by Karen Dionne
He left the first aid supplies on the table and went into his bedroom to get dressed. Jeans and a T-shirt, topped off with two thick hoodies. His trademark look. Part style, partly because of the weather. Holder could have added body armor beneath the layers since it was winter and nobody would have noticed, but he preferred to work clean. It wasn’t that he was reckless, or that he enjoyed living on the edge. It was just that you could play your role better if you were authentic all the way down to your skivvies. No badge, no vest, no gun. Just your own quick wits and a devotion to the greater good.
He went back to the kitchen. Drowned a bowl of high-fiber cereal with skim milk and opened his laptop. Logged onto the King County Sheriff Department website and scanned yesterday’s activity. Undercover didn’t mean out of touch. It was important to keep up with what was going on. Maybe somebody he was getting close to got arrested. Maybe somebody he needed to steer clear of got out.
His phone rang. Not the burner he carried with him when he was hanging with the tweakers, but the cop phone he left at his apartment. He picked it up. “Holder.”
“Gil here.” Gil Sloane, Holder’s contact officer and supervisor at County, a twenty-year narco with a shaved head and a scrappy fighter’s build who rarely smiled. A no-nonsense cop who didn’t pull punches, the kind of cop who always had your back. The kind that Holder aspired to be.
“Heard you saw some action yesterday.”
“Yeah. Cooker set hisself on fire. My snitch. At least I hoped he was going to be.”
“Heard you saved his kid.”
“I did, for reals.”
“I wish you hadn’t. I’m not saying you should have let him turn to toast, but you should have let somebody else take care of it. You could have blown your cover.”
“I hear you.”
“You’d better. You check the BOLOs?”
“I’m lookin’ at ’em now.”
“One’s in your area. SPD asked us to keep an eye out.”
Holder picked up on the subtext. Lame-ass SPD making us do their job again. The tension between the two departments wasn’t territorial. More a matter of too few cops with too much to do.
“I’ll check it out.”
He hung up and scrolled through the reports until he found the one for Rainier Valley. He had a good idea of what it was he was going to find, and his hunch was correct: the cops were looking for Tiffany in connection with her boyfriend’s murder. He memorized the details, even though he knew most of them already, and shut down his laptop. Maybe he’d go on a scavenger hunt this afternoon. He didn’t have anything better to do, and he had a couple ideas where she might be. Wouldn’t hurt to get in good with the SPD. You never knew. He might decide to give homicide a try one day.
* * *
“Yo, fools. Wassup?” Holder shut the door of his dark blue late-model sedan with his foot and swaggered over to where Logic and Company were clustered beneath an overpass, stomping their feet and clapping their arms with their hands to stay warm. It couldn’t have been more than 40 degrees outside. Holder had heard the weather dudes predicting snow. The gang had a fire going in a barrel. Somebody had painted the symbol for radioactive waste on the side as a joke. At least, Holder hoped it was hand-painted.
“Logic’s moms throw y’all out?” he drawled as he sauntered up and held his hands over the barrel. “I don’ blame her. Bunch o’ skanky assed tweakers wearin’ out the furniture.”
“His mom’s on one of her things.” Ridgeback sniffed and wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. “Cops come ’round yesterday, freaked her out. Logic told her they wasn’t lookin’ for dope, or you know where he’d be by now, but you know how she is.”
Holder did indeed know how Jackie was. He’d already gone by the trailer. “If the cops were there yesterday, how come she’s still swingin’ her tomahawk today?”
“She says they came back again last night,” Logic said. “She saw ’em ’cross the street, sittin’ an’ watchin’ the house. She thinks they’s some big bust goin’ down. Made me take all my stuff and clear out.”
“So what—you gonna make this your new permanent address?” Holder swept his arm to take in the piles of trash blown against a chain link fence, the crumbling bridge supports, the cement pillars covered with graffiti. “Oh yeah. Put a couch over there, set up your TV in front of it, table ’n chairs over here, hang a picture an’ call it home. Y’already gots the fridge.”
Ridgeback snorted.
Logic glared. “Yo, fool—you think livin’ in your wheels is better?”
“Least they take me where I wanna go. An’ my wheels is warm. Move over, big guy.” Holder nudged Ridgeback to the side so he could move in closer to the barrel. “My balls is ’bout to fall off.”
“Better’n bein’ dead. Cops found Tiff’s new man with a bullet in his head.” Logic pointed his index finger like a gun and held it against Holder’s forehead and grinned.
“For reals? Man, that’s cold. Does Tiff know?” Play it safe by playing dumb. But how did Logic know that Lance had been shot in the forehead? Holder had only found that out when he read the BOLO report. Was it a wild guess? Or something more?
Logic shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care.”
“Logic, baby!” a woman’s voice called out. “There you are!”
Holder followed the sound to the top of the hillside. Two figures were working their way down the embankment, wearing long, puffy down coats with their hats pulled low and scarfs wound around their necks. It took him a few seconds to realize who they were. Claire and Tiffany, half froze and looking like they’d been walking the streets all night looking for dope, or sex, or both. He almost laughed out loud. Police runnin’ all over the city looking to find Ms. Tiff, an’ she comes strolling up to him.
Claire sidled up to Logic and slid her arm through his, giving him her most innocent, wide-faced smile. Claire was pretty. Dark hair, dark eyes, mostly clear skin. She hadn’t been using that long. Give her a few years, and she’d be as skanky as any tweaker with her cheeks eaten away and her teeth rotted. If she made it that far.
“Hey, baby.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Heard you got some stuff.” Her eyes were unfocused, hungry.
“Depends on what you got.” Logic pinched her bottom.
She squealed and slapped his hand away. Rubbed her rear. Moved back in.
“Whatever you want, baby. You know I’m yours.”
“How ’bout a smoke?” Tiffany asked Holder. Beneath her hood, her nose was red and her lips were blue. There was a cut over her left eyebrow that hadn’t been there the last time Holder had seen her.
He gave her the cigarette he kept behind his ear and held out his lighter. She cupped her hand over his and bent down to shield the flame. Her hands were shaking, the backs raw from scratching. Must not’ve scored in a while.
She took a drag, straightened, let it out. Closed her eyes as the nicotine flooded her system and moved in closer to the burn barrel. Relaxed. Easy. Like all was right with the world. Like there was no place on Earth she’d rather be.
“Yo, Tiff.” Ridgeback looked down sadly from his great gorilla height and reached over and patted her hand. “Sorry ’bout what happened yesterday.”
“Sorry ’bout what, big guy?” She looked up at him and batted her eyes. Hoping to score.
“I gotta take a piss,” Holder said abruptly. He hurried away from the group and ducked behind a pillar. Made like he was doing what he had to do while he listened and waited for what he knew was coming next. When Tiffany began screaming, he pulled out his phone.
18
“So that’s Tiffany Crane.”
Sarah stood outside the one-way glass with Lieutenant Oakes and studied the woman in the interview room. Tiffany was small; she looked like a little girl, hunched in one of the metal chairs with her arms wrapped around her stomach, alternately crying and rocking and moaning. Her jeans were muddy, and the dirty red sweater hanging off the ends of her fingers was so
stretched out and baggy it looked like she’d been wearing it since Christmas.
Her grief over Lance Marsee’s death seemed real, despite Jaycee’s claim that Tiffany had only befriended Marsee for his money. Perhaps that was how their relationship started. But the fact that Tiffany had let Lance move in after he’d gambled away all his money seemed to indicate that her feelings for him had gone beyond avarice. Sarah hoped Tiffany would be able to pull it together enough to answer her questions. She couldn’t wait to get started. Whether Tiffany was a gold-digging cocktail waitress or had been genuinely in love with the dead man, no one knew more about Lance’s problems than she did. Surely she could throw a light on his murder, whether she’d witnessed it or not.
“How long has she been like that?” Sarah asked.
“Since they picked her up,” Oakes said. “Maybe half an hour. Somebody called in her location. Probably an undercover. Guy knew about the BOLO.”
“One of ours?”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Sarah said, though she would have liked to have had the chance to interview the person who called in the tip. Odds were good he could have told her details that Tiffany herself didn’t realize were important. Or that she wasn’t willing to offer.
“Has she said anything?”
“Not yet. But don’t get too excited.” Oakes held out his hand. “She had this.”
Sarah’s euphoria vanished when she saw the small plastic packet filled with white powder. It figured. Just as her investigation was coming together, she found out her main witness was a meth head.
“Let her sit,” she said in disgust. “I’ll be in my office.”
* * *
Goddard was waiting in the extra chair. He pointed to the clock over the door as the hands clicked to 12:46. “What took you so long?”
“Traffic.” She peeled off her jacket and hung it over the back of her chair. “Where’s your sidekick?”
“Oakes rotated him to patrol.” He nodded to the medical examiner’s reports on Sarah’s desk. “You seen these?”
“Not yet. Give me the Cliff Notes version.”
“Your Marsee was killed by a single gunshot to the forehead. Negative results for cocaine and heroin, and a blood alcohol level consistent with a guy who’d had a couple of beers. My guy was clean. M.E. ruled the cause of death was a gunshot to the back of the head.”
No surprises there. “Times of death?”
“Fuzzy. Your Marsee’s body temperature was skewed because of the open door. Mine because the body was outside for hours in a cold rain. Best she can do is narrow both down to plus-or-minus five hours.”
“So we can’t prove my guy died first.” Another disappointment.
“No. But why would we want to?”
“I spent the morning talking to the human resources manager at Stratoco. Turns out, Lance Marsee was fired four months ago after he was caught faking test results. He was also a chronic gambler—he met Tiffany when she worked at Black Bear. But here’s the kicker. Stratoco gave Lance a huge severance package when they fired him. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Hold on. The guy gets fired, and they give him a bonus? That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if it’s a payoff. Think about it. Stratoco knows their research is flawed, but they don’t want the news to get out. Maybe they’re using the data anyway; maybe they’re worried about the damage a scandal would do to their reputation. Either way, the solution is the same: get rid of my guy and pay him to keep quiet.”
“Okay, I’m buying it.”
“Good, because it gets better. My contact told me the severance package was split in half. Four hundred thousand went into a trust fund, and the rest was dispersed in monthly installments, one hundred thousand dollars a month for the first four months. Guess who was the executor of the trust. And the beneficiary.”
Goddard whistled. “My Marsee? You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“So if the medical examiner ruled that your guy died first,” Goddard said slowly as he worked out the ramifications, “my guy could have killed your guy. He certainly would have had opportunity and motive. But if my guy died first, obviously not. So okay. The autopsies aren’t going to help us. What about prints?”
“Ray’s working on it. But our victims were brothers. Your vic’s prints could be all over the trailer and mine in your guy’s apartment, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.”
“What about your witness? The girlfriend? Heard they picked her up. Maybe she saw what happened, or has some idea.”
Sarah shook her head. “The girlfriend is no good to us. She’s a tweaker. We can’t make a case off of anything she says. Who’s the beneficiary to your Marsee’s estate? That’s the person we should be looking for. Because no matter which brother died first, if your guy was the beneficiary to my guy’s trust, with both brothers dead, that person gets it all.”
Goddard laughed. “This is getting confusing. ‘My guy,’ ‘your guy,’ and one of them really is a ‘Guy.’ Maybe we should give our vics numbers.”
“Or switch to first names.” Sarah smiled. “There’s another angle we need to consider. Lance was caught faking test results. Our victims were brothers, so…”
“You think my guy—Guy—was up to something fishy, too? Just because they were related doesn’t mean they were both crooked.”
“Innocent people don’t usually get hauled out to a shipyard and shot in the back of the head for no reason.”
Goddard nodded. “True. I’ll tell the techs to look for faked research or similar unethical activity on Guy’s computer.”
His phone buzzed. He checked the display. “Sorry. Voicemail from my wife. Better call her back. I’ll catch up to you later.”
He hurried out into the hallway. Sarah tapped her fingers on her desk, wondering if she should wait for him. That was the trouble with working alongside a family man—too many demands and distractions. Not that there was anything wrong with caring about your family, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the job. Everyone who wore the badge had to make sacrifices. How many times had she had to leave Jack with Regi while she was working a case? It wasn’t as though a homicide detective could keep regular hours.
There was something she could do while she waited. A quick internet search found Tiffany’s old dupe, Desmond Whittaker, CEO of some corporate monster whose function Sarah couldn’t begin to fathom. At least not without some serious research. But it didn’t seem necessary. According to a piece in an online business magazine, Mr. Whittaker was no longer in the country, just as Jaycee had said. Sarah had never seriously considered him a suspect in Lance’s murder—why would he want to go anywhere near Tiffany again and risk his reputation—but a year-long transfer to oversee the Paris division was a pretty strong alibi. She’d get a uni to ring around to confirm, but it looked like Whittaker was out of the picture.
She checked her watch. Evidently Goddard wasn’t coming back. She stood up. Tiffany had been stewing in the interview room for forty-five minutes. Good a time as any to find out what her former star witness had to say.
19
Goddard punched in the number for his voicemail the moment he was out of earshot of Linden’s office. He’d downplayed the urgency of the call because he didn’t like mixing his personal life with his job.
Also Linden had a reputation for being so focused when she was working a case, she could get more than a little prickly if she got interrupted. But Kath hardly ever called him during work hours. And with just six weeks until the baby was due…
“John,” her message said. “Don’t flip out. I’m at the hospital. I’m fine, but—” her voice broke. “I’m having contractions. Please hurry.”
His heart plummeted. They’d known all along that Kath’s age increased the risk of a premature delivery. But a risk for something, even a higher one, didn’t necessarily mean it was going to happen. He took chances every day. In his job, at home, driving to
work. Life itself was a risk when you came right down to it, a precarious state of existence that anybody could lose at any time. No one had to tell a homicide detective how fine the line was.
Anyway, they’d done everything they could to prevent Kath from going into labor early. No working long hours. No stress. Still.
He texted her to say that he was on his way and hurried to his office to grab his coat. “I’ll be at Harborview Medical,” he called to the desk sergeant as he sprinted out the door. “Family emergency.”
“Emergency.” The word rang in his head as he jumped into his car and peeled out of the parking lot. For most people, the idea of having to deal with an emergency would throw them into a panic. But for a police officer, emergencies were practically routine. Goddard knew how to keep a cool head under pressure. A cop had to. Kath sometimes got frustrated because he didn’t freak out on the rare occasions when the girls got hurt. But how would that help the situation? Would an accident victim or a kid lost in the woods want the police officers who were helping him to panic? Goddard didn’t think so. There were two kinds of people in an emergency: those who sat on their hands and waited for someone to tell them what to do while a building burned down around them, and those who got up and got everyone out. Guess which kind he was. Just because he didn’t panic, didn’t mean he didn’t care.
As he drove, he ordered the next steps in his head. Get to the hospital. Assess the situation. Find out if Kath had actually gone into labor, and if she had, how long it was going to take. It was one-fifteen now; he had a couple of hours to see how the situation was going to play out before the girls got out of school. Depending on how things shaped up, he could call their grandmother from the hospital and she could go and stay with the girls if it looked like he wasn’t going to make it home in time. Six weeks was definitely early, but he was sure everything would turn out all right. Harborview had an excellent neonatal unit. They’d chosen the hospital for that reason. The baby’s condition might be dicey for a few days, possibly a few weeks, but they’d get through it if they had to. And without discounting in any way Kath’s genuine panic, the whole thing might be a false alarm. Maybe what she thought were contractions was really indigestion. Kath had always had a tendency to worry.
