Alice Madison strode toward the building that housed KCVW, fished out her cell from her bag, and dialed the number for Nathan Quinn, the senior counsel to the US Attorney for the Western District of Washington State.
“It’s Detective Madison,” she said when he picked up.
“Detective,” he replied, and there was another voice in the background. Quinn disappeared for a moment and then came back. “The US attorney is in my office. I assume you wanted to brief me about Ludlow. I’ll put you on speaker.”
Madison had not expected to speak to the US attorney. She had never met her, and it felt somewhat uncouth to start their acquaintance while she was rushing down the street. Nevertheless, that’s how it was going to be. Use five words where you would use ten, and don’t leave too many pauses, she told herself. Pauses make you sound dumb on a speaker.
Madison briefed Nathan Quinn and Judy Campbell: she was to the point and left no pauses. As they both soon realized, Madison had more of a status report than a progress report. The detectives had been on the ground for just about twenty-four hours. Progress would come. So they all hoped.
Quinn took Madison off speaker. “Thank you for calling, Detective. Keep me posted.”
Madison shoved her cell into her bag and almost bumped into a woman who was leaving the pharmacy. She apologized and kept going. They had worked out the radio appeal in the diner and it was written on a napkin crumpled in Madison’s pocket.
The radio station turned out to be the size of a small store with a glass front from which the DJ could wave to the passersby. Ben Taylor had long hair in a ponytail and a fake diamond stud in his left ear—at least, Madison assumed that it was fake.
They did three takes because he was trying to “get to the truth of the words.” After the third take Madison told him without uncertainty that she was happy with what they had.
Madison’s voice, Taylor explained, was very appealing and, when he listened back to the recording on headphones, he found there was an earnest quality to it that the listeners would find extremely attractive. He would run the appeal every couple of hours and after each news bulletin.
Madison thanked him and left, grateful that Brown and Sorensen hadn’t been there to witness the earnest quality of her speech, and even more so that Spencer and Dunne, her colleagues in Seattle—who would have never let her forget about it—would never know.
Betty Dennen sat on an upturned basket in her laundry room and wept. She had been weeping, on and off, since Chief Sangster had knocked on her back door early in the morning a couple of days before. She was crying again now in her utility room with the smell of soap and fabric conditioner, crying because she was going to the vigil for her husband and she didn’t know what to wear.
Everything was surreal: from the constant flood of people streaming through her home to the conversations with funeral directors. And then there were her babies, her little children who had been told but couldn’t quite grasp the finality of it. And they too would have to be dressed for the vigil.
It was too much. Everything was too much.
Betty Dennen wiped her face with her hand and loaded a wash into the machine. She was mixing whites and colors and jeans, and she just didn’t care. At the last minute, mustering more energy than she thought she possessed, she emptied the washer, sorted the laundry, and put on a white wash. As it began to tumble and the suds started to foam, she paused and gazed at it, at the rhythm and the movement inside the drum. It was a soothing, empty nothing.
She slumped back on the upturned basket and remained there until her sister’s voice found her a few minutes later.
The roster had been drawn up two weeks earlier. Deputy Hockley knew in advance that he would be on duty on Saturday, while Deputy Kupitz’s day off had been hurriedly canceled only on Thursday. It meant that Hockley would be driving the second cruiser and Kupitz would be riding shotgun with the chief. It was a trivial thing, sure, but that’s what life was made of, and even though he was going to a ceremony in memory of a man he had known and who had died in horrendous circumstances, a part of Hockley was excited by the day’s events and his own part in them. He had never been to a vigil—he had only seen them on TV—and the town, as he drove in, had felt restless, not just deflated but a little on edge.
It was more than he remembered ever happening, and he was going to enjoy every little bit of it. He caught that thought as it popped into his mind and he flashed back to helping the chief with the body in the car.
As penance he offered to make coffee for Kupitz, and even laughed at his silly joke.
“Are you all right, Chief?” Polly asked Will Sangster as she stood by the door of his office.
“As all right as I can be,” he replied to his secretary.
In truth, he felt brittle—as if his mind hurt, whatever thought passed through it. He would have to speak in front of the town; he would speak, and yet he could offer neither facts nor comfort.
He hoped that it would rain; no, that it would snow. That the wind would rise and bring black clouds heavy with all kinds of weather and the ceremony would have to be canceled. It was his fault: he had managed to keep the town safe for a number of years, and yet in the end he had failed. Robert Dennen had left a message on his private cell the morning of the day he had died. It might have been something, it might have been nothing: Please call me, Chief, there’s something we need to talk about.
He had never gotten around to returning the call and had felt too ashamed to mention it to Detective Brown.
Outside his window the sky was a delicate blue, cloudless and pure.