Tracy arrived at the cottage in Redmond in dire need of sleep. After managing just a few fitful hours in the Bremerton hotel room, she’d worked through the day and the night, waiting to hear from Del and Faz about the raid on Eric Tseng’s home.
Del finally called at 5:00 a.m. The news was not good. He told her that they’d located a concrete room adjacent to the man cave where they’d found Tseng’s body. The room had been secured by a steel door. Inside they’d found a glistening metal table and a floor with a drain. Everything else had been cleaned out, and the room held the smell of lemon and bleach. Del said the room was built for someone to clean up quickly, and they likely had. They found no remnants of heroin, no scales or plastic bags. Detectives from CID would go over the house anyway, including pulling the trap on the drain to take samples.
A canvass of the residents in the neighborhood had also failed to reveal any of the telltale signs of a drug operation. The neighbors did not recall random cars or people showing up at all hours of the day and night. In fact, they described Tseng as friendly but private, and said he kept mostly to himself. One neighbor recalled several different women at the home, but she couldn’t identify any of them and didn’t think much of it since Tseng was single. Tseng told his neighbors he ran a software consulting business out of his house, but that fieldwork often required him to leave at odd hours of the day and night to troubleshoot client problems.
Tracy kicked off her boots and set them outside the front door, entering in her socks so as not to wake Dan, if he were still sleeping. However, the sound of the lock disengaging, and the door rattling open—it stuck in the jamb in the winter months—awoke Rex and Sherlock, and the two dogs bolted from the bedroom, barking. Dan followed several steps behind them. Dressed in shorts, socks, and a sweatshirt, he looked to be on his way out the door for a run. “I’ll bet you’re going to be glad when your night shift is over,” he said.
She made her way to the dining room table where she discarded her briefcase, purse, and her jacket. “I don’t even know what shift I’m working anymore.” She shook her head and immediately regretted doing so. Her temples pulsed—a sleep-deprivation-induced headache.
Dan bent to kiss her.
She pulled back. “Better not. My breath must smell like moldy cheese, given what my mouth tastes like.”
“I’d ask if you wanted to go for a run, but I think I know the answer.”
“The only thing I’m running to is the bed.” She walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. Then she rummaged in the cabinets for aspirin.
“Why so late?” He looked at his watch. “Or should I say early?”
“We raided the home of the guy Trejo was supposedly supplying. I wanted to wait and find out what happened.”
“And?”
She drank in large gulps. “We found him,” she said, lowering the glass. “Nothing else. No drugs, no drug paraphernalia.”
“Doesn’t sound good,” Dan said.
She exited the kitchen and walked into the bedroom. “Shot in the temple, like Trejo. Del said it was probably about the same time too.”
“Somebody cleaning up,” Dan said.
“Looks that way. They’re processing the house, but no one is optimistic.” She shimmied her jeans over her hips and sat on the bed to pull them off. “This one just gets more and more confusing.”
Tracy pulled back the covers and climbed into bed. Sherlock, seizing his chance, leapt onto the duvet cover and plopped down in the center of the mattress. Dan sat on the edge, Rex at his feet, looking up at him as if to say, I thought we were going on a run!
Dan stroked Rex’s head. “We’ll go in a minute,” he said. He looked to Tracy. “You want to walk through it?”
She didn’t, but she also knew Dan was not offering just to be kind. He had enough on his plate at the moment. With a criminal defense background, he was a good sounding board, and she needed one, with Kins out of commission. Dan also knew she would stew on her thoughts, preventing her from sleeping. Talking to Dan was the equivalent of writing it on a sheet of paper to get the thoughts out of her head.
“Sure.” She sat up and adjusted the pillows at her back, considering where to start. “Laszlo Trejo runs a red light and hits a kid in Seattle. Why was he over there?”
“He had heroin in his car and was making a delivery.”
“Right,” she said. She rubbed her face and shook off the cobwebs. “Who helped him ditch the car and get back to Bremerton?”
“The most obvious choice would be the guy he was delivering the heroin to, but you’re not going to be able to verify that with both men dead.”
“Agreed. Highly doubtful we can verify it; highly probable Tseng helped him.” She grimaced, her head now pounding. “I don’t know where to go with this. Ordinarily, I’d say this is a drug deal gone bad, but we have the issue of the missing convenience store videotape, and I no longer believe it was just a bad coincidence.”
Tracy put her head back against the pillows. She could feel the fatigue settling into her joints and her eyelids becoming heavy.
“Who had access to that videotape?” Dan said.
“Anyone who had access to the evidence room in the DSO building.”
“Which is who?”
Tracy took a deep breath. “Battles, the defense attorney; the prosecutor; his assistant; the court reporter; the janitors. The problem is, I got a copy of the security tape for the building before I left Bremerton and no one came in or out of the building the night and morning that the tape disappeared, except the janitor.”
“You viewed it?”
“Not yet.”
“Then—”
“I was told what was on the video by Leah Battles and by her officer in charge. She pulled it the day the convenience store tape went missing.”
“Could it have been the janitor?”
Tracy thought of Al Tulowitsky and his boss, Gary Buchman. “It’s possible, but it seems unlikely.”
“What about Battles?” Dan said.
Tracy told him about the link to the video Owens had sent her, the one showing Battles disarming a person holding a gun.
“I know you don’t want to believe it was her, Tracy, but everything seems to point to her. She lives in Seattle. She had the opportunity, certainly, to take the security tape. She has no seeming alibi for Trejo’s death and now, apparently, she had the ability to get his gun. How much do you really know about her?”
“Not a lot,” Tracy said. “Maybe not enough.”
“Maybe that’s where you should start.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I’m not doing anything until I get some sleep.”
“The less you have the more you crave it,” Dan said.
She smiled.
“You said you have a copy of the security tape for inside the building that night? Tracy?”
“Huh?”
“The security tape. Do you want me to watch it?”
“It’s on a disc in my briefcase.”
He stood watching her sleep. “I’ll take that as a yes.”