She saw Madison and reached for the switch. “Detective,” she said.
In the light Madison could see that a night and a day of rest had done her good. Her color was better and her voice had improved too. Madison, on the other hand, looked dreadful.
“Are you all right?” Kate Duncan asked her.
“No,” Madison replied and her eyes wouldn’t settle on anything. She felt nauseated. “I have some good news. We’ve found how Burnette chose his victims.”
“How?”
“Online. He found them online. Trawling for people who were looking for help, who needed to share their troubles with others who would understand. Instead, they found him. Alcoholics, people with addictions to drugs of all kinds, with aggression and control issues.”
Kate Duncan paled.
“That’s how he found you,” Madison continued. When the woman opened her mouth to object, she raised her hand. “Please don’t deny it. We’ve had your laptop since CSU processed your house, and it’s not encrypted. It was easy to find your search history, your conversations on the anger management forum—”
“How dare you?” The slight woman had sat up straight and something inside her had gone rigid.
Madison could have done with a really strong drink just then. “Joe Burnette liked you very, very much indeed. He liked how you spoke about what it felt like to be physically abusive toward Matthew, how you had been for years, and that you wanted to stop but you found it difficult. He liked how you lived in a house with a big backyard, and he thought you would be perfect for his game.”
“What game?”
“The night Matthew was killed, Joe Burnette sent you an email—you deleted it before we got there, but it wasn’t hard to recover it. It was anonymous and it said that your husband was having an affair and you should check his golf bag. What was in the golf bag? Underwear from an imaginary mistress? Whatever it was, he had put it there himself when he pretended to be an HVAC engineer.
“But you know what the kicker is? You never run with your cell phone—it’s in the notes he made on you. You were supposed to go running, come home, and find Matthew dead by his hand. Once we got there we would have found the email, your history of abusive behavior—two broken fingers, a broken ulna. We would have found out about your rages, your obsession with control. It would have been a strong case. But you were late and you saw the message and you confronted your husband.”
“I have no idea . . . you can’t possibly believe . . .”
“I don’t need to believe. We have the recording. Burnette recorded you.”
“No, it’s a mistake. He must have faked it.”
“It took us the whole day to find it.”
“No.”
“It took us the whole day to find it and, once we had it, we had to listen to it.”
“No.”
“See what you made me do.”
Kate Duncan’s mouth was a hard line.
“That’s what you said after you killed him.”
The cuff went around the delicate wrist faster than the woman could move, its twin locked shut around the bar on the side of the bed. Madison stood up and read Kate Duncan her rights. The woman shrieked and lunged at her, but Madison was out of her reach. The cuff rattled and banged as Kate Duncan strained to reach her.
“Confess, don’t confess, I don’t care,” Madison said. “But you should know that we have the clothes you wore when you killed him and the jewelry you wanted us to believe the killer had stolen. You killed Matthew, you changed your clothes, you went running. But Burnette was very thorough: he followed you and he picked them up from the trash cans in Lincoln Park.”
The woman struggled to calm her breathing, to speak slowly and clearly, her Southern accent more pronounced now. “You don’t understand, he provoked me. It was an accident. I tried to revive him.”
Madison saw Kate Duncan in the back of the ambulance as she told them how she had found her husband’s body—her voice shaking but her words surprisingly clear and sharp. She saw her in her friend’s home after Joe Burnette had followed her in the gardens and she had looked terrified—she must have been, questioning if that was the person who had sent her the email and whether he’d go to the police. Madison remembered her the night of the ferry—scared and confused because she didn’t understand what her stalker wanted. After a sudden bereavement people are moved by odd things: grief could be triggered by a word, a name, or a memory. Kate Duncan’s tears, though, had been the product of anger and fear—they had just been too blind to see it.
Madison did not know what she was looking at—what the creature on the bed pleading with her really was—and she imagined the slight woman hitting the leg of a wooden chair against a brick wall, over and over, in a wave of fury until it was nothing but splinters. Devil’s work done by human hands. Burnette had been hiding inside that empty darkness, waiting for her.
No, not the Devil’s work, Madison thought, just us and our messes.
“I think he was trying to stop,” the Cybercrime investigator had said on the speaker phone earlier in the day.
Brown had made the call as soon as they got to the detectives’ room.
“What do you mean?” Brown said.
“I’ve been looking at his searches and all he was interested in were online support groups for anger management, alcoholism, personality disorders, and every addiction possible. He spent all his time online in these forums.”
Online. Things had moved on from Father O’Reilly and his church basement.
“Was he in touch with anybody specifically?” Brown said.
“Sure, quite a few people.”
“Any names you recognize?”
“They’re all anonymous. Everyone has a handle.”
“Any doctors? Anyone moderating the forums?”
“He’s only been talking to the other visitors. Very supportive, actually. People poured their hearts out to him.”
“He wasn’t trying to stop,” Brown said.
“He was looking for the next victim,” Madison finished the thought.
“What else did you find?” Brown asked.
“He had made documents out of the conversations with some of these people. And a lot of the hard drive’s space is taken up by audio surveillance.”
“How many are we talking about?”
“Dozens. Look, I’ve gone into some of the conversations he had with the other people online and some of those guys had pretty serious problems. I’m going to email you some so that you can read for yourself.”
Brown called the KCJC hospital and managed to be put through to Jerry Lindquist.
“Jerry,” he said. “I know that you told me you’ve never been to a support group meeting, but have you ever—even once—visited a website? A forum online for people with similar problems. Even once. Did you post on it?”
There was a long stretch of quiet and then his voice came back, small and weak. “Once. I left a message on a board. Just once. Was that how he found me?”
“It’s possible.”
It was more than possible, Madison thought, it was highly probable. For someone with Joe Burnette’s skills it would have been relatively easy to hack into the websites, find out which of the participants were local, and follow them all the way home.
Her eyes had fallen on the newspaper.
Brown met Madison as she left Kate Duncan’s room and walked out of the hospital with her. They left the synthetic, chemical air and emerged into a clean, freezing night.
“You’re not taking this home,” Brown said, perhaps with more strength than he himself had expected. “You’re not taking this home, because it’s not yours to take.”
Madison did not speak. The chill that was wrapping itself around her felt oddly welcome.
“You saved her life, and it was right that she should live,” Brown continued. “The same stars that put her there also led you to her. And now, you leave all this here. You leave it in the precinct inside the reports. You’v
e done right by Matthew Duncan. And that’s all he could have asked of you—that and no more.”
Madison shoved her hands deep into her pockets and looked to the west, where there was no line between the water and the black sky.
“If I do, will you?” she said.
Brown shrugged. “I’ll try.”
She wanted to hug him then: he was the gold in a day of ashes.
Chapter 50
The days after Kate Duncan’s arrest had their own peculiar hush, as if the whole unit was muted. Madison ran on Alki Beach after every shift, shopped at the farmers’ market, and cooked far too much food for one person to eat. Under the blessing of a sunny December she took out her kayak and paddled on the flat silver water between her home and Vashon Island.
By tacit agreement Aaron kept his distance and was not at Rachel’s home for Hanukkah. Madison fell asleep by the fire with Tommy’s head on her shoulder and a book open in her lap.
Every day she saw Andy Dunne in the detectives’ room and every day she wondered what to do about Stacey. In the end, she took Brown out to the Husky Deli for some chocolate and strawberry ice cream and told him everything. As she spoke she decided that she would do nothing and say nothing to either Andy or Stacey. It would just stay in the past while the investigation remained shut down.
Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown worked on the Burnette case for as long as it took to get every single convicted defendant out of jail, and he spent a lot of time with Saul Garner to that end. The day Jerry Lindquist walked out of KCJC—with his arm in a sling and tears in his eyes—Brown met him at the gate and drove him to his sister’s home in Spokane. Madison watched Brown for the scars that the Burnette case had left and knew that every hour spent helping Saul Garner was part legal process and part magical healing.
Madison saw Chris Kelly at every shift. They each did their best to avoid the other: she didn’t want to think too much about either him or Stacey. They were there, they existed—like black ice and frozen mud.
Joe Burnette’s notes on his past and future work were extensive. The detectives of the Homicide Unit visited five homes in the Seattle area and dug up five cigar cases from their yards. They sat with the residents in their sitting rooms and delicately explained what had almost happened to them and now never would.
Amy Sorensen carefully straightened each recovered strip of paper with her tweezers, each sliver of Joe Burnette’s life: a visit to the Pacific Science Center, breakfast at The 5 Spot, groceries from Metropolitan Market. They were all that remained of his thoughts and his pleasures, what he had seen and what he had touched.
By the time she was finished, the dozens of fragments on her bench made up a huge mosaic, blank and indistinct.
Detective Kyle Spencer wanted to go home. He wanted to go home and see his wife and hug his kids. He was going to try to forget the recording they had all heard in Lieutenant Fynn’s office as soon as humanly possible. If he could take a pill for it, he would. Even Andy, who had come back from Hawaii sunburnt and happy, had gone pale under the freckles.
Would things have been different if they had followed up on Edith Walker’s tip straight away? Maybe it wouldn’t have fallen to Mother Nature to resolve the matter in its own particular way and Burnette would have spent the rest of his life in jail. Nobody was pointing fingers because that’s just how things had played out but Spencer regretted the delay because he regretted not seeing Burnette on the stand. There was one thing, though, that he could do, and it would make him feel better. Spencer called the Cedar Grove Home for the Elderly. He wanted Mrs. Walker to know that it was her tip that had given them Joe Burnette’s name and his address.
“Who’s speaking?” the nurse asked.
“Detective Kyle Spencer. I visited Mrs. Walker recently.”
“I remember you, Detective. I’m so sorry to have to tell you that Mrs. Walker passed away on Thanksgiving.”
“But I saw her and she wasn’t sick.”
“No, she wasn’t. She went in her sleep after a full day with her family and her friends here.”
Spencer found himself strangely moved that there still was such a thing as passing away in one’s sleep after a good, long day. He called Mrs. Walker’s daughter at home and explained what her mother had done and how it had saved a life.
Chapter 51
Twenty years ago, the day had been dull in the way only the days of the physically unwell can be: it had brought a combination of crushing boredom and occasional pain relieved by doctor-prescribed medicine and a single glass of wine in the evening. Edith Walker’s foot was slowly improving—or so she had been told—but it was hard to tell under the cast. She had slipped on a wet spill in her own kitchen and now, at sixty-seven, she was trapped in her daughter’s guestroom like a gray-haired teenager who had never left home.
Edith Walker had decided that she’d make the most of this enforced rest and learn Italian—she had always wanted to, and her French was really rather good for someone who had never left the United States. At school they had told her that she had a facility for languages—and so, naturally, she had disregarded them entirely and gone on to study pharmacy.
After all those years she still regretted it.
Edith did amble around the house on her crutches, but mostly she sat on a stuffed, chintzy armchair near a large window that gave her an excellent view of the street. She listened to her Italian CDs, wearing headphones, read her books, and watched the comings and goings of the Bellevue neighborhood.
Soon she began to see the patterns. And after the patterns she noticed the people.
There he was, the Burnette boy, with his strange gold eyes like a fox’s; in the warm evenings she had often noticed the tip of a cigarette in the darkness of his open window. Mrs. Walker’s granddaughter liked him very much and always tried to start a conversation, but Edith was secretly glad that the boy never reciprocated. Every time something ugly happened in the street, the boy was there: an argument, the discovery of a dead cat, a broken window. There he was, watching people argue with each other, as if it were the best of times.
Edith Walker closed her eyes and listened on her headphones—she didn’t understand the words yet, but she knew that one day she would.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
The rain had stopped a while earlier and strands of clouds were blowing east. Joe Burnette was driving fast back toward Seattle. He wound down the window, looked up into the night, and did not see the elk. The accident was grinding metal and the scrape of concrete.
After a few minutes, the man stirred. He found himself halfway out of the window—broken glass and blood in his mouth. He reached twice for his seat belt lock, but his hand wouldn’t work. He tried to get a deep breath and failed.
There they were—his thoughts flashed—the woman in her walled prison and him, lying on the road. He coughed. She had been such a significant part of his life: the first moment he had read her words online; the first moment he had watched her run; and the shocking, exhilarating moment when he had watched her kill. He had so enjoyed taunting her and pursuing her. And now their courtship was done: now she was where she had to be because she owed him a death.
And here he was. He coughed again and his eyes did what they did automatically at night and under an open sky: he found Jupiter.
He tried to get any kind of breath and failed.
What a day he’d had, what a day.
Chapter 52
Madison drove home one evening in mid-December after running on Alki Beach and the air was so sharp it could have cut her breath in two. She toed off her trainers at the door, dropped her groceries on the kitchen table, and padded to the fireplace. She was halfway through Double Indemnity and was planning an evening by the hearth with a glass of red and the previous day’s leftovers.
Her cell pinged. She saw the caller ID and hesitated.
“Madison,” she said when she picked up.
&nbs
p; “Would it be all right if I dropped by?” Nathan Quinn said.
“Sure,” she replied. “When?”
“About now.”
“Okay.”
They hadn’t spoken since before Thanksgiving. Madison took off her holsters and splashed cold water on her face. In terms of primping it would have to do.
She heard Quinn’s car and it was a sound from other times. But, whatever he was there for that night, it was not a social visit.
She opened the door and, just as he came in, Madison realized that it was the first time they had met just the two of them since that day eighteen months earlier.
Quinn looked ill at ease. He had a small box in his hand and held it out to her.
“It’s from Jack. He asked me to give it to you in person.”
“What is it?”
A package from John Cameron was not to be accepted lightly.
“I don’t know,” Quinn said, and she believed him.
Madison took the package and placed it on her table. It was wrapped in old-fashioned brown paper with a string around it. She untied it to reveal a cardboard box the size of a slim book. She lifted the thin lid. Inside, a line of spiky writing on a white card read: I know you lost yours in Whatcom County. A folding knife rested on black velvet: the handle was ebony and steel, and the blade—when Madison opened it—was simply patterned in the fashion called Damascus. It was beautiful.
There was a business card from the knife maker’s too—Ceccaldi in Paris. The knife was called Vendetta.
“He’s sent me a knife and it’s called Revenge,” she said.
“So it seems.”
For a moment Madison wondered whether she should accept it, and then her grandmother’s teachings kicked in. “Thank you for bringing it; it’s really quite something.”
“Jack’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“He left Seattle and he’s not sure when he’s coming back. I think he might be in Europe or in Greenland or God-knows-where.”
It occurred to Madison that she was the only person Quinn could talk to about Cameron, although that should no longer be true.
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