My Sister's Grave (20 page)

“I’d be happy to help, honey, but I’m afraid you won’t find anything at the service station. Harley cleared it out when he closed it.”

“I was afraid of that when I went by earlier and looked through the windows, but I thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Well, I better let you get back to your needlepoint, and I better get started back to Seattle.”

“What about the records?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said you wanted to go through his records.”

“I thought you said he threw them out?”

“Harley? You saw his office. That man never threw out a scrap of paper in his life. You’ll have to dig a bit to reach them, though.”

“You have the records here?”

“Why do you think I park in the driveway? Harley brought everything from the station here and put it in the garage. He kept telling me he was going to go through them, but then he got sick and, to be honest, I haven’t given them a second thought until you brought them up.”

CHAPTER 32

T
racy gave up and got out of bed at just after two in the morning. During her years investigating Sarah’s disappearance and murder, she’d rarely slept through the night. It had gotten better when she’d finally put the boxes in the closet, but now her insomnia had returned. Roger, her black tabby, followed her into the living room, meowing loudly.

“Yeah, well, I’m not happy to be awake either,” she said. She grabbed her laptop and a down comforter, along with the remote control, and sat on the sofa in her seven-hundred-square-foot apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. She hadn’t rented the apartment for its amenities or its view
—
which was of another brick apartment building directly across the street. She’d rented it because it was the right price and in the right location for when your profession didn’t include the initials “Dr.” before your name but required you to live close and be frequently on call.

Roger leaped into her lap and, after a moment kneading the blanket to get comfortable, curled into a ball. Tracy reconsidered her conversation with Dan earlier that evening. After she’d told him about Maria Vanpelt and the meeting with Nolasco, Dan had broached the subject of him driving down to Seattle the upcoming Friday, taking her to the Chihuly glass exhibit, and then getting dinner.

Since her initial visit to Cedar Grove to bury Sarah’s remains, Tracy had, in the intervening weeks, made several additional trips to provide Dan with the rest of her files and go over what her investigation had revealed. She’d spent the night twice. Nothing romantic had happened between them since her impromptu golf lesson. Tracy was wondering if she had misinterpreted Dan’s intentions, though
she
had certainly felt the sexual tension and didn’t think she had been imagining it. A part of her wanted to act on it, but she worried that a relationship with Dan would not be wise under the circumstances. Not to mention the fact that she did not see herself ever moving back to Cedar Grove, where Dan had clearly reestablished a home. It was a complication she had decided to put aside. The Chihuly invitation, however, forced her to reconsider his possible intentions. She could not rationalize the invitation as work related, not to mention the fact that it put their sleeping arrangements at the center of a target. She only had one bedroom. Caught off guard, she’d accepted, and had spent the rest of the evening wondering if she’d made the right decision.

She fired up her laptop, pulled up the Washington State Attorney General’s website, and typed her username and password to log into the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, or HITS. The searchable database contained information on more than 22,000 homicides and sexual assaults across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon that had occurred since 1981. Assuming Hansen had been murdered and hadn’t died from a sex act gone horribly wrong, studies had revealed that persons who killed in such a unique manner often practiced their craft in order to perfect it. So, after the long days at the office working on the case, Tracy would drag herself home and sit at the computer running searches and reviewing cases similar to Nicole Hansen’s murder.

Her initial search using the key words “motel room” had reduced the 22,000 cases to 1511. She’d added the word “rope,” but not “strangulation,” because she wanted to keep the search broad enough to capture cases in which the victim had been bound, though maybe not strangled. That further reduced the field of cases to 224. Of those 224, 43 of the victims had not been sexually assaulted—Nicole Hansen’s autopsy had revealed no semen in her body cavities. That anomaly could be explained by the fact that it would have been a near physical impossibility to have intercourse with Hansen with her body hideously contorted and bound. Hansen had also not been robbed. Her wallet, flush with cash, had been left untouched on the motel dresser. That ruled out the second most logical motive, again assuming Hansen had been murdered.

Tracy had been focused on those forty-three cases, reviewing the HITS forms on file. After an hour, she’d considered three more of the cases. None seemed promising. She closed the laptop and leaned back against the pillows. “Like searching for a needle in a haystack, Roger.” The cat was already purring.

Tracy envied him.

CHAPTER 33

F
riday afternoon, Tracy’s phone vibrated as she and Kins drove west across Lake Washington on the 520 floating bridge. Traffic was heavy with people trying to get downtown. Tall cranes jutted high above the darkened water on floating platforms, helping construct a badly needed second bridge parallel to the first one, but screwups in the concrete pontoons that would keep the second bridge afloat had delayed completion until sometime in 2015.

Tracy checked her most recent calls and saw that she’d missed two previous calls from Dan. She called him back.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I missed your calls. We’ve been running around today tracking down witnesses and talking with experts about the rope in that murder in North Seattle.”

“I got a surprise this afternoon.”

“A good surprise or a bad surprise?”

“I’m not sure. I was in court most of the day, and when I got back to the office I found a copy of Vance Clark’s Opposition to the Petition for Post-Conviction Relief in my fax machine.”

“They filed early?”

“Apparently.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Haven’t read it yet. Thought I’d call you first and let you know.”

“Why would he file early?”

“It could be he decided to keep it simple, make the Court of Appeals think the petition lacks merit. I won’t know until I read it. Anyway, it sounds like you’ve got your hands full.”

“Email it to me and we can talk more about it tonight at dinner.”

“Yeah, about that,” Dan said. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just some things to take care of. Okay if I call you later?”

“Sure,” Tracy said. “We’ll talk tonight.” She hung up, uncertain what to make of Dan breaking their date. Though initially concerned about it, she’d begun to look forward to it and where it might lead. She’d planned to buy a couple of Dick’s hamburgers—the $1.39 variety—and serve them at her apartment just to tweak him.

“New development?” Kins asked.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I said, new development?”

“They filed the opposition to the petition. We weren’t expecting it for another two weeks.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Don’t know yet,” she said, still hearing the uncertainty in Dan’s voice.

CHAPTER 34

D
an O’Leary tilted back his head to apply eyedrops. His contact lenses felt glued to his corneas. Outside his bay window, rain fell in the shafts of yellow light from the street lamp. He had the window open so he could listen to the storm as it rolled in from the north, bringing the sodden, earthy smell of rain. As a boy, he used to sit at his bedroom window watching for lightning strikes over the North Cascades, counting the seconds between the strike and the clap of thunder exploding across the mountain peaks. He’d wanted to be a weatherman. Sunnie had said that she thought that would be the most boring job on the planet, but Tracy had said Dan would be good on television. Tracy had always been that way, even when other kids had treated him as the dork he’d sometimes been. She’d always stood up for him.

When he’d seen her at Sarah’s memorial service, alone, his heart had bled for her. He’d always envied her family, so close and loving and caring. His house had not always been that way. Then, in a relatively short period of time, Tracy had lost everything she’d loved. When he’d stepped to her side at the service, it had been as her childhood friend, but he also could not deny he had been physically attracted to her. He had given her his card in hope that she might call him, and come to see him not as the boy she’d known, but as the man he’d become. That hope had faded when she had come to his office and asked him to review her file. Strictly a business meeting.

Later, he’d invited her to his home out of concern for her safety, but seeing her again, he hadn’t been able to help hoping that something might spark between them. When he’d wrapped his arms around her to putt the golf ball, something had stirred inside that he had not felt in a very long time. He’d spent the past month tempering those feelings with the realization that Tracy remained deeply wounded and was not only vulnerable, but distrustful
—
about Cedar Grove and everything and everyone she associated with it. Dan had suggested the Chihuly glass exhibit and dinner to remove her from that environment, then realized that he’d placed her in an awkward dilemma. Did she invite him to spend the night or did he get a hotel? He’d sensed that he was rushing her, that she wasn’t ready for a relationship, and that she had enough on her plate with the recent discovery of Sarah’s remains and now the potential for another emotionally draining hearing.

He’d also had professional concerns. Tracy was not his client. Edmund House was his client. But Tracy had all the information Dan needed to prepare properly for the post-conviction relief hearing, should a court of appeal grant House that right. Under the circumstances, Dan thought it best to remove any undue pressure on Tracy and bow out of their date until they were both in a better place and time.

Sherlock grunted and twitched, asleep beside Rex on the throw rug in front of Dan’s desk. Dan had begun bringing the dogs to work after Calloway’s threat to impound them. He didn’t mind. They were good company, except for the fact that every noise caused them to bolt upright and race into the reception area barking. For the moment, at least, they were quiet.

He refocused on Vance Clark’s Opposition to the Petition for Post-Conviction Relief. His intuition that Clark had filed his opposition early in order to insinuate to the Court of Appeals that the petition had no merit had been correct. Clark had kept his arguments simple. He’d stated that the petition failed to show any impropriety in the prior proceedings that would warrant a hearing to determine if Edmund House should get a new trial. He reminded the Court that House had been the first individual in the state of Washington to be convicted of first-degree murder based solely on circumstantial evidence because House had refused to tell authorities where he’d buried Sarah Crosswhite’s body, though he’d confessed to killing her. Clark had written that House had instead tried to use the information as leverage to force a plea, and that he should not now benefit from that strategy. Had House advised authorities of the location of Sarah Crosswhite’s body twenty years ago, Clark concluded, any exculpatory evidence could have been introduced during his trial. Of course House had not done so because it would have been conclusive evidence that he’d committed the crime. Either way, House was guilty. He’d received a fair trial. Nothing that Dan had introduced in his petition for post-conviction relief changed that.

Not a bad argument, except it was completely circular, premised upon a court accepting that House had confessed to the murder and used the location of the body as leverage for a lesser sentence. DeAngelo Finn had done a poor job cross-examining Calloway on the lack of a signed or taped confession, which would have been any defense attorney’s first plan of attack. Finn had compounded his mistake by putting House on the witness stand to deny confessing, which had put his credibility at stake and allowed the prosecution to successfully argue that House’s prior rape conviction was now fair game, allowing them to question him about it at his trial. That had been the death knell. Once a rapist, always a rapist. Finn should have moved to exclude the introduction of House’s alleged confession as circumspect due to the lack of any supporting evidence and highly prejudicial to House’s case, avoiding the entire fiasco. Even if the motion had been denied, House would have established strong grounds for an appeal. Finn’s failure to do so, regardless of the exculpatory evidence found at the grave, was itself a basis for a new trial.

Sherlock rolled and lifted his head. A second later, someone rang the reception bell.

Sherlock’s nails clicked on the hardwood, Rex close behind, followed by a chorus of barks and baying. Dan checked his watch, started for the door, then paused to pick up the autographed Ken Griffey, Jr., baseball bat that he’d also started bringing to the office.

CHAPTER 35

S
herlock and Rex had pinned an African-American man with his back against the door. The man looked and sounded seriously intimidated. “The sign said to ring the bell.”

“Off,” Dan said, and both dogs obediently stopped barking and sat. “How’d you get in?”

“The door was unlocked.”

Dan had taken Sherlock and Rex out earlier in the evening to conduct their nightly business. “Who are you?”

The man eyed the dogs. “My name is George Bovine, Mr. O’Leary.” Dan recognized the name from Tracy’s files even before Bovine continued, “Edmund House raped my daughter, Annabelle.”