Owens, who wore slacks and black dress shoes, stepped lightly around the puddles and joined Tracy at the door. Water dripped from the overhang onto his Gore-Tex jacket. Tracy used a door knocker to rap three solid beats. The door pulled open as if Al Tulowitsky had been standing on the other side, expecting them. The surprised expression on his face refuted that assessment.
“Mr. Tulowitsky,” Tracy said. “We met the other day at IJS’s office.”
“I remember,” Tulowitsky said, clearly confused by her presence. He glanced at Owens. Tracy introduced him.
“I have a few more questions I’m hoping you can answer for me.”
“What kind of questions?” Tulowitsky wore his work uniform—blue pants and a white short-sleeve button-down with the company logo of the energetic man on the breast pocket.
“I just need to nail down a few things for a timeline.” Water continued to drip from the small overhang, and the pine tree shed water like a shower burst with each gust of wind. “We won’t take up much of your time,” she said.
“I have to get to work pretty soon.”
“Just a few minutes,” she said.
Perhaps conceding more to the weather than Tracy’s request, Tulowitsky opened the door and stepped back to allow them entry. They stepped onto a couple of rows of cracked tiles leading to a front room. The shades had been drawn over both windows, giving everything a yellowish tint, and the air held the thick smell of cigarette smoke. After the hellish ride on the ferry, Tracy’s nausea didn’t need much to be reactivated. She quickly felt queasy. Sufficient time in here, and she’d breathe enough secondhand smoke for an entire city. Tulowitsky picked up a remote from a cluttered coffee table and turned off the television. He seemed uncertain about what to do or to say next.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked, then made a face as if he regretted the offer. “I don’t really have much.”
“We’re fine,” Tracy said. She gestured to the living room. “Maybe we could just sit for a minute.”
Tulowitsky sat in a brown leather recliner. The faded color of the chair’s arms, and the pile of newspapers on the floor beside it, indicated the recliner was his preferred seat. An ashtray on a side table overflowed with butts, and the smell of cigarettes intensified. Tracy took shallow breaths to fight off her nausea.
They sat across the coffee table from her on a worn cloth couch. Hot air poured out of the floor vents with enough force to shake the leaves on a fake palm in the corner of the room. “You said you had a question?” Tulowitsky asked.
Tracy read from a blank page in her notepad to give Tulowitsky the impression these were follow-up questions to their prior conversation. “I’ve had a chance to go over the security tape for that evening we talked about. It looks like you arrived at the building at just after 11:00, 11:03 to be precise, and began emptying garbage cans, as you said.”
“That’s what I do first,” Tulowitsky affirmed. He had his hands on the arms of the chair, like a man about to be strapped down for an electrocution.
“Right.” She returned to her notepad. “You left the building again at 11:17.” She glanced up at Tulowitsky. “That was to take out the garbage, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering, did you take the garbage anywhere to be shredded or incinerated when you left?”
“No,” Tulowitsky said. “No, we just drop off the bags before we leave the base.”
“So you just take it out to your truck, grab cleaning supplies and a vacuum, and continue on with your duties.”
“Pretty much,” Tulowitsky said.
“You don’t do anything else at that point, right?”
“Like what?” He gave her an inquisitive stare.
“I mean when you go outside, you don’t fill out paperwork or call in to the office?”
“Oh, uh, no,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“Did you have a cigarette when you went out, Mr. Tulowitsky?”
That question got his attention. Tulowitsky glanced between her and Owens. “What’s that?”
She pointed to the pack of cigarettes on the side table. “When you stepped out to empty the garbage, did you have a cigarette? Is that part of your routine?”
“No,” he said. “There are designated areas for smoking on the base. So . . . no.”
She got a sense he was not being honest. “Is there a designated area near that building?” She was playing a hunch. She doubted Tulowitsky could go long between cigarettes.
“No.” He shifted as if someone had started to apply electrical current to the chair.
“Mr. Tulowitsky, I’m not passing judgment, and I’m not here to create trouble for you, but you left the building and you didn’t return for nine minutes. That’s a long time to just dump the garbage and grab cleaning supplies.”
“I might have been looking for something,” he said quickly.
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a long time now.”
“I understand. But you didn’t recall doing anything other than loading the garbage bag and grabbing supplies. That’s also what you told NCIS.”
“But that doesn’t mean I didn’t.”
“You would have told NCIS if you had, wouldn’t you?”
He paused again. “I don’t know.”
Tulowitsky hadn’t. She had his statement. “Did you see anyone when you went out?”
“Meaning what?”
“Anyone standing by your truck or near the building?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, no.”
She took a different tack. “You shut the door to the building when you go out, right?”
“It shuts automatically,” he said.
Tracy set down her notepad and picked up the log of Social Security numbers entered on the pad that night. “This is a list of people who entered and left the office that evening. It should show you initially logging in at 11:03, and then logging in again when you returned at 11:26, correct?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“How come it doesn’t for that day?” Tracy said.
Tulowitsky didn’t immediately answer. When he did, he said, “What’s that?” He was stalling.
“How come the log for that night shows you arriving at 11:03 but doesn’t show you returning nine minutes after leaving to dump the garbage, at 11:26?”
“You said it did.”
“No. The security tape documents your return at 11:26, but the security door does not.”
Tulowitsky pressed his lips so tight they nearly disappeared altogether. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“Mr. Tulowitsky, did you leave to have a cigarette and prop the door open so you wouldn’t have to log back in nine minutes later?”
Tulowitsky folded his hands in his lap, fidgeting with his thumbs. His lips began to move as if he were craving that cigarette right now. After another beat, he said, “I could get fired.”
Tracy felt a twinge of excitement and had to calm herself. “For having a cigarette?”
“In a non-designated location? Yeah,” he said.
“And you had one that night?”
Another nod.
“Some place out of view?”
“I go around the side of the building,” he said. “Just one cigarette.”
“When you go around the side of the building, can you see the door to get back in?”
“No.”
“And did you prop it open so you could get back inside without using your code and thereby registering how long you’d been out?”
“Yes.”
Tracy glanced at Owens before reengaging Tulowitsky. “Is that something you do every night?”
“You mean have a smoke?”
“And leave the door propped open?”
Again he paused. “Pretty much every night; there might be a night when I don’t.”
“How do you prop the door open?”
“There’s a wood block, a wedge. I jus
t pop it between the door and the jamb. Look, there’s nobody else there that late, not usually anyway, so it’s really not a big deal.”
Only this night there had been, and whoever it had been, Tracy was betting they also knew Tulowitsky’s routine.
They knew it well.
CHAPTER 43
During her three years at Bremerton, Leah Battles had ridden her bike to and from the ferry in some pretty nasty storms, and this storm certainly rivaled, if not surpassed, the worst of them. The wind gusted in sustained bursts, enough to cause Rebecca Stanley’s Chevy TrailBlazer to shudder. Battles hated to consider what that wind would do to a rider on a bike.
Her bike was currently in the back of Stanley’s car.
“Thanks again for the ride,” she said. “This storm is nasty.”
“Not a problem,” Stanley said. The wheels of the car plowed through another puddle, sending up a wall of water outside Battles’s window.
The darkened sky had brought an early dusk that was quickly fading to night. Rain had overwhelmed the gutters, and ponds of water extended well out onto the surface streets. The car’s tires sprayed rooster tails each time it ripped through the puddles.
Battles looked down at the driver’s-side floorboard. “How’s the ankle?”
Stanley had stepped in a calf-deep puddle just outside her door in the parking lot. “Wet and cold,” she said. “Do you mind if we stop at my apartment so it doesn’t feel like I’m sitting the rest of the night with my foot in a bucket of ice?”
Battles smiled. “Sure.”
She touched her side and felt the comforting presence of her Glock just beneath her blueberries.
“How do you feel about The Bulkhead?” Stanley asked.
Bremerton being a Navy town, there was no shortage of bars using Navy terminology. The Bulkhead was in favor because it offered frequent discounts for military personnel, like two-buck beers on Thursday nights and eight-dollar “Bell” hamburgers, which came with french fries and the drink of your choice.
“Sounds good,” Battles said.
“It’s close to my apartment,” Stanley said. “I can quickly change and we can grab that drink and maybe a bite to eat and still get you back to the ferry at a reasonable hour. You think they’ll continue running in this weather?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time they cancelled them,” Battles said. “I have the app and the number for the ferry system on speed dial. I can call for an update if the weather doesn’t clear. I heard on the radio this was supposed to blow through later this evening.”
“Hopefully we don’t lose power.”
“Hopefully,” Battles said.
Stanley lived east of the base, across the Manette Bridge, which spanned the Port Washington Narrows. They drove the road that hugged the coastline to an apartment complex designated The Crow’s Nest, likely because there wasn’t anything else around the two multistory apartment buildings situated directly across the Narrows from Naval Base Kitsap.
“Do you sometimes go home and feel as though you never left?” Battles asked, admiring the view.
“I’ve always been partial to water,” Stanley said. “I have a killer view off my deck. Come up and see.”
Battles pushed out of the car. She felt the wind gusting at her back and gripped the bill of her hat to avoid having to chase it across the lawn. She followed Stanley through a glass door into a small entry with mailboxes and an elevator. Stanley retrieved her mail and they took the elevator to the top floor. Stanley’s apartment was three doors to the right of the elevator. She unlocked the dead bolt and doorknob and stepped inside, turning on lights. Battles followed her inside and shut the door.
Battles considered an apartment to be an extension of the person. Hers was somewhat cluttered, with an ever-present easel holding her latest painting, and a chessboard on the kitchen table with a game in progress. She played against herself, making a move in the morning before she left for work and a countermove for the opponent when she returned home. Her longest game to date was three weeks.
Stanley tossed her keys on the Formica counter separating the kitchen from the living room. “Make yourself at home. I’ll just be a minute.” She disappeared down a hallway.
Battles walked farther into the front room, which was neat, but sparsely furnished. A sliding glass door led to a narrow balcony that barely fit a small metal table and two matching chairs, but which did have a killer view looking across the water to the lights of the shipyard.
She stepped to the mantel. Framed photographs displayed Stanley with a dark-haired man and a small girl, perhaps two or three. Stanley kept no such photographs in her office, and she’d never mentioned being married, or being a mother, or from the looks of the apartment, being divorced. Things were starting to add up.
Battles heard Stanley returning and reached for the Glock, pulling it from her holster and holding it at her side.
“Told you it was a hell of a view,” Stanley said.
Battles turned and raised the Glock. “Actually, you said it was a killer view.”
Tracy now knew how someone had entered the DSO building without having to punch in a Social Security code and without having been seen. Whoever that person was, they’d simply waited for Al Tulowitsky to take his regular, prolonged cigarette break, and prop the door open with the wooden wedge. It confirmed that the convenience store videotape had not been misplaced. It had been an intentional act, stolen by someone who knew Tulowitsky’s routine. That meant, in all probability, that the person was someone who worked within the building. Battles and Cho were Tracy’s first choices. Stanley also could not be dismissed.
All three knew where the evidence room was located, as well as the significance of the videotape. It provided a direct link to what Laszlo Trejo had been doing in Seattle the night he’d run down D’Andre Miller, which meant he’d likely been delivering heroin smuggled on and off his last naval ship.
“You think Tulowitsky could have been in on it?” Owens asked. They were back in his car on their way to meet his contact at the naval base.
Tracy had considered that same question, whether Tulowitsky could have left the door open on purpose.
“No,” she said. “Whoever snuck in went to great lengths to remain hidden from Tulowitsky. They wouldn’t have bothered if he’d somehow been involved. I’m betting that same person also killed Trejo to prevent him from testifying, if it came to that, which makes involving Tulowitsky too big a risk.”
Owens and Tracy presented credentials to the MAs manning the Charleston Gate, then waited until the friend Owens had called to gain admission met them and escorted them to the security office on the first floor of the DSO building.
David Bakhtiari’s office was loaded with computers, video screens, and blinking lights. Bakhtiari wore the same blue-and-gray uniform as everyone else on base, but that was where the similarities ended. He was as big as Del, and bordering on 300 pounds. He wasn’t fat, far from it. He looked like an NFL offensive lineman. After introductions, Owens’s friend remained outside the office.
“You want the disc for the night of March 18,” Bakhtiari said. It wasn’t a question. “I copied that tape once, for OIC Stanley.”
“I understand,” Tracy said. “We’d like to see the original.”
Bakhtiari’s eyes narrowed with interest. He was clearly wondering why, and likely processing the possible answers. “You have a subpoena, I assume.” He said it in a tone that sounded like a challenge, but more likely was intended to cover his ass in case anyone ever asked.
Tracy handed him the subpoena. Bakhtiari read through it in some detail. After a minute or two he nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll burn you a copy. Where should I send it?”
“We’d like to see the tape now,” Owens said. He reached into his coat pocket and handed Bakhtiari a business card. “After we see it, you can forward a copy to this address, but we’d like to see it now.”
Bakhtiari let out a held breath and quickly checked his watch. Trac
y wondered if he was covering for someone.
“You need to be somewhere?” Owens asked, letting a hint of sarcasm creep into his tone.
“My daughter’s birthday is today.” Bakhtiari shrugged. “We’re supposed to be having a party in the backyard, but with this weather . . . My wife is a bit stressed-out. She asked that I get home as soon as possible.”
Tracy fought the urge to smile; nothing could take down a man, even a very large man, faster than his wife’s irritation. He’d stand up to other men, even go to blows to save his ego, but when the wife asked for something, he shuddered at the thought of not delivering.
“I have the time stamp with the time we’re interested in,” Tracy said. She reached into her pocket for the piece of paper on which Dan had scribbled the times that the door to the office appeared to have moved. “We just want to see a particular section of the tape. After we do, you can mail Detective Owens a copy and we’ll be out of your hair in time for you to get home and celebrate your daughter’s birthday.”
Bakhtiari seemed to exhale in relief. “I appreciate that. What sections?”
Tracy handed him the slip of paper. He studied it, then said in a brighter tone, “Okay. This makes it easy.”
They followed Bakhtiari to a computer terminal, standing behind him as he sat and pecked in commands. Within minutes he’d pulled up a familiar lobby. Bakhtiari pointed to the first series of numbers on the scrap of paper he’d set on the desk and confirmed it as the first location.
Tracy said, “But take it back thirty seconds earlier.”
Close to Home (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 5) Page 30
