In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(89)
“I don’t know. That’s what I need you to tell me.”
Kins held up his phone for more light as he carefully stepped down, making certain of his footing. Another bare bulb hung from a joist in the center of the room. He pulled the string. The light emitted a dull glow. The room looked to be eight feet square and perhaps six feet below ground. The walls were railroad ties. Wooden posts braced the floor joists and continued below ground. Attached to the posts were chains and shackles. In the corner was a table. Over it, tools. In the other corner, a mattress.
Kins swore. “Holy shit.”
“Is she there? Kins?”
“Huh?”
“Is Cole there?”
“Not above ground,” he said. He covered his nose and mouth with the collar of his shirt. “It smells like death down here.”
“Does the floor look freshly dug up?”
Kins shone the phone’s beam of light around the room. “Nothing I can see.”
“I think Franklin and Evan are at the cabin, Kins, hopefully with Stephanie Cole still alive. I need you to find Brian Bibby.”
“Bibby? Why?”
“Go down the street. Knock on Bibby’s door and tell me if he’s home. If he is, arrest him. He’s had a hand in all this.”
CHAPTER 37
The drive from Yakima to Cle Elum took an hour. It had started snowing as soon as Tracy jumped on the I-90, west out of Ellensburg. The snowfall intensified as she neared the town, at times swirling. She’d got what information she could on the cabin from Lindsay. She’d contemplated, but only briefly, bringing Lindsay with her, but she couldn’t do that to the young woman, not after all she had been through, all she had somehow managed to survive. Tracy knew what it was like to go back to a place of your worst nightmares.
Tracy called the Cle Elum police department and spoke to Chief of Police Pete Peterson. Peterson knew the cabin in Curry Canyon but said he had not seen the gate across the access road open in years. He thought the property might have been abandoned, and more than once he’d contemplated looking up the owner at the registrar’s office.
“The roads aren’t cleared in the winter. Not enough money in the budget, and no one goes there this time of year to justify it,” Peterson had said.
“Can you get there?” Tracy asked.
“It’s dumping buckets,” Peterson said. “But we got a four-wheel drive with a plow. We can get you there.”
Tracy and Dan had visited Cle Elum on weekends, though usually in the summer. It was roughly a square mile with fewer than 1,000 homes. A 120-year-old former mining town, Cle Elum was quiet and peaceful in the summer, more so in winter when there were fewer tourists. A developer had built the Suncadia Resort, a mountain retreat with golf courses and fly fishing just outside of town that brought in tourists.
Tracy followed her GPS’s directions to the police station on West Second Street—a one-story, clapboard building surrounded by pine trees, their branches burdened with snow. It reminded Tracy of the police station in Cedar Grove.
As she pulled into a parking space, her cell phone rang. Kins.
“Bibby isn’t home,” he said. “He told his wife he was going down to the Edmonds Marina with Jackpot to work on the boat and wouldn’t be home until late. She gave me the slip number. I called the Edmonds Police Department and an officer made a run out there. Bibby’s car isn’t in the parking lot, and he isn’t at the boat. What the hell is going on?”
Tracy quickly explained what Lindsay Sheppard had told her, but she didn’t have time to be detailed. “I called Boeing on my drive. Bibby did retire with a back injury like he tells everyone, but he was also months from aging out.”
“And he and Ed Sprague were . . . what, friends?”
“I don’t know what you call people like that.”
“The house . . . There’s shit everywhere, Tracy. Pornography. We took the cadaver dogs into the room under the house and they went crazy. I’ve called in Kelly Rosa,” he said. Rosa was King County’s forensic anthropologist. “This is not going to be good.”
“I think I know where Bibby’s gone, and if I don’t get there quickly, there might be more graves to dig.”
“Don’t be cowboying this, Tracy, and don’t think about going in alone. You got a little girl at home. According to Carrol, his brothers went hunting. That’s unlikely, but he said they hunted with their father as kids and own shotguns and rifles. I asked about the weapons, and he started to tell me where they were but caught himself. Now I know why. They’re probably at this other piece of property, which means it’s likely Franklin has access to those rifles and shotguns and knows how to use them. Get some backup.”
“Way ahead of you, partner. I got the local police with me.” Tracy had no intention of being a cowboy.
She disconnected her cell, shoved it in her pants pocket, and checked her Glock. She put two additional magazines in her coat pocket and stepped from the car into a foot of snow that continued to fall in large flakes and cling to the roof.
Peterson met her in the building lobby in full uniform. A tall, thin man, he wore a handgun at his hip and carried a rifle. Peterson introduced a young officer as Mack Herr. He, too, wore a pistol and carried a rifle. Peterson had a full head of red hair laced with gray. Wrinkles indicated he had years under his belt. Herr, on the other hand, looked to be in his twenties. Tracy quickly and fully advised them of the situation. She assured Peterson they had exigent circumstances—that the young woman’s life was in imminent danger, negating the need for a search warrant.