Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (6 page)

Tracy and Kins had checked off two names before leaving the Justice Center—two druggies dead more than a month. They’d quickly eliminated two more when the men didn’t deny having been in that motel room, just not the previous night, or previous week for that matter, and each could account for his whereabouts.

“Apparently, the staff is not big on dusting,” Kins said.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the Ford they’d pulled from the motor pool, Tracy held up the driver’s license photograph of the next positive hit on the list. “Walter Gipson,” she said. Gipson’s photo revealed a man with narrow-set eyes and a hairline receding in a horseshoe pattern, likely the reason he’d cut what remained nub-short.

“Shaving your head—the balding man’s solution to hair loss,” Kins said, glancing at the photograph from the driver’s seat. “How does that make any sense?”

“Why fight the inevitable, I guess,” Tracy said.

“That’s like complaining you’re getting a gut, so you go on an all-Twinkie diet.”

“Twenty-six-year-old white male, a special-education teacher,” Tracy said.

“And apparently,” Kins said, imitating an English accent, “aficionado of prostitutes and fine motels. Does he have a prior?”

“Nope. He applied for a permit for a semiautomatic handgun,” Tracy said.

Kins glanced across the car. “Always good to know.”

Kins pulled into a spot reserved for visitors to the Willowbrook apartment complex in Redmond as Tracy disconnected her call with the chief dispatcher. She’d provided their location and advised of their intent to speak to a suspect. When she stepped from the car, she noticed the air was heavy, with the earthy smell indicative of an impending downpour.

“Which one?” Kins asked, eyeing the two-story wood-framed buildings, typical of the suburban complexes developed on the Eastside in the 1980s.

“Building E,” Tracy said, pointing. “That one.”

They stepped between covered carports and made their way up a staircase and down the second-story landing. Tracy heard televisions inside the apartments. They stopped outside unit 4, and Kins gave a polite knock. The door emitted a hollow thud and shook in the jamb. “Quality construction,” he said.

A woman inside shouted in Spanish. Kins shrugged. “I flunked Spanish in high school.”

“Knock again,” Tracy said.

Kins did, and they received the same response. “Is she yelling at us or telling someone in the apartment to get the door?” he asked.

“Don’t know. I took French.”

“Use that a lot, do you?”

“Oui. About as much as you use your Spanish.”

Kins reached to knock a third time when the door pulled open. A heavyset Hispanic woman held a young girl wrapped in a canary-yellow bath towel on her hip.

“Sorry,” Tracy said. “You look like you have your hands full.”

When the woman responded with a blank stare, Tracy held up her badge. “Do you speak English?”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Yes.”

Tracy introduced herself and Kins, then said, “We’re looking for Walter Gipson. Is he home?”

“He is not here.” Her accent was thick.

Tracy felt a drop of rain on her neck. “Are you his wife?”

The woman blew a strand of black hair out of her face. “Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“He is working.”

Kins checked his watch. Tracy didn’t need a watch to know it was late for a high school teacher to be teaching. “Where does your husband work?” she asked.

“At the school.”

“Does he always teach this late?”

“Tonight, yes, at the community college.” She looked up at the sky. “Please, my little girl, she is cold.”

“What time do you expect him home?” Tracy asked.

The woman’s gaze drifted past them to the parking lot. A man in a ball cap carrying a backpack on his shoulder stood looking up at them, then veered suddenly toward the carport.

Kins moved to the walkway railing. “Walter Gipson?” he yelled.

The man bolted.

Kins ran for the staircase they’d ascended. Tracy hurried to the staircase at the opposite end of the landing, losing sight of Gipson behind a carport. She descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot. When she reached the carport, she stopped and removed her Glock. Kins was slowed by his bad hip. They stepped around the corner. Tracy crouched to look beneath the cars. Kins moved to the back of the carport and pulled on doors, likely storage units, though most were padlocked shut.

“Hey,” he whispered and held up a black backpack.

Tracy heard what sounded like the rattle of a chain-link fence and hurried across the parking lot. A fence separated the apartment complex from what looked to be an undeveloped piece of property full of thick brush and trees.

“We’re going to need the dogs,” Kins said. “I’ll radio it in and follow the fence line in case he doubles back.”

Tracy found a toehold in the chain link and dropped on the other side. She kicked free of blackberry vines snagging the cuffs of her jeans and pushed through the foliage to a horse trail of matted grass. The trail lead to a grove of trees—Douglas fir, cedars, and maples. The tops swayed in gusts of wind.

“Walter Gipson?” she yelled, wiping rain from her face. “You’re making this more difficult than it needs to be. We just want to talk.”

She looked for movement and unnatural colors in the underbrush, but the fading light and increasing rain made it difficult to see. A hundred yards in, the brush and trees thinned to rolling pasture. In the near distance, horses had lifted their heads, ears perked, watching her. About to walk back out and wait for the dogs, she heard a branch snap behind her. She spun and raised her Glock. Horses crashed through the brush, veering at the last moment, hooves pounding the ground as they sped past her.

Tracy’s heart hammered, and she had to take a moment to catch her breath and realized that the snapping branch had spooked the horses, not the other way around. She looked at the brush the horses had come through and took a blade stance but kept the barrel of the Glock pointed at the ground. “Walter Gipson?”

No answer.

“Mr. Gipson, you need to think of your wife and your daughter. I’m armed, and in about five minutes this place is going to be crawling with dogs and police officers. We don’t want an accident here, Mr. Gipson. We just need to talk. Walter?”

“Okay. Okay.” Gipson stood suddenly from his hiding place.

“Freeze,” Tracy yelled, taking aim. “Do not move! Do not move!”

Gipson continued forward.

“Freeze!” she yelled, louder. “I said, do not move!”

Gipson froze. “Okay. Okay.”

“Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Gipson’s hands shook. His arms started to drop.

“Keep your hands up!” she said.

“All right. All right.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“It’s . . . it’s in the apartment.”

“Do you have any weapons on you?”

“No.”

“Just keep your hands where I can see them.” Tracy removed her handcuffs, stepped behind Gipson, and quickly cuffed him.

“I didn’t do it,” Gipson said. “I swear to God I didn’t kill her.”

CHAPTER 10

T
hey placed Walter Gipson in one of the hard interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of the Justice Center. A windowless box, the room seemed to radiate beneath white fluorescent lights. They’d let Gipson “cook” for twenty to thirty minutes. With the door shut, the walls closed in quickly, as did the thought of spending years in a room just like it.

Rick Cerrabone, a senior prosecuting attorney and member of MDOP, joined Tracy and Kins, all of them watching Gipson from behind one-way glass. The teacher sat hunched over the nicked and scarred table. He looked older without the baseball cap.

“How’d he know her?” Cerrabone asked. Faz had once pointed out that Cerrabone was the spitting image of former Yankees manager Joe Torre—balding, with a hangdog look about him, dark bags beneath tired eyes, and a heavy five-o’clock shadow.

“She was a student in his writing class at the community college,” Tracy said. “He admitted taking her to the motel on Aurora last night, but he swears to God he didn’t kill her.”

“They always swear to God, don’t they?” Kins said. He sat in a chair near the blinking colored lights of one of the recording devices.

“Why’d he run?” Cerrabone asked.

“Says he got scared and panicked,” Tracy said. “He’d seen a news report.”

“Any DNA?” Cerrabone said.

“None on file.”

“So no priors,” Cerrabone said. In Washington State everyone
convicted
of a crime was required to provide a DNA sample.

“Not even a parking ticket,” Kins said. “The guy teaches handicapped kids.”

Cerrabone ran a hand over the stubble of his chin. “Any DNA on the rope?”

“Melton says he’s making it a priority,” Tracy said, referring to Michael Melton at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.

“What about Nicole Hansen? Does he have any known connection to her?”

“He says he’s never heard of her,” Tracy said. “I’ve got Faz and Del running his photo over to the Dancing Bare to see if anyone picks him out of a montage.”

“How long before we get the search warrants for his house and office?” Kins asked.

“And the storage shed,” Tracy added.

Cerrabone checked his cell phone. “Probably have them by the time you’re finished. Make sure he waives his right to counsel on the tape.”

Kins stood. Tracy said, “I’ll take this alone.”

“You sure?” They almost always interviewed a suspect with another detective, for safety.

“He started talking the minute I put the cuffs on him and didn’t shut up the entire ride here. Let’s see if he’ll keep talking to me.”

Tracy removed Gipson’s handcuffs, sat across the table from him, and confirmed that he understood his Miranda rights and agreed to waive them. “Let’s go over some things again, Walter. How did you know Angela Schreiber?”

“She was taking a course in English at Seattle Community College. I teach there a couple nights a week.”

“Okay. So what happened?”

“She submitted an essay on being a dancer. It was really well written, detailed. After class I asked her about it, and she told me it was true and invited me to come see her.”

“And you went to watch her dance?”

“Not at first. Not for a while actually. She kept asking when I was going to go, so I decided to go see, you know, just one time. I only went a couple times.”

“So how long before you started having sex?”

Gipson sighed. “I don’t recall. She asked for a ride to the club one night after class. She said her car had broken down and she didn’t have the money to fix it.”

“You had intercourse in your car?”

“No.”

“She gave you a blow job?”

Gipson lowered his focus to the table, embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“And you paid her for it.”

He closed his eyes. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Tell me what it was like.”

He looked up. His eyes were watering. “She said she was having a hard time making ends meet. She’d come to Seattle for a job, but it didn’t work out and she hadn’t been able to find another one, and living here was more expensive than she thought, and then her car broke down. She said she started dancing to pay the bills.”

It sounded like a sob story to separate Gipson from his money. “So, what, you were just helping her out?”

“I know how it sounds now.”

“How much would you give her?”

“Fifty. Sometimes a hundred.”

“It had nothing to do with the sex?”

Gipson frowned. “I guess it did.”

“And you went to the motel last night?” Tracy asked.

“Yeah.”

“What about your wife?”

“She went to her sister’s to have dinner, then called and said she was going to spend the night in Tacoma.”

“So you didn’t have to rush home.”

“Right.”

“Who chose the motel?”

“She did.”

“Did you ask her why you didn’t just go to her apartment?”

“She said she had a roommate who worked early and she didn’t want to wake her.” According to Ron Mayweather, the A Team’s fifth wheel, Schreiber lived alone in a rented studio apartment on Capitol Hill.