Tracy shuffled forward, Glock raised. She avoided the noose and stepped through the gate, keeping her back pressed to the fence. Gravel crunched under her boots as she worked her way from the hood down the side of her truck to the driver’s door. She retrieved her car key, dropped her gaze to fit the teeth into the lock, and turned the key. The door lock popped. She didn’t rush, waiting a beat before pulling the door open. About to get in, she noticed something protruding from the back of the truck bed and realized it was the corner of the spring-loaded window to the truck canopy.
She slid to the rear bumper, paused, then spun and swept the bed. Empty. She spun again and swept the area behind her but saw only the outlines of telephone poles shrouded in fog.
She lowered the canopy window and turned the handle, hearing it latch. As she made her way back to the truck cab, the dogs in the kennel started to bark again.
Chapter 2
Tracy drove back to the street in front of the alley leading to the Seattle Police Athletic Association. She didn’t have to wait long for a patrol unit to arrive. She instructed the uniformed officer to string yellow-and-black crime scene tape across the entrance to the alley. Shortly thereafter, she was glad she had. The news vans and reporters arrived, followed by her sergeant, Billy Williams.
“Thought you called it in on your cell,” Williams said, eyeing the media.
“I did,” Tracy said.
Using a cell phone should have skirted the media, but SPD had long been a sieve. The brass liked to cull favors with reporters by feeding them information, and it was suspected among the detectives in the Violent Crimes Section that they had a leak. Tracy herself also remained relevant news after what had happened in Cedar Grove.
Williams adjusted a black knit driving cap that had become a fixture since he’d conceded the inevitable and shaved his head. He said the cap provided warmth in the fall and winter and protected his scalp from the sun during the summer. Tracy suspected Billy just liked the look. He’d also grown a pencil-thin mustache and soul patch, which made him look a lot like the actor Samuel L. Jackson.
Kinsington Rowe, Tracy’s partner, arrived ten minutes later. Kins got out of an older-model BMW, slipping into a leather car coat. “Sorry,” he said. “We were at Shannah’s parents’ for dinner. What do we got?”
“I’ll show you,” Tracy said. Kins climbed in the truck cab with her. Billy followed in his Jeep.
“You all right?” Kins asked.
“Me?”
“You seem a little freaked.”
“I’m fine.” Wanting to change topic she said, “Shannah’s parents’?”
Kins made a face. “We’re trying to have Sunday night dinners together to see if it helps. I got caught in a discussion with her father on gun control.”
“How’d that go?”
“About as you’d expect.”
Tracy swung the truck wide and parked well clear of the entrance to the range. She turned on the wipers to clear the mist from the windshield. The truck’s headlights spotlighted the hangman’s noose.
“What do you make of it?” Kins asked.
“Not sure. Someone put it up right after the lights went out.”
“He wanted you to find it.”
“Appears that way.”
“Got to be.”
They got out of the cab and approached the spot where Williams now stood. “Looks like the same rope,” Kins said. “Same color. Can’t see the knot.”
Nicole Hansen hadn’t just been strangled. She’d been hog-tied, with an elaborate system intended to torture the victim. If Hansen straightened her legs, it pulled the rope and tightened the noose. Eventually, she tired trying to hold the pose and strangled herself. Tracy and Kins had treated it as a homicide, though they didn’t immediately rule out the possibility that Hansen had died during a sex act gone horribly wrong. Hard as it was for some to imagine a woman agreeing to such torture, Tracy had seen worse when she’d been assigned to the Sexual Assault Unit. When Hansen’s toxicology report revealed Rohypnol, a well-known date rape drug, they scratched that theory.
“So door number one, it’s the same guy who killed Nicole Hansen,” Kins said. “Door number two, it’s somebody angry about the Hansen investigation being sent to cold cases and wants to make a point.”
“Could be a copycat,” Billy said.
“Door number three,” Kins said.
During the Hansen investigation, Maria Vanpelt, a local television reporter, had leaked an expert’s opinion that the rope used to strangle Hansen was polypropylene with a Z twist. SPD had loudly protested to the station manager, who’d apologized profusely and said it would never happen again. No one at SPD was holding their breath.
“Whatever the choice,” Billy said. “He left it where you couldn’t miss it. It means he followed you. I’m going to have a detail keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t need a babysitter, Billy.”
“Just until we figure out what this guy intended.”
“I’ll put a hole in him before he can get within ten feet of me,” Tracy said.
“One problem,” Kins said. “You don’t have a clue who he is.”
About the Author
Robert Dugoni is the #1 Amazon and New York Times bestselling author of My Sister’s Grave. Dugoni is also the author of the critically acclaimed David Sloane series—The Jury Master, Wrongful Death, Bodily Harm, Murder One, and The Conviction—as well as the bestselling standalone novel Damage Control and the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year selection. Dugoni’s books have been likened to those of Scott Turow and Nelson DeMille, and he has been hailed as “the undisputed king of the legal thriller” by the Providence Journal.
Visit his website at www.robertdugoni.com. Follow him on Twitter @robertdugoni and at Facebook at www.facebook.com/AuthorRobertDugoni.
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