Close to Home (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 5) Read online

  “Get out some clean plates, Stevie.”

  Del opened the refrigerator and found the shelves bare but for a few condiments and leftovers from the spaghetti he’d made two nights earlier. He’d need to go shopping again if he couldn’t get his sister out of her room.

  “We don’t have any,” Stevie said, looking at the empty cabinet.

  Del opened the dishwasher. “Didn’t I ask you to put the dishes away last night?”

  “We forgot,” Mark said.

  “Probably all that homework you were doing has taxed your brain.”

  “They can tax your brain?” Mark said, wide-eyed.

  “They tax everything else,” Del said. He pulled clean plates from the dishwasher and handed them to the boys. “You need utensils?”

  “For what?” Stevie asked.

  “Never mind.”

  The boys carried the plates to the kitchen table. The legs of their chairs shuddered as they slid them across the linoleum. Mark started to twist the top off a half-empty bottle of Diet Coke.

  “Not for dinner,” Del said.

  Mark looked and sounded like he’d been deprived of a constitutional right. “What are we supposed to drink?”

  “Milk,” Del said.

  “We’re out.”

  Del set the bag on the counter and pulled out a carton of milk. He should have purchased two, maybe a whole cow, given how quickly the boys went through a carton.

  “My man!” Stevie lifted his hand in the air. “Don’t leave me hanging, Uncle Del.”

  Del gave him a high-five. Not to be outdone, Mark held out his fist for a bump. “Bring it home, Uncle D.”

  Del returned the fist bump and filled the two glasses. The boys nearly drained them. Mark burped and Stevie tried to best him.

  “How about an ‘excuse me’?” Del said.

  “Why? Did you fart?” Mark said. That set them both off laughing.

  “You guys are a couple comedians.” Del handed them chicken burritos. They peeled off the tinfoil and went at them like they hadn’t eaten all day. “Did you use the money I gave you to buy lunch today?”

  “Yeah,” Stevie said, through a mouth full of rice and beans.

  “What did they have?”

  “Pizza.”

  “When’s the last time either of you ate a vegetable?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said.

  “I had an apple slice at school,” Stevie said.

  “Close enough. After you eat, I want to see your day planners. I want to see what you have for homework.”

  “We don’t have any,” Stevie said.

  “Thought you said you were taking a break?” Del arched his eyebrows.

  Stevie looked over the top of his burrito at Mark, whose eyes widened in the universal sign for Shut up, you idiot!

  “Never lie to a detective,” Del said. He rubbed the tops of their heads and departed the kitchen, turning on the hall light. He passed the door to Allie’s room, still closed, and knocked twice on the door at the end of the hall. Colored light from the television flickered out the gap between the door and the hardwood. Del pushed the door open.

  Maggie sat on top of the bedcovers in pajama bottoms and a bathrobe. The lights were off. The blue-gray of the television flickered about the room. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She tucked her bare feet beneath her and tried in vain to straighten her hair. She looked like someone who’d had the flu for a week and hadn’t showered.

  “Have you gotten out of bed today, Maggie?”

  “Yeah,” she said, a little too quickly. “I was . . . I was out. I just climbed in an hour ago.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “I ran some errands.”

  “Did you go grocery shopping like I asked you?”

  “Yeah, I got a few things.”

  Del walked to the window and cracked it open. The room smelled stale, like an old person’s closet. He turned on a wall lamp on the other side of the bed.

  “The grocery list is still on the counter.”

  “I forgot to bring it.”

  “Your car is parked in the exact same spot as yesterday.”

  “I parked it there when I got back. The space was still open.”

  Del had chalked her front tire the previous night. She hadn’t moved the car. Never lie to a detective.

  “Did you call the name of that therapist I left for you?” He pointed to the scrap of paper on her cluttered nightstand.

  She turned as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, uh, no. I got busy and forgot.”

  “If you don’t call tomorrow, I’m going to make an appointment for you.”

  “I don’t need you to make an appointment for me.”

  “Tomorrow. Or I call.”

  Maggie sighed and looked away.

  He picked up clothes from the floor and tossed them on a chair in the corner. “You still got two boys out there who need their mother, Maggie. There’s no food in the house. They’re wearing the same clothes they had on yesterday, and they’re not doing their homework.”

  She wiped tears with the bedsheet, then clutched it tightly to her chest. “It just hurts so bad, Del. It hurts all the time.”

  He bit back tears. “I know,” he said. “But the boys need their mother, Maggie, more now than ever.”

  “So did Allie, Del. And I wasn’t here for her.” Her crying intensified.

  “You did everything you could for Allie. You’re not responsible.”

  “I was her mother,” she whispered, the tears now racking her body, coming in great sobs of pain.

  Del moved to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Heroin killed Allie—heroin and the people who supplied it. Not you.” He sat on the edge of her bed, silent for a long minute. Feeling himself getting angry, he stood. “I bought you a burrito. Come out and eat with the boys.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “When’s the last time you ate?”

  “This morning. I had coffee.”

  “Coffee isn’t food. You need to eat.”

  “I can’t. I feel nauseous when I eat.”

  “Then just come and sit with them.”

  “I will. Tomorrow I will.”

  Del didn’t push it. “What about work?”

  “I’m on bereavement leave. I have another two weeks.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then I go back to work.”

  “You think you can, like this?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “None of us wants to move on, Maggie, but we have no choice. I have to work. Faz can’t keep covering for me.”

  More sobs. In between, Maggie said, “What more could I have done, Del? What more should I have done?”

  She’d asked that question of him for more than a week, and he answered the same each time. “You did everything you could, Maggie.”

  “Then why isn’t she alive?”

  Del thought of his conversation with Celia McDaniel. What would Maggie have given just to keep her daughter alive? Everything, and then just a little bit more.

  The family had tried counseling when they learned Allie was using, but Allie had left the facility. They tried to have her involuntarily committed to a hospital psych ward, but she’d bolted. When they pushed the issue, they’d learned that they couldn’t have Allie committed without her permission, that teenagers could refuse treatment in Washington State—unless a mental health specialist deemed her a threat to herself or to others. Apparently, overdosing on heroin was not considered enough of a threat. Allie overdosed a second time and then a third. The paramedics brought her back, stabilized her, and left her in her room. They had no place to take her. The treatment facilities were overrun with a long waiting list. Maggie called Del and pleaded with him to have Allie arrested, but Washington law prohibited it. Besides, even if arrested, Allie would have been released within hours.

  We can’t police our way out of this problem, Celia McDaniel had said.

  Then, out of
the blue, Allie walked in the front door of the house one morning after disappearing for three days. Maggie described her as looking like hell. She said she looked like death—so rail thin her clothes hung as if on a wire hanger. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Her arms were so bruised they looked like pincushions. Allie told Maggie she was done using. She said she didn’t want to die. She begged for help. Del and Maggie scraped together every penny they had to get her into a facility in Eastern Washington. It wasn’t cheap. Del took out a loan using his pension as collateral and he’d have done it again and again. The thought made him recall what Celia McDaniel had said.

  They got Allie away from her user friends, user contacts, and the familiar places to buy. By all accounts, Allie went through hell, physically and psychologically, even with the drugs to ease the pain of withdrawal. On the day they released her, Allie’s counselors told Del and Maggie, The loss of hope is nearly as dangerous as the drug itself. Addicts have a lot of self-hatred. They believe they’re worthless. Allie has a lot of fear she’s going to slip back to using again. It can be debilitating.

  When they brought Allie home, she looked better, though timid. She’d put on weight. The black circles beneath her eyes had faded. She looked like the old Allie—the happy, funny kid with the quick wit. Her eyes sparkled when she talked about finishing high school and attending Gonzaga in the fall. Del got her a job at a coffee shop. She went to NA meetings. Maggie accompanied her and Del watched the twins. Once he went with Allie and learned what he already knew. She was a good kid from a good family, but she was in a fight for her life, a life-and-death struggle to be here each day. A life-and-death struggle she’d ultimately lost. My God, how could it get that bad for someone so young?

  She just couldn’t beat it. Using always lingered on the edge of darkness, a devil looking for any tiny crack to squeeze through and tempt her. It came in all forms, from her addict friends to the suppliers who wanted to make a buck and didn’t care whom they killed to get one.

  Del cared.

  They’d killed the wrong girl.

  “If I’m going to find out what happened to Allie, I need to get into her room,” Del said.

  The tears trickled down Maggie’s cheeks. She wiped them with the sheet. She’d left the room the way it had been, with the needle on the floor amid the pile of clothes, a half-finished can of Coke on the dresser, posters on the walls, unfinished homework open on Allie’s desk.

  “I need to get on her cell phone and her computer. I need to find out who she was talking to so I can find out what happened. So I can get the people responsible. It’s time, Maggie.”

  “I can’t go back there, Del.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll do it for you. Moving forward doesn’t mean forgetting the past. Moving forward means doing something about the past. Let me move forward, Maggie. Let me do my job.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Tracy and Kins missed the 7:55 p.m. ferry back to Seattle and now waited in a short line to board the 9:05 crossing. Rather, the car waited in line. It was too cold to sit in a parked car, though that wasn’t what had initially motivated Tracy to go inside the sports bar across the street from the terminal. She had an upset stomach, and she’d been having hot flashes since they got back into the car after interviewing Trejo. Dr. Kramer had indicated both were potential side effects of the Clomid. She went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face, taking short, quick breaths, briefly feeling like she might throw up.

  When the nausea passed, Tracy returned to the restaurant. The walls and ceiling were adorned in Seahawk blue and green, and Mariner and Seattle Sounders paraphernalia. On a Tuesday night, the crowd was sparse and the atmosphere subdued. Kins sat at a table staring up at one of the flat-screen televisions, oblivious to the fact that Tracy had been in the bathroom long enough to write War and Peace, or maybe just not wanting to bring up the subject for fear her prolonged absence had been related to a “women’s issue.” The TV was tuned to ESPN—a tape-delayed broadcast of a Mariner preseason baseball game—not that what was on the television mattered. Dan did the same thing; he’d watch any sport, even when he already knew the outcome.

  When she sat, Kins said, “You want to split an order of french fries?”

  Tracy had to stifle a burp. “I thought you were trying to lose weight before your surgery?”

  “I’ve decided that if I’m going out, I’m going out in a blaze of glory.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. “I hope you don’t say these things around Shannah.”

  Kins ordered coffee. Tracy asked for ginger ale but had to settle for Sprite. They got around to talking about Trejo. “He’s lying,” Kins said for at least the third time since they’d left Trejo’s apartment. He sipped his coffee. “And he knows that we know he’s lying.”

  “And we know that he knows that we know he’s lying,” Tracy said over the sound of two men at the bar.

  “Sounds like an Abbott and Costello routine,” Kins said.

  “About what, exactly, I’m not sure,” Tracy said.

  “How do we prove it?”

  “The ferries have video cameras at the terminals. They film the cars getting on and off the boat. If he took a ferry yesterday, the Subaru should be on the footage.” She sipped her drink and folded her arms across her stomach.

  “He might not have taken the ferry,” Kins said. “He might have driven around to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and come up through Tacoma.”

  “Well, if he did, that could also be telling us something,” she said.

  “He wanted to stay off the ferry camera?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That bridge also has cameras,” Kins said. “I got a ticket once for not paying the toll. I didn’t realize I was in a carpool lane. A couple days later, they mailed me a snapshot of my license plate and the ticket.”

  Tracy wiped down the table with her napkin. “Those are traffic cameras,” she said.

  Kins set down his coffee. “Washington State Patrol has access to that video system.”

  “What would it show—a license plate? Maybe the car?” Tracy asked, thinking out loud. “Would it even show the driver? Trejo says the car was stolen; he’d just say the video proves it.”

  “Maybe, but we should have the video guys contact Washington State Patrol and see if they can come up with anything, maybe find the car on tape. Trejo said he worked that day and got off at five o’clock,” Kins said. “So we can narrow the time he would have either been parked here at the terminal or driving across the bridge.”

  She removed her coat. “Go for it, but keep in mind, even if you find the car, all that is going to give you is his car. We need to put him behind the wheel.”

  “We can do that with the DNA.”

  “His DNA will be all over that car. He owned it. The crucial evidence is if his DNA is on the air bag,” she said.

  “Or if there’s blood inside his car,” Kins said. “He has a much harder time explaining how it got there if he really did cut his head on a kitchen cabinet like he said.” After a beat, Kins asked, “Don’t you have to give your DNA when you enter the military?”

  “Only for purposes of identification—and it can only be used to identify you if you’re killed in action,” she said. “It can’t be used in a criminal case.”

  “You know this, or think you know it?” Kins asked.

  “I went through it with NCIS in that other case I told you about. It can’t be used to prove liability for a crime. If you want to confirm DNA, you have to get another DNA test.”

  “Which Trejo won’t agree to do.”

  “He might not get that choice,” she said. “As I remember it, the Navy has a permissive procedure and a nonpermissive procedure. If we have enough evidence, I think the Navy can force him to provide a sample.” Tracy checked the clock on her phone. They still had another half hour before the ferry sailed. She could feel another hot flash coming on. “We should also have Jensen check the back bumper and see if he can find a hide-a-key.�
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  “It might never have been there,” Kins said.

  She sipped her drink. “I doubt it was. But if he was driving, how did he get back to Bremerton without his car?”

  “Or hide the car by himself,” Kins said. “It’s not exactly a public place, and he said he’s from San Diego. We should find out where the wife is from. Maybe she knows the area and helped him hide it.”

  “So how’d they get home?” Tracy asked. “They only have one car.”

  “She could have borrowed someone’s car.”

  “Maybe, but that puts another witness and another car in play.” She checked the time on her phone again.

  “We should at least ask.”

  “I agree.” Tracy’s cell rang and she checked caller ID. “It’s Jensen,” she said, then spoke into the phone. “You’re calling with good news, right?” She listened for a beat. “Okay. We’ll be there.” She disconnected. “We’ll know soon enough about the DNA. They got a warrant to get into the car first thing tomorrow morning.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Del grabbed a cup of coffee from the dispenser and brought it back to his chair inside the King County Medical Examiner’s waiting room on Jefferson Street.

  “How late were you up?” Faz asked.

  This Wednesday morning, Del felt the effects of another night of too little sleep. After leaving work, he’d returned to his sister’s, arriving there at a little after 12:30 a.m. and not getting to sleep until after 1:45 a.m., which is when he last saw the digital clock on his phone. He got up at 6:00 a.m., got the boys ready for school, and drove them in. Then he rushed downtown. The Medical Examiner’s Office had called the night before; they had the toxicology report on Allie.

  His thoughts were foggy from too little sleep. He felt like he had when, as a younger man, he’d climbed Mount Rainier and suffered altitude sickness—light-headed and slightly off balance. Now the fatigue had settled into his joints and seemed determined to stay there.

  “Too late and too early,” he said.

  He shook his wrist to free the gold chain his ex had given him during happier days in their marriage. With the rise in gold prices, he often had more money on his wrist than in his bank account. “I fed the boys and got them off to school, but the place looks like a bomb went off, and there isn’t any food in the house. My sister’s in bad shape.” He sighed. “I’m not sure what to do about it.”