What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(17)
“Because she had a daughter.”
He shook his head. “Because she had stories she was working.
I can’t see her leaving those stories unfinished. I know how that must sound, but I think it would have driven her crazy to not finish a story, let alone to leave several unfinished.”
“Was she obsessive?”
“She was about her stories.”
“You think it’s more likely that something nefarious happened.”
“I wish I didn’t, but . . .” Jorgensen shrugged. “That would be my conclusion.”
C H A P T E R 6
As Tracy made her way back to Police Headquarters on Fifth Avenue, she wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew, if her empathy for Anita Childress had led her to pick a case that couldn’t go anywhere. Statistically, when a young woman went missing, the odds were overwhelmingly against finding her alive, and those odds only worsened with the passage of time, especially if Lisa Childress had been sticking her nose in dangerous places.
Tracy found herself at an early crossroads.
She either had to accept, as Moss had accepted, that Larry Childress killed his wife and disposed of her body, in which case she agreed with Moss’s assessment that unless Larry Childress confessed and provided details, the investigation had reached a dead end. Or, she had to assume Larry Childress was innocent, and Lisa Childress was killed by someone trying to conceal illegal activity. In which case, Tracy needed to get a much better handle on the four investigations Lisa Childress had been pursuing, somehow determine how far Childress had delved into each story, whom she had spoken with, and whether there had been any threats, other than the one by Greenhold, and whether those threats should have been considered serious.
Maybe Moss hadn’t been lazy. Maybe he’d just been practical.
Anita Childress had already done much of the legwork. Tracy just needed time to get up to speed, then devise a course of action.
Inside her office, Tracy put her desk phone on “Do Not Disturb,”
cleared space by putting the black binders of cases she had solved in a box to be closed and sent back to storage, and pulled out the four manila files Anita Childress had provided. She decided to start with the file that most interested her—Lisa Childress’s investigation into police corruption. It was hard to stomach the thought of bad cops on the take, but having once worked in the Narcotics Unit, Tracy knew Washington to be a narcotics distribution point because it bordered Canada, which provided drug dealers with an assortment of ways to smuggle drugs into the state—by car, by boat, by train, or by plane, and those planes could land in remote wilderness locations, including on lakes and rivers.
She’d also read and heard of instances of narcotics agents being corrupted in cities like Los Angeles and Miami, especially in the 1980s, when cocaine distribution escalated sharply. Her narcotics training had included classes on corruption, and she learned of police officers stealing drugs from one dealer and reselling them to another, an act known as “trading licks.” In other schemes, police used an undercover cop to make a large drug purchase, busted the deal, then drove to a secluded location and divvied up the take.
Corruption could start innocently. An idealistic young officer, with the best of intentions, graduates from the Academy and sees the world in black and white, right and wrong. Then that officer sees other officers bend the rules, just slightly, to justify a conviction. The bend might be a search that goes a little too far. The officer is told it happens all the time. He wants to be a team player, to be accepted, so he acquiesces. His first mistake. The officer then must fabricate a report to cover up the overaggressive search. Again, no big deal.
The case goes to trial, and the officer perjures his testimony to safeguard the false report justifying the search that went too far.
And it works.
The perpetrator is convicted. The officers don’t get caught. No harm. No foul.
And each time it becomes a little easier to bend the rules until the officer starts to justify taking the money and reselling the drugs.
Tracy flipped through Childress’s notes and came to a copy of a police report that detailed an investigation into two bodies found floating in Lake Union. Nothing in the report indicated drugs or a drug bust. Interesting. Police had responded to a 911 call from the Diamond Marina on Lake Union in November 1995. Tracy read the name of the two responding detectives. Del Castigliano had been the lead detective, and his partner had been Moss Gunderson. Del had to have been a relative newbie on the homicide team in 1995, when he transferred into Seattle from Madison, Wisconsin.
Tracy flipped through the report. The decedents were two men of Mexican heritage estimated to be in their late twenties to early thirties. The two men were subsequently identified by the border patrol as Ayax Florez Navarro and Juvenal Lucio Ibarra, both from Mexico. They had prior convictions for drug smuggling and had been linked to a drug cartel in Oaxaca.
Okay, so the case was about drugs. She flipped to the medical examiner’s report, which said the two men had drowned. Each had alcohol and cocaine in his system.
Tracy flipped through the rest of the report but did not find any reference to a boat on which the two men had been working, or how they otherwise turned up floating in the water at Lake Union. Del had concluded the two had fallen overboard, from some boat or pier, and drowned, and he closed the file. His conclusion seemed convenient and, at best, sloppy, even for a detective working his first homicide.