What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(14)

Moss shook his head. “You’ll have to check the file notes. I don’t recall anything.”

They drove down the hill and onto the fairway. Moss hit his second shot from the trees. It landed in a sand trap.

“You losing your concentration, Moss?” one of his foursome called out.

“Yeah, I’m thinking about all the money you’re going to owe me.”

“I think you’re thinking about something, or someone, else.”

Moss got back in the cart. “I assume you get that crap all the time. Sorry if it offends.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“We never had a female in Homicide when I was there. Not one in twenty-five years.”

“I was the first.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” Tracy said. “If you were me, Moss, where would you go with this case?”

Moss blew out a blast of air. “I racked my brains for years trying to think of things we could do. Did I tell you my partner and I wanted to send a bulletin to the media and law enforcement, but both the husband and the parents opposed it?”

That definitely seemed odd. “Why would they oppose it?”

“The husband was being hounded by the media. He and his daughter had been ostracized by the community. He said we had made his life intolerable, and he didn’t need the story publicized any further at the expense of his daughter.”

“And the parents? What was their opposition?”

“They refused to believe Childress would have abandoned her daughter. They were worried, based on the bank withdrawal that night, that she was working undercover, and that the publicity could put her life in danger.”

Tracy shook her head, disbelieving.

“Bizarre, huh? After a few weeks, the husband agreed to let us send out a news release but only to law enforcement, not to the media. We got a few hits, pursued those hits, but ultimately, found nothing of interest. As the weeks passed, my partner and I came to the conclusion that unless the husband confessed, or someone arrested for another crime admitted to killing Childress, we were at a dead end. I occasionally worked the case over the years, but when I retired, I had no choice but to send it to cold cases.”

“So either the husband killed her, or she took a Greyhound bus and disappeared. But you don’t believe she did,” Tracy said, summarizing.

“We didn’t find any paper trail she did—no credit card receipts, and nobody came forward talking about a woman bleeding at the bus station, which I’ve got to believe someone would have remembered, though as you probably saw in the file, we didn’t find the car until three or four weeks after Childress went missing. But I don’t think she just disappeared.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s like you said. I just didn’t see a mother up and leaving her child, whatever the reason—bad marriage or not. If she was going to leave, she’d take the kid, wouldn’t she?”

Tracy thought of Anita Childress’s statement that her father quit his job and stayed home because there had been incidences of her mother leaving her alone to chase a story.

“Normally, one would think that to be the case,” Tracy said. But this case seemed to be far from normal.





C H A P T E R 5

Moss dropped Tracy off at her car after they came up the fifth fairway. She thanked him for his time, and he provided his cell phone number and told her he would be happy to answer any additional questions.

“I’d like to get this one off the books,” he said. “I don’t think of it often, but when I do . . . It’s like a chore I’ve never finished. You know what I mean?”

Tracy did.

She left the country club and drove west across the 520 bridge spanning Lake Washington’s steel-gray waters. The Seattle skyline popped against a sky streaked with faint cloud trails. She had an interview with Bill Jorgensen, who had been Lisa Childress’s city editor at the Post-Intelligencer and was now a production editor for the Times.

Tracy didn’t know what to think of Moss Gunderson. He had certainly lived up to his billing. He definitely glowed. And not just his clothing. Tracy didn’t know what type of homicide detective Moss had been. He said he solved every case but Childress, but that didn’t necessarily say a lot. Back in his day, according to Del and Faz, detectives couldn’t “cherry-pick” their cases, but they could work a sergeant, especially if they were friends, to play favorites. Beyond that, 90 percent of homicides were what Tracy and her colleagues referred to as “grounders”—easy cases to field and to solve. The mysteries were rare. Moss got one. He didn’t solve it. He admittedly focused from the start on the husband, as would someone used to fielding grounders. When he couldn’t put the evidence together to take a run at the husband, Moss seemed incapable, unwilling, or maybe just too lazy to take the investigation in another direction.

Tracy didn’t get the impression from her brief review of the file, or from talking to him, despite his bombastic personality, that there had been a lot of outside-the-box thinking.

Maybe it was just Moss’s pants that made her think that way. An overstatement. Attention seeking. Neither Faz nor Del would ever wear them. People gravitated to the two of them naturally, like Italians to antipasto. It was the difference between charisma and insecurity. Something behind the gregarious Moss fa?ade shouted insecure, but, again, maybe she was just reading too much into the pants or trying to psych herself into believing that she could do what Moss had not. Find Lisa Childress’s killer.