In the Clearing (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 3)

by Robert Dugoni

  “No worries,” Kins said, departing.

  “Subtle,” Tracy said to herself. “Real subtle.”

  She checked the time on her computer. She’d put off talking to Nolasco about Kimi Kanasket until the end of the shift, because a day not dealing with Nolasco was always better than a day dealing with him. Time, however, had run out. She walked along the outer glass wall to Nolasco’s office, thinking, again, that the man would have a killer view of downtown Seattle and Elliott Bay if he ever opened his blinds. He didn’t.

  Nolasco sat at his desk, head down. Tracy knocked on the open door. “Captain?”

  Nolasco looked annoyed. He always looked annoyed. “Yeah.”

  “Got a minute?”

  Nolasco very deliberately set down paperwork on one of many piles on his desk and motioned to one of two empty chairs. Tracy entered and sat. She could see files on the carpet behind Nolasco’s desk and pieced it together. Nolasco had his old case files pulled and was going through them, likely preparing for OPA’s inquiry of possible improprieties in those investigations, an inquiry he no doubt blamed on Tracy. They said timing in life was everything, and Tracy couldn’t have picked a worse time to want something.

  “What is it?” Nolasco asked.

  “Wanted to run a case by you.”

  “Angela Collins?”

  “No. A cold case down in Klickitat County.”

  His eyebrows knitted together. “What’s that got to do with us?”

  She explained the circumstances, leaving out Jenny Almond’s name, with whom Nolasco also had a history from their days at the police academy.

  “We got somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred fifty open and unsolved cases in the cold unit,” he said. “You couldn’t pick one of those?”

  “The sheriff wants an outside inquiry to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and because there’s some indication that if things aren’t as they seem, it could implicate members of the community, including law enforcement.”

  “Any potential DNA for analysis?” Nolasco asked, focusing on the single most important factor in deciding whether to reopen an old case. Advances in DNA analysis and other technology made it now possible to solve cold cases detectives never could have solved with technology available at the time of the crime. But in the case of Kimi Kanasket, there was no DNA.

  Tracy didn’t lie. “No.”

  “And your witness pool has aged forty years. How many are even still alive?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “What about Angela Collins?”

  “Faz and Del are looking for something to do,” she said. “That kid pled in the drive-by they were working. Faz testified at the sentencing today.”

  “Faz and Del have their own files.”

  “Faz is looking to work a homicide.”

  Nolasco sat back. “What about Kins?”

  “I’d work this one alone. Kins is taking the lead on Collins.”

  Nolasco rocked backward in his chair. “If I say no, then what? You going to take it to Clarridge?”

  Sandy Clarridge had been police chief both times that Tracy received the department’s Medal of Valor. In both instances she’d made Clarridge look good at a time when he and the department had been under scrutiny. She didn’t want to play that card. It would only make her life with Nolasco more miserable.

  “I think the upside could look good for the department,” she said, subtly answering Nolasco’s question without directly challenging his authority or bruising his already fragile ego.

  “Sounds like a hobby to me,” he said. “You want to use some of your personal days, go ahead. Otherwise, we got enough here to keep us all busy.”

  What Nolasco failed to consider was all the overtime Tracy had accumulated working the Cowboy investigation. She’d built up a boatload of personal days that she’d lose if she didn’t use them by the end of the year. With Dan in Los Angeles and Kins on a path to becoming a full-blown member of the idiot club, Tracy was happy to use those personal days to get out of the office.

  She grabbed her coat and purse and started from her cubicle, intending to call Jenny on the drive home, but stopped when her desk phone rang. The small window on the console indicated an inside line. She hoped it wasn’t Nolasco calling to rescind his backhanded consent, just screwing with her, which used to be his full-time hobby.

  “Detective Crosswhite,” the duty officer at the desk in the building lobby said. “I got somebody here says he needs to speak to you or Detective Rowe.”

  “I don’t have anybody scheduled to meet with me. I’m not sure about Kins. He’s gone for the day.”

  “He doesn’t have an appointment, but he says it’s urgent.”

  “Who is it? What’s his name?”

  “Connor Collins.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The officer behind the bulletproof partition nodded in the direction of Connor Collins. The young man stood in the lobby looking very much like a high school kid on his way home from school, a ball cap propped backward on his head, backpack dangling from his shoulder, skateboard tucked under his arm.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said as Tracy approached.

  Tracy raised a hand, stopping him. “I can’t speak to you. You’re represented by an attorney.”

  She’d contemplated not even coming down the elevator, telling the officer to send Connor away. She’d tried calling Cerrabone, but he wasn’t picking up his office phone, and his cell phone went straight to voice mail. The receptionist said he’d left for the day. She’d also tried Kins, but he also didn’t answer. She immediately wondered if he was with Santos.

  Connor shifted on the balls of his feet. “I don’t have an attorney. I never did. My grandfather just said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re seventeen.”

  “I turned eighteen yesterday.” He reached for his back pocket. “You can check my driver’s license. So I’m an adult, right? I can decide for myself. I wanted to talk to you about what happened that night, when my dad came to the house.”

  Connor was holding out his license like an underage kid with a fake ID hoping to buy beer. He wore blue jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt with a gothic design—wings of some sort. Tracy studied his pupils and the whites of his eyes. He didn’t appear to be under the influence of any drug. She didn’t smell pot, just the faint scent of teenage body odor.

  “Let’s go upstairs. I don’t want you to say anything to me until I say you can speak. Understood?”

  Connor nodded.

  They rode the elevator in silence to the seventh floor. Tracy deposited Connor in one of the hard interrogation rooms, then went into the adjacent room and turned on the video recorder. She returned to her cubicle and tried Cerrabone and Kins again, without success. She walked to the back of the floor, where the administrative staff sat, and found Ron Mayweather, the A Team’s “fifth wheel,” still at his desk. The fifth wheel was a detective assigned to assist one of the Violent Crimes Section’s four units.

  “You have time to sit in on an interview with me?” she asked. “Something unexpected in the Collins case.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Mayweather said, rising from his chair.

  When they entered the interrogation room, Connor sat up straight. He’d propped his skateboard against the wall and put his backpack on the floor beside it. He didn’t stand when Tracy introduced Mayweather, nor did he offer his hand. He just gave a nearly imperceptible nod and a soft “Hey.”

  Tracy and Mayweather took the two seats across the small metal table. “I’m videotaping and recording everything being said,” Tracy said. “You understand that?”

  Connor nodded.

  “You have to answer out loud,” Tracy said.

  “Oh. Yes,” he said.

  “You can sit back. Relax.”

  Connor sat back. After getting him to state his name, address, and date of birth, Tracy introduced herself and Ron Mayweather, gave the date and time, and brief
ly summarized the situation. Then she said, “Let’s back up and start over, Connor. You came to the police department this afternoon, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I took the bus and rode my skateboard.”

  “No one came with you?”

  “No.”

  “You said you do not have an attorney representing you?”

  “No. I mean, right. I said that. I don’t.”

  “Your grandfather, Atticus Berkshire, is not your attorney?”

  “No. He’s not my attorney. He’s my mom’s attorney.”

  “Does he know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Does your mom know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them you were coming here?”

  “They would have tried to stop me. But I’m eighteen. I’m an adult. So I can do this.”

  He dug a hand into the front pocket of his jeans. “Here’s my license again. In case you don’t believe me. My birthday was yesterday.”

  “Happy birthday,” Mayweather said.

  Connor glanced at Mayweather, looking uncertain.

  “You’ve handed me your driver’s license.” Tracy took a moment to consider it before handing it to Mayweather. “It confirms that you turned eighteen yesterday. And you’re here of your own volition? No one forced you or coerced you to come here?”

  “I came because I wanted to.”

  “Okay. When we met in the lobby, you said you had something you wanted to tell me. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Tracy looked to Mayweather, who nodded his consent. “Okay, Connor. What do you want to tell me?”

  Connor sat up and glanced at the camera again. “Okay. Well, what I wanted to tell you was that my mother . . . she didn’t shoot my father.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I did.”

  “Stop talking.”

  Tracy played the video. Rick Cerrabone stood with one hand covering his mouth. Kins sat near the one-way glass, largely ignoring the video and watching Connor Collins, who remained in the hard interrogation room.

  After Connor’s confession, Tracy and Mayweather had stepped out of the room to discuss the situation. Both agreed that Tracy had followed established protocol but that Connor’s confession now mandated that he be read his Miranda rights. After Tracy did so, Connor described again how his father had come to pick him up and forced his way into the house. He confirmed that his father and mother had quarreled, and further confirmed Angela Collins’s statement that his father had picked up the sculpture and used it to hit his mother, knocking her to the ground. He said his father then kicked her in the stomach.

  From that point, however, his and his mother’s stories diverged. Whereas Angela Collins said she sent her son out of the room, Connor said he intervened and his father slapped him hard across the face. Connor said the distraction, however, had allowed his mother enough time to get to her feet and run down the hall, locking herself in the bedroom. His father followed her and was threatening to kick in the door, and that’s when Connor remembered the gun in the closet. He said he got the gun and went down the hall, but by then his father was in the room with his mother, threatening to hit her. Connor pulled the trigger, shooting his father in the back.

  “What did you do with the gun after you shot your father?” Tracy asked.

  “I put it on the bed,” Connor replied.

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Nothing. My mother was pretty hysterical. She said we needed to call my grandfather. She told me to go into the living room and sit on the couch.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you touch your father?”

  “Touch him? No.”

  “Did you touch the sculpture?”

  “No.”

  “How long was it from the time you shot your father until the time your mother called your grandfather?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who called 911?”

  “She did.”

  Tracy shut off the video, and the room was silent for several moments.

  “I thought he was going to tell me what Angela told you and Faz,” she said to Kins. “I figured he’d back up her story and say it was self-defense.”

  Cerrabone lowered his hand. “Where’s Mayweather now?”

  “Typing out a statement for Connor to sign,” Tracy said. She turned to Kins. “This could explain the twenty-one-minute gap between when the neighbor heard the shots and when Angela Collins called 911. She was cleaning up after the kid’s mess.”

  “Or the kid’s lying, and they were covering up her mess,” Kins said, standing from his chair and turning away from the window. “The brother said Angela’s a master manipulator and that she’s been working the kid for years. She could have put him up to it.”

  “Up to what?” Tracy said.

  “Taking the blame.”

  “For murdering his own father?” Tracy shook her head, not buying it. “What kind of person would do that? What kind of mother would do that?”

  “A very, very sick one,” Kins said.

  “They each have a motive to lie,” Cerrabone said. “That’s the problem. Both their fingerprints are on the gun. They’re also the same height, so the trajectory of the bullet won’t tell us anything. They each have a story that fits with the evidence.”

  “Not all the evidence,” Kins said. “There’s still the problem of the lack of fingerprints on the sculpture, and the kid’s prints on his father’s shoe, which doesn’t fit with either story.” He looked to Cerrabone. “Can we charge them both and see if one of them blinks?”

  “Not with what we currently have. Not without risking having the charges against both of them dismissed.” Cerrabone massaged the back of his neck, a habit when he got frustrated. “Besides, Berkshire would see through it and use one against the other to raise reasonable doubt as to both. This seems calculated to me.”

  “Could be the reason Berkshire let Angela tell us her story,” Kins said, “So we’d have two competing stories and not be able to prove which one is the truth.”

  Tracy pressed her temples, feeling the beginning twinge of a headache. “Berkshire’s a scumbag, but that’s his daughter and his grandson.”

  “I know, but if it’s the only way to get his daughter off . . .” Kins said, letting the thought linger.

  Cerrabone leaned against the edge of the table. “This was already going to be a difficult case with the domestic violence allegation. Now . . .” He let out a breath and shook his head. “I’m not sure where it leaves us.”

  “This is why we should have GSR kits at every homicide,” Kins said, referring to gunshot-residue kits. Detectives could use them to take swabs of a person’s hand to detect primer and gunpowder residue. SPD didn’t use the kits because they weren’t conclusive. They could prove only that a person had been near a discharged weapon, not that he necessarily fired it.

  “But we don’t,” Cerrabone said. “And it’s too late now.”

  “He’s declined an attorney,” Kins said. “Why not go back in and confront him with the discrepancies in the evidence.”

  “If we do and this is a ruse, we’d be educating him and his mother and Berkshire,” Tracy said. “That just gives them time to come up with something to explain the discrepancies. I say we keep that to ourselves for now.”

  “Couple other problems,” Cerrabone said. “One, he might technically be an adult, but he looks fourteen. Berkshire, or whoever they get to defend him, will say he was scared and intimidated, and a jury will buy it. Two, unless they both recant and tell the same story, we have reasonable doubt up the wazoo, whoever we charge. Berkshire would, without a doubt, refuse to waive a speedy trial, and we could lose any chance of ever convicting either of them. I’m going to talk this over with Dunleavy,” he said, referring to the King County prose
cutor, Kevin Dunleavy. “I’m going to recommend that we let them both go for now. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work this and see if something shakes free. It always does.”

  “Yeah, but in the interim, this isn’t going to play well in the media, especially if the brother raises hell,” Kins said.

  “So talk to him,” Cerrabone said. “Explain the situation. Tell him we’re not giving up, but we need time to work the evidence.”

  Tracy and Kins looked through the one-way glass. Connor Collins sat with his legs extended, head tilted back. Their would-be grounder had not just taken a bad hop; it had become a fly ball into the sun, against a bright-blue sky, and neither Tracy nor Kins were wearing sunglasses.

  CHAPTER 11

  The following morning, Tracy and Kins called Cerrabone, who’d spent a late night talking with Dunleavy. He had agreed with Cerrabone’s assessment not to charge either Angela or Connor Collins, but to wait until they’d developed more evidence.

  “And nothing yet from Berkshire?” Kins asked, still puzzled by Berkshire’s silence.

  “Not a word,” Cerrabone said.

  They all had expected the Berkshire they knew to be raising holy hell that they’d taken a statement from Connor without an attorney present. “Could be further evidence he’s orchestrating all of this,” Kins said.

  “You get a hold of Mark Collins?” Cerrabone asked.

  “Faz and I are heading out that way now,” Kins said.

  With a seeming stall in the Collins case and Kins and Faz working the evidence, Tracy turned her attention to Kimi Kanasket. She ran the names Earl and Élan Kanasket through Accurint, a database that provided access to public records, which meant it provided last known addresses. Going back forty years, Tracy suspected she was testing the limits of the system, but she was relieved to find a matching address in Yakima for both men. A quick Google search confirmed the address was on the Yakama Reservation. On a hunch, she also ran Tommy Moore’s name through the same database and determined that Moore also lived on the reservation.

  Next, she ran all three men through a Triple I criminal background check. Moore had been arrested in 1978, 1979, and 1981, each time for drunk and disorderly conduct. On one of those occasions, he’d also been charged with assault and battery. In 1981 he’d been charged with breaking and entering, and in 1982 he’d spent time in jail for possession of a controlled substance. After that, his record was clear. The lack of any further arrests was ordinarily a strong indication the criminal had died, but the recent utility records said otherwise. Tracy wondered if Moore was one of the lucky few who had managed to somehow turn his life around.