Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

“What the hell?” he demanded.

Pearce shook his head. He looked as though he was about to cry. Grabbing his mouth with one hand, he plunged past his partner and out of the front door. Robinson started after him, then turned back. He drew his pistol and stepped warily into the room. The bed unmade, female clothing strewn around, no sign of any serious disturbance. The light was dimmed by layers of grimy net curtains and a dust-laden valance of folds and flounces that resembled bad meringue. A flicker of movement caught his attention. A mobile suspended over a crib. Plastic figures of animals and birds in bright primary colors revolved slowly in the draft from the heating vent.

Then he heard a noise, somewhere between a groan and a gurgle. It seemed to be coming from the crib. Robinson remembered that the Sullivans had had another child just before they broke up. The “Accident,” Dawn called it. Kimo Robinson thought that was kind of gross, even though the little thing couldn’t understand. The noise was repeated, more urgently. He walked over to the crib, feeling awkward and incompetent. Hopefully the EMTs would know how to calm a baby.

But this baby did not need calming. Even before he reached the crib, Robinson realized that the noise he had heard was coming from beyond the window, out in the front yard, where Bill Pearce was hurling up a curdled mess of half-digested Tex-Mex. The baby, by contrast, lay quiet and still, its tiny fingers clutching at nothing, its pale blue eyes wide open, a neat, blackened hole punched in the center of its forehead. The mass of blood and brain fragments which had hemorrhaged from its nose and mouth lay congealing on the pillow and quilt.

By the time Patrol Sergeant Alex Mitchell arrived at the house, the body count had risen to four. The Fire Department’s paramedics had been and gone. Those guys would do CPR on anything with a heart left to pump, but once they looked the scene over they knew they were wasting their time there.

Mitchell had driven fast-siren and lights, touching a hundred- down Highway 169 from the headquarters of Third Precinct at Maple Ridge. “Get me a sergeant,” Robinson had blurted hoarsely over the radio. Everyone knew what that meant. To make matters worse, the field trainee had flipped completely, and it was only after another patrolman showed up to hold his hand that it had been possible to complete the search of the property. That was when they’d found the other victims downstairs in the basement, two boys about ten years old.

Next thing some woman name of Kelly Shelden turned up at the door, saying she was the person who’d called 911 in the first place.

“When I saw what’d happened I just freaked. I mean, I know Wayne’s crazy, but I never thought he’d do nothing like this. So I called Chuck, that’s my husband, and then I took Jamie across the street to the neighbors. Mr. Valdez was real nice, even though I hardly know them. He wanted to come over and take a look, but I told him, ‘You keep out of there till the police get here.’ I knew there was nothing we could do for Dawn, not that I’m a doctor or anything, but you can tell, right?”

Alex Mitchell listened with half an ear as the woman blathered on. He didn’t have time to follow the ins and outs of her story. What he had to do was call downtown. All the local TV and radio stations had scanners tuned to the police frequency, and one word about a case like this over the air would have them all banging at the door before the homicide dicks had even got their coats on. He needed a land line. The phone in the house could be evidence, so he couldn’t use that. Mitchell had never gotten over being bawled out for mishandling a scene-of-crime following a drug shoot-out in Cascade Vistas. “Procedural irregularities impacting the investigative assignment,” the report had said. That would stick with him the rest of his career, filed away in a computer somewhere.

“Let’s go back across the street,” he suggested to the woman. “You can tell me all about it there.”

The neighbor, Valdez, was an intense Hispanic with pockmarked skin and pure black eyes. His wife was talking softly in broken English to a boy of about seven or eight who sat on the sofa, staring down at his knees. Mitchell asked to use the phone. It was in the bedroom. The air was filled with musky, intimate smells.

Down at Precinct One, they went ape-shit. A quadruple slaying meant pictures in the paper, prime-time TV, you name it. When Mitchell put the phone down he found the Shelden woman at his elbow. She started in again right away, but Mitchell cut her off, telling her the detectives were on their way and would want to hear it all from her own lips. Back in the living room, the kid was in tears, weeping and sniffling. Kelly Shelden walked right by him, still trying to interest Mitchell in her story. He found it kind of weird, her showing more interest in bugging him than comforting her own son, but life was full of things he didn’t get, and some he didn’t want to.

The homicide dicks were there in twenty minutes flat. There were four of them-“One per stiff,” thought Mitchell cynically- plus all the personnel who traveled with the Van. Thanks to the grisly and still unsolved Green River murders, King County had one of the best Mobile Crime Scene Units in the business. While the detectives nosed around getting a feel for the scene, the technicians donned their protective suiting and got busy photographing and fingerprinting and vacuuming, looking for all the world like some maid brigade.

In charge of the case was Kristine Kjarstad, who ran homicide and assault investigations in the southeast district of the county, where 14218 Renfrew was located. Mitchell knew her slightly from the time they’d both spent working out of Second Precinct, and they kidded around some, the way everyone does when they’re nervous. Kjarstad was wearing a well-tailored suit and carrying one of those metal executive cases with combination locks. Like many tall women, she stooped slightly, giving her a round-shouldered slouch which undercut the power look she projected in other ways. There was almost nothing about her to suggest that she was a detective. Most people would have spotted her for a realtor or maybe an executive secretary, some wanna-be highflier gradually discovering that she was trapped between a sticky floor and the glass ceiling. Only Mitchell noted the little clues: the sensible shoes, the cheap clip-on earrings, the absence of rings or other jewelry. Fashion shoes slow you down, pierced earrings can get torn off, rings can snag on fences just long enough to get you shot.

Kjarstad’s partner was a guy named Steve Warren. Mitchell marked him down as one of those nerds with a taste for cop toys, the kind who drops a couple hundred of his own dough every month at Blumenthals on a high-tech baton or some snappy gizmo to hold your Mace canister. He wore a cheap clone Brooks Brothers outfit with a snazzy tie and carried his automatic in a soft rawhide holder clipped to the inside of his pants.

The other two dicks had just come along for the ride, but Kristine Kjarstad didn’t seem to mind. Mitchell could understand that. There may be no such thing as a good homicide, but by the looks of it this was one of the worst. It helped having colleagues around to talk you through it, to make it all seem just another detail, part of the job. The detectives weren’t even too bothered when Davidoff, the patrol lieutenant, showed up and started giving them the benefit of his wisdom and experience. Davidoff had put in time working out of the courthouse before being promoted. Now that the biggest thing in years had landed on his territory, he wasn’t about to miss out.

All this activity had drawn a small crowd of spectators, so Mitchell went to tell Kimo Robinson and one of the other patrolmen to secure the street in front of the house. The roll of official POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape ran out halfway through, and they had to use a length of orange tow rope instead. While he was rooting around in the trunk looking for more tape, Mitchell noticed one of the plastic-bagged soft toys which every patrol car carried. These were donated by members of the public, dry-cleaned and bagged so that they could be given to distressed children following automobile accidents, domestic shootings, and so on. “Yo, kid, your mom and pop are roadkill but here’s a stuffed animal.” It sounded sucky, but sometimes it helped, if anything could.