My Sister's Grave

by Robert Dugoni

  “Did the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab run tests on those strands of hair?”

  Giesa considered her report. “We examined each strand under a microscope and determined that some had been pulled out by the root. Others had broken off.”

  Finn stood. “Objection. The officer is speculating that the hairs had been pulled out by the roots.”

  Lawrence sustained it.

  Clark looked glad to have the phrase repeated. “Do we humans shed hair, Detective?”

  “Shedding hair is a natural process. We shed hair every day.”

  He patted his bald spot. “Some of us more than others?”

  The jurors smiled.

  Clark continued. “But you also mentioned that your team found some hair that had been broken off. What did you mean by that?”

  “I mean that we did not find a root ball. Under a microscope, one expects to find a white bulb at the base. Breakage is usually the result of damage to the hair follicle by external factors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Chemical treatments, heat from styling tools, or rough handling come to mind.”

  “Can someone tear out another person’s hair by the root, say, during a struggle?”

  “They can.”

  Clark acted as if he was reviewing his notes. “Did your team locate anything else of interest in the truck cab?”

  “Trace amounts of blood,” she said.

  Tracy noticed several jurors turn their attention from Giesa to Edmund House.

  Again using the photograph, Giesa explained where her team had located the blood inside the truck cab. Clark then placed a blown-up aerial photograph of Parker House’s property in the mountains on the easel. It showed the metal roofs of several structures and the shells of cars and farm equipment amid a grove of trees. Giesa pointed to a narrow building at the end of a footpath leading from Parker House’s one-story home.

  “We found woodworking tools and several pieces of furniture in various stages of completion.”

  “A table saw?”

  “Yes, there was a table saw.”

  “Did you find any blood inside that shed?”

  “We did not,” Giesa said.

  “Did you find any blonde strands of hair?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find anything of interest?”

  “We found jewelry inside a sock in a coffee can.”

  Clark handed Giesa a plastic evidence bag and asked her to unseal it.

  The courtroom grew silent as Giesa reached inside the bag and held up two silver pistol-shaped earrings.

  Dan stopped pacing. “That’s when you really began to suspect something was wrong.”

  “She wasn’t wearing the pistol earrings, Dan. I know she wasn’t, and I tried to tell my father that afternoon,” Tracy said. “But he said he was tired and wanted to get my mother home. She wasn’t doing well. She was an emotional wreck, physically weak, and becoming more and more reclusive. After that, every time I tried to bring up the subject, my father would tell me to let it alone. Calloway and Clark told me the same thing.”

  “They never heard you out?”

  She shook her head. “No. So I decided to keep the information I had to myself until I could prove them wrong.”

  “But you couldn’t leave it alone.”

  “Could you have, if it had been your sister, and you’d been the one who left her?”

  Dan sat on the coffee table facing her. Their knees nearly touched. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Tracy.”

  “I had to know. When no one else was going to do anything about it, I decided to do it myself.”

  “So that’s why you quit teaching and became a cop.”

  She nodded. “After ten years of using all my free time to read transcripts and hunt for witnesses and documents, I sat down one evening, opened up the boxes, and realized that I’d gone over all the records and interviewed all the witnesses. I’d reached a dead end. Unless they found Sarah’s body, I had nowhere to go. It was a horrible feeling. I felt like I’d failed her all over again, but it’s like you said, the world doesn’t stop so you can grieve. One day you wake up and realize you have to move on because . . . well, what are you going to do? So I put the boxes in a closet and tried to move on.”

  He touched her leg. “Sarah would have wanted you to be happy, Tracy.”

  “I was fooling myself,” she said. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think of her. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t tempted to pull out the boxes, that I didn’t think I had missed something, that there had to be one more piece of evidence. And then I was sitting at my desk and my partner said they’d found her grave.” She exhaled. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone to tell me I’m not just some obsessed crazy person?”

  “You’re not a crazy person, Tracy. Obsessed, maybe.”

  She smiled. “You always could make me laugh.”

  “Yes, but unfortunately that usually wasn’t my intention.” Dan sat back and exhaled. “I don’t know what happened back then, Tracy, not for certain, not yet, but what I do know is, if you’re right about this, if House was framed, it wasn’t orchestrated by one person. This was a conspiracy and Hagen, Calloway, Clark—even Finn, potentially—would have had to have been a part of it.”

  “And someone with access to Sarah’s jewelry and our home,” Tracy said. “I know.”

  Roy Calloway’s Suburban was parked in the driveway of her parents’ home behind another sheriff’s vehicle and alongside a Cascade County fire truck and ambulance. The sirens were silent and no strobes pierced the early morning darkness. It gave Tracy a strange sense of relief. Whatever the emergency was, it couldn’t be too bad if the lights were off. Could it?

  Calloway’s call had awakened her at just after four in the morning. Though Ben had been gone three months, Tracy had kept the rental house. Home no longer held the fond memories it once had for her. Her mother and father remained reclusive and quiet. Her father had quit working at the hospital and was rarely seen around town. They had not held their annual Christmas Eve party since Sarah’s disappearance. Her father had also started to drink at night. She heard the slur in his voice when she called to check up on them and smelled it on his breath when she visited. She also did not feel fully welcome there anymore. There was an elephant in the room nobody wanted to acknowledge. The memory foremost on their minds was the one they wanted to forget. They were each wracked with their own guilt—Tracy, for having left Sarah to drive home alone, and her parents, for having gone to Hawaii instead of being at home that fateful weekend. Tracy rationalized it all by telling herself she was too old to be running home to her parents anyway, and that home was no longer home.

  In his call, Calloway had told her to get dressed and get to her parents’ house. “Just get here,” he’d said, when she’d attempted to question him further.

  She hustled up the front steps to the sound of chatter from the emergency vehicle radios. Medical and police personnel milled about the porch and grand foyer. Nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry, and she took that as another good sign. One of Calloway’s deputies saw her come in and knocked on the doors to her father’s den. Moments later, it was Roy Calloway, not her father, who slid them apart. She saw others in the room behind him, though not her father or her mother. The deputy said something to Calloway, who slid the doors closed. He looked pale and sickly. Stricken.

  “Roy?” she asked, stepping toward him. “What is it? What happened?”

  Calloway wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “He’s gone, Tracy.”

  “What?”

  “Your father’s gone.”

  “My father?” She hadn’t even considered her father. She’d been certain something had happened to her mother. “What are you talking about?” When she tried to step past him, Calloway blocked her path, holding her by the shoulders. “Where is my father? Dad? Dad!”

  “Tracy, don’t.”

  She fought to free herself. “I want to
see my father.”

  Calloway took her out onto the porch and pressed her shoulders to the side of the house, restraining her. “Listen to me. Tracy, stop and listen to me.” She continued to struggle. “He used the shotgun, Tracy.”

  Tracy froze.

  Calloway lowered his hands and took a step back. He glanced away, exhaling before regrouping and reconsidering her. “He used the shotgun,” he said.

  CHAPTER 25

  A week after she’d buried Sarah’s remains, Tracy slid onto a bench seat attached to a table in the visitor’s area of Walla Walla State Penitentiary. “Let me do the talking,” she said.

  “I will,” Dan said, taking a seat beside her.

  “Don’t promise him anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “He’ll try to cut a deal.”

  Dan reached over and gripped her hand. “You told me that too. Calm down. I’ve been in prisons before, though admittedly the ones I’ve been in looked more like country clubs. This looks like an austere high school cafeteria.”

  Tracy looked to the door but did not see Edmund House. He was imprisoned in the D Unit of the penitentiary’s West Complex, the prison’s second-highest security unit. His placement reflected the severity of his crime, murder in the first degree, not his behavior during his time served. Tracy’s phone calls over the years had revealed House to be a model inmate who kept mostly to himself, reading in his cell or working in the library on one of the many appeals he had filed during his years of incarceration.

  Having forensic evidence from the grave to support her ten-year theory that House had been framed and Sarah’s killer remained at large would do her no good unless she could get the evidence before a judge and get the witnesses back on the witness stand, under oath, and subject to thorough cross-examination. The only way to do all of that was to get Edmund House a post-conviction relief hearing, the precursor to a new trial. They could not do that without House’s cooperation. She hated the thought that she needed House or that her fate was tied to him in any way. During her previous two trips to visit him, House had toyed with her and her fragile emotions. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but she realized it now in hindsight. House had seemingly held all the cards. That was no longer the case. If House wanted a new trial and a chance to get out of prison, he had to cooperate.

  The voices of the inmates and visitors seated at the surrounding tables echoed loudly. Tracy checked her watch and looked again to the door. She noticed an inmate lingering at the entrance, eyes scanning the tables. His gray braid hung well past muscled shoulders. She started to dismiss him. He looked nothing like Edmund House, but his gaze found hers and his mouth inched into a “look what the cat dragged in” grin.

  “That can’t be him, can it?” Dan said, also looking to the door.

  At his trial, the newspapers had likened Edmund House’s thick hair and burning good looks to James Dean. The face of the man walking toward them had broadened with age and weight, but the changes in House’s facial features and the length of his hair was not the most striking change in his appearance. Not by a long shot. The muscles of his neck and chest pressed taut the fabric of his prison-issued T-shirt and pants, as if the seams might burst. Filing appeals was not the only thing House had done to pass his time in prison.

  House stopped at the edge of the table and took a moment to appraise them. “Tracy Crosswhite,” he said, as if savoring the name. “I thought you’d given up. What’s it been, fifteen years?”

  “I haven’t kept track.”

  “I have. Little else to do in here.”

  “You could file another appeal.” The prison information network, like the drug and illegal steroid network, was intricate and extensive. She needed to know if House already knew they’d found Sarah’s grave.

  “I plan on it.”

  “Yeah? What are the grounds this time?”

  “Ineffective assistance of counsel.”

  “Sounds like you’re reaching.”

  “Am I?”

  She estimated House to be two hundred fifty pounds of thick muscle. Prison had washed dull the once-sparkling blue eyes, but not the piercing quality of his gaze.

  A correctional officer approached. “Take a seat, please.”

  He sat. They were separated by just the width of the table. The closeness made her skin crawl, as it had whenever House had looked her up and down in the courtroom. “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “Yeah, I got my GED and I’m working toward my AA. How about that? Maybe I’ll become a teacher when I get out of here.” House looked to Dan.

  “This is Dan,” Tracy said.

  “Hello, Dan.” House extended his hand. Dark-blue letters, prison tats made with the ink of ballpoint pens, ran vertically along the inside of his forearm as thick as a mooring line.

  “Isaiah,” House said, catching Dan’s focus on the tattoo. He kept his grip on Dan’s hand and rotated his forearm so the words could be read.

  To open the blind eyes,

  to bring out the prisoners from the prison,

  and them that sit in darkness

  out of the prison house.

  “Proper English would have been ‘those that sit in darkness,’ but I don’t question the writer,” House said. “Dan have a last name?”

  The correctional officer stepped forward again. “No prolonged contact.”

  House released Dan’s hand.

  “O’Leary,” Tracy said.

  “Dan have a tongue?”

  “O’Leary,” Dan said.

  “So what brings you here, Tracy and friend Dan, after all these years?”

  “They found Sarah,” she said.

  House arched his eyebrows. “Alive?”

  “No.”

  “That doesn’t help me. Though I am curious, where did they find her?”

  “Not relevant at this moment,” Tracy said.

  House tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “When did you become a cop?”

  “What makes you think I’m a cop?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, your whole demeanor, your posture, the tone of your voice, your reluctance to introduce friend Dan or provide information. I’ve had a few years to make some observations. You’ve changed too, haven’t you, Tracy?”

  “I’m a detective,” she said.

  House grinned. “Still hunting for your sister’s killer; any new leads you’d like to share?” He turned to Dan. “What do you think about my chances on my latest appeal, Counselor?”

  At Tracy’s instruction, Dan had dressed down in blue jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt. “I’d have to review your file,” he said.

  “Two for two,” House said. “Watch me go three for three. You already have, and you agree. That’s why you’re sitting here with Detective Tracy.” He looked at her. “They found your sister’s remains and something about the crime scene confirms what you and I discussed all those years ago. Someone planted evidence to frame me.”

  Tracy regretted those previous visits. With the experience and training she’d received at the academy and as a patrol officer before becoming a detective, she knew she’d told House too much.

  House shifted his gaze between her and Dan. “Am I getting warm?”

  “Dan would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’ll tell you what, when you’re ready to stop playing games and start talking like a normal human being instead of talking in cop speak, come back and see me.” House slid from the table.

  Tracy said, “We leave and we don’t come back.”

  “I leave and I don’t come back. You’re wasting my time. I have studying to do. I have finals coming up.”

  Tracy stood. “Let’s go, Dan. You heard the man. He has studying to do.” She started from the table. “Maybe you can teach in here. By the time you’re done, you’d have tenure.” She got half a dozen steps before House spoke.

  “Fine.”

  She turned back. “Fine what?”

  House bit at his lower lip. “
Fine, I’ll answer attorney Dan’s questions.” He shrugged and smiled, but it looked forced. “Why not, right? Like I said, not a lot to do in here.” House sat and Tracy and Dan rejoined him at the table. “At least give me the courtesy of telling me why you came.”

  “Dan has reviewed your file. Incompetence of legal counsel might be a basis for a new trial. I’m not interested in that.”

  “You want to know who killed your sister,” House said. “So do I.”

  “You told me once that you thought Calloway, or someone executing the search warrant, planted the earrings at your uncle’s property. Tell Dan.”

  House shrugged. “How else did they get there?”

  “The jury concluded you put them there,” Dan said.

  “Do I look that stupid? I’d been in prison six years; why would I keep evidence that would put me back in here?”

  “Why would Calloway or anyone else frame you?” Dan asked.

  “Because they couldn’t find her killer, and I was the monster living in the mountains above the quaint little village, and I made people uncomfortable. They wanted to get rid of me.”

  “You have any evidence to support that?”

  Tracy relaxed a bit. Now that he was in his element, Dan seemed more assured, confident, and less intimidated by House or their surroundings.

  “I don’t know,” House said, looking between them. “Do I?”

  “They ran a DNA test on the strands of blonde hair they found in your truck,” Tracy lied. “They confirmed they belonged to Sarah. A billion-to-one odds.”

  “The odds are irrelevant if someone else put them there.”

  “You told Calloway you’d been out drinking and picked Sarah up and gave her a ride,” Dan said.

  “I didn’t tell him anything of the sort. I wasn’t even out that night. I was asleep. I would have been pretty stupid to make up a story so easy to refute.”

  “The witness says he saw your truck on the county road,” Dan said.

  “Ryan Hagen,” House said with sarcasm. “The traveling auto-parts salesman. Convenient he would come forward after so much time had passed.”

  “You think he lied too. Why?” Dan asked.