The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(26)

Madison nodded. “I’m going to check in with Spencer about something.” She headed out of the room.

She had found a message from Dunne on her voice mail as they were cutting off the garbage bag, reception being what it was in the morgue. It was good news: the residence was, indeed, the primary crime scene—specifically the bedroom and the kitchen—and there were no other victims as far as they could see.

Spencer didn’t pick up, but Dunne did on the second ring.

“You’re going to need to print all the household stuff in the kitchen, from the cleansers to the tools to what have you. The doc says they might have forced the vic to swallow some kind of detergent. Did they keep him in the kitchen?”

“Yes, and the bed was a mess. Sheets yanked out—probably happened when they woke him and forced him to get up. The rest of the house was untouched except for the kitchen. We found sick on the floor, and they’re picking up all kinds of trace evidence.”

“How did the perps get in?”

“Back door. There was no alarm.”

“Does it look like a burglary?”

“Ain’t nothing to rob here, and, far as I can see, nothing was taken. He must have made a little more than minimum wage, but not much more than that. Cause of death?”

“Not yet. I’m going back in.”


Fellman and his assistant were still focused on the top half of the victim’s body. Even at a distance Madison could see that the rest of it—except for the wrists and ankles, where he had been tied—seemed unblemished. An average man, slightly overweight, whose age as given by the driver’s license was forty-nine but who looked a few years older.

Her cell started vibrating, and Madison again left the room.

“We found a whole mess of drugs in his bathroom cabinet, all prescription. I’m going to send you a picture, and you can ask the doc,” Spencer said.

“They didn’t touch the drugs?”

“No, left them where they were. The guy had more pills than Walgreens.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Madison wandered over to the vending machine at the end of the corridor and got herself a bottle of water. The autopsy room managed to be both cold and suffocating at the same time. It was the smells, Madison told herself. You could build a kind of resistance against the visuals, but the darn smells got you every time. She drank deeply, and by the time she walked back in, Fellman had performed the Y incision, and the chest cavity was exposed.

“I think we might have cause of death,” he said.

Some of the internal organs had already been removed, she noticed.

“He had an enlarged heart. There could be a number of causes for that, from coronary artery disease to cardiomyopathy, but the result was heart muscle that did not work as it should have.”

Madison checked that Spencer’s picture had arrived on her phone and showed it to Fellman.

“This is his medicine cabinet.”

“Yes, it makes sense. Have a look at his stomach contents.” He pointed at a metal bowl on a wall-mounted shelf.

Madison looked: what was in the bowl made no sense.

“I know,” Fellman said. “Hell of a last meal.”


“Are you kidding?” Spencer said.

“It was green, and if you check out the sink in his kitchen, you’re going to find a bottle of dish detergent, apple scented. They forced him to swallow it, as well as what could be clothing detergent. Fellman thinks that the streaks on his face were caused by a bleach-based cleaner.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“His heart wouldn’t have been able to take the stress. The doc said the massive release of adrenaline and cortisol would have been fatal for a heart as damaged as his was.”

Madison heard Spencer sigh, or maybe it was only a background sound.

“We’re going to get the entire kitchen packed up,” he said. “Did I tell you we found a roll of picture-hanging wire under the sink?”

“No.”

“Looks like they used what they found lying around,” he said. “Did the doc say how long?”

“No, he’ll tell us more after the tests.”

“I hope he died quickly.”

“So do I.”


By the time the autopsy was finished, it was the middle of the afternoon, and Madison couldn’t wait to be outdoors. On Cherry Street she grabbed a chicken sandwich and a coffee to go and had both while typing out her notes for Spencer’s case file.

The victim’s death was due to a preexisting condition, likely exacerbated by extreme stress. Madison wondered if it was at all possible that the intruders had not actually meant to kill Warren Lee and straightaway excluded that option: they had tied him to a chair with picture wire; there was no way that the man wouldn’t end up on the corner of 35th and Myrtle under the water towers. How much his death had surprised them and how much it had ruined their plans for the night was something the police would only discover in due course.