What She Found (Tracy Crosswhite #9)(74)

The waiter left. No one touched the food. Del continued. “Moss says he wants me to handle the case, take the lead. I thought, terrific. Give me a chance to show my chops to the captain and others in Homicide. Moss even tells me to run everything through him so he can make sure I don’t make any mistakes. I was grateful to the guy.” Del shook his head. “Moss sends over his report on his conversation with Slocum. Nothing in that report says anything about a raid.

“I started asking around all the other marinas if anybody recognizes the two guys. Nobody does. A couple of weeks pass, and Funk sends over the toxicology report. The two guys had narcotics and alcohol in their systems. Okay, I think, so maybe they were fishing and fell in. The logical starting point is the marina, right?

That’s where they found the bodies.”

Faz put a bruschetta and pieces of calamari on a plate and handed it to Del, then handed a second plate to Tracy. “I’m good, Faz. I ate at home.”

“You can’t come to Fazzio’s and not eat. It’s an insult to the chef . . . and his father.”

Tracy took the plate. Del took a bite of the bruschetta and made a face like he’d fallen in love. “This is better than Vera’s, but you tell her I said anything, and I’ll deny it.”

They all laughed. Nerves. Del sipped his wine and leaned forearms on the table. “I finally go back to the marina to see if the harbormaster has a thought or has heard something more, and the guy, David Slocum, he says to me, ‘What did you ever find out about the raid?’

“I must have looked like a deer in headlights because Slocum, he says, ‘I told your partner.’

“‘Told him what?’ I say. He says, ‘I told him about the raid on the fishing boat two nights before the bodies floated up to the dock. Half a dozen guys.’ Well, by now I realize I can either look stupid or try to bluff. So, I bluff. I look stupid enough on my own.” Del gave a half-hearted smile. “I say, ‘Yeah, he wants me to get a little more detail about that,’ and Slocum proceeds to tell me that two nights before the two men floated up to the dock, these guys raided the marina and impounded the boat for running drugs. I just let him talk ’cause this is all new to me. He said they took the boat from the marina and that’s the last he’s ever seen of it.

“I’m asking myself why my partner did not tell me this, since it might have made my life a lot easier figuring out the identities of the two men. I smell something rotten. I get back to the office to find Moss, but I run into Faz and we go to lunch. Eventually I get around to the information I acquired and Moss not sharing it with me. I tell him Slocum said the guys who made the raid wore face masks, and Faz tells me to talk to Rick Tombs in narcotics.”

“He ran the Last Line,” Faz said.

“Tombs tells me two cartels are fighting over distribution in the Pacific Northwest and he’ll ask around. More bullshit, though I don’t know this. I get back to my desk and Moss drops a report on it. Says the Border Patrol ID’d the two men and he was right. He said they’re illegals and part of a cartel. Moss tells me to send the file to him and he’ll wrap it in a bow and send it over to the DEA, that our investigation is done.

“Now I know something is up. On my own I track the boat to Vancouver, Canada, but I can’t find anything to indicate the boat was ever impounded, that it was raided for drugs, or that any drugs or cash were ever put in the evidence room. I checked the Coast Guard here and in Canada, Border Patrol, customs officials. No one ever heard of it.

“But I’m a rookie,” Del said. “I’m trying to walk in the dark; you know? I’m not sure what to do. Am I going to go running off and accuse a decorated narcotics unit of something illegal? What proof do I have?”

Tracy couldn’t imagine what Del went through. He must have felt like he was on an island, alone.

“I dig up articles on the Last Line and read them in my apartment. It confirms everything I’ve been told about the group being small and anonymous, except for Tombs. There’s another article in the Post-Intelligencer about this drug bust of some two dozen dealers in Seattle by the Last Line and how all these dealers were pleading out, all except this one guy.”

“Henderson Jones,” Tracy said.

“Jones said he had hard evidence to prove he was somewhere down in LA, so I decide to talk to Mr. Jones, but who do I take with me?” Del said. “Can’t take my partner, and I ain’t going into Rainier Valley to speak to a supposed drug dealer—alone.” Del looks across the table. “So I chose the other Italian; you know? I’d heard the area was once known as Garlic Gulch because of all the Italians who migrated there. Figured we might fit in.”

Del and Faz both chuckled. “Like two trees in Greenland,” Faz said.

“This guy, Henderson Jones, he doesn’t want to talk to us.”

“No, he does not,” Faz said in between bites of his calamari.

“He was mad,” Del said.

“Spitting mad,” Faz interjected. “Said he had an attorney, and he was going to sue the city for false arrest.”

Del continued. “So I say to the guy, ‘Listen. We just want to hear what happened, okay? You tell us what happened.’” Del told Tracy basically the same story Henderson Jones had told her.

Then he said, “Well, now I’m screwed. And worse, I screwed Faz now too.”