What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(66)

C H A P T E R 2 5

Tracy left Henderson Jones’s home no longer certain about anything. His son walked her outside and closed the door behind them.

“You know what it takes to raise three kids in the environment that surrounded us and have us all come out clean? Don’t buy drugs.

Don’t sell drugs. Don’t use them,” Deiondre said.

“He sounds like a remarkable father.”

“He raised us after my mother died unexpectedly at forty-two.

He had help from my grandparents, but the responsibility fell to him and he did it. And he didn’t go back to dealing drugs to do it either.

He worked multiple jobs, sometimes getting just four hours of sleep a night so he could give my brother and sister and me a better life. But he did it. And what did he get for it?” Deiondre raised his eyebrows as if waiting for an answer. He wasn’t. “Nothing. He stood tall when everybody else rolled over. I know my father, and I know you coming around here asking him questions is making him stand tall again, hoping that the rich and powerful get their due, and I don’t have the heart to tell him it isn’t going to happen. Is it, Detective?”

Tracy couldn’t immediately answer.

“That’s what I thought. Think about it. A young kid gets pinched for having a couple ounces of pot and fifty dollars on him. The rich and powerful, they get away with stealing millions of dollars and nobody does anything. They sweep it under the rug, so the city doesn’t get embarrassed on a national stage.”

“I think you’re right,” Tracy said. “I think that’s exactly what happened. But some people did get hurt, and that’s my priority at the moment, finding the people responsible and trying to bring them to justice.”

“Yeah? Well, see if maybe you can spread that justice around a little bit.”

“Can I ask what happened to your father, why he’s in the wheelchair?”

“Diabetes. He’s got neuropathy bad in his feet, but he keeps on trucking every day. That’s my dad.”

Deiondre walked across the lawn to friends, who continued to give Tracy the stink eye. She didn’t blame them. Each was likely to get a big laugh when Deiondre told them why she had come to visit his father. They’d laugh because they’d experienced it too much, a justice system that too often meted out judgment based on color and race.

Tracy got back in the car and drove from Rainier Valley. What Henderson Jones had told her tested so many of her basic precepts of being a Violent Crimes detective, precepts she had learned from both Faz and Del. Now it appeared Del had withheld information on the raid of a drug boat that had led to the deaths of two crewmen and the theft of potentially millions of dollars in drug money, not to mention putting those drugs back out on the streets of Seattle. Faz also must have known about it. That was the only rational explanation for why he came with Del to talk with Henderson Jones.

Faz was not Del’s partner back then. Not yet, anyway.

The unreported raid on the Egregious had also, not so inadvertently, led to the death of David Slocum and, for all intents and purposes, the death of Lisa Childress. She wasn’t six feet under, but Tracy could only imagine what it must have been like to wake up one day and not know who you are and not recognize any of the people in your life. Maybe it was just being a mother and thinking of the pain it would cause her to not know Daniella. Tracy’s maternal grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and for the last years of her life, she didn’t know anyone, not even her daughter or her grandchildren. The disease had stripped her of all the people she had once loved and all the memories she had once shared.

Tracy thought it to be the cruelest of all the diseases, and she prayed she was not genetically disposed to suffer the same fate.

As she got back on the I-5 freeway, she wondered what had happened, what had gone wrong. Del had been a new homicide detective when he worked with Moss Gunderson. Faz, too, had come up the ranks about the same time. Had they been sucked in by the money? Or had they just gone along to get along, then found themselves in too deep to get out? Had that been the reason they talked with Henderson Jones, had they been trying to claw their way out of a situation only to find the walls were sandstone and the more they clawed, the more the walls crumbled, leaving them without a perch on which to stand?

Had Del and Faz been complicit in the death of David Slocum?

Tracy couldn’t bring herself to believe it possible. Had Slocum been prepared to tell Lisa Childress about the raid at the marina and the drowning of the two men because Del and Moss had ignored him?

That certainly seemed to be the reason for Slocum’s death. Tracy didn’t believe for an instant that he committed suicide. But if members of the Last Line killed Slocum, why hadn’t they also taken out Childress at the same time? The presence of the bear spray seemed to make it a near certainty Childress had been at the site.

Had she arrived after the murder? Had the shock and the horror been too much for her and led to one of those psychological injuries of which Dr. Laghari spoke?

Maybe, but that didn’t explain the head injury Childress presented with at the mall in Escondido. Had she struck her head or had the blow been inflicted? If so, why had they let her live, a reporter who could, potentially, take down everyone? Had they decided that, without Slocum, Childress had no corroboration? Had they decided they couldn’t kill an investigative reporter? Or were they just waiting for a more opportune time, and Slocum’s death was meant to be an explicit message to Childress that they could get to her sources and they could get to her?