Faz was about to snap a picture when someone bumped him, knocking the phone off center. “Sorry,” a young man said.
Faz smiled. “No worries.” He redirected the phone to the gap between the two tents. Gonzalez and the man were gone. Faz turned, searching. Gonzalez was crossing the field in the direction of her parked car. Whatever she had come to say, she’d apparently said it. Though Faz wanted to follow her, he sensed it more important to follow the man, try to get a picture, and learn his identity. He turned back to the tents but didn’t initially see the man. Three tents down, he saw him step into the back of a tent where a woman sold beaded trinkets and two young children sat at a nearby table sliding beads onto string. The man and woman spoke briefly, but Faz saw his face only in profile. The man kissed her and bent and kissed the two children. Then he turned and disappeared out the back of the tent before Faz could get a good look at his face. About to follow, Faz stopped when the man quickly returned, apparently in response to a question from the woman, giving Faz a good look at his face.
He wore dark sunglasses and a baseball hat, but Faz was certain he recognized him.
CHAPTER 42
Tracy called Kelly Rosa. “Did you complete your report yet for Kavita Mukherjee?”
“Working on it,” Rosa said. “But you’re not the only one calling.”
“Bellevue?”
“Yep. Last night before I went home.”
“How long can you stall?”
“They’re asking for my preliminary findings, so I’d say not long.”
Kaylee Wright had said much the same thing when Tracy called her. She’d have to provide Bellevue with something soon.
Tracy and Kins drove to Park 95 to pick up the flash drive onto which Andrei Vilkotski had copied six months of Kavita Mukherjee’s text messages from her phone, and to find out where Katie Pryor was on securing other court orders. Tracy loaded the flash drive on her laptop, and she and Kins went through the information. Nolasco had tried to call each of them late Friday afternoon, but they hadn’t taken his calls, anticipating that he was calling to tell them to transfer the file to Bellevue.
“Some nasty text messages from her brother,” Kins said, stretching his back. “He’s a piece of work.”
Tracy had typed “Nikhil” into her search window and pulled up his text messages to his sister. She read a message in which Nikhil told Kavita that her disobedience of her mother and father’s wishes was juvenile and disrespectful.
You are causing unnecessary stress and aggravation for the whole family. Are you so ashamed to be Indian that you would go so far as to hurt Ma and Baba? It is time you came home and stopped behaving like a child.
“Do we know Nikhil’s whereabouts Monday night?” Kins asked.
“Home with his mother and grandparents,” Tracy said. “The father was returning from a business trip to Los Angeles, and Sam spent the night at a friend’s home after a soccer game. Should be easy enough to confirm.”
“She didn’t respond to any of Nikhil’s text messages. That had to piss him off, don’t you think?” Kins asked.
“Or he was used to it.” Tracy read the text messages Aditi had sent Monday night and Tuesday morning expressing concern and imploring Kavita to respond. She also found the text message Sam, Kavita’s younger brother, had sent Monday night.
Hi Vita. I was just thinking of you and wondering what you are doing. I have a soccer game tonight at Roosevelt near your apartment. It’s at 6:00. Ma and Baba cannot attend so it will just be me. I was hoping you would come.
Kavita responded to her younger brother almost immediately.
Hi Sam. Thanks for the invite. I miss you. Today has been very hard. I suppose you heard that Aditi is married? I’m betting everyone knows by now. She came back from India and moved out of our apartment. She’s moving to London. Her husband is an engineer. I feel so alone, Sam. I feel like I have lost a sister. I can only imagine what Ma had to say when she heard the news! Mrs Dasgupta must be throwing it in her face. I wish I could come to your game, but I can’t tonight. I have a date.
I’ll be thinking good thoughts for you. Text me when the game is over and tell me how you did? I love you, little brother.
“The date had to be with Shea,” Kins said.
“Definitely.”
“And the last line, asking Sam to text her,” Kins said, pointing to the screen. “That’s not a woman thinking of killing herself.”
Tracy agreed. She read Sam’s response sent after the game.
Vita, we won! I didn’t score but I played well. Call me when you get home. I’m staying at my friend’s tonight so I’ll have my phone.
“What did he mean by ‘I’ll have my phone’?” Kins asked.
“The mother takes his phone at night,” Tracy said.
“Shannah does the same thing. If she didn’t, the boys would never get their homework done.”
Tracy read the message Sam sent Kavita later that evening, after ten at night.
Vita did you get my message? I called but you didn’t answer. Call me.
Sam sent a third message Tuesday, after Tracy and Katie Pryor had visited the family.
Vita? Are you there? The police were here looking for you. Everyone is worried about you. Ma and Baba are worried. I’m worried. Please, if you get this, could you call?
There was also a text message from Nikhil.
Vita, the police have come looking for you. You need to stop this nonsense and come home.
“Nothing from the mother or father,” Tracy said. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”
“Seems odd to me,” Kins said. “Maybe they asked Sam and Nikhil to contact her. I know Shannah would be texting every five minutes.”
“Seems odd,” Tracy said again, thinking of her own mother and father when Tracy’s sister had disappeared. She and her parents hadn’t had the luxury of cell phones then.
CHAPTER 43
Faz watched the man exit the back of the tent and walk east, toward Eighth Avenue. Though the man wore a baseball-style hat and sunglasses, Faz was sure he was the same person Faz saw in the lobby of Eduardo Lopez’s apartment building just before he and Gonzalez went up the elevator. The man had looked at both of them, though his eyes had lingered on Gonzalez. At the time, Faz had thought the prolonged stare had to do with the man deducing that they were detectives.
No longer.
Gonzalez had come to South Park to give the man a message, or to obtain one, since nothing appeared to have exchanged hands between them. Whatever Gonzalez had said, the man was on the move. So, too, was Gonzalez.
At the very least, Faz needed to get a better picture of the man to possibly help identify him. He walked parallel to and slightly behind the man as they crossed the lawn. When the man reached Eighth Avenue, he turned right and walked south. Faz crossed the street to where he’d parked his car and watched the man until he turned right at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and South Cloverdale. Faz quickly got into the car and pulled a U-turn. At the intersection—a red light—he inched forward to look down the street, but he did not see the man walking down the sidewalk.
Faz swore. He turned the corner, proceeding slowly, searching the building windows and the alleys between them. He heard a powerful car engine turn over. A moment later, a red Chevelle with black hood stripes pulled from a space along a cyclone fence and approached the street. The man sat behind the wheel. Faz drove past, watching in his rear and side mirrors. The car pulled into the street behind him and Faz recognized it as the same car that had driven past Monique Rodgers’s apartment complex with Little Jimmy in the passenger seat.
“Now this is getting interesting.” He turned right at the next intersection, ensured the driver did not follow, and pulled a U-turn. He turned right at the corner and settled in fifty yards and one car behind the Chevelle. The Chevelle crossed beneath an overpass for State Route 99. Cloverdale curved to the left and became First Avenue South. Faz and Gonzalez had driven this same road to Eduardo Lopez’s apa
rtment and he wondered if the driver, too, lived in the apartment complex and was simply going home. A moment later, the road forked. The Chevelle took the fork to the right—away from the front entrance to Lopez’s apartment building. “Scratch that thought,” Faz said.
The Chevelle continued along the side of the building, to the apartment parking lot in the rear, but he slowed and instead turned right, into a driveway for a public storage complex.
Faz continued past, looking to his left but still unable to read the car’s license plate. He continued along a chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire strung along the top. Halfway down the block, he pulled to the curb beneath the shade from a tree and turned to look out the back window. The Chevelle had stopped at a chain-link gate inside the storage facility. The man had his arm out the window and punched numbers on a keypad. The gate rolled open and the Chevelle drove through and disappeared behind one of the storage buildings.
Faz considered the apartment building across the street. From what had been Eduardo Lopez’s apartment, Lopez could have watched the storage facility twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Faz also knew from the prior visit that the storage facility was less than a half mile from Highway 509, which intersected Highway 518 near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and eventually merged with I-5, the main artery extending from the Canadian border to Los Angeles.
It was all very convenient.
If Faz could get the license plate of the red Chevelle, he could hopefully obtain the car’s registration and the name of the man Gonzalez had come to meet. He stepped from the car, looking through the fence and between the storage buildings, but he did not see the car.
He counted four rows of buildings with four buildings in each row. They were arranged in a grid so cars could drive between the units.
The driveway sloped uphill to a squat retail store at the back of the lot that likely rented the storage units and, based on signs in the windows, packing materials and U-Haul trucks.
Faz walked toward the store entrance, glancing down the asphalt drives between the buildings as he did, but he did not see the Chevelle. The man had either turned into one of the storage units, or he had parked at the far end of the lot, behind the last buildings. Faz decided the safest thing was to wait in his car until the Chevelle left the complex, then call Del and have him run the plate.
As he walked back down the driveway, he heard the mechanical sound of a motor engaging and saw the entry gate rolling open. A truck idled inside, preparing to leave the facility. When the car drove out, Faz stepped inside before the gate had rolled shut. Now all he needed to do was find the car, snap a picture of the plate, and leave. He noticed security cameras atop the buildings but dismissed them as cameras running on a loop that no one looked at unless there was a theft.
He continued down the asphalt to the intersection between the first two rows of buildings and looked around the corner. He did not see the Chevelle. He walked past the second row of buildings and again looked, but still did not see the car. He moved to the end of the complex.
As he suspected, the Chevelle was parked at the back of the lot, alongside another red muscle car and a large U-Haul truck.
Faz lifted his phone, about to snap a picture of the license plates, when he heard what sounded like one of the orange doors to the units rolling open and men speaking Spanish. He moved in the only direction he could, along the back of the building. As he walked, he aimed the phone at the Chevelle’s license plate and snapped a picture. Then he snapped a picture of the license plate of the second car. He had his head turned, his focus on the license plates.
When he reached the corner of the building, he felt the barrel of a gun press against his temple.
“Do something stupid, Detective, so I can put a bullet in your head.”
CHAPTER 44
Early Saturday evening, Tracy and Kins returned to Police Headquarters.
Papers lay scattered across the table in the center of their bull pen, and the aroma of pizza permeated their work space from the MOD Pizza box on Faz’s empty desk—late lunch or early dinner. Tracy ordinarily would have said no to pizza, but now that she was gaining weight, no matter what she ate, she figured she might as well enjoy it. She was starving; she and Kins had not eaten since early that morning.
Muted light filtered into the bull pen from the building’s tinted windows. The C Team had gone out to eat, and Kins had turned off the flat-screen television so they could concentrate. No voices. No one-sided telephone calls. No click or clatter of keys on keyboards, just silence, and time to again review Kavita Mukherjee’s e-mails and text messages to see if they were missing something and to theorize about what could have happened.
Tracy grabbed a slice of pizza and a napkin and returned to consider the papers on the center table. This was how she liked to work—everything in front of her, all at the same time. It forced her to think in a nonlinear manner—sequential thinking too often caused her to consider what should logically come next in an investigation, which could lead to missing something that did not logically follow. It was human nature for the mind to fill in blanks so things made sense, even when no evidence supported doing so. Murders didn’t make sense. The vast majority were not meticulously planned, far from it. The vast majority occurred spur-of-the-moment.
Tracy took a bite of pizza. The pepperoni, red bell peppers, and garlic assaulted her taste buds. She and Kins would reek the remainder of the night and quite possibly in the morning. They agreed to work all night if they had to, as on Thursday, knowing that come morning they would likely have to surrender the case.
Tracy picked up Kaylee Wright’s preliminary report, which reiterated what she’d told them in the park. Wright had found a few scattered prints that matched the sole of Kavita’s shoes at the trailhead near the parking lot—indicating Kavita had walked into the park. She found more prints farther along the trail, though the stride had changed, indicating Kavita had been running. And she found prints in all different directions, as if Kavita had stopped, possibly because she’d heard something. The lack of similar prints along the trail leading to or around the abandoned well was also a clear indication that Kavita had not accidentally stumbled into the hole. The logical conclusion was that her killer had carried her.
When she lacked evidence, Tracy opted for common sense. “Let’s assume she was carried to the hole,” she said. “For one, Kavita was not small. She was five feet ten and one hundred and thirty pounds.”
“A grown man could have carried her, but I agree, that’s dead weight,” Kins said.
“Charles Shea?” Tracy said. She walked to a whiteboard she’d found in one of the conference rooms and wrote “Shea” in blue.
“We still have to tie him to the park, and come up with a motive,” Kins said. They’d called the park ranger, Margo Paige, late Friday afternoon. Paige had confirmed there were no cameras in the Bridle Trails parking lot. Too bad. Shea’s car would have been hard to miss. Paige had said she would drive to Seattle on Saturday to look through the storage files for the park, and that she would call them if she found anything of interest.
“Shea could have convinced Kavita to take a walk with him. It was a beautiful night. Maybe he started acting strange, possessive, and Kavita ran to get away from him. She could have been turning in a circle, searching for a way out of the park and away from him when he came up behind her,” Tracy said.
“But Kaylee didn’t find two sets of shoeprints on the trail. She found just the one,” Kins said.
“Kaylee didn’t find much, given how dry the trails have been and how much use they get. Shea’s prints could have been destroyed by a runner or by horses. Since Kaylee didn’t have a print to look for, it isn’t so obvious. As for a motive, it could also be as simple as: Shea developed personal feelings toward Kavita and was upset that she was ending their contract.”
“Which also fits with your hypothesis that Kavita suddenly had twice as much money to start medical school and that was the reason
she ended their relationship,” Kins said.
“Which Shea confirmed,” Tracy said.
“Okay, so what about the hole? How did he know about it?”
“Again, the simple answer would be that he was familiar with the park.”
“But we don’t know that he was. Medina isn’t that close to Bridle Trails for him to take evening runs.”
“I agree.”
“I think we should start with who might have known about the hole.”
“The family, for certain,” Tracy said. “Her father said they took walks in the park together and hunted for mushrooms, which would have taken them off the beaten paths.”
“We need to check the airline, determine if his alibi checks out. And add Aditi to that list,” Kins said. “And her family. What do we know about them?”
Tracy wrote the names on the whiteboard, then turned and faced Kins. “Not a lot.”
“Circle the father and Nikhil,” Kins said. “Sam and the mother would have had difficulty carrying the body. Sam doesn’t look like he breaks a hundred pounds. And what would be his motivation? I’d put someone random ahead of him.”
Tracy wasn’t yet buying that the crime was committed by someone random. For one, the theory didn’t fit with the forensic evidence. Based on the damage to Kavita’s skull—Rosa said the blows were purposeful, a possible indication the killer had been angry. She picked up Kelly Rosa’s preliminary autopsy report. Rosa attributed the cause of death to blunt-force trauma to the left side of Kavita Mukherjee’s head, just above the temple. Given the nature of the fracturing, Rosa further concluded that Mukherjee had been struck three times, which also supported an argument that the attack had been a possible crime of passion born of rage or anger. Rosa’s report further detailed that there was no physical trauma to indicate Kavita had been raped, though she’d had sexual intercourse within twenty-four hours of her death—that having been with Shea.
A Steep Price (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 6) Page 26