A Steep Price (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 6)

by Robert Dugoni

  “Why did Kavita use her nickname and her middle name for the Wells Fargo account?” Tracy said. “Who was she hiding it from?”

  Aditi closed her eyes and exhaled. “Everyone.”

  Tracy looked to Kins. He shrugged. She said, “Why? Where did she get the money?”

  Aditi shook her head. “I didn’t know the amount was so large.”

  “Do you know where the money came from?” Tracy asked again.

  Aditi nodded, but before she could speak, she again began to weep. Kins held out additional napkins. Aditi took them and staunched her tears. After a moment she said, “Vita was very strong willed.” She spoke as if out of breath. “When she made up her mind . . .” She looked at Tracy and swallowed. “We were different in that respect. Vita was not about to do what her parents wanted. She was not about to get married. You had to know her.”

  “What did she do?” Tracy asked.

  Aditi watched a young couple holding hands as they strolled past the table, then redirected her attention to Tracy. “No one can know,” she said. “Vita’s parents cannot know. It would bring their family great shame.” She paused. Then she said, “And Rashesh cannot know.”

  “Rashesh?” Tracy said. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  Aditi sipped her coffee, set the cup down on the table, and took another deep breath. “Vita was not just my friend, Detectives. She was my sister. After our parents had issued their ultimatums that they would no longer pay for our education or our apartment, we stayed up talking very late, discussing what we were going to do. Neither of us knew. It had always been our dream that someday we would become pediatricians and work together. But before we could do that, we had to get through medical school. The tuition alone seemed insurmountable without our parents’ financial support.”

  She took another sip of coffee. Tracy gave her time.

  “Kavita was much more determined. Perhaps she was just much more brave. I don’t know. I had mentally prepared to move home, but Vita told me not to do anything until we had to leave the apartment. I agreed to give her time. Another few days passed and Vita came home very excited and animated.”

  “About?” Tracy asked, gently nudging Aditi forward.

  “She’d gotten a job working at a clothing store on the Avenue. It wasn’t a lot of money, but her boss said he’d increase her hours when she graduated. She said the money she earned plus my salary working in a chemistry lab on campus would allow us to stay in the apartment for the summer and at least give us additional time to get things figured out. Though I liked the idea of living in the apartment and working, I thought it would be short-lived, because after paying our rent we had little left to live on, let alone to save for medical school tuition. Vita said not to worry, that we’d figure something out. I began looking for student loans and scholarships. A few weeks after Vita started work at the clothing store, she came home, this time more subdued. She said that she’d been talking with one of the women she worked with. I don’t recall her name, but Vita said she had several piercings—a nose ring, I believe.”

  “Lindsay,” Tracy said, recalling the young woman from the store.

  “Yes. Vita said she’d been explaining to Lindsay our circumstances regarding our parents, and that Lindsay said she had a way for us to make more money. She apparently pulled out her laptop and opened it to an online dating service. She called it ‘sugar dating.’”

  Tracy had read an article some month earlier published in the Seattle Times discussing the websites. It had also been discussed in the office. Young women filled out an online profile with the hope that a “sugar daddy”—an older, wealthy man—would want to date them. The sites promised the young women the potential to meet men looking to lavish them with gifts and money, and zip them around the world on jets and yachts in exchange for the young woman’s companionship, which, loosely translated, meant sex.

  “And Vita filled out a profile for one of these sites,” Tracy said.

  Aditi cried and dabbed at her tears. “Lindsay said she’d made five hundred dollars a month, sometimes more. I told Vita the idea was ridiculous, but Vita remained angry and resentful of her parents. She said that if her mother was intent on giving her away to someone she didn’t know then she might as well get paid for it.”

  Tracy sat back. It was not the story she had expected, but it did put things into better perspective. Vita had not just been a recent college graduate living in a relatively safe area. She had placed herself among those in society most compromised, most at risk. It made Tracy think of what Sam had told them, about Vita having a “date” the night she had disappeared.

  “And what did you think, Aditi?”

  Aditi lowered her eyes. “I said I thought it was ludicrous. But Vita kept telling me that I did not have to sleep with the men, that some men were just looking for companionship. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I owed it to Kavita to try to make more money, that we had come so far together. I had to at least try. I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

  “You created a profile too,” Tracy said. She glanced at Kins. The reason for Aditi’s desire to keep the information from Rashesh became clear. “What site?” she asked.

  “Sugardating.com.”

  “And what happened?”

  “What always happened.” Aditi raised her eyes and looked at them. Anger, or bitterness, maybe jealousy, leaked into her voice. “Men took one look at Vita and began responding to her profile. She turned down most and dated a few.”

  “And what about your profile?” Tracy asked.

  Aditi gave a sardonic huff. “I had one or two inquiries, but the men were losers. It became apparent that they weren’t looking for companionship.”

  “They were looking for sex,” Tracy said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go on a date?”

  “Once,” Aditi said. “The man was Indian. I thought he would be safe. His profile said he was a computer software engineer and he was opening his own start-up company.” She scoffed again. “He was an unemployed computer programmer living in the garage of his parents’ home. We went to dinner. On the drive home he pulled into a parking lot and offered me fifty dollars for a blow job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tracy said.

  “It was humiliating. I got out of the car and called Vita to pick me up. That was my one and only date, and that was when I decided I would give in to my parents’ desires.”

  “And what about Vita?”

  “Vita was not going to give in that easily. Initially, her dates were like mine, but she just dismissed them. Then she got a message from a man in Medina, a doctor.”

  Medina was a wealthy community on the east side of Lake Washington with expensive homes and wealthy residents. “Vita met him at a restaurant, and when she came home she said he had offered to pay her a two-thousand-dollar-a-month stipend to be available when he called, which they agreed would be no more than once a week. Vita told me she would split whatever she earned to help fund our medical school tuition. I told her that I couldn’t do that, that I wouldn’t accept it. I told her not to do it, not to compromise herself.”

  “But Kavita did,” Tracy said.

  Aditi nodded. “We didn’t talk about it, but I knew she was seeing him.”

  “Who is this guy?” Tracy asked, becoming angry.

  “Dr. Charles Shea.” Aditi sat back from the table. “I get the creeps and Vita gets the doctor, a pediatrician no less. It was always that way.”

  “Was she sleeping with Shea?” Tracy asked.

  “I don’t know for certain.”

  “Aditi—”

  The young woman raised her voice. “She never told me their arrangement and I didn’t ask, Detective.” She sat back, catching the anger in her voice. She continued, this time more softly. “I didn’t want to know and I didn’t want her money. Given the circumstances, and the amount of money you said that she had in her account . . .�
�

  Tracy found it unlikely Kavita would not tell Aditi. “She didn’t tell you, Aditi?”

  “No.”

  “Why wouldn’t she tell you?”

  Aditi frowned. “Because I didn’t want to know. And, I think, because Vita felt bad for me and didn’t want me to feel worse.”

  “Felt bad for you?” Kins asked.

  But even before Aditi began to speak, Tracy knew why. It was the same reason her sister, Sarah, had been so rebellious as a child, and so fiercely competitive, especially with Tracy. It was tough to live in an older sister’s shadow, especially a sister everyone thought was perfect. Tracy wasn’t perfect, far from it, but that didn’t make it any easier for Sarah to hear. Kavita had been tall, light skinned, and gorgeous. She was also extremely bright. “Was it really that bad, Aditi?” Tracy asked. “So bad that Kavita would sell herself?”

  “Kavita would have never seen it that way, Detective. In her mind, she saw this as a business opportunity. That’s what she would have told herself. It was a business opportunity that would get her, and me, where she wanted us to go.”

  “But to put up a profile on the Internet . . . Isn’t that what she wanted to avoid, what her mother was doing?” Kins asked.

  “Perhaps I can put it in perspective. Ever since we were young, we’ve heard people talk about how much we are worth to our family. Indian women are given away for gifts and tradition all the time in India. In marriage, we are transferred from one family to another. We are not valued as our brothers are valued—for our intelligence and creativity. We are not seen as their equals. We are seen as a commodity. We are seen as brides.” Aditi shook her head. “That was never going to be Kavita and this was her way of standing up for herself, of fighting back, of not succumbing to a vicious circle. This was her way of sticking it to her parents and everyone else who said she couldn’t do it.”

  CHAPTER 36

  After returning Aditi to her parents’ home, Tracy and Kins ran Dr. Charles Shea through the system. He had no priors, not even a parking ticket. The DMV provided his address. A further Google search revealed he was a respected pediatrician with a practice in Bothell. Tracy called Shea’s office but was told that he had taken the morning off but would be in that afternoon. They drove to his home on the shores of Lake Washington but encountered a gated entrance. No one answered the intercom and they saw no cars parked in the driveway.

  “Probably golfing,” Kins said. “Don’t all doctors golf?”

  Tracy tried to push back her frustration. They had a direction and a sense of purpose but probably little time to pursue Kavita Mukherjee’s killer. She suspected that at some point soon, if not already, the brass at Bellevue and Seattle would talk, and she and Kins would be out. They needed to push things.

  They waited for Shea outside his home, sipping coffee. “Play out this scenario with me,” Tracy said. She’d spent the morning thinking about it. “From what we know, Kavita was using sugar dating to get enough money for her and Aditi to attend medical school, right?”

  “That’s what Aditi said, but she also said she wouldn’t take it,” Kins said.

  “Forget about that for the moment. Let’s just say that was Kavita’s intent.”

  “Okay.”

  “But then Aditi goes to India and returns married, which means what?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t need the money?”

  “It means Aditi isn’t going to medical school.”

  “Right. So she doesn’t need the money.”

  “Right. So Kavita suddenly has twice as much money as she thought she had to put toward her medical school tuition.”

  “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “So if that’s true, what if, after getting the news that Aditi was married and moving to London, Kavita told this guy Shea that she didn’t need to see him anymore?”

  “And what? He gets angry and kills her? How did Shea know about the old well?”

  Tracy shrugged. “I don’t know. He works and lives over here. Maybe he knows the park. But forget that for the moment. What if Kavita told Shea she was done?”

  “I guess it’s possible, Tracy, but—”

  “Rosa said the killer was angry. Kavita was a beautiful girl. What if this guy Shea got attached to her?”

  “Okay,” Kins said. “Time-out. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Wright said Mukherjee appeared to have walked into the park. Why would she walk into the park?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why was Shea in the park?”

  “Again, I don’t know,” Tracy said. “Maybe he runs through the park before or after work.”

  “And she just happens to be there?”

  “Maybe they were running together.”

  “No, Kaylee said Mukherjee was wearing flats and there was only one set of prints.”

  Kins was right. Tracy’s theory didn’t fit with the known evidence. “I’m just saying it’s a theory. It’s a start,” she said.

  Kins tried her theory aloud. “He gets upset that she’s leaving him, kills her, and dumps the body? Even if he had a gun and forced her to walk into the park, you still have the problem of one set of shoeprints.” Kins sat up. “Call Vilkotski. See if Pryor dropped off the phone.”

  She’d asked Katie Pryor to drop off Kavita Mukherjee’s phone to Vilkotski after it had been processed for fingerprints and DNA. Tracy called and the call rang through to voice mail. Vilkotski was either not in or not at his desk. Tracy left a message that she wanted every text message sent to or from Kavita Mukherjee’s phone during the past six months.

  She hung up and called Pryor, who answered on the second ring. Pryor confirmed that she’d dropped off the phone. “We’re going to need another search warrant,” Tracy said. “It’s for a dating site.”

  She explained to Pryor what they had learned and asked that she prepare a search warrant to obtain Vita Kumari’s dating profile from Sugardating.com, including all communications to or from anyone who had contacted her. She also asked Pryor to run the name Dr. Charles Shea, though she suspected Shea, too, had used a different name on the site.

  When she hung up, Kins said, “Run a search on sugar dating. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

  Tracy typed the words “sugar dating” on her laptop and was assaulted by dozens of websites, from the banal—Seekingarrangement.com—to the more explicit Honeydaddy.com. She limited her search by adding “Seattle” and pulled up an article published in the Stranger, an alternative weekly newspaper with a liberal bent. One of the Stranger’s reporters had created a profile as a wannabe sugar baby, and went on several dates. She’d even attended a sugar baby conference in, where else, Los Angeles.

  “No shortage of wannabe actresses down there looking to supplement their nonexistent acting income,” Kins said as Tracy shared her research.

  “Not to mention older sleazebags looking to take advantage of those younger women and their dreams.”

  Kins frowned. “Take advantage?”

  “Don’t challenge me on this,” she said, striking the keys on the keyboard. “There wouldn’t be any sugar babies if there weren’t any sugar daddies.”

  “Like there wouldn’t be any prostitutes if there weren’t any johns?”

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  “I think you’re being naïve,” he said. “It’s the oldest profession for a reason.”

  “Yes, because there are men who take advantage of women, especially women with a dream, no matter how far-fetched those dreams may be. They exploit them.”

  “Not all those women have dreams, Tracy.”

  “No, they don’t. Some have given up on their dreams and are just poor and desperate. Does that make it okay?”

  “And some are just looking to make money. The men are paying for it and the women accepting it.”

  “And that makes it okay?”

  “If they’re over eighteen and participating of their own free will, yes. We’ll never stop it, no matter how many
resources we devote to it, including you and me.”

  She’d heard this before. Kins had long been an advocate for legalizing prostitution so police could devote their resources to other crimes. Tracy didn’t see it that way. She saw prostitution as the tip of an enormous iceberg that denigrated and devalued women and led to violent crimes such as rape, assault and battery, and murder—not to mention the use of illicit drugs, needle sharing, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. A similar argument about police resources had been made to support the legalization of marijuana—that it would allow police to concentrate on other, more serious crimes. It looked good on paper, but then the Mexican drug cartels, realizing they were going to lose a cash cow, plowed under their marijuana fields and planted poppies. They flooded the US market with black tar heroin and created an epidemic leading to much more complex crimes.

  “Let’s agree to disagree,” he said. “Call the newspaper. See if we can meet with the reporter. She might have done much of our legwork for us, which could be useful when we talk to Dr. Charles Scumbag.”

  An editor at the Stranger told Tracy the reporter was a freelance writer named Tami Peterson. He wouldn’t give out her phone number but said he’d take Tracy’s number and let Peterson know Tracy wished to speak to her.

  According to the article, Peterson was twenty-two years old and single. The article included two photographs, one of Peterson at work, the other after she’d primped for her dating site profile. Both revealed her to be attractive—tall and slender with fair skin. In her working photograph, Peterson wore sturdy black-framed glasses, which gave her a studious look. For her profile picture, she’d ditched the glasses to better accentuate blue eyes and long lashes, and she gave the camera a subtle pout that exuded sex appeal. Peterson had used her real name, and indicated she lived in Seattle and loved the theater. As for a dating fee, she’d put “negotiable.”

  “Look at these websites,” Tracy said to Kins. “Date a millionaire! Travel the world on private jets and stay in five-star luxury hotels!”

  “Give a loser a blow job in his car!” Kins said, imitating the British accent of the host from the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.