In the Clearing (Tracy Crosswhite #3)(22)

“Tommy ever pick her up after a shift and drive her home?”

“Couple times, yeah.”

Buzz looked at his watch. “Thanks, Lorraine. I appreciate the conversation—and the pie. I better get going. Could I box up the rest of this so I can eat it later?”

“You’d have hurt my feelings if you hadn’t asked.” She stood and started for the counter, then turned back. “You don’t think Kimi did it, do you? You don’t think she jumped in the river?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Buzz said, not wanting word to get back to the detective, Jerry Ostertag, that he was conducting an investigation. “I just make the reports.”

“So is anyone going to pursue this?”

“I’ll let the detectives know,” he said.

“Seems like somebody should.”




Buzz Almond placed the Styrofoam pie box on the passenger seat. Lorraine had slid in a fresh slice of pie to go with the one he’d partially eaten. “For your wife and girls to share,” she’d said.

Buzz backed from the parking lot onto 141, drove around a bend in the road, and slowed when he saw a turnout he’d missed the night he and Earl Kanasket walked the road. He pulled in and got out, keeping to the shoulder. A few steps in, he noticed an undefined dirt path partially covered by foliage, ferns, and thimbleberry and blackberry vines. He pushed the brush aside and saw where tire tracks had left the road. Some of the foliage also looked to have been freshly broken, the stems still green. He started down the path, following the ruts in the road, the frozen ground crunching beneath the soles of his boots.

A few feet in, he stopped and crouched for a closer look. The tire tread looked to have been made by oversize truck tires, the kind he associated with off-road vehicles, the kind he’d noted on Tommy Moore’s truck. He also noticed something else: impressions where it looked like the heel of a shoe had struck the ground.

He stood and continued, walking along the side of the tire tracks so he didn’t step on them or the shoe impressions. The shrubs and branches clawed at him, snagging the fabric of his uniform as the path narrowed and wound its way east a couple hundred yards before widening again and angling up a rise. Buzz climbed the hill, feeling the exertion in his thighs and calves and hearing his labored breathing. He continued to notice broken tree limbs and branches scattered on the ground, and shrubbery that looked to have been trampled and crushed. By the time he crested the hill, each breath marked the air in white bursts, and he needed a moment to catch his wind. In the Marines he’d have charged up and down hills like this a hundred times and not broken a sweat. Now he was huffing and puffing . . . and lasting fifteen minutes in the bedroom.

He found himself looking down on an oval-shaped clearing, an amphitheater of green and brown. It looked like something man-made, but he was certain it was natural. For one, no stumps littered the sight to indicate that it had been logged. And two, who would have bothered?

The tire treads stopped at the top of the hill, with nothing on the downhill side until the flat area at the bottom, where the ground looked like it had been torn up good. Buzz’s heart started to pound with a rush of adrenaline, which had nothing to do with the exertion from climbing the hill. He turned and hurried back down the way he’d come, using his forearms to push the foliage aside where the path narrowed.

When he reached his patrol unit, he opened the passenger-side door and hit the button on the glove box. It sprang open, ejecting the Instamatic camera and the extra rolls of film.





CHAPTER 8


Tracy made two detours on her way to the Justice Center on Monday morning. First, she drove to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Jefferson Street, in an area of Seattle referred to as Pill Hill because of the abundant number of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and the blood bank. She met Kelly Rosa in the building lobby. Rosa had been the forensic anthropologist in charge of exhuming Sarah’s body from its shallow hillside grave and performing an analysis of the remains. She and Tracy had known one another for several years and had become close working cases together.

“Is that it?” Rosa asked, meeting Tracy in the lobby.

Tracy handed Rosa an envelope containing a copy of the coroner’s report on Kimi Kanasket, which included the photographs.

Rosa opened the package and slid out the report, holding it at arm’s length. “Lord, is this some kind of eye exam? What year is this?”

“1976.”

“You said it was old. Klickitat County? No medical examiner. It was likely farmed out to a local pathologist.”

“That’s what I figured.”

Rosa took out the photographs, considering them a moment before sliding them back into the envelope. “It’s going to be a while,” she said. “I’m testifying in that Carnation matter, and we’re pretty backed up here.”

Everyone in Seattle knew what Rosa meant by “the Carnation matter.” After years of legal delays, a woman and her boyfriend were on trial for the brutal murder of the woman’s entire family on Christmas Eve. And while Rosa worked for the King County medical examiner, she was also available to all thirty-nine counties in Washington State.

“I understand,” Tracy said. “I don’t need it tomorrow.”

“You said she was swept away in a river?”