“I met the mayor,” Madison said, and took a sip of blessedly strong coffee.
They had taken a booth in the corner—Brown and Sorensen on one of the red leather banquettes and Madison on the other. The diner was busy and agreeably warm after Madison’s long walk.
The Magpie was the kind of diner Norman Rockwell would design, Madison thought—if he had been alive and inclined to design diners. A long chrome-topped counter with stools on one side and a line of booths on the other. The black-and-white floor tiles were spotless; ketchup and mustard came in immaculate red and yellow plastic bottles.
Nothing would have mattered, though, if the coffee was less than nuclear strength, since Madison had left the Miller house with nothing more than a glass of milk in her system.
She had ordered French toast and bacon, and it came with a cinnamon smiley on the top. Sorensen was steadily demolishing a “Farmhand’s Favorite,” which seemed to include every item on the menu piled high on a single plate. She had told Brown that he was letting the side down when he ordered his oatmeal and toast, and he had replied that he would very much like to live to see sixty.
“What’s the mayor like?” Sorensen said.
“A little pompous, a little annoying, means well,” Madison said quietly, even though no one was close enough to overhear them. “He’s very interested in the details of the case. Wanted to know about any evidence we recovered.”
Brown was quick to spot the signs that something troubled Madison. “What’s on your mind?”
“You know how every single person we met here, the first thing they told us when we asked them about the victim was what a good guy he was?”
“Yes.”
“Not the mayor. Also, he used certain words when he was talking about the last time he saw him alive. He said ‘nothing odd, nothing out of place.’ He didn’t say the doc was fine, the words meant the situation appeared fine.”
Sorensen was used to playing devil’s advocate. “You don’t think you’re being picky about language?”
“Possibly. But he asked me to keep him posted about what we discover not about what we find.”
“He knows there is something for us to discover as opposed to the eventuality of us finding something?” Brown said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Madison said.
“Be careful,” Sorensen said, and when she knew she had the others’ full attention she leaned forward. “We have nothing to go on: no motive, no suspects, and barely a clear cause of death. If we start to weigh people by their casual words, without any evidence, we’re going to be left flapping in the wind—and it won’t look pretty.”
“All I’m saying is that the guy used some peculiar turns of phrase, and I’m going to keep an eye on him—”
“He doesn’t have a record, this much we know,” Brown interjected.
“I put in a request yesterday to find out if there were any warrants out or any felony arrests for the whole town.” When Madison blinked, he continued, “It’s not like I asked them to run the New York City phone book. Anyway, unfortunately for us—though kudos to Ludlow—there isn’t one citizen with a felony arrest of any kind. The closest we got was a record for assault in Sherman Falls—and anyway the guy was drunk when he hit his brother-in-law. This town is mercifully free of ex-cons and felons.”
“Good to hear,” Madison said, and she did not want to consider that something as dark as murder with a side of arson could be the first fledgling step of an offender. If it was, what could possibly follow?
“Do you need me at the vigil?” Sorensen said.
“Yes,” Brown and Madison replied in unison.
“We’ll be stretched as it is,” Brown continued.
“Thought so.” Sorensen finished her last bite of egg. “Do you have your own camera?” she asked Madison in a tone that implied that Madison was in fact one of the investigators in her unit and only temporarily seconded to Homicide.
“Yup, ready and waiting.”
“If the killer is coming to the vigil,” Brown said, “he might want to have a real front seat for the show.”
“Be close to the family,” Madison agreed.
“Yes,” Brown said. “There might be a few hundred people there, and he’s going to be in a place where he can see and hear well.”
“There will be speeches?” Sorensen said.
“I’m reasonably sure Mayor Gibson will want to say something,” Madison replied.
“One of us should speak,” Brown said, tactful as always about his seniority in a situation where he was not the primary detective.
“You have fun with that,” Madison said. “I’m going to be eyes on the crowd.”
“We should update the boss and Nathan Quinn. We’ll need warrants in the near future,” Brown said. “Okay if I take Fynn?”
“Sure,” Madison replied. “I’ll call Quinn on my way to KCVW.”
They paid and left for their separate tasks: Brown to interview the Jacobsens—the last known people to see the victim alive—Madison to record an appeal for information at the local radio station—after the bakery, before the bank—and Sorensen back to the car crime scene—taking advantage of the clear, dry morning.
The woman behind the counter gave them a smile as they left, and Madison was grateful that she had let them get on with their business without joining them for a chat. Then she instantly felt guilty about that notion. You have a cold, big-city heart, she told herself.
She hadn’t failed to notice, however, that the woman’s smile had been mostly directed at Brown.
Joyce Cartwell watched the detectives as they left her diner. Every customer in the place had been staring. Stare they might, but the investigators had specifically chosen the last booth against the wall, the one without neighbors, and she didn’t think they wanted to chitchat. She wondered what kind of person they were looking for, what kind of trial had befallen her town. Had it been the end of a terrible sequence of chance events? Or was it the beginning of a different kind of darkness?
Under the diner’s uniform, under her garments, a three-inch scar traveled over her ribs. Not all crimes in Ludlow ended up in a report.
Unheard by Joyce, or by the detectives, one of the customers told her elderly mother that she must have imagined the face she had glimpsed outside the kitchen window in the middle of the night. They didn’t have those kinds of perverts in Ludlow.