Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (43 page)

“You mean like out of a lineup?”

“I mean, could you identify him if you saw him?”

“Yeah, I could identify him. Absolutely.” Casterline’s eyes narrowed. “You think he could be the guy?”

“Who else have you told about this?”

“No one.”

“Don’t. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely. I can’t lose my job, Detective. I don’t know what I’d do . . . you know?”

“You’re not going to lose your job.”

“But if you got the wrong guy . . . it means he’s still out there. The Cowboy. And then he killed that other girl . . .” Casterline choked on the words. His eyes watered, and he took another sip of beer.

“That wasn’t your fault, okay? Casterline, look at me.” Casterline looked up. “That wasn’t your fault. If you’re right, if this is the guy, he kills because he wants to and he was going to kill again. Running his plate likely wouldn’t have turned up anything of interest, and you would have let him go anyway. All right?”

Casterline nodded.

“Now I’m going to need a number to reach you. I need to get a few things put in place, make some calls. I’ll protect you to whatever extent I can, Casterline, but you’ve got to work with me on this.”

“I will,” he said.

Tracy handed him a napkin and a pen from her purse. Casterline wrote his phone number on the napkin and slid it across the table to her. “What should I do?”

“Go home to your family. Wait until I call.”

Tracy drove immediately back to her house in West Seattle and hurried to where Dan had left the box of documents from Dirty Ernie’s that he’d found in the storage shed. Her heart was pounding, her palms moist. Her mind was swimming with questions. This is what members of the Ridgway task force had told her about how these guys were often caught. Sometimes it was a tip from the most unexpected of places, something little, a small mistake, and you realize the killer has been under your nose the whole time. Because that’s what these guys did. They blended in.

“Relax,” she said out loud. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.” The possibility remained that Casterline was wrong and, despite all the screwups in procedure, that David Bankston was the Cowboy. But something told her that wasn’t the case.

Tracy slid the box into the dining room and dropped to a knee, fumbling through the pages, pulling out folders, riffling quickly through them. She kept at it, nearly ten minutes, until she’d found the file she was most interested in, the payroll. She pulled out the sheets of paper, scanning the names as she stood and took the file to the table. She set the pages down, continuing until her finger came to rest on one she recognized.

CHAPTER 55

T
racy got up at just after four thirty Wednesday morning and drove to the Justice Center. She parked in the secured lot and took the elevator to the seventh floor, arriving a few minutes after five thirty, early enough that most detectives would not yet be in, except one notorious early riser. She’d been locked out of the computer system when Nolasco put her on administrative leave. When she entered the A Team’s bull pen, she found Faz’s chair empty but his computer turned on. She sat down, about to type on the keyboard.

“Whoa! Professor,” Faz said, stepping into the bull pen carrying a folded sports section. “What are you doing in this early?”

“Didn’t know if you were here,” she said. “Nolasco’s got me cleaning up the Cowboy.”

“Yeah, I heard. Sorry about that.”

“I was hoping to get a copy of that video shot outside the Pink Palace to send to storage with the rest of the stuff.”

Faz eyeballed her. “And you thought you’d do it at five thirty in the morning? What’s going on, Professor? You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

She waited for a detective from burglary to walk past. “Is it still in the system somewhere, Faz?”

“I don’t know. I heard they sent everything to never-never land and scrubbed everything clean.”

“I’m talking about your computer.”

“It ain’t Bankston, is it?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it is, Faz. Do you still have a copy on your computer?”

“Shit, you know me, Professor. I don’t know how to delete anything.”

Tracy gave up the chair and looked over the top of the cubicle walls to see who else was around. Faz sat, navigating through several portals.

“Still got it,” he said.

“Run it.”

“Can’t read the plate, Professor. Melton enhanced it but still couldn’t read it.”

“Run it anyway.”

Faz played the video, which Melton’s team had lightened and made less grainy. Walter Gipson and Angela Schreiber walked around the corner of the building in the direction of Gipson’s car. Tracy kept her focus on the upper left corner of the screen, on the street, waiting for the car to appear. It drove down the street and exited the camera frame. Gipson pulled from the lot into traffic.

“Okay, slow it down,” Tracy said.

Faz hit a couple of buttons. The picture proceeded frame by frame. Tracy waited. The car entered the picture. “Freeze it.”

They leaned closer to the screen. “No good,” Faz said. “Still can’t read the license plate.”

“Let me.” She reached for the mouse and moved it to enlarge the picture.

“Too grainy,” Faz said. “No good.”

But Tracy wasn’t focused on the license plate. She was focused on the front grill just beneath the hood, on the circle with the bent
L
. A Lexus.

CHAPTER 56

T
hursday night, Tracy sat in the cab of her truck, sipping coffee that had long since gone cold. The clock on her phone glowed 1:27. Exactly three minutes later, from her position parked down the block and perpendicular to the front of the Pink Palace, she watched Izak Casterline exit the building. Casterline wore a baseball cap pulled low on his head. He walked calmly to his minivan, got in, started the engine, and took a left out of the parking lot. Tracy tossed the coffee remnants out the window, started her truck, and followed, checking the rearview mirror.

Two blocks from the Pink Palace, she pulled into the parking lot of an IHOP restaurant, drove around the back, and parked beside the van. Casterline got out and climbed into the cab of her truck.

“It’s him,” he said. “That’s the guy I pulled over. One hundred percent certain. Absolutely.”

CHAPTER 57

T
racy removed the earbuds and massaged her earlobes, which felt warm to the touch—the only part of her body that felt warm. It wasn’t particularly cold—she guessed the temperature to be upper forties. Sitting was the hardest part of a stakeout. After a while every part of your body was stiff and uncomfortable. You couldn’t very well get out of the car to stretch or pump out a set of jumping jacks or push-ups in the street. You learned to do little things to fight off the cold and the stiffness—flex your fingers and hands, rotate your ankles, isolate and tense and relax certain muscles. It helped. It didn’t make the cold go away, especially not when it was damp. That kind of cold chilled to the bone and made her collarbone ache.

She’d downloaded some classic ’80s rock—Aerosmith, Van Halen, Springsteen, a little Journey, even some AC/DC—to help pass the time. She didn’t need the music to keep her awake, despite not having slept much since meeting with Izak Casterline. Over the three days and nights since, she’d established a routine. She got home just after five—no longer a problem since she was mostly doing a lot of nothing at work, ate an early dinner, watched television for a bit, then tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to sleep a couple of hours. She arrived at the Pink Palace at midnight and located the Lexus. Sometimes he parked on a side street, sometimes in the parking lot. There seemed to be no pattern. She also varied where she parked, which could be difficult, because she needed to be able to see the Cowboy’s car. Tonight she’d parked halfway down a tree-lined street running perpendicular to and slightly east of the Pink Palace entrance, with a view of the parking lot. A midsize SUV provided some cover, but it wasn’t so tall as to block her view.

Just after one o’clock, the parking lot would start to thin, and customers would start heading home. The dancers would exit the building by the rear door minutes after two. The remaining staff would exit shortly thereafter. The Cowboy was usually one of the last to leave. So far, he’d driven home each night, though not always the same route. Not wanting to draw attention to her truck in case his inconsistency was purposeful, Tracy broke off her tail blocks from his house, then circled back to confirm the Lexus was parked in the driveway. Even then, she’d awake each morning with a pit in her stomach, certain that she’d pick up the newspaper and see a headline that would make her sick.

Still, she had no doubt she was doing the right thing.

The only two detectives she trusted were Kins, who remained in Mexico, and Faz, who knew something was up but for now was content with being on a need-to-know basis. She couldn’t go to Nolasco. She’d considered going directly to Clarridge, but under the circumstances—his career in jeopardy, Tracy discredited—he would be reluctant to accept any argument that David Bankston was not the Cowboy without some definitive proof. At the moment all Tracy had was circumstantial evidence and the word of one young police officer scared to death he would get fired, leaving him unable to support a growing family. It wasn’t enough. The King County Sheriff’s Office had boxes of circumstantial evidence that pointed to Gary Ridgway as the Green River Killer, but it had taken twenty years to confirm his DNA at crime scenes. Ridgway had discarded a piece of gum, the story went, and detectives watching him had picked it up. Only then did they have him. Truth or urban myth, Tracy didn’t know. She only knew she needed more.

She also feared that if she went to Clarridge with her doubts about Bankston and they agreed to reopen the investigation, it would leak to the media. That big a story would be too hard to keep quiet. When it ran in the papers or was broadcast on the news, the Cowboy might flee, maybe change his name, making him free to continue killing somewhere else.

That left Dan. Keeping secrets wasn’t a great way to build a relationship, especially if she was going to take the next step and move with him to Cedar Grove, but that dilemma had been at least partially solved by logistics. Dan had spent the week in Cedar Grove playing catch-up on his cases after having been away too long. When he called, Tracy didn’t lie, not exactly. She just hadn’t offered any details about what she had learned, or how she was spending her evenings. She knew Dan would try to talk her out of what she knew to be the best option—to stake out the Pink Palace and wait. For how long Tracy didn’t know, but Amanda Santos had said that once the urge to kill started, it was too strong for most serial killers to ignore. The Cowboy would seek to kill again. It was just a matter of when. Tracy was not going to let that happen.

She slid lower in her seat and stuck the earbuds back in her ears. Springsteen was moaning about a little girl whose daddy went away, leaving her home all alone, and another man with a “bad desire.”

“Prophetic,” she said.

Rain began to splatter her windshield just after one. The weatherman had forecast early morning showers and intense but short-lived wind. Tracy reached for the windshield wipers, then thought of the cleared windshield on the snow-covered car in Cedar Grove, and decided to leave the wipers off.

She shuffled through her playlist on her phone and watched the raindrops run together until they’d formed a sheet of water.

As closing time neared, she felt more on edge than the prior evenings. Maybe it was the accumulation of too much caffeine, or too many days in a row without exercise, but the feeling that something was going to happen was pronounced. She couldn’t explain it any more than she could explain why, when she’d been a patrol officer, bad things seemed to always happen on nights with full moons. It was an instinct developed over two decades of being on the street and years working graveyard shifts. She could sense when a routine traffic stop was not going to be routine, when a seemingly in-hand situation was about to escalate, when it was time to trust her intuition and protect herself.

She detected blurred images—dancers filing out the rear door of the building, running to their cars through the steady rain. The staff left shortly after them. Her target was likely counting the money and doing the books for the night.

The rain suddenly intensified, further obscuring her view. It was one of those rushes of water like God had opened the tap to drain a heavenly lake. The back door to the building opened, but no one emerged. She surmised that he was waiting for the deluge to subside. When it didn’t, he shot out the door, stepping lightly, trying in vain to avoid the rapidly expanding puddles. He quickly got in the Lexus but again did not immediately depart. Prior nights, he’d left without hesitation.

After several minutes the headlights illuminated, cones of light piercing the sheeting rain. The Lexus pulled to the driveway, paused briefly, and turned left, toward Aurora.

The direction home.

Tracy started the engine and drove to the intersection. She turned right at the corner and settled in a comfortable distance behind the Lexus. The truck’s wipers slapped a steady beat. At the intersection, he turned right onto Aurora, southbound, continuing toward home. Perched in the cab of her truck, Tracy had a good view over the cars in front of her. He drove another block and switched to the far right lane. A car on Tracy’s right prevented her from immediately merging. She slowed to allow the car to pass and settled in two cars behind the Lexus. The Cowboy continued through the next light.