It’s a modest Seattle suburban home, with two stories, steep gables, and cream-colored siding. A row of artless bushes lines the walkway, courtesy of the builder’s unimaginative landscaping. It looks exactly like the house to its left and too similar to the house to its right.
And yet the number above the garage marks this house as altogether unique.
I hunch down in the passenger seat of the cruiser, just enough to spy the glow from the second floor through the cold drizzle. A bay window frames the blond woman swaying, the little boy curled within her arms, his cheek resting against her shoulder in a way that suggests he’s asleep.
“Where are they going to go?” I ask, eyeing the large “For Sale” sign staked into the front lawn. Just another thing for the neighborhood to look at as they throw sympathetic glances on their way by.
“She can’t make the mortgage,” Officer Burk confirms through a casual sip of coffee, its pungent aroma filling the car’s interior. “Her parents have a farm outside the city. Sounds like that’s where they’re heading.”
“He had no life insurance? Nothing?”
“She had to take a loan out on the house just to pay for the funeral.”
A dull pang throbs in my chest as I watch Betty-Jo Billings drift over to the window, listless eyes resting on the driveway below, where puddles of water pool in the indents formed by the tires that used to sit there. The exact place where her husband waved to her for the last time before climbing into the passenger side of his cherry-red Ford F-250. The truck he had advertised for sale on Craigslist. The truck he was allowing a prospective buyer to test drive.
Seattle police found Wayne Billings’s body fourteen days later in a city dump. The truck hasn’t turned up and it probably never will. No witnesses to interrogate, except for Wayne’s wife, and all they could get from her was that the driver wore a baseball hat and he was dropped off by someone in a dark sedan. She hadn’t been paying any real attention and I understand why. With a two-year-old hanging off her leg and a three-week-old baby in her arms, the poor woman was asleep on her feet, exhausted. When Wayne left, all she was probably thinking about was the family-friendly minivan they would buy with the cash from the truck.
The wipers swish back and forth in a monotonous song and heat blasts out from the dashboard to counter the chill in the damp spring air. I arrived on the West Coast one week ago and, though locals swear it’s not usually this bad, it hasn’t stopped raining.
I don’t mind it at all. I find it soothing, actually.
“It’s a real shame. Everyone says he was a decent guy. His kids will never get to find out,” Burk murmurs in that wearied voice that tells me that this is just another case to him. He has succumbed to the job. It’s not his fault; it’s how many cops learn to deal with the kinds of things we see every day.
Detachment.
The case sits open, but the local police force has pretty much written it off. I knew that the second I made the request for the files. Under a generic guise of a Washington, D.C., cop researching similar cases on the East Coast, of course. None of these guys knows why I’m really here.
I peer up at the little boy’s angelic face again.
And make a silent promise that Rust Markov—and anyone tied to him—will pay.
