What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(36)

She called the US Customs and Border Protection for the Port of Seattle, the DEA, and the FBI, and provided the information and asked for records. She called Bennett Lee, the public information officer with whom she had a close working relationship, and asked if he had any stored files on such a raid. A drug bust that big—if Hopper’s estimates were accurate, especially by a task force designed for just that purpose—would have been big news back then. Hell, it would be big news now. Half an hour after Tracy placed the call, Lee called back. He had found nothing.

Customs and Border Protection called back late in the day.

They, too, had no records for the dates provided or for the name of the boat. The DEA and FBI had the same response.

Tracy checked the SPD evidence room’s archived files. Back then they didn’t have computers to keep track of evidence admitted and released, which made it easier for evidence to get lost. The detective at the evidence room bitched about the extra work and claimed he was busier than a one-armed paperhanger, but he, too, called Tracy back. No drugs or drug money had been checked into the evidence room the nights of the eighteenth or nineteenth or the morning of November 20.

Tracy ran the Egregious and Hopper’s description of the boat through the Washington Department of Licensing as well as the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. There were multiple ships with the same name, but none was a seventy-five-foot purse seine fishing boat.

She called the Canadian Register of Vessels and asked that they search for legal title to the fishing trawler. An hour later they emailed her a hit, with photographs. The commercial fishing boat had been commissioned in 1985. They found a record of the boat subsequently being sold to a Jack Flynt, who registered it in September 1989. The records indicated Flynt owned the boat until it was seized in American waters on March 10, 2002, roughly ten miles west of Cape Alava, just south of the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The boat contained 3,300 pounds of cocaine and marijuana with a street value of more than $30 million.

Hopper had not been exaggerating.

Tracy called the Coast Guard Investigative Service, asked if the agency had existed back in 1995 or 2002, and if so, if it had any records related to the purse seine fishing trawler, in particular its impoundment. The Coast Guard emailed her records that matched the information she had learned from the Canadian Register of Vessels. The Egregious had been seized on March 10, 2002.

Hopper had been correct that the ship had been used to transport drugs, but could he have been off on his dates? Could he have remembered something that happened in March 2002 instead of November 1995? Could he have related the drowning of Navarro and Ibarra to the seizure of the boat? He was, after all, a self-proclaimed aging hippie who had smoked a lot of pot. She dismissed the thought almost immediately. Hopper’s recollection of the date Slocum told him the two men floated up to the dock had been accurate, and it seemed highly unlikely David Slocum would have had the opportunity, let alone any reason to question Moss or Del about the raid, had they not come to the marina in response to the two drowned men. As Hopper had said, you didn’t forget things like that, especially when they happened so close together.

So what happened to the Egregious and its drugs in November 1995? And why hadn’t Del put the information of the raid in his file?

Tracy ran the name Jack Flynt through several databases but did not find any records that charges had ever been filed against Flynt in the United States. Further digging at the customs department revealed the 2002 seizure case had been handed off to Canadian law enforcement, since Jack Flynt was a Canadian citizen and the Egregious a Canadian vessel. The boat had been dry-docked in Port Angeles while the US customs service completed a forfeiture process.

Tracy called Staff Sergeant Tyner Gillies, who ran the drug unit of the RCMP in Surrey, British Columbia. She had assisted Gillies on a prior case in Washington that involved a Canadian citizen, and she eliminated a number of legal hoops Gillies would have otherwise had to jump through. She hoped Gillies could do the same. She asked Gillies to run the name Jack Flynt through their system and let her know if anything turned up.

An hour later, Gillies called her back and advised that Flynt had pled guilty to smuggling cocaine and marijuana into the United States in March 2002, received a twelve-year sentence, served just five years, and had been paroled. At the time of his parole in 2007, he lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. Five years seemed like an incredibly short time to have been incarcerated, given the quantity of drugs confiscated and the length of the sentence imposed, but maybe the Canadian system was more forgiving. Gillies told her Flynt had been pinched more recently and was currently imprisoned at the Mission Institution outside of Mission, British Columbia, an hour from Surrey.

Tracy explained her situation and asked Gillies if he could make arrangements for her to speak with Flynt in prison. He said he’d see what he could do.

When she disconnected the call, her instinct was to turn around and speak to Del—an old habit. Del used to have the desk directly behind her in the four-detective bull pen that made up the Violent Crimes Section’s A Team. She wanted to ask Del about Navarro and Ibarra, and whether Slocum had questioned him and Moss about a raid. She wanted to know if either Del or Moss had looked into the veracity of Slocum’s statement. It didn’t appear either had. But she recalled Del’s seeming lack of memory about the case, though it had been his first homicide, and the way his face had changed when she mentioned Lisa Childress. She did not yet have any hard evidence a raid had occurred. What she had was the hearsay recollection of what David Slocum had allegedly said to an aging, pot-smoking vagabond, and as much as she liked Dennis Hopper, that was not likely to get her far.