Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  The chief and the deputies had helped the detectives to unload their cases and then had left them to arrange the makeshift incident room as they wished. Madison suspected, correctly, that the chief knew they all needed a little space from one another and had dispatched his men on errands around town to get them out from under the detectives’ feet.

  A kitchenette stood in a corner with a microwave oven and a coffee percolator; Madison approached it warily. She’d had coffee in Seattle what seemed like days earlier and nothing to eat since then. Madison found the coffee—Equal Exchange Colombian—and measured it in the filter, adding a bit more than was strictly necessary, and then left it to brew. The machine was ancient, and so was the carafe; however, the coffee inside the pack seemed fresh, and that was all that mattered.

  The pavement was deserted, but Brown dropped the blinds anyway for a degree of privacy and turned on the neon overhead lighting. It flickered and then caught. They pushed three tables—which would serve as desks—toward the middle, and Sorensen appropriated a smaller room with a bench by the back wall as her own lab and evidence work surface.

  “Do you have enough power outlets?” Madison asked her.

  “I never have enough power outlets,” Sorensen replied. “But this will do.”

  The chief had given them the password for the Wi-Fi and as Brown turned on his laptop and connected to the Seattle PD site, the hall began to look a little more like home.

  Madison poured the coffee. They sat at their desks and looked at one another. It was their job to talk about the things no one wanted to talk about. About the body in the fridge locker. And which one of the merry villagers had put him there.

  “Darn fire took everything,” Madison said. “No obvious sign of injury.”

  Brown dug into his bag and produced a package of Oreos; Madison almost hugged him.

  “No,” Sorensen said. “And the ME will have to look very carefully to find any kind of wound that predates the fire. It would have been good to have Fellman onboard.”

  Dr. Fellman was the King County medical examiner, and if there had been a clue as to cause of death hidden in the folds of charred skin he would have found it. They didn’t know anything about the Colville County ME except that he was late, had missed them at the medical center, and had never worked a local murder.

  “Well, Fellman isn’t here. Where does that leave us?” Madison said.

  “In a dangerous place,” Brown replied. “In all probability the ME will find heat fractures and he won’t be able to confirm they’re the work of the killer unless they bear a particular shape from the weapon that caused them.”

  “Then we have to hope for a bullet still inside the body,” Madison said.

  “Could have melted in the fire.” Sorensen sipped the coffee and picked up a cookie.

  “Not necessarily,” Madison said. “The internal organs could have shielded it from the worst of the heat.”

  “Are you thinking of—?”

  “Yes, the Bellevue case from a year ago.”

  “I remember.” Sorensen nodded. “A bullet would be nice.”

  “How are you going to deal with contamination?” Madison waved a hand around the room.

  It might be a lovely place for senior citizens to gather and for cops to discuss murder, but it was far from being the sterile environment needed for court-approved evidence analysis.

  “I’m doubling up every sample I take. One I seal for the Seattle lab, and the other I work on here. If anything holds any results, they will repeat the process there so that it can stand up in court. Fingerprints and DNA I can handle here.”

  “What do you think of the hands?” Brown asked her.

  After the ME, Sorensen was the one among them who would have examined the largest number of homicide victims as she found, collected, and preserved the evidence around their bodies.

  Sorensen didn’t want to think about Robert Dennen’s hands. “Almost completely consumed by the heat. And, even considering the contraction of the muscles, the way the arms rested seems to indicate they were tied by something that disappeared in the flames.”

  “Plastic cuffs,” Madison said.

  “Probably,” Sorensen concluded.

  “Then we have a problem,” Brown said. “Why did the killer need the cuffs?”

  Madison sat back in her chair. Her thoughts had been circling around the same idea.

  Brown’s eyes were blue and sharp. “We don’t know how the killer and the victim met and—for that matter—we don’t know where they met. If they met by chance on that stretch of road and the killer murdered Dennen and set fire to the car—”

  “He wouldn’t have needed to restrain the victim, unless he was going to spend some time with him.” Madison finished Brown’s thought: plastic cuffs meant premeditation.

  “Dennen was sitting in the passenger seat,” Sorensen reminded them.

  Robert Dennen had been intercepted between the Jacobsens’ home and his own, and someone had held him hostage for a while, somewhere nearby. And then the killer had driven him to the place where they had found him.

  Madison stood up. “We need a map,” she said.

  Deputy Kupitz sat forward on his chair to get a better view of the senior center across the road through the sleet. The blinds were drawn and the light escaped in thin strips.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” he asked Deputy Hockley, who was doing the paperwork for a parking violation.

  They had gone to school together, and their families had known each other for a long time; because of this Hockley could swear, hand on his heart, that Jay Kupitz had all the sense of a bag of jam nuts.

  “What do you think, Koop?” Hockley replied.

  Kupitz shrugged. “Did you see how the redhead worked the body?”

  “I’d like to see you call her that in front of her.”

  “Don’t start. You know I’m no good with names. I only know yours ’cause you wear a tag. I meant to say that she did the whole thing like they do on TV, and she knew what she was doing.”

  “Yes, she sure did.”

  “Did you hear? The nurses at the medical center are making a banner for the vigil with signatures from all his patients.”

  “I heard.”

  The door of the senior center burst open and a figure ran across the road and into the police station. Alice Madison wiped the dampness off her hair with the palm of her hand. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were rosy with the cold.

  The deputies froze.

  “Hi,” Madison said. “Do you have a map of the town we could borrow? We’re going to need all the major and minor roads, any hiking trails, and all the houses, farms, huts, and shacks within three miles of Ludlow.”

  Hockley and Kupitz stood up at the same time but the latter was closer to the bookshelf and quickly grabbed a folded map from the stack that was inches thick.

  “Here you go,” Kupitz said.

  “Thank you,” Madison replied, and she was gone before he had the chance to say anything more.

  Kupitz’s gaze followed her back across the road, and when he looked away he saw Hockley’s grin. “What?”

  “Never gonna happen,” Hockley said.

  The map was spread out and tacked to a corkboard. Madison took a couple of steps back: most of the map was taken up by swathes of green and brown.

  Chief Sangster had left them copies of the notes he had taken, with details of the witnesses. They were not printed statements; his writing was small and cramped, his turn of phrase precise and to the point. She consulted the notes, then stuck a pin on the Jacobsens’ residence, one on the victim’s, and one where the car had been found.

  There was only one thoroughfare in and out of town, and the other roads radiated from Main Street into the forest. Beyond the town there were miles of nothing—aside from the odd farm and homestead—until Canada.

  “There are no houses immediately close to the crime scene. However, I bet a gunshot in the middle of the night
would have been a very loud, sharp crack,” Madison said. “Too loud for the killer to risk it, unless he was using a silencer.”

  “If he was using plastic cuffs and a silencer, we’re going to be looking for a particular kind of fellow,” Brown said. “I’m inclined to say probably not a farmer.”

  “Nope.”

  “I want to meet the wife,” Brown said. “When did the chief say he’d be back?”

  “Soon, I think. Amy, what are you going to do?” Madison said.

  “I’m going back to the car,” Sorensen replied and turned her attention to something that looked like a large printer set up on her workbench.

  “Anything useful in the samples they took yesterday at the scene?”

  “Possibly,” Sorensen replied. “I don’t know yet. I want to get to work on the blood as soon as I can, and I need my bag of tricks for that.”

  Madison followed the line on the map that was Main Street with the tip of her finger. “I wonder if the chief has realized—if anyone here has realized yet—what kind of a mess this sort of case makes in a community this small.”

  “They don’t know,” Brown said. “They have no idea. Our best hope is that the killer has come from outside.”

  If he has come from outside, Madison mused, he’s come ready with cuffs and a silencer.

  Chapter 9

  Alice Madison walked through the unlocked back door of Robert Dennen’s home, into the large kitchen/dining room with the country-style cabinets, and she saw the casserole dishes covered with foil placed on all the available surfaces, the freshly baked bread in a basket, and the plain cakes in plastic containers. Such were the signs of a home marked by grief: neighbors came with sympathy and food. A blue ribbon looped through the handles held the fridge doors closed.

  “This way,” Chief Sangster said as he led Brown and Madison into the house.

  Robert Dennen’s wife sat on a sofa with a baby on her lap, surrounded by a small group. The woman’s bare face was pale and her dark eyes shone. The baby, asleep in the folds of a pink blanket, had the same long lashes.

  “Betty,” the chief said.

  Betty nodded, and an older woman stood up from her side and ushered the people present into the next room. Madison checked them out automatically: three women and one man the same age as the wife; one older man. Their clothing said local, their manners said close friends or family.

  “Betty,” Sangster said. “These are Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown and Detective Alice Madison from Seattle Homicide.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Betty Dennen said as she rocked the baby.

  The notes said that she was forty-two years old and a schoolteacher. Betty and her husband had three children—a boy and a girl in middle school, and the baby.

  Madison spied a blonde girl watching them from the hallway. She wore jeans and bunny slippers and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, listening. There were livid smudges under her eyes. The older woman found her, put her arm around her shoulders, and led her into the kitchen.

  Madison knew about losing a parent when you’re that age, about the kindness of neighbors and school friends and the awful, awful silence when everybody goes back to their own homes and you are left alone with your pain and a father who doesn’t understand that your heart is only beating because you’re willing it to with each breath.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Betty Dennen was saying—not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours, Madison suspected.

  She was still in shock, but ran through the time line of events exactly as Sangster had reported and then answered their questions as best she could. No, nothing remarkable had happened in the last few weeks, and she hadn’t noticed any strangers around the house or around town. No, Bobby had never argued with anyone in the community, not about so much as a parking place.

  “Did he suffer?” she asked Brown, as if he had been in possession of information the chief had not.

  “We’ll know more in the next few days,” he replied.

  “I just don’t understand,” Betty Dennen said. “Why did this happen?”

  She kept rocking the baby absentmindedly, as if understanding the reason why her husband was dead would somehow bring him back to her.

  They could not give her an answer, and the longer they stayed the more obvious it seemed that they knew nothing yet of any relevance and could offer very little comfort. Their presence there—all the way from a place that had an actual murder rate and the clearance statistics that went with it—was all the comfort that was to be had. As if they had received training in some kind of advanced magic that was not allowed in Ludlow, where people didn’t kill each other.

  They were offered coffee and cake and knew to accept both. Madison sat with the older woman, who turned out to be Betty Dennen’s sister and lived in Ferry County, while Brown sat with one of the neighbors. At the kitchen table the woman gave Madison a picture of Betty and Robert’s life in Ludlow, which was not far from The Waltons—a close community where people had to work hard for every dollar the state didn’t take away in taxes, but a good place to bring up a family.

  “They don’t have gangs here,” she said. “And everybody’s American.” The woman’s eyes were washed-out blue and her blonde hair was tied up in a ponytail.

  Madison didn’t want to get into the demographics of murder. Lots of Americans kill each other, she wanted to say, but she didn’t. She also didn’t say that the numbers for spousal homicide would make her eyes bug out. Still, Betty Dennen had looked devastated. And reading her body language, Madison had seen nothing except a wife in shock.

  The house wore the details of the Dennens’ life: children’s drawings under fridge magnets and school pictures framed on the walls. The Dennens had been high school sweethearts in Spokane and had moved to Ludlow before their oldest child was born.

  Madison and Brown spoke in turn to all the neighbors, and while they drank their coffees and listened to their stories about what a wonderful doctor Bobby was and how important he had been in the community, they quietly looked for the breadcrumb trail of lies, pretense, and deceit.

  Amy Sorensen adjusted her disposable coveralls and slipped on a pair of heavy-duty rubber gloves. Her arson toolkit was packed in a metal box by her feet and she picked up nine-inch stainless-steel tongs. She turned to Deputy Kupitz, who lurked by the aperture of the tent that housed the burned-out car, and said, “Glove up and come in.”

  Sorensen had been vaguely disappointed to be assigned Kupitz instead of Hockley, as his gaze seemed rather vacant compared with his colleague’s. However, to complain would have felt churlish and mean; and since they were there to investigate and train, she was going to try her best in both.

  Amy Sorensen was not an arson investigator. Arson was a sinister combination of chemistry, opportunity, and intent, and it was studied and investigated by a particular branch of criminalistics. The fire in the car had not been the killer’s main objective, though. This, Sorensen reflected as she walked around the blackened metal body, was a kidnap, hidden inside a murder and wrapped in an arson investigation. And kidnap and murder she understood all too well.

  Sorensen stood next to the LED floodlight she had brought from Seattle and shifted the stand a couple of inches so that the 180-degree beam would hit exactly the area that she needed covered. Once she was satisfied she took a step back, and her eyes traveled over the destruction that the heat had caused.

  A couple of minutes went by.

  “Powerful lamp,” Kupitz said. He had spoken because Sorensen made him nervous, and he wasn’t very good with silences anyway.

  Sorensen had almost forgotten about him.

  “At middle strength it gives us twenty-three-hundred lumens for six and a half hours,” she said. “And we can stretch it to ten hours if we go down to fourteen hundred. Fully portable at 2.85 pounds.”

  Sorensen regarded the young man. “So, Crime Scene Investigation 101, Deputy Kupitz: On the scene of a fire, what’s t
he first job of a fire investigator?”

  Kupitz’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. He had hated school and felt a blush rising to his cheeks. “To find out who set the fire?” he managed to get out.

  “That’s on the list, for sure,” Sorensen replied. “But it’s not the first item. A fire can be accidental, natural, or deliberate. Until we know which, we don’t have a case.” Sorensen remembered that she was teaching someone who had not chosen to be in her class and, given the chance, would probably opt out of any class. “What do you think we have here?” she said, hoping that he’d rise to the challenge of a conversation.

  “Looks deliberate to me.”

  “Yes, it sure does.”

  Sorensen approached the side where the victim had been found and peered in. “See that pattern of burns on the seat?”

  “Driver’s side?” he said, taking a step closer as if expecting an ambush.

  “Yes, after we decide that a fire looks deliberate we look for origin and cause. And by that I mean, where did it start and was an accelerant involved?”

  Kupitz nodded. “Like gasoline?”

  “A chemist would say that gasoline is fuel for the combustion process—and I agree—but if some numbnut sprayed it on a sofa on the side of the road and then lit a match to watch it burn, he would be using it as an accelerant.”

  Kupitz smiled—she had said numbnut.

  Sorensen paused. She didn’t know what kind of training Kupitz had had, and there was a strong chance that anything she was going to say today would be forgotten in a week—or that he’d leave the force and take a job as a waiter in Milwaukee. Then again, something she said today might stick and, Lord knows, might even be useful to him and to the town of Ludlow one day.