Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or ideas from The Killing. It's all just for fun.
Spoilers: Season 3, episode 10
Linden knocks on Skinner's front door.
No one answers, so she tries the doorknob. It's unlocked, and she opens the door a few inches and peeks her head in. She's not in the practice of just walking into other people's houses, but this is no time for hesitation or politeness. Holder's in trouble, and she has to find Skinner and get him to fix it. And of course, Adrian's missing as well… so forget politeness.
"James?" she calls, as she steps through the door and closes it behind her. She's hoping that his wife, Jen, isn't home, because this could be really awkward…
The living room is empty, and she pauses for just a few seconds looking into it. It always feels a little strange to look around in other people's homes, especially the ones with families. Those people that have all those things that she herself had never had… Not just a house, but a home. A family...
She feels a twinge somewhere deep within her that she quickly suppresses. It's fine, she tells herself, I don't want that. Any of it. The other voice in her head pipes up then. Holder would call bullshit, and you know it. In fact, he already did, that day outside the prison.
Fuck you, she tells the voice angrily, but keeps herself calm on the surface. This is no time to be pining for things that she'd never had. It is what it is.
She has only taken a few steps down the hall leading away from the front door before she hears movement upstairs. She turns back, looks up the staircase and pauses, then walks up quietly. In one of the rooms at the top of the stairs she finds Skinner, putting folded clothes into a suitcase.
Her hand grips the doorknob of the open door as she steps into the room. "What are you doing?" she asks quietly.
He turns his head quickly at the sound of her voice, surprised to see her there behind him.
"Hey, what are you doing here?" he asks, momentarily confused.
"Holder was taken by IA. I've been calling you," she says quickly. "They won't let me see him. You've got to get him out." She walks forward into the room as she speaks, so that she's standing just behind him. He turns back to what he had been doing, moving more clothes from the bed to the suitcase and smoothing them down.
"Yeah, I'll, uh, yeah… I'll take care of it." There's no urgency in his voice, however. He takes a step away from her to smooth something in his suitcase, but she takes that step almost in synch with him, staying just as close as she had been before he had moved, and removes a folded paper from a pocket inside her jacket.
"The traffic cams show that there was a gray car stalking Adrian." She unfolds the paper and he looks up, watches over her shoulder as she does. "Here," she indicates on the blurry photo, "and here."
He barely glances at where she's pointing, and instead turns and walks across the room. "It could be anyone's car," he replies, and she now realizes that his voice is devoid of any hint of worry or interest. She looks at him, taken aback. "Doesn't mean it's Reddick's, right?" he adds as he takes something off the dresser behind her, then walks back across the room to place it in his suitcase. She can't believe her eyes or her ears, and for a second she just stares at him.
He's now zipping his suitcase as she asks, "So after all this, it really does come down to your career? Your reputation? Reopening the case would be too messy?"
Skinner turns and looks at her. "You have no idea what I'm thinking." He walks past her again, back to the dresser across the room.
"OK, so tell me, because I don't – I don't understand." Her voice is beginning to shake. No! He has to do something! her mind is screaming.
"I just gotta get out of here. Things have blown up with Jen. I just – just can't get into it right now."
Linden's trying to get Skinner to focus on the case. "James, right now we need to find this car. We need to find Adrian."
"And we will. I promise." She has never seen anyone so unconcerned, so clearly just humoring her, in her life, and she's quickly getting frustrated with him. This was not what she expected.
"I don't understand why you're not doing anything!" Her frustration shows in her voice.
Suddenly he's no longer annoyingly calm, and he snaps at her. "Because the case you and Holder made against Reddick is appallingly weak and circumstantial at best. Accusing a fellow cop without hard evidence? I mean, I'm surprised at you, Sarah. You used to be a thorough and careful detective!"
Used to be. Those are his words. Linden can't argue with people that find fault with her parenting skills, or even her ability to make good decisions in her personal life, because God knows she makes some of the worst ones possible. But this is different. Skinner's questioning her competence at her job, and that's the one thing in her life that she's actually good at. The words sting, and she's silent for a moment as she absorbs them.
She draws her lips into a tight line and looks down before looking back up at him. "I'm sorry you feel that way," she replies simply, though she wants to scream. She holds in the wave of emotion that she feels, putting the folded papers back into her pocket, and turns to go. Fuck you, Skinner, she thinks. I was an idiot to think that he'd do anything to help. He's just one more person who has disappointed her, and she curses herself for giving him that power in the first place. For letting him in.
Skinner turns as she starts to leave the room. "Listen," he says. "Wait… wait, wait." She turns back around and looks up at him, curious what he can possibly want to say at this point.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just having a horrible day. I'm just trying to keep it together, you know?"
She looks up at him, stone-faced. The walls are up. She's not going to let any more of his words surprise her, cut into her the way the ones he's just said already have.
"And I believe you." He has taken small steps toward her to close the distance between them as she has continued to stare at him, her face hard. He puts a hand on her shoulder as he says, "Of course I do. I believe you." The look on her face softens slightly. His face is only inches away from hers.
"You need to call IA," she begins again, softly. Her hand hooks around the elbow of his arm that's still extended, his hand still on her shoulder.
"Yeah," he says simply, his tone once again soft. They both lean back slightly, so that their faces are not so close together. She thinks that maybe, just maybe, she overreacted slightly, that he'll help her figure it all out.
Minutes later, the two of them are walking down the stairs to leave, Linden in front, when the front door opens to reveal Jen and Bethany Skinner. Linden knows it's about to get ugly, and she's right.
Jen continues through the entryway, farther into the house, disgusted at finding Linden there with her husband. Skinner talks to his daughter while Linden stands awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs, watching everything unfold before her.
And that's when it happens.
Linden's standing there, trying to be invisible, watching this incredibly uncomfortable scene between Skinner and his teenage daughter, who's crying and hugging him, when suddenly, there it is. It's as though there's a spotlight shining on a blue ring on Bethany's index finger. The same ring that Linden has stared at in a giant, enlarged picture on the board in the Task Force Room for what feels like years now. She would know that ring anywhere. Its former owner is dead, and it has disappeared… taken by the man who killed her. The man who is not Joe Mills. The man who is not Carl Reddick.
That man is James Skinner. Her boss. Her former partner. Her lover, past and present. The man who is more than likely responsible for Adrian's disappearance.
The man who is standing right in front of her, who doesn't yet know that he's been discovered.
As Skinner hugs his sobbing daughter, it's all Linden can do not to tackle him to the ground right then and there. It's for the best that he's distracted at that moment, because she's unsure that she could have reacted if he'd read her face and tried to subdue her… because if he'd been watching her, he would have seen the change come over her. He would've known. Known immediately that she knew. As closed as she is, there are certain things that she can't close off completely. Those one or two people who actually know her can get a lot from the looks on her face. And unfortunately, he knows her.
Her vision has tunneled to the point of bright blue on Bethany Skinner's finger. She no longer hears the words that either of the two people standing in front of her are saying. The ring is in sharp focus, while the two Skinners in front of her make up one large, fuzzy shape. Her brain is simply overloaded. It cannot process all of the information it is receiving and what it all means. Her ability to hear and see clearly returns only slowly as Skinner tries to pacify his daughter, then attempts to extricate himself from the scene.
So far he hasn't noticed any change in Linden, but he hasn't looked at her yet. His focus is still on getting out the door. She knows it won't be long. She tries to nudge her brain into action, but it's still stuck.
Skinner. Is. The. Killer.
He picks up his suitcase from where it's sitting on the bottom step by her feet, and pauses to let her walk out the front door, still open from when Jen and Bethany came in, ahead of him. He follows her out and closes the door, and she's acutely aware of his presence behind her.
The killer. One step behind her.
She knows that she has to remain absolutely calm. Skinner may be the killer, but he's anything but stupid, and he knows her. She hates it, but she knows that it's true. She has to keep herself calm, not give anything away, if she wants to have any chance of finding Adrian… and, she realizes a second later that she's probably in danger herself, as well. Not that she can't hold her own in a fight, but he's bigger than her, and stronger. Depending on the situation… No, she thinks. Focus.
"That was awful, I'm sorry," he says in his normal soft and raspy voice. He walks past her down the stairs from the small porch to the front walkway, carrying his suitcase. She stands on the top step, still shell-shocked despite her best efforts to get herself together. She's been in a lot of tough situations before, but this one… this one is different, and her brain just won't cooperate, won't think rationally.
This is not happening… except that it is.
She walks down the steps behind him in slow motion. He still hasn't looked at her since her discovery. She knows that it's only a matter of seconds. That he's going to turn around, and he's going to know. She knows that her eyes give too much away, and she hates that about herself. Sometimes, lots of times, she can turn it off, mask it with a cold steeliness that's unreadable to most of the world. But not now... though goddammit, she's trying.
Everything is moving in slow motion. Her feet, finally moving down the stairs to the walkway. Skinner, walking in front of her to his car, parked at the curb ahead of them. An ice cream truck goes by, and Linden only very vaguely hears the melody it plays. A sprinkler spins, throwing water across the grass on the other side of the street. A child rides by on his bike. These rhythmic sounds blend into the rest of the noises around her, all of which sound wrong. It's as though the sounds around her are not just in slow motion, but also distorted, as though she's underwater. Her brain simply isn't returning to full processing speed, no matter how hard she tries to force it to do so.
Finally, Skinner has put his suitcase in the backseat of his car and closed the door. He turns around and looks at her, still moving in slow motion. She has moved forward on autopilot, and is now standing halfway between his front porch and his car, staring at him… and she knows that he can read it on her face as clearly as if she'd been wearing a sign that said it in words. He knows that she knows that it was him.
They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, but is actually only a few seconds. Now it's a matter of survival. She has to get ahold of herself. The sounds fade back in around her, and suddenly she is aware of her surroundings again. She can again hear the sprinkler across the street, and the world is moving at normal speed. The look on his face has hardened, and she can feel every muscle in her body tense, knows that the look on her face has hardened as well. She wishes that she wasn't so damned transparent.
With a swift movement, she pulls out her gun and holds it trained on him as steadily as she can. He doesn't look afraid, not even bothered. She wants to say he almost looks… What is it? Amused? Exasperated? Disappointed? Relieved?
"You want to see him alive, you'll come with me," he says simply, calmly, looking off down the street in the direction the car is facing. He doesn't sound stressed, not even annoyed. It's as though he was telling her he'd seen a squirrel down the street, or something equally trivial.
He hands over his gun when she asks for it, and doesn't resist when she pats him down, still pointing her own gun at him the best she can. He doesn't try to stop her, even though he can see her shaking slightly. He seems to want her to go with him enough that he isn't bothered by how it happens. After all, even with the gun, she's not really in charge.
She asks him again where Adrian is, but he doesn't answer. He seems cocky about it, even.
He really is a psychopath, she thinks.
She orders him into the car, and they drive off, her gun still pointed at him from where she's pushed her back up against the passenger side door beside him. She can think of nothing but getting Adrian back safely. She knows the danger she's putting herself into by getting into the car with him, instead of arresting him, as she'd almost done a moment before, and calling it in like procedure dictated. Calling in for back up. Asking for help, the thing she loathes most in the world.
Would an arrest have even held up? Arresting her own boss, a Lieutenant on the police force? It sounds completely ridiculous, even to her. Besides, Skinner knows their case and all the evidence, knows that their case is weak, and he'd probably be released… no one would believe her. And once he got out, he'd run, he'd disappear. No, if she doesn't act now, and they might never find Adrian.
She doesn't have a choice. She'll do it on her own.
Still, she wishes fleetingly as they drive away that IA hadn't taken Holder. It occurs to her only then that Skinner had probably arranged for Holder to be picked up once he'd found out how close they were getting, so that she'd be without backup. And it had worked, because she's there at his mercy. That's the problem - Skinner knows her, knows that she'll do anything to get Adrian back, that she won't follow protocols or call for back up if she thinks it'll hurt her chances of solving her case... which she does, of course.
Dammit.
She's half tempted to try to signal Holder somehow, like she had when she'd been forced to drive around the city by Pastor Mike that night ... but how? Skinner is smarter than Pastor Mike had been, and he's a cop. Anything she might do, Skinner would see, and who knows if he would tell her where Adrian was then… She needs to let him stay in control for now, or at least to feel like he's in control.
Is he the one in control? Or is she? Despite the fact that she's the one with the gun, she feels like anything but the one who's in control.
She knows that Holder will go absolutely crazy when he finds out what she's doing. He cares more about her safety than she does herself, and she knows it. She hopes that he'll find a way out of the IA mess on his own. Knowing Holder, he'll think of something. She'll never admit it to him, but he really is a genius sometimes. She could never tell him that, though, because she'd never hear the end of it.
No, all she can do now is sit in that car with the man that she'd thought she'd known, this psychopath who'd been someone else all along… pointing a gun on him and hoping that he'll lead her to Adrian.
And what then? She has no idea. Will he hurt her? There's no way to know, but that isn't even her primary concern. All she knows is that she has to find Adrian, or hope that Holder will find him… and maybe, that he'll find her as well, like he always does.
Before it's too late.