Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (4 page)

Tracy quickly scrolled to the section asking questions about Stinson’s lifestyle. Twenty-one years old, Stinson worked in North Seattle as a bookkeeper for a big-box store. Nothing on the form indicated she partied, brought home men, or was into bondage or rough sex.

She scrolled to the box for question 102, whether the crime had been “sex-related.” The “yes” box was checked. She scrolled to question 105:

Was semen found in body cavities of the victim?

No

Yes

“What?” she said aloud. She reread the two questions. The answers seemed incongruous. It was possible the killer had worn a condom, but Tracy wouldn’t know that unless it was in the medical examiner’s report. Given the date of the murder, nine years earlier, she wouldn’t have access to that information online.

She scrolled to the section on the offender. Wayne Gerhardt, a twenty-eight-year-old Roto-Rooter technician, had made a house call to Stinson’s home the previous afternoon. Except for an arrest for driving under the influence, he had no known criminal history. Detectives found a dirty bootprint on Stinson’s bedroom carpet that matched the sole of a pair of boots found in Gerhardt’s apartment closet. Gerhardt’s fingerprints were lifted from surfaces in the bathroom and the bedroom, and from the kitchen counter. Tracy scrolled to question 135, which asked whether Gerhardt’s blood, semen, or other forensic evidence, such as hair, had been found on Stinson’s body. The “no” box had been checked.

Tracy sat back thinking that also odd. Why would a killer take no apparent precaution to prevent leaving behind fingerprints, yet somehow not leave behind any other forensic evidence? It didn’t make sense.

Deciding the similarities to the details of Nicole Hansen’s death were enough to warrant pulling the file and talking to the detectives who’d worked the case, she scrolled back to the top of the form.

4. Officer/Detective Last Name: Nolasco 5. First Name: Johnny

“Damn,” she said. No way Johnny Nolasco would want her, of all people, digging around in one of his old files.

Her cell phone vibrated on the dining room table. Sherlock sat up as if he’d been shocked. The number on the screen puzzled her. She and Kins were not the homicide team on call.

So why was the on-call sergeant calling her?

CHAPTER 6

T
racy had patrolled the Aurora strip the first year after she graduated from the Academy, when she was assigned to the North Precinct. She’d become even more familiar with it over the past seven years, when she’d investigated several homicides on the strip, including Nicole Hansen’s.

Once the main artery in and out of Seattle, Aurora Avenue, also known as State Route 99, was now a multilane thoroughfare with a cluttered skyline of tangled wires strung between telephone poles and traffic lights, and billboards advertising massage and tanning parlors, tobacco shops, and adults-only establishments. A string of motels also lined the strip, some quickly built to house the throng of visitors to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Fifty-plus years later, those structures that had not already been razed and replaced by more modern accommodations were showing their age, but they continued on life support, catering to those who now frequented the strip with cold hard cash looking to buy drugs or hire a prostitute.

Tracy slowed her truck as she approached the turn for the Aurora Motor Inn, badged a patrol officer on traffic duty, and drove down a sloped driveway into the parking lot. The Aurora Motor Inn was typical of the older motels on the strip, a U-shaped two-story auto court with rooms accessed from exterior landings. Kins stood in the parking lot, his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, his chin tucked in the lining of his upturned collar. Billy Williams, who would serve as the scene sergeant, stood beside him. They both squinted at the glare from the truck’s headlights.

Tracy zipped up her down jacket and stepped out into the chilled morning air.

“Déjà vu all over again,” Kins said.

Williams gave her a “here we go” nod and lifted the glasses dangling from a chain around his neck onto the tip of his nose. His hands shook from the cold as he read from a spiral notepad. “Decedent is Angela Schreiber, a dancer at the Pink Palace.” Tracy looked to Kins, who arched his eyebrows. Williams pointed to a glass door beneath a porte cochere. “Manager lives in a unit behind the office. Says Schreiber came in just after one this morning, paid cash.”

“Anyone come in with her?” Tracy asked.

“Claims he didn’t see anyone with her, didn’t pay attention. Didn’t care until her time was up and she failed to return the room key.”

“He familiar with her?” Tracy asked.

“Says she started coming in a couple months ago. Always alone. Always cash. Always returns the key. Very polite and prompt. Until tonight. When she didn’t bring the key back, he went to the room and knocked. When he got no answer, he let himself in. Didn’t get far. Went back to his office and called 911. Patrol secured the room. CSI and the ME are on the way. Likely someone from MDOP.”

Whenever there was a violent crime in King County, one of the county’s most experienced prosecutors was dispatched to the scene as part of the Most Dangerous Offender Project. The prosecutor was assigned to the case from beginning to end, and available to detectives for legal questions or concerns, with the intent to make the investigations more efficient and collaborative. Some of the older detectives resented having prosecutors underfoot at crime scenes, but it had never bothered Tracy.

“You had a look?” Tracy asked Kins.

Kins nodded. “In this instance, a picture is truly worth a thousand words.”

Tracy walked to the last door beneath a narrow overhang. Williams had set the interior perimeter with red tape, and a patrol officer stood outside the door holding the scene log. Anyone crossing that line had to sign the log and file a written statement. The brass liked to make appearances at high-profile crime scenes, but they really hated writing statements.

“Were you the responding officer?” Tracy asked, signing the log.

“Yeah.”

“Fire department been in?”

“Left about ten minutes ago.”

“You note the engine number?”

The officer pulled out a small notepad. “Engine 24.”

Tracy would follow up and get the crew’s report. It was ludicrous, but the fire department always responded to homicides, ostensibly in case the victim was still alive, and if not, to declare the victim dead. That was more often than not the case, and in many instances easily discernible, but the firefighters stormed the crime scene anyway, screwing up forensic evidence by leaving multiple bootprints that had to be considered and eliminated, stepping on shell casings, and sometimes repositioning the body.

Tracy looked to the edge of the parking lot where the patrol sergeant had set the exterior perimeter with yellow-and-black crime scene tape. “Let’s run that tape across the driveway entrance,” she said.

“Owner’s going to squawk about it.”

She wasn’t in the mood. “Arrest him if he gets in your way.”

The officer departed.

“Bad night?” Kins asked, giving her a look.

“Bad month,” she said. “Got a feeling it’s about to get a whole lot worse.”

She stepped inside the room. Angela Schreiber had toppled onto her side at the foot of the bed, her naked body bound and contorted, head back, neck craning, eyes open. A rope extended through a slipknot and ran down her spine, binding her wrists and ankles. Her legs were bent so severely her heels nearly touched her buttocks.

“Hog-tied,” Kins said, standing at the threshold, “like an animal at some sadistic rodeo.”

“They don’t kill the animals at the rodeo, Kins,” Tracy said.

Kins ran a hand through his hair and let out a sigh. “Yeah, well, looks like we got ourselves a cowboy.”

Angela Schreiber’s pupils had turned gray, and her corneas had filmed over. Petechiae, tiny red dots from burst blood vessels caused by excess pressure, spotted her face, a telltale indication of strangulation, though the noose had pretty much ended that debate. As with Nicole Hansen, Tracy estimated Schreiber to be early- to mid-twenties. She was an attractive young woman with a blonde ponytail and a petite figure.

“Was she on her side?” Tracy asked the patrol officer who’d returned. “Or did Fire move her?”

“She was like that,” the officer said.

Tracy bent to a knee to look more closely at the soles of Schreiber’s feet. “What are those? Are those cigarette burns?”

Kins stepped closer, snapping photographs with his cell phone. CSI would photograph the crap out of the room, but he liked to have his own. Sometimes the camera captured things the eyes didn’t see. “I don’t recall those on Hansen.”

“They weren’t there,” Tracy said. She looked again to the noose and the rope running down Schreiber’s back, then considered the room, typical of the motels on the strip—a double bed with a thin floral bedspread, pressboard furniture, and wallpaper yellowed from cigarette smoke that fouled the air. She did not see any cigarette butts or spent matches.

“Guess we’ll be getting Hansen back,” Kins said.

Nolasco’s decision to send the Hansen investigation to the Cold Case Unit just a month into the investigation was rare, but it was exactly the type of passive-aggressive move Tracy had come to expect from him. It meant that Tracy had an unsolved homicide on her record and indicated that her boss had no confidence she’d solve it. The move backfired, however, when the family protested and the women’s rights groups went ballistic. What had been a strangulation of an erotic dancer in a motel room became a lightning rod for activists to push an agenda asserting that the SPD was insensitive to women. The timing could not have been worse. The SPD was already reeling from a Department of Justice investigation that concluded Seattle police officers employed excessive force, and a subsequent federal court decision that found that the department was dragging its feet implementing reforms. The brass wasn’t exactly in the mood to have groups of women screaming to the news media.

Tracy considered the worn gray carpet and contemplated the amount of hair, blood, semen, and God-knew-what-else CSI would vacuum up. She didn’t envy them. “Forensics is going to be a bitch,” she said.

“Maybe this is what they mean by fifty shades of gray.”

She gave Kins an eye roll and looked again at the dancer. Tracy wanted to cut the rope, but Stuart Funk, the King County medical examiner, had jurisdiction over the body. She and Kins couldn’t touch it. Funk would transport Schreiber back to the ME’s office downtown, still naked, bound, and contorted.

A final indignity.

CHAPTER 7

A
computer check through the Office of the Secretary of State revealed that a limited liability company, Pink Palace LLC, operated three strip clubs of the same name in Seattle. The president was one Darrell Nash, whose address was a pricey Victorian in the pricey Queen Anne neighborhood.

“Who says sleaze doesn’t pay,” Kins said, climbing an impressive flight of stone steps.

They’d done a drive-by of the Pink Palace club located just off Aurora a couple of miles from the Aurora Motor Inn. Tracy wanted to get a feel for the magnitude of the operation. As with most things in life, not all strip clubs were created equal, or catered to the same clientele. The Pink Palace looked like one of the more high-end clubs, resembling a modern Cineplex with a glowing neon marquee. A Jumbotron television alternately flashed images of scantily clad, writhing women, and advertised special attractions and discounts. The posted hours revealed the club had closed at two and wouldn’t reopen until eleven.