In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(94)

“Evan,” Stephanie said again. “I want to play Monopoly. Let’s play now.”

Evan shook his head. “I got to do what Franklin says.”

“Evan,” she called out, but he’d run out the door.

Bibby looked back at her and smiled. “I’ll be back. Maybe we can play our own games.”





CHAPTER 39

Peterson gunned the engine up the final slope in the road. Tracy felt the truck tires spinning, the back end fishtailing. The tires gripped and the truck lurched forward. Peterson stopped behind a Jeep Cherokee and a white van parked in a turnaround. Snowflakes fluttered to the ground, making it difficult to see. The three officers exited the cab. Peterson and Herr kept the rifles at their side. Tracy removed her Glock. They proceeded cautiously, watching the windows in the house, the barn door, the tree line.

They moved along the side of the house to a small shed.

“Pump house,” Peterson said softly.

When they reached the doorway, a blood-red streak in the snow led away from the pump house, as if someone had been dragged. Tracy saw fear in Herr’s eyes. She figured this was a baptism by fire. Tracy thought of the two shots they had heard, as she followed the trail of blood around a corner, the pistol extended. Halfway across the snow-covered ground, a body lay facedown, already partially covered with falling snow. The body had not been dragged. Tracy could tell from the divots in the snow where the man had dug in his elbows, knees, and the toes of his boots; the man had crawled on his belly. They approached cautiously.

Tracy dropped to a knee and rolled him over. Franklin Sprague.

Bibby beat them here and was tying up loose ends, as she had feared.

Franklin’s eyes were shut. His face ashen. She checked his neck for a pulse, didn’t find one. All the while she had her head up, eyes scanning her perimeter, the tree line, and the distant barn. Peterson, too, kept his rifle raised, swinging it left and right.

Peterson spoke to Herr. “Go back to the truck. Call the station and ask for all available officers. Have them radio the sheriff in Kittitas County. Tell him to send officers.”

Herr took off for the truck. Tracy looked to Peterson. “That’s a rifle wound. We might be sitting ducks out here in the open.”

“Thinking the same thing. Let’s move.”

Tracy stood and together they moved toward the barn, pointing at multiple sets of footprints in the snow, including dog prints. Jackpot. She looked to Peterson for an acknowledgment that he, too, had seen the tracks. He nodded.

She and Peterson moved quietly but deliberately. No time to waste now.

At the barn, they didn’t have much cover. The walls were dilapidated wood. Peterson stood to the side and used the rifle muzzle to push on the barn door. It swung in. The interior was dark, lit only by the ambient light filtering through the wood slats and rough holes in the wood siding.

A huge barn owl screeched and launched from an upper rafter, swooping down at them. Startled, Tracy ducked just as the owl passed a foot from the top of her head, then continued out the barn door. Peterson let out a held breath.

“Evan?” A woman’s voice. “Evan, come back.”

They moved inside, to a horse stall at the back of the barn. A door had been opened. It looked to have been added sometime after the original barn was built. She pulled on a handle and slid the door farther back, then waited a beat. When the response wasn’t a rifle shot, she and Peterson went in with guns aimed. Tracy moved to the left, Peterson to the right.

Handcuffed to three wooden poles in the center of a rectangular room were three women. They sat wrapped in horse blankets. Tracy recognized the one closest to the door. Stephanie Cole. She looked to the others and recalled the two cold case files, Donna Jones and Angel Jackson, though the two women were painfully thinner than their pictures in their files.

“He took Evan,” Cole said. “He said Franklin wanted him.”

“Who?” Tracy asked.

“Evan called him Bibby.”

“Which way did they go?” Tracy asked.

Cole pointed to an open door on the other side of the room. “They went out that way, just a few minutes ago. The man has a rifle.”

“Stay with them,” Peterson said.

“No,” Tracy said. “You stay. In case the man comes back.”

“Take my rifle,” Peterson said.

“Don’t need it,” she said. Tracy could put a bullet in a bottle opening at ten yards.

She hurried out the back, following the footprints. Two sets. They could not have gone far, not in this deep snow. She moved between the trees, hoping to reach them before she heard another rifle crack. A few minutes into her trek, she was sweating and out of breath but glad she’d stayed in shape during her time away. Her hands hurt from the cold. She stopped. Listened over the sound of her own breathing.

Voices. Faint.

She pushed away from the tree and followed the trail to a bend. The snowfall intensified, making it difficult to see. An eerie silence enveloped her. Around the bend she spotted two men in the falling snow. They stood twenty-five yards down a shin-deep path they’d forged. Bibby and Evan Sprague. Evan walked in the lead. Bibby was behind him, holding a rifle. She could hear the muffled sound of their voices, but with the wind and swirling snow, she could not decipher their conversation.



“Why would Franklin be out here?” Evan asked as he trudged through the snow. “This isn’t where we keep the woodpile.”