One Last Kill (Tracy Crosswhite), page 3
Tracy called SPD’s liaison at the Washington State Office of the Attorney General and asked the liaison to search the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, or HITS, criminal database using search words like “angel” and “wings.”
Half an hour later, the liaison emailed Tracy with paperwork for each of the Route 99 Killer’s victims. In each file she scrolled to the section asking questions about the victim’s lifestyle. Question 102 asked whether the crime had been “sex related.” In all but one file, the fourth victim, the “no” box had been checked.
She scrolled to question 105 of the fourth victim:
Was semen found in body cavities of the victim?
1. No
2. Yes
That surprised her. She had understood no DNA material existed.
A note had been typed below the box:
Given the victim’s occupation, the presence of semen may not be determinative of the killer and may be a mixture of several johns.
She scrolled back to the top of the form to determine the detective who had filled it out.
Officer/Detective: Last Name: Fazzio, First Name: Vic
Someone knocked on Tracy’s office door. She looked to the clock in the lower right corner of her computer screen. She’d been so absorbed in her work, she’d missed lunch.
“Come in,” she said, thinking speak of the devil, though Faz was ordinarily not one to knock.
The door pushed in.
Johnny Nolasco stood in her office doorway. He looked like he was chewing nails.
CHAPTER 3
Tracy closed Lisa Childress’s file and slid it beneath others, out of sight. She’d once said Nolasco could look like someone with a pointed stick up his ass, wincing with each movement, but his current expression appeared to be directed less at Tracy and more at his circumstance, which made her apprehensive. Nolasco clearly wasn’t happy to learn his nemesis would be pursuing an investigation he had failed to close—and perhaps find his mistakes.
“Captain,” Tracy said.
Nolasco stepped in. “Don’t act like you don’t know what this is about, Crosswhite.”
“What is this about?” she said, toying with him.
He looked like he had swallowed what he was about to say, then said, “Chief says you’re looking into the Route 99 killings and asked for help.”
“Almost.”
“Almost what?”
“Almost correct. Chief ordered me to look into the Route 99 killings, and I suggested Faz could help since he was on your task force.”
Nolasco shut his eyes for a beat, a tic that could be unsettling. “Well, that might be, but Chief Weber didn’t ask me to reassign Vic.”
“No?” Tracy said, confused for a moment before the developing picture emerged.
“No,” Nolasco said. “She told me to help you.”
Her stomach clenched. Nolasco wasn’t gloating, far from it. He had no doubt just deduced that Weber, well aware of Tracy and Nolasco’s volatile history and general dislike of one another, was using him. Weber wanted the serial killer cases resolved, but if Tracy failed, Weber would want to place that failure directly on Tracy’s shoulders. She likely presumed Nolasco would support any disparaging report that could hasten Tracy’s departure out the SPD door.
Tracy fought against displaying her discomfort. “So how do you want to go about this?” she asked.
Nolasco scoffed. “You tell me. They’re your cold cases.”
In other words, he wasn’t going to help her efforts to make him look bad. “Okay. I have some questions about the investigation,” Tracy said.
“Let me stop you right there,” Nolasco said. “If your questions are going to insinuate my task force failed in any aspect of this investigation, you can save your breath. I’m proud of the work we did. We did everything we could have.”
“Except catch the killer,” Tracy said, unable to resist, though she knew from her work as head of the Cowboy Task Force there was no “right” way to hunt a serial killer, just best guesses, hunches, and previously used techniques. A task force was not the glamour and series of dramatic breakthroughs depicted on television. It was day-to-day routine and mind-numbing drudgery. You couldn’t predict what the killer would do, because serial killers weren’t motivated by anger, greed, jealousy, profit, or revenge, which makes them the most bewildering, disturbing, and difficult to catch. They enjoyed killing and often saw their acts as fulfilling some higher purpose. Twenty-five years ago, catching them would have been even more difficult without the current advances in DNA testing and other forensic sciences, as well as technology like cameras on cell phones.
Nolasco did not verbally respond, but those jaw muscles looked to be crunching those nails again. Finally, he said, “I don’t have much time.”
Tracy offered him a seat, waited a beat until he took it, then said, “Did you have any solid suspects or leads?”
Nolasco took a breath and grimaced like the stick had jabbed him. “Four or five. I can’t remember the exact number.”
But he did remember. Tracy was certain the failure to catch the killer had eaten at Nolasco’s enormous ego. It was the only investigation he and his erstwhile partner, Floyd Hattie, had failed to close. As Faz had once put it, “That’s thirteen big matzo balls hanging out there.”
Then Nolasco proved he remembered. “We eliminated two suspects because they were in prison on other charges at the time of the last killings. A third suspect had moved out of state, making him unlikely but still possible. We had one or two other suspects. Dwight something.”
“McDonnel.”
“Yeah. McDonnel. He’d never been convicted of a crime, but coworkers at his place of employment indicated he picked up prostitutes on the Aurora strip. We tailed him a couple of nights, but nothing came of it.”
“Anyone else?” Tracy asked, not even pretending to be taking notes, which seemed to unnerve Nolasco. His gaze kept shifting from Tracy to the pen and pad of paper resting on her desk.
“Levi Bishop. I remember his name because of the jeans. I always thought he could be our guy. He got pinched for domestic violence. Beat the hell out of his live-in girlfriend and did six years. That was right around the time the killings stopped.”
“What happened to him?” Tracy asked.
“He was paroled for good behavior and, as far as I can recall, left the area.”
“To where?”
“Don’t know.”
“You didn’t check?”
Nolasco bristled. “The task force had been disbanded.”
“Did you run his DNA to determine if it matched the DNA left behind at any of the crime scenes?”
“DNA analysis back then wasn’t what it is now, and the killer, it was determined, wore a condom, making DNA scarce.”
“Is that a no?”
“Check the file, Crosswhite. Like I said, the killings stopped, the task force disbanded, and I moved to active homicides.”
“The task force disbanded but the files were never closed. As the lead investigator it remained your investigation. Yours and Floyd Hattie’s.”
“Hattie retired.”
“Then yours.”
“And now it’s yours. What’s your point?”
“Just trying to find out if you ever ran down Levi Bishop, and if there were any murdered young women with markings that resembled angel’s wings carved in their shoulder near where he relocated.”
Nolasco’s eyes quickly roamed the room. No doubt he looked for boxes containing his task force’s investigation. They had not yet been brought up from the vault. “I would have received an alert if that had been the case. The angel’s wings evidence was never released to the public. How do you know about it?” Nolasco asked.
“You had a leak.”
He looked like he’d taken a punch. “The fuck we did.”
“A reporter knew about the angel’s wings. Someone had to have told her.”
“The same reporter who wrote those articles about the drug task force?”
Unable to secure hard evidence to prove Moss Gunderson or Marcella Weber were on the Last Line’s payroll, Tracy had gone instead to Anita Childress, and the Times had run a series of articles on Tracy’s search for, and discovery of, Lisa Childress living in Escondido. But to tell that story, the paper also had to tell of Lisa’s sudden disappearance shortly after leaving her home in the middle of the night to meet a source who claimed to have information on the drug task force. The source had been found shot in the head. Childress had vanished.
Tracy suspected Nolasco or Hattie had been the leak, since it had been their egos on the line. “Why would you ask if Lisa Childress was the source of the leaked information? Her articles never mentioned the Angel of Death cases.”
“Because she was the P-I’s investigative reporter. She showed up at press briefings we held about the Route 99 killings. And the daughter came to you with a theory her mother was killed because of one of her investigations—the Times certainly intimated that to have been the case in the series of articles they wrote casting this department and your fellow officers in such a piss-poor light.”
Many of Seattle’s PD had supported Tracy and Del’s talking to the media, but there had also been the expected blowback. “Did you tell Lisa Childress about the angel’s wings carved in the victims’ shoulders?”
Nolasco laughed as if he found her question so ludicrous as to be comical. “Tell me why that is important, or relevant to catching the killer now?”
He also didn’t answer her question.
“The file indicates the killer first targeted prostitutes and drug addicts, then turned to suburban women not in the sex trade. What was your theory for the sudden shift? It definitely put the killer at greater risk of being caught.”
“We concluded his initial victims were victims of opportunity, marginalized women on the fringe. Then he sought greater attention and killed women who would get more mainstream media coverage to taunt us.”
It wasn’t a bad theory. From her work on the Cowboy Task Force, Tracy had learned serial killers were narcissists who thought they were smarter than everyone else and would never be caught. The Cowboy, Nabil Kotar, had told Tracy he saw himself as an actor starring in the lead role of a serial killer movie.
Nolasco looked at his watch. “Anything else?”
“That’s it for now.”
He got up and turned for the door, then stopped and turned back. “Do you have any leads?”
So, he was interested. “I have some things I’m going to do to get started.”
“Such as?”
“Thought I’d set up another tip line, use social media, and bribe Mike Melton to maybe do some DNA work, among other things.”
Nolasco said, “Weber will use your notoriety as evidence she’s serious about finding the killer. She’ll be throwing your ass on the bonfire, and you’ll get burned when you don’t find the killer.”
Tracy suspected that ass on fire had once been Nolasco’s, and she knew how it felt to be in that position. It was the closest thing to empathy Tracy had ever heard from him. “That bonfire is already lit,” she said.
“How so?”
“Weber said the Times is running a series on the anniversary of the last killings—the last one was twenty-five years ago—and the articles won’t be positive.”
Nolasco made his chewing-nails face again. “Did you have anything to do with those articles?”
So like him to be paranoid about her stabbing him in the back. “Nothing.”
“We ran down more than two thousand tips, processed some three hundred fingerprints, and seriously interviewed dozens of suspects.”
“We can get an officer to monitor the tip line I set up, compare any tips with the tips you received, and try to find a thread, or at least run down anything with potential,” Tracy said.
“Moss was the lead control officer,” Nolasco said, leaving unsaid that Tracy shouldn’t expect much in the way of support.
She’d already figured that, and she figured Moss, who Faz and Del both said was lazy, wouldn’t have coordinated the tips. “Who was Augustus Cesare?” Tracy asked.
“Augie? He was Moss’s lackey. Moss had me pull him from patrol. Said Cesare helped him track evidence in another case and knew computers, one of the first in our section who did. He kept a color-coded spreadsheet of the tips, determined if any overlapped, and named the task force detective assigned to follow up.”
“I’ll see if I can find the spreadsheet.”
“He put it on a disk. Have TESU convert it to a format you can use.” Nolasco referenced the Technical and Electronic Support Unit, which was part of the Violent Crimes Section’s Intel Unit, also located on the seventh floor. “Let’s also get a young officer to monitor the tip line and work with the original spreadsheet. Someone also computer savvy. They can do all kinds of things now we couldn’t do back then.”
Was she mistaken, or did Nolasco damn near sound helpful?
“I’d like to also start a Facebook page to work in concert with the tip line. I’ll have the page made up with the names and photographs of the victims, their personal histories, and the dates and locations they were last seen. Maybe someone will recall seeing or remember something about one of them.”
“That was nearly thirty years ago,” Nolasco said. “It’s a long shot.”
“We found Lisa Childress.” A woman had recognized Childress’s Facebook picture, and her tip led Tracy to Escondido. “All we need is one tip on one victim to get us started.”
“Childress was a reporter for a prominent newspaper. These women were prostitutes.”
“Not all of them.”
Nolasco let out a burst of air and fingered his mustache. “Do what you want, but focus on his later killings.”
Tracy would talk with Melton and have him run Levi Bishop’s DNA against what little DNA had been found at the one crime scene Faz had documented in the HITS questionnaire. Tracy knew the lab was under the gun, but she also knew Melton’s weakness—sandwiches from Salumi, the famed Italian deli in Pioneer Square, especially now that his family had mandated he diet to lower his cholesterol and blood pressure.
“I’m also going to make an appointment to talk to an FBI profiler who Kins and I consulted in the Cowboy case and get her take on the killings, the suspects, what was and wasn’t done.”
“Profilers are bullshit, Crosswhite. They’re one step above the psychics and their Ouija boards. Don’t put too much faith in that crap,” Nolasco said.
She didn’t, but what did they have to lose at this point?
“I’m going to ask her if she has any insight into why the killer switched his victims to middle-class women, and why he ultimately stopped killing.”
“He stopped because he’s dead or incarcerated for some other crime,” Nolasco said.
Tracy had the same thought, but closure for the families would only come from knowing that was true. “Thought I’d also look up where McDonnel has lived the last thirty years and determine whether there have been any unexplained killings of young women in those areas. Maybe pay him a visit and see if it rattles his cage.”
Nolasco stared at her. Tracy could almost see the gears shifting. She knew Nolasco’s type well enough to know he hated the thought of her solving the killings without him receiving any of the credit. “Keep me posted on getting the tip line and the Facebook page set up. If you get any blowback, tell them to talk to me. And let me know when you meet with Bishop or McDonnel . . . and the FBI profiler. I’ll go with you.”
“No need. I know you’re busy. I can handle it.”
“Look, Weber ordered me to work with you. I don’t like the arrangement any more than you do, but I’m following orders and trying to make the best of the situation. Maybe we can bring some closure to this thing.”
Tracy had always likened Nolasco to a reptile—thin, cold blooded, and scaly—but maybe he had an ounce of human decency. Maybe he was thinking about someone other than himself for a change—closure for the victims’ families. “I’ll let you know when I get it set up.”
“Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a publicity stunt and a colossal waste of my time and resources without any likely benefit. But maybe I can get it off my back.”
And just as quickly, the reptilian scales emerged from beneath the collar of his shirt.
CHAPTER 4
October 1994
Seattle, Washington
Johnny Nolasco trailed Floyd Hattie, Police Chief Sandy Clarridge, and Stephen Martinez, assistant chief of criminal investigations, into the press briefing room. Both Clarridge and Martinez wore the department’s French-blue short-sleeve shirts. Nolasco and Hattie, dressed in sports coats and ties, took up positions behind the podium, their backs against the backdrop bearing the Seattle Police Department logo. Nolasco stared at the throng of reporters, microphones, and television cameras for what would be a public flogging, though he doubted anything could be worse than the tongue-lashing he and Hattie had just privately received.
The Route 99 serial killer had just murdered his tenth victim, but unlike his previous nine, Mary Ellen Schmid had been a married lawyer working in the civil division of the Seattle city attorney’s office and living in an upper- to middle-class suburb. Schmid’s car had been disabled in a downtown Seattle parking lot. A security guard found her body inside. She, too, had been marked with angel’s wings on her left shoulder.
“Before we get started,” Clarridge said to the sea of reporters, two to three times more than had attended the press briefings for the prior nine victims, “I want the public to know the Seattle Police Department has provided all available resources to the task force that has the sole purpose of catching the person responsible for these killings.”
That wasn’t exactly true, but Nolasco wasn’t about to debate it, and he refrained from making a face, or looking at Hattie, who no doubt had the same thought. The task force had not been established until after the killer’s fourth victim, when the angel’s wings could no longer be ignored. Nolasco had asked to head the investigation, believing it would enhance his resume and further fast-track his ascension through the Seattle PD. He had designs on an administrative job, possibly chief of police and, depending on how things went, a political career. But Nolasco’s task force had been limited in the number of officers he could utilize. Nobody would admit it, and certainly not Clarridge, but those nine women hadn’t justified the department’s full resources, not to mention the expense.
