In the time it took for the small procession to leave the crime scene and reach the medical center—a squat redbrick building at the end of Main Street—the rain had turned to sleet, the mountains had all but disappeared, and the sky hung low. Even the wind had picked up, and Madison tried not to think about landing a puny little plane in those conditions—the red Cessna as slight as a child’s toy against the rocky crags.
The room where the remains of Robert Dennen had been kept was at the back of the center, past the cheery waiting room with the kids’ drawings tacked on the corkboard. Madison wondered what it would be like to live a life meted out in this building: to come for croup as a baby, for a skinned knee from a skateboard fall as a teenager. It was a gentle place where residents took care of lesser injuries because nothing bigger than a bloody nose had ever been inflicted in Ludlow and adults could get a lollipop from the nurse if they asked nicely.
A pretty young woman with her arm in a sling was leafing through a magazine as they filed past; she looked up and Deputy Kupitz nodded to her. He might have winked too—Madison wasn’t sure.
The nearest funeral home was in Sherman Falls, and the medical center had the facility to keep two bodies; it was a recent addition to the doctors’ offices and very useful, especially in winter when the snow might block the roads for days and the odd, unexpected natural death had to be dealt with. Chief Sangster explained this as he unlocked the door, led them into the room, and closed the door behind him. “Bobby’s office is across the hall,” he said.
They would go through it, by and by, and no one missed the absurdity of it.
There was nothing left to say. Madison had seen a few arson deaths and she knew what to expect—that is to say, she knew that knowledge would not help her one bit in the face of what lay inside the fridge locker.
“All right then,” the chief said, and he pulled out the drawer.
Samuel took off his boots: his socks were as cold and damp as the rest of him, and the wood stove was all the way on the other side of the room. He would have gladly climbed inside it to warm up just then—even at the cost of turning into kindling. The weather had shifted too quickly for him to make it back to the farm before getting soaked and, since he wore third-generation hand-me-downs, nothing he owned would keep him warm or dry quite as well as it was supposed to. He peeled off his socks and rubbed his feet with a thin towel.
“Where did you go today?” The man’s voice cut through Samuel’s musings.
The boy started, as if ice water had been poured down his back. “Up toward the creek, sir, all the way to the pass and back around the old mine trail.”
“And?”
“Nothing, sir. They’re keeping away.”
“They’d better,” he said.
The man walked off and the boy went back to trying to get some warmth into his feet. He hadn’t told him that he had seen the town plane—and on a day he did not expect to see it. More important, he hadn’t told him about the beautifully clear paw print he had seen up near the pass. It had been pressed into clean dirt—four and a half inches long, three and a half wide—the claws peeking out, and enough weight behind it to have been an adult male. So pretty. Samuel turned the image around in his mind. The pass was far enough from the farm that it didn’t matter—and if the pack stayed put, there was no reason to tell anybody where they were. Samuel had run his fingertip inside the indentation—four wide toes and a central pad—and he could still feel the packed earth against his skin.
The detectives had looked at the body for as long as it was useful and were happy to pull up the zipper on the black bag and return Robert Dennen’s remains to the fridge locker once they were done.
Madison had seen more dead bodies than most people ever would in their lives, and that was understandable and the way it should be, she considered, because she had chosen to be in that line of business—the business of hunting killers. And yet there was something particularly awful about arson, about someone setting a fire that would consume a human being. It spoke of the complete destruction of the victim, and there was something repulsive about it that struck everybody who investigated those cases—officers who were, if not used to, at least prepared to witness the worst human beings did to one another. In other times, in times of savagery of the mind and of the heart, human beings had been burned at the stake for their sins, both real and imagined. In Madison’s times, fire was still seen as the force that would purify a body in death, and inevitably it would also obliterate every trace of the killer on the victim. Why had the killer set fire to the car? Why had he or she made sure that Robert Dennen would be almost totally obliterated inside it? Was it purely to conceal the circumstances of the murder, or was there a deeper meaning behind it?
Even with the victim back in the locker the stench still permeated the room, and they were all eager to leave.
“We have a space where you can set up,” Chief Sangster said. “I’m afraid the police station is too small, but the community hall across the road should be all right. Usually it’s used by seniors to visit and do their art classes—this week they’ll be using one room in the elementary school. And Polly, my secretary, has been preparing the guesthouse for you.”
“The guesthouse?” Madison asked.
“We have a few motels about a ten-minute drive out of town, but they’re closed for the winter. The guesthouse is around the corner from Main Street and a short walk from the hall. Edna Miller, the owner, is in Florida until March; I called and she said, sure, to go ahead and use it since we kept a set of keys. Polly has turned on the furnace in the basement this morning because the house has been empty and cold since November. It’s not the Hilton, but it’s the best we could manage.”
The detectives were quick to assure him that it would be fine, and in the flurry of thanks and necessary courtesies they left the medical center. The deputies, Madison noticed, had kept quiet; however, their eyes had never left Sorensen while she had taken samples from the body, and—as pale as the young men had been—neither had turned away.
The senior center was a bright, wide room with the scent of dried flowers and freshly sharpened pencils. It smelled like the first day at school, minus the teenage perspiration. Dried lavender sat on the shelves next to how-to books that ranged from watercolors to whittling your own buttons. It was spotless, and the linoleum floor had been recently swept. Madison knew without checking that one of the doors in the back would lead to an orderly cupboard with cleaning products and detergents, and there would be a roster on the wall so that everyone would be aware of their day to make sure the place was left clean for the next class.
The chief and the deputies had helped the detectives to unload their cases and then had left them to arrange the makeshift incident room as they wished. Madison suspected, correctly, that the chief knew they all needed a little space from one another and had dispatched his men on errands around town to get them out from under the detectives’ feet.
A kitchenette stood in a corner with a microwave oven and a coffee percolator; Madison approached it warily. She’d had coffee in Seattle what seemed like days earlier and nothing to eat since then. Madison found the coffee—Equal Exchange Colombian—and measured it in the filter, adding a bit more than was strictly necessary, and then left it to brew. The machine was ancient, and so was the carafe; however, the coffee inside the pack seemed fresh, and that was all that mattered.
The pavement was deserted, but Brown dropped the blinds anyway for a degree of privacy and turned on the neon overhead lighting. It flickered and then caught. They pushed three tables—which would serve as desks—toward the middle, and Sorensen appropriated a smaller room with a bench by the back wall as her own lab and evidence work surface.
“Do you have enough power outlets?” Madison asked her.
“I never have enough power outlets,” Sorensen replied. “But this will do.”
The chief had given them the password for the Wi-Fi and as Brown turned on his laptop and connected to the Seattle PD site, the hall began to look a little more like home.
Madison poured the coffee. They sat at their desks and looked at one another. It was their job to talk about the things no one wanted to talk about. About the body in the fridge locker. And which one of the merry villagers had put him there.
“Darn fire took everything,” Madison said. “No obvious sign of injury.”
Brown dug into his bag and produced a package of Oreos; Madison almost hugged him.
“No,” Sorensen said. “And the ME will have to look very carefully to find any kind of wound that predates the fire. It would have been good to have Fellman onboard.”
Dr. Fellman was the King County medical examiner, and if there had been a clue as to cause of death hidden in the folds of charred skin he would have found it. They didn’t know anything about the Colville County ME except that he was late, had missed them at the medical center, and had never worked a local murder.
“Well, Fellman isn’t here. Where does that leave us?” Madison said.
“In a dangerous place,” Brown replied. “In all probability the ME will find heat fractures and he won’t be able to confirm they’re the work of the killer unless they bear a particular shape from the weapon that caused them.”
“Then we have to hope for a bullet still inside the body,” Madison said.
“Could have melted in the fire.” Sorensen sipped the coffee and picked up a cookie.
“Not necessarily,” Madison said. “The internal organs could have shielded it from the worst of the heat.”
“Are you thinking of—?”
“Yes, the Bellevue case from a year ago.”
“I remember.” Sorensen nodded. “A bullet would be nice.”
“How are you going to deal with contamination?” Madison waved a hand around the room.
It might be a lovely place for senior citizens to gather and for cops to discuss murder, but it was far from being the sterile environment needed for court-approved evidence analysis.
“I’m doubling up every sample I take. One I seal for the Seattle lab, and the other I work on here. If anything holds any results, they will repeat the process there so that it can stand up in court. Fingerprints and DNA I can handle here.”
“What do you think of the hands?” Brown asked her.
After the ME, Sorensen was the one among them who would have examined the largest number of homicide victims as she found, collected, and preserved the evidence around their bodies.
Sorensen didn’t want to think about Robert Dennen’s hands. “Almost completely consumed by the heat. And, even considering the contraction of the muscles, the way the arms rested seems to indicate they were tied by something that disappeared in the flames.”
“Plastic cuffs,” Madison said.
“Probably,” Sorensen concluded.
“Then we have a problem,” Brown said. “Why did the killer need the cuffs?”
Madison sat back in her chair. Her thoughts had been circling around the same idea.
Brown’s eyes were blue and sharp. “We don’t know how the killer and the victim met and—for that matter—we don’t know where they met. If they met by chance on that stretch of road and the killer murdered Dennen and set fire to the car—”
“He wouldn’t have needed to restrain the victim, unless he was going to spend some time with him.” Madison finished Brown’s thought: plastic cuffs meant premeditation.
“Dennen was sitting in the passenger seat,” Sorensen reminded them.
Robert Dennen had been intercepted between the Jacobsens’ home and his own, and someone had held him hostage for a while, somewhere nearby. And then the killer had driven him to the place where they had found him.
Madison stood up. “We need a map,” she said.
Deputy Kupitz sat forward on his chair to get a better view of the senior center across the road through the sleet. The blinds were drawn and the light escaped in thin strips.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” he asked Deputy Hockley, who was doing the paperwork for a parking violation.
They had gone to school together, and their families had known each other for a long time; because of this Hockley could swear, hand on his heart, that Jay Kupitz had all the sense of a bag of jam nuts.
“What do you think, Koop?” Hockley replied.
Kupitz shrugged. “Did you see how the redhead worked the body?”
“I’d like to see you call her that in front of her.”
“Don’t start. You know I’m no good with names. I only know yours ’cause you wear a tag. I meant to say that she did the whole thing like they do on TV, and she knew what she was doing.”
“Yes, she sure did.”
“Did you hear? The nurses at the medical center are making a banner for the vigil with signatures from all his patients.”
“I heard.”
The door of the senior center burst open and a figure ran across the road and into the police station. Alice Madison wiped the dampness off her hair with the palm of her hand. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were rosy with the cold.
The deputies froze.
“Hi,” Madison said. “Do you have a map of the town we could borrow? We’re going to need all the major and minor roads, any hiking trails, and all the houses, farms, huts, and shacks within three miles of Ludlow.”
Hockley and Kupitz stood up at the same time but the latter was closer to the bookshelf and quickly grabbed a folded map from the stack that was inches thick.
“Here you go,” Kupitz said.
“Thank you,” Madison replied, and she was gone before he had the chance to say anything more.
Kupitz’s gaze followed her back across the road, and when he looked away he saw Hockley’s grin. “What?”
“Never gonna happen,” Hockley said.
The map was spread out and tacked to a corkboard. Madison took a couple of steps back: most of the map was taken up by swathes of green and brown.
Chief Sangster had left them copies of the notes he had taken, with details of the witnesses. They were not printed statements; his writing was small and cramped, his turn of phrase precise and to the point. She consulted the notes, then stuck a pin on the Jacobsens’ residence, one on the victim’s, and one where the car had been found.
There was only one thoroughfare in and out of town, and the other roads radiated from Main Street into the forest. Beyond the town there were miles of nothing—aside from the odd farm and homestead—until Canada.
“There are no houses immediately close to the crime scene. However, I bet a gunshot in the middle of the night would have been a very loud, sharp crack,” Madison said. “Too loud for the killer to risk it, unless he was using a silencer.”
“If he was using plastic cuffs and a silencer, we’re going to be looking for a particular kind of fellow,” Brown said. “I’m inclined to say probably not a farmer.”
“Nope.”
“I want to meet the wife,” Brown said. “When did the chief say he’d be back?”
“Soon, I think. Amy, what are you going to do?” Madison said.
“I’m going back to the car,” Sorensen replied and turned her attention to something that looked like a large printer set up on her workbench.
“Anything useful in the samples they took yesterday at the scene?”
“Possibly,” Sorensen replied. “I don’t know yet. I want to get to work on the blood as soon as I can, and I need my bag of tricks for that.”
Madison followed the line on the map that was Main Street with the tip of her finger. “I wonder if the chief has realized—if anyone here has realized yet—what kind of a mess this sort of case makes in a community this small.”
“They don’t know,” Brown said. “They have no idea. Our best hope is that the killer has come from outside.”
If he has come from outside, Madison mused, he’s come ready with cuffs and a silencer.