Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  I forced myself to take a deep breath, focused on straightening out the laundry. I put on a robe before I headed towards the living room, feeling somehow that I would be at a disadvantage if I fought naked.

  She was sitting on the couch, looking out the window, and crying.

  I hated when she cried.

  “You know,” she said. “It’s like you’re two people sometimes. One is this sweet guy who spent way too much money buying me a birthday gift. You make me feel really good. Then you tell me you put somebody in the hospital, in the same way some guys talk about making a stock trade or something.”

  “He was a murderer,” I said, getting angry all over again. Why the hell did I have to justify what I did to Wendt? Especially after I’d worked so hard to make sure nobody got killed.

  “But it’s not normal!” It was one of the few times I’d ever heard her raise her voice. “I think that’s what bothers me. You don’t even see this sort of thing as unusual.”

  I started to say “it’s not,” then bit my tongue. I had one of those rare moments of clarity that hit me every so often. I spent most of my time with dead bodies, cops and criminals. The other day I had noticed that I was almost out of Vick’s Vapor Rub. I always carried a tub near the top of my valise, under my extra ammo. It was for when I had to go in a house with a body that had been dead for a while. It helped cut the smell. A little.

  I opened my mouth, realized I didn’t know what I was going to say. She was right. My life wasn’t normal.

  But I liked it.

  My phone started ringing. Audrey picked it up off the coffee table and held it out to me. We both knew it would be work. They were the only ones who ever called.

  For a second, I hated my job. I hated it because I was having weird dreams when I should have been lying there asleep with Audrey wrapped around me. I hated it because Audrey was standing there, beautiful but angry at me, and I was going to have to get dressed and leave with the tension still hanging between us.

  I sighed and held out my hand. Audrey dropped the phone into my palm.

  "Dent," I answered.

  It was Mandy. "Hey. We got prints back."

  "The victim’s or the killer’s?"

  "Both."

  Well, we wouldn't exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to put all the pieces together now. Maybe we could wrap this up soon, and I could try to sort things out with Audrey.

  "I'll be right there."

  Chapter Nine

  Central Precinct was unusually empty, even for a Saturday. I wondered how many people were taking a mental health day so they could enjoy the nice weather.

  I trudged upstairs to our office, trying to put my head in the game. This was a new experience for me. Usually, when I was working a homicide, it was all I could think about. But right now I was feeling a little cheated and resentful. I hated it when things were tense between me and Audrey.

  Maybe after this case, I'd start thinking about a new job in the Bureau. I didn't know how I'd make it happen. I spent way too much time solving crimes and not enough kissing ass.

  Maybe it was time to learn some ass-kissing skills. No matter how revolting it might be, Audrey was worth it.

  Mandy was the only one in the office. She sat in front of her laptop madly clicking away.

  "What's up, super sleuth?"

  She gave me a big grin in return and turned the screen so I could see it.

  On the screen was a mug shot of our victim. The slate under her chin said "JCPD." I flipped the page and found a report from the Junction City Police Department.

  Heather Swanson. Her name was Heather Swanson and she was 17.

  She'd been arrested on a minor shoplift, in Junction City, Oregon and taken to the police department to be mugged and printed before being released into the custody of her parents. There was also a missing persons report.

  I scanned the second report quickly, three months ago, not long after the shop lifting incident, James and Brenda Swanson had reported Heather as a missing. She was still technically a minor, hadn't been seen in a couple of weeks. She'd packed a bag and split without so much as a goodbye, pausing only long enough to clean out several hundred bucks from her parents' bank accounts.

  Mandy had even researched the parents. They looked like Joe and Suzy Homemaker, good credit, middle class jobs, no arrest records at all, no history of domestic disturbances in the past.

  Most murder victims are killed by someone they know. It was certainly plausible that Heather's parents weren't as squeaky clean as they looked. We'd go over them with a microscope later, especially dad. But for right now, they didn't feel like anything other than average suburbanites with an average screwed up teenager to me.

  I flipped back to Heather's picture again. Heather Swanson. I rolled the name around in my head, glad to finally have a name to attach to her. She looked like a Heather. She looked like somebody who had no business being dead.

  "Good work," I said to Mandy. She nodded. "What about notification?"

  "Alex called the JC police. They are on their way to the parents’ house."

  Good. It was the job of the Medical Examiners to notify families of deceased relatives in circumstances like this or arrange for it to happen. I didn't envy that Junction City cop.

  I nodded. Mandy opened another file on the computer screen.

  There was another face on top, another booking photo, this time from the Salem Police Department.

  It was the guy from the van.

  “Dammit!” I said. “It’s him. The guy from the van. I should have gotten a plate.”

  Mandy shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now, we’ve got him.”

  The photo was six months old. I tried to ignore the slate for a second and just look at the face. Young, but older than Heather, he was maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Long, limp brown hair, not styled or anything, he just looked like he needed a haircut. Narrow face, brown eyes, hadn't shaved for a day or two in the picture.

  I was always struck by how ordinary your average murderer looked. People always expected some kind of mustache twirling villain or at least a set of creepy Charles Manson eyes, but that wasn't how it usually worked. Guys who shot their wives and kids usually looked like any other guy with a wife and kids. I'd never worked a serial killer case, but I knew enough about them to realize there wasn't "a look."

  I looked at the name. Gibson Allen Marshall looked like any other twenty something slacker who didn't own a comb or a razor. The only thing remarkable about him in the photo was a busted lip.

  There was a report from Oregon's Law Enforcement Data System, which, of course, everybody abbreviated as LEDS. Marshall had a half a dozen arrests, from a couple of different cities, and a sealed juvenile record to boot. Two drunk driving arrests, one from Eugene, one from Salem. Two instances within six months where he got jammed up on multiple charges, there was a reckless driving in both of them, a menacing here, a harassment there, maybe road rage?

  There was an arrest for some credit card fraud. Then finally a disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. I checked the date on that one. It matched the photo Mandy had dug up. That made sense. I'd yet to see anybody go to jail for Assault on a Police Officer without at least one visible injury. We had a certain standard to maintain.

  I looked down the page to see if he was on parole or probation and got my first surprise. Marshall had never been convicted of any of it. Nothing. Nada. It was like it had all never happened.

  "What the hell?" I said out loud.

  "Keep reading,” Mandy said.

  I scrolled through the report. DMV records. Because of the drunk driving arrests, Marshall's driver’s license should have been suspended, and it had been for a short time after each arrest, but in each case, it had been "Administratively Reinstated." I'd never seen that before.

  She'd tracked down most of the police reports. I'd been right about the road rage. One report was from Corvallis where Marshall had rear-en
ded another driver, then wound up punching him out. A second was from the Oregon State police, Salem office. Marshall had gotten angry at another driver about a last second lane change, pointed a gun at him as they sped down the highway and damn near got himself shot by the OSP during the resulting traffic stop. Nice guy. I was glad the DMV had seen fit to give him his license back.

  The credit card arrest was from here in Portland. I scrolled through the document looking for a report but I didn't see it.

  "Where's the fraud report, the one from here in Portland?" I asked, a little annoyed. That would have been the easiest one to get.

  "It doesn't exist,” she said.

  "What do you mean, it doesn't exist?" I asked. I flipped back to the LEDS screen. There it was, he had been arrested as a suspect in a Portland Police investigation, charged with a bunch of fraud related crimes. Had the case number right there.

  "Records doesn't have the report," Mandy said. "It isn't there. They have a record of issuing the case number, they have a record of receiving the report, but it doesn’t show up in our database."

  I frowned. That wasn't supposed to happen. We'd instituted a document control and case tracking system after an external audit revealed the Bureau had a bad habit of "losing" paper work about incidents that might shine an unfavorable light on the Bureau. Now everything was electronic, and it was supposed to be impossible for a report to just disappear.

  "Want to know why the mugshot I gave you is from the State Police and not from where he was booked here in Portland?"

  That was a good point, now that she mentioned it. The arrest from here in Portland was more recent, the photo would be more up to date.

  "I give, why?"

  "Because that doesn't exist either. I got into the mugshots file. His isn't in there. Nor do we have his fingerprint card in ID division. None of it is here. Except for that little notation on the LEDS report, I would have never even known the Portland Police Bureau arrested this guy."

  I was beginning to smell something rotten. A lost report I could believe. But the mug and print card too?

  "What the hell?" I said.

  "I was hoping you could tell me," Mandy said. "My computer kung fu is pretty good, but I've never seen anything like this before."

  "Ok," I said. "That has to be some kind of computer screw up." That sounded wrong, even to my own ears. "Any idea of where this guy is now?"

  "He's had six different addresses with DMV in the last few years. In Eugene for a while, then Corvallis, up here in Portland, someplace way out in Eastern Oregon. But the piece I find interesting is this…" She moused over to another computer file.

  It was another document from DMV, this one a vehicle registration. It was for a Ford Econoline van, registered to a company, "GM Art and Photography."

  "GM Art and Photography is solely owned by Gibson Allen Marshall. He filed the paperwork with the state two years ago. I might be able to get his corporate tax returns come Monday," she said.

  Mandy looked pretty pleased with herself. She had a right to. She'd run down a tremendous amount of information in the hour since the finger prints had come back.

  I looked at the address on the registration. It was a five-minute drive from Kelly Point Park, where the victim had been dumped.

  I corrected myself. Heather had been dumped at Kelly Point Park. She had a name now.

  It was all starting to fit.

  "I know a guy who works out of North Precinct,” she said. “I had him drive by the address. I got off the phone with him right before you walked in. It's a light industrial type office complex. The van is parked out front. I just had him drive by instead of sit on the place. If Marshal is our guy, I didn't want to spook him."

  "Jesus, Mandy," I said, standing up and grabbing my valise. "Maybe I should just go home. You can call me when you're done with this guy so I can pose in the trophy pictures."

  She smiled. She deserved the praise. "What now?" she asked.

  "Let's go check it out."

  We took my car, but she drove. The sky was cloudless and almost painfully bright, unusual for November.

  The streets around Marshall's address were deserted. No traffic, but it meant we stuck out as we drove by in the Vic. I looked at the place out of the corner of my eye as we went by.

  I didn't turn my head, tried to give off no sign that I was the least bit interested in the place. It was probably more careful than I needed to be, but you never knew. It was for stuff like this that I wanted a different car than the Crown Vic. I'd been fighting that battle since shortly after I became a detective, would probably keep fighting it to no avail until I retired.

  Marshall's building was at the end of a strip of three light industrial offices. The one closest to the road was vacant. The middle one was for a pneumatic drill supply company. The third had a small sign over the door, "GM Art and Photography." There was a big glass window next to the door, with a blind drawn and closed. There was apparently not a big demand for pneumatic drills on a Saturday morning or art and photography for that matter. The only vehicle in the lot was the Ford van.

  I gathered all this in the few seconds it took us to pass the place. Mandy banged an immediate right and put some buildings between us and the office. If Marshall was inside, he was liable to be jumpy. I had a gut feeling that if he was our guy, this was his first kill. I imagined him sitting in there, looking out the blinds, waiting. I wondered if he'd seen Mandy's friend in the marked car drive by earlier, wondered if he'd just seen us drive by in the unmarked Vic. Most people wouldn't notice such things, or wouldn't think much about them if they did. But to a guy who'd just killed a girl and dumped her body, it might add up to the heat. I wished I knew enough about Marshall to guess if he was the kind to be sitting there with a rifle in his lap.

  Mandy pulled into an empty parking lot and stopped. I closed my eyes and played the drive past the office over again in my head, like a movie. The place was going to be a cast iron bitch to approach. It sat well back from the street, surrounded by open fields of weeds and scrub grass that hadn't been developed yet. Marshall could sit inside the front room with the lights off and the blinds adjusted just right so he could see out, and we would never know if he was there.

  Mandy and I got out of the car and walked over to some bushes. We could hide there and see Marshall's office. It was a long way away, but that was why I had a pair of binoculars strapped around my neck.

  I focused on the van for a good long while. It was motionless on its springs. There was no sign that anybody was inside. The office was the same. The blinds didn't move. Nobody came in or out. The pavement was still wet from last night’s rain but the space under the van was dry. Common sense said Marshall had another car, something we had yet to unearth at DMV, and he just drove the van for work. He was probably either on the run or holed up somewhere, watching the news to see if Heather's body had been found yet.

  But as I squatted there in the bushes, my thighs burning from the uncomfortable position, I got the feeling he was in there. I would never be able to say why. I saw nothing. It was just my gut churning the way it would back in Tennessee, when I would go hunting with my uncle before he died. I'd look at a stand of trees and in an instant, I'd be dead certain there was a big buck in there, one big enough to wait for. I'd find a spot and wait, sometimes for hours, sitting there with my back to a tree and gripping the worn stock of an old JC Higgens .30-30.

  When I got that feeling I was usually right. It had made the difference between eating venison and eating beans on more than one occasion. I hated beans.

  I handed the binos to Mandy and stood, grimacing at the pains that shot down my legs. Christ, I needed to get back into shape.

  She found a good spot and looked through the lenses for several minutes. I admired her patience and her stillness. It was rare these days. I bet her mom and dad never bought her a Nintendo.

  "Looks empty," she said. Then after a long pause: "But I can't shake the funny feeling that somebody's in there
."

  Interesting.

  "I think it's time to think outside the box for a minute," I said, borrowing one of Lubbock's favorite, tired expressions. I walked over to the Vic and popped the trunk.

  While the Vic lacked a certain subtlety, it did have one feature I associated with "real" cars. I defined real as being big, made all of steel, rear wheel drive, and having a trunk big enough to haul a body or two. I kept my trunk full of gear, neatly organized in nylon duffel bags. I figured if I ever needed to haul a body, I could just put some stuff in the backseat.

  I found the bag I wanted and pulled out an old black pea coat, followed by a ratty pair of corduroy pants that were big enough to go over my jeans. I put the pea coat on and then a mottled gray stocking cap. The pants were stained and torn. I used them when I worked on my house, cleaning out gutters and such. The pea coat I had picked up at a second hand shop. I completed the ensemble with a big backpack. I looked at myself in the car's mirror. It was a passable attempt at transient chic. It wasn't perfect. Anybody who knew what to look for would probably find the $250 Danner boots I was wearing an odd match for the rest of the outfit.

  Transients and street people make great covers. Most people have a tendency to look right past them, either out of fear or guilt, or just general snobbery. I bought a cup of coffee for an old homeless man once and he started crying. He told me he was afraid he’d become invisible or had turned into a ghost, because nobody seemed to notice he was there.

  I set out from the parking lot. As I walked, my body language changed. I hunched a little, took shorter steps. Anybody watching would have guessed I was a smaller man than what I was. I lost my direct stare at the world and became more furtive. I also mumbled a little under my breath, not loud enough that somebody a foot or two away could tell what I was saying, but definitely loud enough for someone to hear that I was doing it. It wasn't always mental illness that drove homeless folks to do that, but rather the grinding, constant social isolation. Try living in a city of 800,000 people sometime, where most of them won't even look at you, much less talk to you, and see if you don't start talking to yourself a little bit.