Madison nodded. From everything she had learned about him, the man had been meticulous to the point of fastidiousness: if, yesterday, he had begun the day going for a long ride, the sonofabitch would have had a full tank of gas. They could check how much was left when he had the accident and try to determine the distance traveled. It was one flimsy thing and it felt meager next to the width and breadth of Washington State.
“Sarge,” Madison said as something occurred to her. “He changed cars, right? Annie Collins couldn’t remember what make it was, but it was definitely a car, not a van, and it was a dark color. Now, when she got into that car Kate Duncan believed that they were going downtown to catch a ferry. So he must have switched cars before it became obvious that they were driving out of town, otherwise she would have wondered where they were going. He must have tied her up, or incapacitated her somehow, and it’s easier to throw someone in the back of a van than in the trunk of a car.”
There was another thought, though, and Madison tried not to dwell on it: a van is roomier, so if he was carrying tools for whatever he wanted to do with her he would have needed a van.
“A parking garage on the way from Montlake to downtown,” said Brown, “and a vehicle that has been left there since yesterday morning after nine a.m. Let’s get it to patrol.”
Madison called it in to the precinct.
He might have left ID in the car, and any ID might lead them to his home address. Somewhere—somehow—he must have left them a breadcrumb trail to follow back to Kate Duncan.
The landscape was a misty blur. It was the first moment of quiet she’d had since Annie Collins had called. The first chance she’d had to consider the fact that she would not get to find the killer and arrest him, to charge him with fifteen murders and see him go to prison for the rest of his life.
If it was Joe lying on a funeral home table, the game had changed.
Madison gazed up at the sky: she didn’t know where the woman was and couldn’t make a guess at her surroundings, but she prayed for a dry, mild streak that would keep her alive until they found her.
Clifford’s Funeral Home was white with a colonial feel to it, more of a small country club than a mortuary. A County Sheriff’s deputy was stomping his feet as he waited for them. When he clocked them, he waved them in as if they were a plane coming in to land.
Brown and Madison walked in, followed by Sorensen—two of her officers had taken the Crime Scene Unit’s recovery truck straight to the place of the accident.
The hall was busy with visitors for one of the other current residents, but the detectives were ushered through a corridor on one side and toward the back room, where the body had been laid out for them.
“I understand that this is a sensitive situation,” the funeral director said, stopping with his hand on the doorknob. He wore a suit in a discreet shade of charcoal and had introduced himself as Perry, which could have been a first name or a last name. Madison didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t care.
“Yes, it is,” Brown replied.
“You see, there’s a law: we are required to either refrigerate or embalm the deceased immediately. And there cannot be a viewing without embalming.”
“This is not a viewing,” Brown said. “The King County Medical Examiner is on his way and he’ll take over as soon as he gets here. He won’t be happy if he finds you’ve embalmed his suspect and washed away all the evidence.”
“I only thought I should mention it so we’re all on the same page,” Perry said. “Here at Clifford’s we take care of all the deceased, whoever they are and however they came to be with us.”
“And we’re grateful that you do,” Brown said.
It was a bright room with windows on two sides and gleaming steel all around. It felt softer than Dr. Fellman’s underground autopsy rooms—maybe because there was sky and trees in the windows. In the center of it, on a gurney, a body lay inside a black body bag.
Without speaking, Brown, Madison, and Sorensen all took out their kits and slipped on their latex gloves.
“Here we go,” Sorensen said as she began to pull down the bag’s zipper.
They had no idea how much damage the accident had caused, what kind of injuries they would find. Sorensen kept the sides closed until the zipper had run its length and then very gently parted them.
Madison braced herself.
His eyes were closed and the skin on his shaved scalp was pale marble. Blood had trickled from a corner of his mouth into the collar of his thick parka, but that was the only visible damage. A blurred image came back to her, a yellow Windbreaker.
“I’ve seen him before,” she said. “He was on the ferry the other night. He walked out right in front of us.”
A bald man carrying a folding bicycle.
Madison took a photograph with the camera in her phone and emailed it to Spencer while Sorensen took pictures with her own CSU camera.
“He shaves his eyebrows too,” Madison said.
There was something unfinished in his features because of it, as if he were still in the process of becoming a complete human being.
“Less DNA evidence,” Sorensen replied.
The troopers had already checked for ID, but she patted his pockets, careful not to dislodge anything from the fabric.
“Coat, shoes, hands,” Sorensen instructed Brown and Madison.
The man’s coat and his jeans had been spattered with mud—the soles of his hiking boots were caked in it. Madison crouched down and examined his fingernails without touching the hands. “They look grimy—not just dirty, really heavy-work grimy—and I can see dried mud on the fingers too.”
“Boots have one inch of it all around the sole, seems pretty fresh. He was walking around outdoors for a while. And there’s strands of grass too,” Brown said.
“Look but don’t touch,” the CSU investigator admonished them as she scraped some dried mud from the edge of the coat into a container.
He looked like someone who could walk through a shopping mall and no one would ever remember seeing him. Madison thought she should feel something as she stood so close to him—knowing who he was and what he had done—but there was nothing there. He was an absence now. In the slack mouth that rigor was beginning to stiffen, in the turn of the head on the table, there was nothing left there of the man.
Sorensen pushed up his eyelids. “Not wearing contact lenses, and his eyes are not blue.”
Under the cloudiness that was starting to form, the man’s eyes were hazel-gold. A bald man with tawny eyes. No wonder their sketches of the dark-haired, blue-eyed fake engineer had tanked. She texted the detail to Spencer, who acknowledged it. They had to get new identikits out to the public.
Throughout the checks a monologue was running in Madison’s mind.
Is there blood on his clothing, aside from the collar? Are there any spatters of blood not his own? No, I don’t see any. It doesn’t mean he hasn’t harmed her. Mud and grass could mean woods. Has he taken her somewhere isolated in the middle of a forest? Why? What happened there? Did he mean to go back to her? Has he left her there for a while but meant to return? Mud and grass. Mud and grass and no blood. Has she been left indoors or outdoors? What was the weather report this morning? How long can she survive if she’s been left injured outdoors? Are we sure there’s no other blood on his clothing? Low temperatures can help keep somebody alive who’s been injured, but only for a short time. Mud and grass and no blood.
“There’s some kind of dark red powder smudged all over the coat . . . see?” Sorensen pointed at a few smears that were hard to see unless you were standing in the right place.
“Powder?” Brown said.
The deputy leaned forward with his hands in his pockets, mindful of the invisible perimeter around Sorensen and the body. “That’s not powder, ma’am, it’s brick.”
“Excuse me?” Sorensen turned.
“Happened to me last summer when I was building a wall in my backyard. The bricks were old, see, they hadn’t be
en kept as they should have been and some of them were crumbling a little. They left smears just like those.”
Sorensen dug out her cell from her bag. “Do you have the list of every item he had in the van?” she said when she got through to her investigator. “Look out for anything he might have stuffed in the small spaces.”
Somewhere nearby a recording of a hymn Madison didn’t know had started playing as the day of the funeral home continued as normal.
The deputy seemed to be equally proud and embarrassed to have contributed something useful to the proceedings.
Madison’s eyes traveled to the face of the man lying between them. Something told her he would have been pleased with the fuss, delighted by their efforts, and sure that he had bested them.
Sorensen nodded. “Thanks,” she said into the phone and hung up. “It’s not mud,” she continued, pointing at the splashes on the coat’s sleeves and front. “It’s mortar. He was building a wall. There were a couple of empty bags of all-purpose, fast-setting mortar in a garbage bag in the van.” She let them take it in before she went on. “But some good news too: a few empty bottles of water, some with lipstick traces on the rim, and energy bar wrappers.”
He had given her water. He had kept her alive.
Kate Duncan woke up and her first thought was that everything hurt. The second was that her head, in fact, hurt more than anything else. She was lying on the ground on her side, her cheek resting against the dirt floor, and her arms—still tied to the chair—were pulled awkwardly behind her. The middle of her chest felt hot and so did the back of her neck. It was comforting, because the rest of her body was cold and stiff, even though she knew she might be getting sick.
Her eyes were gritty with sleep and tears as she blinked a couple of times. Her breath came out in a small white puff and she inhaled deeply. Nothing wrong with her breathing. Nothing broken, nothing sprained. She whimpered and a new tear rolled down her cheek as she righted herself. She had no other option: she had to break the chair because she couldn’t sit on it now. And she couldn’t stand, crouched as she was, for any length of time. The glow from the lamp was growing fainter and soon—she knew—all that she’d have left would be the chinks of light from the ceiling.
Looking at the broken leg it seemed that she was tied to a plain wooden kitchen chair. She took one staggering step backward and then went forward, swinging the two hind legs against the brick wall.
Once, twice, three times.
Finally, just as she was going to give up from exhaustion and the pain from her bindings, the back of the chair cracked at the same time as the legs and the pieces of wood clattered to the ground at her feet. Slowly, careful of her sore back, Kate straightened up for the first time in over twenty-four hours. She had been tied with orange climbing rope and without the tension from the chair’s structure it rested limp around her shoulders and middle. She pulled it off and threw it in a corner and stood in the middle of the chamber. Without thinking she reached for the blanket and wrapped it tightly around her.
What time was it? How long had passed since she had been taken? Surely by now they must know, surely they must be searching for her.
“Hello . . .” she hollered, but it came out in a strangled rasp. Even her voice was going.
A spike of anger and frustration rose out of nowhere. She grabbed one of the chair’s legs and hit the brick wall. It made a satisfying crack and she clasped it with both hands and continued hitting the wall. If she couldn’t use her voice she’d use anything she could find. She wasn’t going to die in this shitty little hut; she was not going to give him the satisfaction.
People were looking for her. People all over the place were looking for her. And if she couldn’t get out, then she’d survive long enough for them to find her.
He wasn’t coming back. There was no need to be afraid, because if he had built a wall he was not coming back for her.
See what you made me do.
She had to get out of there. Every word was a hard crack against the brick wall. She had seen his face: she would send him to prison until the end of time.
There was one last flash from the lamp. And then it died.
Chapter 46
The newscasters and the reporters had jostled for the best angle, and the street in the Fauntleroy neighborhood that the Duncans lived on was crowded with outside broadcast trucks. The story was prime-time gold: a brutally murdered husband and a pretty wife who had been kidnapped and whose photo could be run, over and over, next to the altered picture of the man who had supposedly taken her.
The facts of the case had been repeated, assessed, examined, and speculated on endlessly. Everybody was waiting for the next revelation, for the next stage of a well-established process. There might be interviews with a rescued hostage, or interviews in Nashville with the parents of a dead hostage. Reporters had prepared for either scenario.
Law enforcement agencies all along I-90 had joined in the search. Troopers and deputies had been alerted to look out for building sites and abandoned structures that might have been used by the kidnapper. What nobody was saying, but everybody was thinking, was that a little shack in the middle of the woods in the middle of a mountain and forest state would be nearly impossible to find.
By the middle of the afternoon search parties had been organized. Volunteers had started walking in long lines, calling out Kate Duncan’s name and shining their flashlights under the darkening sky.
Detective Kyle Spencer was at his desk. He badly missed his partner, who was still on his honeymoon—a six-night package to heavenly Hawaii—because he had no one to bounce his thoughts off of. Kelly and Rosario were out somewhere, trying to find the killer’s car, and Lieutenant Fynn was best left alone at present.
Spencer had been in charge of producing the new image of the face of the killer from the picture and the details that Madison had sent him. It had been released to the media and some responses had already started to dribble in. He was helping to sift the useful from the pointless.
He had printed a picture of the man and tacked it next to the map by Madison’s desk. The picture created had been in color, though normally they were in black and white, because the man’s eyes were unusual and might help to jog the memory of the notoriously unobservant public.
Spencer spoke on the phone but his attention kept wandering back to the picture.
Sorensen and Madison had fingerprinted the man in the funeral home with a mobile device. The result had been expected but still disappointing: so far, he was not in the system.
Dr. Fellman was about to take over. They would get back the man’s clothing and personal effects once the doctor had gotten him to his lab in Seattle. Fellman felt the man’s chest under the mountain coat. He did not often work on victims of car accidents.
“Difficult to say with rigor coming on, but he might have broken ribs—which could have punctured lungs and other organs. Internal blood loss, suffocation, and shock could have killed him. Any one of those could have done it.” He examined the man’s face and hands. “No scratches, though,” he said.
No, Madison thought, it was one of the first things she had looked out for. The man had never been close enough to Kate Duncan for her to try to defend herself.
Her cell started vibrating and she picked up.
“His name is Joseph Burnette,” Spencer said. “Joe. B-U-R-N-E-T-T-E.”
“What . . . how?”
“An old lady Andy and I spoke to last week. She recognized him from the first picture we’d had out, knew him as a boy. I checked the details she gave us and the boy’s name was Joseph. His driver’s license did the rest.”
“Home address?”
“Lives in Queen Anne, unmarried, freelance computer consultant, no sheet. We’re on our way to the house now.”
“His name,” Madison said to the others over the man lying on the table, “is Joe Burnette.”
Madison felt conflicted: on the one hand she wanted to be geographically close to where she
knew Kate Duncan must be held; on the other, Joe Burnette’s home was going to be the key to decoding the man’s actions. She stood with Brown in the parking lot of Clifford’s Funeral Home and watched as Sorensen and the medical examiner started on their way back to the city. The temperature was dropping and the drizzle was turning into rain.
“I think we should go back too,” she said to Brown. “I know she’s around here somewhere, but—”
“Just get in. We have to make it to his house before CSU packs it up,” Brown said as he started the engine.
The media attention had shifted to an unassuming house in Queen Anne and when Brown turned into the right street he swore under his breath as they wove around the trucks and parked inside the police perimeter.
Madison was about to dash out, but Brown made her pause.
“Remember that it’s not just that we don’t know where,” he said. “We also have no idea as to why.”
Brown was right. But with their prime suspect dead it was likely that some questions would never be answered. Madison’s priority was where—hopefully, the rest would come later.
They made their way into the house at the same time as Lieutenant Fynn—he took one look at the crowd of uniformed officers and plainclothes inside, declared that there were way too many people walking around his crime scene, and sent everybody out except for his own detectives and the investigator from Cybercrime.
Now it starts, Madison thought: now it really starts.
This was not a house—it was a map to Kate Duncan’s location. This was going to be a walk through the mind of a skillful and determined killer. How did that mind reveal itself through the ordinary and the everyday? A spike of adrenaline greeted Madison as she stepped inside. Where was the breadcrumb trail?
Burnette had neighbors left and right, people who lived close enough to know what he looked like, people who would have interacted with him every day and might have come inside the house. The police were not going to find anything lying around on the ground floor for some Nosy Nellie to pick up. She gave the living room and the kitchen a cursory look—tidy, modern furnishings, a couple of mass-produced prints on the wall—and she went upstairs.
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