The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(25)

Madison focused on the raw skin on his face: someone had done that to him very deliberately. It could be violence-prone burglars out on a rob-and-violence kick, or it could be someone already in the vic’s life who had reason to be unhappy with him. If it was the latter, unpalatable as that might be, they had a much better chance of finding the culprits swiftly; if the attack was random, their search would be harder and the outcome much more uncertain.

The ME’s people started to prepare the man on the chair for transport; a puff of wind brushed his graying hair. Madison zipped up her coat. Fellman was right: they needed to get everything they could out of the scene before it blew away. The CSU investigators lived their lives in a daily struggle to protect and preserve, and today was not going to be a good day.

“Madison.” Spencer had returned. “Dunne and I are going to the victim’s residence. Can you go with the doc? Anything he finds, we need to know about it as soon as he finds it; we can’t wait for the final report.”

“No problem.”

The first responding officer crossed the green and nodded to Dunne, who knew just about everybody who carried a badge in King County.

“So far no one saw anything,” he said to Spencer. “The only witness we have is the guy who reported it, and the medic had to give him a sedative.”

“We need to know which of his neighbors got home the latest, who walked or drove past the house, or who looked out their own window and saw nothing. We need a time line of the perps’ movements,” Spencer replied.

“Got it.”

Madison looked around. It seemed to be getting darker—after a brief moment when it could have gone either way, the day had apparently decided to cloud over and stay as close to night as possible. The small rectangular screens held by the onlookers looked like pale, unimpressive flares. Nevertheless, Madison thought, it was worth keeping an eye on both those observers and whatever was uploaded to the Web.

“Did we get footage of the crowd?” she asked Dunne quietly, her back to them.

“Absolutely.”

Spencer and Dunne left for Warren Lee’s house, to face only God knew what. Madison stood in the spot where the chair had been, feeling the chill and looking in the direction where Mr. Lee would have been looking had he been alive, and she wondered why if you kidnapped and killed a man in Rainier Valley, you’d then drive him all the way to Georgetown to leave him under two massive water towers due northwest.

She was crossing the green when the first raindrop hit; nearby a CSU officer swore under his breath.





Chapter 12





After the ordered chaos of the secondary, outdoor crime scene, the autopsy room was all sanitized air and clean, sharp corners. Walter Lee was laid out on the table in a pool of glaring light. Metal instruments clanked against metal surfaces as Fellman and his assistant, both in appropriate hazmat suits and wearing goggles, went through the external examination. Fellman spoke into a mike suspended above the table; his commentary would become the official report.

First they had cut through the garbage bag and the coils of duct tape, which together with the chair and the pajamas had been sent to the lab. Madison—in a disposable protective suit without the face and eye protection—stood at an appropriate distance.

Lengths of wire were still taut around the man’s wrists and ankles. The assistant had snipped the ends off, careful to avoid knots and twists and documenting each step with multiple-perspective photographs.

The doctor picked up the man’s right hand and peered at it through a magnifying lens. “No skin under the nails,” he said.

He hadn’t had a chance to fight back, Madison thought.

Fellman turned the hand over, examined the palm, then repeated the process with the other hand.

“Nail marks?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “Quite deep.”

Madison leaned against the wall: nail marks in the palm meant the fists had been clenched. It meant a high degree of pain.

The doctor reached for one of the movable lights and pulled it toward him until it hung above the man’s head. The assistant took various samples from the areas of raw skin and collected some of the dried gray froth around the man’s lips.

“There was vomit on the pajama top,” Fellman said to Madison without turning.

“I saw it,” she replied. “He threw up from the pain?”

“Not sure,” Fellman said, bending close to the man’s face and sniffing.

He picked up a small flashlight and opened the mouth. “The inside of the cheeks and the throat are very inflamed. I think he threw up because he was forced to ingest something. It smells chemical.” He straightened up and turned to her. “Smells like a cleanser.”