Madison smoothed out the clippings with her hand: there were lines that ran from the boys to their fathers and to the men who had taken the boys. After twenty-five years the lines might be almost invisible, and yet somehow Madison knew they had not been erased by time, because Edmond Locard was right: every contact leaves a trace.
Chapter 18
The television in Nathan Quinn’s hospital room was muted. He lay back on his pillow, and his black eyes tracked the figures on the screen. A reporter stood by the water towers on the corner between 35th Avenue SW and Myrtle Street. He pointed to where the murdered man on the chair, Warren Lee, was found days ago, the crime-scene tape even now in place. Quinn didn’t need to hear the words to know that the police had made little progress on the case.
Very slowly he pulled himself up to a sitting position and swung his legs off the side of the bed. He breathed deeply, wishing away the dizziness. Holding most of his weight on his arms, he gingerly edged himself forward and stood up, his bare feet on the cold floor.
The noises from behind the door had settled down into their night rhythm, and Quinn did not expect a nurse to come in and interrupt his work. He took one step, holding on to the side of the bed, and reached for the cane the physical therapist had left behind for him. His right hand—the good one—closed around it, and he put most of his weight on it. He took another step and another after that, the exertion depleting his energy faster than he was prepared to admit.
The partial splenectomy had been done with open surgery, and the incision was but one more wound that slowed down his recovery; in this hospital room he wore his body like a prison sentence he had to get past. He took another step.
They had told him that twenty-five percent of splenic preservation might be adequate to preserve its function. The doctors had left him forty-seven percent of his spleen, and so far infections had been kept at bay by medication and sheer stubbornness. He took another step.
On the screen, the photograph from Warren Lee’s driver’s license appeared for a few seconds; then the story cut to a car accident in Everett. Nathan Quinn walked inch by inch across the room and back, his gaze on the screen.
His thoughts, so unlike his body, had been traveling fast and moving back and forth in time as the memories had thickened around him like wild grasses. He didn’t offer any resistance as feelings he hadn’t experienced for years washed through him whether he liked it or not. The doctors had told him that the kind of trauma he had gone through was likely to affect his sense of balance, and not merely from a physical standpoint. They had warned him to expect rushes of emotions that might be unfamiliar to him as his body and his mind tried to give meaning to what had happened. The counselor from the psychology department had spent twelve minutes with him a few days after he had first woken up and then had left, never to return. She had very quickly, and quite correctly, come to the conclusion that Nathan Quinn was not the kind of patient who was eager to overcome his present difficulties with an open and frank discussion of his state of mind. Polite but frosty, she had written in her report.
On the table, next to copies of Cameron’s defense case, lay a pile of letters and personal notes that Carl had delivered that morning, among them a letter from the US Attorney for the Western District of Washington State—an old friend from the days of the King County prosecutor’s office—who wrote to wish him well and to convey her yearly invitation to leave his practice and join her in her fight against the tide of brutes that threatened the land. It was their private little joke: she always asked; Quinn always declined. There was also a kind, sweet card from Rabbi Stien, who remembered his parents and wished him well in his recovery; when the time came, he would support anything Nathan decided to do about David’s remains.
Quinn had not formulated the thought in so many words; nevertheless, the notion was there and probably had been there since that first visit by the Jefferson County police: David would not be laid to rest next to their parents until his killers had names. He wondered if Rabbi Stien would understand: in his note he had spoken about Quinn’s courage, resilience, and inner strength. Quinn knew he had resilience, knew that now for sure if he hadn’t known it before. The other two he wasn’t sure about; he could still taste the fear as he tried to free Madison’s godson from his cage and the relief as Jack held his hand, tethering him to this world, when all about him was darkness.
Maybe resilience was enough to get him through this, he thought—resilience and rage. Rabbi Stien might favor one over the other, but Quinn recognized that he needed both, and for most tasks, you use what you have at hand.
Chapter 19
July 4, 1985. John Cameron, twelve, lies down on the backseat of his father’s car. His legs are stretched out, and his feet, in his cherished red Converse sneakers, rest against the rolled-up windowpane. From that position he can see the sky and the wisps of clouds that foretell another hot July day—as if they haven’t had enough of those this year. It makes the journey more interesting than sitting up, even though his mother will tell him off and get him to “sit properly” as soon as she notices.
They are driving to the Locke estate, outside Seattle and somewhere east, where they will spend the Fourth of July with friends—running around in the wooded grounds, cooling off in the pool, and stuffing themselves with barbecue. Heaven. Though all that would be only the prelude to the highlight of the day: the fireworks over the lake. Jimmy and David would be there too, of course, which was good, as well as Bobby Locke, which was less good—he was in their year in junior high, and no one could stand him. Hopefully there would be enough people around that they could lose him and do their thing. The fact that it was Bobby’s house they were going to and his pool they would dive into took the edge off Jack’s delight a little but not too much. There was a gloss to the day that made you feel as if every atom in Creation had been polished to a shine, like his father used to say—and he felt generous, even toward a ratty little sneak like Bobby Locke.
“Jack, sit up straight, honey.”
“Yes, Mom.”
His father is a fast driver, and they’re making good time. Jack sits up and leans his cheek against the glass pane, keeps an eye on his Casio wristwatch, and practices holding his breath like a swimmer underwater.
Nathan Quinn, twenty, wakes up in his bedroom, and it takes him a second to realize where he is. All summer he’s been slaving away as an intern at a law firm in Boston, and he arrived back home in Seattle only yesterday.
His old bedroom seems hopelessly childish to him this morning, and—still not entirely awake—he resolves to take down his Springsteen poster and replace it with a CND one. When he graduates, he will apply to Harvard Law, and this internship—making coffee and carrying files for divorce lawyers in suede slip-ons—will seem like a distant nightmare.
“Don’t they pay you enough for a haircut?” his father had asked him last night, his tone gentler than the words.
“I like the curls,” his mother had said simply.
The internship paid hardly anything, but it looked good on the résumé, and, anyway, it had paid enough for David’s present. The silly kid had practically squealed with joy when Nathan had given him a 35mm Nikon camera. It still made Nathan smile: he had felt grown-up then and his brother, seven years younger, impossibly young. He had spent hours showing him how to use the aperture and the zoom. It had been a long time since they had spent any time together; David was growing up, and Nathan was missing it, coming home from college or his summer jobs and driving off to see his friends, just about saying hello and good-bye to the little kid who had trailed behind him as soon as he had started to walk.
David’s thirteenth birthday had been in May; Nathan had made it to the bar mitzvah and had left quickly after.
“He misses you,” his mother had said, and he had easily found a dozen reasons why study, work, and social commitments had prevented him from spending time with his brother. Nevertheless, his mother knew that her words would stay with Nathan better th
an any reproach.
“God knows how he’s going to be a lawyer,” his father, an attorney himself, would say to her. “You can see every single thought in his face.”
The expensive camera was an apology. Maybe David had understood that, and maybe he hadn’t; Nathan couldn’t tell, and he didn’t care. He remembered them sitting on the kitchen steps, the sun setting in the purple sky, and his brother’s small hands fumbling around the back of the Nikon as he changed the roll of film.
“Show me again. I’m afraid I’m going to scratch it,” David said.
“Give it here. First, look at the sprockets . . .”
As a concession to his mature years, Nathan had been left to sleep late today while the rest of the family drove to Conrad Locke’s ranch for the Fourth of July celebrations; he would join them at some point later, depending on how his 1973 Ford Pinto decided to behave.
Chapter 20
Madison had spent the morning interviewing Ronald Gray’s colleagues and getting nowhere—a quiet guy, kept to himself, never spoke of his private life. She typed up her notes, however little value they held. So far the day’s only blessing was that Kelly had remained wrapped in his usual scowling silence.
The apartment and Gray’s body were both free of any traces of drug use, and his bank account, modest as it was, spoke of a life lived within its means.
Her phone rang, and she picked up.
“Homicide, Madison.”
“It’s Sorensen. Is Spencer there?”
“Sure—they put you through to me by mistake. I’ll transfer you—”
“No, I need you both. Could you get him over to your desk and put me on the speaker?”
“Hold on.”
Madison turned. “Spence . . .”
Ten seconds later Spencer and Dunne were there, and Amy Sorensen was on the speaker.
“Spencer, you’re the primary on the Warren Lee case, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Okay. What I have here are flakes of paint recovered from the clothing Ronald Gray was wearing, and they match the paint on the chair that Warren Lee was tied to when he was found by the water towers.”
“Gray was one of the men who carried the chair? That’s how it got transferred?” Madison asked.
“No. Judging from how the flakes were grouped on the cloth, I think it was transferred from the shoe of one of the men who killed Lee when he kicked Ronald Gray.”
Madison sat back in her chair.
“Let me start from the beginning,” Sorensen continued. “Lee was tied to the kitchen chair with picture wire. As you can imagine, that created a lot of friction against the wood; the wire went through its first and second layers of paint. The flakes were all over Lee’s pajamas, and one or more of the killers was close enough to the chair that the chips transferred to their clothing, their shoes. Lee was transported with a garbage bag over his upper body—that limited the transfer a little, but they couldn’t avoid it altogether. When they attacked Gray, some of the flakes transferred on to him. We’re testing them for blood, as well; it should be a match to Warren Lee’s.”
“Silly question, Sorensen, but—” Spencer said.
“Am I sure it’s the same paint?” Sorensen interrupted him.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely. The chair had been painted twice in different shades of the same color. I used a stereomicroscope. It’s the same paint, coming from the same chair, sliced off by the same picture wire, on both your victims. They couldn’t have chosen a better kind of ligature, from our point of view.”
“It’s what they found in the house,” Spencer said.
“Thrifty as well as vicious. A charming combination.”
Madison leaned forward. “Do you have any news on the lump of ash and plastic found in the saucepan at Gray’s?”
“So far, I can tell you it’s a lump of ash and plastic. I’ll tell you more when I know more.”
Sorensen rang off.
“It’s a twofer,” Dunne said.
“I don’t know what ‘it’ is,” Madison said. Then she remembered something. “You need to see the bus-station footage. I really don’t think they picked Gray at random, and the man was on the run; chances are, Warren Lee was not picked at random, either.”
“I guess he didn’t know he was supposed to run,” Spencer said.
At his desk, near enough to hear every word but clearly not interested enough to participate, Detective Chris Kelly kept on typing up his morning interviews.
Madison left her desk for a few minutes in the early afternoon. She snuck into a deli and grabbed a smoked-salmon bagel and a black coffee, sitting at a window table and looking out at the street. She ate thinking about the cases and hardly tasting the food. Outside the rain was thin and gritty, more like sprayed by urban traffic than heaven sent.
She missed Brown’s insight and dry wit, for sure, but mostly she missed him at lunchtime, when more likely than not they would sit in silence and think their thoughts about the Salinger case and the shadow it had thrown over the city.
Madison, a psychology graduate, didn’t need to dig deeply into the mind to understand a young woman with no father to speak of who had connected deeply with an older, respected, male colleague. Still, awareness of how the mind worked didn’t change the end result.
Back in the detectives’ room, the teams swapped files so that Madison and Kelly could go over the Lee case while Spencer and Dunne could catch up on the Gray murder. Fynn joined them after a while. It was an informal briefing; Fynn leaned against Brown’s vacant desk and looked over Gray’s autopsy report.
Ever since Sorensen’s call, notions and facts had been shifting in Madison’s perception and finding new positions, as if one map had been overlaid on top of another, and dry land was even farther away than they had thought. The similarities in the cases so far were a deliberate and prolonged attack and, though in different circumstances, the death of the victim. In essence, torture and murder.
“Do we have a time line yet?” Fynn asked the group in general.
“It started sometime on Thursday night,” Spencer said. “Three, possibly four, intruders break into Warren Lee’s house; they wake him up and tie him to a chair in his kitchen with picture wire. The ME’s report says they used what they found lying around—cleansers, detergents—to inflict a considerable amount of pain on the guy. He has a medical condition, and his heart gives out. They wrap him up in a black garbage bag and leave him still tied to the chair by the water towers on the corner of 35th Avenue and Myrtle.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Not at Lee’s house. What we do have is a witness who could swear the body was not there at 3:10 a.m. Friday and the cyclist who called it in at 6:52 a.m. And, to make the ID easier for us, the victim driver’s license had been taped to his chest.”
“Neat,” Fynn remarked.
“That takes us to Friday morning.” Madison picked up the narrative. “Then, thirty-six hours later, Saturday evening, the CCTV at the bus station tells us Ronald Gray was followed into the restroom by two men and marched out. A third was creating a diversion for the security guards. Patrol called us Sunday morning just before 9:30 a.m.: Gray had been taken to an empty warehouse, hit nineteen times with a blunt object—the piece of wood is at the lab—and then shot in the head twice with a .22.”
“We recovered the bullets?”
“Yes, Ballistics has them.”
“And the paint flakes are telling us we are talking about the same men who attacked first Lee and then Gray?”
“So it seems,” Spencer said.
“What about the vics’ families?”
“Both unmarried. Lee has a sister in Tennessee; they hadn’t spoken in thirteen years.”
“Gray had no next of kin we can see from the records,” Madison said.
“Do the victims have anything in common?” Fynn asked. “Acquaintances, work histories, anything at all?”
“If they do, it’s not immedi
ately evident, but we only just heard about the connection,” Spencer replied.
“Different day, different cause of death, same killers.”
“Yes and no,” Madison said as her gaze traveled over the autopsy reports, her thoughts aligning. “The crimes do have something in common: during the attacks the killers used what was present at the scene for the torture. Chemicals for Lee, a piece of wood from a pallet for Gray. Both attacks lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour. Lee would have survived the assault, and Gray would have survived the beating, but both died—one of a stroke and the other as a result of the GSWs to the head.”
Madison had not yet worked a case where torture had played a part. It happened from time to time, and those who investigated such cases would carry them quietly at the back of their minds for a long time and not talk about them at home.
“They didn’t want to kill them,” she said finally.
“Mr. Gray would disagree, I think,” Kelly interjected.
“I mean, yes, they killed both of them, and Lee might very well have been shot like Gray if his heart had not been compromised. But if the object of the exercise was cruelty and pain, why shoot Gray? Considering the injuries, they could have gone on torturing him for hours. They chose not to. The reason for the assaults was not necessarily to kill the victims.”
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