by Karen Dionne
“So I introduced them. I told Lance and Guy about their half-brother and suggested they meet. Of course they were excited, but understandably, there was also some resentment that they hadn’t been told sooner. I told them—” His voice broke. “I actually told them, ‘Better late than never.’” He shuddered, drew a deep breath. “Of course, as it turned out, ‘never’ would have been preferable. I should have known that Neil hadn’t changed. He couldn’t. Once I told him about the project and explained its potential, he had his genome mapped, as well as his son’s. Hugo doesn’t carry the beneficial mutation, but Neil did. That was the moment my dear boys’ fates were sealed. He killed them. Shot them both. He lured Guy to the shipyard under the pretext of meeting with an investor and shot him in cold blood. Then he shot Lance in that woman’s trailer. Neil killed them, but it may as well have been me. I’m the one who set events in motion.”
“How do you know Neil killed them?” Sarah asked. “Did Neil tell you what he’d done?” The confession would be hearsay, but it would be admissible in a court of law now that Campbell was dead.
Rutz shook his head, clucked his tongue in disgust. “Neil would never do anything that straightforward. He was the most cunning and manipulative person I’ve ever known. I told you he was deeply flawed, and I meant it. It was the woman who told me about the murders. His girlfriend, Tiffany. The heartless bastard took her with him when he killed my boys. To keep an eye on her. To make her watch.”
Tiffany. Tiffany had witnessed both murders? The revelation was incredible. Difficult to believe. And yet, as she looked at the broken man weeping at his kitchen table, Sarah knew it was the truth.
She picked up the stuffed bear. “Did you buy this toy for Hugo? Did you take the boy? Are you hiding him somewhere?”
Rutz sat up straight. Vehemently, he shook his head. “No. No. I told you. I don’t have any idea what’s happened to the boy.”
“Then why do you have this? You don’t have children. Why do you have a new teddy bear?”
Rutz’s eyes filled with tears. He took the bear from Sarah. Fondled the store tags. Stroked the bear’s fur. “It’s not new, it’s just never been used. I bought this years ago,” he said softly, almost to himself. “I bought it the day Hugo Campbell’s father was born. The day I promised his mother that I would be his godfather and watch over him, just as I did her other sons. This bear was meant to be Neil’s.”
Rutz lifted the toy to his cheek, then laid his head on the table and held the bear close as he wept for the disastrous consequences of the events he had set in motion. For the deaths of his favored godsons. For Campbell. For the deaths that he had caused.
38
After Sarah and Goddard brought a tearful and handcuffed Rutz to the station, after they shunted him off to an interview room to cool his heels and he asked for his lawyer again, after she checked in with the task force (which had grown to over a dozen officers and detectives in her absence) and stopped by her office to make sure Jack hadn’t eaten himself into a sugar coma, Sarah was still turning around Rutz’s revelations in her head. She could hardly believe that Tiffany had witnessed the Marsee brothers’ murders. That Tiffany was such a consummate actress, she’d sat across from Sarah at the interview table and boldly hidden everything she knew. Tiffany could have won an Oscar for her innocent victim performance. Sarah wasn’t sure now if anything Tiffany had told her was true. Maybe she wasn’t even a tweaker. Maybe the whole scratching-her-arms-cause-I-need-a-fix jitters was an act as well.
She was itching to interview Tiffany again. Her gut said that the woman was the key to finding Hugo. Not only because they had no viable suspects left; Sarah was convinced that Tiffany was still holding back. Possibly “Tiffany Crane” wasn’t even her real name. A woman who could fool who knew how many men into thinking she was madly in love with them no doubt had more than a few as-yet unplayed tricks up her sleeve.
But Tiffany was still in the wind. The officers who’d gone to talk to her while Sarah and Goddard followed up with Rutz had hauled in a man and a woman they found in Tiffany’s trailer for narcotics possession, but Tiffany herself was nowhere to be found.
As she stood in the hallway outside the interview rooms, Sarah reminded herself that patience was one of her strong suits. In time, all would become clear. All she had to do was follow the right leads, ask the right questions.
Rutz was in one interview room, and the woman from Tiffany’s trailer was in the other. The man the officers had brought in with her had been released. As it turned out, he was the undercover cop who was working narcotics in the trailer park, the one Goddard had met and who had helped shed light on the strange dynamics between Tiffany and the men in her life. The officers at the station had roughed him up at his request and held him long enough to make the collar seem believable before they turned him loose again. Sarah hoped the ruse was sufficient to maintain the officer’s cover. It was too bad their investigation had put a fellow officer at risk, but it happened. Undercover cops got picked up along with the bad guys. Especially when an undercover was good. It sounded like this one was.
The woman, Claire Seinfeld according to the booking sheet, looked up as Sarah came in. She was pretty. Dark hair, dark eyes, wide face and mouth, pale skin. Her eyeliner was smudged, and her hair was a rat’s nest, but once she was cleaned up, she’d have been more than presentable. Of course, she’d have to get clean on the inside as well before anyone would give her a second look. If this woman wasn’t a tweaker, Sarah didn’t have a son named Jack.
“Claire?” she said. “It is ‘Claire,’ isn’t it?”
The woman nodded. Hesitant. Timid. On guard, like she was expecting a trick.
Sarah smiled. “It’s a pretty name. Claire, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that you’re in a real jam.” She picked up the incident report. “Possession. Six grams of methamphetamine. That’s a Class C felony. Those charges aren’t going to go away.”
“Help me,” the woman said. “I have a little boy. I can’t get locked up.”
“I can’t promise I can get you released, but I’ll do my best.” Should have thought of your kid before you started using, Sarah wanted to say. “But first, you have to help me.”
“Anything. I’ll do anything.” Claire rubbed her arms, bit her lip, scratched the backs of her hands, picked at her lip, shivered. Sarah bet the woman would do anything Sarah asked her to, all right—as long as the payoff was a hit of crank.
“I’m looking for Tiffany Crane,” Sarah said. “Your girlfriend. You are friends, aren’t you? That’s why you were in her trailer?”
Claire nodded. “She lets me stay there sometimes. When I don’t have anywhere else to go. But I don’t know where she is. She took off. She said she was going out to get some dope, but I don’t think that’s what she did, because we had plenty already.” She stopped, suddenly realizing that admitting to the drug possession charge probably wasn’t the smartest move she could have made. Sarah wasn’t about to tell her that the detective she was talking to couldn’t have cared less about the drug charge. Their conversation was being recorded. Might as well make it easy for the officers who’d brought her in to follow up.
“Did you and Tiffany often get high together?” The routine questions and plodding pace were necessary, but frustrating. Sarah itched to move the interview along. Her gut said that Tiffany’s disappearance and the kidnapping were connected. She needed to find Hugo, and fast. Seventy-five percent of the kids who didn’t make it after they were abducted by a stranger were killed within the first three hours. Hugo had been missing for two. Before Rutz’s revelations, Sarah would have said that Tiffany wasn’t capable of hurting the boy. Now, nothing was off the table.
Claire nodded. “Tiffany and me started using at the same time, about a month ago. We were friends with one of the dealers in the park, and he gave us some stuff. Good stuff, too. His best. He liked us. Or rather, he liked Tiffany. Most men did.” Claire shook her head as if she were in awe of Tiffany’s
powers of attraction. At least Sarah knew now that Tiffany’s meth addiction was real.
“Was the dealer Neil Campbell?”
“No, no. Neil was Tiffany’s boyfriend. The dealer was somebody else.”
So Neil hadn’t got Tiffany hooked to keep her in line. One crime that couldn’t be laid at his door. Unless he’d got this dealer to do it for him. Sarah could have asked for a name, but let it go. She wasn’t interested in a drug collar, and anyway, most likely, Goddard’s undercover friend was probably already on it. “And Tiffany used to babysit for Neil’s little boy, right? What’s his name again?”
“Hugo. Isn’t that the cutest name? I just love that little boy. When his daddy died…” Her face clouded.
“When his father died, you wanted to take care of him,” Sarah supplied. “I don’t blame you. It’s only natural. Poor little guy. No mother. No father. Do you think Tiffany wanted to take care of him, too?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Steve asked me that too.”
“Steve?”
“My boyfriend. The guy who was with me when we got picked up. Can I go see him?”
The undercover was sleeping with this girl? That was a new one. Normally undercovers played it safe, didn’t get involved. Sarah wondered what Claire would think if she told her that her boyfriend was a narcotics officer with the King County Sherriff Department. Hoped for the undercover’s sake that she never found out. A woman deceived could be almost as vengeful as a woman scorned.
“What did you tell him when he asked if you thought Tiffany wanted to take care of Hugo?”
“I told him what she told me. Tiffany said she didn’t love Neil anymore, but that she still loved Hugo. That she would always love him. And that she would always watch out for him. Especially if something happened to his dad. She said that, like, a month ago. In a way, it was kind of creepy. It was almost like she knew Neil was going to get hurt.”
There was a knock on door. Sarah went out into the hallway.
“It’s going well in there.” Goddard nodded toward the interview room. Sarah was annoyed at the interruption, but held her tongue. Goddard seemed tense, distracted. Like there was something more he wanted to say. Probably wishing he was at the hospital with his wife and baby instead of being stuck at the station. He definitely needed to learn how to compartmentalize.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think Tiffany’s got the boy. The question is, where would she take him?” Goddard was still looking at the woman in the interview room. Granted, she was pretty, but there was a time and a place for girl-watching, and this wasn’t it. Although there was something in his expression that Sarah couldn’t pinpoint. Now that she thought about it, there was no lust there, more like regret, perhaps anger.
She shook the thoughts away. It didn’t matter what Goddard thought about the tweaker girl. She pursed her lips as she replayed the details of her interview with Tiffany, combing it for clues. She moved on to the conversations she’d had with Ms. Crowd at the casino and Tiffany’s coworker, Jaycee. Tiffany’s Facebook postings, the online photo albums filled with pictures of company picnics and outings with her casino friends, the photo of her with Lance.
Suddenly, she grinned. She knew where the picture had been taken. It wasn’t a random location. It was someplace special. A place that Tiffany knew would be empty. A place where she might have taken the boy.
“Grab your coat,” she said to Goddard. “I have an idea.”
Goddard didn’t answer. He was still staring at the woman in the interview room, studying her like he felt sorry for her, like he was trying to get inside her head so he could figure out what made her tick. Why she did what she did.
Sarah tugged impatiently on his sleeve. They didn’t have time to stare pensively at loser tweakers like they were your long lost sister. They had a little boy to save.
39
“What do you think she’s planning to do with the boy?” Sarah asked as she crossed Magnolia Bridge, a high, arched span across Smith Cove that connected the hilly, forested peninsula northwest of downtown Seattle to the city. They were on their way to the country house owned by Tiffany’s former dupe, Desmond Whittaker. The house to which, according to Jaycee, Tiffany still had the key, and which would be standing empty, its owner thousands of miles away on a different continent. She and Goddard had driven most of the way absorbed in their own thoughts.
“You interviewed her,” he responded. “You must have come away with some sense of her thinking.”
“After what Rutz told us, I’m not sure anyone can know what’s going on in that girl’s head. Imagine, she saw Campbell kill both men—one of them her boyfriend, or whatever Lance really was to her—and she said absolutely nothing.”
“Campbell must’ve had some hold on her, is all I can say.”
“Rutz described him as a master manipulator. Tiffany’s coworker told me that Tiffany would do anything for Campbell. And in a sense, she did. By coming on to wealthy men at the casino in order to get stuff for Campbell to fence, she was basically a prostitute. It’s almost like he was a cult leader.”
“A cult with a following of one.”
“I guess once you find the perfect disciple, one is all you need.”
“Tiffany’s lucky he didn’t make her pull the trigger.”
Or maybe he had. Unless and until they found and tested the murder weapon, all they’d have to go on would be her word, and Sarah now knew how reliable that was.
“I can tell you this much,” she said. “I think Tiffany Crane is a great deal smarter than we’re giving her credit for. I think she lied to us when she said she didn’t know about Lance’s project. I think she and Campbell hatched their plot together. Maybe they planned to kill the Marsee brothers from the beginning. Maybe after Campbell blew himself up, she saw her chance to carry on the project by herself, and that’s why she took the boy. Because she needed his DNA.”
“But according to Rutz, Hugo’s DNA doesn’t carry the double mutation.”
“Tiffany doesn’t know that.”
“Maybe. We really can’t assume anything about what she does or doesn’t know. But if she’s as smart as all that, how can she possibly think she’ll get away with kidnapping the boy?”
Sarah shrugged. “Kids fall through the cracks all the time. Think of the child abductions where the kid turns up ten, twenty years later under a new name and a new identity with no clue that the person who raised them wasn’t their mom or dad. Maybe Tiffany figured we’d think he just wandered off. Got lost in the storm and disappeared. Or maybe we’re giving her too much credit. Maybe taking the boy was just something she did on the spur of the moment. Her girlfriend Claire said they were high last night.” Megalomaniac or fool, it didn’t make much difference which category fit Tiffany if the end result was the same.
At the mention of Claire, Goddard’s face darkened.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just drive.”
Which thanks to the storm, was easier said than done. Sarah had driven off the bridge into a foot of snow—twice as much as there had been at the station. Thanks to the weather phenomenon the TV meteorologists called the “Puget Sound Convergence Zone,” it wasn’t unusual for some parts of Seattle to get dumped on while other areas saw rain or even sunshine.
“Accident.” Goddard pointed to the road ahead. A pickup truck and a minivan had apparently tried to defy the laws of physics by occupying the same space at the same time. Sarah held her foot on the brake pedal until the antilock system kicked in. The car slowed. A police officer held up his hand as they approached, then waved them around.
“How much farther?” she asked. While she’d never admit it to Goddard, the tension of driving in the snow was starting to get to her. She took one hand off the wheel long enough to rub the back of her neck.
Goddard checked the GPS. “Maybe half a mile. Tell me again why you’re so sure this weekend house is where she’s taken him.”
“It was the photo,
the one of Lance and Tiffany as a couple. For a long time, I didn’t think much about where it was taken. It’s an outdoor shot, and you can see a little water in the background, but other than that, there’s nothing that would tie it to a particular spot. But then when I was trying to figure out where Tiffany would have taken Hugo, I remembered her coworker saying that Tiffany sometimes used a casino john’s weekend house for parties, and it clicked. I’d bet any money that’s where the photograph was taken. It’s the perfect hideout. It’s remote, she has a key, and there’s no direct connection between her and the house. And according to Jaycee, the old man it belongs to hardly ever visits. Even less chance in this weather. The only reason we even know where it is is because the owner filed a police report against her. The charges were dropped, but his name and this address are still on the record.”
“You’re a genius.”
Sarah accepted the compliment with a tip of her head. Her I.Q. was on the high side of normal, but her real talent was seeing the details that others missed.
As they got closer, Goddard counted off the house numbers. “There,” he said, pointing to a stone and brick mailbox at the end of a long driveway. Sarah turned in. The security gate was open. A single set of tire tracks marred the otherwise pristine, snow-covered drive. The tracks were close together, like they’d been made by a compact car. Tiffany’s red Toyota?
“How do you want to play this?” she asked as she put the car into park. “Wait for backup, or storm the castle alone?” “I doubt she’s got the cannons loaded. If she is inside with the boy, she’s been there for hours. Enough time to hunker down. I’ll call for backup, but I say we move now.”
Sarah passed him her radio, then turned off the engine and pocketed the car key. She checked her weapon in its holster. As a detective, she didn’t have to draw her gun often, but she was an excellent shot when she needed to be—something that, if Tiffany made it necessary, Sarah had no compunctions about proving.