What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(37)

She decided to find something more concrete before she went to Del. In the interim, she tried to dismiss the notion that Del had been involved in illegal activity, but that thought was tempered by the knowledge that twenty-five years ago, Del had been new to homicide and to SPD. Could he have unwittingly stumbled onto something, then found himself in no-man’s-land? Did Del learn about the raid but was told to keep his mouth shut, then saw no way out of the situation except to continue his silence and hope for the best, knowing that speaking out would likely ruin his career or possibly get him killed?

She went to the computer, pulled up a search engine, and typed in the name David Slocum. It generated 329,000 hits. She refined her search by adding “Seattle” and “Washington State.” After some additional filters, and some starts and stops, she found a 1996

obituary for a David Allen Slocum, age forty-two. Details were provided for a funeral and celebration of Slocum’s life. A summary of his work history included a four-year stint as a civilian harbormaster at a marina in Seattle. There were no details of the cause of death.

His mother and father, a brother, and a sister were identified as his surviving family.

Tracy exited the article and scrolled further down the links. She found a short Seattle Times news story. David Allen Slocum, forty-two, had been found dead from a single gunshot to the head. He had been seated in his car behind a building in Seattle’s Industrial District on February 27, 1996.

Tracy felt her pulse quicken. She reread the date.

She didn’t have to look at the Lisa Childress file to confirm the date of Slocum’s death matched the date Lisa Childress had disappeared. No way this was a coincidence.

She recalled Dennis Hopper saying Slocum had died roughly three to four months following the two bodies washing up to the marina—further evidence nothing was wrong with Hopper’s memory.

Tracy opened the SPD database of closed cases and found the David Slocum file. She called the Evidence Unit and asked them to pull any evidence sheets and photos, assuming they had not been purged, then left her desk and went to the vault to get the file.

An hour later, she sat at her desk reviewing the file contents.

The Evidence Unit also had provided the evidence logs and photos.

She went through the police incident report and the death investigation checklist. February 27, 1996, Seattle Police Department officers had responded to a call from a supervisor at a plastics company in Seattle’s Industrial District. The supervisor reported a black Ford parked at the rear of the building near the loading bays. The car was impeding the company’s semitrucks, but that wasn’t the primary reason for the call. The reason for the call was the man in the driver’s seat slumped sideways, his head below the passenger seat, the passenger door open.

Officers arriving at the scene immediately determined the driver to be deceased and noted a handgun on the floorboard of the passenger compartment. They called the Homicide Unit. Detectives Keith Ellis and Moss Gunderson were dispatched as the two standby detectives to process the scene.

There were those names again. She felt another tingling sensation in her stomach.

At present, a violent crime investigation was given to the detective team next up. She wondered if Moss had lobbied to get the Slocum case. He certainly had the seniority to do so.

She went through the witness statements of the plastics company supervisor and the semitruck driver who arrived just after 5:00 a.m. and noticed the car. She viewed a series of gruesome photographs of the car interior and of David Slocum, shot once in the left temple. After the photographs, she found the medical examiner’s report documenting the time of death, based upon rigor mortis and body temperature, to be approximately four to five hours, or roughly two or three in the morning. Other than the single gunshot wound to the left temple, the medical examiner’s autopsy failed to reveal any other wounds, bruises, cuts, or scrapes to indicate a struggle.

Tracy worked her way through the file. A ballistics test indicated the gun had been recently fired and, from the extent of the burned flesh at the wound to the temple, embedded powder grains, and human tissue blowback in and on the gun barrel, the weapon was confirmed to be the weapon used in the shooting.

Detectives dislodged a bullet from the passenger-side door, but the damage was too severe for the ballistics team to confirm the bullet had been fired by the found gun, though that seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Fingerprint experts found the victim’s fingerprints on the gun grip.

Tracy went through the evidence log inventorying the car’s interior, including the glove compartment. It did not list a suicide note. A subsequent search of Slocum’s houseboat also failed to turn up a suicide note, but it did turn up marijuana plants. Again, the information caused Tracy to pause. She considered the telephone call made to Lisa Childress the day before Childress had disappeared. It had come from the Shell station just a block from the Diamond Marina, David Slocum’s home.

She wondered if Childress’s notes were a record of that call.

She went back to the file. Slocum’s phone records had been reviewed and each phone number investigated and determined to be unrelated to his death. Interviews of persons living at the houseboat community and who worked at the marina, including Dennis Hopper, did not turn up any indication Slocum had been depressed or otherwise suicidal. He was not known to own a handgun.

Tracy looked for but did not find any further investigation to explain how Slocum came to possess the 9 mm weapon. The serial number required to be engraved on the handgun by the Gun Control Act of 1968 was not documented anywhere in the file, nor had Ellis requested that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) National Tracing Center determine the gun’s origins. No documents explained how David Slocum had come to possess it.