Tracy looked inside the car’s windows, without touching them. “The air bag is deployed.”
“That’s a good thing,” Jensen said. “If it picked up the driver’s DNA we might know the driver at the time of impact—if he or she is in the system. I’ve called to have the car impounded at VPR and we’re working on a search warrant to get inside.” VPR was the vehicle processing room of the Seattle Police Department located at a satellite facility next to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. “You want me to involve CSI?”
CSI would process the car if homicide was going to get involved. Remembering Nolasco’s reluctance that morning, Tracy opted not to involve them. “No. You guys handle it, but let us know when you get the warrant to get inside.”
“Will do.”
“Does the owner live around here?” Tracy figured the driver of the car had to know the lot existed.
Jensen shook his head. “According to the DMV, he lives in an apartment in Bremerton.”
“Bremerton?” Kins said. “What the hell is the car doing over here?”
“I assume it has something to do with the car being stolen,” Jensen said.
Bremerton was a city located west of Seattle and accessed either by ferry across the Puget Sound, which took about an hour, or by driving south and cutting across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which took an hour and a half.
“What’s the driver do in Bremerton?” Tracy asked.
“He’s enlisted,” Jensen said.
“Great,” she said, shaking her head.
Bremerton was also home to one of the largest naval shipyards in the United States.
Tracy and Kins nearly missed the ferry departure because the Department of Transportation had blocked several streets leading to the terminal, which set Kins off on one of his biggest pet peeves. Seattle had been in the process of installing an underground tunnel and tearing down the elevated viaduct. At least that had been the plan. The traffic project, like so many in Seattle, had been fraught with delays, lawsuits, and mounting expenses almost from its inception.
Hey, if you can’t have it on time, the public might as well pay double for it, Kins would say.
They parked on the ferry and went upstairs for the hour-long crossing. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. You want anything?” Kins asked.
Tracy declined and found an empty table. Out the window she watched the Seattle skyline fade behind them as the boat powered across Puget Sound’s slate-gray waters, the engines emitting a low chugging sound. On her laptop, she pulled up the information she’d found running the car’s owner, Laszlo Gutierrez Trejo, through DMV, military, and criminal records. Trejo had two prior speeding tickets, but no criminal record. He’d been enlisted in the Navy for five years and had achieved the rating of logistics specialist, or LS. Uncertain what that designation meant, she’d Googled the position. As far as she could tell, a logistics specialist worked in ship storerooms and/or military base warehouses.
She’d then called Trejo and told him they were gathering information in the search for his stolen car. Since he couldn’t come to them—he professed to owning just the one car—she and Kins were headed to Bremerton, to an address in an area referred to as Jackson Park, Navy-owned apartment units about four miles north of Naval Base Kitsap.
Kins returned to the table with coffee and a hot dog loaded with relish and onions.
“I thought you were dieting?”
“This is dinner.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You had to get the onions, didn’t you?”
“Love onions on a hot dog.”
“They don’t love you,” she said. “I hope you brought breath mints.”
“Humor a condemned man.”
“For the love of God, you’re getting hip surgery. Seriously, are you nervous about it or just screwing with me?”
“Of course I’m nervous about it; they have to knock me out.”
“They’ve done it thousands of times, Kins.”
“That’s what the doctor told me. You know what? I don’t give a damn about the thousands of times everything went hunky-dory. I care about the one or two times it didn’t.”
“You’re young and healthy. Don’t overthink it.”
Kins set down his hot dog. “I got three kids, Tracy, who I still need to put through college. I’ll be fifty-three when the last one graduates, and that assumes none of them go on to graduate school. Do you know what college tuition costs nowadays? I’m looking at a couple hundred grand.”
Tracy did the math in her head. If she and Dan were to have a child, she’d be in her early to midsixties before their child graduated from college. God only knew what tuition would cost by then.
Kins took a bite of the hot dog and wiped mustard from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “What do you think of our man Lazarus?”
“Laszlo?” she said, thinking she’d misheard him through a mouth full of hot dog.
“What do you think of him?”
“I think it’s a long way for him to travel that late at night.”
“So you think he’s telling the truth, that his car was stolen?”
“I’m open to hearing what he has to say.”
“Wouldn’t the base keep records of people coming and going?”
“He doesn’t live on base. He lives in an apartment complex.”
“You said he lived in Navy housing.”
“It is, but not on base, which is why we can talk to him without jumping through hoops. Haven’t you ever worked with the Navy?”
“No,” Kins said, taking another bite of hot dog. “You?”
“Once. A home burglary. An enlisted man robbed his ex-girlfriend and NCIS got involved.” Navy Criminal Investigative Services were civilians, the Navy equivalent of detectives. “They made it a nightmare just to talk to the guy, but ultimately decided not to push jurisdiction and backed off.”
“Yeah, I heard they can be difficult.”
“I was told that after 9/11, the best investigators got pulled from the criminal division and transferred to counterterrorism. Those who remained aren’t as good or as cooperative. Laszlo’s apartments are zoned for federal and civilian jurisdiction, which means we can talk to him without going through NCIS.”
An hour and fifteen minutes after departing, the boat docked at the Bremerton Ferry Terminal with a slight jolt. The sun had faded, and dusk and the low cloud layer made everything nearly as gray as the water. The temperature had also dropped to the upper thirties. Kins and Tracy had returned to their car on the car deck and were waiting to disembark.
“So how do you like living at the edge of the world?” Kins asked.
“Don’t be a snob,” Tracy said. Kins lived in Madison Park near the university. “Redmond is far from the edge of the world.”
“You miss West Seattle?”
“I miss the commute. And the views.” The house in West Seattle had been a fifteen-to twenty-minute commute to the office, and the deck provided a billion-dollar view looking back across Elliott Bay to the Seattle skyline. “Some mornings it can take me an hour to get in, but the house is homey, and when we’re there, work seems far away.”