In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(4)

Tracy took the elevator to the seventh floor, already feeling comfortable again. She nodded to the detectives on the telephone and acknowledged others who called out to welcome her back. She stepped into the A Team’s bull pen, one of four bull pens for the Violent Crimes Section’s sixteen detectives.

Tracy noticed framed photographs of people she didn’t recognize on her desk. Kins had called to give her a heads-up that Nolasco had hired Maria Fernandez while Tracy and Faz were out. Faz took medical then paid administrative leave after sustaining injuries while pursuing a drug dealer. He’d been back at work for roughly a month. Kins told her that he and Del had been up to their eyeballs, and they had asked their captain, Johnny Nolasco, for the help. Nolasco had offered the position to Henry Johnson, the A Team’s overflow detective, also known as a “fifth wheel,” but Johnson declined. He had four kids under the age of eight and needed the flexibility the fifth-wheel position provided.

“Hey, hey! The Professor’s in early. Who died?” Vic Fazzio lumbered into the bull pen with a mug of coffee and a familiar greeting—an old homicide joke made colorful by Faz’s perpetually hoarse voice and New Jersey accent. They called Tracy “the Professor” because she’d once taught high school chemistry.

“Hey, Faz.”

“Welcome back.” He burst into the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter, a 1970s sitcom starring Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta with a song about dreams being your ticket out of your situation. “But the dream died!” Faz said, punctuating his punch line with a fist.

Faz set his mug of coffee on his desk, lowered his Windsor knot, and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. He and Del were old-school—sports coats and slacks, despite the section’s long-established dress-down policy. Others in Violent Crimes called them “Italian goombahs.” Del and Faz called themselves “Italian stallions.” Clydesdales was more of a reality. At six foot five, Del stood an inch taller and had once outweighed Faz, who pushed 260 pounds. A younger girlfriend, an improved diet, and vanity convinced Del to lose fifty pounds. He now referred to himself as “Del 2.0.” Faz said he was “Half-a-Del.”

Faz looked to what had been Tracy’s desk. “You knew about Fernandez, right?”

“Yeah, Kins let me know.”

“She’s in a trial,” he said. “A holdover case from her time working the Sex Crimes Unit. Like you, she gave up sex for death. Bada boom!” he said, making another fist.

Faz puffed out his jowls and gave a not-so-bad impression of a supersized Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “How’s my goddaughter?”

“Growing like a weed,” Tracy said. “Anybody know what happens to Fernandez with me back?”

“Don’t know.”

“Any other teams down a detective?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

An administrative assistant appeared at Tracy’s cubicle. “Tracy. Welcome back. Captain Nolasco would like to see you.”

Tracy checked her watch. This was early for Nolasco. “Okay. Tell him I’m on my way.” She looked at Faz, who shrugged.

Tracy and Captain Johnny Nolasco didn’t have a complicated relationship. Their mutual animosity stemmed from Tracy’s time at the police academy. Nolasco had been one of Tracy’s instructors, and she broke his nose and nearly neutered him during a training exercise when he grabbed her breast. Then she’d beat his decades-old shooting score at the range, which was as much a blow to his ego as her elbow had been to his nose and groin. They tolerated one another because he was her captain, and she was too good a homicide detective to screw with—the only two-time recipient of the department’s highest award, the Medal of Valor.

Tracy walked the inner hallway. Glass walls revealed a blue October sky. She loved the crisp fall temperatures and clear views. The gray gloom of November would hit soon enough, along with the persistent rain. She knocked on a closed door.

“Come in,” Nolasco said.

Nolasco looked like he hadn’t expected her, though she suspected he had. Nolasco rarely—as in never—got into the office early. Twice divorced, he’d long ago swallowed the bitter pill, but it hadn’t kept him from working out mornings to keep in dating shape, or from getting the suspected vanity eye job that gave him the look of the perpetually surprised.

“Tracy. Welcome back,” he said with a grin she didn’t buy for a second.

“You wanted to see me?”

He gestured to one of two chairs across his desk. “Take a seat.”

She reluctantly did so; the less time she spent in his office, the better.

“How was your maternity leave?”

She didn’t take the time to correct him. “Fine. I’m looking forward to getting back to work.”

Nolasco reclined, his chair creaking. “You were out a long time.”

“What happened in Cedar Grove mandated the leave; the department approved it.”

“No doubt, but . . .”

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

He squinted, as if fighting a headache. Another habit. “We promoted Fernandez.”

“I heard.”

“I didn’t have a choice with both you and Faz out. We were short on manpower, like the rest of the department.”

Tracy and just about everyone else in the department knew Seattle PD was down as many as ninety police officers and detectives, despite a concerted, three-year effort to hire two hundred more. Tracy’s colleagues were fleeing King County for other police agencies as quickly as the homeless moved into the state. SPD had become the city council’s whipping boy, and many officers were tired of it. The council ignored drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness and stuck to its mantra that homelessness wasn’t a crime and shouldn’t be treated as such. Meanwhile, Seattle’s property-crime rate was increasing faster than Los Angeles’s or New York City’s, and annual homicides would exceed thirty for the first time in years.