“We need to talk about Henry Karasick,” she said. “To begin with.”
“Henry’s dead,” the man said after a beat.
“When can you meet me, Counselor?”
“Okay, okay, let me just think about it . . .”
They agreed on a time and Madison ended the call.
By now the detectives’ room was busy around them—chatter, phones ringing—and Lieutenant Fynn watching them all, his eyes sharp and somber.
Madison looked around Saul Garner’s office: whatever it was that had gotten him there and working every morning, it certainly was not gold or glory. Garner had listened intently as she had explained the situation and then had gone next door to find the Karasick file. His eyes had met Brown’s when they were introduced and Madison was surprised to find something there akin to regret.
Garner came back with a large box, which he dropped on top of his already crowded desk. He measured Brown with a quick glance and said, “We haven’t met before today, Detective, and I say this in all honesty: we never stood a chance with Karasick’s case. We had zero and the only reason I took it on was that—perversely, perhaps—there was something about Henry that I couldn’t shake off. I mean, the guy would not give up. He would not plead when everybody in the world was telling him to. Did you know his own mother begged him to plead and get a lesser sentence?”
“No, I did not.”
“He wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t mentally incapable of understanding the kind of pickle he was in and yet he hung in there.”
Madison didn’t need to look at Brown to know that each word would have been painful for him.
“He was a stoner and a drunk with anger management issues, that’s for sure, but before that night he had never done anything remotely like that. And today, seven years later, you’re telling me he really didn’t do it.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Madison said.
“There will be a time for publicity,” Brown interjected, “but this is not it. When we are done, when we have the man we are looking for, then you can talk to the family or whoever needs to know. However, if this gets out now, it would compromise our investigation. And we have every reason to believe that, if the killer has gotten this far, he will continue unless he’s stopped.”
Garner gazed from one to the other. “I’m not interested in publicity, but I have clients in KCJC, I have clients upstate, and if there is the smallest chance that they might be innocent, that their cases are related to yours, then I need your cooperation to make sure they are going to be given special consideration, that they are kept safe inside—wherever they are—until the time when they’re released. That is my priority.”
“We can’t speak for the King County Prosecuting Attorney, but you should get in touch with Sarah Klein. She will be able to work things on that end.”
Garner nodded. “Seven years?” he said.
It was a lot of time to fill for someone whose taste was what lay in Dr. Fellman’s morgue.
He grabbed his notebook. “I need an exact series of parameters that you want me to use.”
“Murders with a particular degree of violence,” Madison said. “And the weapon is not a firearm—possibly, but unlikely, it could be a blade. More probably a hammer or something that could be used to batter the victim.”
“No alibis,” Brown said. “And no plea bargaining.”
“What else?” Garner said.
They went back and forth for a while. When Brown and Madison left him he had a long list and looked like someone who was going to war with it.
Good, Madison thought. It was what they had wished for and what they needed. Most of Saul Garner’s life was lived among the hopes of desperate men in horrendous places; the notion that he might be able to lift even a few of them from their private hells must have been irresistible.
Sarah Klein would get a call within the hour to get things rolling just in case—no question about that.
Saul Garner called his wife and told her that something of an emergency had come up and he had to spend some time in the office. She was a doctor and was used to those; in the background the kids howled.
He debated whether to call his secretary and try to rope her into the search or not. It was true that time was a factor, but he paused. He knew the cases inside out and he would be faster than she could possibly be in his digging, and—deep down in a place he didn’t particularly want to admit to himself—he doubted whether he would have been able to trust her to be completely silent about it, whether this was not something too good, too juicy not to share with a friend, a colleague from another office in the building. The same reason ruled out the volunteers from the law school. This was his, and his alone. Everyone else could come on board once things were in the open and there was a case to answer.
Where was the number of the prosecuting attorney the detective had left? Garner dialed and left a message for Sarah Klein. She was another name in many of the files he had labored on all these years and now they were all finally meeting, courtesy of this man—this crazy, violent nutjob.
Saul Garner called up on his computer screen all the cases that he had worked on in the last seven years. The list was overwhelming: he would start from the oldest and work his way toward the present. He might think that—he might even say it in the privacy of his own deserted office—if what the detectives had said was true, the killer wasn’t crazy.
He was just plain old-fashioned evil.
The face of the fake HVAC engineer had made the prime-time news the previous evening and the morning news on local and national channels. There had been twenty-seven calls so far: most from within Washington State, three from Texas, two from California, one from Maine.
The man picked up a copy of the Seattle Times from a vending machine and read it as he walked back to his car. The police sketch was on the front page. The man looked at it and then caught his reflection briefly in the window of a shop. The reflection showed a bald man with a perfectly naked, hairless face and piercing tawny eyes, nothing at all like the dark-haired face in the picture.
The man looked up at the sky: so much light that hid all the secrets and the beauty held by the heavens. He wondered where Jupiter was when he wasn’t looking at it. Some philosophers would have wondered if it even existed at all. The man smiled. His life was made by small pleasures.
Chapter 28
Madison was on the phone speaking to a caller about the sketch in the papers when she began to slowly lose her will to live.
“He definitely looks like my brother-in-law,” the man was saying.
“That’s very useful, sir. May I have your brother-in-law’s details.”
“I can give you his name but not his address. Sonofabitch works on one of the big fishing boats that sail to Alaska and back. Doesn’t have an address; we get his mail and keep it here when he’s away.”
“I see. And is the boat in the harbor now?”
“No, they left one month ago. He called my wife from Juneau last weekend.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
Madison replaced the receiver, ran a black line through a name on a list, and looked up. For a moment her brain could not quite compute what she was seeing. Right there, standing six feet away from her, Matthew Duncan met her eyes. It was him—and yet, as Madison gazed at him, she noticed small but definite differences. This man was a little younger and his hair was darker.
He stepped forward.
“I’m Casey Duncan,” the man said, and then added, as if she hadn’t realized, “I’m Matt’s brother.”
Madison led him to the rec room, where they could sit away from the bustle, and made him some hot tea. Casey Duncan was apologetic; being in the place where they were investigating his brother’s murder seemed to have poked at the open wound. He knew he didn’t have an appointment, but he’d hoped to meet her anyway.
“You don’t need an appointment, Mr. Duncan,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”
He nodded. His eyes
were red-rimmed and he looked pale under the freckles. Casey Duncan chose his words carefully and his grief was barely kept in check.
“Matt was eleven months older than me and, when we were young, we did everything together. Everything. This has been . . . this has been hell for all of us and I don’t know how Kate has managed to keep it together.”
Madison let him speak. By showing up, he obviously wanted to get something off his chest.
“Matt was very kind. He was a good, kind, gentle person. You saw him and you’d have thought he was a typical jock, but he wasn’t. He was not loud or aggressive or . . . I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you that and give you this.” He slid a DVD across the table. “So that you’d see how he was. So that you would see him alive and think of him as a real person, not . . . not . . .”
“I see him as a real person,” Madison said gently.
“I mean, you couldn’t even see his face,” he said.
And Madison understood: the killer had destroyed something the brothers had shared. “The injuries were terrible—it’s true—but we spoke to his wife, to his colleagues and his friends. We tried to create a picture of your brother from all who knew him. He is very real to me.”
Casey Duncan nodded without looking at her. His eyes were welling up.
“I just thought you should see him in life,” he said.
Madison placed her hand over the DVD. “Thank you,” she said. “I will watch this.”
“Is there any news?” he asked.
They had decided that the family should not be told of the link to Mitchell’s murder and Madison heard herself say, “We’re going through the calls from the public at the moment. The response was good.”
She wanted to tell him that they would hunt the bastard down to the ends of the earth, but that was not what she was trained to say.
Madison watched the man gulp the last of his tea, because he couldn’t sit still and words were failing him. She sat on the edge of the chair and leaned forward. She had been in that room, she had seen Matthew Duncan on the wooden floor in a sea of red with nothing left to tell them that he had looked like his brother.
“We will find him,” she said softly.
The man looked up.
“We will,” she repeated.
He nodded. “I have your word?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Casey Duncan left and Madison felt like a complete idiot. She had just given her word. It might have been the right thing to say, but she didn’t even want to consider the story five years down the line with Casey Duncan saying you gave me your word while she was trying to explain that they’d done all they could. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Madison looked out of the window where the light was beginning to dim and realized only then just how smart Casey Duncan had been because, as they spoke, she had looked into his dead brother’s eyes too. And it was to him that she had made her promise.
Brian Baines, the friend who had found Peter Mitchell’s body seven years earlier, didn’t work in the warehouse anymore: he had moved up to a management job in the harbor and a house in Ballard. He met Brown and Madison in his driveway—a man in his early forties who wore a knitted tie over a denim shirt.
“I remember you,” he said to Brown as he led them inside. “I thought the case was closed . . .” he continued once they were sitting around his dining table.
Sounds of life in the rest of the house were muted by the closed door.
“It was,” Brown replied. “But some new evidence has come to light and we want to look into it.”
“But the guy who did it went to prison for it.”
“Henry Karasick was convicted, yes.”
“Well, I don’t know, everything I knew I said at the time.”
“Mr. Baines, have you ever seen this man?”
Brown pulled out a number of sketches which, essentially, were the Duncan killer’s composite but had been altered to account for the suspect being seven years younger. The artist had also done a couple of variations with different hairstyles and a beard.
“This man might have been around at the time of the murder. He might have known Peter Mitchell from the warehouse.”
Baines’s eyes traveled across the pictures spread out in front of him. “You’re saying he could have been involved? There could have been two of them?”
“We’re looking at all the possibilities,” Brown replied.
He was about one hair’s breadth away from lying outright, Madison thought.
Baines frowned. “Seven years ago we had many temporary workers who would just stay for a few weeks, a few months, and then move on. Just before the recession, you know.”
“Do you remember Peter Mitchell ever talking to anyone about his neighbor troubles with Karasick? Do you remember anyone ever taking particular interest in that subject?”
Baines let out a wheezy laugh. “You’re going to have trouble finding people who didn’t know about it. Peter—God rest his soul—never shut up about it. It was always the Ruski did this, the Ruski did that.”
“Karasick was from Tacoma,” Brown said.
Baines shrugged. “It was a Russian-sounding name and it was enough for Pete.”
“Look at these pictures again, please.”
A teenage boy burst into the room—all skinny legs and floppy hair.
“Not now,” Baines said, not unkindly.
The boy gaped at the detectives—Madison received a long, lingering glance that took in her sidearm—and then he backed out, closing the door.
“Maybe,” Baines said, eyes still on the sketches, his mind traveling back to snatches of conversations, to moments half glimpsed through stacks and loaders. “There was a guy, he was stuck to Peter like white on rice. He was with us for two to three months max, then he left.”
“Did he leave before or after Peter died?” Brown said.
“Before, but I remember someone must have let him know and he came to the funeral. That’s right,” Baines slapped his hand on the table. “He was always around Peter and couldn’t get enough of all the stuff that Peter would come up with. Don’t get me wrong: he was my best friend, but he was talking crap half of the time—” He stopped with a smile half formed on his face. The sudden memory had unfolded itself and it was ragged and searing.
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. He had a thin face. Dark hair. Couldn’t tell you about the eyes.”
“Did he look like the picture?”
“Sort of. But I don’t really remember him very well, you know. More like his presence around us.”
“Do you think we could get the records from the warehouse?”
“Company went bust two years after Pete died. I’d left just in time.”
“Who else might remember?” Madison asked him.
They left the house and the sky was already inky violet. Baines had given them the names and numbers of his former colleagues. Someone had to remember the man who had been Peter Mitchell’s shadow during the last months of his life.
“I didn’t ask the right questions,” Brown said, as he turned the key and the engine started. “Seven years ago, I didn’t ask the right questions.”
Madison didn’t want to offer platitudes. In her experience they cheapen the giver and irritate the receiver.
“It was an aberration, Sarge,” she said finally. “How many cases do you know where the most pressing issue is to find out who really liked the victim?”
It didn’t seem that Brown had heard her, or maybe he just didn’t bother to reply.
Madison leaned her head against the window and let him be.
Chapter 29
Detective Kyle Spencer ran the palm of his hand over his tie to flatten it. He was a tie-and-sports-coat man and, after many years, some of his style had rubbed off on his partner, Andrew Dunne, who had started out as a detective in a T-shirt and a leather jacket, graduated to button-downs, and finally attained tweed.
They had parked their c
ar a few yards away and the walk to the imposing house at the end of the driveway was pleasant in the early dusk as the gravel crunched under their feet. There was woodsmoke in the air and the scent of fresh damp earth mixed with something like pot roast from the kitchens at the back of the building.
Spencer rang the doorbell of the Cedar Grove Home for the Elderly in north Seattle.
“I still think it’s a waste of time,” Dunne whispered.
“Indulge me,” Spencer replied.
Dunne rolled his eyes. He was a ball of energy, barely contained by his badge and his partner—and best friend—and he felt that interviewing seniors whose memories and recall were notoriously foggy was not the best use of their already limited time.
“Just tell me something: didn’t the person who called say that this is someone with the early stages of dementia?” Dunne said.
“Yes.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Don’t be a smartass. If your grandmother told you she’d seen Joe DiMaggio walking down the street you’d be tripping over your feet to get your bat for an autograph.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I know my Nanou. She’s brighter than both of us put together.”
“She called me Anthony three days ago.”
“Anthony was her brother.”
“I’m saying she didn’t notice I’m half Japanese. And fifty years younger than her dead brother.”
“Details,” Dunne replied as the front door opened.
They were shown into a comfortable sitting room at the back of the house, overlooking a garden. Most of the residents were slowly making their way to dinner, but some were still chatting or reading. Clearly this was the upper end of senior care and yet it was still a different world: a place where adult human beings were shepherded like kindergartners through their day by other people, and the notion—however lovely the surroundings, however kind the shepherds—was terrifying.
Spencer and Dunne had grown up close to their grandparents—Spencer could even briefly remember a great-grandparent—as part of their Japanese and Irish heritage, and they were used to a multigenerational family. They watched as the residents filed away until the nurse returned with a white-haired lady who barely came up to their chest.
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