Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (36 page)

Dan laughed, tossed the empty box over his shoulder, and pulled his shirt over his head as he hurried across the living room and embraced her.

“Make love to me, Dan.”

He kissed her hard on the mouth, then softly about her neck and shoulders, hands finding the towel. It fell gently to the floor. Tracy felt herself drifting with his touch, as soothing as the shower’s warm water. Her arms and legs weakened, and she became light-headed. She managed to help him remove his pants, but they never made it to the bed. Dan lifted her against the wall, and Tracy wrapped her legs around his waist.

Afterward, both of them still breathing heavily, Dan turned his head to see the clock on her nightstand. “I never thought I’d be proud to say that I made love in the time it takes to boil noodles.”

“And with three minutes to spare,” she said.

They laughed. Dan said, “Unless you like your pasta soggy, I better get out there.” He gathered his clothes, slipped on his boxer shorts and T-shirt, gave her another kiss, and left the room.

After jumping back in the shower to rinse off, Tracy slid on sweats and ran a brush through her hair. The rain came in a rush, hard enough that it sounded like the roar of cars on a freeway and triggered the lights in the backyard.

Tracy stepped to the glass doors. This time, the yard was not empty. A hooded figure stood in the spotlight on her lawn, though rain cascaded all around him and a shadow obscured the details of his face. Then the lights shut off.

Pulse racing, Tracy quickly crossed the room, grabbed her Glock, and hurried for the living room stairs.

Dan looked up as she exited the bedroom. “You want that glass—?”

Tracy bounded down the stairs.

“Tracy?”

She unlocked the deadbolt and pulled open the door.

“What’s going on?” Dan shouted.

She hurried across the darkened lower floor to the door leading to the backyard, snapped that deadbolt, and rushed out into the pounding rain, Glock raised, head swiveling left and right, eyes searching. The floodlights burst on, illuminating an empty yard. She swung the gun left to right, following the edge of the perimeter of light while moving toward the thick shrubbery. Her bare feet sank into the water-soaked lawn. Rain blurred her vision. She shook her head to clear it. “Where are you?” she said. “Where the hell are you?”

“Tracy?” Dan shouted from the open door. “Tracy?”

At the edge of the brush, she searched for broken branches, a worn path, footprints in the sodden soil.

Dan was suddenly beside her, talking over the rain. “What are you doing?”

“He was here.”

“What? Who?”

She continued to search, making her way clockwise around the edge of the lawn, gun aimed at the brush. “Someone was standing on the lawn. He triggered the light.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I saw him standing right over there, staring up at me.”

“Let’s go inside. We can call—”

She spun. “Who, Dan? Who am I going to call? I am the police. Okay? I’m the damn police, and that bastard was standing right there in the middle of my yard! My yard!” She turned back to the bushes and glimpsed something in the brush. She stepped in, the branches pricking her skin through her sweats and scratching her bare arms. She picked up a sodden piece of paper and noticed several more in the dirt and clinging to branches.

“What is it?” Dan asked.

“I don’t know.” She stepped farther in, careful she wasn’t stepping on a footprint or disturbing other potential evidence, and retrieved the pieces of paper. As she collected them, she began to get a better sense of what they had been a part of.

A photograph.

Tracy set the pieces of paper on the dining room table, arranging and rearranging them as if putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Her pants and shirt were saturated, puddling on the carpet; her hair was matted. Dan came into the room and handed her a towel. She wiped the water from her face, frantically moving the bits and pieces of paper. The image slowly took shape.

Her stomach dropped, and she stepped back from the table.

“It’s you,” Dan said.

It was a close-up of her face shot with a telephoto lens. The hood of her jacket framed her face and protected her from the falling snow.

“Where was it taken?” Dan asked.

She remembered the moment. She’d been standing on the porch of the veterinary clinic in Pine Flat while Dan was attending to Rex. She’d been talking on her cell phone and looking out across a snow-covered field at a parked car. Despite the heavy snow, the windshield had been freshly cleared and she’d sensed someone inside, watching her.

“Pine Flat,” she said. “The veterinary clinic.”

“What?”

She hurried to the hall, where she’d left her purse, and retrieved her cell phone.

Dan followed. “Pine Flat? That was more than a month ago. Six weeks.”

“He could have left a shoeprint in the mud. A piece of his clothes or hair could have snagged on one of the bushes. Something.” She called dispatch, provided her name and badge number, and asked to be patched through to the CSI Unit.

“You mean when Rex was shot?” Dan asked, sounding as though he was still coming to grips with it. Rex had taken buckshot in the side, and they’d had to rush him to the veterinary clinic.

“I saw a car,” she said. “I thought it was abandoned in the snowstorm until I realized the windshield was clear. I saw it again later, at night, parked outside the motel.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure it was anything. I thought it was a reporter.”

She raised her hand, but Dan continued talking. “So it’s him. It’s the same guy. The guy who left the noose. He’s been following you for weeks?” He walked to the sliding glass door and looked down into the yard.

After hanging up with CSI, Tracy joined him. “He was in camouflage, I think. I couldn’t tell, but I think he was wearing one of those wide-brimmed hats. It was raining too hard, and the shadows fell across his face. Then the lights went out.”

She stepped back from the window and sat in one of the dining room chairs, feeling a sudden chill. She started to shake. Dan grabbed the towel from her and wrapped it around her shoulders. He started for her bedroom. “You need to get out of those wet clothes,” he said, but Tracy wasn’t certain wet clothes were the reason she was shaking.

CHAPTER 48

K
aylee Wright was the last of the CSI detectives to leave, and Tracy walked her out to the gray CSI van. The rain had lessened to a light mist. Wright was a “man-tracker” with the Special Operations Section of the King County Sheriff’s Office. An expert in crime scene investigation and reconstruction, Wright had been one of the trackers who’d sought out the remains of the victims Gary Ridgway had dumped in woods and marshes, and along the Green River. Wright said she’d found bootprints in the brush several feet from the edge of Tracy’s backyard, and broken foliage where the man had made ingress and egress up the steep hill. She also found bootprints in the water-soaked lawn, indicating the path he’d taken to cut across the backyard. The torrent of water had obliterated many of the impressions, and Wright wasn’t sure she’d be able to identify the tread to determine the brand of boot, but she was confident in the size, between a twelve and thirteen.

As Wright and the CSI van departed, Kins and Tracy stood together on the sidewalk. “You sure you’re going to be okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. I have Dan, and I have my Glock.”

“You’ll call if you notice anything.”

“You know it.”

“I’ll see about getting a patrol officer put back on watch.”

Tracy doubted Nolasco would authorize it. “Go on home. I appreciate you coming out, Kins.”

“No problem.” He started for his car, then stopped. “Hey, I just wanted you to know. There’s no hard feelings. I know you were just trying to protect me.”

Tracy nodded.

“So we’re good?” Kins said.

“We’re good.”

Tracy shut the wrought iron gate behind him and shook it to ensure that it was locked. She watched Kins drive off down the street, his BMW disappearing over the small crest in the road. They’d seen each other nearly every day, eight to ten hours a day, for more than six years. She’d miss working with him.

Inside, she closed the front door, hearing the deadbolt engage automatically.

Dan was ascending the stairs from the lower level. “Everything is locked up tight,” he said. “I checked every window and door. Did you change the code to the gate and the front door?”

She nodded.

“I’ll bring down Rex and Sherlock and leave them here when I can’t stay.” He looked at his watch, which caused Tracy to check the clock on the kitchen wall. It was just after two. So much for an early night.

“I don’t think I can sleep,” she said. She went to a cabinet beneath the kitchen counter and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. She poured two fingers in each and handed a glass to Dan. They sat at the dining room table.

“So, the noose and the photograph,” Dan said, “what’s it all supposed to mean?”

She’d been thinking it over as CSI scoured her backyard. “I think the noose was to get my attention, to let me know he was out there. He killed Angela Schreiber later that night.”

“Is that why he left the photograph?”

Tracy hesitated. Then she said, “The drapes in the bedroom were open, and the lights were on.”

Dan set down his drink. “He saw us.”

Tracy nodded. “I noticed it when I was down there with CSI. You can see into the bedroom and the dining room from where the tracker says he was hiding. She said that from the position of his bootprints, the pressure points were more on the balls of his feet than his heels, so he was likely crouching, the way someone might if they were in a duck blind while using binoculars to watch the sky.”

CHAPTER 49

T
he following morning, exhausted and mentally drained, Tracy drove to the Justice Center with the same feeling of trepidation she’d felt the day she reported to the Violent Crimes Section as one of Seattle’s first female homicide detectives. Unlike that morning, when the staff and most of the other detectives made a point of welcoming her, this time, only Nolasco’s assistant met Tracy as she stepped off the elevator. He advised her that she’d been assigned to be the D Team’s fifth wheel and given a desk at the back of the seventh floor with the rest of the administrative staff. If Nolasco wanted Tracy out of sight, he’d succeeded. Her new desk was in a corner and literally surrounded by stacks of boxes.

Tracy avoided the morning news and refrained from reading the
Seattle Times
.
She had an afternoon meeting scheduled with OPA to discuss both her assault on Bradley Taggart, which was suddenly an issue again, as well as the impropriety of sharing a police file with a civilian attorney. She’d called her union representative and asked for legal representation. The lawyer was supposed to get back in touch with her about whether the meeting would proceed or be delayed.

She spent the morning combing the Internet, reading articles on the Cowboy killings. Then she Googled the names Wayne Gerhardt and Beth Stinson and was surprised to find several pages of results. She methodically went through each hit. It wasn’t until her stomach growled that she checked the clock on her computer. Almost noon. She called Kins on his cell. “Just checking in to see how things are going.”

Kins lowered his voice. “Nolasco moved us all back to the Justice Center, and he’s using your desk. I get the sense he’s keeping an eye on everyone. The mood in here is like a funeral. He’s called a noon meeting. What do they have you doing?’

“Twiddling my thumbs,” she said.

“Any word from Melton?”

“Nothing yet. Let’s get coffee.”

“I’ll call if I can get away.”

As Tracy disconnected, she looked up to see Preston Polanco, a member of the D Team, step around a stack of boxes, carrying a pile of documents. Polanco dropped the documents on her desk. “Nolasco said to give you something to keep you busy,” he said, smiling. “I need someone to go through these witness statements and make a timeline. Not nearly as interesting as your Cowboy—just a couple gangbangers shooting each other, but we all got to do the grunt work sometimes, right?”