Madison’s cell vibrated and when she saw the caller’s ID she let out a sigh. “Sorensen,” she said. “Please tell me you have something for us.”
“Who’s the Deputy Prosecutor on the case?” Sorensen said, and her voice told Madison that she bore no gifts for them that night.
“It’s Sarah Klein, I spoke to her earlier.”
“Good, that’s what I was hoping. Brown with you?”
“Yes, we’re driving back from Montlake. We were with the victim’s wife.”
“Okay, I need the two of you and Klein as soon as you can make it to the lab.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s easier to explain face to face.”
“I’m calling Klein now.”
Brown gave her a questioning look.
“Sorensen has something and it doesn’t sound like good news,” Madison said and speed-dialed Sarah Klein.
Madison was puzzled. Evidence simply was. It existed as a neutral tool to help find the truth: if Sorensen had found something, whichever way they looked at it, it should turn out to be useful. Still, Sorensen had been less than happy about it; that much had been clear.
Sarah Klein was on her cell in the lobby when they arrived. Madison had worked with her enough times to have a healthy regard for her skills: she was the only prosecutor she knew to have ever challenged attorney–client privilege in a criminal prosecution and got the judge on her side. As always, Klein was impeccably turned out in a shiny dark bob and a slate-gray skirt suit. She finished her call and turned to the detectives.
“Lucky you caught me before I went into a hearing,” she said by way of greeting. “I have fifteen minutes.”
She wasn’t being churlish: her minutes were measured by the court calendar and the judges’ dockets. Madison was glad that she was on board for whatever Sorensen needed to share with them.
“I’ll get to it in a moment,” Sorensen said as they stood around one of the work benches in her lab. “But first I’ll quickly run through some bullet points.”
Madison loved the lab and Sorensen had more than once suggested that she should come to work for her “where the real investigating is done” instead of all that foolish gun-waving that cops were apt to do. It was a joke—sort of.
The room was dim except for a wide pool of light over the table. Sorensen’s files had been scattered over it along with a number of evidence bags—including the murder weapon’s, which shone under the overhead lamp.
“No surprises in terms of how the action had played out. The blood spatter pattern confirms the victim was bludgeoned with this,” she pointed. “And the only prints we recovered from it were the wife’s and the victim’s. These were ‘handling’ prints and not over the part the killer would have held. That part had been wiped clean. Aside from the victim’s and his wife’s we did not recover any other prints at the scene except for the housekeeper’s—she came in this afternoon to be printed for exclusion purposes.”
Madison made a mental note to speak with her as soon as possible; the woman had been out of town since the previous Friday.
“As you know,” Sorensen continued, “we didn’t find any footprints either—except for the wife’s, after she came back from running. All the movements and transfers around the victim’s body match her statement.”
Madison could see that Klein was keen for Sorensen to get to the point but was respectfully and uncharacteristically biting her tongue.
“What we have found,” Sorensen said finally, “is a drop of blood—less than a drop, in fact—and epithelials in the drawer that contained the wife’s jewelry box. It’s consistent with someone putting his hand deep in the drawer and then pulling it out quickly and getting caught by a splinter on the underside. A scratch, in essence.”
She certainly had their attention now.
“The blood—Caucasian, male—was a match to a hair found on a crime scene seven years ago. It was found on the victim’s body at the time of death. It was never identified and it had remained unmatched and nameless in the system.”
“What crime scene?” Brown said quietly. “What victim?”
The air in the room had suddenly changed.
“It was the Mitchell case; the body in the closet,” Sorensen said. “You investigated it,” she said to Brown. “And you prosecuted it,” she said to Klein.
It was before Madison’s time in Homicide, but she saw that both Brown and Klein instantly remembered.
“The neighbor was charged,” Brown told Madison. “He pleaded not guilty, he had no alibi, and the murder weapon—a hammer—was found buried in his yard. There was a history of bad blood between them and there had been threats flying both ways. We even had the victim’s blood on a rag in the suspect’s house.”
“How did he explain it?”
“He didn’t. He said he was passed out, stoned and drunk, on his sofa at the time, alone. Toxicology confirmed he had enough in his system to set up his own Walgreens.”
“What about the hair?”
Klein came in on that. “We explained it away because the victim had been on a busy bus on his way home from work: the hair could have been transferred through contact with another passenger and when he scuffled with the suspect it ended up on one of the injuries.”
“This could still be valid,” Madison said. “There might be reasons why someone else might have been handling the drawer—”
“Peter Mitchell was beaten to death with a hammer,” Brown interrupted her. “His injuries—if you account for the difference in weapon—are very similar to Matthew Duncan’s. Not as extreme but definitely in the same neighborhood.”
“The suspect never pleaded,” Klein said. “He rejected all pleas we sent his way. He kept saying he had been framed and somebody had buried the hammer and hidden the rag so that we would find it. No one was going to benefit from his going to jail, there was no money involved, and so the jury put it down to one final quarrel that got out of hand and too much alcohol. They returned a guilty verdict in record speed. He brought a weapon to the scene with the intent to cause harm. He meant to kill, but he didn’t have any previous strikes so . . . twenty years.”
“Twenty-three,” Brown corrected her softly.
Klein looked at Brown. “The minute they hear about this, his appeal team is going to—”
“He committed suicide two years ago,” Brown said. “Four years into the sentence they found him hanged in his cell. He never stopped saying that he was innocent.”
“I hadn’t heard that he died,” Klein said and, for once, she seemed shocked. “Even when it was looking terrible for the defense and it was clear the jury was going to convict, we wanted to close the case and offered him murder in the second degree. But he wouldn’t take it. His lawyer was practically in tears.”
There was a moment of silence around the bench. Sorensen knew full well what kind of grenade she had just pitched in their midst and Brown and Klein contemplated the possibility—however remote at that stage—that they might have put the wrong person in jail, and there was absolutely nothing they could do to fix that mistake.
Madison was the only one who had not been involved in the Mitchell case, and her mind was catching up and lurching forward.
“Amy,” she said to Sorensen, “forgive me for even asking you this, but—”
“Yes,” Sorensen replied without animosity. “I’m sure it’s the same person. I’ve tested the blood twice to make sure.”
“Okay. Sarge, were you the primary on the Mitchell case?”
Brown nodded. This was the noose every cop feels against their throat when a suspect’s life is in the balance.
“We’re going to have to look at the whole case again,” Madison said. “We don’t know one way or the other yet for sure.” However, as Madison looked around the table, it seemed to her that conclusions had already been drawn.
“I’m going to have to get my boss in on this,” Klein said without any joy.
Her boss was Ben McReady,
the King County Prosecuting Attorney, and he was not going to be happy to hear from her that night.
Klein left and the three of them examined blood-spatter charts and photographs of the Duncan house, wondering about exit and entry points.
“I have something from that possible observation site you found under the trees,” Sorensen said to Madison, and smiled. “We found a small tin, well buried under the roots of the tree.”
“A tin?”
“Yup, it was full of Hershey’s Kisses wrappers and, judging by the size of the fingerprints on the tin, it belongs to a young child with a taste for chocolate who hides in there when he wants a quiet snack.”
Madison sagged. “The kid next door. Eight-year-old boy. The family wasn’t at home the night of the murder.”
“Eight-year-old boy sounds about right. There’s a thin trail behind the tree that leads to the house next door, and small sneaker footprints coming and going. However, there was nothing at all that would indicate that an adult has spent any time there.”
“There might not be any trace evidence, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been there. It’s the perfect place to observe the Duncans without being seen.”
“I tells it like I sees it,” Sorensen said.
Sorensen was right and Madison felt they were now fighting not one but two ghostly figures. Her usual reliance on physical evidence today had bestowed on them more questions than answers.
It was a relief to leave the building. Brown had been very quiet since the revelation about the Mitchell case and Madison didn’t want to intrude. At some point it would happen to her too—she was sure of that—she would be one, two, ten years down the line and someone she had put in jail might be discovered to be innocent.
She didn’t know how she would cope with it. Watching Brown silhouetted against the dusk and the headlights she hoped that she’d have the kind of record he had—that, by then, she’d have become the kind of cop he was.
She approached him. “Sarge, the housekeeper just texted me back,” she said. “She’s still nearby and is going to come in to give us a statement.”
“Good,” he replied. “If you can talk to her yourself, I’m going to Records to get the file.”
Madison didn’t need to ask what file. Soon she would see with her own eyes how Peter Mitchell had met his end.
Chapter 10
Lisa Waters sat at the rec room table, weeping. She was in her early fifties, a fit and good-looking brunette with a Florida tan.
“I hadn’t even seen Mr. Duncan for the last two years,” she said. “They’re never home when I’m there.” She wiped her eyes with a sheet of paper towel Madison had found by the sink. “And before then I must have seen him no more than three times,” she continued, and the tears were not drying up.
Madison let her gather herself at her own pace.
“Okay,” the woman said, wiping her face energetically. “Okay, let’s do this, let’s do this now. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Madison said. Lisa Waters’s response to the Duncan murder was in fact the correct human reaction, she thought.
Empathy, distress, sorrow. Even if you didn’t know the victim personally. Except Lisa Waters knew Matthew Duncan: their lives had somehow intersected and she had been intimately connected to the daily workings of his life without actually meeting him.
They spoke of her work in the house—four hours, twice a week—and her impressions of the couple—regular people, polite, tidy—and then Madison came to ask about the last weeks because that’s what mattered the most to her.
“We had the usual deliveries of groceries—they always ordered a box of organic vegetables that would arrive when I was there to receive it. And then there were the utilities companies.”
“Go on,” Madison said.
“In the last month we had fellas from Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, and also the air-con company coming in to do maintenance and checks.”
“Were you expecting their visits?”
“I knew about City Light but not the others.”
“Do you remember what these guys looked like and exactly what they did in the house?”
Lisa Waters told Madison. She was a good witness with a sharp memory and when she got up to leave after a few more questions she grasped Madison’s hand in hers. For a moment it looked as if she might start weeping again, but she didn’t.
The minute she left, Madison put in calls to the utilities companies to check the engineers’ logs. Maybe, just maybe, she thought, their guy had wanted to do a quick recon before the main event.
It would be a while before they’d come back with the answers she needed. And even if it turned out that the killer had visited the house before, what would have stopped him from stealing the jewelry then? On the living-room table, the night of the murder, the expensive, latest model Apple laptop had sat in plain view and there it still was—untouched—when the police had arrived, as was the Nikon camera in the study.
Through the open door Madison saw Lieutenant Fynn talking on his phone, and she hoped she’d find some answers sooner rather than later.
Brown returned with a thick file. “I’m going to tell Fynn about what Sorensen found unless you want to do it,” he said—it was her case, after all.
“No, you go ahead,” Madison replied. Telling Fynn felt too much like telling on Brown.
“This is the file.” He placed his palm flat on the card cover. “Before we talk about it, before I say anything about anything, you should read it and draw your own conclusions.”
Madison nodded.
Their shift had been over for a while, but there was no way that she’d leave without reading it cover to cover. She opened the file, started reading, and barely looked up when Brown came back from talking to Fynn. Sometime later she realized he was asking her a question.
“What?” she said.
“Are you going to finish it tonight?”
Madison looked at the clock: it read 9:37 p.m.
“Yeah, I am. What are you still doing here?”
The next time she looked up there was a grilled chicken sandwich from Jimmy’s Bar with a cup of coffee on her desk and Brown was gone.
Madison made it home just before midnight. She had texted Aaron earlier and went straight for a hot shower. Her mind was full of the details of the Mitchell case and she didn’t want to start analyzing and evaluating any part of it now. She needed to sleep and let the facts simmer for a night.
Her last thought was for Brown: his kindness in bringing her food she hadn’t asked for, and his dread that he’d made a terrible, lethal mistake.
What Madison had discovered in the files was that seven years earlier Peter Mitchell had not shown up for work in two days and there was no answer on his cell phone. One of his colleagues at the warehouse—his best friend there—had driven over to his house near Westcrest Park and arrived to find the car parked in the driveway and the door unlocked. He called out and when he received no reply he walked into the house. It was January and the weather was bitterly cold with a scrubby daylight that was of little use to raise spirits or illuminate the day. However, it was enough for the man to realize that he had walked into something—he just didn’t know exactly what. In the living room the table had been overturned, a couple of plates had been knocked over and smashed, and the radio was murmuring in the kitchen.
What stopped the man though, what nailed him where he stood, was the scent: heavy, metallic, mixed with something rotten that came through in spite of the cold draft that had followed him into the room. He knew what it was because when he was a teenager he had worked in a slaughterhouse—not for long, just long enough to turn him into a vegetarian. And as his eyes adjusted to the gloom he noticed the dark streaks and splashes that seemed to reach everywhere in the room. He called his friend once more, his voice failing a little, and then stepped backward and called the police from his car.
They found the body of Peter Mitchell in a closet. It h
ad been easy to find because a drag mark in blood from the living room had shown them the way. The Medical Examiner, Dr. Fellman, estimated that Mitchell had died almost forty-eight hours earlier, instantly, when a hammer had struck his parietal bone, crushing his skull. After three more blows, the killer had gone to work on his hands.
Early canvassing of the neighborhood and interviews with friends and colleagues had revealed that Mitchell had had a long-standing grudge with his next-door neighbor, Henry Karasick. When interviewed about it Karasick had joked that Mitchell had gotten himself killed just for the pleasure of getting him into trouble. Karasick didn’t see the clouds coming—not until Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, who was in charge of the investigation, had read him his rights. A crime scene officer had found the rag under a chair and they were about to dig up an area of the garden which looked recently disturbed.
After that, it was textbook. Karasick denied everything. He would have denied ever having met Mitchell if he could. His nonexistent alibi had been that he’d spent the evening alone at home, partaking of large quantities of weed that an acquaintance had given him, together with alcohol and a few other illegal drugs that were slowly but surely working their way out of his system.
The prosecuting attorney, Sarah Klein, suggested that he might very well have blacked out and therefore could not be sure about what he did or did not do. Karasick denied it. He never wavered, not for a second. His story never changed, even after they found the hammer buried in his backyard. There was a restraining order against him by his ex-wife and a long list of people he had argued with and fought with—and some of those times had landed him briefly in jail. And yet Karasick kept denying being anywhere near Mitchell the night of the murder.
No one on the street had heard a thing because doors and windows were shut against the cold and only the pathologist could confirm the time of death, which was when the prime suspect was alone and a few meters away, with opportunity and intent. Karasick told them he had a drug and alcohol problem, that he was going to an anger management support group, that he had had a horrendous childhood that made him what he was. He told them every last dark and twisted thing he had ever done in his life, but he denied taking a hammer from the toolbox in his garage and going to Mitchell’s home with the intent to kill him.
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