“Did she say what she did for a living?”
“No,” the woman said.
“You have any other conversations with her?” Tracy asked.
“Not really. Honestly, I got the impression she didn’t want to be bothered.”
“Why do you say that?” Tracy asked.
“She wasn’t unfriendly but . . . mostly she kept to herself. And when I did see her go out, she wore those big sunglasses and ball caps. So, was she hiding from someone?”
Tracy and Kins didn’t answer.
“She was hiding from someone,” the manager said.
She stopped outside a red door with a gold “8D.” Kins set his go bag on the landing—a black-and-yellow tool bag he’d bought at some big-box store because he liked all the pouches and pockets. Typical guy. He removed two pairs of latex gloves and handed a pair to Tracy. If they stepped in and saw blood spatter on the wall or a large stain on the carpet, they’d step out and wait for the CSI unit to process the room.
“Anyone been in here since her?” Tracy asked.
“No. It’s still rented to her.”
The manager used the master key to open the door, then stepped aside.
“We’ll need you to wait outside,” Tracy said. The woman stepped back.
Tracy had more than her fair share of experience with motel rooms recently. The Cowboy had killed his victims in cheap motel rooms along the Aurora strip. They could be difficult to process. The latent-fingerprint examiners could find enough prints to start a small village, especially if Lynn Hoff had been a prostitute. When Tracy crossed the threshold she paused, surprised to find the interior so neat and clean. Perhaps too clean.
“Shot to the back of the head would be messy,” Kins whispered to Tracy, reading her thoughts and keeping his voice low. He moved farther in, looking about. “I doubt she was killed here, but I guess we’ll find out.”
An inventory of the refrigerator included a Styrofoam box containing a half-eaten spring roll and leftover pad Thai, but no indication of the restaurant. Tracy also found a half-full pint of 1 percent milk, which, from the smell of it, had soured, a loaf of wheat bread showing the first signs of mold, and a block of cheddar cheese. A half-finished bottle of chardonnay was in the door tray.
In the bedroom closet, Tracy found a couple of blouses, a jacket, shorts, blue jeans, a pair of tennis shoes, ankle boots, and flip-flops. She moved to the bathroom. On the counter she noted a makeup kit, but with just the bare essentials. The shower was clean, with a small bottle of shampoo and conditioner.
“Sparse,” Kins said, sticking his head into the bathroom.
“Definitely,” Tracy said.
She went back into the kitchen, opening up the cabinet under the sink and pulling out the garbage pail. It had not been emptied. She rummaged through it and found a wadded-up piece of paper—a withdrawal slip from a bank, Emerald Credit Union. The address was also Renton, Washington. “Might have found her bank,” Tracy said.
Kins walked over and took a look, then considered the rest of the apartment. “No wallet. No cell phone. No laptop.”
“Lynn Hoff did not want someone to find her,” Tracy said.
“But someone did,” Kins said.
Faz and Del rotated their chairs from their desks as Tracy and Kins entered the bull pen. The desks were positioned in the four corners, a worktable in the center. Tracy couldn’t help but compare them to Rex and Sherlock, Dan’s 140-pound Rhodesians, who reacted just as quickly every time Tracy walked in the door. The last time she’d seen the dogs had been early that morning. Dan, a lawyer, had left before her, flying to Los Angeles to argue in court against a motion to set aside a verdict in his client’s favor. Rex hadn’t even bothered to raise his head from his dog bed as Tracy departed the apartment. Only Sherlock had been chivalrous enough to walk Tracy to the door. For that gesture, he’d gotten to enjoy a synthetic dog bone.
“NCIC and WCIC came up negative for Lynn Hoff,” Faz said.
“Seriously?” Kins said, disbelieving. He’d been even more certain that Hoff had been a prostitute after learning she’d been paying cash for her reconstructive surgery and rent at the motel.
“Not even a parking ticket,” Del said.
“What about the Department of Licensing?” Tracy asked.
“More interesting,” Del said. He swiveled his chair and retrieved an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper from his desk, handing it to Tracy. “Meet Lynn Hoff. I’ve asked for a copy of the actual photograph.”
Plain looking, Lynn Hoff, if that was her name—Tracy now had doubts—had straight brown hair parted on the side that extended past her shoulders. She wore heavy black-framed glasses. The license indicated she was five foot six and 135 pounds with brown eyes, which corresponded with Funk’s autopsy findings.
“The DOL issued the license March 2016 but has no prior licenses issued in that name,” Del said.
“She’s twenty-three,” Tracy said, looking at Kins. “Might not be her real name.”
Tracy and Kins had come to that conclusion on the drive back from the motel, after they’d turned jurisdiction of the room over to the CSI sergeant.
“Likely an alias,” Faz said. He swiveled his chair to follow Tracy as she crossed the bull pen to her cubicle and deposited her purse in her locker. “I ran a LexisNexis search on her and came up with bubkes. No past employers, no former addresses. I also ran her name through Social Security. The number appears legit but no employment. She’s a ghost,” Faz said.
“A ghost on the run,” Kins said. “She had reconstructive surgery on her face and afterward insisted on getting back all the photographs. She didn’t provide any personal information or family history, and she paid cash for a motel room. It also looks like someone cleaned it. No cell phone. No wallet. No computer or laptops.”
Tracy handed Faz a copy of the receipt from the bank she’d found in the garbage. “Found this in the trash, though. Can you log it in and run it down for me?”
“No problem,” Faz said.
The yellow light on Tracy’s phone blinked, indicating she had a voice mail message—or several dozen. One or two were likely from her favorite muckraker, Maria Vanpelt. Bennett Lee, SPD’s public information officer, had also likely called, in part because Vanpelt had called him. Lee would be seeking a statement for the media. It was unlikely Nolasco had left a message. He liked to be an ass in person.
“How does someone exist today without debit or credit cards?” Del said, facing the interior of the A Team’s shared workspace.
“Prepaid credit cards and burner cell phones,” Faz said. “You use them and throw them away.”
Faz had spent four years working with the fraud unit before homicide. Though he and Del went out of their way to keep things in the section loose, they were far more than just comic relief. Promoted to homicide the same year, twenty-one years ago, they had worked as partners for seventeen and had solved every homicide put before them. Yeah, they played two Italian gumbas, but Faz also had college degrees in accounting and finance, and Del had graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in political science. Over lunch one afternoon, Faz had told Tracy he’d been headed to grad school to get his master’s in tax, but needed to make some money to pay down his student loans. An uncle secured a summer internship for him at the Elizabeth Police Department in New Jersey, and Faz found his calling—much to his mother’s disappointment.
“But you said you didn’t find any prepaid credit cards or cell phone,” Del said to Tracy and Kins.
“Didn’t even find a wallet,” Kins said. “She paid cash for the surgery and a month’s rent. Close to seven grand.”
“Where’s she getting that kind of money?” Del asked.
“Don’t know yet.”
“Someone could have whacked her and cleaned up the motel room,” Faz said. “They certainly didn’t intend for her body to ever be found.”
“Whacked her?” Del said to Kins while jabbing a thumb toward Faz. “He thinks he’
s Michael Corleone.”
Tracy turned to Kins. “What about running her photograph through facial recognition software, see if we find a license under a different name?”
“How’re you going to get the DOL to authorize that?” Kins said.
After a $1.6 million investment, SPD had the facial recognition software and staff trained to use it, but the Seattle City Council had only approved its use to go through jail-booking mug shots. The DOL had the most comprehensive database of photographs of Washington residents, but the powers that be would not allow SPD to use that database to hunt down criminals because an ACLU lawyer had argued it could invade John Q. Citizen’s personal privacy rights. Yeah, better to let the criminal kill John Q. Citizen than learn how tall he was, or how overweight. And God forbid they determine the identity of a dead person so they could advise their next of kin.
“Maybe they’ll make an exception,” Tracy said. “She’s dead.”
“A government bureaucrat willing to think outside the box for the greater cause,” Del said. “Good luck with that! While you’re waiting for them to say no, I’ll do things the old-fashioned way and take a look through the missing persons database.”
“Let’s at least take the photo back to the condominiums and show it around the marinas,” Tracy said.
“We can do that,” Faz said.
“CSI is processing the motel room, so there could be another list of names to go through when we get the report from Latents,” Tracy said, growing more frustrated. “Screw this. I’m going to ask Nolasco to push the DOL on the facial recognition. The woman is dead. Whose privacy are we invading?”
“Can I get an amen?” Faz said, shaking his hands in the air.
Del obliged him without looking up.
“You want me to come with?” Kins asked.
Tracy only briefly considered his offer. If Nolasco was going to turn her down, it wouldn’t matter if Kins was with her or not. Kins’s offer had more to do with chivalry, like Sherlock walking her to the door in the morning. Tracy and Nolasco’s volatile history dated to the police academy, when she’d stood up for a female recruit during a pat-down demonstration. Nolasco had ended up with a broken nose and singing soprano from a well-placed elbow and knee. More recently, Tracy had inadvertently exposed Nolasco and his former homicide partner, Floyd Hattie, for their somewhat questionable investigation techniques when she discovered one of their cold cases in her search for other possible victims of the Cowboy. That had sparked a full-blown investigation by the Office of Professional Accountability. Hattie, long retired, fell on his sword, and Nolasco, snake that he was, had managed to slither away with only a written reprimand.
“No,” she said. “If he’s going to turn me down, it won’t matter whether you’re there to see him do it or not.”
“Maybe we get lucky and somebody recognizes her,” Kins said. “She had to come from somewhere, right?”
“Unless she hatched,” Faz said.
Tracy left the bull pen and walked the hallway between the inner offices and the outer glass walls that provided glimpses of Elliott Bay between the high-rise buildings. A haze hovered over Seattle and a thin red line extended across the horizon. Smog. It seemed as unfathomable as a drought in the Emerald City, but there it hung, where it couldn’t be ignored. She stepped into Nolasco’s office with a short rap on his open door.
The captain sat at his desk, talking on the phone. He didn’t wave her in. He didn’t even acknowledge her. He just kept her standing in the doorway, like smog on his horizon. Nolasco said something about having the best outfield with both Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, and she deduced that he was discussing his fantasy baseball team. Fantasy football, March Madness, fantasy baseball—Nolasco played them all. Divorced twice, how else was he going to spend his time? God forbid he should let the murder of a young woman interrupt his make-believe life.
While waiting, Tracy checked her messages on her cell phone. Dan had texted to let her know he’d arrived at LAX and would be home by six. Tracy had never had anyone check in with her just to check in, and it felt comforting to know that Dan cared enough to do so. In the two years since they’d reconnected, Dan—a childhood friend—had never made her feel like an afterthought. She was always on his radar. She had typed a partial response that she would be late getting home when she heard Nolasco say, “Gotta go.” He hung up his phone and said, “What is it?” presumably to Tracy. She didn’t immediately acknowledge him. Instead, she finished texting Dan.
“Hey, I got things to do,” Nolasco said.
Tracy lowered her phone and stepped into the office. “Need to talk to you about the woman in the crab pot.”
Nolasco’s brow furrowed. “We got an ID?”
“We do and we don’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have a name, Lynn Hoff, but we think it’s an alias. We think she’s a ghost. We’re not finding anything on her in any of the systems. Kins and I took a drive out to her last known address—a motel in Kent. She was either getting ready to run or already on the run. We think someone cleaned up the place. No wallet. No cell. No computer.”
“So she was into something illegal.”
“Don’t know.”
Nolasco scowled. “How else would you explain it?”
“I can’t yet,” she said.
He leaned back from his desk. “Sometimes things are as they appear, and it appears she was either a hooker, a druggie, or had pissed off the wrong people.”
“Initial autopsy examination doesn’t indicate druggie, and why would someone go to the effort to stuff a hooker or druggie in a crab pot and dump her in Puget Sound?”
“Don’t get all crusader on me, Crosswhite. We get Jane Does all the time.”
“Not in crab pots.”
“Like I said, sounds like she pissed off the wrong people. She doesn’t come up in missing persons or nobody comes to identify her, the city will cremate her and six months from now she’ll get a decent burial out at Olivet. We have more pressing matters.”
Like fantasy baseball? Tracy wanted to say but refrained. “Fingerprints didn’t come up in the system,” she said, further evidence Lynn Hoff wasn’t a hooker or a druggie.
“Run her through missing persons. I’m betting she shows up.”
“Del’s doing it now. She also had surgery to alter her appearance.”
“A lot of women do. It’s called vanity.”
“Men too,” Tracy said. Rumor had it Nolasco’s two-week vacation to Maui had actually been a trip to a plastic surgeon. He had the wide-eyed look of the perpetually surprised. “This wasn’t cosmetic. This was reconstruction. She was changing her appearance.”
“How do you know that?”
“Funk found implants. That’s how we got a name. Her doctor said she provided little in the way of personal information and no family history, but she insisted that she get back all the before and after photographs. Del ran her through DOL and came up with a photograph, but no prior licenses, which seems odd given she’s twenty-three. I want to use the facial recognition software on DOL’s database and see if we can find any other matches. I need you to make it happen.”
Nolasco shook his head. “DOL won’t do it.”
“I know that’s the party line, but I’m hoping you can convince them. The woman is dead. It’s not like we’re invading her privacy.”
“ACLU says we can’t use it unless we suspect criminal activity.”
“We do suspect criminal activity. Someone killed her and stuffed her in a crab pot.”
“Let’s wait and see what Del finds before we go running off spending the budget.”
“Del’s not going to find her in missing persons. She wasn’t missing. She was hiding.”
“From who?”
“Whoever killed her.”
“Send the photo to vice. Have them show it around downtown and see if anyone on the street recognizes her. Sometimes good police work is about pounding the pavement, not just the
keyboards.”
Tracy bit her tongue. “Thank you, Captain.” She turned for the door, got an idea, and turned back. “By the way, I heard Trout has a bad hamstring that could bother him most of the year.”
Nolasco looked up, initially puzzled by her comment and clearly not expecting it. Then his perpetually wide eyes widened further. “What would you know about it?”
“Me? Nothing. But Dan knows a guy on the Angels’ medical staff.”
As Tracy departed, Nolasco picked up his desk phone. She hoped Mike Trout hit three home runs that night.
Tracy took Nolasco’s advice and gave Billy Williams a copy of Lynn Hoff’s photograph to give to the sergeant in vice. She asked that patrol officers show it around the city’s well-known prostitution areas. She didn’t do it because she thought it was a good idea, or because she thought it would yield results. She did it so she could tell Nolasco she’d done as he’d suggested, and he’d been wrong. Lynn Hoff might have been doing something illegal, but Tracy was convinced Hoff wasn’t a hooker or a druggie, and she wasn’t homeless, not if she was spending that much money to change her appearance and paying rent up front.
She’d been on the run.
Tracy left the office at just after nine, which was well past when her shift ordinarily ended, but early for the first forty-eight hours working a murder. It would take Del time to go through missing persons. Funk wouldn’t have the toxicology report for a couple weeks, and DNA analysis would take almost as long. They didn’t find Hoff’s fingerprints in AFIS, and Tracy doubted her DNA would be in CODIS.
She drove home. The sight of Dan’s Suburban parked in front of the gated courtyard brought a smile to her face, the way the sight of his bike lying on its side in her parents’ front yard used to make her smile when she was twelve. She hadn’t been in love with him then, far from it, but Dan had always been fun to have around.
They’d reconnected in Cedar Grove, when hunters discovered Sarah’s remains in a shallow grave and Tracy went home to lay her only sister to rest, and to pursue her killer. Dan attended the funeral service. They’d been dating since, though they saw each other more now that he had moved from the North Cascades to a five-acre farm in Redmond. So far, the extra time together had not diminished her romantic feelings for him—or his for her. She’d thought of marriage, though neither had broached that topic. Each had been married and divorced, and neither appeared in a rush to make things official. Dan had recently hit several large jury verdicts, including the recent verdict against the Los Angeles company, and he was not in a hurry to get back into any prolonged litigation. Instead, he’d used his free time to remodel the house on the farm—work he enjoyed and did well. He’d remodeled his parents’ entire home in Cedar Grove. Dan would work on the remodel during the day, then drive out to West Seattle to cook her dinner and spend the night. He was the better cook, and as crazy as it sounded for a woman who carried a Glock .40 and could shoot faster and more accurately than any officer on the force, Tracy slept better with Dan and the two dogs in the house.
The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4) Page 5