“Do we know why ‘there’ was there?” Madison said. “I mean, did Warren Lee have any connection to that spot? Far as I could see, he never worked at the reservoir, and no one around there knew him.”
“No connection to his life that we can see,” Spencer replied.
Madison went back to typing up her interviews. Lieutenant Fynn was waiting for Spencer to come up with motive and suspects, and for the moment he had neither. What he had was a brutal home invasion that had ended with the victim being dropped off in a spot known for its water towers. Madison had not read the medical examiner’s report sitting on top of Dunne’s desk—she didn’t need to. It had taken a very long, hot shower to wash off the autopsy room from her skin.
The man on the chair had found posthumous fame if not fortune at the hands of the press. Quick to catch the details that mattered, online and in print, the media grabbed the story and shook it hard for all it was worth: a sadistic murder, the torture of a defenseless man taken from his own bed, the body dumped in such an unusual manner. Select words had been picked up by the search engines and YouTube; crime-scene footage shot with cell phones—grainy and shaky but perfectly clear—was all over the Web. The words were torture, murder, Seattle, and, Madison found out to her surprise, chair.
The city reacted the way it did when a person who is not involved in a life of violence meets a violent death: it held its breath, waiting for law enforcement to comfort and reassure with its own set of words. The killers were known to the victim, possibly a drug deal gone wrong, possible retribution, leads are being followed, and, most important, arrests have been made. And when no such reassurance was forthcoming—because Warren Lee had no ties to gangs and not so much as a parking fine to his name—the city held its breath.
Chapter 15
Madison finished typing the interviews, printed them, and left the pages on Spencer’s desk; Spencer was in Fynn’s office, having what was, no doubt, going to be a very brief conversation on the Lee case.
She checked the wall clock, turned off her Anglepoise lamp, and shrugged on her jacket.
As she was leaving the detectives’ room, she noticed that Tony Rosario’s desk had been cleared of papers—the man must be on yet another medical leave. She had never seen him look anything other than stick-thin and gray-faced; maybe that’s what fifteen years in Homicide do to you.
She had found out what she could reading the reports on Cruz, Kendrick, and McMullen—the three men Detective Frakes had identified in the David Quinn file. At different times they had individually been charged with a variety of felonies from insurance fraud and corruption to all colors of assault, malicious harassment, and coercion, which fit with the potential protection motive for the abduction of the children. Eduardo Cruz had died in 1987, a hit-and-run that had first left him in a coma for three days. The driver was never found. The second, Leon Kendrick, had withdrawn from the business and moved to California in 1998, never to spend a single day in jail. The last of them, Jerome McMullen, was doing time in the Bones, the McCoy State Prison north of Seattle, for extortion.
Files and reports were useful, but, as always, there was much that hadn’t made it onto the page. If Madison wanted to find out about what things were like on the street in 1985, she had to go to someone who had been there. Before the Internet, before e-mail and text messaging, before the dozens of ways in which information was acquired or dispersed, encrypted or straight, before all this there was Jerry Wallace, who always knew who was doing what, where, and for how much, and he would be happy to share that information for a fee. He didn’t take sides and was consulted by all, the Switzerland of the West Coast crime scene.
Detective Frakes had said that after the boys’ kidnapping, a shroud of silence had fallen on the informants’ community in the city, but now, twenty-five years later, there was no harm in trying for a chat with Seattle’s retired information bureau chief.
Wallace lived off Highway 165 just before the bridge that led into Burnett, in Pierce County. Madison didn’t want to call: this was a conversation that needed a face-to-face, and if Wallace was not in the mood to converse, even his reaction would be some kind of response.
The drive on 165 was uneventful. There were strips of bright February sky between the clouds, and yet darkness fell quickly after the middle of the afternoon. By the time Madison arrived, she had turned on her headlights, and they swept across a dense copse as she almost missed the turn. Wallace’s bungalow was three hundred yards off the highway, and Madison could see lights at the end of the narrow lane as she drove under the low branches.