My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(51)

“You have a place to stay?” Dan asked.

“I’ve made arrangements.”

Dan walked George Bovine back to the reception area. Bovine pulled open the door but looked back again at Rex and Sherlock. “Tell me, would they have bitten me if you hadn’t called them off?”

Dan petted them about their heads. “Their size is intimidating, but their bark is worse than their bite.”

“But still very much capable of causing damage, I’d imagine,” Bovine said, stepping into the hall, the door swinging shut behind him.





[page]CHAPTER 36





Tracy was running on fumes, unable to recall the last time she’d slept through the night. She felt the fatigue in her limbs and heard it in her voice as she and Kins sat in the conference room with Faz and Del, updating Billy Williams and Andrew Laub on the A Team’s active files.

During the weeks since Dan had filed his reply brief to Vance Clark’s Opposition to the Petition for Post-Conviction Relief, Tracy and Kins had retraced many of their steps in the Nicole Hansen investigation without success. They’d re-interviewed the motel owner and motel guests. They’d run latent fingerprints lifted from the motel room through King County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System and run down hits, crossing off persons with lock-tight alibis as potential suspects. They’d spoken again to the dancers at the Dancing Bare, to Nicole Hansen’s family, to her friends, to a couple of ex-boyfriends. Tracy had created a timeline of the last few days of Hansen’s life and had identified any person with whom she’d come into contact. They’d also executed search warrants that had been spectacularly unproductive.

“What about the employee files?” Laub asked.

“They came in late yesterday afternoon,” Tracy said, referring to the files they’d subpoenaed of current and past Dancing Bare employees. “I got Ron getting a head start on them,” she said, meaning the A Team’s fifth wheel, Ron Mayweather. Each of the four Homicide teams had a fifth detective assigned to them for carrying out some of the more mundane tasks of investigative work.

Laub turned to Faz. ”Where are we on the cars in the parking lots?”

Faz shook his head. “We got bubkes,” he said. “We’re still running down an out-of-state plate in California and one up in British Columbia. We’re making nice to our buddies across the border.”

“Anything on HITS?” Laub asked.

Tracy shook her head. “No.”

When the meeting broke up, Tracy was craving caffeine, but Williams met her at the door. “Hang out a minute,” he said, and she suspected she knew why.

When they were alone, Williams said, “Vanpelt’s show last night created a shit storm. You can expect another phone call.”

Vanpelt’s early Christmas present had been an hour-long report profiling Edmund House, Cedar Grove, and Tracy on her show, KRIX Undercover. Vanpelt had spliced historical photographs of the town with photographs of Tracy, Sarah, their parents, and Edmund House. She’d used interviews of Cedar Grove residents discussing how Sarah’s disappearance had shattered the town’s bucolic existence, the emotional impact the trial had had on the town, and how they felt about the possibility of going through it all over again. No one was happy about having their lives dragged back through the media mud.

Tracy leaned against the conference room table. “I thought it might,” she said to Williams. “How bad is it?”

“Media fielded two dozen requests for interviews from the local and national media, and that was before the Seattle Times ran the story on the front page this morning. They want an interview. So do CNN, MSNBC, and half a dozen others.”

“I’m not doing it, Billy. It won’t end the inquiries. It will only heighten the attention.”

“Laub and I agree,” Williams said. “And we’ve told Nolasco as much.”

“Yeah? What did he say?”

“He said, ‘what do we do if House gets a new hearing?’?”



Nolasco rarely looked happy, but that afternoon when Tracy entered the conference room he was scowling like he’d received Botox injections while constipated. Lee again sat beside him, his chin resting on the palm of his hand and his eyes locked on a single sheet of paper on the table, no doubt another statement they’d ask Tracy to sign. She just couldn’t seem to keep from disappointing them.

“What’s the status of the Hansen investigation?” Nolasco asked, before Tracy had the chance to sit. Tracy didn’t think for a minute Nolasco had called the meeting to discuss the Hansen case.

“Not much different from when we spoke last night,” she said, pulling out a chair.

“And what are you doing to change that?”

“At the moment I’m sitting in here, so not much.”

“Maybe it’s time we brought in the FBI.”

“I’d rather work with a Boy Scout troop.” In Homicide, FBI stood for “Famous But Idiots.”

“Then I suggest you get me something to take upstairs.”

Tracy bit her tongue as Nolasco gave a nod to Lee, who reached below the table and retrieved a half-inch-thick stack of paper.

“We started getting these just after Ms. Vanpelt signed off last night,” Nolasco said, sliding the stack to her. Tracy flipped through copies of e-mails and transcribed phone messages. They weren’t pretty. Some called her unfit to wear the uniform. Others asked for her head on a platter.