Free Dark Specter by Michael Dibdin

didn’t have a life , so why should he have an alibi? And while he did admit to having a gun, it turned out to be a .30-caliber Remington hunting rifle. He claimed that he had spent the day painting the Bellevue apartment and had heard of the killings on the radio as he was driving home. He was offered and accepted a polygraph test, which he passed. Tests for nitrates on his hands and face proved negative. His fingerprints had been found at the scene, but not on the bodies or clothing, and since he regularly visited the house, and had lived there until recently, this proved nothing.
    There wasn’t enough evidence to hold Wayne Sullivan for the killings, but Kristine Kjarstad ran a computer scan which showed that there was a warrant out in his name for unpaid traffic fines amounting to $145. Sullivan couldn’t pony up, so he was taken across the street to spend the night in the King County jail. Meanwhile Kjarstad obtained a warrant and ordered a search of the house in Renton. This turned up a .22 automatic pistol belonging to one of the other residents, but it was loaded with a different type of ammunition from that used in the killings and showed no sign of having been recently fired. Moreover, the absence of spent cartridges at the scene meant that the perpetrator had either carefully collected them after shooting—in itself inconsistent with the domestic scenario—or had used a revolver instead of an automatic.
    Then two things happened that changed the whole tenor of the case. The first was that the social worker looking after Jamie Sullivan contacted the police with the news that the boy had started to talk about what had happened. Kristine Kjarstad tried without success to get him to respond directly to her questions, but the foster mother reported that Jamie had told her that he had been concealed behind a service hatch in the furnace housing as part of a game of hide-and-seek with the other two boys. While there, he had heard strange voices in the house. One had said something about “a piece of wood,” presumably referring to the panel covering Jamie’s hiding place, which had fallen off. The other man had used the name “Russ.”
    If this was true, it explained why Jamie had survived the slaughter. However, its real significance lay in the fact that it suggested that there had been at least two killers, neither of them known to Jamie. Unfortunately its value was diminished by the source. Jamie Sullivan had had plenty of time to think the situation through and decide what story to tell. The part about hiding in the furnace hatch might well be true, but suppose the person he had seen from his refuge had not been a stranger. That would explain his shock, his initial refusal to speak, and the elaborate and unlikely tale he had finally come up with, as well as his continuing reluctance to expose himself to cross-examination by the police. The cover story must be as different from the truth as possible: two men, not one, and safely anonymous strangers, not the all-too-familiar figure of his own father.
    But even as Kristine Kjarstad was digesting the implications of Jamie’s reported statement, a second development promptly superseded it. One of the two men Sullivan had been sharing the house in Renton with appeared at the courthouse and paid the fines outstanding in Wayne’s name. Since they still lacked sufficient evidence to press murder charges, the police had no choice but to release Sullivan. When he was informed of this, however, the prisoner refused to be released and demanded to speak to Kristine Kjarstad.
    Fearing some kind of protest against his unjust detention, Kristine asked Steve Warren to sit in on the interview. Sullivan was tall and rangy, with a sad, defeated face framed by a bushy brown beard. His piercing green eyes looked restlessly around the room as though on the alert for insult or aggression. He sat down opposite the two detectives and asked for a cigarette.
    “This is a no-smoking