Blood and Bone Read online

  The bedroom door was open, the drawer in the dresser ajar. The woman looked inside and picked up a red leather box lined with chamois. The clasp was undone.

  “My jewelry is missing. A pearl necklace, some earrings, some rings.” Kate Duncan didn’t care: she was bewildered and puzzled, as if she had expected to find something that would explain everything.

  She gave them a list of every item the intruder had taken and then they led her back downstairs. Her friend was waiting by the front door.

  “Kate?” The woman stood there, rooted to the spot, uncertain of what to do next.

  “Annie . . .” Kate Duncan opened her arms and walked into her friend’s embrace.

  They left after it was agreed that Madison would take her to see her husband the following day. No, Mrs. Duncan did not need a doctor. Yes, she would be staying with her friend. They exchanged phone numbers and a uniformed officer sheltered them under an umbrella as they made their way to the friend’s SUV.

  Vans from local television stations had already positioned themselves and the lights from their cameras tracked every movement. Even the helicopter swooped low and took its fill before it disappeared back into the rain.

  Chapter 6

  The portable lights of the Crime Scene Unit burned dazzling white in the living room and the temperature had already become uncomfortably warm; Madison wished she could take off the protective suit.

  “Let’s have a look at the entry point,” she said to Brown.

  Amy Sorensen was busy making a chart of blood spatter patterns, but one of her best and brightest was working on the French doors.

  “Hey, Lauren,” Madison said. “What do we have?”

  “Standard glass panels,” Frank Lauren replied. “Easy enough to break with something hard and sharp. They were unlocked and open. Here and here,” he pointed, “I have some blood transfer, probably from when the killer left. Rest of the door? No prints so far.”

  “Was there any water or dirt next to the door when you arrived? Any marks at all?” Brown said.

  Lauren knew what Brown was driving at and didn’t even turn around. He continued to work with his swabs. “No water marks, no dirt, no footprints, no trace evidence brought in from the deck. This section of the wooden flooring was as immaculate as the day it was laid.”

  Madison found herself drawn back to where the body of Matthew Duncan had been found. Her mind was beginning to sift through all the information they had gathered. “The victim must not have heard the intruder coming in,” she said to Brown. “If he had seen the intruder the first blow would have been a frontal one and he wouldn’t have let him get that close.”

  “Have you seen the deck?” he replied.

  “I know. Anyone walking in from outside in the last few hours would have left some kind of footprints.”

  “And . . . ?”

  Madison suppressed a smile: sometimes Brown could still be the benevolent if exacting teacher. It was either mildly annoying or very useful, depending on Madison’s mood. Tonight she decided it was useful.

  “And anyone out walking would have most likely worn some kind of rain gear, but . . . no marks on the floor from the water dripping either.”

  “Could have dried before we got here.”

  “Possibly. But the footprints?” Madison looked around. “Maybe he took his shoes off as he came in. I’m not being flippant. If the victim was in the kitchen he wouldn’t have seen him sliding the French doors open and coming in.”

  Madison’s gaze found the body shape on the floor by their feet.

  “Here’s the thing though,” she said. “We have a missing pearl necklace, some earrings and other jewelry. Is that what the intruder was hoping to find? If it was, why didn’t he just incapacitate the victim and move on to do his business? This was incredibly violent for a pretty mundane B&E.”

  “Whatever it was he wanted, he wanted it very badly.”

  Beyond the glass wall there was nothing now except for a pitch-black night and a human being who had done an awful thing.

  “There is another option,” Madison continued. “And time of death is going to help us only up to a point because it all happened in minutes.”

  “Go on.”

  “The intruder breaks in. At some point, for some reason, Matthew Duncan comes to check what’s going on—maybe he was still in the kitchen fixing dinner—and the intruder attacks him, leaves him on the floor unconscious. Then he goes upstairs, takes everything he can find of any value, comes back downstairs, and then he finishes off Matthew Duncan.”

  “After he picked up the jewels?”

  “After. So no blood transfer from the killer except on his way out.”

  “Mrs. Duncan said the jewels were worth maybe $12,000. The rest was in the safe and the safe was not touched. That’s not a bad haul for a few minutes’ work and wouldn’t leave a trail as hot as murder in the first degree.”

  “I know.” Madison thought about the small transactions of daily life that happen in the street without us even noticing. “I hope somebody saw him,” she said. And if somebody did, would they have noticed the dark stains on the clothing? Would the rain have washed clean the killer’s face?

  They spent another hour on the scene and one more canvassing the neighborhood. The first forty-eight hours after a murder are the most valuable time—when witnesses might remember what they would forget days later, for sure.

  Now was also the time when most people were at home after a long day at work: they were eating dinner, their attention was dulled and their minds ready to switch off. The detectives’ quest was made worse by the crops of thick vegetation around the houses: it wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to slip into the backyards unnoticed from the street.

  The call came as Brown and Madison were retracing their steps to the crime scene—damp, exhausted, and with very little to show for their efforts.

  It was Frank Lauren.

  “Got your murder weapon,” he said.

  An object that reminded Madison quite inappropriately of an Academy Award had been placed inside a clear plastic bag that had already been signed and countersigned by Lauren and another Crime Scene Unit officer. It was covered in something that Madison would rather not examine too closely.

  “What is it?” she asked Lauren.

  “Bronze, I’d say. Some kind of sports trophy. I’ll tell you more, but we’ll have to wipe off the blood and everything else first.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Under the sofa. Rolled or kicked under it.”

  Madison felt the weight of the object and passed it to Brown. It carried enough heft to turn a single blow into a lethal hit.

  “Are you going to fast-track this?” she asked Lauren.

  “We’ll do what we can, but we’re going to be here a while . . .” he said and gestured to the rest of the room.

  It would take days to process the house—days spent fastidiously covering each place where the intruder had been.

  Again Madison went back to the spot where they had found Matthew Duncan. “If you’re a burglar . . .” she said to Brown.

  “Let’s say I am.”

  “You know enough not to leave immediately obvious fingerprints or footprints by the point of entry. And none of the neighbors have come forward yet with a description.”

  “Let’s agree I am adequately competent at my job.”

  “Well,” Madison continued, “if that’s the case, what are you doing getting into a house at 6:30 p.m. with all the lights on and a person—a big, football-player-type guy—clearly visible from the backyard and the deck? Why on earth would someone try to rob a house with the owner right there? And if you are going in for anything other than a robbery, why are you not armed instead of using something you just find lying around? And why wait for the small window of time when the husband is alone in the house and the wife is on her run—when you had all day for the burglary as they were both out at work?”

  “All good questions.”

/>   “Questions, Sarge, are all I’ve got right now,” Madison said.

  In the empty detectives’ room, late into the night, after the hot lights at the scene and the rain as they canvassed the neighbors, Brown and Madison sat in silence at their desk, picked at takeout from the Hurricane Café, and finished their paperwork.

  Madison sipped from her thermos of coffee; her eyes had been on the same line of the report for a few minutes.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said finally.

  Brown looked up.

  There was so much he wanted to tell her: about his first homicide case and the crevice it had left somewhere in his soul, about the fierce light and the warmth he had seen in her the first day she had joined the unit, and about how he had learned in the decades on the job that those things had to be protected at all costs. For a moment he looked for the words he needed, but they were not there for him to catch.

  “I know,” he replied.

  A couple of hours later, Madison twisted and turned in her bed but sleep would not come. Her mind never quite stopped, never quite left the room with the pretty wood flooring and the sweeps of red high on the walls. A while later she found her way in the dark to the sofa in the living room and lying there, wrapped in her comforter, she fell asleep.

  The dream came as it always did—as a comfort and a sharp, sudden ache. In it she sat curled up on the armchair watching someone sleeping on the sofa. The morning light crept into the room and moved toward the recumbent figure. Madison didn’t have much time. There was never enough time. And still she watched.

  She woke up hours later, still feeling the dream on her skin.

  Chapter 7

  By the time Madison was drinking her second cup of coffee and attempting to finish her oatmeal, the day was bright—brighter than it had felt for days—and the wind had swept up what was left of the night’s rain and left in its place a hard blue sky and gusts that bent the trees and disheveled the lawn with dry leaves. So much light. It reached into Madison on some subatomic level and scrubbed off the half-formed thoughts of the previous night. There had been doubts, there had been uncertainties, and they had left traces like words in chalk on a blackboard after the class is done. Madison felt the balm of the unexpected light on a cold, clear morning and took it for what it was: a gift. There was going to be an autopsy, there were going to be more devastating questions and worthless answers, but there was also this, and Madison gave herself a few minutes by the windows, sipping her coffee and watching the seagulls gliding, utterly still, in the northeastern wind.

  In the car, traveling as fast as the boundaries of civic rule and street courtesy would allow, Madison turned on the radio. When the news came on she knew what the first item would be: after a brief, vague description of Matthew Duncan’s murder, the local pundit went on to talk about the young, relatively inexperienced Homicide detective in charge of the investigation and speculated whether, for the good of the community, it wouldn’t be more effective to have a senior officer in charge.

  It wasn’t Madison’s first homicide, but without a doubt it was the most brutal and senseless. She swore under her breath and turned off the radio: she wouldn’t let herself feel undermined by someone who had never walked a crime scene, never smelled it in her hair after the shift was done.

  Brown met Madison at the front door of the Duncans’ residence; he was wearing the protective suit and an expression that said he’d heard the same news item. His silent message was simple: ignore the idiots and get on with the job at hand. Madison slipped into her own paper suit—message received.

  Morning light flooded the room and Crime Scene Unit Investigator Amy Sorensen straightened up and looked over her domain. She was a tall, striking redhead in her early forties and the bane of defense lawyers across the state. Sorensen worshipped at the altar of Edmond Locard whose exchange principle—every contact leaves a trace—informed every second of the life she had devoted to finding the truth through the interpretation of collected evidence; she liked Madison because they both believed that the evidence would tell them the story if only they asked the right questions. And this was going to be one nasty piece of storytelling.

  Sorensen had examined, photographed, studied, and collated, and she had a pretty good idea of how the action had played out. Of course, she thought, good had had nothing to do with it.

  Madison stepped into the bright room: through the glass windows the deep green below rolled down toward Fauntleroy Way and Lincoln Park, and beyond it the waters of Puget Sound. She put away her doubts and the echoes of the broadcaster’s voice and let the room speak to her. The Duncans had led a comfortable life and someone had killed for a paltry slice of it. The question was, as always, who or what were they really looking for?

  Sorensen turned when she heard them approach and smiled. “My favorite Homicide detectives,” she said. “Welcome to my humble crime scene.”

  “Amy,” Madison said, “you are the shining center of our universe.”

  “And so I should be.” She took a deep breath and her joviality went away. “Ready for it?”

  “As ready as we’ll ever be,” Brown replied.

  Sorensen launched into a run-through of her findings. They were grim.

  “The first blow,” she concluded, “would have been struck with limited force—there was hardly any blood loss—but we also have high-speed droplets cast off from the murder weapon. They struck the ceiling as the attacker lowered and raised the object repeatedly while the victim was splayed out on the ground. The cast-off pattern is clear . . .” She pointed.

  Sorensen let them absorb the facts. “I’d say there were well over six or seven blows. This here is where he fell on his knees, then a blow pushed him onto his back—see the cast-off on the sofa . . . there . . . and there. I doubt he had a chance to defend himself at all. And here is where the wife slipped and crouched when she found him. See the transfer from her hand when she touched him and then steadied herself on the floor? The only footprints with blood transfer in the room are hers.”

  Madison nodded.

  So much violence, so much inexplicable violence.

  She turned to Brown. “Drugs?” she said.

  “Possibly,” he replied.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time that a burglar high on something or other had turned a perfectly straightforward job into something altogether different.

  “Except,” he continued, “if the intruder was high I’d have expected a messier scene and prints everywhere. Maybe not fingerprints but definitely transfers.”

  “No transfers upstairs, just the ones on the French doors,” Sorensen confirmed.

  “If he killed Matthew Duncan first he would have been covered in blood,” Madison said. “He would have left a trail this wide when he went upstairs and searched the bedroom.”

  “Unless he found a way not to,” Brown replied.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t want to entertain the idea that he would have gone back to kill the man after he found the jewelry, that he killed him out of spite or just because he could.”

  “He only had fifty-five minutes from when Mrs. Duncan left to when she came back,” Madison said. “He could very well have seen her leave and must have known that she would be back soon.”

  Brown nodded.

  What they knew of the killer made him vicious and reckless: if the former made him dangerous maybe the latter would get him caught.

  Madison walked the perimeter around one side of the house, Brown walked the other. The air was surprisingly soft and under the firs it smelled of mulch. The thicket had grown between the houses as if they and their well-tended gardens had merely borrowed the land for a brief moment in time and nature was determined that sooner or later it would get it back.

  Madison kept her eyes on the ground, still damp, and sought the small disturbances that betrayed the passage of the intruder and maybe a quiet, hidden place from which he had been able to observ
e the inside of the house. Low branches brushed against her shoulders and raindrops found their way under her collar. It was pleasantly shaded there and after a minute Madison was level with the deck at the back of the house. A small ridge in the ground had created a kind of trench next to a fir. She crouched under the tree. It was a natural shelter, Madison thought, and then revised that notion: it was a hunting blind.

  Madison had a perfect line of vision to the living room of the Duncans’ home and Amy Sorensen inside it, busy with her kit, directing her team. Sorensen’s cell must have rung because the investigator picked it up from her open kit box. It was a personal call—Madison had no doubt even though she couldn’t hear her. Sorensen had stepped closer to the glass and was talking to someone. One of her kids maybe. Madison looked away. How easy it was to pry, to eavesdrop on the life of the house and those within it. A memory came and went before she had time to pluck it out of the stream and she returned to the intruder: it would have been even easier to burrow into the trench in the dark, when the back of the house shone out and the trees lay in darkness. He could have watched them, learned their habits, their routine. Did Matthew Duncan use a glass for his beer or did he drink from the bottle? Where did Mrs. Duncan sit to watch television?

  Madison examined the damp ground and the knots on the tree roots: someone could have made a nest for himself there. She looked across to the house, pulled out her cell and dialed.

  Sorensen picked up. “Madison?” she said.

  “Hey, Amy. I’m running a little experiment. I’ve found a good place where the killer could have kept an eye on the house. I need you to walk up and down the room and see if you can spot me.”

  “Haven’t played hide-and-seek with my kids for a while . . .” she replied and ran her gaze over the line of trees on both sides of the house, first from the living room then from outside on the deck.

  After the third time her eyes had passed over Madison without seeing her, the detective called her back.