In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(100)

Most families expressed relief amid their anger and their pain, happy to finally know what had happened to their child or their sister. Happy to no longer be in a state of limbo. They didn’t ask for many details. They didn’t want to know. As one mother said, “It’s enough that we have the chance to bury her, and to know that she’s now in a better place. Retribution doesn’t bring closure. Peace of mind brings closure.”

Tracy knew that too.

Tracy vowed to straighten her office that morning and started with the black binders. Those cases she had closed, she prepared for storage. Those she had not, she marked with a blue sticker and put back on the shelf. In the process, she found the Elle Chin binder open on her desk. It gave her pause.

She had no new leads, and she worried this might be one of those cases Nunzio said she’d just have to learn to live with. She couldn’t save them all.

She sat in her desk chair and looked through her interview notes, some she had not yet had the time to type up. She found the notes of her conversation with Evelyn Robertson, the Chins’ neighbor, and scanned what she had written. She had noted Robertson’s final comment, and she could still recall the woman’s face when she’d said it. Robertson had looked pensive, as if not finding Elle Chin might not have been a bad thing.

“So sad they never found that little girl, but . . .”

Tracy waited. “But . . .”

Robertson shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just sad.”

Officer Bill Miller had made his own sad commentary on the entire situation. “I just hope, for the little girl’s sake, that she’s alive somewhere. Alive and safe and that neither of them has any further contact with her. That’s the kid’s only hope for a normal life, in my opinion.”

She thought of her interview of Jimmy Ingram and the brief glimpse he’d had of the little girl. She hadn’t been crying or struggling. She’d been holding the woman’s hand. Tracy sat back. Ingram had never said “Asian woman.” But Jewel Chin had repeatedly used the word “Asian.”

Bobby Chin said he’d found Elle’s wings on the ground. He said Elle had been proud of those wings, so much so that he couldn’t get her to put on a coat. Wouldn’t she have been upset to leave them?

Ingram said the little girl he saw wore a coat, which led Tracy again to believe it had not been Elle unless . . . What if Ingram had been accurate? What if it had been Elle? What would that mean about the woman Elle had gone with?

“Someone Elle knew. Someone she would have trusted. Someone Elle loved,” Tracy said aloud. But if that were the case, then the abductor would have had to have been someone who also understood Elle’s situation and took Elle believing, as Robertson and Miller had believed, that Elle was better without either parent.

Tracy recalled her interview of Elle’s preschool teacher, Lynn Bettencourt. She’d thought the same thing, and Bettencourt had spent every weekday with Elle.

“Detective?” Bettencourt had said.

Tracy stopped. Bettencourt looked troubled. “Something else?”

“Earlier, you asked for my judgment.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think either living situation was a healthy environment for that little girl . . . Let me put it this way. I see a lot of kids in difficult home situations, and usually one of the parents is more to blame—they’re lashing out and blaming their spouse for what has happened. The other spouse becomes the child’s protector, the person who swallows their own pain or pride and puts the child first.”

“But not here.”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, not.”

Tracy again thought of Jewel Chin, of the interview in the dining room of the staged house. Jewel Chin had certainly been a piece of work, but she didn’t strike Tracy as sick or mean-spirited enough to harm her own daughter just to spite her husband. Neither had Bobby Chin. But Jewel kept repeating evidence that no one else said. She kept saying the woman who had taken Elle had been “Asian.” Was it just a casual slip of the tongue or did Jewel know, or perhaps suspect she knew, who took Elle? If Jewel did know or suspect, why had she not told the detectives . . . not told Tracy?

It made Tracy think of Evan Sprague. No one, not even his mother, had acted in his best interests. He was better off without his family. He was better off with Lindsay, not a parent, more a sibling who had been willing to do the right thing and look out for Evan’s best interests.

Tracy would never forget what Lindsay had said to her. What had compelled the young woman to run away.

“I knew I would be better off with people thinking I was dead than living another day in that house.”

And that was when it all came together, not like a lightning bolt, but like an electrical pulse, just enough to make Tracy sit up and go back through the notes, back through what they had all said. Who was in a position to know the damage Elle was suffering, the little girl’s pain? Who spent time with Elle during the divorce? Who would Elle have trusted, loved enough to leave her wings?

She pulled out the file she’d copied from Lynn Bettencourt, the one with the names of the people authorized to pick up Elle from school. Tracy sat back and wondered how she and Nunzio, and the detectives working the active case, had missed it. Had it just been too difficult to even imagine? Had it been unfathomable that a sibling would inflict such pain on another sibling?