by Daniel Kalla
But now even my livelihood was threatened.
I’d originally planned to drive straight home from work—maybe even indulge in the unopened bottle of scotch tucked away in the cabinet—but I found myself heading toward a neighborhood in the Capitol Hill district that backed onto Lake Washington.
I had been in Helen’s modern one-bedroom apartment once before. She’d promised to feed me a dinner that she billed as being “whipped together with leftovers and crap,” and which turned out to be a five-course feast that included the best salmon I had ever tasted. Aside from discovering her culinary talents, I learned that Helen was “happily” divorced for years and that her nineteen-year-old daughter was studying drama at UCLA. Consequently, much of the year she had the place to herself, and she liked it that way.
Parking in front of her building, I realized I would likely be far less welcome on this occasion. With little to lose, I trudged up to her door anyway. Her intercom rang twice and then Helen’s voice boomed over the speaker. “Don’t remember ordering pizza or Chinese tonight.”
I cleared my throat. “Helen, it’s Ben Dafoe.”
There was a pause. “Ben, this isn’t a good idea.”
“Please, Helen. It’s important.”
She didn’t reply, but the door buzzed and my hand shot out for it, concerned she might change her mind at any moment.
In a bulky sweatshirt and matching pants, Helen waited for me by the door to her fourth-floor apartment. She wore a simple bead necklace that looked out of place with her bulky sweats. With hair down, no makeup, and an expression that lacked its trademark smile, she looked much older. No doubt, her assessment of my condition wasn’t any more complimentary, but like me she kept it to herself.
Silently, I followed her into her apartment. I was struck again by the uncluttered layout of her living room: two cloth sofas, a stereo in the corner, a few standing plants, and two white orchids on either side of her mantle. The only crowded feature was the bookshelf in the corner filled with a diverse range of titles and genres.
We sat down across from each other. I was disappointed Helen didn’t offer me a drink. I craved something to ease the tense awkwardness that ran between us like electricity. “Thanks for seeing me.”
She sighed. “Nothing personal, Ben, but this kind of contact isn’t exactly kosher.”
I nodded. “I had to see you, though. So I could be up-front about everything.”
“Oh?”
I cleared my throat. “I got another call this morning.”
“From your whisperer?”
I nodded.
“What did old Deep Throat tell you this time?”
I broke off our eye contact. “That the blood at Emily’s place is mine.”
She didn’t say anything, but her blank face showed no surprise. Feeling my heart thump against my ribcage, I wondered if it meant the detectives had already gotten a positive match from the sample I’d given them two years earlier.
Helen was too good a poker player to reveal her hand. “Is that why you refused to give us a DNA specimen?”
“God, no!” I snapped. I stopped to breathe while I reined in my emotions. “Look. Things are so upside-down right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if my DNA was a match for the blood at the scene.”
Helen viewed me coolly without comment.
“Helen, I think someone is setting me up.”
She folded her arms over her chest. When she spoke, her tone was even more detached. “Ben, we hear that a lot in our line of work. And yet in my sixteen years with Homicide I can count with one finger the number of times it’s turned out be the case.”
“It did happen, though!”
“Yeah, but it involved one stupid drug dealer planting a murder weapon on another stupid drug dealer.” She sighed. “No one borrowed anyone else’s DNA.” She grunted a humorless chuckle. “That only happens to O.J.”
“It’s different with me. I am one of a pair of identical twins.”
“But your brother died two years ago,” she said, still measuring me with her eyes. “And unless you have a long-lost evil triplet lurking around, I don’t see how it makes a difference.”
She was right. And now I’d just exposed my attorney’s defense strategy, but I didn’t care. At that moment, all I wanted was to see a flicker of belief from Helen. “Why, Helen?”
She reached out and picked off a brownish leaf the plant beside her. “Why what?”
“Why would I kill Emily and some drug dealer I don’t even know?”
“I do know this: The vast majority of my business boils down to two motives.” She held up two fingers as if flashing the peace sign. “Money and sex.” She wiggled each finger in turn. “I’m pretty sure that at one point you were sexually involved with the victim. And you’ve told us you were giving her money up until she died.”
I gripped the armrest, digging my fingers into the fabric so hard that they pressed against the wood frame. “Helen, I was giving her money to help prolong her life, not end it.”
“Problem is, Ben, there’s no easy way to prove that you provided the money voluntarily.”
I gritted my teeth. “You can’t be serious!”
“We have to consider the possibility that Emily was blackmailing you.”
“Blackmailing me? Over what?”
“I have no idea, Ben,” Helen said, showing a hint of her own impatience. “Drugs? Financial indiscretions? Sexual proclivities? Or maybe over your brother’s disappearance. We never did figure out exactly what happened to him.”
My heart thumped harder as I tried to tame my rising fury. “So now I killed my brother, too?” I spat. “Jesus, I think I would have got a better reception at Rick’s house!”
“I just threw that out there,” Helen said. “I think you better step back and consider how all of this looks to us.” Again, her fingers came up with each point. “You were once engaged to the victim. You paid her off in cash every month. You threatened to kill the second victim. You have no alibi. You initially lied to us about your association with the victims.” She moved to the fingers on her other hand. “There’s a good chance your blood is at the murder scene. And you refused to give us a DNA sample.”
Steadying my breathing, I held Helen’s stare.
“You tell me, Ben. What the hell are we supposed to think?” she asked, but her tone was compassionate, as if seeking some way to escape the inevitable conclusion associated with all the evidence.
The sense of defeat was so strong that I felt the rest of my emotions slip away. My chest quieted. My hands steadied. “How long have you known me, Helen? Five years?”
She looked away. “Sounds right.”
“Do you really think I’m capable of butchering two people?”
Helen sighed. “Ben, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen people to be capable of.”
“Not people, Helen. Me.”
She reached down and touched the beads hanging around her neck. She fingered them like they were rosary beads. “In some ways, I miss the old Wild West.” She showed a fleeting smile. “It was easier then. The bad guys all wore black hats. There was no confusion.”
“I don’t own a hat.”
“That’s the problem. Not all murders are committed by people we recognize as bad guys. Sometimes it’s just a reckless, desperate spur-of-the-moment act.”
“But what happened to Emily wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment crime. Someone tortured her.”
For a moment, I saw agreement in Helen’s eyes. But then she shook her head and looked at me with genuine sorrow. “Can I tell you about the toughest bust I ever made, Ben?”
I nodded.
“Mark Bellon. Remember the name?”
“Vaguely.”
“It was big news about eight or nine years ago. Mark was a twenty-two-year-old seminary student,” she said. “Ashy skinny kid. A real wallflower. He volunteered at a downtown parish with a priest by the name of Father Kevin McDougall. The man was a living saint who worked w
ith addicted street kids and the homeless. Ran a support system for half of the downtown’s disenfranchised out of his small church. And young Mark, a priest-in-training, worshipped Father Kevin.
“Then this sixteen-year-old kid, Dale Einarson, showed up claiming that Father Kevin had molested him. Dale was a born con artist. Could’ve sold the tainted apple a second time to Adam. Dale demanded hush money for not running to the media with his all-too-common story of sexual victimization at the hands of a priest. In far more saintly terms, Father Kevin told Dale to go screw himself. He was prepared to defend himself in public.”
“But Mark Bellon wasn’t going to let that happen.”
“Exactly.” Helen nodded. “For a while Mark even paid Dale off out of his own pocket. But Dale kept wanting more, and seminary students don’t have deep pockets.”
I dropped my eyes to the floor, knowing where the story was headed.
“The irony was that the bribes Mark paid only served to make Father Kevin look even guiltier,” Helen said. “Mark was so desperate, he honestly believed he had no options left except murder. But he didn’t have a gun. Not even a knife. So Mark took a hammer from the church’s tool room and used it to crush Dale’s skull in.” She cleared her throat. “Mark’s now doing life in the state pen. Just a skinny awkward kid who wanted to be a priest. God knows how many times he’s been beaten and raped since he went in.”
“I didn’t kill Emily,” I said softly.
Helen didn’t seem to hear me. “Mark didn’t kill Dale out of hatred, greed, or any self-interest. The only reason he killed him was because he thought he was protecting someone he loved. Mark was—I bet you still is—essentially a good person. But it was one god-awful crime he committed.”
“I didn’t kill Emily,” I said more forcefully.
Helen worked the beads around her neck. She answered without looking at me. “Ben, I think you better tell that to your lawyer, not me.”
Chapter 12
I headed out on my road bike the next morning at five for another dark ride. I cycled at a leisurely pace because my head ached and my stomach flip-flopped from the remainder of the bottle of scotch I’d polished off on returning home from Helen’s. Fighting back the nausea, it dawned on me that I’d consumed more alcohol in the past week than in the past year. Memories drifted to my mind of Dad waking Aaron and me up in the middle of the night with his missteps and stumbles on the staircase from yet another night of boozing. How he managed to function in the daytime and sustain his accounting practice amazed me even then. And having witnessed my identical twin battling drugs, I didn’t need a blood test to know I possessed the same predisposition toward addiction.
Blood. It suffocated me. I could still see the disappointed certainty in Helen’s brown eyes. With each turn of the pedal, I grew more convinced that she already knew what the whisperer had predicted—that the blood on the wall did match mine.
But how? Had someone stolen a sample of my blood? I scoured my memory for my last blood test. Three years earlier I’d had baseline testing done at the hospital lab to check my hepatitis immune status, but there was no way the lab would have hung on to the blood for more than a few weeks.
My stomach churned again, but not from alcohol. If the blood wasn’t mine, then the only alternate explanation was Prince’s farfetched suggestion that it came from my brother. And unless the killer had access to highly sophisticated blood-freezing equipment, it would have to have been produced by Aaron’s bone marrow in the last few months. But I wasn’t ready to accept the implication that Aaron survived the slaughterhouse of his trunk and was somehow involved in Emily’s death.
Pumping hard to climb the last steep hill on my cycle home, a moment of clarity overcame me. No one was going to rescue me. I’d become the sole focus of the investigation, and after hearing Helen’s long list of circumstantial evidence, I understood why. I had no time left for mourning or self-pity. I had to act.
They would come for me soon.
At 8:05 A.M., I sat in Michael Prince’s office staring out at the fog that hid much of Puget Sound and sipping a coffee as bitter as the last one. Across the desk, Prince leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his neck interlocked over his flowing silver hair.
“Ben, I think it probably was not the most prudent step,” Prince summed up my visit to Helen’s house with pained understatement.
“I consider Helen a friend,” I said. “I thought without her partner around, she might see my side.”
Prince pulled his hands from his head and snapped forward in his chair. “Listen to me, Ben. You have no friends left inside the Seattle P.D. From now on, you do not talk to any of them. That’s my job.”
“Meanwhile I sit back and wait?”
His expression softened. “I know it’s frustrating, but that’s exactly what you have to do. Go back to your regular life. Maybe this won’t lead to the doom and gloom you’re expecting.”
I shook my head. “They think I killed Emily. They’re not going to drop this.”
“But they need evidence.”
“I think someone is supplying them with all the evidence they need.”
Prince tilted his head. “Oh?”
I told him about the two anonymous whispered phone calls. When I finished, Prince viewed me poker-faced. “And you’re certain the calls originated in Canada?”
“According to my call display,” I said.
“Why Canada?”
“There could be a connection. Aaron had moved to Vancouver about a year before he died.”
Prince’s lips broke into a slight smile. “You mean before he disappeared.”
“I keep forgetting.”
His smile faded. “I won’t let you.”
“Michael, I don’t think I can sit back and wait. The cops aren’t looking for any other suspects. They’re building the case against me.”
“Which may or may not be enough to lead to charges,” Prince said, relaxing back in his seat. “We can’t stop them from investigating you. What we need to do is to focus on preparing your defense should it become necessary.”
I wasn’t ready to let it go. “Michael, didn’t you once defend the second victim, Jason DiAngelo, on charges of drug possession?”
The skin around his eyes tightened slightly. “And how is that relevant to you?”
“I’m not sure it is, but I’d heard that Philip Maglio hired you.”
“Which of course I can’t comment on,” Prince said dismissively. “Where are you going with this, Ben?”
“J.D. was a drug dealer who sold Emily black-market HIV drugs. He worked for a supposed Seattle mob boss. A few days ago, I saw another drug dealer die in the Emergency Room of the same kind of knife wound that killed J.D. Maybe it’s all tied in somehow.”
Prince smiled reassuringly, but warning lurked behind the benign countenance. “Ben, we don’t have to produce alternate suspects. We don’t even have to prove your innocence. All we have to establish is reasonable doubt. And I think your missing brother will offer us that.”
An hour after leaving Prince’s office, I sat at the computer in my small home office. Trying to follow my attorney’s advice, I surfed the familiar cycling Web sites looking for distraction. I logged onto the Pacific Northwest Cyclist’s discussion forum. (Having sworn never to get involved in online chatting, I’d skeptically signed on to the forum a year earlier and after following the intelligent conversation threads for a while I soon became a frequent contributor.) The online members were holding another “did he or didn’t he?” discussion of Lance Armstrong’s alleged blood doping in his early Tour de France wins. I’d sat through the same discussion too many times before. Besides, I couldn’t stomach the topic of incriminating blood tests.
Exiting the forum, I wandered off into cyberspace. At the Google home page, I typed in “Emily Kenmore AND Philip Maglio” but came up with no hits. I tried the same with various combinations, including “Jason DiAngelo AND Aaron Dafoe.” All misses. Then I searched for
“Philip Maglio.” I stumbled upon a few old newspaper articles that insinuated links to organized crime, before finding the official Web site of his company, NorWesPac Properties, a Seattle-based real estate development company. I clicked on the CEO’s biography. Predictably, the blurb focused on his rise from humble working-class roots in nearby Redmond to become founder and chairman of the multimillion-dollar NorWesPac Properties.
I enlarged the small photo inset in the corner of the screen. Fiftyish, with thinning black hair and acne-scarred skin, Philip Maglio smiled back at me, though his face was anything but welcoming. Strong jaw clenched, his gray eyes challenged the camera. Though not handsome, his face exuded power. From the photo alone, I would’ve recognized in an instant that Maglio was not someone to be screwed with.
I read as much as I could find on his company, learning that NorWesPac primarily developed condo projects. I know little about real estate, but I was impressed by the list of their current developments, which stretched from Portland, Oregon, to as far north as British Columbia, Canada.
On a hunch, I Googled “Emily Kenmore AND NorWesPac Properties.” I sat up straighter when the list of twenty-five hits popped up on my screen. My heart rate sped up as I scanned the list, including one from the official NorWesPac Web site. I clicked on that link to discover that Emily was listed as the Seattle sales director for NorWesPac’s very upscale condo development called SnowView at the world-renowned Canadian ski resort of Whistler, seventy miles north of Vancouver.
Canada! There it was again. Another link to our northern neighbors.
Fingers racing and mouse clicking frantically, I pieced together the story of the SnowView development. Intended to cater to the Seattle “dot-commers” with loads of disposable income and a taste for the slopes, the development never got off the ground. Problems with zoning permits, the rising Canadian dollar, and cost overruns eventually sidelined the project. None of the sites mentioned how Emily came to part ways with NorWesPac Properties, though I knew from our own interactions that NorWesPac hadn’t employed her for more than six months.