What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)
Robert Dugoni
P R O L O G U E
February 27, 1996
The Industrial District
Seattle, Washington
Working nights in forbidding areas never bothered Lisa Childress. A reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Lisa met sources for her investigative articles at all hours of the day and night, and at some questionable locations. The dark didn’t frighten her. Nor did haunted houses or horror movies. As a child, she had looked forward to Halloween, with all its creepy costumes and the different ways people tried to spook, surprise, and scare her. They never did. In her teens, she had laughed watching horror movies that caused her friends to run screaming from the room. Being frightened, she concluded early on, was simply a state of mind, just like being cold or being happy. She could control it.
So, it didn’t bother her when a source asked to meet at 2:00
a.m. in downtown Seattle’s Industrial District. He explained, during their brief telephone conversation, that he had read her most recent news article and had information she might find interesting. Lisa understood why the man would be cautious. The story she pursued, if properly sourced, would blow the top off much of Seattle, and the fallout would be widespread.
She drove south on East Marginal Way, past a cement plant, a glass-recycling center, trucking companies, and businesses that produced raw materials housed in a complex of concrete buildings interconnected by metal bridges. Pipes and stacks spewed smoke and particulates twenty-four hours a day, 365 days of the year. The businesses, if not closed, worked through the night with skeleton crews. Few cars littered their parking lots. The eating establishments that catered to the blue-collar workers would remain dark for several more hours.
Lisa looked through the windshield at clouds crossing a starlit night sky, pushed by a strong, cold breeze. She couldn’t help but think the area would make a great location for one of those horror films she’d seen as a teen.
At a stoplight, she unscrewed the cap of her liter of Coca-Cola.
The carbonation fizzed. She took a swig that made her sinuses buzz and her throat tingle. Drinking Coke was a habit she’d picked up in college that had followed her to journalism school, and to her job.
Coffee upset her stomach, but she needed the caffeine to get through these late-night and early-morning meetings. The Coke helped her to focus—she wasn’t sure why—and kept her from crashing. She often worked in rushed spurts, largely because she procrastinated too much. Figured she always would—that thing about zebras not changing their stripes. If she didn’t have a deadline hanging over her head like a guillotine blade, she couldn’t focus worth a damn. Not that she met them or even tried. She despised deadlines, which was one reason she never told her editors the details of the stories she pursued. If she did, they’d slot her article for a certain run date. She believed investigations had lives of their own, just like stories—a beginning, a middle, and an end. If she rushed the ending, she could miss the real substance. Her editors had given up trying to corral her, so long as she delivered the powerful, hard-hitting news articles that drew local and national attention.
Her husband, Larry, wasn’t so understanding, especially now with Anita, their two-year-old, at home. But Larry had known what he was getting into; they’d lived together for almost a year before getting married. Lisa would have been fine without the wedding ring, but they had a little slipup that she discovered when she peed on the stick. Larry said a baby needed a mother and father and one last name. Lisa figured he had a point.
Larry also knew Lisa hadn’t been raised in a traditional Leave It to Beaver home, where the husband went to work, and the wife primped and had dinner ready. Lisa’s mother, Beverly Siegler, was one of Seattle’s first female cardiothoracic surgeons—“Don’t call me a cardiologist. I work for a living,” she used to say. Her father, Archibald Siegler, struggled as a novelist—which he used as an excuse to stay at home and drink like Hemingway.
Larry also knew about Lisa’s clutter and lack of organizational skills. He knew her mind shifted from one topic to the next, often without pause and seemingly without reason. Her mother’d had Lisa tested as a child, and the doctors concluded she had autism, which according to her mother meant she was just a shade below brilliant.
The light changed. Lisa turned right on South Fidalgo Street— that was a name she wasn’t about to forget. Fidalgo. Had to be a person’s name. She visualized the Thomas Guide street map.
Continue to the end of the road. Just past a single-story, rectangular, concrete building. Drive through the gap between the corner of the building and the Duwamish Waterway.
The area behind the building was shaped like an isosceles triangle with the Duwamish running along the hypotenuse. Across the water, industrial lights illuminated flat-bottomed cargo ships stacked with colorful containers anchored in the middle of the waterway. Along the shortest side, semitruck cabs had backed up against closed loading bays, their grills smiling at her. Nearby, a car had parked in the shadows cast by the tall grass growing along the waterway. Her source. Lisa shut off her car’s headlights. Her source had said he would flash his high beams if it was safe to meet. Again, a bit melodramatic, but when in Rome . . .
She waited.
No high beams.
Maybe she was supposed to flash her car’s headlights. She waited just under a minute, then figured it couldn’t hurt. She reached and turned the knob on and off.