In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(16)
“Just to clarify. The little girl didn’t appear to be struggling at all?”
“No,” Ingram said. “She was just walking along.”
CHAPTER 9
The morning after Halloween, Tracy stepped from the elevator onto the seventh floor and turned for the A Team’s bull pen out of habit. “Old dogs,” she said, changing direction and making her way to the Cold Case office.
She had rushed home following her interview with Jimmy Ingram, and she and Dan had pushed Daniella’s stroller through a Redmond neighborhood. She was surprised to find entire families dressed in matching costumes, characters from the movies The Incredibles and Frozen, even The Wizard of Oz. Tracy had not even contemplated dressing in costume, though Dan apparently had. He’d worn a Frankenstein mask, an Elvis wig, and a hideously colorful jacket. Leave it to him—people thought Franken-Elvis was hysterical.
Tracy had dressed Daniella in a bumblebee outfit, which everyone said looked adorable. Daniella only lasted an hour before falling fast asleep in her stroller. They returned home to a mess; Rex and Sherlock had eaten chocolate bars Dan bought and left on the kitchen counter. Lucky for the dogs, they’d thrown up. Not so lucky for Dan. Since the chocolate bars had been his idea, in the unlikely event a child trekked to their remote home, Tracy gave Franken-Elvis the privilege of cleaning up the mess and calling the vet to determine if the dogs needed to go in. Considering the amount of chocolate and kibble Rex and Sherlock had thrown up, the vet didn’t need to see them.
She’d spent much of the remainder of the night going through the Elle Chin file, looking for something the prior detectives had missed, some clue hidden in the photographs and witness statements that would unlock what had happened to the little girl. Experience had taught her that detectives could get so close to the evidence during an investigation, their focus becoming myopic, they’d let something significant slip past, unnoticed.
That’s when Tracy sought fresh eyes. A fresh opinion. A fresh start. She reviewed the Elle Chin case as if just beginning the investigation.
The Chin divorce had been bitter and ugly in just about every sense of the words. It had also been violent, at least according to Jewel Chin. The detectives had run a background check on Bobby Chin but found no prior incidents of physical or verbal abuse of women—his wife, the notable exception. Was this an allegation just to get leverage? Tracy didn’t think so. Her mother used to say tigers didn’t change their stripes. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Once abusive, always abusive.
She decided to find out if Bobby Chin was a tiger. The burning question was whether he could have hated his ex-wife so much he might have harmed his daughter. Tracy didn’t want to believe that was possible but, sadly, she knew it happened far too often. SPD had also appeared to give Chin the benefit of the doubt; he was one of their own. Tracy would not do so.
Chin had graduated from the University of Washington, where he’d been a member of the Phi Delta Phi fraternity. The investigating detectives found no police reports evidencing he’d ever abused woman, though he certainly could have. Many college women chose not to report such incidents. They didn’t trust the system, and they feared spending their college years as a leper. Chin’s plea to domestic battery, and the two other documented incidents that brought police officers to the home, indicated a propensity for violence, and Chin’s only “excuse” was his wife had baited him into hitting her, which wasn’t exactly an admission of remorse or regret.
She added a note to her list to find and talk with some of Chin’s fraternity brothers.
The file also did not contain any evidence that Jewel Chin had a psychological disorder, or an addiction, as Bobby Chin alleged, though again, that wasn’t necessarily something someone walked into a shrink’s office and volunteered. Jewel certainly could have a psychological problem that had gone undiagnosed. The guardian ad litem’s report made no such reference, but again, Tracy presumed both Jewel and Bobby Chin would have been on their best behavior when meeting the person who would determine their parental rights.
As for Jewel Chin being a suspect in her daughter’s disappearance, the file contained multiple statements from both Jewel Chin and her boyfriend, Graham Jacobsen, that supported each other’s alibis for that evening. The two claimed to have stayed at home—except for approximately fifteen minutes when Graham left to pick up Chinese food at a nearby restaurant. The restaurant had confirmed the order and the pickup. Detectives had obtained receipts. Bobby Chin dismissed this as a planned alibi. At his urging, the detectives had put together a timeline and determined that, even with the boyfriend’s drive to the restaurant, there would have been sufficient time for him and Jewel Chin, or someone else, to drive to the maze and snatch the little girl, and still be home in time before all hell broke loose. If the little girl Jimmy Ingram saw that night had been Elle Chin—unlikely, Tracy thought—the timeline could explain, perhaps, why that little girl did not appear to be struggling. She’d been walking with her mother.
The case-file detectives had also contemplated this scenario, but they found no further Evidence to support it. Bobby Chin could label his ex-wife a nut job all he wanted. He was throwing stones from a glass house.
Bill Miller, the first officer to the Chin home the night Elle went missing, filed a report that was strange, to say the least, and it made Tracy wonder if Miller had seen the detectives’ reports before writing his own and had been looking out for a fellow officer. He and Chin both worked out of the North Precinct. Miller was also on Tracy’s list of people to speak with.