My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(47)
“Actually, I was hoping to talk a little shop with him. Harley worked on just about everyone’s car in Cedar Grove, didn’t he?”
“He sure did. Your father was a regular customer. Harley appreciated that about him. Such a shame what happened. Your father was such a good man.”
“Do you know who Harley bought his car parts from, Carol?”
Carol Holt made a face like she’d been asked a question on quantum physics. “No. I didn’t get too involved in any of that, dear. I imagine he bought them from any number of places.”
“I remember he had all those cabinets in his office,” Tracy said, getting to the reason for her visit.
Carol Holt threw up her hands. “That office was an abomination, but Harley didn’t have a problem with it. He had his own way of doing things.”
“How long ago did he close the station?”
“It was when he retired. He was hoping our son Greg might take it over, but Greg had different plans. Three, four years ago, I suppose.”
“Would you happen to still have a key to the building?”
Her eyebrows arched. “I wouldn’t know. I suppose it’s somewhere around here. What is it you’re looking for?”
“I’m curious about something, Carol. I know it sounds crazy, but I was hoping I could just take a look through Harley’s records to satisfy my curiosity.”
“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.”
[page]CHAPTER 32
Tracy 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.