CHAPTER 24
Dan paced near the flat-screen television. They’d moved to the family room. Tracy sat on the couch listening as Dan alternately asked questions and thought out loud.
“The obvious question is, if Calloway was telling the truth, why would Edmund House change his story? He’d already spent six years in prison, which means he’d likely received a pretty good legal education. One has to assume he would have known that changing his alibi would be enough for Calloway to get the search warrants. And if he was going to change his alibi, why would he tell Calloway he’d been drinking at a bar in Silver Spurs, something Calloway could so easily refute, though he apparently never did?”
Tracy said, “I spoke to every bartender in Silver Spurs. No one remembered Edmund House, and no one remembered Calloway coming in and asking any questions.”
“Another reason to suspect Calloway lied about the confession,” Dan said.
“Something else. Finn never cross-examined Calloway about it at trial,” Tracy said.
“A mistake, for sure,” Dan agreed, “but that’s not what got House convicted. What got him convicted was what they found at the property.”
Late in the afternoon, the storm intensified, causing the lights hanging from the courthouse’s ornate box-beam ceiling to flicker. The wind had also kicked up, the trees outside the courtroom windows now swaying violently, their limbs shimmering.
“Detective Giesa,” Vance Clark continued, “with respect to the truck, would you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what you found?”
Detective Margaret Giesa looked more like a runway model than a detective, with long, light-brown hair and blonde highlights. Perhaps five foot four, she looked considerably taller in four-inch heels and wore well a gray, pinstriped pants suit. “We located multiple strands of blonde hair varying in lengths from eighteen to thirty-two inches.”
“Would you show the jurors exactly where your team found these strands of hair?”
Giesa left her chair and used a pointer to direct the jury’s attention to a blown-up photograph of the interior of the red Chevy stepside that Clark had set on an easel. “On the passenger side, between the seat and the door.”
“Did the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab run tests on those strands of hair?”
Giesa considered her report. “We examined each strand under a microscope and determined that some had been pulled out by the root. Others had broken off.”
Finn stood. “Objection. The officer is speculating that the hairs had been pulled out by the roots.”
Lawrence sustained it.
Clark looked glad to have the phrase repeated. “Do we humans shed hair, Detective?”
“Shedding hair is a natural process. We shed hair every day.”
He patted his bald spot. “Some of us more than others?”
The jurors smiled.
Clark continued. “But you also mentioned that your team found some hair that had been broken off. What did you mean by that?”
“I mean that we did not find a root ball. Under a microscope, one expects to find a white bulb at the base. Breakage is usually the result of damage to the hair follicle by external factors.”
“Such as?”
“Chemical treatments, heat from styling tools, or rough handling come to mind.”
“Can someone tear out another person’s hair by the root, say, during a struggle?”
“They can.”
Clark acted as if he was reviewing his notes. “Did your team locate anything else of interest in the truck cab?”
“Trace amounts of blood,” she said.
Tracy noticed several jurors turn their attention from Giesa to Edmund House.
Again using the photograph, Giesa explained where her team had located the blood inside the truck cab. Clark then placed a blown-up aerial photograph of Parker House’s property in the mountains on the easel. It showed the metal roofs of several structures and the shells of cars and farm equipment amid a grove of trees. Giesa pointed to a narrow building at the end of a footpath leading from Parker House’s one-story home.
“We found woodworking tools and several pieces of furniture in various stages of completion.”
“A table saw?”
“Yes, there was a table saw.”
“Did you find any blood inside that shed?”
“We did not,” Giesa said.
“Did you find any blonde strands of hair?”
“No.”
“Did you find anything of interest?”
“We found jewelry inside a sock in a coffee can.”
Clark handed Giesa a plastic evidence bag and asked her to unseal it.
The courtroom grew silent as Giesa reached inside the bag and held up two silver pistol-shaped earrings.
Dan stopped pacing. “That’s when you really began to suspect something was wrong.”
“She wasn’t wearing the pistol earrings, Dan. I know she wasn’t, and I tried to tell my father that afternoon,” Tracy said. “But he said he was tired and wanted to get my mother home. She wasn’t doing well. She was an emotional wreck, physically weak, and becoming more and more reclusive. After that, every time I tried to bring up the subject, my father would tell me to let it alone. Calloway and Clark told me the same thing.”
“They never heard you out?”
She shook her head. “No. So I decided to keep the information I had to myself until I could prove them wrong.”
“But you couldn’t leave it alone.”
“Could you have, if it had been your sister, and you’d been the one who left her?”
Dan sat on the coffee table facing her. Their knees nearly touched. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Tracy.”
“I had to know. When no one else was going to do anything about it, I decided to do it myself.”
“So that’s why you quit teaching and became a cop.”
She nodded. “After ten years of using all my free time to read transcripts and hunt for witnesses and documents, I sat down one evening, opened up the boxes, and realized that I’d gone over all the records and interviewed all the witnesses. I’d reached a dead end. Unless they found Sarah’s body, I had nowhere to go. It was a horrible feeling. I felt like I’d failed her all over again, but it’s like you said, the world doesn’t stop so you can grieve. One day you wake up and realize you have to move on because . . . well, what are you going to do? So I put the boxes in a closet and tried to move on.”
He touched her leg. “Sarah would have wanted you to be happy, Tracy.”
“I was fooling myself,” she said. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think of her. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t tempted to pull out the boxes, that I didn’t think I had missed something, that there had to be one more piece of evidence. And then I was sitting at my desk and my partner said they’d found her grave.” She exhaled. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for someone to tell me I’m not just some obsessed crazy person?”
“You’re not a crazy person, Tracy. Obsessed, maybe.”
She smiled. “You always could make me laugh.”
“Yes, but unfortunately that usually wasn’t my intention.” Dan sat back and exhaled. “I don’t know what happened back then, Tracy, not for certain, not yet, but what I do know is, if you’re right about this, if House was framed, it wasn’t orchestrated by one person. This was a conspiracy and Hagen, Calloway, Clark—even Finn, potentially—would have had to have been a part of it.”
“And someone with access to Sarah’s jewelry and our home,” Tracy said. “I know.”
Roy Calloway’s Suburban was parked in the driveway of her parents’ home behind another sheriff’s vehicle and alongside a Cascade County fire truck and ambulance. The sirens were silent and no strobes pierced the early morning darkness. It gave Tracy a strange sense of relief. Whatever the emergency was, it couldn’t be too bad if the lights were off. Could it?
Calloway’s call had awakened her at just after four in the morning. Though Ben had been gone three months, Tracy had kept the rental house. Home no longer held the fond memories it once had for her. Her mother and father remained reclusive and quiet. Her father had quit working at the hospital and was rarely seen around town. They had not held their annual Christmas Eve party since Sarah’s disappearance. Her father had also started to drink at night. She heard the slur in his voice when she called to check up on them and smelled it on his breath when she visited. She also did not feel fully welcome there anymore. There was an elephant in the room nobody wanted to acknowledge. The memory foremost on their minds was the one they wanted to forget. They were each wracked with their own guilt—Tracy, for having left Sarah to drive home alone, and her parents, for having gone to Hawaii instead of being at home that fateful weekend. Tracy rationalized it all by telling herself she was too old to be running home to her parents anyway, and that home was no longer home.
In his call, Calloway had told her to get dressed and get to her parents’ house. “Just get here,” he’d said, when she’d attempted to question him further.
She hustled up the front steps to the sound of chatter from the emergency vehicle radios. Medical and police personnel milled about the porch and grand foyer. Nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry, and she took that as another good sign. One of Calloway’s deputies saw her come in and knocked on the doors to her father’s den. Moments later, it was Roy Calloway, not her father, who slid them apart. She saw others in the room behind him, though not her father or her mother. The deputy said something to Calloway, who slid the doors closed. He looked pale and sickly. Stricken.
“Roy?” she asked, stepping toward him. “What is it? What happened?”
Calloway wiped at his nose with a handkerchief. “He’s gone, Tracy.”
“What?”
“Your father’s gone.”
“My father?” She hadn’t even considered her father. She’d been certain something had happened to her mother. “What are you talking about?” When she tried to step past him, Calloway blocked her path, holding her by the shoulders. “Where is my father? Dad? Dad!”
“Tracy, don’t.”
She fought to free herself. “I want to see my father.”
Calloway took her out onto the porch and pressed her shoulders to the side of the house, restraining her. “Listen to me. Tracy, stop and listen to me.” She continued to struggle. “He used the shotgun, Tracy.”
Tracy froze.
Calloway lowered his hands and took a step back. He glanced away, exhaling before regrouping and reconsidering her. “He used the shotgun,” he said.