The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(15)

“Let’s at least take the photo back to the condominiums and show it around the marinas,” Tracy said.

“We can do that,” Faz said.

“CSI is processing the motel room, so there could be another list of names to go through when we get the report from Latents,” Tracy said, growing more frustrated. “Screw this. I’m going to ask Nolasco to push the DOL on the facial recognition. The woman is dead. Whose privacy are we invading?”

“Can I get an amen?” Faz said, shaking his hands in the air.

Del obliged him without looking up.

“You want me to come with?” Kins asked.

Tracy only briefly considered his offer. If Nolasco was going to turn her down, it wouldn’t matter if Kins was with her or not. Kins’s offer had more to do with chivalry, like Sherlock walking her to the door in the morning. Tracy and Nolasco’s volatile history dated to the police academy, when she’d stood up for a female recruit during a pat-down demonstration. Nolasco had ended up with a broken nose and singing soprano from a well-placed elbow and knee. More recently, Tracy had inadvertently exposed Nolasco and his former homicide partner, Floyd Hattie, for their somewhat questionable investigation techniques when she discovered one of their cold cases in her search for other possible victims of the Cowboy. That had sparked a full-blown investigation by the Office of Professional Accountability. Hattie, long retired, fell on his sword, and Nolasco, snake that he was, had managed to slither away with only a written reprimand.

“No,” she said. “If he’s going to turn me down, it won’t matter whether you’re there to see him do it or not.”

“Maybe we get lucky and somebody recognizes her,” Kins said. “She had to come from somewhere, right?”

“Unless she hatched,” Faz said.



Tracy left the bull pen and walked the hallway between the inner offices and the outer glass walls that provided glimpses of Elliott Bay between the high-rise buildings. A haze hovered over Seattle and a thin red line extended across the horizon. Smog. It seemed as unfathomable as a drought in the Emerald City, but there it hung, where it couldn’t be ignored. She stepped into Nolasco’s office with a short rap on his open door.

The captain sat at his desk, talking on the phone. He didn’t wave her in. He didn’t even acknowledge her. He just kept her standing in the doorway, like smog on his horizon. Nolasco said something about having the best outfield with both Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, and she deduced that he was discussing his fantasy baseball team. Fantasy football, March Madness, fantasy baseball—Nolasco played them all. Divorced twice, how else was he going to spend his time? God forbid he should let the murder of a young woman interrupt his make-believe life.

While waiting, Tracy checked her messages on her cell phone. Dan had texted to let her know he’d arrived at LAX and would be home by six. Tracy had never had anyone check in with her just to check in, and it felt comforting to know that Dan cared enough to do so. In the two years since they’d reconnected, Dan—a childhood friend—had never made her feel like an afterthought. She was always on his radar. She had typed a partial response that she would be late getting home when she heard Nolasco say, “Gotta go.” He hung up his phone and said, “What is it?” presumably to Tracy. She didn’t immediately acknowledge him. Instead, she finished texting Dan.

“Hey, I got things to do,” Nolasco said.

Tracy lowered her phone and stepped into the office. “Need to talk to you about the woman in the crab pot.”

Nolasco’s brow furrowed. “We got an ID?”

“We do and we don’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“We have a name, Lynn Hoff, but we think it’s an alias. We think she’s a ghost. We’re not finding anything on her in any of the systems. Kins and I took a drive out to her last known address—a motel in Kent. She was either getting ready to run or already on the run. We think someone cleaned up the place. No wallet. No cell. No computer.”

“So she was into something illegal.”

“Don’t know.”

Nolasco scowled. “How else would you explain it?”

“I can’t yet,” she said.

He leaned back from his desk. “Sometimes things are as they appear, and it appears she was either a hooker, a druggie, or had pissed off the wrong people.”

“Initial autopsy examination doesn’t indicate druggie, and why would someone go to the effort to stuff a hooker or druggie in a crab pot and dump her in Puget Sound?”

“Don’t get all crusader on me, Crosswhite. We get Jane Does all the time.”

“Not in crab pots.”

“Like I said, sounds like she pissed off the wrong people. She doesn’t come up in missing persons or nobody comes to identify her, the city will cremate her and six months from now she’ll get a decent burial out at Olivet. We have more pressing matters.”

Like fantasy baseball? Tracy wanted to say but refrained. “Fingerprints didn’t come up in the system,” she said, further evidence Lynn Hoff wasn’t a hooker or a druggie.

“Run her through missing persons. I’m betting she shows up.”

“Del’s doing it now. She also had surgery to alter her appearance.”

“A lot of women do. It’s called vanity.”