Close to Home (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 5) Page 5

  He grabbed his coat, throwing it over his arm. “Thanks for the memo.”

  “What would you have given to have saved your niece’s life?” McDaniel asked. “What would your sister have given?”

  “Anything,” Del said without hesitation. “I would have given anything, and my sister would have too. But that isn’t going to happen. Allie isn’t coming back and that isn’t going to change.”

  “No, she’s not. You paid for her rehab, and yet she died anyway.”

  Del bristled. “So what are you saying—that it was a mistake?”

  “Of course not. I applaud you for it. I applaud her for going. What I’m saying is that to be addicted is to be continually in search of the next fix. It becomes an all-consuming focus.”

  “If we start getting rid of the dealers, start putting them away for significant sentences, and make it more and more difficult and expensive to buy the heroin, maybe those addicts at least have a chance.”

  “I don’t disagree. But what do you do with the addicts in the interim?” When Del didn’t answer, McDaniel said, “There’s a proposal to create two safe injection sites here in Seattle—the first ever in this nation—to give addicts that chance.”

  Del scoffed. “Yeah, I read about that. And you know what? I think it’s crap. Have somebody fill the needle for them? Shoot them up? Let them get high? How is that giving them a chance to get clean? It’s just feeding their addiction.”

  “Vancouver has done it since 2003 and it has reduced public injecting and increased participation in addiction treatment.”

  “So how does that solve the problem? You still have addicts.”

  “Because no one died, Del, which is what you and your sister wanted most of all.”

  Del felt like he’d taken a blow to the chest.

  “They’ve had more than fifteen hundred overdoses, but not a single loss of life. Allie might still be alive. My son might still be alive. And if he was, at least I’d have the chance to get him into treatment.”

  McDaniel looked off and exhaled. Then she crumpled her napkin and threw it on the table beside her unfinished donuts.

  Del froze, uncertain what to say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “No, you didn’t.” She grabbed her coat. “I know what you’re going through, Del. I did everything I could to convict those who supplied my son, and I succeeded. But I would have given so much more if someone had just saved him; if someone had given me just one more chance to get him clean.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Tracy sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair in a Spartan office at the Seattle Fertility Clinic, waiting to learn if science could do what nature apparently could not. The overhead fluorescent tubes emitted an annoying buzz and illuminated the room so brightly the white walls and linoleum floor nearly glowed. She wanted to get up and walk, to relieve her stress, but the office wasn’t much larger than one of SPD’s interrogation rooms.

  She vacillated between feeling depressed, angry, frustrated, and embarrassed. She’d done everything her OB-GYN had told her to do—timed her menstrual cycle, religiously peed on plastic sticks each morning to pinpoint her ovulation, and stalked Dan like a sailor on shore leave after a year at sea. Nothing had worked.

  The door to the consult room pushed open, and with it, Tracy felt her anxiety rise. She spent her days and, this month at least, her nights hunting murderers and other violent criminals, but she’d never felt as anxious as she felt at that moment. She was not in control here, and she hated feeling powerless to alter the result.

  Dr. Scott Kramer entered the room in a white lab coat with his name stitched in blue over his breast pocket. He offered his customary warm smile, then paused just inside the door and pointed to the gun near Tracy’s SPD badge, both clipped to her belt. “I hope you’re going to work after this.”

  She smiled. “Night shift.”

  Kramer pulled over a rolling stool and sat beside a computer and keyboard on a movable workstation. Tracy smelled the faint aroma of his cologne as he angled the metal stand to allow her to see the computer screen. About to begin, he removed his hands from the keys and asked, almost as if he’d forgotten, “How are you doing?”

  “I guess you’re going to tell me,” Tracy said.

  Kramer nodded, his smile now just a bit less pronounced. Midfifties and bald, Kramer had soft eyes that seemed to be perpetually squinting, and a tennis player’s trim physique and tan. His physical appearance matched his mellow demeanor. “Well, the first thing to keep in mind is these tests are relative. They’re not black-and-white.”

  “I understand,” she said. So the news was not good.

  Kramer tapped the keyboard, talking in a soft voice. “What is relative is the decline in fertility as women age.” A graph popped up on the monitor and Kramer traced it with his index finger. “There is a gradual fertility decline in women up until about thirty-five years of age, and then a much steeper decline.” The graph looked like someone falling off a cliff. “At forty-three, you have about a thirty percent chance of getting pregnant.”

  “And a higher percentage of having a miscarriage if I do,” Tracy said. She’d been reading the articles she could find online, though she knew that a little bit of Internet knowledge was almost always dangerous.

  “Perhaps, about thirty-five percent,” Kramer said.

  “So what do the tests show?”

  Kramer had ordered several tests on the third day of Tracy’s menstrual cycle to determine her ORT, or ovarian reserve testing. He had explained that the blood tests determined how many eggs she had, and how responsive those eggs would be at ovulation.

  “Frankly, your ovarian reserve is poor,” Kramer said, cutting to the chase. He folded his hands. “Now, as I previously advised, that is negative information but it is not absolute.”

  “It suggests that the odds are stacked against me getting pregnant with my own eggs.” So she would not be walking in the door of their home after her shift tonight shouting to Dan that she was “locked and loaded and ready to bear.”

  “The window of opportunity is definitely shorter. How long have you and your husband been trying to get pregnant?”

  “After his vasectomy was reversed, about six months,” she said. Was she supposed to discuss frequency? She didn’t know.

  Dr. Kramer crossed his legs and leaned forward. He had a deliberate manner that, at times like this, could be maddening. Tracy already knew from articles that six months was about the prescribed period for a couple to try to get pregnant without intervention. She and Dan had crossed that milestone.

  “That’s the period of time we usually recommend,” Kramer said.

  “My alternatives now?” Tracy asked.

  “Well, we could try fertility drugs,” Kramer said.

  She smiled softly. “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  Kramer shrugged. “Given your age, your ORT score, and the length of time you’ve been trying to get pregnant, I’d say the percentages of a pregnancy are limited.”

  “Limited, meaning . . . ?”

  “Low.”

  She considered the information. “What kind of fertility drug?”

  Kramer looked as though the question had diverted his train of thought. He had probably been about to discuss the use of a donor egg, but Tracy did not want a child who was half Dan’s and half from someone she’d never met. She didn’t want a child conceived in a petri dish. She wanted their child.

  “If we pursued fertility drugs, we’d start with a protocol of Clomid and monitor you with ultrasound to see if and when you were ovulating. You and Dan take care of business. After that, we wait ten to fourteen days to perform a pregnancy test. But under the circumstances—”

  “What would be my chances?”

  Kramer looked to be running numbers in his mind. “It’s difficult to quantify, but under the circumstances . . .” He paused. “Let’s be realistic. Yes, we could flog your ovaries with fertility drugs to get you to ovulate, but will your eggs even be ab
le to be fertilized? And if so, keep in mind the high rate of miscarriages, as well as birth defects such as Down syndrome. Are you sure you can handle all that?”

  “But you said that the ORT is not absolute.”

  “It’s not a certainty,” Kramer said. “But it is informative. In your case, the chances are very slim, at best, of your getting pregnant. There are other options.”

  “A donor egg.”

  “Yes.”

  Tracy sighed. If she were going to use a donor egg, she might as well adopt, give a good home to a child in need. She and Dan had agreed to make these decisions together. They agreed to discuss whether she should go on fertility drugs, which had some potentially negative side effects. They agreed that the decision to adopt would be one they evaluated together and in detail. But that was before Tracy knew for certain that she, and not Dan, was the problem.

  “I’d like to try the Clomid,” she said. “I’d like to at least try.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Joe Jensen called Tracy as she drove downtown from Dr. Kramer’s office. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

  She thought of her conversation with Dr. Kramer and decided she’d had enough bad news. “How about some good news.”

  “The video team was unsuccessful tracking the Subaru after it departed the intersection, probably because it’s mostly residential areas without cameras.”

  “If that’s the good news, don’t tell me the bad news.”

  “The good news is patrol received a call from a woman who lives in that neighborhood.”

  “They found the car?” Tracy asked.

  “A black Subaru with damage to the hood and front headlight.”

  “Where?”

  “A vacant lot behind the woman’s home not far from the intersection,” Jensen said.

  Half an hour later, Tracy and Kins were driving to the address on Renton Avenue South. The street, under some sort of repair, was lined with orange cones and city workers in yellow jackets and white hats. Kins pulled to the curb and parked behind a patrol car in a sloped driveway. As he exited the car, he flashed his badge at an overly zealous city worker trying to tell him he couldn’t park there.

  “You’re driving a Prius?” the worker asked, disbelieving.

  They’d pulled the car from the pool. Kins called it the Toyota sewing machine.

  “We’re doing our part to save the environment.”

  Tracy slipped on gloves and wrapped her jacket tight to ward off the chill as she climbed concrete steps. A cracked walkway led to the front door of a small, single-story, clapboard home, which was typical for that area. At the top step, Tracy sensed Kins was not beside her. He stood at the bottom step. “You all right?” she asked.

  “Just give me a second,” he said. “I’ve been sitting and it’s cold. That’s a bad combo.” He grimaced and started up the steps. Tracy waited for him. Together they approached a uniformed police officer standing near the front door. He looked frozen, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue SPD jacket, his chin tucked low into the collar, an SPD baseball cap pulled low on his head. As they approached, Kins sidestepped a child’s bicycle lying in the crabgrass.

  “My partner is in the back talking to the property owner,” the officer said, his mouth emitting white wisps as if exhaling cigarette smoke. He led them along concrete pavers to a wooden gate at the rear of the property. “When we got out here I remembered the call from the morning roll call. Black Subaru, right? It looks like it was in some kind of accident.”

  The officer pulled a string, and the bottom of the gate scraped against a stone paver as it swung in. The lawn had been cut around the clutter—two older-model cars that didn’t look like they’d been run in years, a motor home, and several rusted boat trailers. At the back of the lot, partially obscured by bushes and trees, was a black Subaru.

  Joe Jensen stood speaking to a woman dressed in black jeans tucked into her boots. A down jacket extended to her knees. Jensen again had his head covered by the black knit ski cap.

  Tracy and Kins introduced themselves.

  “I saw it this morning and figured it was one of the neighbors’,” the woman said, sounding both upset and excited by the attention. “My husband charges fifty dollars a month to park a car or trailer, and a hundred dollars for the motor home. This morning, after I took my daughter to school, I knocked on doors and asked the neighbors who owned the car. It doesn’t belong to any of them. So I called it in to get it towed, and I was told I’d have to pay in advance.” She sounded like someone had just asked for her kidney. “It isn’t my car. Luckily someone reported it as stolen.”

  Luckily, Tracy thought.

  Jensen gave Tracy and Kins a subtle eye roll. He’d apparently heard the woman’s spiel already, possibly more than once. The three of them excused themselves and crossed to the car.

  “Do we know when it was reported as stolen?” Tracy asked Jensen. She felt the cold stinging her cheeks.

  “Seven o’clock this morning. Owner said he went out to get in his car, and it wasn’t there.” Jensen held the broken car part, in a plastic evidence bag, up to the damage to the left front headlamp. “It fits,” he said. “This is the car.” The windshield on the passenger’s side had cracked like a spider’s web. The hood was also dented. “Initial impression, the driver hit the kid and he wrapped around the hood, hit the windshield, then got propelled forward. That’s why he was so far from the intersection.”

  Tracy looked inside the car’s windows, without touching them. “The air bag is deployed.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Jensen said. “If it picked up the driver’s DNA we might know the driver at the time of impact—if he or she is in the system. I’ve called to have the car impounded at VPR and we’re working on a search warrant to get inside.” VPR was the vehicle processing room of the Seattle Police Department located at a satellite facility next to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. “You want me to involve CSI?”

  CSI would process the car if homicide was going to get involved. Remembering Nolasco’s reluctance that morning, Tracy opted not to involve them. “No. You guys handle it, but let us know when you get the warrant to get inside.”

  “Will do.”

  “Does the owner live around here?” Tracy figured the driver of the car had to know the lot existed.

  Jensen shook his head. “According to the DMV, he lives in an apartment in Bremerton.”

  “Bremerton?” Kins said. “What the hell is the car doing over here?”

  “I assume it has something to do with the car being stolen,” Jensen said.

  Bremerton was a city located west of Seattle and accessed either by ferry across the Puget Sound, which took about an hour, or by driving south and cutting across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which took an hour and a half.

  “What’s the driver do in Bremerton?” Tracy asked.

  “He’s enlisted,” Jensen said.

  “Great,” she said, shaking her head.

  Bremerton was also home to one of the largest naval shipyards in the United States.

  Tracy and Kins nearly missed the ferry departure because the Department of Transportation had blocked several streets leading to the terminal, which set Kins off on one of his biggest pet peeves. Seattle had been in the process of installing an underground tunnel and tearing down the elevated viaduct. At least that had been the plan. The traffic project, like so many in Seattle, had been fraught with delays, lawsuits, and mounting expenses almost from its inception.

  Hey, if you can’t have it on time, the public might as well pay double for it, Kins would say.

  They parked on the ferry and went upstairs for the hour-long crossing. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. You want anything?” Kins asked.

  Tracy declined and found an empty table. Out the window she watched the Seattle skyline fade behind them as the boat powered across Puget Sound’s slate-gray waters, the engines emitting a low chugging sound. On her laptop, she pulled up the information she
’d found running the car’s owner, Laszlo Gutierrez Trejo, through DMV, military, and criminal records. Trejo had two prior speeding tickets, but no criminal record. He’d been enlisted in the Navy for five years and had achieved the rating of logistics specialist, or LS. Uncertain what that designation meant, she’d Googled the position. As far as she could tell, a logistics specialist worked in ship storerooms and/or military base warehouses.

  She’d then called Trejo and told him they were gathering information in the search for his stolen car. Since he couldn’t come to them—he professed to owning just the one car—she and Kins were headed to Bremerton, to an address in an area referred to as Jackson Park, Navy-owned apartment units about four miles north of Naval Base Kitsap.

  Kins returned to the table with coffee and a hot dog loaded with relish and onions.

  “I thought you were dieting?”

  “This is dinner.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “You had to get the onions, didn’t you?”

  “Love onions on a hot dog.”

  “They don’t love you,” she said. “I hope you brought breath mints.”

  “Humor a condemned man.”

  “For the love of God, you’re getting hip surgery. Seriously, are you nervous about it or just screwing with me?”

  “Of course I’m nervous about it; they have to knock me out.”

  “They’ve done it thousands of times, Kins.”

  “That’s what the doctor told me. You know what? I don’t give a damn about the thousands of times everything went hunky-dory. I care about the one or two times it didn’t.”

  “You’re young and healthy. Don’t overthink it.”

  Kins set down his hot dog. “I got three kids, Tracy, who I still need to put through college. I’ll be fifty-three when the last one graduates, and that assumes none of them go on to graduate school. Do you know what college tuition costs nowadays? I’m looking at a couple hundred grand.”