The one positive thing—if one tried very hard to be positive—was that they both knew where they stood, which at the present time was in a corner and without a hope in hell of changing Fynn’s mind.
It was Madison’s turn to be the primary on a case. She slung her bag across her shoulders and nodded to Fynn. “Okay,” she said.
The ride to the Industrial District passed in complete silence. Madison drove under the spitting rain, the day promising just as much light and blue skies as the previous one had. She spent the first ten minutes mentally kicking herself for not having considered the possibility that this could happen until after it had actually happened. The last time she and Kelly had gone head-to-head, Rosario had stepped in and defused the situation; this time it was the two of them riding in the same car and forced to share a case and no one left to step in as needed. Madison decided she’d call Brown the first chance she had and drag the man to the shooting range whether he liked it or not.
Madison had already worked cases in the Industrial District, an area of warehouses, depots, and workshops on the edge of the Duwamish Waterway. It consisted of row after row of identical, washed-out, single-story buildings, the grayness interrupted only by occasional patches of rust. It was built on a grid and unremittingly miserable on a cold, wet February morning.
Madison ignored Kelly, who sat shotgun with his linebacker arms crossed, and her thoughts went back to the remains in the ME’s morgue and David Quinn’s last day on Earth; no one from the Cold Case team had approached her yet, and as far as she knew, no one had been looking into Timothy Gilman’s death in the last twenty years, either. One down, three to go. The chances of getting a forensic anthropologist to look at the remains with any urgency were slim. The question was, what did Nathan Quinn know that they didn’t? She remembered the first time she had met the man in Quinn, Locke & Associates’s smart offices in Stern Tower, Brown and Madison bringing him the news of the murder of James Sinclair and his family like harbingers of the doom the following thirteen days would bring. Quinn had kept his secrets until the end, risking his life in the process, and Madison wondered what he was prepared to risk now that his brother’s killer was the ultimate prize.
The flashing lights of the blue-and-whites at the top of the road told them they had arrived. Madison had decided during the ride to sit on her doubts and wait for Kelly to make the first move. Fynn had been right: they had to work together; that is to say that, as homicide detectives, they had to be able to work with anybody and make the best of it. The case couldn’t suffer because two cops would rather lose a limb than talk to each other. And so Madison would wait, hoping to discover that Kelly had reached the same conclusion, and maybe they’d both make it out alive until either Rosario or Brown could get back to work and the universe would be right again.
Kelly had not said a word. He unfolded his large frame from the passenger seat and hooked his badge on the chest pocket of his overcoat. Madison looked him over quickly as she would a witness to assess his reliability. Late forties, married, put himself through college on a football scholarship. He had probably passed as good-looking then but now his somewhat dainty features looked lost in his wide face, and, since his nature had given shape to it as much as had genetics, there was a bright, hard light in his eyes and furrows in his brow. He was several pounds heavier than he should have been and wouldn’t catch you if you ran fast, but if you stopped and he did catch you, he would do a lot of damage and enjoy it immensely. Madison looked away.
The warehouse, the last one in the long road, was evidently not in use at present; old metal signs discolored by the weather hung by the two front doors—a wide one for trucks and a narrow one for people—and made their statements in peeling red paint over white.
The metal shutter over the larger entry was still intact, but the smaller door next to it had been forced open; the wood had splintered, and the cheap lock had simply given up.
Madison understood that security was expensive, and for companies going bankrupt it was cheaper to replace a lock and fix a door of an empty warehouse than to pay for an alarm that needed to be set up and monitored, or for a security guard to go past every night. Squatters, vandals, and anybody who needed a discreet place for a questionable deed were quick to find these places. Whoever it had been this time was her victim, her case, her questionable deed. A small spike of adrenaline hit below her sternum.
Three patrol cars outside, two officers by the door, the others inside.
Madison knew one of them, and they nodded hello.
“First responder?” she asked him.
He pointed to the doorway to the building. Madison walked in, Kelly a few steps behind her, and her eyes adjusted to the low light. Feeble strips of fluorescence overhead threw a sickly pale glow over everything. A vast space, bigger than she had expected, and bare except for a few stacks of discarded pallets here and there. The floor was concrete and stained; it had been a while since anyone had taken care of it. The air felt grimy with dust and the memory of motor oil. Three uniformed officers stood at the other end, the beams of their flashlights running over the walls and the floor.
Madison smelled the body before she saw it, and for an instant she thought of the man on the chair under the water towers: it was the same foul scent of fear and the beginnings of decomposition. The officers turned when they heard Madison and Kelly approach, their footsteps clicking on the concrete.
“Madison, Homicide. Who’s the first responder?”
“Here.” A tall woman with short fair hair and a plain face stepped forward.
The body lay several feet behind them; a man was curled up against a wall in a corner, his knees up against his chest and one arm over his head. One shoe was missing. Even in the dim light Madison could see that the dust and dirt on the floor had been disturbed: the man had dragged himself, or had been dragged, into that corner. Like Jerry Wallace, dragged into the woods, likely kicking and screaming.
She turned to the officer. “What do we know?”
“One of the workers in the next warehouse saw that the door had been forced and called it in—third time in three months; they have the owners on speed-dial—and they sent a clerk to check it out and call the locksmith. Anyway, the guy comes over, turns on the lights to assess the damage, and sees”—the officer turned and pointed—“him in the corner there.”
“Where’s the witness?”
“Having a cup of strong, sweet coffee nearby—my partner took him. No witnesses to the break-in or the assault. We asked at the offices nearby, but they were all shut for the night. The owners had a CCTV camera, but it was stolen a year ago, and they didn’t replace it. Usually it’s just local kids breaking in for a dare: once they found chicken feathers everywhere—don’t ask. But this is a first.”
“For him, too, I’d imagine,” Kelly said, nodding at the victim.
The beam of Madison’s flashlight traveled over the body as she went closer, his left arm giving the impression that he was shielding his eyes from the light. She stepped carefully around the marks left on the ground. She wouldn’t touch him until the medical examiner had arrived, but she didn’t need Dr. Fellman to fathom the cause of death: two bullet wounds to the head. Instinctively she swept her flashlight beam over the floor nearby for the casings.
“No casings that we could see,” the responding officer said.
Madison nodded. The holes were small, and she couldn’t see blood spatter on the wall or on the concrete from where she was. A .22 perhaps. Brown’s voice came to her then. Tell me what you see. Madison froze everything else randomly circling through her mind—the pit in the woods, the nightmares, vials of acid thrown through metal bars—and did just that. “Male, Caucasian, possibly fifties, two GSWs to the head. I can’t see his face well, but there’s dried blood on his chin and streaked down his shirt collar and front.”
The victim was wearing pants and a shirt, their fabric quite thin, considering the weather. There must be a jacket or a coat somewhere, a
s well as the other shoe—no one would leave the house dressed like that.
“There might be some other clothing around,” she said.
“We’re looking,” the officer replied.
The socks were dark and plain, nothing special, and the remaining shoe was black leather with Velcro straps, comfortable and inexpensive. The sole of the exposed sock was dusty, a small tear in the material. The longer Madison’s beam shone on the folds of the clothing, the more she saw of the last hours of the man’s life: blood droplets from being repeatedly hit, dirt and grime on the knees because he had tried to crawl away, and in the palm of his right hand, open and slack, half-moon nail marks.
Madison stood up and wished the ME would get there quickly; the victim was curled up tightly, and she wanted to see his face. He had suffered violence, sustained violence, for a period of time, and then, when his assailants had what they wanted or maybe because of the opposite, someone had stood at the exact point where Madison was and shot him in the head twice.
“We’ve got something,” one of the officers hollered from behind a stack of pallets at the other end of the warehouse.
They all gathered there, everybody wearing gloves and no one touching anything. In a bundle on the floor a suit jacket, a coat, and, to the side, a small traveling suitcase with wheels, overturned but still locked.
“I’ve got the shoe,” another officer called out from the half-light.
The coat’s inside pocket was visible. With extreme care not to disturb anything, Madison reached in with gloved thumb and forefinger and extracted a brown leather wallet.
At least they would have an ID, she thought. She flipped it open, and a Washington State driver’s license told her his name: Ronald Gray.
Half an hour later the inside of the warehouse was brightly lit by the Crime Scene Unit’s portable floodlights, reaching into every corner and every imperfection in the uneven flooring.
The lights had warmed up the air considerably. Doctor Fellman expected they would and had taken the body’s temperature as soon as he had arrived.
“Rigor?” Madison asked him.
“Still coming on,” Fellman replied as he gently lowered the arm and revealed the man’s face. Pale stubble, sallow skin under the discoloration from the bruising, a broken nose, and dry blood in sticky flakes. Madison took in every detail. The low temperature in the warehouse had impeded the progression of rigor mortis, and the doctor could still move the arm.
The victim’s face, as Madison had predicted, bore the marks of an awful end.
Fellman looked it over. “Beaten about the face with a blunt object. I see splinters embedded in the skin.” He turned to Madison. “There might be a piece of wood around here, maybe coming from one of the pallets.”
The forensics officer standing next to Madison nodded and went off.
“He was beaten,” the doctor continued, “but not hard enough to kill him, as you can see. I’ll know more after the X-rays.”
Madison tried to read through the discoloration of the bruises. “Did you notice the marks on the palms of his hands?” she asked him.
“Yes. It was a prolonged attack. Once I get him out of his clothes, we might see extensive contusions to the rest of the body.”
“And yet . . .”
“And yet the cause of death is two GSWs to the head.”
“Looks like a .22.”
“That’s what I think.”
“How many assailants?”
“I couldn’t tell you now. Maybe later. If they held him down, we could have palm prints.”
“Any defensive wounds?”
The doctor examined the man’s hands. “Hardly. Judging from fingers and nails, he only tried to crawl away. And didn’t really manage that, either.”
“How long do you think the attack lasted?”
Fellman thought it over. It was too early to get a precise time of death, but he could make a rough evaluation considering the time it took for bruises to develop.
“I’d say they had him for at least an hour. That is to say, the attack lasted an hour; they might have had him for longer.”
Madison looked around: if they had spent one whole hour here, they were bound to have left something behind.
Amy Sorensen, the Crime Scene Unit senior investigator, had been taking photographs and making diagrams of the blood-spatter patterns: the dazzling lights had quickly revealed droplets on the walls and floor. Each had been marked and snapped. Sorensen’s people worked like a quiet army in protective suits, collecting and preserving, as they progressed through the warehouse.
Under their suits some of them wore the T-shirts Sorensen had given each member of her team: navy blue, the lettering in bold white: I ♥ LOCARD. Forensic-science pioneer Edmond Locard’s basic principle: every contact leaves a trace. She had given Madison one of the T-shirts, too.
Sorensen had trained her people well, and there was no one else Madison would rather work with at the evidence table. Sorensen pushed a lock of red hair behind her ear.
“Here.” She pointed at the floor. Madison looked where she was pointing and nodded. Sorensen knew that Madison had at least three courses in Evidence Collection and Analysis on top of the basic ones required, and she wasn’t going to spell it out for her.
What she was pointing at was a collection of blood drops on the concrete, all perfectly round.
“And there.” She made a sweeping gesture with her right arm toward the wall.
Madison stepped up to it and narrowed her eyes. “Yes, I can see that.”
The blood drops on the wall had a tail, and it told them which direction they came from and at what speed they flew through the air. Once they had collated all the evidence, Sorensen would be able to tell her how tall the assailant or assailants had been and how the blows had been struck.
From what Madison could see, the warehouse was the primary crime scene. The victim had been brought there and attacked. No blood had been found anywhere near the door. Madison looked at the round drops like shiny coins on the cement. That was where the attack had started: the man had been standing right there, and the aggressor had been raining blows down on him, the weapon creating the pattern of drops on the wall as the arm traveled back and forth, over and over.
“I’d like to see the inside of the suitcase,” she said to the CSU officer standing next to it; the black American Tourister was already sealed in a large evidence bag to be opened at the lab.
“If we start taking things out here, we might contaminate—”
“I understand. I just need to see inside. We don’t even need to touch the contents.”
“Why?” He started to undo the plastic evidence bag.
“Because the victim’s wallet contained plastic and two hundred and fifty-seven dollars and twelve cents.” Madison thought of the half-moon nail marks on his right palm. “It wasn’t a robbery,” she said. “We need to know if he was in a hurry.”
The CSU officer placed the suitcase on a sheet under one of the lights. He had hooked what looked like a bent paperclip in the hole on the pull tab and moved it gingerly backward as the zipper’s teeth came apart. Madison knelt close to it, aware of the hectic work around her but focusing only on this one thing. How quickly did you pack, Mr. Gray? How quickly did you get out of the house last night?
The officer’s gloved hands turned over the flap and moved back. Madison stilled and stared; then she turned and looked at the medical examiner zipping up the body bag.
No, not for travel—the suitcase had been packed for running. A jumble of items of clothing thrown together, balled up and crammed into the small space without any care except for speed. As much as could be carried of the man’s life was in that bag. She could almost see his frantic hands grabbing shirts from a drawer and papers from a table and shoving everything into the case until it could hold no more. There was something unspeakably ugly in the way the things were twisted and molded into each other. Fear, Madison thought—fear had made him move fast but, i
n the end, not quite fast or far enough.
“Packed in a hurry,” the officer said.
“Evidently with good reason,” Madison replied, and she straightened up. “Thank you.”
“Here. We found these in the coat’s inside pocket.” A CSU officer showed her two thin plastic bags: in one, Ronald Gray’s passport; in the other, a bus ticket in his name to Vancouver. The bus would have left the previous night just before 9:00 p.m.
She needed air. Madison edged out the door as two forensics officers were taking off the lock. It had started to rain in earnest, and it was eerily dark outside compared to the blazing light inside. The clouds were rolling in from the sea, heavy with rain, their edges black with it.
A patrol car had been dispatched to the address on Ronald Gray’s license: the residence had been empty, the front door secured. Madison would get there as soon as she could. Her unmarked car was parked just beyond the blue-and-whites, and, she realized, Kelly was sitting inside it in the passenger seat, possibly talking on his cell phone. She hadn’t even noticed when he had left the warehouse and couldn’t see his face behind the windshield. Maybe that was his first move.
Madison breathed deeply. He could do what he damn well pleased as long as he stayed out of her way.
The body bag was loaded into the ME’s white wagon, and Sorenson’s people left. Cars and trucks came and went on the road, unloading their cargos and picking up deliveries. Cars. Ronald Gray had a driver’s license in his wallet, not somewhere lost in a kitchen drawer or under last year’s bills. He had a driver’s license in his wallet because he had a car he drove every day, and yet he had bought a bus ticket to Vancouver. Madison, a fast driver even on her slowest day, could make it in three hours, maybe two and a half if traffic was on her side. She turned and considered the suitcase, already repackaged in plastic and ready for the lab. Gray had been on his way to the bus station. Maybe he had already made it there when he was picked up by his killer.
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