Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (25 page)

The phone on Kins’s desk rang, and he answered it. “I’ll be right down.” He hung up. “That’s him,” he said to Santos.

Kins greeted David Bankston in the lobby and endured an uncomfortable elevator ride. Bankston stared at the metal doors.

“Thanks for coming in,” Kins said.

Bankston gave him a quick glance. “Sure. How long will it take?”

“Shouldn’t be too long. How old is your daughter?”

“She’s two.”

“The terrible twos. That’s a joyful time for every parent.”

“Yeah,” Bankston said, keeping his gaze fixed on the doors.

“Did you talk to your wife?”

“What about?”

“Coming in here.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Didn’t mention it?”

“No.”

When Kins walked Bankston to the soft interrogation room, Bankston saw Santos sitting at the table and hesitated. He turned to Kins. “Where’s Detective Crosswhite?”

“She’s involved in another matter,” Kins said.

“They took her off the case?”

“This is Santos,” Kins said, deliberately avoiding the use of the term ‘agent.’” Santos had come to the door. She offered her hand, but Bankston turned again to Kins. “I thought I was meeting with Detective Crosswhite.”

“Was there something in particular you wanted to tell Detective Crosswhite?” Kins asked.

“She asked about the rope, whether we can track the shipments.”

“Did you find something out?” Kins asked, though he already knew the answer, because Mayweather had been going through the store’s inventory and had been complaining it was like trying to find an honest man in Congress. Mayweather had also gone through Bankston’s purchases using his employee discount, which did not reveal polypropylene rope.

When Bankston didn’t immediately answer, Kins said, “Why don’t we sit down?” For a moment Bankston looked uncertain. Then he walked in, and they sat at a round table.

“What did you find?” Kins asked.

“What?”

“About the shipments, what did you find?”

“They can track the inventory. They use bar codes. They can track where the inventory is shipped, to which store. Once the shipment arrives, it’s inventoried at that store, which means they can track sales from that store.”

“But only if the person used a credit card,” Kins said.

“Not necessarily. They have these rewards programs people can sign up for. They get credits even if they use cash. But they have to provide a phone number.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Kins said. They had, but doubted the Cowboy was providing a phone number. “That’s a good tip.”

Bankston nodded. “And I was thinking, you know, that the stores have cameras all over the place, so you could maybe go through the videos, find out if someone was buying rope on the day that the women were killed.”

Kins nodded and looked to Santos. “Another good suggestion. I can tell you were at the Academy. You think like a cop.”

“The police academy?” Santos asked.

“David was a recruit before he joined the Army,” Kins said, noting that Bankston was rubbing his hands on his thighs.

“Is that right?” Santos said. “Why did you decide not to become a police officer?”

Bankston directed his answer to Kins. “It just didn’t work out.”

“Why was that?” Santos knew. The answer was in Bankston’s file. Kins wondered if she was pushing him to see how quickly Bankston might anger.

“I messed up the physical.” He looked to Kins. “So how long before the examiner is ready?”

“The Academy can be rough,” Santos said. “How many times did you try?”

Bankston sat back, eyes focused on the floor. “Just once. I figured no point trying again.” Again he looked to Kins. “How do we start?”

“The examiner is getting the room ready. It shouldn’t be long.”

Bankston looked to Santos. “You’re not the examiner?”

“No.”

“The room’s down the hall,” Kins said. “Let me go over the procedure while we’re waiting, David. Are you nervous?”

“Why?”

“Stressful situation,” Kins said. “It would be natural to be a little nervous.”

Bankston shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

Kins slid Bankston a piece of paper. “These are the questions the examiner will ask you.”

Bankston’s focus shifted from the paper to Kins, then to Santos. “You’re giving me the questions?”

Kins smiled. “Not like high school, right? We give you the questions but not the answers. We’re not trying to trick you, David. You can take as much time as you’d like to go over the questions. You’ll see the first few are pretty basic—your name, address, age. The examiner calls them control questions. She uses your responses to those questions to get a baseline of your reaction to the other questions. As I said, this is all about clearing you so you can get on with your life.”

He handed Bankston a pen and noted that he took it with his right hand.

After further explanation of the procedure, Kins looked to Santos, who subtly shook her head.

“Okay,” Kins said. “Unless you have any questions, David, I’ll introduce you to the examiner.”

He walked Bankston down the hall to Stephanie Ludlow’s office. She’d already put a sign in the hall asking for quiet. The anteroom was all about comfort, an open space with leather chairs, a potted plant, and soft colors and lighting. After introducing Bankston to Ludlow, Kins went back to the interrogation room.

“Strange guy,” Santos said. “He wouldn’t make eye contact with me.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“What about when you and Detective Crosswhite first interviewed him? Did you notice anything like that?”

Kins shook his head. “No, but Tracy took the lead.”

“Ask the examiner her impression,” Santos said.

“He didn’t tell his wife,” Kins said. “I asked him in the elevator if he’d told his wife he was coming in. Does that strike you as odd that he wouldn’t tell her?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he didn’t want to upset her unnecessarily,” Santos said.

“Or he’s afraid of her reaction,” Kins said. “What do you make about him wanting to help with the rope and the video cameras?”

“With all the cop shows now on TV,” Santos said, “everyone is an amateur detective. I think a part of him is enjoying being a part of this.”

Kins wasn’t at his desk when Tracy returned to the Cowboy Room, so she’d asked Faz if he wanted to take a drive to find Taggart. They’d struck out at the apartment building in Pioneer Square—the superintendent hadn’t seen Bradley Taggart for days. They’d knocked on the neighbor’s door, but she also hadn’t seen or heard him, nor had the bartender at The Last Shot.

Late on a Friday afternoon, traffic was heavy, and they were inching their way back to the Justice Center garage when Tracy’s cell rang. Dispatch had a bead on Taggart’s car, and the location instantly improved Tracy’s mood. Disconnecting, she said to Faz, “Taggart’s parked on Fourth Avenue South.”

“Fourth Avenue South,” Kins said. “Why does that sound familiar?”

Tracy nodded. “Because he’s at the Dancing Bare.”

Graffiti artists had tagged the bluish-gray stucco, which was nicked and chipped where patrons had misjudged the distance between the one-story building and their cars’ bumpers. The Dancing Bare preferred a lower profile than The Pink Palace—the only thing that revealed the nature of the club was the name, hand-painted across the façade, along with the outline of a nude dancer.

Tracy and Faz did a drive-by to confirm that Taggart’s car remained parked out front.

“That’s our boy,” Faz said.

The windows facing the street had been blacked out from the inside with heavy film, but Tracy recalled the club’s layout from the Hansen investigation. She also recalled that the building was situated on a V-shaped lot, with the tip of the lot at the intersection of Fourth Avenue South and the BNSF railroad tracks.

They drove around the corner. The back of the building abutted a chain-link fence that separated the lot from the railroad tracks. The alley was too narrow to get a patrol car behind the building, and on the other side of the fence was a gated parking lot, for a warehouse with semitrailers parked in loading bays.

“This dump even have a rear exit?” Faz asked.

Tracy pointed to the only door. “That’s it.”

A patrol unit pulled up alongside them. Tracy gave the two officers a photograph of Taggart and explained the problems with the layout of the building and the lot. She instructed them to wait on Sixth, where the warehouse parking lot exited.

As the officers departed, Tracy turned to Faz. “He obviously knows me. I go in and he’s liable to run. You go in the front. I’ll wait out back.”

Tracy was in position outside the back door when she heard Faz’s call on the radio.

“We got a rabbit!”

But Taggart did not burst out the back door. He came around the corner of the building, skidded to a stop when he saw Tracy, then leapt onto a waist-high concrete-block wall and launched himself at the fence. He caught the top rail, but his square-toed boots prevented him from getting a toehold and he started kicking at the fence, unable to pull himself over.

Tracy made the same leap and caught Taggart around the waist, her weight pulling his grip from the rail. She hit the ground, and her right ankle twisted, producing a stabbing pain. Taggart rolled and kicked at her. She avoided a blow to the face, but the heel of his boot struck her hard in the collarbone. She managed to pull herself up Taggart’s body and pin him until Faz arrived, wheezing like a man with asthma, dropped a knee, and put all of his considerable weight on Taggart’s shoulders and neck.

“Okay, okay,” Taggart groaned, going suddenly limp.

Tracy jerked both his arms behind his back, cuffed his wrists, and rolled off, winded and in pain. Her shoulder and ankle felt like they were on fire.

Faz grabbed Taggart by the collar and nearly lifted him off the ground, which triggered more profanity-laced threats. “I’m going to sue all of you. This is harassment. I’ll be out in the morning, and I’m going straight to the news station.”

“You ain’t seen harassment yet, pal,” Faz said, “But keep talking and I guarantee you, you will.”

CHAPTER 37

K
ins sat in Stephanie Ludlow’s office, staring in disbelief at her preliminary assessment of David Bankston’s polygraph.

“Not all the questions,” Ludlow said, “but—”

“What questions did he fail?”

She pointed. “Flip the pages. There. Stop there. See? Whether he knew any of the victims; whether he’d ever been with any of them.”

Kins looked up from the report. “What about whether he killed them?”

“No discernible response.”

“How can that be, Stephanie? How could he be lying about not knowing them but not be lying that he didn’t kill them?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Kins.” Ludlow handed him the list of questions and her preliminary conclusions. “He also spiked when I asked him his current place of residence.”

“So it’s inconclusive.”

“That he’s lying? No. But
what
he’s lying about, that’s hard to say. He’s skittish and distrusting. He never did fully calm down.”

Kins remembered Santos’s request. “What about eye contact? Did he make eye contact with you?”