The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(79)

Orr sighed, still sounding uncertain, and Tracy couldn’t completely understand her reticence. “It’s just that, if it isn’t her, then it raises doubt again about what happened to her. I’m not sure I can go through that again,” Orr said.

“I understand this has been difficult,” Tracy said. “But if it isn’t Andrea, there’s another family out there possibly wondering the same thing—what happened to their daughter. They deserve closure too.”

Orr seemed to give that argument some thought. After several long moments she said, “Okay. Go ahead and send it.”

Devin Chambers’s sister, Alison McCabe, had also been resistant, but she too ultimately relented. Tracy suspected that whatever bad feelings had developed between the two sisters, blood remained blood.



The following week, both women shipped back the tests and, with the DNA samples secured, Tracy drove to the squat concrete building on Airport Way South that housed the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The facility, located in an industrial area south of downtown, looked more like a food-processing warehouse than home to the state’s high-tech crime lab responsible for analyzing the evidence to convict murderers, rapists, and other miscreants.

Mike Melton sat in his office. Today he was not strumming on his guitar or singing. When Tracy knocked, Melton was taking a bite out of a homemade sandwich that reminded Tracy of the cheese sandwiches her mother used to make her and Sarah—two slices of white bread, mayo, and a slice of Velveeta. An apple, an uncapped bottle of water, and an open brown bag sat on Melton’s desk.

“Looks like I caught you at a bad time,” Tracy said from the doorway.

Melton waved her in as he chewed and swallowed, washing the sandwich down with a sip from the bottle. “Just eating a late lunch,” he said. “I was over at the courthouse working on some last-minute prep work for the Lipinsky trial.”

“Kins said it could go out next week,” she said.

“That’s what they tell us.” Melton used a napkin to wipe at the corners of his mouth visible beneath his thick reddish-brown beard. Over the years it had become streaked with gray. Tracy had heard the term “bear of a man” used to describe big men, but in Melton’s case the analogy fit, and not just because of his size. In addition to the beard, which seemed to get longer and fuller each time Tracy visited, Melton wore his hair combed back off his forehead, the curls touching the collar of his shirt. He also had the build of a lumberjack, with meaty forearms and hands that looked like they could tear a phonebook in half, yet his fingers were nimble enough to pluck the strings of a guitar. Detectives referred to Melton as Grizzly Adams, because of the uncanny resemblance to that TV show’s star, Dan Haggerty.

“Come in and sit.” Melton walked to Tracy’s side of his desk and moved a leather satchel from one of two chairs. The other was stacked with technical books.

“A little light reading?” Tracy asked.

“Just trying to stay on top of everything.”

Tracy settled in. Rather than returning to behind his desk, Melton leaned against the edge. “Heard Pierce County pulled the crab pot case.”

Melton was no dummy, nor had he just fallen off the turnip truck. As the crime lab’s lead scientist, he possessed multiple degrees, none of which hung on the wall of his office. Instead of diplomas, he kept mementos from prior interesting cases—a hammer, a saw, a baseball bat. He also knew that when detectives showed up unexpectedly at his office door they usually wanted something.

“They did,” she said. “And left me with a couple loose ends I’m trying to nail down.”

“Such as?” Melton said, moving back to his seat and picking up his cheese sandwich.

“DNA. Given the condition of the body, it’s the only means for a positive identification.”

“Heard the parents were deceased and no siblings,” Melton said, taking another bite.

“Found an aunt in San Bernardino. The mother’s sister.”

“Ah.” Melton put down the sandwich and sipped his water.

Tracy had no way to soften the question. “I was hoping you’d provide me with the victim’s profile so I can send it to an outside lab for comparison.”

Melton leaned back in his chair. “You don’t like the work we do here?”

“It would be better at this point to let an outside lab handle it.”

“How are Nolasco and Martinez going to like that?” he said, the corners of his mouth inching into a slight grin.

“You heard about that?”

“I hear everything. You know that.”

She smiled softly. “They’ll like it probably less than they liked me going to talk to the aunt in the first place.”

Melton gave her comment a moment of thought. “Well, we send out the profiles all the time when we get backed up and overwhelmed here. In fact, with the Lipinsky matter taking up so much time, I was just thinking we needed to send that profile out so we could speed things up.”

Tracy smiled. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Don’t thank me. Just doing my job. Would it also be better if I didn’t ask why you’re using an outside lab?”

“Probably.”

Melton nodded. “You don’t think it’s her, do you? You don’t think it’s the woman everyone said walked off Rainier.”