“Do you smell it?” Madison asked.
Kelly grunted.
The kitchen was an IKEA knockoff, and Madison found what she was looking for on the stove: a tall saucepan, the kind used to cook pasta. She lifted the lid and found the source of the pungent smell: floating in a few inches of grayish water, a black, ashen mass with something fused to it, something plastic that had melted into burning paper.
Ronald Gray didn’t have a fireplace; he had a smoke alarm in the living room and a kitchen stove. If he needed to burn something, he didn’t have many options. Madison looked at the pattern of disarray in the rooms. Part of it had been generated by packing the suitcase as quickly as his hands would allow him; part of it had been the result of his searching for something, maybe a couple of items, which, once found, had ended up in the saucepan and been set alight. Once he had achieved the required level of destruction, Gray had poured in the water to douse the burning and replaced the lid.
Madison pulled out a cheap digital camera that she kept in her bag and started taking pictures. There was a trail—she could almost sense it—in Gray’s frantic comings and goings from room to room. It might tell her what he was trying to obliterate. It was the first thing she had in her hand that whispered motive.
It didn’t take long to go through the apartment, and nothing else held Madison’s interest as much as the saucepan and its contents. As she was locking the door, Lauren and Joyce walked up the stairs.
“How did it go?” Madison asked.
“As predicted,” Joyce replied.
Madison handed her the keys. “The saucepan on the stove. He used it to set fire to something very recently.”
“You owe us breakfast, Madison,” Frank Lauren said as the detectives were leaving. “In a place with cloth napkins.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Madison knew just how good they were, and how undaunted by circumstances: if there was something useful to the case in that restroom, Lauren and Joyce would have found it, no matter how many layers of crud they had to go through to collect it.
The afternoon had slid into an early night, and the road was slick with rain. It was past the end of their shift, but Madison wanted to go to the morgue to see what the autopsy had revealed. She turned to Kelly, sitting in the passenger seat, his face barely lit by the streetlights’ orange glow.
“I’m going to see Fellman,” she said. “Would you like me to drop you off at the precinct first?”
Kelly turned. It was their first conversation of the day. “Why?”
“Because it’s past the end of our shift, and I’m not familiar with how you like to work.”
Kelly nodded. “So you can tell the boss you stayed on and I clocked off?”
“No, I couldn’t care less about the hours you keep. I will miss you, but I’ll survive,” she replied. “Honestly, Kelly? I don’t care. We made it through the shift without killing each other, maybe due to the fact we exchanged three words in total, and in my book that’s an achievement. So far, so good. I’m asking you again, do you want me to drop you off? It’s not a trick question.”
Kelly thought about it for a second. “Let’s go to the morgue.”
“Wonderful.”
They found Dr. Fellman in his office, still wearing his scrubs and typing a report.
“Nineteen blows to the body,” he said, “including three to the head. The lab has the piece of wood they used. It was about this wide.” He held his fingers three inches apart.
“We saw the men on CCTV; they picked him up at the bus station. We saw three; we think four on the whole.”
“It would make sense. There was bruising on the arms where they restrained him; the way the fingers were splayed, I’d say large hands. At least two people, plus another who was doing his work with the wood.”
Madison tried not to think about how Ronald Gray must have felt, how terrified he must have been. She tried to keep it a sequence of events, and still there was something about fear, about that sheer, overwhelming panic that she had seen in his home, that kept coming back to her.
“What can you tell from the blows?” she asked.
The doctor sighed. “They didn’t want him unconscious—this much I can tell you. The blows were designed to hurt but not to kill: his internal organs were intact, and there were no breaks except for his nose. There was dirt and grit under the fingernails—he dragged himself into that corner with the last shreds of energy he had. He would have survived if not for the GSWs.”
“Anything else?”
“He had Vietnamese soup before they grabbed him.”
“There’s a restaurant just by the bus station.” Madison nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”