My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(86)

“I don’t think anybody will be out walking the streets tonight. They’re predicting a blizzard.”

“Here too, and you know these people can’t drive these hills in the snow. Stay warm. I’m heading home before the crazies totally clog the roads.”

“Thanks for this, Kins. I owe you.”

“And you’ll pay.”

Tracy hung up and switched applications on her phone so she could open Kins’s e-mail. Her initial pass through the materials he’d sent indicated that the list of potential license plate combinations was not insignificant. She scrolled through a second time, quickly scanning the names and cities of the registered owners, looking for anything familiar. She didn’t see a name she recognized, but she did see the word “Cascadia,” and stopped scrolling. The vehicle was registered to a “Cascadia Furniture.” She took her phone to the nook where Dan kept his home computer, shook the mouse, and keyed the name into a search engine. “Wow,” she said, surprised when the search resulted in close to a quarter of a million hits.

She added the words “Cedar Grove.” It reduced the hits significantly, but there were still too many to efficiently go through. “What else?” she said out loud. After three days, her brain was fried. She couldn’t think of any additional tag words to reduce the number of hits.

Tracy slid back her chair, about to grab another beer, when she recalled where she’d heard the name before. She looked about the kitchen. The boxes containing the files she’d accumulated during her investigation of Sarah’s disappearance were stacked in a corner. There’d been no need for Dan to bring them all to court each day. She set the top box on the kitchen table and riffled through the files until she found what she was looking for. Sitting, she flipped the pages of the transcript containing Detective Margaret Giesa’s trial testimony. She knew the trial testimony well, having studied it, and quickly found the portion of Giesa’s testimony she was looking for.



BY MR. CLARK:



Q. Did your team locate anything else of interest in the truck cab?



A. Trace amounts of blood.



Q. Detective Giesa, I am placing on the easel what has been marked as the State’s Exhibit 112. It is a blown-up aerial photograph of Parker House’s property. Can you tell the jury, using this photograph, where your search next proceeded?



A. Yes, we went down this path to search this first building here.



Q. Let’s mark that building you’re pointing to with the number one, then. Did you note anything of interest in that building?



A. We found woodworking tools and several pieces of furniture in various stages of completion.



Tracy shifted her focus back to Kins’s e-mail. “Cascadia Furniture,” she said.

An explosion rattled the windows and shook the house, causing Rex and Sherlock to bolt upright and race to the plywood-covered window barking, just before the house plunged into darkness.





[page]CHAPTER 52





Vance Clark was gathering his briefcase and coat from the chair and standing to leave Roy Calloway’s office when the radio on Calloway’s desk crackled. Finlay Armstrong spoke, though his voice was barely audible through heavy static.

Calloway adjusted the dial.

“Roy, you there?” Finlay sounded like he was talking in his car with the window down.

“I’m here,” he said, then heard what sounded like distant thunder but quickly recognized to have been a single explosion. The fluorescent bulbs flickered and dulled and cut out completely. A transformer had blown. Calloway swore and heard the emergency generator kick in, like an airplane engine gearing up for takeoff. The lights came back on.

“Chief?”

“We just lost power for a second. Hang on, the generator is still kicking in. You’re breaking up. It’s hard to hear you.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re breaking up.” The lights dimmed, then brightened.

“Storm’s picking up.” Armstrong was shouting. “Wind gusts . . . You need to get out here, Roy. Something . . . You need to . . . here.”

“Hang on, Finlay. Say again. Repeat. Say again.”

“You need to get here,” Armstrong said.

“Where?” The radio crackled. The static increased. “Where?” Calloway asked again.

“DeAngelo Finn’s house.”



The high winds had toppled trees and knocked out all power. Downtown Cedar Grove looked like a ghost town, with the wind whipping snow into drifts piled high on the deserted sidewalks, the streetlights and store windows blackened. Farther out of town the windows in the houses were similarly dark, indicating the power outage to be at least citywide.

Snowflakes slid over the windshield and swirled in the cones of light from the Tahoe’s headlamps. They struggled to illuminate the branches that the wind had ripped from trees and left littering the road, which caused Dan to drive slowly and swerve frequently. As he approached the turn to Elmwood, he noticed a fire burning atop a telephone pole like a distant torch—a transformer. That explained the darkness. The entire electrical grid for all of Cedar Grove was down. The city had no emergency backup power, which was a costly upgrade that the city council declined to invest in several years back, reasoning that most residents had their own generators. Of course, backup generators didn’t solve the problem of spotty cell phone reception in a mountain town, especially during a major blizzard.