After several hundred yards, the trail again forked. The Coyote Trail continued to the left, in the direction of the flashing blue light on the phone. They walked on.
The first chorus of thunder struck—a distant thrum to the east. Tracy briefly contemplated going back to the parking lot, waiting out the storm, and calling for a canine unit, but instead she pushed forward. Seconds later the forest sparked, a dazzling flash of light that caused the air to crackle just before thunder detonated. It sounded like the blast of a shotgun. The storm was moving fast.
“That felt close,” Tracy said over the echoing retort.
“Too close,” Pryor said, glancing up.
The blue signal on the phone continued flashing. “We’re almost there. Come on.” Tracy left the main trail for less defined foot trails and climbed another incline, came down the slope, and crossed a footbridge. The trail looped to the south. Between the trees, along the southernmost edge of the park, Tracy could see pitched roofs. She stopped to again consider the blue dot.
“That direction,” Pryor said, pointing.
“There’s a path,” Tracy said, using the beam of her flashlight to highlight an unmarked trail snaking through the underbrush.
Lightning struck again, this time a brilliant spark that lit the area in shades of blue and gray and rippled the air. Almost immediately, thunder exploded, this time loud enough to cause Tracy and Pryor to instinctively duck.
“Shit,” Pryor said.
Tracy thought again about turning back, but the blue dot beckoned, ever closer, as did the thought that Mukherjee’s phone could be low on power and might soon die. Still, she also knew Pryor had kids at home.
“Why don’t you go back to the parking lot,” she said. “I can finish this and we’ll meet there.”
“No,” Pryor said, shaking her head, determined. “Let’s go. We’re almost there.”
“Try to stay off the path,” Tracy said. “Walk in the underbrush.” If there were shoeprints in the path, Tracy knew they could be important.
They slowed their pace, picking each step carefully, shining the light on the bushes and looking for colors that didn’t belong. They were walking toward the houses along the park perimeter. Tracy stopped. According to the app, they were directly on top of the flashing blue light. “It’s here, somewhere,” she said.
They swept their flashlights over the underbrush, walking in a circle, increasing the circumference. The deepening darkness worked against them; Tracy stumbled several times on tree and plant roots. Lightning struck yet again, this time followed by a loud crack and the sound of splintering wood. She looked up in time to see a thin tree shear in two, the top half crashing through the canopy, dismembering limbs of nearby trees as it fell, and hitting the ground with enough force to send tremors through the soles of her feet.
“This is idiotic,” she said. It was something the old Tracy would have done, the Tracy who had no family and nothing to lose. She was also putting Pryor and her family at risk. It was time to leave. “Let’s go back to the parking lot, let the storm pass, and we’ll call for a canine unit.”
But this time Pryor was unwilling to give up. “Try calling the phone,” she said. “Maybe we can hear it.”
It was a smart move. Tracy called the number. They stood very still, listening, trying to hear over the sound of the wind. “You hear anything?” Tracy asked.
“Just the wind,” Pryor said.
The call went to voice mail. Tracy disconnected and tried again. Again, they could not hear the phone ringing.
“Let’s quickly drive a stake into the ground and mark the area with crime scene tape so we can find it if the phone dies, or the app quits working,” Tracy said.
She snapped off a dry branch from a tree and used the knife from her go kit to sharpen one end. Pryor handed her a rock and Tracy pounded the sharp end into the ground, then used the rock and the knife blade to split the top of the stick. She removed a roll of yellow crime scene tape from her bag and forced it into the cut, tying two streamers and giving the plastic a tug to ensure it was tight. When they retreated to the main trail, she’d tie crime scene tape around the trunks of several trees to guide their return—if she could find the main trail. In all her twisting and turning, she could not immediately recall the direction they’d walked.
“Do you remember the direction we came?” she asked Pryor.
Pryor looked around the area. “Didn’t we come from over there?” She pointed toward the incline.
“I think you’re right,” Tracy said.
They walked northeast, side by side, sweeping their flashlights left and right along the brush. Tracy was looking back over her shoulder to determine if she could see the two yellow streamers fluttering in the wind, when Pryor suddenly tugged on her arm, crying out. In the split second it took Tracy to turn back to the trail, Pryor was falling through the brush. Tracy grabbed Pryor’s arm and dropped to the seat of her pants to keep Pryor from falling farther. Pryor had stepped through the brush into a hole, one much larger than a depression.
Tracy held Pryor’s arm as the young officer scrambled out. They fell back onto the brush, catching their breath.
“Are you all right?” Tracy asked.
Pryor nodded. “I think so.” She looked back to the hole. “How deep is it?”
Tracy stood and helped Pryor to her feet. They took small, careful steps, testing the ground with their feet, seeking to determine the circumference of the hole, which was concealed by the foliage. It appeared to be approximately four feet in diameter.
The foreboding feeling returned.
Tracy dropped to her hands and knees at the edge of the hole. Pryor knelt beside her.
“Hold back the plants,” Tracy said.
Pryor pushed back the plants and Tracy directed a beam of light into the dark. The circumference of light centered on the broken body at the bottom of the pit, head contorted to the right, dark hair, splayed like the ribs of a fan, covering much of the young woman’s face.
They’d found Kavita Mukherjee.
Faz stumbled off balance and hit the wall on the other side of the hallway. He’d managed to turn his head enough to see a person emerging from the adjacent apartment door just as three loud shots echoed in the hallway along with three flashes of light. He rebounded off the wall, struggling to recover his balance.
Andrea Gonzalez stood in front of him, her mouth opening and closing, speaking with urgency, though Faz couldn’t hear her. The ringing in his right ear deadened all other sound, and it was as if he was watching a silent movie. Every movement passed as if through a thick, clear fluid. Gonzalez pushed him again, this time farther down the wall, away from the door and the possible line of fire, if additional shooters were inside the apartment.
Her voice came back online. “. . . all right? Are you all right?” she asked over the sound of a woman screaming and a baby wailing, presumably from inside the apartment.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” he heard himself say. From the way Gonzalez winced, he deduced he was shouting.
The body of a Hispanic man lay sprawled on the tile floor, blood saturating a white tank top and already running in rivulets along the cracks and seams. The man’s jeans sagged low on his hips, revealing black underpants. Faz stepped forward to kick the gun away from his hand, but pulled back his foot when he didn’t see a gun. What he saw instead was a cell phone near the man’s right hand. He recognized the face from the DMV photo. Eduardo Felix Lopez.
Gonzalez moved inside the apartment while Faz quickly handcuffed Lopez, as was procedure, and checked for a pulse, not finding one.
He stood and followed Gonzalez inside the apartment. A woman sat slumped in the corner, clutching a wailing child to her chest. When Faz swept his gun right to left, briefly taking aim at the woman, she screamed again, something incomprehensible, and turned her head to the wall.
Gonzalez entered from a room to the right, speaking to the woman in Spanish. “¿Hay alguien más aquí? ¿
Hay alguien más aquí?”
The woman lowered her head against the child.
Faz continued forward, clearing the kitchen, then a bathroom.
When he returned, Gonzalez knelt beside the woman and was pointing to the open door. “Dime tu nombre. Dime tu nombre.”
Faz had a hard time hearing either of them with the child crying and the persistent ringing in his ears, and he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“El hombre en el pasillo, ¿cómo se llama?” Gonzalez said. When the woman did not answer, Gonzalez gripped the woman’s shoulder and turned her. “¿Cómo se llama?”
“López,” the woman shouted. “Se llama Eduardo López.”
Gonzalez looked to Faz, then again to the woman. “¿Quién vive en el apartamento del al lado?”
The woman pointed out the door. “El lo hizo. El lo hizo.”
Gonzalez stood, exhaled a held breath, and spoke to Faz. “Like I said, you can prepare for just about anything and still get it wrong. She says Lopez lives next door, in 511, but came over just before we got here.”
Faz turned to the hallway, to Lopez’s twisted body. The voice they’d heard speaking Spanish had been his, maybe on his cell phone. They’d just killed their only potential link to the Monique Rodgers shooting. Worse, Gonzalez appeared to have shot an unarmed man.
CHAPTER 26
Tracy stood beside her truck in the parking lot of the Bridle Trails State Park waiting for what was certain to be a large contingent of police and forensic experts. Though the physical storm might have passed, the police storm was just starting. And jurisdiction would be the first battle.
Though Kavita Mukherjee lived in Seattle and Aditi Banerjee had filled out a missing persons report with the Seattle Police Department, Kavita’s body had been found in Bellevue. Bellevue had its own police force and jurisdiction over the state park and crimes committed therein. Tracy’s only conceivable basis for not surrendering jurisdiction was a lack of information—that is, it remained possible that Kavita had been murdered in Seattle and her body dumped in a Bellevue state park.
That would be for the experts to decide.
One thing was for certain: Tracy wasn’t about to just give up the case—not until they knew, definitively, what had happened. Her captain, however, might think differently, which was why Tracy called in the location of the body to her sergeant, Billy Williams, and brought up the issue of jurisdiction, deciding to tackle that problem head-on. She told Williams she intended to work the crime scene, if in fact it was a crime scene, and asked that a team from the King County Medical Examiner’s Office and from SPD’s CSI unit be dispatched to preserve whatever evidence existed. They could debate jurisdiction later. Billy agreed, but said Tracy would have to fight that battle without him. Williams was on his way to South Park, along with an anticipated throng of brass, and Stuart Funk, the King County Medical Examiner. Faz and Andrea Gonzalez had been involved in a shooting.
After confirming that neither Faz nor Gonzalez had been shot, Tracy told Williams she would meet CSI officers and forensic personnel in the parking lot to give them the lay of the land before leading them to the body.
After disconnecting, Tracy called Kelly Rosa’s cell number. Rosa was a forensic anthropologist for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. She had exhumed Tracy’s sister’s remains from a burial site in Cedar Grove, and was largely considered one of the best forensic examiners in the state, if not the country. Technically, they didn’t need a forensic anthropologist; Rosa’s skill was in the handling of skeletal remains and decomposed bodies, but Tracy trusted Rosa as much as she trusted Stuart Funk. She wanted someone who would tell her what evidence existed and give an opinion on what had happened. The last thing she wanted was somebody indecisive, somebody unwilling to say whether Mukherjee had been killed elsewhere, and her body moved and dumped into the hole. Rosa would have no problem making that call and likely others.
Tracy also called Kaylee Wright. Wright worked out of the Special Operations Section of the King County Sheriff’s Office as a “tracker” or “sign-cutter.” She’d hunted down the bodies Gary Ridgway had dumped during his decades-long murder spree, and she had helped Tracy solve a cold case in Klickitat County in which the victim was a young woman who had been killed forty years earlier. Wright had pieced together what had happened to the woman using photographs of footprints and tire tracks originally taken by a young officer who had found the body in a clearing in the woods.
While Tracy waited in the parking lot for the forensic teams, Katie Pryor remained in the woods. Tracy had directed Pryor to establish a perimeter by stringing yellow crime scene tape around the trunks of trees, then to designate a path, other than the foot trail, to and from the grave. A designated path would hopefully preserve whatever evidence might exist on the foot trail, and the larger trails connected to it—footprints in the dirt, strands of hair or clothing snagged in branches, and broken twigs and trampled leaves. Then again, multiple days of summer weather had no doubt enticed horseback riders, joggers, dog walkers, and berry pickers, who might have already trampled any evidence on the park’s trails, but Tracy couldn’t make that assumption. She needed Wright’s expertise to tell her what was evidence and what wasn’t.
Kins was the first to arrive from his home in Madison Park, just across the 520 bridge. He parked his blue BMW beside Tracy’s truck and got out of the car shaking his head.
“You’re always right, aren’t you?” he said.
She gave that comment some thought. Then she said, “I wish I wasn’t, not in this case.”
Sensing her mood, Kins said, “You all right?” Kins knew the details of what had happened to Tracy’s sister, and how finding the body of another young woman buried in the woods could impact her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just feel helpless, you know.”
“Not your fault.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing wrong with feeling bad,” Kins said. “I’ll quit this job when I stop feeling bad. I’ll know then that I’m dead inside.” He looked around the parking lot. “So, how’d we get here?”
Tracy explained that Pryor had prepared search warrants for Mukherjee’s phone carrier and what she’d learned from Andrei Vilkotski about using Aditi’s shared account to track Mukherjee’s cell phone.
“So if Nolasco asks, you can say Pryor found the body,” Kins said.
“Pryor did find the body,” Tracy said. “She nearly fell into the hole on top of it.”
“Is this a natural hole, or did somebody dig it?” Kins asked.
“I don’t know. I’d guess that it’s not natural but it also doesn’t look like it’s been recently dug. It’s deep. I’d say between six and eight feet, and maybe four feet in circumference. It may have been an old well partially filled in over the years and grown over.”
That caused Kins to ask the obvious next question. “Could she have fallen in, an accident?”
“Could have, but if she did, it raises another question.”
“Why was she here?”
Tracy nodded and pointed. “She grew up in a home close by. She and her best friend lived in houses along that side of the park. It was practically their backyard. But she was estranged from her family and didn’t have a reason to come back here.”
“If someone killed her, Tracy, it’s likely they knew about the hole.”
“I agree.”
“The roommate?”
“Maybe. Maybe a family member—someone who knows the park and the trails. Either that, or she came back to a place she knew and, distraught, killed herself.”
“In the hole? How?” Kins said.
“I don’t know. I’m just throwing out possibilities. That’s why I called Kelly Rosa.”
Kins said, “Any gun?”
“Not that I could see. It could be underneath her, or somewhere in the brush. No sense speculating at this point. We’ll know soon enough too.”
“Jurisdiction is going to be a problem,�
�� Kins said.
“Maybe. She could have been killed and her body dumped here.”
“How likely is that?”
Tracy looked around the empty parking lot. “How’d she get here? Her car isn’t here. It’s parked on a side street close to her apartment. That increases the likelihood that someone killed her someplace else and dumped her body here, which would give us jurisdiction.”
“Is Pryor here?”
“I left her at the site to create a perimeter.”
Kins looked over his shoulder at the formidable forest. “Better her than me.” He zipped closed his jacket. “Did Billy tell you about Faz?”
“Yeah, but not a lot. What the hell happened? Did they have the wrong apartment?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t know. Billy gave me the Reader’s Digest version also. They’ll have all kinds of people out there though, including FIT.”
FIT stood for the Force Investigation Team. SPD had formed the team of six detectives as part of the federally mandated reforms created in response to the Justice Department’s determination that Seattle Police too often resorted to unnecessary force. A federal monitor overseeing those court-ordered reforms had recently applauded the department’s response. This wasn’t going to help.
Nights like this, Tracy wondered if maybe Kins was right. Maybe she should just stay home after her baby was born.
Faz stood in the hallway. Lopez’s body lay beneath a medical examiner’s white sheet, an army-green bag close by to transport the body back to the ME’s offices after Stuart Funk finished his on-scene examination. An EMT kept asking Faz if he was all right, and Faz kept telling him he was fine, though he had a persistent ringing in his ears that sounded like static when a television went off the air—back before cable and twenty-four-hour programming. He also had a headache. Though he maintained to everyone who asked that he was fine, nobody seemed to want to accept that answer, or maybe the EMTs just didn’t have much else to do. They weren’t going to save Lopez. Andrea Gonzalez had seen to that. She’d put three bullets in Lopez’s chest, damn near one on top of the other.
A Steep Price (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 6) Page 16
