Kevin Brown tucked the soft checked shirt into his trousers and pulled the thick sweater over his head. He hadn’t shaved, and his stubble was silver against his pale skin. He checked himself in the mirror.
It would have to do.
“A deer?” Sorensen said.
“Looks like it,” Chief Sangster replied.
“Well, it’s the thought that counts.” Sorensen poured herself some coffee.
The chief wanted a quiet word with the detectives before the day ran away from them, and he’d rather do it privately. The round clock on the wall read 7:30 a.m., and he looked like he hadn’t bothered to go back to sleep at all.
“Are you sure?” Sangster asked Brown for the second time that morning.
Madison’s keen eye was on her partner.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he replied.
“Alrighty, then. You know what you know,” the chief said. “To make things more fun, it looks like the weather is going to turn, might get a little snow in the afternoon, keep things interesting.”
Madison was already wearing her parka, and Brown picked up the heavily lined coat the chief had brought for him. Neither was wearing visible Seattle Police Department or local law enforcement insignia.
“You’ll be okay?” Madison asked Sorensen.
“I’ll be fine: in case I get bored with the mass spectrometer, I’ve always got crayons and basket weaving.”
They left the Ludlow Police Station in a convoy: Chief Sangster in his cruiser first, with Deputies Hockley and Kupitz, followed by Brown and Madison in Hockley’s pickup, and finally a state police truck with officers in full body armor. It was the first time the deputies had worn their ballistic vests since they had joined the Ludlow police, and neither was sure what to expect—or what to wish for—from the day ahead. Kupitz rode shotgun and Hockley sat in the back, his eyes on the houses and the stores he had known all his life, which today felt a little less familiar.
Madison was glad to have some time alone with Brown on their journey to the Tanner farm. As always, even in the depths of Colville County, he was the one behind the steering wheel and Madison had the opportunity to observe him. He seemed preoccupied—well, they all were to a degree, sure—however, there was something else. She remembered the aftermath of the shooting in the square and Brown making his way into the copse of trees, chasing after the shooter.
“What’s up, Sarge?” she said, and instantly regretted the blunt approach.
Brown turned. “What’s up?”
It was impossible to lie to Brown, and on this occasion Madison would rather sound foolish than be less than truthful with him.
“Is there something on your mind?” she said. “I mean, something other than Tanner?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Seemed like there was something yesterday in the square, and maybe now.”
“We got shot at in the square.”
“I know, but . . .”
“No, nothing else on my mind—aside from getting Tanner to cooperate.”
“Okay, sure thing.”
They were leaving town and Madison concentrated on the view. If Brown didn’t want to talk about whatever it was that troubled him, experience told her that the only option was for her to wait until he was ready to open up. And at some point he would, she knew he would.
The vest was tight around Madison and it felt like both a hindrance and a reassurance, while—curiously—the weight from her holster and around her ankle was unequivocally a comfort. Such an elemental notion, Madison reflected, when in fact should any of them be forced to reach for their sidearms, the whole enterprise would be doomed to failure.
They left Ludlow behind them and headed for the highway. Before the junction, Chief Sangster turned into a road that bent back toward the town but rose up into the mountain. After a handful of residences the landscape became a dense stretch of firs, unbroken on both sides, and Madison emptied her mind of every other concern except Jeb Tanner, who had a grudge against each of the dead men and might have been just angry enough to do something about it. As the ribbon of concrete road coiled around the mountain, the patches of snow became larger.
“It’s called Jackknife, ’cause it’s a twisty, dangerous one and it’ll cut you in two if you’re not careful,” Sangster had told them. “Same as the old mine up near the pass. Killed enough miners in its time. Now the tourists lap it up.”
Jeb Tanner’s farm was on the far side of Jackknife, covering almost two thousand acres of land that spread out toward Canada. His nearest neighbors were miles away, and judging from the feeling in town, that was exactly how he liked it. Madison went over what they knew about the man: he was born in Ludlow, had left to go to college in Kansas on a sports scholarship, dropped out, apparently lived in California for a while, and when his father died had come back with his wife and taken over the family farm. Over the years, the increasing isolation had become a thick shroud around the Tanner family and some years back his wife had left. Two thousand acres was enough land to keep things private, and few people knew much about the daily life of the family.
Sangster had explained the previous night.
“Tanner’s got supporters—some, at least. Others who like the way he does things. If people come to live all the way out here, it’s not because they want to live like everyone else, right?”
After about half an hour, the chief’s cruiser turned into a dirt road. It was narrow and almost overtaken by the trees and shrubs around it. Naked branches scraped against the sides of the cars as they made their slow progress. It said everything they needed to know about the landowner’s feelings regarding visits.
“Kind of says go away, doesn’t it?” Brown said.
“. . . and don’t bother coming back,” Madison replied.
After a couple of minutes, they arrived at a wooden gate with an arch. It stood in the middle of the path and, even though there was no fencing on either side, it bore a hand-painted sign that read NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY. And at the top of the arch someone had crudely carved the words JACKKNIFE FARM.
The chief pulled in on the side and got out. “From here on, it’ll just be us,” and he pointed at his cruiser and the pickup.
It had been agreed before they’d left that the state police truck with its Special Weapons and Tactics team would stay behind and wait. Hopefully, they’d remain where they were until it was time to turn back.
Sangster pushed open the gate and left it open after they drove through.
If Tanner was the shooter, he would have seen Madison standing next to Ty Edwards and returning fire. If Tanner was the shooter, Madison wanted to look him right in the eye when he saw her. Because there was no way that he wouldn’t recognize her—wouldn’t recognize the person who had emptied a full magazine in his direction not even twenty-four hours earlier.
The dirt road to the farm continued for several minutes in the same cramped, awkward manner, and Madison was becoming impatient to get there. Brown drove without conversation, in his usual steady manner, staying at a safe distance from the cruiser and missing nothing of his surroundings.
The narrow road broke out into a flat, open area. The view of the jagged peaks around them was all the more breathtaking for being unexpected. Even the sky and the streaks of cloud seemed closer than in Ludlow.
Tanner’s homestead was a collection of wooden structures close to the tree line: a few barns, sheds, paddocks, and what looked like the main building—a large cabin with a porch. Smoke drifted from the chimney, and the barn doors were open because although it was early on a Sunday morning, the farm’s day had already begun.
“There’s no machinery,” Madison said.
“And I only see the one car,” Brown replied.
A red pickup truck, which was possibly older than Madison, was parked by the paddock. It was the only hint that they were not on an early twentieth-century homestead. Six horses in the main paddock twitched their ears in the direction of the approaching cars, but a
side from that there was no other sign of life.
“No dogs,” Brown said.
“I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a couple somewhere. And no eagle bait, either.”
They pulled in behind the cruiser, which had come to a stop by the red truck, and up close Madison noticed that the buildings had been badly worn by the harsh weather and what had looked pleasantly old-fashioned from afar was in fact austere and unadorned. The yard was neat and the ground was hard with frost. There was a bare and pared-down quality to the place that spoke to Madison of tough winters in a beautiful, ruthless landscape.
The car engines and slamming doors should have alerted the residents that someone had arrived, but the main cabin door remained shut and the plain drapes were drawn.
“I’m sure they’re here, somewhere,” Sangster said.
“He’s just having a good look at us,” Brown said quietly. “Give him a minute.”
Hockley and Kupitz lingered by the cruiser, and Madison realized that they had never been to Jackknife Farm. They were country born, only a few miles away, and were probably counting the ways in which the place differed from their own homes.
Madison took a lungful of the chilly air: wood smoke and animal manure and something deeper—a warm, sweet scent that made her hackles rise.
The only sounds were the snickering of the horses and the jingling of a metal chain wrapped around a post. Two ravens landed on the roof of the cabin and kept a watchful eye on the visitors.
Blood, Madison thought.
The scent was fresh blood, and it was somewhere close.
Chapter 33
Samuel had woken up in the dark. His body ached from the time in the lonely place the day before, and he thought that the sooner he started his chores, the sooner he would get warm and loosen up his cramped muscles. The horses’ cubicles needed mucking out and he looked forward to it; he didn’t particularly enjoy shoveling dung, but working close to the large, skittish animals was pleasing and snug. Their barn was warm, even on the coldest day, and Samuel appreciated their company: they were bigger than he was, and yet he knew how to soothe their nerves; they were good listeners, and they didn’t bite like the edgy mongrels his father seemed to favor. Overall, they were better company than some of his siblings.
The cabin was silent as he poured himself some fresh coffee from the urn—someone must have been up earlier than him—and snuck some sugar into the tin cup. Crossing the yard, he wrapped one gloved hand around the hot mug and covered it with the other to keep it from cooling.
The animals whickered and shifted when he stepped into the barn and closed the door behind him. He was familiar with each creature’s tics and moods, and the atmosphere in the barn was usually peaceful.
“Hello,” he said. He didn’t expect them to answer, and yet somehow he had come to expect them to understand the spinning thoughts that made his brain hurt. If it was a contradiction, the boy didn’t know or care.
Since Luke had grabbed him on his way back to the farm, Samuel had been nudging and poking the same notion. Why had Luke said that Cal was a liar? And why the ugly glint in his eyes when he had told him?
Samuel ran his hand along the strong neck of his favorite—a chestnut quarter horse called Flare. In a life where the days followed one another with hardly a ripple of change, where snippets of news from the outside world were rare and far between, the smallest detail acquired importance, and in Samuel’s mind everything began to connect: Luke’s words, the red plane he had spotted, and the certainty that someone was on his side, someone who had risked his father’s wrath and passed him food when Samuel was in the lonely place.
Could it really be that Cal had returned?
There was a whole world out there, and he wondered if each and every person was a beggar, a killer, or a thief—as his father had always said. If that was the truth, how had his brother survived among them since he’d run away? His hand went unconsciously to the raven’s feather in his inside pocket. It was not the very same one that Cal had given him when he was twelve. As the first one had come apart, it had been replaced with a new one, and a new one after that. There was a long line of tatty black feathers in Samuel’s life, and he had kept each one.
The boy swept the floor of the barn and wished for a way to tell the good people from the bad, the way you can with dogs.
Amy Sorensen had been working in the senior center since the law enforcement convoy had left for the Tanner farm. The instruments in her makeshift lab clicked and buzzed—it was generally accepted in her unit that no instrument would dare malfunction on Sorensen’s watch and it would wait until she was in her car on her way home to short.
The cloth that bore the scrawled message had been unfolded under a powerful lamp, and Sorensen picked up her magnifying lens.
It was cotton—thin, frayed cotton—from a shirt, maybe, or a slip dress. And the stitching . . .
Sorensen examined the stitching on the hem: there was no way that it had been done by a sewing machine—it was too irregular and crude, and it lacked the bland conformity of a mass-produced item of clothing.
Homemade.
It had to be: wherever the scrap had come from, the item had been homemade, sewn and stitched together by someone who wasn’t very good at it and didn’t have access to a sewing machine.
Sorensen reached for the senior center phone and the telephone number they had been left.
“Hello, dear,” Polly, the chief’s assistant, said when she picked up. “How can I help?”
Five minutes later, Sorensen had the name of the only store in town that sold fabric and textiles, and the owner’s home phone number.
Twenty minutes later, an SUV pulled up in the police station parking lot.
Sorensen was not surprised when the owner and her husband met her in the station: in Seattle, she would have had to wait until the store’s official opening hours; in Ludlow, there was an element of curiosity and the currency a juicy piece of gossip would provide anybody even marginally involved in the investigation.
“Most fabric trade is done online nowadays,” the woman said as she unlocked the store’s door with the sign LUDLOW OUTFITTERS. “But there’s still those who want to come in and choose in person. And that’s what we’re here for.”
She turned on the lights: the store carried clothing and footwear for tourists but also a staple stock of common brands for the residents. A corner was dedicated entirely to fabrics, sewing, and quilting.
“Do you sew?” the woman asked Sorensen.
“Not really, but my mother did. She was a quilter. Good one too.”
The woman smiled. She was easily a six-footer, with blonde curls and flawless makeup. Her husband had parked himself by the door and pretended not to listen to the women’s conversation. Sorensen remembered seeing them both at the vigil a day earlier.
“What exactly are you looking for?” the woman asked Sorensen.
“Cloth. Cotton. White. Bought here a while ago by someone who might have been making a shirt or a dress. Here . . .” Sorensen showed her a magnified picture of a detail of the cloth on her smartphone.
The woman examined the photograph. “Solid white. We carry three types of that specific white. Come with me.”
“Do you keep records of who buys what? Would you be able to tell me?”
“We don’t keep electronic records, no. Whether it’s cards or cash, it just goes into the till as a receipt. We do the fabric inventory by hand—unless we run out of something, and then we order it straightaway.”
No records. That would make it impossible to find out who had bought the cotton, even if they found a match.
Sorensen sighed.
“We do have our book, though,” the woman continued as she led the way. “That’s how we keep track of things. Otherwise how would you know how to match something you bought seven years ago?”
“You have a book? Like a records book?”
The woman looked at Sorensen as if she’d expected better from
her. “We supply two quilters’ groups, five sewing classes, the senior center sewing parties, and the Ludlow High School Young Designers project.” The woman stopped in front of a rack and, with practiced hands, pulled out three rolls of white cotton fabric. “Of course we have a records book.”
Chapter 34
Madison sniffed the air. The horses in the paddock behind her pawed the frosty ground—they could smell the blood as clearly as she could.
A tall man walked out of the mouth of the largest barn. In the frigid air he did not wear a coat and his white shirt, open at the neck, was spattered with red. He wore black trousers, and the outfit was stark and somewhat formal—as if he’d just dropped by on his way from a funeral. He held a small child over one hip and the boy, who was as fair as the man was dark, was barefoot. Two youths in their early twenties flanked the older man.
Early fifties, at least six feet tall, dark hair and blue eyes. Jeb Tanner’s driver’s license photo did not do him justice: his hair was swept back, as was the fashion in the 1940s, and his blue eyes were fringed by long lashes. His features were almost delicately drawn, and the result should have been attractive. And yet, while it had every reason to be handsome, the outcome was unpleasant.
The youths were a watered-down version of the same genetic makeup: tall and heavy, with farm toil muscle. One was almost a head taller than his father and the other seemed eerily vacant. Both carried rifles and were dressed for farm labor—layers of work shirts, jeans, and heavy boots—their hair was shoulder length, and their starter beards made them look like sullen, armed hippies. Their clothing, Madison noticed, had seen many seasons on the farmyard.
The child whimpered—how old could he be? Three, possibly four—and reached around the man’s neck, hiding his face from the strangers.
The man’s gaze traveled over the officers and came to rest on Madison. She looked back and stared into the void of the man’s eyes. If there was any recognition that they had been shooting at each other merely hours earlier, Madison didn’t see it.
Sweet After Death Page 20