Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2)

by Robert Dugoni

  “Take your time,” Dan said, understanding now why Bingham had chosen a bar. It was unlikely she’d run into anyone from her church community.

  Bingham sipped her ice water and set the glass down. “Like I said, Beth and I were best friends in high school. We partied pretty hard with another friend back then. None of us went to college. I worked as a receptionist, and Beth was doing some bookkeeping. We went out a lot, just about every night.”

  It confirmed what Beth Stinson’s employer had suspected. “That wouldn’t have been unusual for people your age back then,” Dan said.

  Bingham took another sip of water and another deep breath. “One night, we’d been drinking and getting high, and out of the blue, Beth says, ‘Let’s go to a strip club.’”

  Dan felt as if a rock dropped in his stomach.

  “At first I thought she was joking,” Bingham said, “but she wasn’t. She was serious. There was this club that had just opened in Shoreline, and everyone was going crazy about it. It had been in the paper and on the news. Beth wanted to check it out. I was like, ‘What?’ But she kept saying it would be fun to just see, you know, what it was like. So finally I said, ‘What the hell,’ right? So we went. We just sat in one of the booths in the back, and when the women came around, Beth started talking to them, asking them all types of questions about how much money they made and how much they worked. Some of them were making a couple hundred bucks a night—more on the weekends. They were making way more than us. Back then minimum wage was nothing. One of the dancers looked us over and said, ‘You should dance. With your figures, you’d make a lot of money.’ The men apparently preferred women who were well-endowed. Beth fit that mold. Me, not so much.”

  Dan was furiously working through his conversations with Beth Stinson’s former employer and with Wayne Gerhardt, as well as trying to remember the information he’d learned from the police file. Stinson’s employer had said Stinson worked Monday through Friday. Wayne Gerhardt had told Dan he’d made the service call on a Saturday, but that Stinson had moved her new car because she had to get to work.

  “Beth called me the next day to talk about what the dancers had said, about us being able to make a lot of money,” Bingham said. “She wanted to go talk to the manager. I wasn’t going to do it, but Beth could be pretty persuasive when she wanted something. She’d thought it all through. She said we could dance under assumed names and that some of the dancers wore wigs. She said no one we knew would likely go there anyway. So finally, just to get her to stop talking about it, I said I’d go with her when she talked to the manager, but only for support. We went the next day. I think it was a Saturday. I remember that we smoked a joint in Beth’s car before we went in. The interview was nothing. All the manager wanted to know was our ages and whether we had criminal records. Then he pointed to a pole and said, ‘Have at it.’ So Beth went over and just started swinging and spinning. She’d done gymnastics in high school and was really good. He hired her on the spot. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Your turn.’ I told him no, but he said, ‘Just give it a shot. What the hell. You’re here.’ I still wasn’t going to, but then Beth started in again and I was pretty high, so I just did what Beth did, being silly, acting stupid, you know?”

  “And he offered you a job also,” Dan said.

  “I’d run up some pretty sizable debt, and I really wanted to get out of my parents’ house, you know? And I guess if I’m being honest, the thought of being a dancer was kind of exciting.”

  “What was the club called?” Dan didn’t dare take out a notepad, afraid Bingham might bolt like a skittish horse.

  “Dirty Ernie’s. Beth and I worked the same shift, you know, to get over our nerves—my nerves, really. Beth didn’t seem nervous at all. We went after work and danced until around eleven or twelve, depending on the crowd. It was topless only. Beth was better than me, less inhibited. Men started coming in and asking her for table dances and lap dances. Because the club was new, it was pretty popular and Beth started to make a lot of money. She was talking about quitting her bookkeeping job. I wasn’t making that much. I didn’t like doing the private dances, and that’s really where they make their money.”

  “What stage name did Beth use?” Dan asked.

  “Betty Boobs.” Bingham paused and sighed, as if out of breath. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Dan pulled a brown paper napkin from the dispenser and handed it to her. “I have a lot of guilt about this,” she said, wiping her eyes, struggling to get the words out. Her chest shuddered. Dan gave her time to compose herself. After another moment, Bingham blew her nose and reached for more napkins. “Beth started bringing some of the men home.” The words spilled out of her mouth as if she’d been holding them in for years and no longer could. Dan’s mind was churning with questions, but he wanted to let her finish what she’d come to say.

  “She’d started renting a house in North Seattle, and she’d bring them there. It wasn’t all the time. And it wasn’t just anybody.” Bingham wiped at her tears. She looked physically exhausted and emotionally drained. “I mean, she knew the men from the club.”

  Dan prodded gently. “What happened, Celeste?”

  “I went to the manager and quit. I told Beth she should quit too, but . . . she liked the money too much. We kind of had a fight about it and fell out of touch for a while.”

  “So when you heard that Beth had been murdered, you thought it was one of the men she’d brought home with her.”

  Bingham nodded. “But then no one ever came to talk to me. And I read in the paper they had a suspect and that the guy pled guilty. I figured I’d never have to tell anyone about it. You know, why embarrass our families? I’d moved back home with my parents, and I was attending AA meetings twice a week. I met my husband about six months after Beth died. He doesn’t know any of this. He can’t know any of this.”

  “Did you know Wayne Gerhardt? Was he one of the men Beth brought home?”

  “I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him at the club. You get to know the regulars, you know?”

  “And he wasn’t one of them.”

  “No.”

  Sensing there was something else, something more Bingham wanted to say, that she hadn’t come to the bar just to tell Dan that she and Beth used to dance, Dan said, “Can I ask you something, Celeste?” She nodded. “Why’d you agree to talk to me? Why not just tell me you didn’t remember why you’d called the police and just leave it at that?”

  She nodded. “Are you familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Step nine in the treatment is making amends. You make amends unless it could injure someone. I don’t want to hurt my husband or my children, Mr. O’Leary. I have four kids. I have a good life, a good community. But it’s always bothered me, the thought that maybe that man didn’t do it.”

  And there was the reason Bingham was sitting in the booth like a penitent in a confessional. Guilt.

  “He said he did it,” Dan said.

  The tears started to roll again. This time, Bingham made no effort to wipe them away.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Celeste?”

  Her chest heaved. She took another sip of her water. “I’d talked to Beth that day. We’d started talking again on the phone, you know, just checking in, trying to get past what we’d said to each other. And I asked about maybe going out later that night, after she got off work. But she said she had a date.”

  “Maybe her date was with Gerhardt.”

  She shook her head.

  Dan was trying not to rush the conversation. “Why not?”

  “Because I was worried about her, you know? And I told her to be careful. I said I wouldn’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her, and she told me not to worry. She said that it was okay . . . ,” Bingham’s chest shuddered. “She said it was okay because . . . because the guy was someone I knew, and that he was a nice guy.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Tracy didn’t see Dan’s Tahoe parked in
the driveway or in the street. The police cruiser from the Southwest Precinct arrived as the garage door rattled open. She thought about asking the officer to come inside while she checked the house, then decided against it. She was a cop, with a gun. What was he going to do that she couldn’t?

  She took out her Glock as she stepped into the house and did a sweep of the entire upstairs before returning to the kitchen. She set the Glock on the counter, retrieved the leftover pasta from the refrigerator, and poked at cold noodles with a fork while her brain continued to mull the seeming inconsistencies in the evidence—from Bankston failing his polygraph, to Taggart’s fingerprint showing up in Veronica Watson’s motel room, to Beth Stinson’s murder nine years earlier.

  Exhausted, and her aches and pains crying out for a soothing, warm shower, she put the pasta back in the refrigerator and realized Roger had not greeted her. It was really not like him. She walked through the house calling his name, thought she heard soft mewing, and stopped to listen. She opened the door to the garage but didn’t find him. When she called out, she heard him respond, and followed the sound into the dining room but still didn’t see him. “Roger?”

  She heard him a third time, this time more distinctly, and followed the sound to the top of the stairs leading to the lower level. The deadbolt was turned to the left, in the locked position. “Roger?”

  His mewing grew in volume and intensity. A black paw swiped at her from beneath the door.

  Tracy stepped back into the kitchen and retrieved her Glock. She was thinking of the raised toilet seat, which she hadn’t asked Dan about. He’d been staying at the house; it was possible he’d gone to the lower level or the backyard, but for what? He didn’t bring the dogs with him. Then she thought, Maybe he went down to adjust the light sensor. It was possible Dan had left the door open and Roger had seen it as an opportunity to explore.

  Roger clawed at the bottom of the door again, sounding annoyed. Tracy stepped down to the landing, clicked the deadbolt straight up, turned the doorknob, and yanked open the door, aiming into the darkened room. Roger darted past her and up the stairs, a black blur. Gun raised, Tracy reached around the wall and slapped at the switch. Recessed lights illuminated the L-shaped leather couch and an older-model projection table that faced a large television screen on the back wall.

  Tracy looked across the room to the door leading outside. Like the door at the bottom of the stairs, the deadbolt was engaged. She closed the interior door, reapplied the bolt, and hurried back up the stairs.

  Roger paced the kitchen counter, making a fuss about wanting to be fed. “Well, don’t go places you shouldn’t and this won’t be a problem.” Tracy picked him up. “Maybe I should have named you Houdini, huh? How did you get down there?”

  Roger whined at her, annoyed and in no mood to play. “Okay. Okay.” She popped open a can of food, spooned a dollop on a plate, and watched Roger eat while she called Dan’s cell. He didn’t answer. She ended the call without leaving a message and walked to the bathroom and shut and locked the door. She set the Glock and her phone on the counter and gingerly slid off her clothes. Her knee was red but not swollen. Her ankle hurt, but not as bad as she’d feared it might. It was her collarbone, where Taggart had kicked her, that was bothering her most. The reflection in the mirror showed signs of bruising. About to toss her jeans in the dirty-clothes pile, she checked the pockets for cash and found the message slip the officer staffing the tip line had handed her just before Tracy had left the Cowboy Room to talk with Michael Melton. That reminded her that she’d also failed to call back Bennett Lee, who was likely pitching a hissy fit.

  Tracy unfolded the piece of paper and read the name. “Shereece,” she said, recalling the name of the African American dancer from the Pink Palace. She called the number.

  A woman answered. Tracy said, “Shereece, this is Detective Crosswhite.”

  “’Bout time you called me back,” Shereece said. “We need to talk. Now.”

  Johnny Nolasco chose a table in the corner beside a stone fireplace. The surrounding tables were empty. He nursed a coffee and watched the door while replaying his conversation with JoAnne Anderson in his head, growing angrier each time through it.

  Dan O’Leary was the attorney who had represented Edmund House. He was Tracy Crosswhite’s childhood friend. If he was looking into the Beth Stinson case, Crosswhite had to be behind it.

  The Stinson investigation had been intense. Beth Stinson was not some dead prostitute, drug addict, or runaway. She was the girl next door, living in a middle-class neighborhood, attacked in her own home. Murders didn’t happen to the girl next door. They didn’t happen to the daughters of the middle class living in safe neighborhoods. The neighbors were scared, the local politicians were outraged, and the politicians downtown were pushing the brass for an arrest. And, since shit flowed downhill, Nolasco and Hattie were getting a steady flow day and night.

  They caught a break when a review of Stinson’s credit cards revealed a service call from Roto-Rooter the day before she was murdered. A few quick phone calls led to Wayne Gerhardt, a twenty-eight-year-old living alone in an apartment not far from Stinson’s rented home. Gerhardt’s fingerprints were all over the house, and he’d left a muddy bootprint on the carpet, which he’d unsuccessfully tried to clean up. He had no alibi. Nolasco and Hattie were convinced he was their guy, but although the neighbor initially said she believed she’d seen Gerhardt that night when she got up to get a glass of water, she was the religious type and kept vacillating, concerned about convicting an innocent man. Without the witness’s testimony, they didn’t have enough to convict.

  Back then, it had been a different time and a different administration. Montages could be manipulated. So could police lineups. Witnesses could be encouraged to remember what they saw. There were techniques, subtle but effective, with the sole goal being to put the bad guy in jail, and no homicide team had ever had the success rate Nolasco and Hattie had put together. Hattie hadn’t been about to retire with an open case, and Nolasco didn’t want that on his record as he worked his way up the ranks. Wayne Gerhardt was their guy. They were certain of it. They just had to give JoAnne Anderson reason to be confident in her ID. They knew that once she got on the witness stand, the trial would be over. Gerhardt would have two choices: take a plea or face the death penalty. Nolasco predicted Gerhardt would see the light.

  So they told Anderson they had a suspect and just needed her to confirm he was the guy she’d seen that night. They showed her Gerhardt’s photo, and she ID’d him. Then they asked her to come downtown for a police lineup and she picked Gerhardt without hesitation, dead certain. And when she got on the stand at trial, she didn’t equivocate. Gerhardt took the plea, and Hattie put four other suspects’ photos in the file along with Gerhardt’s mug shot and rode off into retirement with a clean slate. Nolasco left the streets and started to make his way up the ranks to lieutenant, then to captain. He’d never given Beth Stinson or Wayne Gerhardt another moment of thought.

  Until now.

  After hanging up with Anderson, Nolasco had made a call to Olympia and confirmed that Crosswhite had pulled the Stinson file from storage and had it shipped to the Justice Center. Initially he could think of only one reason why she’d be looking at his old files: she’d heard the rumors circulating among the older detectives questioning his and Hattie’s investigation methods, and she was looking for something to embarrass him. When his initial anger had subsided, he began to think more clearly. Tracy Crosswhite was not stupid; she wouldn’t be pursuing a decade-old case without good reason, especially not one of his. She had to know any attempt to get another killer a new trial would make her media fodder. So there had to be a reason.

  Nolasco reconsidered the details of the old case and recalled that Stinson had been tied up and strangled with a rope. He also remembered that they had noted something odd about the crime scene—that Stinson’s bed had been made despite the fact that the murder occurred in the early hours of the morning. Tha
t left one possible conclusion. Crosswhite thought there was a connection between Stinson and the Cowboy killings, and she had O’Leary going through the file and talking to the witnesses, who would no doubt tell him that Nolasco and Hattie had never followed through with them. He wondered if JoAnne Anderson recalled that Hattie had only showed her Gerhardt’s photograph and not a montage. If she had, O’Leary might argue that Nolasco and Hattie had improperly influenced a witness to convict Gerhardt, and that maybe, because of police misconduct, not only had an innocent man been convicted, but a serial killer had been left free to kill for nearly a decade. Nolasco didn’t believe that to be the case. He believed Gerhardt had killed Beth Stinson. But he didn’t want Crosswhite poking her nose in his old files.

  He’d stewed for several hours, thinking about how best to respond. If he confronted Crosswhite directly, she could go over his head, maybe go to OPA or to one of the prosecutors. She could suggest that not just the Beth Stinson case be reviewed, but all of Nolasco and Hattie’s cases.

  He couldn’t make it look personal.

  That’s when he’d thought of Maria Vanpelt. Sure, it was a risk saying anything to an investigative reporter, but even he had to admit Vanpelt was a hack. More often than not, she chose the low-hanging fruit, because she was lazy, not interested in doing any real work to uncover facts. She sought out the sensational stories that would get her face front and center on the six and eleven o’clock newscasts.

  And Nolasco had something that could do just that—make her career.

  Vanpelt walked into the coffee shop looking and sounding annoyed.

  “This better not be some ploy to just get me over here, Johnny. I’ve had a long day.”

  “Nice to see you too,” he said.

  She dropped her keys on the table, which drew the barista’s attention. “Coffee, decaf. Black.”