In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(65)
It sounded more like “I need to get on with my life.”
Tracy arrived at Police Headquarters early afternoon, grabbed a cup of coffee, and sat at her desk in her office. She wanted to confront Nolasco, but she kept thinking of the Bobby Chin interview. Chin made a lot of sense when he said he took responsibility for his daughter, but at the same time, he didn’t help himself. If his ex-wife had screwed with his mind so much that Chin was unstable, that he had contemplated killing himself, then wasn’t it possible he saw the only other way out of the situation as well?
Under normal circumstances, Tracy would have said no, but Chin had said these weren’t normal circumstances. They were far from normal, at least as he described them. Something was amiss, but Tracy was starting to doubt she would ever figure out what had happened.
Her computer pinged. An email from Kins. His attempt to get a search warrant had been denied. The judge had ruled as Cerrabone had predicted—insufficient evidence to warrant a search of the Sprague brothers’ home.
The email frustrated her, but the court often frustrated her, seemingly more concerned with perpetrator rights than with the victims. She was convinced the brothers were behind Cole’s disappearance. There were just too many coincidences, too many half-truths and outright lies. But as much as she wanted to work on the case, she knew she couldn’t.
Nolasco had been direct about that.
She looked to the two cold case binders on her desk, one for Angel Jackson, the other for Donna Jones—the two prostitutes who had disappeared on Aurora Avenue North. Was that just another coincidence, that their disappearance was in roughly the same area as Stephanie Cole’s, and under similar circumstances, with no body found?
When she broached the subject of the two prostitutes with Kins, he had suggested they work Cole’s case, and if that led to the two prostitutes, they could work those cases as well. Tracy smiled.
Wasn’t the reverse equally true?
If she worked the two prostitute cases and it happened to lead to Stephanie Cole, well, Nolasco couldn’t very well discipline her for it, could he?
She pulled out her keyboard and started typing. Using King County land records, Tracy determined Ed and Carol Lynn Sprague purchased the house in North Park in 1957. She looked for whether Ed Sprague owned any other property, someplace out of the area, remote, where the sons could have taken a kidnap victim, either with the intent to keep her alive, or to bury the body. She did not find other property in Ed Sprague’s name.
According to an obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Ed had died of cancer ten years ago. He had worked as a machinist at Boeing. That fact got Tracy’s attention. Brian Bibby had also worked as a machinist for Boeing. Given their similar ages, the two employments likely overlapped. That didn’t necessarily mean they knew one another. Boeing employed thousands of machinists, but it was something to at least explore. She made a note to ask Bibby.
At the time of his death, Ed was survived by his wife, Carol Lynn, and his three sons, Franklin, Carrol, and Evan. The obituary also noted another child, Lindsay.
Tracy paused. It felt like the moment in an investigation when there was an unexpected breakthrough, a piece of critical evidence. No one had mentioned a daughter.
She read the ages of the children at the time of Ed Sprague’s death. Lindsay was ten years younger than Evan. Simple math indicated Carol Lynn, the mother, would have been in her midforties when Lindsay was born. It wasn’t impossible she’d had a child. Tracy knew that well. But ten years between children seemed a long time to wait. An unexpected pregnancy? Perhaps. Had they adopted Lindsay to give Carol Lynn the girl she’d always wanted? Again, if so, why wait so long to make that decision?
Tracy wondered where Lindsay was now.
She called the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families in Olympia. She wouldn’t be able to get sensitive information, such as birth parents, assuming Lindsay had been adopted, but she could get basic information. Fifteen minutes later, after two different conversations, she hung up the phone with information that confirmed her suspicions. Carol Lynn had not become pregnant, nor had the Spragues adopted Lindsay. She came to the Spragues through foster care, living with them from ages twelve to eighteen, at which time she became an adult and left the DCYF system. Tracy obtained her birth name: Lindsay Josephine Sheppard.
She thought of the school just down the block from the Sprague house, and Brian Bibby’s statement that it had been the shortest commute a teacher ever had to make to get to work. The same applied to neighborhood children. She made a note to determine if the Sprague children had attended the North Park elementary school and, if they had, whether the school had further information on any of them, particularly Lindsay.
Tracy switched gears. She checked whether any of the three Sprague brothers had a criminal history. Again, she got a hit. Franklin Sprague had been arrested twice for soliciting a prostitute. “Bingo,” she said out loud. A possible connection to Angel Jackson and Donna Jones? She read further. Franklin had been picked up twice, both times not far from where the two prostitutes had subsequently gone missing on Aurora Avenue. Two more coincidences.
Her reading picked up speed. His first arrest, Franklin Sprague had solicited an undercover Seattle police officer working a sting operation. His second arrest, detectives working the strip observed him soliciting a known prostitute from his van. Tracy pulled up the criminal files. His first offense, Franklin had been charged with a misdemeanor, fined $1,000, and given a ninety-day suspended sentence, subject to his completing 250 hours of community service. Six months later, following his second arrest, Franklin served 120 days in the county jail.