The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(44)

“I guess he didn’t know he was supposed to run,” Spencer said.

At his desk, near enough to hear every word but clearly not interested enough to participate, Detective Chris Kelly kept on typing up his morning interviews.


Madison left her desk for a few minutes in the early afternoon. She snuck into a deli and grabbed a smoked-salmon bagel and a black coffee, sitting at a window table and looking out at the street. She ate thinking about the cases and hardly tasting the food. Outside the rain was thin and gritty, more like sprayed by urban traffic than heaven sent.

She missed Brown’s insight and dry wit, for sure, but mostly she missed him at lunchtime, when more likely than not they would sit in silence and think their thoughts about the Salinger case and the shadow it had thrown over the city.

Madison, a psychology graduate, didn’t need to dig deeply into the mind to understand a young woman with no father to speak of who had connected deeply with an older, respected, male colleague. Still, awareness of how the mind worked didn’t change the end result.


Back in the detectives’ room, the teams swapped files so that Madison and Kelly could go over the Lee case while Spencer and Dunne could catch up on the Gray murder. Fynn joined them after a while. It was an informal briefing; Fynn leaned against Brown’s vacant desk and looked over Gray’s autopsy report.

Ever since Sorensen’s call, notions and facts had been shifting in Madison’s perception and finding new positions, as if one map had been overlaid on top of another, and dry land was even farther away than they had thought. The similarities in the cases so far were a deliberate and prolonged attack and, though in different circumstances, the death of the victim. In essence, torture and murder.

“Do we have a time line yet?” Fynn asked the group in general.

“It started sometime on Thursday night,” Spencer said. “Three, possibly four, intruders break into Warren Lee’s house; they wake him up and tie him to a chair in his kitchen with picture wire. The ME’s report says they used what they found lying around—cleansers, detergents—to inflict a considerable amount of pain on the guy. He has a medical condition, and his heart gives out. They wrap him up in a black garbage bag and leave him still tied to the chair by the water towers on the corner of 35th Avenue and Myrtle.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Not at Lee’s house. What we do have is a witness who could swear the body was not there at 3:10 a.m. Friday and the cyclist who called it in at 6:52 a.m. And, to make the ID easier for us, the victim driver’s license had been taped to his chest.”

“Neat,” Fynn remarked.

“That takes us to Friday morning.” Madison picked up the narrative. “Then, thirty-six hours later, Saturday evening, the CCTV at the bus station tells us Ronald Gray was followed into the restroom by two men and marched out. A third was creating a diversion for the security guards. Patrol called us Sunday morning just before 9:30 a.m.: Gray had been taken to an empty warehouse, hit nineteen times with a blunt object—the piece of wood is at the lab—and then shot in the head twice with a .22.”

“We recovered the bullets?”

“Yes, Ballistics has them.”

“And the paint flakes are telling us we are talking about the same men who attacked first Lee and then Gray?”

“So it seems,” Spencer said.

“What about the vics’ families?”

“Both unmarried. Lee has a sister in Tennessee; they hadn’t spoken in thirteen years.”

“Gray had no next of kin we can see from the records,” Madison said.

“Do the victims have anything in common?” Fynn asked. “Acquaintances, work histories, anything at all?”

“If they do, it’s not immediately evident, but we only just heard about the connection,” Spencer replied.

“Different day, different cause of death, same killers.”

“Yes and no,” Madison said as her gaze traveled over the autopsy reports, her thoughts aligning. “The crimes do have something in common: during the attacks the killers used what was present at the scene for the torture. Chemicals for Lee, a piece of wood from a pallet for Gray. Both attacks lasted between forty-five minutes and an hour. Lee would have survived the assault, and Gray would have survived the beating, but both died—one of a stroke and the other as a result of the GSWs to the head.”

Madison had not yet worked a case where torture had played a part. It happened from time to time, and those who investigated such cases would carry them quietly at the back of their minds for a long time and not talk about them at home.