What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(62)

The good lawyers don’t need to expend all that hot air; they’ve paid their dues.”

“So then what are you doing in the office? You should have at least taken a long weekend.”

“You know the drill. I’m trying to dig out from under the pile I let smolder while I prepared for a trial that is not going to happen.”

Cerrabone did not sound happy. He sounded like he was already thinking of what kind of revenge he could exact on the defense lawyer. The Seattle legal community was bigger than it had been when Cerrabone started, but the adage “What goes around comes around” remained true.

“I appreciate the call back,” Tracy said, thinking about her smoldering piles.

“Henderson Jones was charged with possession with intent to distribute, among other things. He was one of about two dozen charged but the only one to not accept a plea. He claimed the police framed him and he’d been a good citizen for years before his arrest.”

“How much evidence did the prosecutor have?”

“Not much. The file is thin. They had a police officer’s statement that an informant would testify that Jones was regularly dealing in Rainier Valley.”

“That’s it?” Tracy asked, incredulous.

“That’s it. Like I said, ‘thin.’ Jones’s attorney provided gas and restaurant receipts as evidence Jones was in Los Angeles visiting a brother.”

“Legit?”

“Doesn’t appear the prosecutor followed up. There’s a Post-Intelligencer article in the file, though, that indicates a reporter did follow up and confirmed some of the receipts were legit. Anything else?”

Tracy assumed it was the article written by Lisa Childress but asked Cerrabone to read the byline.

She heard the pages rustle. “Lisa Childress.”

“Did the prosecutor’s file have an address and phone number for Jones or his attorney?”

“Both,” Cerrabone said, and he waited for Tracy to get out a pen and a pad of paper before he gave her the information. “That was a long time ago though.”

“Yes, it was.” Tracy thanked Cerrabone and disconnected. She called the attorney’s work phone number, but a recording told her the number was no longer in service. She called the last known number for Henderson Jones, but it, too, was no longer in service. She called Police Headquarters and asked Faz to run Henderson Jones’s name through the DMV and provide her with an address. A long, pregnant pause followed. “Faz?”

“Yeah, I’m here. The name was muffled. Say it again.”

“Henderson Jones.”

“What are you working on?” Faz asked.

The question caught Tracy off guard. “Just trying to track down a relative of one of the victims.” She didn’t like lying to Faz, but she didn’t want to get into a protracted discussion, nor did she want to put Faz in a difficult position. Faz and Del were like peanut butter and jelly, and good partners never lied to one another. The relationship depended upon trust. Partners spent eight hours of every day with each other and picked up on each other’s tells.

“Here he is,” Faz said. “You have a pen?”

“Fire away.”

Faz provided her a Seattle address. “Do me another favor,”

Tracy asked.

“At your beck and call,” Faz said.

“Run his name and tell me the last time he was charged and convicted?”

Faz’s thick fingers again stumbled over the keyboard. A minute later he said, “The last time? The last time would have been August 1989. Possession with intent to distribute.”

Tracy thanked him and hung up. In the newspaper article discussing Jones’s refusal to enter a plea to drug charges, Childress quoted Jones as saying he had not dealt drugs since the birth of his son. Either he’d been telling the truth, or he just hadn’t been caught, which seemed unlikely since he was on the Narcotics Unit’s radar and they’d be looking for him to slip up. That meant Jones likely told Childress the truth, that the charges levied against him by the task force had been fabricated.

The smoldering pile was starting to catch fire.

Tracy followed Google Maps into Rainier Valley, a once mostly African American neighborhood, though with housing in high demand in one of the nation’s fastest growing cities, the neighborhood had gentrified and home prices soared to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on average and higher near Lake Washington’s shore. She parked at the curb in front of a one-story, redbrick home with a well-maintained yard. A wooden wheelchair ramp and railing extended from the front door to the cement walk that split the lawn down the center. She got out of her pool car to the unwelcome stares of five young men seated in lawn chairs next to the address she hoped still belonged to Henderson Jones. In Tracy’s experience, people living in these neighborhoods had a police radar, and they could pick her out as a cop no matter how she dressed.

Over the years, she’d had people tell her they recognized the pool cars, but also the way cops walked, or the cocksure manner in which they stood, and, in some cases, their “holier than thou attitude.”

As Tracy drew nearer to the home with the ramp, she caught sight of one of the men approaching in her peripheral vision.

“Can I help you?” He stopped several feet away, his head tilted, and he held an expression that could best be described as Whatever you’re selling, we aren’t buying.