“Angel?”
“Her stage name. The dancers all have stage names. Look, Detectives, I’m running legitimate gentlemen’s clubs. We don’t condone any extracurricular stuff in the club. I have no control over what the girls do after they leave, so if she was giving some guy a blow job in the parking lot, it’s not my problem.”
“Did you see Angela Schreiber giving someone a blow job in the parking lot last night?” Tracy asked.
“No, I was just . . . Look, I don’t remember even seeing her last night.”
“But you were at the club?”
“Yeah, I was there. My club.”
“And you don’t recall seeing Angela Schreiber all night?”
Nash shook his head. “I’m mostly up front working the booth or in my office in back. Like I said, I don’t pay much attention to the dancers.”
“Independent contractors,” Tracy said.
“What?”
“Did you see anyone paying attention to Angela Schreiber last night?”
Nash shrugged. “No. But it wouldn’t be unusual. I mean, that is how they make their money. They get a guy interested, ask if he wants a lap dance or a private show. Making men pay attention is what they do.”
“Who else pays attention to the dancers and customers?”
“Floor manager.”
“What’s his name?”
“Why do you need that? What did Angel do?”
“She died,” Kins said.
Nash looked to Tracy, then to Kins. “Do I need my lawyer here?”
“Why don’t we start with the name of your floor manager,” Kins said.
“Nabil.”
“That a first or last name?” Kins took out a small spiral notebook and scribbled the name.
“First. Last name is Kotar.” Nash spelled both names. “I think he’s Egyptian or something. How did she die?”
“Someone killed her,” Tracy said.
“You have an address or phone number for Nabil?” Kins asked.
“I’ll have to ask my director of human resources,” Nash said. He looked to Tracy. “Killed how?”
“We’re going to need the name of every employee and independent contractor working last night.” Kins held out a business card.
Nash hesitated, took the card, and set it on the desk. “So how did she die?”
“That’s still under investigation,” Tracy said.
“When can you get us that information?” Kins said.
“But she was murdered, right? I mean that’s why you’re here.”
“What about security cameras at the club?” Kins asked.
“Yeah. One mounted in the front office and two covering the exterior of the building and parking lot.”
“What about the dance floor?” Tracy said.
Nash shook his head.
“You don’t have a camera on the dance floor?”
“No. We want our customers to feel comfortable.”
“Having sex with the independent contractors?” Tracy asked.
“I told you that’s not allowed.”
“But it does happen—that’s why you asked if Angel was giving some guy a blow job in the parking lot.”
“I said a parking lot. I didn’t mean our parking lot. Look, I’m not at every club twenty-four–seven. All I can say is it isn’t supposed to happen. We find anyone engaging in that sort of activity, we kick them out and fire the dancer.”
“Independent contractor,” Tracy said.
“Look, Detective, you get a few peep-show freaks, but they learn pretty quick that isn’t the kind of club we’re running.”
Tracy was enjoying getting under Nash’s skin. “What kind are you running?”
“I told you that already. It’s a gentlemen’s club. They’re big in the South. Guys can relax, have a drink, and watch some beautiful women dance.”
“Do you have regulars?”
“Of course. We get some of the athletes coming through—mostly the baseball guys in for a series. But our bread and butter is the business suits downtown. You’d be surprised who shows up.”
“I doubt it,” Tracy said. “We’ll need the names of regulars.”
“I don’t keep a list of our customers.”
“You have an e-mail list, newsletter, anything like that?” she asked.
“Nah, word of mouth is our best advertising.”
“What about a website?”
“Sure.”
“What’s the website for?”
“Advertising. And the men can go online and reserve a lap dance with their favorite dancer.”
“We’ll need that list,” Kins said.
“I’m going to have to talk to my attorney. Don’t you need a warrant?”
Tracy handed Nash a card. “I can get a search warrant by the time we’re finished talking, or you can agree to cooperate in a murder investigation. What time did you close last night?”
Nash looked like his headache was back. He considered Tracy’s card for a moment. Then he said, “Two. It’s a city ordinance.”
“Do the dancers leave right away?”
“No reason for them to stick around.”
“Did you see Angela Schreiber leave?”
“No.”
“How about you?” Kins asked. “What time did you leave the club?”
“I counted the registers and prepared the deposits. I’d say I got out of there around two thirty, two forty-five.”
“Where’d you go?” Tracy asked.
“Why are you asking me that?”
Tracy didn’t answer. Neither did Kins. Silence could be unnerving.
“I came home and went to bed.”
“Anyone that can verify that?”
“My wife.”
Tracy gave Kins a look to continue without her and stepped to the glass trophy cases.
“Are the cameras on a loop?” Kins asked.
Nash kept an eye on Tracy. “I think it’s twenty-four hours,” he said.
“We’re going to need the tapes from last night. Make a call and make sure they’re not erased. You said the cameras cover the parking lot. Do the dancers park in the lot?”
“At that club they do, yeah.”
Tracy considered a framed photograph. The shrine wasn’t just about football. Nash sat atop a horse, a mustang from the look of it. He wore a felt cowboy hat pushed back off his forehead, a collared denim shirt, and blue jeans over cowboy boots. A stalk of hay protruded from between his front teeth. His hands rested atop a saddle horn, from which hung a coil of rope.
Tracy turned. “Do you ride?”
Nash, who had started tossing the football again, caught it and said, “Yeah. My dad owned a cattle ranch outside Laredo. My brothers and I worked it growing up. We sold it after he died.”
Which explained the likely source of the funds Nash used to bankroll an expensive house with a shrine devoted to himself, and a string of strip clubs. “You and your brothers ever do any competitive roping?”
“Some.”
“You any good?”
“I could hold my own.”
“Three-strand?”
“What’s that?”
“You prefer three-strand or five?”
Nash tossed the football again. “Whatever. I didn’t pay much attention to that.”
“We’ll send someone by the club later today,” Kins said, “to get the surveillance tapes and the names of the people working last night.”
“I’m going to have to consult my lawyer,” Nash said. “This is a disruption to my business.”
If she’d been carrying a Taser, Tracy might have used it. She and Kins started for the door. Kins turned back and held up his hands. Nash threw him a tight spiral. “Maybe you should have played quarterback,” Kins said, returning the toss.
“Nah,” Nash said. “Quarterbacks take a beating. I like hitting people.”
CHAPTER 8
Tracy sat back from her computer when Kins handed her a fresh cup of coffee.
<
br /> “That the interview?” Kins asked.
Tracy looked at the screen. “Is ‘shithead’ one word or two?”
“In his case I don’t think spelling matters. Did you make a note of which hand he used to throw the football?”
“Could it be that easy?”
Darrell Nash had tossed Kins the football with his left hand. An expert in the Hansen case said the rope was three-strand polypropylene with a Z, or a “right” twist, and that the knot had been tied by someone left-handed. Polypropylene stretched less than natural fiber and slid more freely through the knot to tighten a noose. Unfortunately, it was also generic and could be bought at any hardware, marine, or big-box store.
“The rope on the saddle horn in the photograph was a five-strand,” Tracy said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning it’s only used by experienced ropers. Nash could be smarter than he looks and could have played dumb when I asked him about it, but I don’t think he knew the difference. I don’t think he’s a cowboy.”
“Maybe not,” Kins said, “but he’s still at the top of the shithead list.”
CHAPTER 9
Tracy and Kins spent much of the rest of the day looking into Hansen’s and Schreiber’s backgrounds to determine what, if anything, the two women had in common, other than the obvious. When CSI e-mailed its initial fingerprint report of Schreiber’s motel room, it was as bad as Tracy and Kins had predicted. They had processed more than three dozen prints and had to call in examiners from SPD’s Latent Print Unit to help individually compare each print with possible matches generated by the King County Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Referred to as “AFIS,” the system stored hundreds of thousands of fingerprints, from people charged and convicted of crimes, people seeking gun permits, federal workers, military personnel, and certain professionals who worked with children.
Vic Fazzio and Delmo Castigliano—the self-proclaimed “Italian Dynamic Duo” of the Violent Crimes Section’s five-detective A Team—walked into the bull pen looking spent. As the “next up” homicide team, they had been responsible for canvassing the crime scene—gathering witness statements from the motel owner, guests, and the businesses across the street.
“Nothing, Professor. Nobody saw nobody.” Faz topped 250 pounds and favored slacks and loose-fitting bowling shirts that somehow seemed to accentuate his New Jersey accent. Del was bigger, with a face he was fond of saying was one “only a mother could love.”
Tracy handed Faz half of the list generated by the Latent Print Unit. “Sorry to do this to you.”
“The wife made meatballs,” Faz said, sounding seriously disappointed.
“So you have a meatball sandwich to look forward to tomorrow,” Del said, taking their half of the list.
Tracy and Kins had checked off two names before leaving the Justice Center—two druggies dead more than a month. They’d quickly eliminated two more when the men didn’t deny having been in that motel room, just not the previous night, or previous week for that matter, and each could account for his whereabouts.
“Apparently, the staff is not big on dusting,” Kins said.
Sitting in the passenger seat of the Ford they’d pulled from the motor pool, Tracy held up the driver’s license photograph of the next positive hit on the list. “Walter Gipson,” she said. Gipson’s photo revealed a man with narrow-set eyes and a hairline receding in a horseshoe pattern, likely the reason he’d cut what remained nub-short.
“Shaving your head—the balding man’s solution to hair loss,” Kins said, glancing at the photograph from the driver’s seat. “How does that make any sense?”
“Why fight the inevitable, I guess,” Tracy said.
“That’s like complaining you’re getting a gut, so you go on an all-Twinkie diet.”
“Twenty-six-year-old white male, a special-education teacher,” Tracy said.
“And apparently,” Kins said, imitating an English accent, “aficionado of prostitutes and fine motels. Does he have a prior?”
“Nope. He applied for a permit for a semiautomatic handgun,” Tracy said.
Kins glanced across the car. “Always good to know.”
Kins pulled into a spot reserved for visitors to the Willowbrook apartment complex in Redmond as Tracy disconnected her call with the chief dispatcher. She’d provided their location and advised of their intent to speak to a suspect. When she stepped from the car, she noticed the air was heavy, with the earthy smell indicative of an impending downpour.
“Which one?” Kins asked, eyeing the two-story wood-framed buildings, typical of the suburban complexes developed on the Eastside in the 1980s.
“Building E,” Tracy said, pointing. “That one.”
They stepped between covered carports and made their way up a staircase and down the second-story landing. Tracy heard televisions inside the apartments. They stopped outside unit 4, and Kins gave a polite knock. The door emitted a hollow thud and shook in the jamb. “Quality construction,” he said.
A woman inside shouted in Spanish. Kins shrugged. “I flunked Spanish in high school.”
“Knock again,” Tracy said.
Kins did, and they received the same response. “Is she yelling at us or telling someone in the apartment to get the door?” he asked.
“Don’t know. I took French.”
“Use that a lot, do you?”
“Oui. About as much as you use your Spanish.”
Kins reached to knock a third time when the door pulled open. A heavyset Hispanic woman held a young girl wrapped in a canary-yellow bath towel on her hip.
“Sorry,” Tracy said. “You look like you have your hands full.”
When the woman responded with a blank stare, Tracy held up her badge. “Do you speak English?”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Yes.”
Tracy introduced herself and Kins, then said, “We’re looking for Walter Gipson. Is he home?”
“He is not here.” Her accent was thick.
Tracy felt a drop of rain on her neck. “Are you his wife?”
The woman blew a strand of black hair out of her face. “Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“He is working.”
Kins checked his watch. Tracy didn’t need a watch to know it was late for a high school teacher to be teaching. “Where does your husband work?” she asked.
“At the school.”
“Does he always teach this late?”
“Tonight, yes, at the community college.” She looked up at the sky. “Please, my little girl, she is cold.”
“What time do you expect him home?” Tracy asked.
The woman’s gaze drifted past them to the parking lot. A man in a ball cap carrying a backpack on his shoulder stood looking up at them, then veered suddenly toward the carport.
Kins moved to the walkway railing. “Walter Gipson?” he yelled.
The man bolted.
Kins ran for the staircase they’d ascended. Tracy hurried to the staircase at the opposite end of the landing, losing sight of Gipson behind a carport. She descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot. When she reached the carport, she stopped and removed her Glock. Kins was slowed by his bad hip. They stepped around the corner. Tracy crouched to look beneath the cars. Kins moved to the back of the carport and pulled on doors, likely storage units, though most were padlocked shut.
“Hey,” he whispered and held up a black backpack.
Tracy heard what sounded like the rattle of a chain-link fence and hurried across the parking lot. A fence separated the apartment complex from what looked to be an undeveloped piece of property full of thick brush and trees.
“We’re going to need the dogs,” Kins said. “I’ll radio it in and follow the fence line in case he doubles back.”
Tracy found a toehold in the chain link and dropped on the other side. She kicked free of blackberry vines snagging the cuffs of her jeans and pushed through the foliage to a horse trail of matted grass. The tr
ail lead to a grove of trees—Douglas fir, cedars, and maples. The tops swayed in gusts of wind.
“Walter Gipson?” she yelled, wiping rain from her face. “You’re making this more difficult than it needs to be. We just want to talk.”
She looked for movement and unnatural colors in the underbrush, but the fading light and increasing rain made it difficult to see. A hundred yards in, the brush and trees thinned to rolling pasture. In the near distance, horses had lifted their heads, ears perked, watching her. About to walk back out and wait for the dogs, she heard a branch snap behind her. She spun and raised her Glock. Horses crashed through the brush, veering at the last moment, hooves pounding the ground as they sped past her.
Tracy’s heart hammered, and she had to take a moment to catch her breath and realized that the snapping branch had spooked the horses, not the other way around. She looked at the brush the horses had come through and took a blade stance but kept the barrel of the Glock pointed at the ground. “Walter Gipson?”
No answer.
“Mr. Gipson, you need to think of your wife and your daughter. I’m armed, and in about five minutes this place is going to be crawling with dogs and police officers. We don’t want an accident here, Mr. Gipson. We just need to talk. Walter?”
“Okay. Okay.” Gipson stood suddenly from his hiding place.
“Freeze,” Tracy yelled, taking aim. “Do not move! Do not move!”
Gipson continued forward.
“Freeze!” she yelled, louder. “I said, do not move!”
Gipson froze. “Okay. Okay.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Gipson’s hands shook. His arms started to drop.
“Keep your hands up!” she said.
“All right. All right.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“It’s . . . it’s in the apartment.”
“Do you have any weapons on you?”
“No.”
“Just keep your hands where I can see them.” Tracy removed her handcuffs, stepped behind Gipson, and quickly cuffed him.
Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) Page 4
