The Killing: Uncommon Denominator

by Karen Dionne

  Holder’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. He picked it up. Claire looked over his shoulder at the display.

  “Who do you know at Harborview Medical?” Said in the tone of voice that wives had been using since the beginning of time to make their guilty husbands toe the line. Something about the way she asked made Holder wonder if she’d somehow found out about the cute nurse at the burn unit. In Holder’s experience, women seemed to have a way of picking up on things like that. Especially women who’d made up their minds that they were your girlfriend. Even though there was nothing going on between him and Claire. Serpico meets Fatal Attraction, anyone? He could see how some guys ended up with a wife and a family they hadn’t planned on or even wanted. Sometimes it was easier to just do as you were told than to cross your woman once she’d made up her mind that you were the marrying kind.

  “I asked the hospital to call me if Campbell woke up. I didn’t expect to hear so soon. Guess the poor bastard’s gonna make it after all.”

  Claire nodded and sat back. Holder put the phone in his pocket and settled his arm around her shoulder as she packed the pipe and flicked her lighter. He was okay with playing house as long as it suited his undercover role, though he still couldn’t get over how quickly she’d established them as a couple. Yesterday morning when they were under the overpass, she’d been coming on to Ridgeback and Logic. Now less than twenty-four hours later, him and her were as good as married. No wonder Ridgeback had doped him.

  He thought about giving Claire a kiss, watched her flick the lighter and hold the flame under the pipe bowl, and decided not. He felt restless and bored. Lately it seemed as though the sum total of his life had devolved into hanging out in Logic’s trailer. Back when he was working his way into the group, there had been some exciting times. Tense moments. Close calls. Now that he’d been accepted, the lack of a challenge was turning his brain to mush. Holder wasn’t sure what he expected when he’d signed on as an undercover. Not a life of non-stop James Bond adventure, but definitely nothing as mind-numbingly boring as hanging with the same sorry group of people twenty-four seven; watching movies with them, playing video games with them, drinking with them, getting high with them. Getting drugged by them. That was a new one. Most undercovers only got beat up or robbed.

  He ached for the kick of being out there. He wanted to take risks. Get shot at. Arrest somebody. Make ’em pay. Make a difference. He got that long hours with no action was part of the job. Some cops stayed under for years working a single case. And Holder was good at it, without a doubt. But he wanted more. Something a little higher on the interest scale than watching grass grow.

  “Aren’t you going to listen to the message?” Claire asked.

  He pulled out his phone and looked at the display. Got up and went out into the kitchen before he played it on the off chance that it actually was the charge nurse. Listened to the message, and felt like he’d been punched in the chest.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” Claire asked when he came back into the living room.

  “It’s Campbell.” Holder shook his head. “He’s dead.”

  “Aw, man. I’m really sorry to hear that. I know he was in a bad way, but I really hoped he’d make it. What about his little boy? What’s going to happen to him now?”

  What indeed? One more child lost. He’d planned to turn Campbell, but the man might still have ended up in prison, albeit on a reduced sentence. The kid would have gone into foster care just the same.

  Suddenly, he’d had all of Claire and the drugs and the sleazy trailer park that he could stand.

  “Why should I care what’s gonna happen to him? Fool’s only gonna grow up to be another sorry ass tweaker. Coulda done the world a favor and checked out with his pops.” He zipped up his hoodie.

  “Where you goin’, baby?” Like she thought she had a right to know.

  “Out,” he snapped. Like the henpecked husband he was pretending to be. And some people thought that women were the weaker sex.

  He felt better as soon as he was outside. Logic’s place was too claustrophobic, that was all, what with the dope fumes and the spoiled food stink and the cigarette smoke. He pulled out his keys, got into his car, and drove. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. He just needed to get away.

  He pulled off onto a dirt access road that led to the river and parked under a bridge. The underpass was vacant. Most days the place was lousy with junkies and street kids, but it was too windy and cold for hanging out today. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag and stared and smoked. The gray water suited his mood. It was hard to say why Campbell’s death bothered him so much, but it did. Even though he knew Campbell’s life going forward wouldn’t have been the same, at least he would have been alive. Alive was always better than the alternative.

  He took another long drag. Blew it out. Let the nicotine take the fight out of him. He shouldn’t let the people he was working with get under his skin. It didn’t matter what they said or did. He was just doing a job. Logic was a dope dealer and Holder had set out to take him down. End of story. Meth was a hard addiction, and Holder was doing his best to stop it. A person would have to be a fool to give it a try. A meth high was so intense, once you’d experienced it, nothing else compared. Like Claire had said, meth got you believing you were a better person than you were before you started using. It made you happy, even as it cut you off from your family and friends. No room for them in your new and improved life. No time to worry about it. All a meth head cared about was their next hit. They were probably glad that everyone from their old life stayed away so they didn’t have to deal. All they had to do was find a way to get high every day.

  That was why he wanted to get Logic. Take him down. Dealers like Logic were at the center of a spiral that grew larger and pulled everything into it until it touched more people than you could count. The scum at the bottom of a whirlpool that sucked everything down. Holder thought about the twenty-something from his last assignment. She’d known she was three months pregnant, and still she took crank almost every day. She had another kid that she was breastfeeding. She claimed the crank didn’t hurt her unborn child. Never mind the breastfeeding baby who could’ve overdosed on his mother’s milk.

  Families were the fallout. That was the real reason Holder did this job. So kids like Neil Campbell’s could have something better. He hoped the little dude got adopted. He was young and cute enough to have a chance at a new set of parents. Even one parent would be enough. Somebody like his sister. Davie would like to have a little brother. He wondered if he could talk Liz into signing up.

  He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray and started the car. Drove up the embankment and onto the highway and turned back toward Rainier Valley. Because he had to. But also because he wanted to. Because he was the bad-ass Dutch dude givin’ the sea the finger.

  30

  Sarah drove straight from the hospital to Rainier Valley. After the phone call in which she broke the news about Campbell and Goddard brought her up to speed on what he’d found out about the brothers’ test results at Rockland Diagnostics, she wished more than ever that she’d had the chance to interview Neil Campbell before he died. She was almost certain that he’d known about the Marsees’ secret project. Perhaps the three men were even working together. Just because Rutz claimed the Marsees didn’t know about their half-brother didn’t mean it was true. Rutz had lied to them on more than one occasion. Rutz had an agenda. She and Goddard just had to figure out what it was.

  Meanwhile, if Campbell had hidden his identity from his half-brothers and was indeed all Rutz had described—a man without conscience or empathy—and if his DNA also carried the double mutation, it was certainly possible that Campbell had killed Guy and Lance in order to take over the project. Sarah bit her lip at how close she’d come to finding out the truth, and clenched the steering wheel until her fingers went numb, as if physical pain could somehow dissipate her anger. She was bitterly disappointed. Sarah had a reputation for being co
ld and unemotional, but the truth was, every day, she had to fight to keep her emotions in check. She felt everything deeply. Too deeply, according to her lieutenant—and her shrink. But she couldn’t help it. When you were a cop—a cop who made judgment calls that affected people’s lives—there was always a case that ate away at you, the worry that you’d got it wrong, locked up the wrong guy. The poet said that to err was human. But how could you forgive yourself when your mistake put an innocent person’s life on the line? And people wondered why she was so driven.

  This time, she’d been so close to a solve she could feel it, like a twist in her gut or an ache in her bones. If she could have talked to Campbell, even if only for a few minutes, if she could have extracted a confession from him, she would have been at the station right now filling paperwork instead of hitting the interview trail yet again. Talking to someone who had known both Neil Campbell and the Marsee brothers was a poor substitute, but it was all she had.

  The gloves were off. No more “I can’t remember” and “I don’t knows.” This time, Sarah would get her answers.

  The rain was mixed with sleet by the time she turned into Rainier Valley. Sarah followed the now-familiar decaying streets to Tiffany’s trailer. The crime tape was gone, the front door closed. The trailer looked abandoned. Empty houses had a certain air about them that was easy to spot, hard to explain. Tiffany’s trailer had that look. More importantly, there was no red Toyota in the driveway. Wherever Tiffany was staying, it wasn’t here. Sarah supposed that if she had been in Tiffany’s shoes, she wouldn’t have wanted to sleep in the trailer where her boyfriend was killed. She wasn’t worried that Tiffany had skipped out on her. How far was a penniless tweaker going to go? She was probably off somewhere getting high. If so, Sarah would find her. The cops had picked her up once, they could do it again.

  Sarah checked her watch. Almost noon. Aside from a pack of feral toddlers breaking up the ice in the puddles at the end of the street, the park was quiet. Kids were in school, their parents at work, hookers and other denizens of the night were still asleep.

  She lit a cigarette, then sat back and watched the kids stomp and shriek as she waited on the off chance that the Toyota might return. A person could take these same kids, she reflected, dress them in clean clothes and put them in a different environment, like a field trip to a concert or a museum, and anyone looking at them would still know they were poor trailer park trash. There was an indefinable something about their appearance that went beyond their mothers’ inexpert haircuts and their ragged clothes. A combination of poor nutrition and negligent parenting that left an indelible mark.

  Sarah had that mark. The brand had faded over the years, but it was still there. Outwardly she had put her less than perfect upbringing behind her, but inside, she still sometimes felt like that frightened little girl. It wasn’t her fault. Sarah had been five when her mother left. CPS found her in the apartment after she’d spent the night alone in the dark because her mother hadn’t paid the electric bill. Child Protective Services must have come five or six times before that. Each time, Sarah tried to hide the truth. Even at that age, she knew a foster house was going to be worse. Most of them were. She’d run away a half-dozen times after that. But it was her mom who started it all when she gave Sarah up.

  She smoked the cigarette down to the filter, then got out of the car. Pulled her jacket hood over her head and made her way through the rain up the broken sidewalk. Knocked on the door. Waited. Waited some more. Turned around and scanned the street as if by looking long and hard enough, Tiffany would magically appear.

  Her gaze was drawn to the trailer across the street. The one that had hosted the meth party last night. A lamp glowed weakly through the living room curtains. The woman she’d talked to when she was canvassing the neighborhood the day Lance’s body was found had been hooked up to an oxygen tank. Odds were good she’d be home. Old people and the housebound made great witnesses. They had nothing better to do than spy on their neighbors’ comings and goings all day.

  She crossed the street. Fresh tire tracks in the driveway and a dry spot on the pavement indicated a car had recently been parked there. She threaded her way through the yard junk—a patio table and chairs sans umbrella, broken bicycles, and a kid-sized plastic basketball hoop setup minus the net—then climbed the steps to the covered porch. A clay flowerpot in the corner was tipped over and broken, spilling a desiccated cactus onto the unpainted porch boards. Empty beer bottles lined the railing. Through the thin trailer walls, she could hear a television, along with the rhythmic click and hiss of an oxygen machine.

  “Mrs. Gallagher? Jackie?” Sarah knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again. “Mrs. Gallagher? It’s Detective Linden. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Tyler, someone’s at the door!” a woman’s voice called. “Tyler, get the door!”

  Sarah waited. At last heavy footsteps shook the trailer’s floor. Clearly Tyler wasn’t the helpful type. The doorknob rattled as someone fumbled to unlock it, then Jackie Gallagher peered out. High side of forty, stringy hair, bloated face, oxygen tube shoved in her nose. She was wearing the same ratty housedress she’d had on the first time Sarah interviewed her.

  “I already told you everything,” she said. The door started to close. Sarah quickly stuck her foot in the gap.

  “I realize that, Mrs. Gallagher. And we appreciate your help.” Said with a smile, though in truth, the woman had offered Sarah’s investigation no assistance at all. “I’d like to ask you about the trailer fire across the street. We believe the two incidents might be related.”

  “Hmph.” The door closed, the chain rattled, and then the door opened wider. “I wouldn’t be s’prised. Nuthin’ but trouble in this dump.”

  “How well did you know Neil Campbell?”

  “I seen him around.”

  “And his little boy? Hugo?”

  The woman nodded. “Blond. Always with his daddy.”

  “What did Neil do?”

  The woman snorted. “What do you think? He cooked meth.”

  “Right. We know that. I mean when he wasn’t cooking. Did he have any friends in the park? Maybe spend time at the trailer next door? At Tiffany’s?”

  The woman snorted again. “More like she spent time at his.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The woman laughed. Unattractively. And her breath smelled. Sarah took a step back.

  “I mean those two were a couple long before the new boyfriend moved in.” She nodded smugly and winked as if there were more to the story.

  Confirming the account from Tiffany’s coworker, Jaycee. “And after? Did the three of them do things together?” Thinking about the secret project.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. Going in for the kill. She took her hand out of her housedress pocket and held Sarah’s gaze as she slowly rubbed her thumb against her fingers.

  Sarah pretended she didn’t see. If cops had to pay for every bit of information they needed to solve a case, the SPD would quickly go broke. “Please try to remember. It’s important.”

  The woman frowned and put her hand back in her pocket. “Yeah, they were together a lot. Like one of those menageries.”

  “A menagerie?”

  “You know, a threesome.”

  A ménage à trois. Sarah tried not to smile. She took out her phone and pulled up a picture of Guy Marsee. “Tell me, did you ever see this man with them?”

  The woman took the phone, squinted at the picture, and handed it back. “Can’t say. Maybe.” She waited. Sarah waited too. In a contest of wills, she always came out the winner.

  “What’s he drive?” the woman asked at last.

  “A white Prius.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that car. It’s always parked over there.” Pointing across the street. Not to Tiffany’s trailer, but to Campbell’s.

  Before Sarah could stop her, Jackie shut the trailer door. She heard the chain rattle back into place. Sarah turned around and started down th
e porch steps. Her mind was reeling. She’d expected that Guy Marsee would come to the trailer park to visit his brother, Lance. Tiffany had said as much: that they were working on a project together, something secret that they wouldn’t talk about in her presence. But what was Guy Marsee doing at Neil Campbell’s?

  “Who was that?” she heard a man’s raised voice from inside the trailer as she continued down the sidewalk. High-pitched. Whiney.

  “Why’n’t you answer the door yourself?” the woman responded. “Then you’d know.”

  “’Cause I ain’t your lame-ass slave, bitch.”

  “Yeah, but you’re livin’ in my house. Show some respect, boy. You don’ like it, you can get out.”

  Their voices faded. The last thing Sarah heard was Jackie’s boy yelling, “Yo! You hit me. You in a world o’ hurt now!” followed by a thud. Something being thrown? Someone falling?

  She crossed the street and leaned back against her car door and shook out a cigarette. Took a drag as she studied the two trailers, one half destroyed, the other seemingly abandoned. Sarah now knew that the half-brothers had known each other—perhaps more intimately than either she or Goddard had guessed. The question was, did they know they were half-brothers?

  31

  Goddard had nothing but admiration for the undercover making his way through the food line ahead of him in the hospital cafeteria. Undercover work was a tough gig. It took a certain personality to pull it off, a combination of fearlessness and street smarts that not every officer possessed. An undercover had to be believable in their assumed persona, to strike the right balance between being too friendly and too aloof. Weariness and stoicism made a more convincing criminal.

  Kings County Sherriff Department Officer Stephen Holder had texted a reply to Goddard’s voicemail, suggesting a meet. Goddard had had to drive a steady ten miles an hour over the speed limit all the way back from Rockland Diagnostics in order to make the appointment, but it was worth it. An undercover’s life was so erratic that you had to adjust to their schedule, or you might not get another chance.