Duncan.
“Are you behind this?” Fynn asked Brown.
“Yes. He wouldn’t have dropped her just anyplace.”
“I don’t know,” Fynn continued. “It’s possible, but—”
“Sir,” Madison interrupted him, “so far, the search has focused on the areas along the I-90 without any specific structure. But Burnette knew where he was going, and one reason he might have been there before is stargazing. Everywhere we have looked so far today is just—”
Fynn’s cell rang. He picked it up and stepped away.
Madison shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “We don’t have much time,” she whispered to Brown.
“He knows.”
Fynn ended his call and returned to them.
“ALPR has come back online. They picked up Burnette’s van traveling in the early hours of this morning near Exit 63, close to Little Kachess Lake,” he said.
It took the techie five seconds on his laptop to confirm that there was a well-known spot for stargazing right on Little Kachess Lake.
Kate Duncan huddled on the ground in a corner of the shack. The damp chill coming through the dirt floor and the walls had found her in spite of the blanket that was tucked all the way over her.
She was exhausted and her head was burning hot.
She would give herself another five minutes of rest and then she’d grope in the dark for the remains of the chair and start banging on the walls again.
There had been no helicopters overhead and no sign of life, except for the odd, muted bird call. If they were looking for her, they were doing so somewhere else far, far away.
Her mind began to slow down under the make-believe warmth of the blanket as it reached for sleep—the only comfort left.
Chapter 47
Brown and Spencer traveled in Madison’s Freelander, which would turn out to be more useful if they were going to end up off road. Madison drove as fast as the law would allow her in the small convoy traveling from Seattle to Little Kachess Lake in Kittitas County.
Normally it would take about one hour and eighteen minutes to cover the seventy-five miles without traffic; Madison did it in a little over an hour. She got off at Exit 63 and doubled back, heading north toward the lakeside campsite.
Around the beams of the vehicles the forest was pitch black. The lake was long and thin, surrounded by mountains and woods, and Madison wondered how many warm bodies they could count on tonight, because as sure as heck a helicopter wouldn’t see anything in the midst of all that. And thermal imaging wouldn’t help either—unless Joe Burnette had left Kate Duncan in a cozy, well-heated cabin.
They arrived, changed hastily into wet-weather gear and checked in at the rally point. It had gone up fast by the side of the lake, and Madison was pleased to see that it was busy with State Patrol officers, rangers, and local volunteers as well.
They couldn’t take anything for granted; they couldn’t make any assumptions. Yes, it looked like he had recently built a wall, but Kate Duncan might be in a ditch somewhere around there—injured and unconscious, and exposed to the elements.
Brown, Madison, and Spencer took a square of the grid that needed searching with a group of volunteers and spread out into the dark. The forest was full of sound now and sliced through by the beams of their torches. They walked,
making as much noise as possible, calling out, then stopping, listening, and starting over.
The air was damp and smelled of pine and Madison prayed that she had been right. She shone her torch on the ground a few feet ahead of her, swinging it back and forth, then at waist level, moving farther up the trail where the ground—covered in mossy rocks, dry leaves, and ferns—dipped and rose.
Brown walked a few feet from her on one side and Spencer on the other. It was not Madison’s first search and rescue, but it was the first time that it had happened when she was the primary and had chosen to pacify the hostage with a placebo security detail.
The trail widened and narrowed and then fell away behind a boulder. At some point, Brown offered her some water. She declined, but he told her to just drink it already and so she did.
She checked her watch: they had been walking difficult terrain for almost an hour. Her eyes caught Brown’s and she wondered if she looked just as desolate and desperate as he did.
Radio crackle burst out behind them, somebody hollered for the group to stop and, just like that, it was over.
Way past the campsite, past the area people used for stargazing, a dirt road tapered into a trail and the trail tapered into nothing. And there, built against a boulder and nearly repossessed by the forest, stood a small brick structure with a makeshift roof and a wooden door. The ranger had opened the door and found himself looking at a wall—the mortar between the bricks was still fresh and light-colored and, in the present weather conditions, it would not dry out for days.
They had called out before, and they continued to call, but there was no answer from inside. The ranger, a six-footer, stood on the shoulders of his colleague, who was half a foot taller, and carefully shifted one of the planks that covered the roof. He shone his flashlight inside and the beam caught a human shape curled up in a corner.
“Could have been a little kid,” he would say later to his wife. “Could have been a little kid at the bottom of a well.”
Madison covered the distance at a dead run, barely managing not to fall or trip over the tree roots that poked out of the ground everywhere. She followed the direction in which everyone was moving, toward the growing hub of light, while it fell to other people to check for life signs, to administer aid, to call for the air ambulance to get ready.
She broke through the assembled crowd and showed her badge to get close to the hut.
“How . . . ?” she asked a trooper who was standing by a rope ladder.
“Alive, but running a temperature and dehydrated. The medic is with her. We’re winching her out of there as soon as we get set up—easier and safer than breaking down the wall.”
Madison saw the rope ladder and made a move toward it.
“Excuse me, ma’am, where do you think you’re going?” The trooper had stepped out and blocked her way.
“I’m climbing in there,” Madison said.
“No, you’re not. You’re going to wait out here with everyone else—there’s barely room for the medic.”
Madison was about to reply, but three search and rescue officers had just arrived with a stretcher and she let them pass.
It had become a show—the Rescue Kate Duncan from the Hut Show—and almost everyone present felt that they could relax and congratulate themselves on a job well done because the hostage had been found alive and apparently uninjured. Madison stood by holding her breath.
When the tip of the stretcher appeared out of the empty hole that had been the roof, a huge cheer went up and even Madison had to smile. Strapped in and bundled in blankets, Kate Duncan seemed tiny.
Madison made her way to her. “Kate?”
The woman’s eyes slid over the crowd, found Madison, and struggled to focus on her.
“You came,” she whispered.
Madison fell into step with the men carrying the stretcher. She bent low and spoke quietly.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He died last night. It’s over. You won.” She didn’t want Kate to feel that Joe Burnette had any power over her, any lingering hold.
Kate Duncan smiled. “Stay with me,” she rasped.
Madison tossed her car keys to Brown and followed the medics.
The flight was brief. However, the patient had already fallen asleep when the chopper landed at the heliport of the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. She had been hooked to a saline IV and Madison made sure that it didn’t slip off the blanket as they hunched against the wind and the rain and hurried to carry her inside.
Kate Duncan’s brother-in-law and her friend Annie were already there. Madison, shaky with exhaustion, told them the bare minimum: the kidnapper was dead; Kate was safe. The rest would have to wait.
Kate Duncan lay sleeping in a private room and Madison took one last reassuring look at her heart monitor, which beeped a strong and steady rhythm, before she made her way downstairs.
When Brown walked into the precinct a little after 3:00 a.m. he found Madison—still covered in mud and grime—asleep at her desk with her feet balanced on an upturned wastebasket.
The graveyard shift was all out.
“What are you still doing here?” he said.
“I wanted to make sure you got back all right,” Madison said, straightening up and stretching.
“Go home, go to bed, sleep, take a shower. Maybe not in that order.”
“I might just do that.”
Madison drove with the windows rolled down. She felt numb.
She decided that it was too late and she was too tired to make a final decision on how she should feel about the day. She limited herself to a very long, hot shower and half a latke.
She crawled into her bed and fell asleep instantly.
Jerry Lindquist shifted in his cot. He didn’t have access to the day’s news and, even if he did, he would not have connected a fatal road accident and a successful hostage rescue to the wreck that was his life.
He had managed to identify three new residents of C Wing, one of whom might be the man who was going to kill him in the near future. And that, as things stood, represented a day well spent.
Chapter 48
Alice Madison woke up and felt the tension of the previous day in the texture of soreness all over her body. She chugged a glass of milk, pulled on some sweats, and left the house. As she strode up her driveway toward the main road she thought of Coach Lewis. Biggest mistake civilians make—they stretch before they’ve warmed up. Don’t you go and be fools now, girls. A civilian in her world was everyone who was not a professional athlete.
The day was overcast and the air was crisp, but it lacked the harsh slap of real coldness. Madison started a gentle jog to get her muscles moving and her blood flowing. Joe Burnette was dead; Kate Duncan was safe. The words kept twisting and taking different shapes, but it always came back to those two notions. Where would they go from there? What about the world of pain Burnette had created?
Madison ran for an hour in fast and slow segments until her lungs stung and her calves burned. Once back home she showered and found splashes of mud she had managed to miss the night before. Her clothes from the forest ended up in the washing machine and it was a treat to spend ten minutes doing nothing more morally taxing than folding dry laundry.
When she drove over the West Seattle Bridge toward downtown, the rain started and the wind picked up.
Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown was drinking his second coffee of the day when his cell phone rang. It was Saul Garner, the lawyer from the Release Project.
“One of my clients was stabbed at breakfast today,” he said. “His name is Lindquist, Jerry Lindquist, and he’s on the list.”
There was only one list and it was the one with the names of the people that Burnette’s crimes had sent to prison.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes, just about. Guards and medics got to him in time. Have you verified his case yet?”
Brown had gotten the message from the Crime Scene Unit yesterday afternoon: all seven cases in King County ha
d been confirmed. Burnette’s time capsules had been found in the yards of each victim’s home. Including what used to be the home of Jerry and Jennifer Lindquist.
“Yes, it was confirmed yesterday.”
“Good, because we need to get him out of KCJC. He’s in the hospital there, but—”
“I need to speak with him.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the person who’s going to get him out and I need to speak with him.”
“Fine, I’ll see about visits.”
“The sooner, the better.”
Madison parked one block away from the Harborview Medical Center and made her way there on foot. Dr. Fellman might do the autopsy on Joe Burnette today: he was going to be laid out on the doctor’s table and still he would not give up his secrets. Madison wanted to check in on Kate Duncan before going back to Burnette’s house to continue her own inquiry. Cybercrime was still struggling against his encryption system. In the absence of their prime suspect and a confession, they would have to reconstruct each murder with whatever he had left behind.
Brown had called and told her about Lindquist. Without proper corroborative evidence all of Burnette’s “secondary victims”—Lieutenant Fynn had come up with that moniker; it sounded more formal than “scapegoats” in the press conference—would stay right where they were.
Privately, Madison thought that “scapegoats” was the right term and there was nothing secondary about what had happened to Jerry Lindquist.
Kate Duncan was sitting up in bed when Madison arrived. She looked washed out and was still hooked up to an IV. An empty breakfast tray was in front of her and on her bedside table a nurse had left a plate of homemade banana bread already sliced.
“Detective,” Kate Duncan said when she saw Madison on the threshold and extended her hand. Her voice was still a little croaky. Both hands, Madison noticed, were bandaged around the knuckles.
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