Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2)

by Robert Dugoni

“I don’t know him.”

  “Really? He was in one of the Twilight movies and Night at the Museum.”

  “I missed those.”

  “You work too hard; you need to find time to relax.”

  “You’ve kept me pretty busy. You mind if I sit down again?”

  Kotar gestured with his free hand.

  Tracy sat. She was running out of things to talk about and sensed, with the cartoon winding down, that she didn’t have much time. The blue and red strobes continued to pulse.

  “Woody Harrelson would be my first choice, but he’s getting too old.”

  “He’d be good,” she agreed. “So what do you say? You ready to walk out of here with me? Live long enough to see your likeness on the big screen?”

  CHAPTER 60

  Johnny Nolasco pulled his Corvette up onto the sidewalk and quickly got out. News vans lined the curb, photographers shooting. Overhead a news helicopter hovered, the thump of the blades near deafening, the spotlight blinding in its intensity. Chatter spilled from police car radios. Nolasco badged one of several officers on crowd control and shouted over the din of the helicopter, “Whose scene is it?”

  The officer pointed to a barrel-chested man barking out orders in the middle of the fray. Nolasco approached and introduced himself.

  “Michael Scruggs,” the man said. “Seattle SWAT.”

  “What’s the situation, Sergeant?”

  “Captain,” Scruggs corrected. “And it’s one of yours, Tracy Crosswhite. She’s got a hostage situation. Man inside the room is holding a woman at knifepoint. She’s told us to stand down.”

  “Get on the radio and tell them to get that news helicopter out of here.”

  “Already have. Story this big, the TV station will just pay the fine. You want to try, feel free to give it a go.”

  “What about HNT?” Nolasco asked, referring to the Hostage Negotiation Team.

  “They just pulled up. Heading toward the door.”

  Nolasco made his way through the crowd to the motel room. He stayed well back, but the room was lit up like daytime. Just inside the door, Tracy Crosswhite sat in a chair.

  “Detective?” he said.

  Tracy did not turn her head. “Yeah, Captain?”

  “What do you got?”

  “I got a cowboy in here.”

  Nolasco heard a second voice, a man, shout, “The Cowboy.”

  “I got the Cowboy,” Tracy said.

  Nolasco felt his stomach drop. “HNT is here.”

  “We’re good,” she said. “We’re just chatting about books and movies.”

  “You need us to send in anything? Bottled water?”

  “Nobody comes in,” the man shouted.

  “I said we’re good, Captain.”

  “Nobody comes in,” Kotar repeated, sitting up and adjusting the knife.

  The woman moaned.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “Take it easy,” Tracy said. “Nobody’s coming in, Nabil. They figure they’ll just starve us into submission.”

  He looked to be calming, though he was sweating profusely. “What’s HNT?”

  “Hostage Negotiation Team.”

  “That’s some serious shit, huh?”

  Tracy looked to the cartoon. She had no idea how much longer the episode would last, but from what she recalled from her childhood and from what she could deduce about the attention span of children, she thought the whole thing was no more than fifteen minutes total.

  Kotar caught her gaze. “Just a few more minutes now,” he said quietly, perhaps sensing the reality of his predicament. “Don’t you have training?” he asked.

  “For this kind of thing? Not really. I’ve done crisis intervention, but it’s not really the same thing.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing a pretty good job.”

  “You know, Nabil, this is one of those things in which the end result really dictates how I did.”

  “I can see that,” he said. Then he got silent again.

  “Why do you tie them up?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Okay. Why dancers?”

  He looked to be contemplating how to answer, or whether to answer at all. Then he said, “She danced.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My mother. She’d leave me alone at night with the cartoons, and if I didn’t behave, didn’t have the apartment clean, she’d beat me with an electrical cord or tie me to a chair.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Kotar rested his head against the wall. His gaze shifted to the curtain. “Someone strangled her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tracy said. “Did they ever catch him?”

  Kotar nodded. “It was one of the guys she brought home.”

  Tracy wondered if maybe Beth Stinson hadn’t been Kotar’s first. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Kotar pressed the knife to the woman’s throat. Tracy’s finger tensed on the trigger, but she made a snap decision not to shoot. Kotar smiled. “Nice self-restraint, Detective.”

  She was struggling to remain outwardly calm. Her heart raced, and she was getting a strong sense that this was not going to end well. She looked again to the television. “Cut the rope, Nabil. Let’s walk out together.”

  Kotar’s gaze also shifted to the TV.

  “This is it,” Kotar said. “This is the end.”

  Porky Pig burst through a paper drum onto the television screen. Kotar stuttered with him. “Ba-dee, ba-dee, ba-dee . . . That’s all, folks.”

  And he raised the knife.

  CHAPTER 61

  Nabil Kotar slashed the rope. The woman’s legs dropped as if spring-loaded and hit the floor with a dull thud. Her head fell forward, dangling like she was a rag doll.

  Tracy eased the tension on the trigger. A few more millimeters and she’d have put a bullet between Kotar’s eyes.

  Kotar rolled the woman away from him. She flopped onto her back, ankles and wrists still bound, coughing and wheezing. Kotar set the knife on the carpet and rested his head against the wall, just beneath a “No Smoking” sign. He looked up at Tracy with tired eyes and gave her a smile.

  Tracy took her first deep breath since she’d entered the room. “I have to cuff you, Nabil.”

  He nodded, the smile turning to a resigned frown. “I know.”

  Tracy walked Kotar to the door, his hands cuffed behind his back. The rain had let up, but the darkened pavement retained a sheen that made the parking lot look like the surface of a body of water.

  “You ever see First Blood?” Kotar asked.

  “Sylvester Stallone, right?” It was one of Kins’s favorite movies.

  “You remember the scene when he walks out with his commander, and all the police cars are there, all the policemen just waiting for a chance to kill him?”

  “I’m not going to let that happen, Nabil,” she said, suddenly worried this was a suicide scene.

  “I was just thinking this is sort of like that.”

  “Everything is going to go just as we talked about.” She shouted out the door. “We’re coming out! I need a clear path to a patrol car with the back door open.” She looked to Kotar. “Anything else, Nabil? You want me to put the hood of your sweatshirt up?”

  He glanced at her, but it was only for a moment before he looked back to the crowd of police officers—uniformed, plainclothes, others dressed in SWAT tactical gear. Kotar grinned. “Are you kidding? I was born to play this scene.”

  Outside, an officer repeated Tracy’s orders. Car engines started, and patrol cars backed up and shot forward, clearing a path across the parking lot to a lone unit, the back door open. Tracy saw SWAT team members lying prone on the second-story landing and the roof, rifles trained on the door. As much as she wanted to believe Nabil Kotar had given up, that he was harmless with his hands cuffed behind his back, a part of her still worried he was living out a movie scene and he didn’t have in mind a thought-provoking ending of dramatic
irony. She saw him thinking about a dark action-adventure conclusion that didn’t end well for either of them.

  “Just like we discussed, okay, Nabil? We take it nice and slow. No sudden movements. Let me lead you. We’ll walk straight to that car, and I’ll help you into the backseat. We good?”

  “Yeah, we’re good,” he said, eyes flicking left and right.

  “Coming out,” Tracy yelled. She held Kotar by the sleeve of his sweatshirt and guided him out the door.

  Nabil took three steps and abruptly stopped. “Wait.”

  Tracy glanced up at the snipers. “No hurry, Nabil. This is your show.”

  “How do I look?”

  “You look fine. You look good.”

  The spotlight from the helicopter found them, and she noticed the drops of perspiration trickling down his face. “Nice and steady now,” she said. They started again, making their way toward the car. She glanced at him to make sure he wasn’t about to panic. Kotar was smiling.

  “Hey, what was that line again I liked so much? The one you said in the room.”

  “None of us is getting out of here alive?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was it.” He stopped just short of the patrol unit and looked out over the crowd. Tracy had no doubt that in his mind he was standing on a stage, looking out at the audience. He projected his voice like an actor in a street performance. “None of us is getting out of here alive,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be today.” Then he turned to her. “How was that?”

  “Nailed it,” Tracy said. “Fade to black.”

  She put her hand on the crown of his head and helped him lower into the backseat. When he’d drawn his legs in, she shut the door. Only then did she feel her body relax, the tension start to dissipate. Only then did she realize the magnitude of the response. The parking lot was filled with SPD patrol units and SWAT vans, along with ambulances and a fire truck. Paramedics were hurrying in and out of the motel room, tending to Raina. Overhead, the first news helicopter was joined by two others and a police helicopter. The media was across the street, lights shining brightly.

  Johnny Nolasco met Tracy at the police car. “What the hell happened? How did you get yourself in this situation?”

  She was in no mood. “By doing my job.”

  “I put you on desk duty.”

  Tracy stepped toward him. “Get out of my way, Captain. I have a suspect to book.”

  “This isn’t over,” Nolasco said.

  They were toe-to-toe, face-to-face. “Yeah,” she said. “It is over. Remember you asked me how I thought it was going to end? Not well for you, Captain.”

  “The evidence I had was solid.”

  “Tell that to David Bankston’s wife and daughter.” She pulled open the passenger door, about to slide in, and saw Izak Casterline standing among the other police officers. Casterline gave her a subtle nod. She returned it, slid in, and closed the door. The driver backed up and pulled toward the exit. From the backseat, Nabil Kotar said, “Hey, Detective?”

  “Yeah, Nabil.”

  “I have the first line of the book. You want to hear it?”

  “Sure, Nabil.”

  “‘The Cowboy had time to kill.’ What do you think?”

  Not anymore, she thought. Thankfully, not anymore. “I think you’ll have plenty of time to work on it.”

  CHAPTER 62

  For days, the capture of Nabil Kotar, the Cowboy, was front-page news, not that Tracy read the stories or watched the reports. As with her ordeal in Cedar Grove, it had been enough that she’d lived it. She had no desire to read about it.

  Dan kept her up-to-date, telling her the substance. Reporters couldn’t get enough of the story. They were writing about Beth Stinson and the investigation that had led to the wrongful conviction of Wayne Gerhardt; the day Gerhardt stood in a King County courtroom and a judge ordered him set free; and the botched search warrant executed on the home of David Bankston.

  Curious about what had motivated Bankston, Tracy had spent an afternoon with Amanda Santos, offering to buy her lunch and give her an apology. She’d been skeptical that a profiler would be of any help, but Santos’s profile of the Cowboy had been close to spot-on.

  They met downtown, at a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant that Tracy and Kins frequented, on Columbia Street beneath the Viaduct. Even dressed down, in jeans and a leather jacket, Santos drew attention. As she sipped green tea from a tiny porcelain cup, she gave her theory on Bankston. “Stalkers want to interact with their love interests. They just don’t necessarily know how. In these types of situations, where the person becomes obsessed not with a person they know, but with a fantasy, they’re often too intimidated to approach the person or to interact with them. To David Bankston, you were more than Tracy Crosswhite. You were the persona portrayed in the news. So he tried to find a way to be a part of that person’s life.”

  “That’s why he had all the newspaper articles and notes on the investigation.”

  Santos lowered her cup to the retro Formica table. In the open and cramped kitchen behind them, a woman barked orders, and pots and pans clanged as steam wafted up into the faces of two cooks moving as if choreographed. “If I had to venture a guess, I’d say he saw the Cowboy as competition for your attention and thought he could get close to you by solving the crime, or at least becoming a part of it. That’s why he went to the crime scenes and stood in the crowd taking pictures. It put him close to you.”

  “So why leave me the noose at the shooting range?”

  “When you didn’t reciprocate his attention, at least the attention he believed he was devoting to you, he became more desperate, and more bold. Again, I would suspect he left the noose intending for you to find his DNA. He did, after all, have police training. He had to know it was a distinct possibility. It was a way of drawing you to him. But the evening he saw you and your boyfriend, his obsession changed. In his mind you’d betrayed him, after everything that he was doing for you. Stalkers are largely an annoyance, until obsessive love becomes obsessive hate.”

  “So he decided to kill me and make it look like I was another of the Cowboy’s victims?”

  “That appears to be the case.”

  “What about the polygraph? How do you explain that?”

  “I think,” she said, “that he was so familiar with all the intimate details of the killings that he had, in effect, convinced himself he knew the women. But don’t quote me on that. This isn’t an exact science, and this kind of speculation is exactly the type of thing that gives us profilers a bad reputation.” Santos smiled and picked up her tea.

  Tracy laughed. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  “Buy me lunch and we’ll call it good.”

  The press had also dug up old articles and the police file on the death of Nabil Kotar’s mother in a skid-row apartment in Boston. The man convicted of killing her, a traveling salesman, had died in prison two years after his sentencing. Oddly, despite Nabil Kotar’s willingness to talk in great detail about the five dancers, he refused to speak of his mother’s death or to admit to killing her. Santos said that in Kotar’s mind, he hadn’t killed his mother, just as he hadn’t killed any of the five women. To him, they’d killed themselves, with the lifestyle choices they’d made. Kotar told Santos that he loved his mother, and he spoke of her with affection, but he also hated the woman who brought men home at night, drunk and smelling of cigarettes. That was the woman he wanted dead, perhaps thinking in some demented way that her death would somehow free his mother.

  There was even a story on Walter Gipson, the hapless teacher Faz called “the unluckiest son of a bitch in the world.” Gipson told a reporter that he finally felt vindicated enough to walk out of his apartment without averting his eyes, but he blamed SPD for the breakup of his family and for otherwise ruining his life. Gipson’s wife had not returned, and his old school district had not reinstated his job.

  “Hell of a price to pay just to get laid,” Kins said.

  Tracy didn’t h
ave a lot of sympathy for anyone who cheated on their spouse. “That’s what you get when you decide to join the idiot club,” she said.

  The story that had not been told was how Tracy Crosswhite ended up in the motel room with Nabil Kotar. The brass had put a gag order on her—not that she had any intention of speaking to the press about it—and for once the story didn’t leak. In a private meeting with Chief Clarridge, she told him she’d never been fully convinced David Bankston was the Cowboy, and that when Izak Casterline brought her his suspicion that a routine traffic stop had not been routine, she agreed to meet him. Turned out, she told Clarridge, Casterline’s suspicion was correct. Clarridge, who was on thin ice, wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth or draw any negative attention to what was now being feted in the media as dogged police work.

  Three weeks after the standoff in the motel room, Tracy waited next door to the SPD press conference room with Sandy Clarridge, Stephen Martinez, Andrew Laub, and Billy Williams. They were all decked out in their dress blues. Johnny Nolasco was not among them. He’d been told by Clarridge to sit this one out. Not that Nolasco had a lot of free time to be attending news conferences, not with OPA looking into the Beth Stinson investigation and rumors circulating that they intended to open other Nolasco and Hattie cases. They were also investigating Nolasco’s ill-fated raid on David Bankston’s home. Tracy had no illusions, however, that she was rid of Johnny Nolasco. The man was like a cat. Not to offend cats everywhere, but she knew he had at least several more lives to torment her.

  Clarridge said, “Did anyone discuss the format with you for this morning, Detective Crosswhite?”

  “Yes, sir. Billy went over it with me.”

  “Stick to the format. Be brief with your answers.”

  Tracy smiled. “That won’t be a problem, sir.”

  Bennett Lee opened the door and leaned in. “We’re ready for you.” Clarridge led the group out. As Tracy walked past, Lee said, “Packed house.”