Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  He placed the objects in the deep hollow of a fallen maple and then made to leave. The drone of an engine cut through the air and Samuel looked up: a small red plane had appeared out of the clouds. The boy watched it as it dropped altitude—the red so bright against the clouds behind it.

  Once it had disappeared beyond the trees, and the hum of the engine had been whipped away by the wind, Samuel turned and bolted back into the forest.

  Madison had lost track of time. They had been flying through cloud cover for a while, most of it in turbulent air. She was glad to be sitting up front, next to the pilot—glad that he was busy and didn’t seem inclined to chitchat.

  The world was a stream of gray. Behind her, Brown sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded politely in his lap. He would have seemed perfectly relaxed to most people, but Madison was not most people. She knew the thin frown between his brows for what it was.

  “You okay, Sarge?” she said.

  Brown nodded without opening his eyes. Next to him, Amy Sorensen slept with her head against the window and a gentle snore that was lost in the engine noise.

  “Here we go!” The pilot shifted the control column and the plane dropped out of the clouds.

  “Oh—” Madison said.

  A valley had opened below them: tall, blue-green mountains around them everywhere she looked—the peaks still covered in snow—and a thin ribbon of a river catching the light from above. It was eerie. Madison felt as if she could reach out to every tree and every rock. They flew over a lake, and the reflection of the plane glided on the water below.

  “Nearly there,” the pilot said.

  And yet Madison hadn’t spotted a landing strip or control tower—or a town, for that matter.

  “Reason why we needed to start off early is that I need to be sure I can eyeball the landing strip, otherwise we’ll end up in the woods like so much kindling,” he chuckled. “None of those fancy control towers up here. No landing at night either. We do it old school.”

  The plane followed the bend of the valley and just then, tucked at the foot of a mountain, Madison spotted a smattering of white timber-frame houses among the trees.

  “Welcome to Ludlow,” the pilot said.

  Polly had been standing by the window for the last hour, or so it seemed. It was probably only ten minutes, but to Will Sangster it felt as if she had been standing there forever, sipping from the travel mug she brought from home and peering at the sky as if it was going to start raining snakes any second. It made him nervous, but then again he was already nervous, and it wasn’t Polly’s fault. She was his secretary, part-time and poorly paid, and he was thankful for her presence in the office—more a benevolent great-aunt than a secretary—thankful for the homemade cookies she brought in every Monday, and even more grateful for the town gossip that was, after all, his best source of information on the goings-on in the territory he was supposed to police.

  He had tried to occupy himself with paperwork, but his attention kept going back to Polly at the window. It was almost a relief when she turned and said, “They’re here, Chief.”

  Chief Will Sangster picked up the radio on his desk. “They’re here, guys.”

  Through the crackle two voices responded and acknowledged his message.

  He stood, sat his hat on his head with a well-practiced gesture, and grabbed his heavy coat off the back of the chair. “All right, Polly, you know what to do,” he said as he left.

  The woman nodded.

  Sangster climbed into the cruiser parked in front of the small building that housed the Ludlow Police Department and started the engine. They were guests in his town, he thought. His town. As he drove to the landing strip he reached for the glove compartment, took out a half-full bottle of Tums, and popped two into his mouth. The bodywork of the white cruiser was spattered with mud, and for a brief, surreal moment Sangster mused whether he should have washed it off.

  Chapter 6

  The landing turned out to be no more pleasant than the journey, with a tall line of firs right by the end of the strip just waiting for the pilot to lose control. However, George Goyer knew every bump on the tarmac, and the Cessna found its footing on the ground with an almost delicate thump. The plane turned around and taxied toward the only visible building, a modest hangar that doubled as passenger and freight terminal. The pilot engaged the brake and Madison took off her headset.

  “Here we are,” Goyer said, as if it had been no more than a quick cab ride downtown.

  “Thank you,” Madison said.

  “Anytime,” he replied.

  Three cars had pulled up as the Cessna came to a full stop. Madison unbuckled her safety harness and glimpsed two police cruisers and a pickup. Behind her, Sorensen was stretching in the tight confines of her seat and Brown looked ready to gnaw his way out of the plane if someone didn’t let him out quickly enough.

  The pilot opened the door and Madison jumped onto the runway, her legs stiff after the cramped seat. It had been cold inside the plane, but the chilly air on the landing strip was cool resin mixed with something green, clean, and mulchy. City cold was different, this was something else. They zipped up their coats and fastened the Velcro straps.

  Brown stepped forward with his right hand out. “Chief Sangster?” he said, addressing the middle-aged man flanked by two twenty-somethings.

  There was a fluster of introductions and a crossing of handshakes while everyone was trying to get the measure of everyone else, then Deputy Hockley backed the truck right up to the plane and opened the covered back.

  Deputies Hockley and Kupitz would have been the kind of kids that high school coaches grab as freshmen and never really let go. It could have been football, or hockey, or basketball—it didn’t matter. They were tall and wide. Hockley called Sorensen ma’am three times in one minute, and Madison saw her biting her tongue. They made short work of unloading the plane and Sorensen’s cases were handled as if made of spun glass.

  “What kind of weather have you had in the last twenty-four hours?” Sorensen asked.

  Madison could almost hear her brain calculating the damage that the crime scene would have suffered out in the elements.

  “Pretty nice for this time of year,” Kupitz replied.

  “Some rain, temperature in the mid-thirties during the day,” Sangster said, ignoring his deputy. “Last night it dropped to the low twenties. It probably snowed higher up.”

  Kupitz blushed.

  Before Sorensen could reply, Sangster added, “We put a tent up around the car yesterday morning to get it out of the weather. By then it had already snowed and rained on it, and God knows what the wind had blown onto it.”

  Sorensen nodded. “Thank you.”

  Madison had had a chance to look the chief over while they were unloading the plane. He was about the same age as Brown, and very tanned for a guy who lived in northeastern Washington State—maybe a recent vacation, definitely not a tanning-bed type. She saw livid shadows under his eyes and wondered if he had managed to get any sleep the previous night.

  Brown was the senior investigator among them, and though that distinction wouldn’t have mattered when he was alone with Madison and Sorensen, he was aware that the three strangers before them would have picked up on it.

  Brown spoke to Sangster. “How do you want us to proceed, Chief?”

  Sorensen shifted her weight and Madison could feel her itching to get to the crime scene. Nevertheless, those first few minutes on the tarmac, establishing boundaries and civility, were going to pay off—wherever the investigation might lead. Sangster was old enough and smart enough to understand that.

  “What did you have in mind?” he replied.

  Brown turned to Sorensen.

  “The crime scene first,” she said. “We’re going to work it step by step. Where’s the body?”

  “In the medical center. The county ME is going to meet us there, and he’ll take Bobby to Sherman Falls later tonight.”

  “Bobby?”

&n
bsp; “Robert Dennen,” he replied. “The victim.”

  They knew the dead man, and that, Madison reflected as they piled into the cruisers, was the main difference between small-town policing and everywhere else. Chances were Chief Sangster personally knew not only the victim but also the killer, his family, his wife, and his kids. And they would all still be there after the killer had been found, arrested, and hauled off to jail by him.

  “The car was found on the other side of town,” Sangster said. “A couple of miles from here. We’ll be there in no time.”

  They left the landing strip and the pilot began to guide the plane into a section of the hangar just as it started to rain.

  “How much do you know about Ludlow?” Sangster asked.

  Sorensen was sitting in front while Madison and Brown were in the back.

  “Not much, I bet,” the man continued. “We’re pretty much lost somewhere between Canada and Idaho and other counties most people don’t know about anyway. Let me fill you in a little.”

  The road out of the airport was lined by firs that grew so thick that even the air between them was green and the ground around their roots had been scrubbed clean of grass by perennial shade.

  “The town was founded around 1897, and back then it was all about mining and timber. Right now we have six hundred and forty-seven registered residents plus some regular visitors, like the folk from the Department of Fish and Wildlife or the geology department from UW. We have Jackknife up near the pass; the travel books call it a ghost town. It’s where one of the mines used to be, and there’s still buildings and all kinds of things from when the miners left. Tourists love it. Summer dollars are important: tourists come to visit the old mines and the farms in the valleys; they camp by the lake and fish to their heart’s content. This is a quiet place, a safe place.”

  The cruiser rounded a bend, and as the road opened they reached what seemed to be the main artery of the town. Madison was born in Los Angeles and the smallest town she had lived in was Friday Harbor on San Juan Island when she was a little girl, and even there she could have counted the residents in the thousands. Madison could hardly imagine life in a place where everybody knew who you were and what you did, and their parents had known your parents going back generations.

  “Were you born here?” she asked Sangster.

  “Me? Nah, I’m from Boise. Came over from Idaho fifteen years ago with my wife and kids. The kids have left for college but we’re still here. I was in Boise PD for four years before Ludlow. Patrol.”

  And that was the heart of the conversation, Madison thought: the chief wanted them to know that he had been a cop in a place with more than three traffic lights. Fair enough. Even so, he had also told them that, having been in Patrol, he would never have been in charge of a murder investigation.

  “This is Main Street,” Sangster said.

  It was a combination of red brick and wood: the timber-frame houses were freshly painted, and if there was a town council they had made darn sure everything looked as pretty as a picture for those summer dollars. She glimpsed other streets and narrow houses with peaked roofs close together, huddling for warmth.

  “Right, this is what we know,” Sangster said. “Yesterday morning, around 6:30 a.m., Buck Ahlberg was driving into town and found the burned-out car—still smoking. He called me, and it was clear that someone was inside, but whoever it was had died in the fire, or before it.”

  “Are there pictures?” Brown asked.

  “Every which way,” Sangster replied.

  “How did you know it was Robert Dennen?” Sorensen said.

  “Car plate. I called his wife and it turns out Bobby had been called out sometime after midnight by the Jacobsens because their baby has asthma and she was having an attack—he was a doctor. I spoke to the Jacobsens, and Bobby left them after 3 a.m., but he never made it home. We’ll get DNA confirmation with a sample from his toothbrush after the autopsy.”

  “What made you think it was murder?” Madison said.

  “The car had been parked on the side of the road—it wasn’t a crash or anything like that. It was driven into a turnout. There was blood on the snow a few yards away.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Yup.”

  “Any chance it was a suicide?”

  “Set himself on fire while quietly sitting in his car?”

  “Could have shot himself before the fire caught on.”

  “No weapon recovered—and it wouldn’t have fallen far.”

  “Snow could give us footprints, if there’s still any.”

  “Some are still there, some were melted by the heat of the fire. And they got rained on quite a bit.”

  “There was more to it, though, wasn’t there?” Brown asked Sangster.

  The chief found his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Yes,” he replied. “The victim was in the passenger seat and his hands had been tied.”

  “How?” Sorensen said.

  “Not sure—whatever it was, it burned away in the fire.”

  The procession of police cruisers and a pickup had attracted a few stares as they drove along Main Street. How quickly had the town grapevine spread the news of the body in the car? Madison was ready to bet that everybody knew why they were there.

  Including the killer.

  Deputy Hockley rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand and made sure he stayed no more than ten yards behind the bumper of Kupitz’s cruiser. He had wanted to drive Ludlow’s second cruiser himself, but Koop’s silly Toyota was never going to be big enough to carry the load the Seattle cops had brought, and so he was stuck driving his own pickup—even if, technically speaking, he had been on the force four months longer than Koop and was, therefore, a senior officer.

  Hockley was twenty-three, worked part-time on his father’s farm, and had been hunting since he could hold a rifle. He had seen life and death from all angles on the farm and in the forest, but he never again wanted to see anything like what was in the body bag in the medical center. He had helped the chief to extract it from the car, and his eyes had stung for hours afterward.

  Hockley hawked and spat out the window. More than twenty-four hours later and he still couldn’t get rid of the taste of smoke in his mouth.

  He thought about the two women in the car with the chief—especially the younger one, who couldn’t be much older than he was. Even the shitty situation they were in had a silver lining.

  “That’s it,” Sangster said, and he pulled in on the side of the road.

  The green tent was not Crime Scene Unit issue: it was a green tent that in its regular life would be protecting merry hikers from the Pacific Northwest weather. It sat as an ungainly lump under the canopy of firs, without guard, and the admonition of the yellow crime scene tape around it seemed too mild a warning to keep anybody away. If there were teenagers anywhere in the vicinity they would have already uploaded more pictures online than Sangster had ever thought to take. A few bunches of flowers had been left against the roots of a tree nearby; a few envelopes and cards had been tacked to the rough bark.

  Hockley and Kupitz held back while the others went ahead.

  The chief unzipped the entrance to the tent and lifted the flap. The scent found them as if it were a live thing. Acrid, cloying, and repulsive. Madison inhaled—the sooner she got used to it the better. Human beings are animals—even if they often try to forget it—and their reactions on a purely instinctive level are still based on survival. This, Madison reflected, was the stench of a violent death, and it said: Go away, you don’t want any part of this, do you? Madison felt the small hairs on her arms rise against her shirt. Did you die of smoke inhalation? Did you see the first flames licking at your feet?

  The red Chevy was a husk of blackened metal: the upper part of the bodywork had been almost completely destroyed—the windows must have blown out when the fire had started. It had eaten through the upholstery and devoured the body of Robert Dennen, and Madison could only hope that he was already dead when it hap
pened. They would find out soon enough. There was barely any space around the car, and they stood by the tent opening.

  “Have you called an arson investigator from State?” Sorensen said as her eyes took in the scene.

  “Yes, and they don’t have one to send for at least a week,” Sangster replied. “Today, ma’am, you’re it.”

  Sorensen and Madison exchanged a look: this was going to be the point where things might start to go south with Chief Sangster.

  “We need a larger tent, Chief. Much, much larger. Big enough for at least two people to work around the car without bumping into it,” Madison said. “And we need to close this road right now.”

  “Close the whole road?”

  Sorensen pointed at some brown patches near the ditch. “That’s the victim’s blood, right? Or maybe it’s the killer’s. We don’t know that yet and we need time to find out. We need time to create a perimeter and search this road inch by inch, and we can’t do that while we’re dodging SUVs.”

  Strike one. They’d barely set foot on the ground and they were already telling him how he should have done his job. Madison noticed Hockley and Kupitz were standing very still and scrutinizing something in the opposite direction. An engine rumbled from around a bend and a truck drove straight through their crime scene—the driver slowing down long enough to nod hello to the chief and get a good eyeful of the strangers.

  Sangster hesitated, then turned to Deputy Kupitz. “Koop, here’s what I need you to do . . .”

  His words were lost in the background as Madison turned around, her gaze sweeping the gloom of the woods on both sides of the road, and she wondered whether the killer was already watching them, gauging them, assessing the kind of threat they posed. Something shifted in the murk and a raven croaked twice. I bet you are.