Dark Specter (12 page)

It was a slow news day in the Northwest, and the early edition of the
Seattle Times
featured a heavily condensed version of the story in its Across the Nation column, squeezed up against an advertisement for a shoe sale at Nordstrom’s department store. In the night final which Kristine Kjarstad read that evening at home, this had been dropped in favor of a piece about the drugs charge which had been brought against one of the pitchers for a leading American League team. Kjarstad skimmed the column briefly before turning to the Arts section to read about a movie she was thinking of seeing.

Almost two months had gone by since the shootings at Renfrew Avenue. The news that Wayne Sullivan had confessed had created a sense of euphoria and relief that was as intense as it was short-lived. Seattleites liked to think of their city as a civilized haven, as temperate as its mild, cloudy climate, immune by its very nature to the epidemic of crime which had turned so many other urban centers into virtual war zones. At the same time, everyone knew that out-of-staters were moving there, partly because of the area’s reputation as peaceful and livable, and there was growing concern that they would bring their problems with them.

So when something like the Renton killing occurred, a houseful of people shot dead in broad daylight without any evident motive, everyone’s worst fears appeared to have been realized.
Any
outcome would have been a relief from the swirling, formless terrors of the community’s collective imagination, but Wayne Sullivan’s confession was the very best news anyone could have hoped for. People might be shocked by what Sullivan had done, but at least they could understand it. Hell, we’ve all been there at some moment or other, if we’re honest.

Above all, they were relieved to find that it posed no threat to them. Far from being the random slaughter it had at first appeared, this was a situation-specific killing. What had taken place was a private affair between Wayne Sullivan and his family. As for that poor Chinese kid, he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could’ve happened to anyone.

There was thus intense pressure on the police in general, and on Kristine Kjarstad in particular, to come up with evidence to corroborate Sullivan’s statement so that charges could be brought. This they had failed to do.

Kristine had known the attempt was doomed from the moment she and Steve Warren had interviewed Sullivan at the courthouse following his unexpected admission of guilt. Things had begun promisingly enough, with Wayne giving vent to obviously genuine feelings of hostility regarding his ex-wife.

“She tried to take the little ones away from me,” he explained in a voice filled with hurt. “She shouldn’t ought to’ve done that. I don’t care about her, but those were my children, the only thing I have in this world. She tried to take them away and form them in her image. No one has the right to do that. I told her. ‘My boys’d be better off dead than brung up by a slut like you,’ I said.”

Kristine waited for him to go on, but he seemed to have lost the thread.

“What happened then?” she prompted.

Sullivan’s eyes darted around the room, as if searching for inspiration.

“She started in at me, calling me a no-good, worthless loser who wasn’t fit to father a dog. I just lost it. I took out this pistol I’d brought with me and I blew her away. Then I got to thinking ’bout the kids, all alone in the world with no one to look after them. And them knowing their dad killed their mom and all. So I knew I had to kill them too. It was for the best. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Kristine Kjarstad nodded sympathetically. So far, so good, she thought. Everything Sullivan had said rang true. Now they just had to sort out the details and type up a statement for him to sign.

“Where did you get the gun?” she asked.

Wayne Sullivan hesitated.

“Guy in Seattle sold it to me. You can get anything you want there, you got the cash.”

“And where did you get the cash?”

Another hesitation.

“I’d saved it up. I was going to take the kids to Disneyland, but she wouldn’t let them go, the bitch. Said I was a bad influence.”

Kristine frowned slightly. She had the feeling she was listening to something which
almost
made sense, but didn’t quite. It was easy to imagine Wayne making extravagant promises to his children, particularly after a few drinks, and equally easy to imagine Dawn putting him down contemptuously. What wasn’t so easy to believe was the idea of him actually getting the money together. She’d seen how Sullivan had been living. He didn’t strike her as someone who was into delayed gratification for himself, never mind others.

“What kind of gun was it?” she asked.

Sullivan glanced at the uniformed man who had brought him over from the jail, and who was now chewing his nails at an adjoining desk. He shrugged.

“I don’t know. I just know it worked. Guy I bought it from took me down the alley, loosed off a few rounds. I knew it would do the job.”

“But it was an automatic?” Steve Warren put in.

Kristine glanced at her partner in surprise. Luckily Sullivan didn’t catch her expression. He nodded.

“Sure.”

“So how come there weren’t any ejected cartridges at the scene?” Warren demanded.

Sullivan looked around nervously.

“The, uh …? Oh, I guess I picked them up.”

“Why did you do that?”

There was no reply.

“And where is the weapon now?” asked Kristine Kjarstad.

This time, Wayne Sullivan had his answer ready.

“Bottom of Puget Sound. I rode the ferry over to Bremerton, dropped it over the side halfway across.”

“Let’s go back to the killing,” said Warren. “You said your old lady started badmouthing you so you shot her.”

Sullivan nodded.

“So you two were just sitting there …”

He broke off.

“Sitting? Standing?”

Sullivan shook his head.

“I don’t know. Standing, I guess.”

“You were standing there chatting, and she said something you didn’t like. It was an impulse thing, right?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t tie her up first, anything like that?”

“Why would I do that?” said Sullivan with a puzzled look.

“And the kids?” demanded Kristine, keeping up the pressure. “How did you kill them?”

Wayne Sullivan flinched visibly. He didn’t mind discussing his wife’s death, but his children were another matter.

“Same way,” he replied shortly.

“What about the Chinese boy? You said your own children would have had no one to look after them, but Ronnie Ho had a family. Why did he have to die too?”

Sullivan shrugged.

“I guess I kind of got carried away.”

“What time did all this happen?”

“Sometime in the afternoon.”

“When we first questioned you, you said you’d been painting an apartment in Bellevue all day.”

“That’s right!” Sullivan exclaimed indignantly.

Kristine Kjarstad nodded.

“We checked into that, and we found a witness who saw you at the apartment block shortly after two that afternoon, just after the bodies were discovered. That’s a twenty-minute drive from Renton. There’s no way you could have got back in time.”

She glanced quickly at Steve Warren, who seemed to be about to protest. Leading questions about the type of gun used were one thing, inventing nonexistent witnesses another. She gave her partner a hard look.

“I did it earlier,” Sullivan said at last.

Kristine Kjarstad nodded helpfully.

“How much earlier?”

“On my lunch break. I didn’t want the boss coming by and finding I wasn’t at work. It’s tough to get jobs these days.”

He looked up at Kristine, as though to confirm the clinching effect of this down-to-earth detail.

“So what time would that have been?” she asked.

Sullivan considered.

“Between twelve and one, maybe.”

“And you were back at work by one?”

Sullivan nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I was listening to the radio while I got the paint ready. Thought there might be something about it on the news.”

Kristine Kjarstad was silent.

“What’s the deal here, anyway?” Sullivan demanded with a touch of anger. “I told you I did it! That’s all that matters.”

He was clearly aggrieved at the way he was being treated. He had voluntarily confessed to the murders, thereby saving the police a whole lot of trouble, and what happened? They started fussing over details and looking for discrepancies, just as though it was his innocence he was trying to establish, not his guilt! Why didn’t they just book him and be done with it?

Kristine Kjarstad would have been only too happy to oblige, if she’d thought she could take the case to the DA’s office with the slightest chance of success. Unfortunately that was out of the question. Wayne Sullivan’s spirit might be willing, but his story was weak. The chronology he’d come up with to accommodate the imaginary witness who’d seen him at Bellevue shortly after two o’clock was the final blow. Before she was shot, Mrs. Sullivan had left a message on her friend Kelly Shelden’s voice mail. Like all such messages, it had been dated and timed, proving beyond doubt that Dawn Sullivan had been alive at seventeen minutes past one that afternoon. If Wayne was at work by one o’clock, there was no way he could have killed her.

Over the next two days, Kjarstad and Warren, working in relays with Harrison and Borg, took Wayne Sullivan’s story to pieces like kids disassembling a junked appliance. It was hard work. Sullivan had clearly hated his wife’s guts and resented her influence over the children, particularly the two boys. He was also grieving in a mute, inarticulate way for their deaths, and feeling guilty for having left them alone and defenseless. The scenario he had invented satisfied and explained all these emotions, as well as casting him as a star player instead of a weak, ineffectual onlooker in his own tragedy. It took a long time—much longer than it would have done if he
had
been guilty—to break him down and force him to admit that his confession was false.

With Wayne Sullivan’s release, the investigation had to start all over again from scratch. But in the absence of any other leads, the case was in practice relegated to inactive status. In most homicides the perpetrator is arrested within hours of the crime, often at the scene. At the very least his identity is established, and it is just a matter of waiting until he is picked up. Intensive, time-consuming investigations of cases where there is no known suspect are simply not cost-effective.

Kristine Kjarstad had gleaned only one additional piece of information since then. A month after the shootings, Jamie Sullivan and his sister Megan moved to Nebraska to live with their maternal aunt. Before they left, Kristine spoke with the boy. By now he had recovered, as much as he ever would, from the shock of what had happened. It had become a story, and Jamie no longer had any problems talking about it. He confirmed to Kristine Kjarstad the account which had been passed on earlier by the social worker, and added one further detail: the man who had come down to the basement of the house that day had been wearing a pair of expensive athletic shoes. He had even been able to identify the model, the Nike Air Jordan.

I
made a vow never to let chance interfere in my arrangements again. My presumption was punished, as it seemed, in the most terrible way.

One day in early spring, three or four months after my meeting with Sam, our son, David, came back from school with an invitation to a birthday party in his lunchbox. A bunch of the kids in his class were going, he told us, displaying the card decorated with red and blue balloons and a clown’s exaggerated rictus.

Like many only children, David found socializing problematic, alternating between bouts of bossy domination and moody withdrawal. Rachael and I were the more disturbed by this because we knew that he was not going to have any siblings. Her second pregnancy had been terminated as a result of complications which precluded the possibility of her having any more children. Birthday parties, with their structured activities and reassuring rituals, were one of the few occasions for peer interaction which David didn’t have to be talked into. Neither of us knew the child whose party it was, a girl who had only just moved to the school, so we called another couple whose son was the nearest thing David had to a friend. They said that he was going too, and offered to collect both boys from school and drop them off at the party. I would then pick up David on my way back from work.

The afternoon the party was held was not an easy one for me. A group of students had lodged a formal complaint against the low grades I had given them, on the grounds that they were the result of “white male Eurocentrist bias.” My initial reaction was to laugh this off, but in the course of an hour-long meeting with the associate dean I quickly learned that it was no laughing matter. I had told one of my better classes a few anecdotes about my experiences at schools in Europe, naively thinking that this would help overcome the teacher-student barrier and foster a sense of shared purpose. This story had apparently gone the rounds of the college, and when I penalized a different group of students who had persistently underperformed, it was raised as a way of bringing my judgment into disrepute. I had expected the associate dean to back me up, but by the end of the interview I had been made to feel that it was I who had flunked some basic test, not the students.