That gave him an idea. Picking up the bagged teddy bear, Mitchell walked back across the street to the Valdez house. The moment he got inside, he regretted his impulse. Kelly Shelden started in on him again without even pausing for breath.
“One of the detectives will be along to take your statement real soon,” Mitchell told her. “You just wait here till they get here. Don’t want to have to tell it all twice, right?”
He pushed the plastic-wrapped package into her arms. Kelly Shelden broke off in midsentence, staring with amazement at the floppy-eared teddy bear.
“For your little boy,” Mitchell explained. “Help him get over the shock.”
“My boy?” queried the woman. “How do you mean? Chuck and I don’t have any kids.”
She sounded indignant, as though Mitchell should have known this. He looked at the boy, who was sitting absolutely still on the sofa, legs clenched together, arms crossed. His eyes, dry now, stared blankly out over a comic book Mrs. Valdez had given him to read.
“I thought …” Mitchell began.
“Jamie?” Kelly Shelden cut in. “I told you. He lived there! He was there when it happened! He saw everything!”
An hour later, Kristine Kjarstad had the familiar feeling that she’d exhausted the immediate possibilities of the situation. When Alex Mitchell returned to tell her there was a material witness across the street, she’d dropped everything and gone to interview him, leaving Steve Warren to handle the scene-of-crime notes. This involved marking, measuring and recording every conceivable physical detail, relevant or not, just in case some smart-ass defense lawyer tried to throw doubt on the prosecution case by pointing out to the jury that the police didn’t appear to have noticed whether or not the windows had been washed recently, so how could their testimony in other respects be credible? It was the kind of thing that Steve Warren could be trusted to handle well, and she was happy to leave it in his hands.
Before Kristine Kjarstad could speak to the boy, she had to listen to the Shelden woman’s version of events. This was of no particular interest to her, but Kjarstad had no desire to antagonize anyone at this stage, particularly a witness who was clearly in shock. It took her the best part of thirty minutes-it felt more like ninety-to sift the facts of the story out of a mass of confused and repetitive responses. The root of the problem was that instead of calling 911 herself, Kelly Shelden had called her husband.
This is after she gets to the house and finds Dawn Sullivan lying face down on the floor. She has no idea what’s happened or what to do about it, and Jamie just sits there howling, so she calls Chuck at work, who calls Emergency. He knows all about the Sullivans, of course, so he naturally assumes that Wayne and Dawn have been duking it out again, which is why the call went out as a domestic.
Once she’d got that straightened out, Kristine Kjarstad spent another five minutes getting Mrs. Shelden out of her hair so that she could talk to the boy. She tried everything she knew, not just from training but from her own experience with her son Thomas, who was about the same age. She talked about Mr. and Mrs. Valdez, about Jamie’s clothes, about his new toy, about anything except the horrors he had allegedly witnessed. She tried to get him to look at her, to address a single word to her-any word.
And she failed. Jamie just sat there, hugging the bear listlessly and gazing into space. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language. She might as well not have been there. To all intents and purposes she wasn’t. Jamie was alone at the epicenter of a psychic blast which had wiped out all life in the vicinity. It would take rescue workers days if not weeks to get through to him. The question was what to do with him until then.
A confusing session with the attention-seeking Kelly Shelden and the idiomatically-challenged Valdez couple elicited the information that there were two more members of the Sullivan family unaccounted for, a teenage girl and the estranged husband. As far as they knew there were no other family members living locally. Mrs. Shelden insisted stridently that Jamie should come and stay with her and Chuck, but Kristine Kjarstad did not feel that this would be in anyone’s best interests. In the end she called in to DSHS and arranged for a social worker to get out there and place the boy in temporary foster care.
It wasn’t the ideal solution, she reflected as she made her way back across the street, but it was the best one available. The only responsible adult relative was the boy’s father, Wayne, and at this stage he was also the principal suspect.
The crime scene technicians were still at work in the basement, but in other respects the preliminary investigation was almost complete.
The medical examiner had come by and certified that the victims were dead, and the corpses of the mother and baby had been removed to the morgue. Steve Warren had compiled notes and sketches of every room in the house, and the other two dicks, Harrison and Borg, had interviewed the neighbors.
Mr. Valdez had been out in the front yard the whole time, working on a car, but neither he nor anyone else had seen or heard anything unusual, despite the fact that at least four shots had been fired. A magnum or a shottie might have attracted attention, but not the small-bores that inflicted these injuries. Even in the next room, a.22 or.25 sounds no louder or more alarming than a book falling to the floor. In the next house, or outside in the street, you wouldn’t even notice it.
As for Wayne Sullivan, none of the neighbors knew where he’d been living since the couple split up, or if they did they weren’t saying. Where the police were concerned, most of these people had been on the receiving end most of their lives. Talking to the cops didn’t come easy.
“But it’s got to be him,” Steve Warren asserted confidently. “He has a record of domestic violence. Only this time he went all the way, took out the whole family.”
He and Kristine Kjarstad had drifted instinctively into the kitchen, the only part of the house untouched by death. In the corner, the fridge hummed sturdily away as though nothing had happened, and at any moment the family would appear and start rooting around for something to eat.
“Except he didn’t,” said Kristine. “The boy survived somehow, the daughter wasn’t around. And what about the other kid?”
She’d just been downstairs. The basement was another world, raw, inconclusive, a place of botched projects and provisional arrangements become permanent by default. There were various utility rooms and a half-finished bar-cum-den. In the center of the floor, the furnace roared hollowly. Two rooms opened off the other wall. The bedrooms looked identical at first sight, full of boys’ stuff: maps and posters on the wall, a globe, an empty fish tank, wooden dinosaurs, a shelf of tattered books and comics, a football, a catcher’s mitt, unwashed clothes strewn on the floor, Lego pieces, a marble, coins, a shell collection. But the two cadavers which lay stiffening on the bed and the floor didn’t conveniently fit the matching decor, because the fourth victim was clearly Asian.
“Then there’s the MO,” Kristine Kjarstad continued. “This guy sounds like a violent slob, a wife-beater. You’d expect him to use a shotgun, something messy like that, not a neat shot to the back of the head. This looks more like an execution.”
Warren shrugged uneasily.
“Maybe there’s a drug angle. They could have gotten involved with the gangs …”
His voice trailed away. He looked around at the line of stoneware jars marked Dawn’s Kitchen, the dirty dishes stacked at all angles in the sink, the stove cover set with pictures of birds, a pizza delivery box with one limp slice inside, an open box of Cheerios, the unicorn spice rack, an empty plastic gallon milk container, the mock-crochet sign reading Bless This Mess…
His face sagged suddenly. He looked old and lost.
“Jesus Christ,” he said quietly. “What is this?”