Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (22 page)

Dan didn’t fully understand the mixed metaphor, but he got the gist. “What about the other witnesses?”

“What other witnesses?”

“The ones listed in the police file; did you speak to them?”

“Probably. Nothing that rocked my world that I can remember.” Tomey checked that expensive watch again. “Okay, we good?”

Dan nodded. “Yeah, we’re good.” He wasn’t, but he knew Tomey wasn’t going to give him any more time. In Tomey’s world, time was money, and he wasn’t making any sitting and talking to Dan about a client from a decade ago sitting in prison. Besides, Dan had figured out what he needed to know.

Tomey had done a horseshit job defending Gerhardt.

When he got back to Tracy’s, Dan took a long run, showered, and spent the rest of the afternoon going through the remainder of the materials in the Beth Stinson file. Tracy called at five in the afternoon to tell him she was coming home early, then called again at five thirty and said she’d been delayed.

Dan managed to scrape together a salad to serve with frozen chicken breasts he’d marinated in soy sauce, which was about all he could find in Tracy’s refrigerator. He put the chicken in the oven when he heard the garage door roll open. The oven clock said 6:33. When he heard the door to the house open, he stood behind the wall and reached out waving a white towel. “Is it safe to come out?”

She laughed. He poked his head around the corner. Despite her smile, she looked as tired and beat as she’d sounded on the phone. She set her briefcase down and tossed her coat over the back of a chair. Dan gave her a kiss. “You want a glass of wine?”

“I better not,” she said. “I’m liable to fall asleep.”

“Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. I thought you might want time for a shower.”

“Thanks. I’m a bit ripe. What did you do with your day off?”

“Day off? I wish. It can wait. Take your shower.”

She eyed him. “You want to tell me something. I can tell.”

“Actually, I’m debating how much I should tell you.”

“Beth Stinson?”

“I talked to JoAnne Anderson this morning.”

“Yeah?”

“Then I spoke to Wayne Gerhardt’s public defender.”

“And?”

“What if they start asking you questions—Nolasco or someone else? Maybe it’s best if you don’t know the details.”

She leaned back against the counter. She appreciated Dan’s concern, but at the moment the investigation was going nowhere fast. And if finding some evidence to change that meant risking getting in trouble for working an old file, then so be it. “I talked to an FBI profiler today,” Tracy said. “She said this kind of serial killer practices killing the way the rest of us practice golf swings, that he doesn’t necessarily get it right the first time. It could explain the difference between the way Stinson was tied and the other dancers.”

Dan appeared to be giving that some thought. Then he said, “Anderson’s nearsighted. She can’t see to the sidewalk without her glasses. I asked her if she was wearing them that night. She said she couldn’t be certain. She
thinks
she put them on because she
thinks
she saw Gerhardt. I don’t think she did, and I’m not certain she could have seen him even if she had. I drove out to her house late last night to get a perspective similar to the one she would have had. It was pitch-black—no street lamps, just a few lawn lights. No lights on the exterior of Beth Stinson’s home.”

“Could have been different nine years ago.”

Dan shook his head. “There are some photos of the exterior of the home in the file. Besides, people usually add exterior lights, not take them down.”

“So how’d Anderson ID Gerhardt?” Tracy asked.

“Initially, she didn’t. She told Nolasco and his partner she couldn’t be certain about what she had seen, that she thought she saw a man but she didn’t want to be responsible for convicting an innocent man and have that on her conscience.”

“But she testified she saw Gerhardt.”

“Only after she picked him out of a police lineup, which was after Nolasco showed her a photograph of Gerhardt.”

“She picked him out of a montage?”

Dan shook his head. “She said they showed her just Gerhardt’s photograph.”

“But there are photographs of four other men in the file,” Tracy said.

“I know. But Anderson was certain.”

“I think I need that glass of wine,” Tracy said.

Dan poured a glass and handed it to her. Tracy took a sip. Then she said, “So they show her Gerhardt’s picture, she sees the same guy in the lineup, and now she’s convinced she was wearing her glasses and saw Gerhardt.”

“She also said she was outside gardening the afternoon Gerhardt was working to clear the clog in Stinson’s bathroom, and she saw him walk out of the house to the back of the van.”

“She could be remembering him from that afternoon and not that night.”

“She testified Gerhardt was wearing coveralls.” Dan shook his head. “No way, even wearing glasses, she could make out that much detail. It was overcast and raining. I’m betting she saw him in coveralls that afternoon.”

“None of this is in the file.”

“No,” Dan said. “But I’m not sure it would have come out at trial even if it had been in the police reports after meeting Gerhardt’s attorney. He told me he didn’t go at Anderson too hard because he was afraid of pissing off the jury. His client was looking at prison, and he didn’t want to piss off the jury?”

For a minute they stood not speaking. Then Tracy asked, “So what next?”

“The next logical step would be for me to speak to Gerhardt, but we need to think this through first, Tracy.”

“Nothing to think through, Dan. Not now.”

“If someone finds out I’m talking to Gerhardt, how long do you think it’s going to take the media, and your boss, to tie me to you? And if he and his partner did railroad Gerhardt, he’s really not going to want you looking into this. He’ll paint you as a crusader trying to free another convicted murderer instead of catching a serial killer. I’m not sure how you survive, especially if someone starts asking how I got a police file.”

Tracy looked out the sliding glass door. The final light of day reflected in bursts of gold off the glass exteriors of the downtown Seattle office buildings. “Do you remember Walter Gipson?”

“The schoolteacher?”

“He admitted being in the motel with Schreiber the night she was killed, but he says he didn’t kill her. If he’s telling the truth, it means someone went to that motel room after him. Had to have, right?”

“That would make sense.”

“The profiler I spoke with today said the killer is very intelligent, careful, deliberate. So what if he knew Schreiber was going to be with Gipson and used Gipson as a cover?”

“Knew how?”

“Schreiber brought Gipson into the greenroom at least once, and Faz found something on the surveillance video of the Pink Palace parking lot the night Schreiber and Gipson left together.”

“What did he find?”

“A car parked on a side street pulls from the curb and appears to follow Gipson and Schreiber as they drive off.”

“So you’re thinking that if Gerhardt didn’t kill Stinson, then the killer might have known Gerhardt performed a service call at Stinson’s house earlier that afternoon and used it as a cover.”

“That would be the logical deduction, right?”

“What about the other two dancers?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still fleshing this out. But if there’s something to it, it could mean I’m going about this all wrong. If this guy had prior contact with his victims, then maybe I need to reassess whether this really is a stranger-to-stranger killer.”

Dan recognized the look in her eye—the look Tracy got at the shooting range when she was zeroing in on a target. “I thought you said you ran every employee through the system, and nothing suspicious came up.”

“We did, but that doesn’t mean a lot. The profiler said these guys fly under the radar, lead seemingly normal lives with no prior criminal records. They’re one and done. They get caught and it’s life or the death penalty.”

“There’s something else,” Dan said. Tracy followed him from the kitchen to the dining room table. He picked up the HITS form for Beth Stinson and handed it to her. “Look at question 102. It says there’s evidence of a sexual assault, but they didn’t check the box indicating they found semen in the body cavities of the victim.”

“I noticed that also.”

Tracy was about to say something more, but Dan said, “Hold that thought.” He picked up a copy of the medical examiner’s report, this one with his yellow highlights and sticky notes. He flipped a few stapled pages and read from the report. “No evidence of redness, soreness, or other signs of physical trauma to corroborate that sexual contact occurred. Swabs collected of the body cavities did not reveal seminal fluid. A colposcopy was performed but did not indicate any genital microtrauma indicating recent sexual contact and penetration. No seminal fluid, no spermatozoa or acid phosphatase.”

Tracy had spent a year on the Sexual Assault Unit. “Cases negative for sperm but positive for ACP typically indicate the assailant had a vasectomy or wore a condom.”

“And that’s probably what Nolasco and his partner assumed when they checked the box,” Dan said, “except the medical examiner ruled out a condom.” Dan read again from the report. “No exchangeable traces of particulates, lubricants, or spermicides.” He lowered the report. “Whoever killed Beth Stinson didn’t have sex with her. Nolasco or his partner checked box 102 prematurely because—”

“They needed a motive.”

Dan nodded. “Just like they needed a suspect. And because the defense attorney got Gerhardt to plead, none of this ever came out and they never bothered to go back and correct the form.”

Tracy said, “So you have to talk to Gerhardt and find out who else knew he’d made a service call that afternoon and follow up on those other witness leads.”

“Beth Stinson’s family is not going to want to relive this.”

“I know, and I don’t blame them. But if we’re right, we’re not just talking about an innocent man in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, we’re talking about someone who might have been killing for nearly a decade, maybe longer, someone who might have killed a lot more than three or four women. And if the profiler is right, something has triggered him to kill again, and this time he’s not going to stop on his own.”

CHAPTER 33

H
e pressed the “Eject” button and looked again at the woman on the floor. Still upright, she had her eyes open, staring at him with her mouth hanging agape. She’d been more work than the others. Each time he’d thought she was dead, she’d flinch, then gasp, and come back to life. It was like one of those zombie horror movies where the zombies wouldn’t die unless they had their heads blown off. At first it had been intoxicating, but it soon got old. He just wanted her to die so he could leave. Her perfume and body odor disgusted him, and the smell of cigarettes was nauseating.

The VCR continued to whir. Then it stopped. He reached for the cassette tape, but it didn’t come out. He pressed “Eject” again and heard a click, indicating that the tape had rewound, but again the cassette did not come out. He pressed the button repeatedly. “Come on. Come on. Come on, you piece of crap!”

He banged his fist on the top of the machine, which caused the dresser to bump hard against the wall. He froze. He’d heard people in the room next door earlier, though it had been quiet the last hour. He lifted the flap on the VCR and peered inside. The tape was there, but it hadn’t popped up. A cold sweat broke out across his forehead and the back of his neck. Rivulets of perspiration dribbled down the side of his face from his temples.

He looked again at the woman. She continued to stare up at him.

“Stop looking at me,” he said. He stood and kicked her with his foot. She wobbled but didn’t topple over.

He gripped the machine, but it was bolted to the top of the wood laminate dresser. “Like someone would steal a decades-old piece-of-shit VCR you couldn’t get ten bucks for in a pawnshop,” he said.

He pressed the “Eject” button again, then opened and closed the dresser drawers, frantically searching for something to pry up the tape. The drawers were empty. He swore under his breath.
What kind of motel doesn’t provide a pen?
He removed his keys from his pocket and tried to work a key beneath the tape. This wasn’t just about sentimentality; he’d had the tape since he was a child, but he was more practical. The tape had his fingerprints all over it.

He checked his watch. How long had she rented the room? He always gave them money for the night but found they were cheap. They’d pay for an hour or two and pocket the change. It was why he’d started to use cigarettes to burn the bottoms of their feet. They were taking too long to die, and he feared a manager would come to the room, looking for the rest of his money. He could use the tip of the cigarette without having to touch them. They disgusted him, but again there were the practicalities to consider. Any contact meant a potential transfer of evidence, a piece of hair, flakes of skin, something.

He looked to the door. The security latch remained in place, the chain lock in its slot.