One last kill tracy cros.., p.11
One Last Kill (Tracy Crosswhite), page 11
“What’s this about?” Moss asked. He was nervous. He put on a good show, but Tracy could see in his somber expression that Moss thought they had come to confront him about the money he’d taken from the Last Line. She wondered if it had been worth it. He had to live in fear that someday, someone would talk, and he’d find himself in handcuffs and maybe wearing a much blander wardrobe than at present, though again, statutes of limitation made that unlikely. Tracy didn’t think it was Moss’s conscience that bothered him. He had rationalized his crime, as Chief Weber had done. He was looking out for himself. Tracy had no doubt he’d sell out someone else to save his own butt.
“The Route 99 serial killer,” Nolasco said.
Moss initially looked confused, then relieved. He exhaled. “You find the killer?”
“We’re working on it.”
“That was twenty-five years ago, Johnny.”
“Twenty-seven from the date of the first murder,” Tracy said.
Moss spoke to Nolasco. “The killer’s likely dead or in prison.”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Tracy said. She wouldn’t be ignored. “You were the lead control officer.”
Moss finally acknowledged her. “Yeah, I was.”
“You followed up on tips deemed worthy and kept track of the evidence?”
“Again. Yeah.”
“Don’t be like that, Moss,” Nolasco said, surprising Tracy. “We’re not here to rattle your cage. We’re here trying to find answers.”
Moss sighed and pursed his lips. Then he gave a brief and curt nod.
“Did you find anything in common between the victims?” Tracy asked.
“Which set?” Moss said. He looked to Nolasco. “The prostitutes or the PTA moms?”
“The PTA moms,” Tracy said.
Moss broke eye contact. “Only thing that jumped out at me, at least what I can remember from so long ago, was the women all worked for the city, though in different departments. You remember, Johnny. We tried to determine if maybe the killer held a grudge against the city—had a permit turned down, was evicted from a home or apartment. But I don’t remember anything coming out of it. Do you?” Moss asked Nolasco.
Tracy wondered why Moss had broken eye contact, then looked to Nolasco for assurance.
Nolasco shook his head.
“I don’t remember anything else,” Moss said.
She had a sense that wasn’t true. “You focused on the killer,” Tracy said. “Whether he held a grudge. Did you focus on the women?”
“We were focused on the women,” Moss said, sounding defensive.
“I mean did you determine whether the women had something else in common.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know,” Tracy said. “I wasn’t part of the task force.”
“Bingo,” Moss said. “So don’t question what you know nothing about.” Again, he sounded defensive. Tracy had experienced something similar when she accused Moss of taking money in the Last Line investigation. He got defensive, told her she didn’t know what she was talking about, then lashed out. Guilt. What could he be guilty about in this case?
“Anything come in over the tip line about any of the women—a connecting thread you could pull between two or more of them?”
“Beyond working for the city?” Again, he looked to Nolasco. “A couple went to the UW, but that isn’t unusual up here. At least not back then. Everyone who lived here went to the UW.”
“Same sorority? Same classes? Same apartment building? Same boyfriend?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t remember anything like that,” Moss said. “And you’re ignoring the other nine women. They certainly didn’t join the same sorority.”
Tracy wasn’t ignoring those victims. She was accepting Santos’s opinion that the first nine women had been the killer perfecting his craft and maybe sharpening his nerve. The last four had been about sending a message. “I spoke with Augustus Cesare,” Tracy said.
“How’s old Augie doing?” Gunderson said. The shortened name sounded like a typical Moss put-down.
“He said when the task force shut down he put his work—the tips and any connecting threads—on a computer disk and gave it to you.”
“First, that was my work, not his. Augie was just a grunt I brought in to free me up. Second, I don’t recall a disk, but if he says he did it, then the disk would be in the file boxes with everything else.”
“It isn’t,” Tracy said.
Moss looked between Tracy and Nolasco, as if expecting something more. When neither said anything further, he shook his head. “Don’t know what to tell you.”
“Did you take it?” Tracy asked.
“What is this shit?” Moss shook his head and looked to Nolasco. “What is this bullshit, Johnny?”
But Nolasco wasn’t offering any help. “Just answer the question, Moss, and you’ll meet your friends on the fourth tee box.”
Gunderson looked at Tracy as if looking at dog shit on the bottom on his shoe. “No. I didn’t take the disk. I don’t even remember a disk. If Cesare created one, I would have boxed it up with everything else, and it would be in storage. So maybe you didn’t look hard enough, or maybe Cesare is mistaken and he didn’t prepare a disk. Maybe he printed out the material and it’s in a box but on reams of paper.”
Tracy doubted that had been the case, given Cesare’s statement he had only worked the task force because he was proficient with computers at a time when not a lot of SPD’s officers had been. Certainly not Moss. Still, she wondered why Moss remained defensive.
“Did you have any conversations with the media?”
“While working the task force? No. None. Johnny was the only one.”
“You knew Lisa Childress?”
“Knew of her. Didn’t know her.”
“You never talked with her about the investigation?”
“Why would I?”
“Is that a no?” Tracy asked.
“Yes, it’s a no. Why do you ask?”
“The task force had a leak,” Nolasco said.
Moss looked to Nolasco. “Did we?”
“It appears someone told Childress about the angel’s wings on the victims’ left shoulder.”
“It wasn’t me. Never talked to a reporter in my life.”
“Except maybe to cut a deal,” Tracy said.
“Excuse me?” Moss’s brow furrowed and his gaze narrowed.
“Childress was also investigating the Last Line drug task force. If she had evidence you took drug money . . . I don’t know. Maybe you tried to keep your name out of the paper by bargaining with information you were privy to, working on the Route 99 serial killer task force.”
“Are you for real?” He looked to Nolasco as if to say, you should know better. “I don’t know anything about any money from the Last Line. And if I did, why would Childress make such an agreement with me?”
She wouldn’t have, Tracy knew. The Lisa Childress she’d come to know through Anita would have seen such a deal as a breach of her ethical duty as an investigative reporter. She just wanted to gauge Moss’s reaction to the accusation, see if she could probe the cracks in his armor. He looked and sounded like a guilty man.
Moss stood. Angry. “We’re done here; aren’t we?” He looked to Nolasco. “I expect this shit from her, but you . . . This is disappointing, Johnny. This is beneath you.” He pushed back and knocked over his chair, then flung the door open and stormed into the locker room.
“You got a way with people, Crosswhite,” Nolasco said.
“Why is he so defensive?” Tracy asked.
“Because he doesn’t like you, and he really doesn’t like you accusing him. Do you have anything to indicate Moss took the disk or was the source of the leak?”
“Nothing except I believe Cesare when he said he made a disk and gave it to Moss. And now it isn’t there. And Moss is a blowhard. Always has been, according to Del and Faz. I could see him trying to work a reporter if she had information on him taking drug money.”
“So nothing solid then,” Nolasco said.
“Nothing solid,” Tracy said.
“And I gave up my Saturday morning for this. I think we’re done being a burr in the man’s ass.” Nolasco stepped past her and back out the door they had entered. They were done, but Tracy still didn’t have an answer to her question.
Why was Moss so defensive?
CHAPTER 15
February 28, 1996
Seattle, Washington
Nolasco stubbed another cigarette into his ashtray already filled with half a dozen butts as he continued to review documents. This early in the morning, he wasn’t worried about the newly established smoking policy. He wasn’t going down seven floors to smoke outside in the blistering cold. With the door to his task force office closed and most of SPD gone but for the graveyard shift, he wasn’t bothering anybody.
He could have taken the materials to his sparsely furnished apartment, but that would have only depressed him. Things had progressed from bad to worse with his wife. They could no longer stand being in the same home together or tolerate one another for the sake of their grade school daughters. His kids, no doubt sensing the tension, had become rebellious and sullen. Nolasco had suggested a family counselor. His wife said it was just typical preteen years, and what did Nolasco care since he was barely home anyway, leaving her to be the disciplinarian.
They had separated. He’d moved out and let his wife remain in his house, the one he had bought and remodeled. He didn’t want his daughters to be uprooted from familiar surroundings and possibly have to change schools. In return, they blamed him for the separation and impending divorce, the long hours he spent at work. No doubt their mother had put that thought in their ears. He didn’t tell them about their mother’s affair, which he had confirmed. He didn’t think it fair to them.
The wheels were also coming off at work, one lug nut at a time, and his once-promising career wobbled more with each passing day. His rapid rise through the detective ranks had not just stalled, it had crashed. People no longer spoke about him in terms of how high he might ascend within the SPD, or about all he had accomplished at a young age. They only spoke of what he had not accomplished. He had not arrested the killer. And it was looking less and less likely, barring some unforeseeable break of luck—a witness who happened to stumble onto something or see someone; a piece of DNA they could match; a fingerprint; a concerned neighbor who noticed something unusual. Something. Anything.
It had been six months since the killer’s thirteenth victim, Debbie Langford, a housewife living on Beacon Hill. The twelfth murder, Christina Griffin, had been the month prior, in July 1995, and with each succeeding death, the hysteria in middle-class suburbia increased, as did the pressure on SPD—Nolasco specifically—to catch the man responsible. There had been talk of replacing him as head of the task force, but that stalled because no one knew the case as well as Nolasco, and it would take anyone outside the task force weeks, if not months, to catch up. The brass had brought in the FBI and, in so doing, made it clear Nolasco was to give them everything they needed—to lick their boots to a high-gloss shine if asked.
Then the killings stopped.
Six months.
Nolasco ran his hands through his hair and examined his desk calendar, which revealed several more fallen strands. His hair felt brittle to the touch. He probed the cowlick atop his head and could feel where his hair had noticeably thinned. It wasn’t genetics. Both his grandfathers had died with full heads of hair, and Nolasco usually had to have the barber thin his hair when he got it cut. Not anymore.
He slid open his desk drawer and removed the bottle of lorazepam. He didn’t want to take the pills for his anxiety and stress. One of the side effects was drowsiness. He was already tired. Dog tired. And likely depressed. He’d been self-medicating with a stiff Scotch at night and recognized the drink was becoming more than a habit. He didn’t want to shitcan what was left of his career by becoming an alcoholic, especially since it looked more and more like he was about to be a single father of two. The doctor told him the medication would help shut down his mind long enough to sleep at night, and he was sticking to routine.
Someone knocked on his door. Nolasco replaced the bottle and quickly closed his desk drawer, then tossed the ashtray and butts into the garbage can beneath his desk.
“Yeah,” he said.
Moss Gunderson pushed open the door, filling the doorway with his large frame. He winced, an indication he smelled the smoke. “Saw the light on beneath the door. You’re still at it, huh?”
“Still at it.”
“They going to shut us down?” Moss asked.
“Don’t know. Until I do . . .” Nolasco shrugged. There had been talk of shutting down or at least reducing the size of the task force.
“What’s on your hand?” Moss asked.
Nolasco looked at the outside of his right palm, black from using it to erase the whiteboard on which he’d been listing the suspects, the dates the victims had been killed, and confirming whether each of the five suspects had been in the state of Washington or had possibly returned from out of state. He hoped to find some thread that would lead them down the yellow brick road to the killer’s front door. Instead, he learned two of the five had been incarcerated at the time of the last two killings, and a third had moved out of state.
He wasn’t getting closer to the killer. He was getting farther away.
“What’s up? Why are you here so early?” Nolasco asked.
“Ellis and I are the on-call team this week. We’re on our way to pick up a pool car. We got a call of a missing person.”
“Why are they sending you two? Why not another team?”
“Sergeant said task force members are returning to their detective units. That’s why I asked if we were getting shut down.”
“No one has said anything to me,” Nolasco said, angry. He was being isolated. “What type of a missing persons case?”
“A wife. The husband called last night. Said she’s been missing since leaving the house at two yesterday morning.”
“Why’d he wait so long to call? Do they think he killed her?”
“That’s what Keith and I hope to find out. It’s always the husband or a boyfriend; isn’t it?”
“Not always,” Nolasco said, stating the painfully obvious.
“But that’s not why I’m here.” Moss paused. Something clearly on his mind.
“What is it?”
“The woman who went missing is Lisa Childress, the investigative reporter for the Post-Intelligencer who’s been covering the Route 99 killings.”
The name hit Nolasco like a dart. Childress had called him just a few days ago and left him a cryptic message. Cryptic to him. Probably not to her. She said she was looking into something that would tie everything together but didn’t explain further. He’d tried to call her back, without success.
Gunderson looked to be measuring Nolasco’s response. “Like I said, thought you might want to know.”
“Anybody have eyes on her or know where she went at that hour of the morning?” Nolasco asked.
“Husband says she went to meet a source for a story she was investigating.”
Shit.
Another bolt sheared off the wheel, Nolasco’s career about to crash. If Childress left the house at two in the morning, could she have gone to Aurora to walk the track, bait a killer? Or had she reached out to one of the five suspects? She wouldn’t be that stupid; would she? Nolasco didn’t tell her to do that. He was just hoping she’d come up with some angle the task force hadn’t thought of, maybe find a witness they hadn’t interviewed or a piece of evidence that led somewhere.
Could she have been so careless? Could she have done something like that?
Everything ties together.
“Did the husband know her source, or the story she was working on?” Nolasco asked Moss.
“Responding officer asked. Husband says she never told him those things. He did say it was not unusual for her to be working multiple stories. Again, that’s something Keith and I will seek to verify, try to determine if he’s lying. We’ll also have a conversation with her editor at the P-I, see if he knows what she was working on.”
“Keep me posted,” Nolasco said.
“Will do.” Moss turned for the door, then turned back. “You all right? You look pale.”
“Too many late nights and early mornings, and shitty food,” Nolasco said.
“I hear you. You don’t think Childress could have gotten too close to the Route 99 Killer, do you?”
“Why would I think that?” Nolasco said and realized he sounded defensive.
“She was covering it for the paper.”
“I have no idea.”
Moss turned for the door but again turned back. “One other thing. You hear about the murder down in the industrial district yesterday morning?”
That triggered Nolasco’s pulse. His adrenaline kicked in. “Another woman?”
“No. No, nothing related to our guy. This was a man. They found him shot in his car behind a trucking company. The superintendent called it in when he arrived at five a.m. The guy’s car was blocking the trucks.”
“They have any suspects?”
“Don’t know. I’m not handling it. Just heard about it. Interesting though.”
“Why is that?”
“The guy who got shot. Name’s David Slocum. He was the harbormaster over at the Diamond Marina in Lake Union. We fished two bodies out of there not long ago.”
Nolasco shook his head, uncertain why Moss was telling him this. “That supposed to mean something to me?”
“Nah,” Moss said. “Just wondering if you’d heard about it.”
“I’ve been pretty busy, Moss. I’m up to my eyeballs here.” And possibly soon to be working alone.
“Yeah, I know. You think maybe our guy is done?”
“Voluntarily? No. Definitely not. For the moment everything is still a go. The brass is treating this as an open investigation, and I will also, until I’m told otherwise.”
