CHAPTER 32
Tracy gave up and got out of bed at just after two in the morning. During her years investigating Sarah’s disappearance and murder, she’d rarely slept through the night. It had gotten better when she’d finally put the boxes in the closet, but now her insomnia had returned. Roger, her black tabby, followed her into the living room, meowing loudly.
“Yeah, well, I’m not happy to be awake either,” she said. She grabbed her laptop and a down comforter, along with the remote control, and sat on the sofa in her seven-hundred-square-foot apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. She hadn’t rented the apartment for its amenities or its view—which was of another brick apartment building directly across the street. She’d rented it because it was the right price and in the right location for when your profession didn’t include the initials “Dr.” before your name but required you to live close and be frequently on call.
Roger leaped into her lap and, after a moment kneading the blanket to get comfortable, curled into a ball. Tracy reconsidered her conversation with Dan earlier that evening. After she’d told him about Maria Vanpelt and the meeting with Nolasco, Dan had broached the subject of him driving down to Seattle the upcoming Friday, taking her to the Chihuly glass exhibit, and then getting dinner.
Since her initial visit to Cedar Grove to bury Sarah’s remains, Tracy had, in the intervening weeks, made several additional trips to provide Dan with the rest of her files and go over what her investigation had revealed. She’d spent the night twice. Nothing romantic had happened between them since her impromptu golf lesson. Tracy was wondering if she had misinterpreted Dan’s intentions, though she had certainly felt the sexual tension and didn’t think she had been imagining it. A part of her wanted to act on it, but she worried that a relationship with Dan would not be wise under the circumstances. Not to mention the fact that she did not see herself ever moving back to Cedar Grove, where Dan had clearly reestablished a home. It was a complication she had decided to put aside. The Chihuly invitation, however, forced her to reconsider his possible intentions. She could not rationalize the invitation as work related, not to mention the fact that it put their sleeping arrangements at the center of a target. She only had one bedroom. Caught off guard, she’d accepted, and had spent the rest of the evening wondering if she’d made the right decision.
She fired up her laptop, pulled up the Washington State Attorney General’s website, and typed her username and password to log into the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, or HITS. The searchable database contained information on more than 22,000 homicides and sexual assaults across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon that had occurred since 1981. Assuming Hansen had been murdered and hadn’t died from a sex act gone horribly wrong, studies had revealed that persons who killed in such a unique manner often practiced their craft in order to perfect it. So, after the long days at the office working on the case, Tracy would drag herself home and sit at the computer running searches and reviewing cases similar to Nicole Hansen’s murder.
Her initial search using the key words “motel room” had reduced the 22,000 cases to 1511. She’d added the word “rope,” but not “strangulation,” because she wanted to keep the search broad enough to capture cases in which the victim had been bound, though maybe not strangled. That further reduced the field of cases to 224. Of those 224, 43 of the victims had not been sexually assaulted—Nicole Hansen’s autopsy had revealed no semen in her body cavities. That anomaly could be explained by the fact that it would have been a near physical impossibility to have intercourse with Hansen with her body hideously contorted and bound. Hansen had also not been robbed. Her wallet, flush with cash, had been left untouched on the motel dresser. That ruled out the second most logical motive, again assuming Hansen had been murdered.
Tracy had been focused on those forty-three cases, reviewing the HITS forms on file. After an hour, she’d considered three more of the cases. None seemed promising. She closed the laptop and leaned back against the pillows. “Like searching for a needle in a haystack, Roger.” The cat was already purring.
Tracy envied him.