Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  “I don’t know what kind of training you’ve had,” Sorensen said. “So I’m going to start from the beginning and whip through it.”

  The deputy was only a few years older than her own son, and Sorensen recognized the startled look in his eyes—the “Please don’t ask me any more questions” look.

  “The crime scene,” she continued, “is your best chance to identify and locate the offender you’re looking for, and as such, you protect it all costs. That’s why your chief covered the car as soon as he could. That’s why we closed the road and built a perimeter around it. Four things you need to remember: first, protect the scene, then recognize, collect, and preserve the evidence. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Kupitz said.

  “Good. Do you know why offenders love fire?”

  “Because it destroys evidence?”

  “Because it destroys evidence. Because fire consumes the evidence of its own origin. But we are not fools, we were not born yesterday, and—most important—we live in the age of mass spectrometry.”

  Kupitz didn’t know what mass spectrometry was and made a mental note to look it up later.

  Sorensen picked up a steel-blade spatula from her equipment. “Every contact leaves a trace,” she said. “It might be burned-out, charred, and damaged beyond all recognition, but it’s still a trace. And I’m the—” Sorensen cut herself off before the profanity, as if she had been speaking in front of one of her children. “And I’m just the person who’ll find it.”

  Outside the tent the rain and the sleet had stopped and the clouds were moving on briskly, as if called elsewhere. A car stopped by the bottom of the street—where the chief had stuck his ROAD CLOSED sign into the ground—and paused there.

  In the gloom of the deserted road the tent shone bright orange, and two shadows were visible moving inside it. The driver watched them: the tent seemed so fragile in the blowing wind, like a Chinese flying paper lantern. A hard gust could just lift it and carry it off with its precious, delicate cargo, off into the black forever.

  The driver counted sixty slow heartbeats and then drove on.

  Chapter 10

  Madison lifted her eyes from the witness notes she was typing; on the other side of the desk Brown was lost in thought. Their canvass had yielded little or no results. They had spoken to the visitors at the Dennens’ home; then the chief had driven them around to the houses in the vicinity and those close to where the car had been found. The people of Ludlow were hospitable and eager to help, and not a single person had had anything useful to contribute to the day. Brown and Madison still had no idea why the car had been found there, instead of on its way home. And the only conclusion they had reached was that the less people knew, the keener they were to talk at length to them about it.

  There was another issue, one that this precarious scheme from the US Attorney’s Office had not considered—or maybe they had considered it and simply flapped it away like a gnat—namely, the flesh and blood of a homicide investigation was held together by more than the detectives’ experience in the process. It was supported by intimate knowledge of a specific place, its history, the tides of people who had gone through it. The map on the wall, with its colorful pins, was at best a reminder of how much they didn’t know and at worst an omen of failure.

  Sleet was lashing the windowpane and Brown seemed to come back to himself.

  “We can work with unusual,” he said out of the blue.

  “We can?” Madison said, not entirely sure where he was heading.

  He nodded. “We don’t know the ways of this town, but they do.” Brown pointed at the police station across the road. “Something happened here that led to this, and they might very well know a lot more about it than they think they do.”

  Madison thought of Chief Sangster: when they returned to the police station after the canvass, the chief had been ambushed by one of his citizens who wanted to report that her dog was missing. The woman had been waiting for the chief because talking to Deputy Hockley about her dog was clearly not enough: Tucker, her poodle, deserved the chief’s attention.

  “I’ve been telling you, Chief, this town has changed. Someone took Tucker.”

  Sangster had been conciliatory and understanding, and finally the woman had left.

  “Sure, someone took Tucker, and it’s her fault,” Hockley said once the woman was out of earshot. “Around here that kind of dog is eagle bait. Little Tucker is probably in some nest up by the pass about to become bird food and wondering how the heck he got there.”

  A missing dog was only one thread in the fabric of lives Sangster dealt with every day, and he did so with grace. It had not escaped Madison’s notice how kindly he had spoken to the woman—as if her concern mattered and he wasn’t cold and tired and hadn’t spent the day as little more than a chauffeur to two big-city cops.

  Tomorrow there would be more people to interview. And late morning, the town council had planned a vigil for Robert Dennen in the main square. There would be speeches; there would be an appeal for information; there would be flowers and candles. Madison eyed Sorensen’s camera; it could take photos and video, and she planned to take plenty of both. Madison loved vigils—more often than not they were irresistible to the killer. All that genuine sentiment, all that sorrow. A vigil was the best kind of party, thrown in honor of the killer’s work. How could he stay away?

  Brown pushed his glasses up on his nose and slapped his notebook shut. Madison smiled. Between them on the desk the package of Oreos lay crushed and empty.

  “Hungry?” she said.

  “Starving,” he replied.

  Sorensen pushed the door open with her elbow and walked in carrying a boxful of samples. She was still wearing the disposable jumpsuit and looked like the end of a forty-eight-hour day. She set the box on her workbench next door, then slumped at her desk next to Brown and Madison. Her red hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and there was a dirt smudge on her brow.

  “The bad news is that anything we collect we can’t keep here, because this place is as open as a bus shelter,” she said. “Every night we’ll have to put the evidence under lock and key across the road.”

  “What’s the good news?” Madison said.

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  “How do you feel about mac ’n’ cheese?” Brown asked Sorensen.

  “Is it a trick question?” she said.

  Madison pointed at the table where some of the seniors’ craft work had been stacked. Two large covered casseroles sat next to the wicker baskets.

  “Betty Dennen wouldn’t let us leave without taking them. She said she had so much food that it would spoil before they could eat it all, and she’d heard we were staying in Edna Miller’s place.”

  “People around here know where we’re staying?” Sorensen said after a beat.

  “Only a handful,” Madison said. “The chief’s assistant and a couple of volunteers opened up the house for us today, and one of the volunteers was a friend of the Dennens. They’re not broadcasting it on the local radio.”

  “They have a local radio?”

  “Yup,” Madison consulted her notes. “KCVW, broadcasts from 6:40 a.m. to midnight. Hits, news, and the schedule for the charter flights to Spokane, Wenatchee, and Seattle. They also read out weather alerts, emergency notices, and supermarket offers.”

  “That’s how they let everybody know about the vigil tomorrow?”

  “I think so, yes, and we’re going to record an appeal for information early in the morning so that they can come find us at the vigil.”

  “Anybody been speaking to you yet?” Sorensen asked the others, and her tone implied she believed that no such thing was possible.

  Brown and Madison exchanged a glance.

  “They speak,” he replied. “But they don’t say much.”

  “Except how awful this whole affair is, and how it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Madison continued.

  “Don’t worry,” Sorensen s
aid. “Give them a day or two to get to know you and the down-and-dirty will come out. It always does.”

  “You’re a cynic, Amy,” Madison said. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “I’m not, but I was born in a town barely bigger than this where nothing, nothing, ever happened. You, and the murder, are the big news. Give ’em a minute to compose themselves and you’ll be beating them off with a stick.”

  In the heyday of mining in Colville County—when around two thousand miners had been crawling deep inside the surrounding mountains for zinc, copper, lead, iron, and silver—the town of Ludlow had flourished, and some of the original buildings still stood to bear testimony to those times long gone. Edna Miller’s house belonged to that period. Edna’s grandfather had bought it for a handful of dollars from a mine owner who’d gone bust, and there it still stood in all its glory. So Chief Sangster had explained as he unlocked the front door.

  The house was four floors of Victorian gable trim, with bay windows wrapped around every corner and a porch that would become useful in the brief hot summers. Snow had dusted the peaked roof and decades of harsh Canadian winds and sleet had turned the sapphire blue of the sides into washed-out slate that suited its age and shape. It sat only a few yards from the main street in a road of similar if smaller houses, watching over them like a dowager and her subjects.

  It had been mutually agreed that they were old enough and capable enough to find their own way to the Magpie Diner or the Tavern, if they so wished. Thus the chief ran through the basics—the furnace in the basement, the fireplaces scattered around the house, the fuse board—and then left them to themselves.

  Some of the beds had been made up for them; the rest they could work out as they went along. Madison looked around the living room with its wide stone fireplace, old-fashioned squashy chairs, and doilies covering almost every table, sideboard, and armrest. It was country with no sign of irony, as if Edna Miller had purposefully kept the place in the early 1900s. She was relieved to see that the kitchen was more modern, and when Brown turned the oven on it purred without a glitch.

  Madison claimed the smallest bedroom, on the top floor right under the eaves. The wallpaper was daisies and bluebells, and even though the heating had been hard at work for hours, she could see her breath in the frigid air.

  The bed was a single brass frame on a bare wooden floor, with a handmade quilt in shades of cerulean over a thick comforter. There was a small desk under the sloping roof, with a padded stool the same color as the quilt and an armchair—with doilies—in the corner. Overall, Madison reflected, it was like a child’s room in a doll’s house—only life size, and the doll’s house had been plunked in a freezer for a few days.

  She reached for her cell and dialed. It went to voice-mail. She gazed at the deserted street below through the round window as she listened to the familiar voice. She knew that voice like she knew her own—better, in fact—she knew the color of it, the warmth of it, in spite of the clipped, almost brusque tone of the message. She took a breath. “Hi,” she said. “We’re in Ludlow. I just wanted to say goodnight. Well . . . goodnight, then.”

  Madison finished the call, astonished by her own awkwardness. It was unlike her—except that it was totally like her, these days. She dug her phone charger out of her pack and left the cell with its dying battery plugged into the wall under the round window.

  The bedroom had a fireplace and—God bless Edna—there was a basket with logs next to it. Madison imagined watching the embers of the fire, growing drowsy, the warmth spreading through the cold room, which in turn reminded her of her fireplace at home in Seattle and how she had fallen asleep on the sofa in front of it the previous night.

  Last night was last night, Madison told herself as she climbed down three floors to the kitchen and the smell of mac ’n’ cheese.

  Sorensen had found some dishes and Brown was checking the casserole in the oven. There was a touch of the surreal about it. This was work, they had come here on the darkest of errands, and yet it also felt unnervingly like camp.

  They sat around the wide table, surrounded by the life Edna Miller had built for herself, and ate their first proper food of the day. Madison felt a rush of gratitude for whoever had taken the time to cook that dish for the Dennen family. It was comfort food and reassuring. It was so much better than anything they could have ordered in a restaurant and—at least for that first night—she was glad to be in a private place, sheltered from the looks of the locals and from their wary curiosity.

  “Check the fridge,” Sorensen said.

  Madison leaned back and opened the fridge door without getting up: the shelves had been stacked with eggs, cheese, milk, and bacon. A plate of homemade cookies had been left on the sideboard covered with plastic wrap, next to a loaf of bread. Polly, the chief’s assistant, and her volunteers. It couldn’t have felt more different if they had been dropped in the local Motel 6 with its free morning coffee and a hot-breakfast voucher.

  “How’s your apprentice?” Brown asked Sorensen between mouthfuls.

  “Valiantly struggling on his way to enlightenment,” she replied.

  “How big of a struggle?”

  “To the death,” she said. “He has a smattering of common sense but no science at all. It’s not his fault. There’s no budget for it. I’m just glad I could get my hands on this one,” she pointed at Madison, “when she was fresh out of the academy and before she could be corrupted by all of you.”

  “You win some, you lose some,” Brown shrugged.

  Madison ignored them. I hope Kupitz realizes just how lucky he is.

  They got through the whole casserole and Brown washed up while Madison built a fire in the living room.

  “I’m going to the Tavern for a drink,” he said, as the first flames flickered in the hearth. “Any takers?”

  “Early night,” Madison replied.

  Sorensen was on the sofa reading her notes and had no intention of moving away from the fragile heat. They heard the door close, and the house fell into a comfortable silence. However welcoming, Edna Miller’s home was still uncharted territory, and Madison listened to the unfamiliar ticks and clicks; the furnace and the pipes had their own individual language, and their voices grumbled on from room to room. Upstairs the windowpanes in one of the unmade rooms rattled in the wind—possibly they were becoming loose in the frame—something else for Edna to check when she returned, before the spring and summer visitors flocked back and filled the large house with noise.

  Madison picked up a book from the shelves and settled close to the fire as Sorensen’s cell rang. She stood to take the call in the kitchen. Madison couldn’t hear the words but she certainly understood the tone. When Sorensen came back, she arranged herself on the sofa but didn’t go back to her notebook.

  “Trouble at the homestead,” she said after a minute. “Lisa wants to go to a party with college kids and we said no. And since I’m not there, she’s trying to charm/bully/swindle/wheedle her dad into letting her go.”

  Lisa was Sorensen’s younger daughter. Madison had never met her; she imagined a teenage version of Sorensen, a prospect that should panic any parent.

  “Why don’t you want her to go?”

  “I imagine you were quite the paragon of virtue at fifteen—straight-A student, running track and volunteering with the homeless. Never drank a beer before you were twenty-one, never rolled a doobie in your life.”

  Madison had never spoken to Sorensen about her background. “I wasn’t exactly trouble free,” she said.

  “Did you party with college boys when you were fifteen?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you raid the fridge for beer when your parents were out shopping for your birthday present?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you steal your older sister’s ID to get into a club?”

  “Nope.”

  “There you go, that’s why she’s not going to the party.”

  “She did all that?”

>   “No, she’s a good kid. I did all that when I was a teenager, and I’m just trying to keep her out of harm’s way.”

  “I see: the glory of hindsight.”

  “What did you do?”

  Madison sighed. Too much history to tell in a stranger’s home at the end of a tough day. Sorensen would have to make do with the bullet points.

  “I ran away from home when I was twelve. My mom had died a few months earlier and . . . well, there was stuff going on with my dad. Anyway, I ran away and they didn’t find me for a week.”

  Sorensen gaped. “A week?”

  “Yeah, I was . . . sort of hiking.”

  “Alone?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Well . . .” Sorensen was uncharacteristically dumbstruck. “And you were okay? You were safe?” she said, her mind still thinking like a parent, traveling in ten different upsetting directions.

  “Mostly,” Madison replied.

  “But not the whole time?”

  Have you ever skinned a rabbit?

  The house creaked, as if someone had rested a great weight on its Victorian gable roof. They both looked at the ceiling.

  “Cookie?” Madison said, stretching and standing up.

  Outside the wind was still blowing hard, even if the sleet had called it a day. The street was quiet and lined by shadows; there was darkness between the houses and behind the thick bare shrubs, through the alleys and on the edge of the front gardens. It would have been easy for someone to watch the Miller place, the guesthouse where the Seattle cops were staying. It would have been easy to do so unobserved in a town where nothing bad ever happened.

  Chapter 11

  Joyce Cartwell, owner of the Magpie Diner, had finished work early and, on a rare night off, had left the keys for her cook to lock up at 8 p.m. and headed home.

  She lived only a few minutes away and, as much as she would have wished for a small farm and a few acres to play with, that close proximity was a blessing in the long winter months when the diner’s doors opened at 7 a.m. whatever the weather. Joyce knew what the town looked like before dawn in every season, and she knew which windows would be bright in which houses. At that time of day her town—and the world—felt pristine and somehow uncomplicated.