The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4)

by Robert Dugoni

  After getting off the water, Tracy wanted to drive home and jump in a cold shower, but that would have to wait. She and Kins returned to Police Headquarters downtown and met in a conference room with Faz, Del, and Billy Williams. Faz reported that their initial canvass of the condominium and apartment buildings, as well as the marinas, had failed to produce anything significant.

  “Would be better if we had a photograph,” he said again.

  Tracy had called Funk when she got off the boat. His office had extricated Jane Doe from the pot, but he said it was unlikely they’d get a usable photograph from the autopsy. A sketch artist might be able to fill in the significant blanks where the marine life had fed on the flesh, but at present the only thing that would come from Faz and Del showing Jane Doe’s autopsy picture to tenants in the buildings or boat owners at the marinas would be a lot of vomit.

  CHAPTER 3

  After a long weekend, Tracy met Kins on Monday morning at the Medical Examiner’s Building at Ninth and Jefferson Street, just across from the Harborview Medical Center. The fourteen-story building, all tinted glass and natural lighting, was nothing like the cement tomb where the ME once worked. While the rest of the building had been dressed up, not a lot could be done to make over the processing room where Funk and his team examined and cut open victims’ bodies. Cold and sterile, the room contained stainless steel tables and sinks, with drains and traps illuminated beneath bright lights.

  Jane Doe’s body lay naked on the table closest to the door. A body block beneath her back forced her chest to stick out and her arms to slump away, making it easier for Funk to do his work. Ordinarily, there would have been a body bag, but given the nature of the crime and crime scene, that was not the case.

  At the moment, Jane Doe was less a human being and more a piece of evidence, something to be dissected and processed. The impersonal nature of autopsies remained a stark and harsh reality Tracy had yet to fully accept, even after nine years working violent crimes. It stemmed from the knowledge that her sister’s bones, recovered from a grave in the mountains above her hometown twenty years after Sarah had disappeared, had once been pieced together on a similar table—like a fossil find from an archaeological dig. Tracy had vowed to never forget that the body on the table had once been a living, breathing human being.

  She sat on a rolling stool out of Funk’s way. Kins stood beside her, the two of them watching and listening as Funk dictated each step with practiced precision and documented his findings with extensive photographs. Funk had weighed and measured Jane Doe—she was five foot six, though it was difficult to be precise because the body had been manipulated to fit inside the crab pot, and weighed approximately 135 pounds. He took vaginal and rectal swabs to check for semen. He examined the skin for petechiae—pinpoint, round blood spots indicating asphyxia—though the cause of death was readily apparent. Jane Doe had been shot in the back of the head. The killer had likely used a 9mm handgun—not that the gun mattered at this point. Without the bullet, which had passed through the skull, they would not be able to confirm the particular gun, if they ever found it.

  Funk’s exterior examination revealed no jewelry, though the earlobes had been pierced, further confirming Tracy’s suspicion the killer had stripped the body. Funk found no tattoos or other distinguishing marks, nor did he find track marks or other signs the woman had been a junkie. He’d taken fingerprints to run through the AFIS database, but unless the woman had been convicted of a crime, served in the military, or had been employed in a job requiring workers to be fingerprinted, the system would not provide an identity. He’d also taken blood and saliva samples for DNA analysis, but similarly, unless the woman’s DNA was in the CODIS database, there would be no hit.

  Funk was preparing to x-ray the body.

  “You okay?” Kins asked.

  Tracy looked up at him from her rolling stool. “Huh?”

  “You’ve got that look in your eye . . . And you’re quiet. Too quiet.” After eight years working together, they had become adept at reading the other’s moods. “Don’t make it any more personal than it is, Tracy. This shit is hard enough.”

  “I don’t try to make it personal, Kins.”

  “I know you don’t try,” he said, fully aware of what had happened to her sister, as well as Tracy’s compulsion when it came to killers of young women.

  “But sometimes you can’t change the facts.”

  “No, but you can change how you react to them,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said, not wanting to sound defensive. “I was just wondering who raises the kind of person who would shoot someone in the back of the head and stuff her body in a crab pot like a piece of bait?”

  Kins sighed. They’d had similar conversations. “Think about it from the parents’ perspective. As horrible as it would be to hear this has happened to your child, I also can’t imagine being told I’d raised a child capable of doing something like this.”

  “Seems like it’s getting worse, doesn’t it?” Tracy said. “People have no respect for other people’s boundaries. They think nothing of breaking into someone’s car or home. Did you read the stories last December of people stealing Christmas presents from porches and taking lawn decorations?”

  “I saw that.”

  “Who raises these people to think that’s okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Kins said. “When the economy isn’t good, people get desperate.”

  “That’s a load of crap,” she said. “There are a lot of really poor people out there who would never think to do those kinds of things.” She looked to the body on the table.

  They watched Funk work. “What did you think of Schill?” Kins said.

  “I think Faz and Del are right; I don’t think he’ll be poaching crabs again anytime soon.”

  “I meant about what Del said—about the odds of Schill hooking on the pot.”

  Tracy heard doubt, or at least skepticism, in Kins’s tone. “I don’t think the kid’s capable of something like this.”

  “I’m just saying we don’t rule him out yet.”

  “Okay, we don’t rule him out, but why would he bring the pot in and call 911 if he was somehow involved?”

  Kins shrugged. “He might have gotten cold feet. Maybe he kills her but spooks and can’t go through with it, so he comes up with a different story. ‘I hooked on the pot.’”

  “He seemed genuinely shook up.”

  “Doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “I say we have Del and Faz ask around, find out if any cats have gone missing in the kid’s neighborhood or if he trolls the Internet for those morbid sites about murder.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “It’s happened before,” Kins said.

  “What?”

  “Someone finding a body in a crab pot. Two years ago a fisherman found a skull in a crab pot out on the coast near Westport.”

  “That was the guy’s pot,” Tracy said, recalling the story.

  “Never did find out how the skull got in there though. And then they found that body in the pot down in Pierce County, near Anderson Island.”

  “They didn’t find it. The boyfriend confessed and led them to it.”

  “Exactly,” Kins said.

  “Detectives?” Funk stepped back from the table and lowered his mask. He’d donned full surgical gear, including protective eyeglasses.

  Tracy and Kins raised their surgical masks to cover their mouths and noses, though it did little to block the smell.

  Funk moved to the computer on the nearby table. It showed images of a series of X-rays of the woman’s body. Using the mouse, Funk clicked his way through the images until finding the ones he wanted. “There. You see?” He pointed to the woman’s face. “She had implants on her chin and her cheekbones. She’s also had her nose altered.”

  “Plastic surgery?” Tracy said.

  “Not the kind you’re thinking of,” Funk corrected. “This is fa
cial structure alteration.”

  “Someone trying to change their appearance,” Tracy said.

  “And recent. I’d say within the month, two months tops. And her hair has been recently dyed a darker color.” Funk turned back to the body. “Her natural color is light brown.”

  Tracy and Kins both knew from a prior investigation that implants included a serial number. Plastic surgeons were obligated to record the serial numbers in their patients’ charts and provide that information to the manufacturer in case of a problem with the implant.

  “Looks like we can cancel the sketch artist,” Kins said. “We just found Jane Doe.”

  Kins and Tracy returned to Police Headquarters. Kins traced the serial numbers to Silitone, a Florida manufacturer. A Silitone worker bee took the information and called back within the hour. The implants had been shipped to a Dr. Yee Wu in Renton, Washington, a city located at the southern tip of Lake Washington, about a twenty-minute ride from downtown.

  Kins called Dr. Wu’s clinic. The staff member gave him the standard admonitions about HIPAA laws and patient privacy. She stopped talking when Kins said he was a homicide detective investigating a potential homicide. HIPAA laws continued after a patient’s death, but Kins and Tracy weren’t interested in Jane Doe’s private medical history—at least not yet. They just wanted to know who she was.

  They took a drive to Renton. Judging from the outside of the one-story stucco building, Tracy would have been nervous to get her nails done by Dr. Wu, let alone allow him to operate on her face. But according to Wu’s website, he’d studied at the University of Hong Kong, did his residency in plastic surgery at UCLA, and was board certified by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

  “Testimonials tout him as the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo,” Tracy said.

  “And of course we know if it’s on the Internet it must be true,” Kins said, pulling into a parking space.

  They exited the car to the sound of a jet engine taking off from nearby Boeing Field, and made their way to the glass doors. The interior had a distinctly Asian feel, from the décor to the half a dozen patients seated in the lobby. A petite Asian woman in blue hospital scrubs identified herself as Dr. Wu’s physician assistant and said the doctor would be with them shortly.

  “Heard that before,” Kins said as they retreated to seats in the waiting area. “Can you imagine if these guys had to keep a bus driver’s schedule? It would be mass chaos.”

  Tracy handed him a Chinese magazine from the coffee table. “At least you won’t have to read a six-month-old copy of Time.”

  The physician’s assistant reappeared in ten minutes. Rather than barking out their names, she discreetly indicated Dr. Wu would see them.

  Kins put down the magazine. “And I was just getting to a good part.”

  Dr. Wu stood behind his desk as Tracy and Kins entered his cramped office. Small in stature, perhaps five foot three, with large silver-framed glasses, Wu wore a white doctor’s smock over a blue shirt and a maroon knit tie, the end of which he tucked into the waistband of his pants.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” Tracy said.

  Wu’s hands were as soft and small as a young boy’s. After introductions, he sat and opened a file already on his desk. “The implant numbers you provided my PA correspond to a patient, Lynn Cora Hoff,” he said in a thick Chinese accent.

  Jane Doe had a name. Simple as that.

  “What can you tell us about her?” Tracy said.

  If Wu was worried about HIPAA, he didn’t express it. He used the ball of his thumb to shove his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. “Ms. Hoff is twenty-four years old, five foot seven, one hundred and thirty-two pounds. Caucasian. She had her nose shaved, a chin implant, and two cheekbone implants.”

  “When was this done?” Tracy asked.

  “June third.”

  “Recently,” Kins said.

  “Yes,” Wu said.

  “Had you worked with Ms. Hoff before?” Tracy asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she say why she wanted the surgery?” Tracy asked.

  Wu looked up as if he didn’t understand the question. The glasses had already slid down the bridge of his nose. “Why?”

  “Why she was having reconstructive surgery?” Tracy said.

  “Many women have reconstructive surgery,” Wu said, as if changing your face was an everyday occurrence. He again used his thumb to push the glasses onto his nose.

  “I understand,” Tracy said. “But this seems more invasive than routine plastic surgery.”

  “Women”—Wu looked to Kins—“and men, have surgery for many reasons.”

  “So she didn’t say why?” Kins said.

  “She did not.”

  “Did she provide her medical background?” Tracy asked.

  Wu undid brass prongs at the top of the file and removed the contents. He handed Tracy a multipage document that she shared with Kins. The first page was a patient registration form filled out in pen. Kins copied Lynn Hoff’s date of birth and Social Security number, as well as an address, which appeared to be an apartment in Renton. Hoff provided only a cell phone number. She did not provide an emergency contact or anyone with whom her medical information could be shared.

  The second page was a patient health questionnaire. Hoff had checked “No” to every question, noted no prior medical history or surgeries, and no current medications. As for her family history, she’d circled “No” to the questions of whether her mother or father were living and did not list any brothers or sisters.

  Tracy set down the forms. “Do you have before and after photographs?” she asked.

  Wu sat back in his chair. “No.”

  Tracy glanced at Kins before reengaging Wu. “You don’t have any photographs?” she said, not trying to hide her disbelief.

  “No,” Wu said again, his voice almost inaudible.

  “Dr. Wu, wouldn’t it be normal procedure to have before and after photographs of a patient undergoing surgery such as this?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is normal procedure.”

  “Then why don’t you have any photographs?”

  “Following her surgery, Ms. Hoff requested all photographs.”

  “She asked for the pictures you’d taken of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you gave those to her.”

  “She signed a waiver,” Wu said. He leaned forward, fumbled in the file, and handed Tracy a two-page document. It was a simple release of liability. Lynn Hoff acknowledged receiving all photographs in Dr. Wu’s possession. In exchange, she had agreed to waive her right to bring any claim against Dr. Wu for any reason or circumstance.

  “Did you have a lawyer draw this up for you?” Kins asked.

  “Yes,” Wu said.

  “So this is unusual,” Kins said.

  “Yes,” Wu said.

  “Did Ms. Hoff say why she wanted possession of the photographs?” Tracy asked.

  Wu shook his head. “She did not.”

  Tracy suspected Wu had speculated why Lynn Hoff wanted her photographs, and probably came to the same conclusions she was now formulating—that he had, maybe unwittingly, operated on a fugitive from justice or someone running from enemies.

  “Did Ms. Hoff return for follow-up treatment?” Tracy asked.

  “No,” Wu said.

  “And again, was that unusual?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she schedule any follow-up appointments?”

  “A visit was scheduled, but she did not keep that appointment.”

  “Did your staff call to find out why not?”

  “The number provided was no longer in service,” Wu said.

  “Where was the surgery performed?” Tracy asked.

  “Here,” Wu said. “We have accredited surgical suites. It helps keep the costs affordable.”

  “How much does something like this cost?” Kins asked.

  Wu consulted his file. “Six thousand three hundred and twelve dol
lars.”

  Tracy had noticed a sign on the counter indicating Wu accepted Visa and MasterCard. “How did she pay? I’m assuming insurance doesn’t cover it.”

  “No insurance,” Wu said. “Not for elective surgery. Ms. Hoff paid cash.” Wu handed Tracy a receipt.

  Kins looked to Tracy and she knew he was thinking it further evidence that Lynn Hoff was a prostitute. She made a mental note to have Del and Faz call local Renton banks to determine if Lynn Hoff had any accounts.

  “How did Ms. Hoff get home after surgery?” Tracy asked. “I assume she couldn’t drive.”

  “A note in the file indicates she used a car service.”

  “What about care at home after the surgery?” Kins said. “Would someone have to look after her?”

  Wu shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know.”

  “You didn’t ask her?” Tracy said, deciding to push him.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t all of this strike you as odd, Dr. Wu?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But you didn’t report it to anyone?”

  “Report what? To who?” Wu looked at her with the flat expression of someone who had already consulted a lawyer and knew he had done nothing wrong. “My obligation is to my patient.”

  “True,” Kins said, “but your patient ended up at the bottom of Puget Sound, and our obligation is to find out who put her there, and why.”

  CHAPTER 4

  April 14, 2016

  Portland, Oregon