“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” they cried, voices sweet enough to melt an angel’s heart.
He lifted one in each arm, and they gripped him around the neck, nuzzling and kissing him. It was horrible to even think, but the thought rushing through his mind at that moment was that Kimi Kanasket was dead, and he couldn’t do anything more for her. These two little girls in his arms, showering him with unconditional love, and the third baby on the way, had to take priority.
Anne followed the girls into the room. Dressed in her nurse’s uniform, she was as beautiful and sexy as the day Buzz first set eyes on her, and just the tonic he needed that morning. You’re a lucky man, Buzz Almond, he thought, trying to convince himself. You are so very blessed.
“Okay, girls,” Anne said. “Finish your breakfast before it gets cold.”
Buzz lowered their bare feet to the ground, and they padded off on tiptoes. “I made oatmeal,” Anne said, starting to gather her keys to get out the door. “With some fresh blueberries.”
“Thanks,” he said.
She stopped, considering him. “Everything okay?”
“Tough day at work,” he said, looking away, though he knew she’d already seen the tears in his eyes.
“Something that can be fixed?”
Buzz thought again of Kimi, and of Earl and Nettie Kanasket. He now knew they would be the hardest part of his job. He’d bring them home with him—and other families like them, families hurting and in pain—long after he punched out of work.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not this time.”
Tracy went back to West Seattle and dismantled Buzz Almond’s file, spreading it out on her dining room table, twice having to shoo away Roger and finally having to distract him with food.
She’d found with difficult cases that sometimes it helped to see all the evidence in one place. Despite the certainty she now had about what had happened on November 5, 1976, she felt like she still didn’t have the complete picture. She was still missing something. It was usually nothing dramatic—not some hidden clue only a Sherlockian mind could unearth. It was usually something much simpler than that, something logic dictated but that her mind had not stopped to consider—the way you don’t stop to consider the meaning of a stop sign. You just take your foot off the gas and apply the brake.
She picked up the reports, skimming through them. She moved next to the photos. Was there something staring her in the face that she wasn’t seeing? Maybe, but it was unlikely Kaylee Wright would have missed something obvious. She reached the same conclusion with respect to Kelly Rosa and her analysis of the coroner’s report. She ruled those out.
Her mind shifted to the evidence she hadn’t yet completely fit into the puzzle, and she picked up the receipts for the bodywork and windshield repair at Hastey Devoe Senior’s two shops: $68 to Columbia Windshield and Glass, and $659 to Columbia Auto Repair. Buzz had included those in the file because that was where the Bronco had been repaired, for cash. She was surprised a cash receipt even existed, that Eric Reynolds would have asked for one, and even more surprised Buzz had located them. How was not the question though. Why was the question. Why would Buzz have gone searching for the receipts?
She thought again of Eric Reynolds’s statement that Buzz Almond had come to the house to ask if he had been out Friday night. Why would Buzz have suspected Eric? He wouldn’t have, not unless he’d first suspected that the tire tracks could have been made by the Bronco’s tires. It was more likely that if Buzz had visited, it was not to talk to Eric but to see the car, to determine if the car had any damage. And if the car had still been damaged, Buzz would have never tracked down the receipts because he wouldn’t have known it had undergone repairs. The fact that he had the receipts, therefore, had to mean that the Bronco had already been repaired.
That’s when what had been gnawing at the back of Tracy’s mind—not one thing it turned out, but several, all interrelated—began to become clear.
And Tracy realized she’d been dead wrong.
Kaylee Wright hovered over the table, using a magnifying glass with a bright light on an extension arm to inspect the photographs. Tracy stood beside her, in Wright’s home office, trying not to crowd her, or to rush her. She’d called Wright’s cell, told her what she suspected, and asked if Wright could go over the photographs again. After nearly ten minutes going over multiple photographs, Wright straightened and moved the magnifying glass out of the way. Tracy felt like she was in court, waiting for a jury’s verdict.
Wright looked to her and sighed. “You’re right. I missed it.”
Tracy felt a huge surge of adrenaline. “How certain can you be?”
“Very certain. I’m sorry. I should have seen this.”
“Don’t be. You hadn’t finished your analysis.”
“I should have seen it.”
“Water under the bridge, Kaylee.”
“The truck that made those impressions entered and exited twice.”
Tracy forced herself to ask questions one at a time, not to rush, to be certain they had the evidence to support her hypothesis. “Will you explain to me how can you tell?”
Wright picked through several of the photographs on her desk until settling on the one she wanted. She adjusted the magnifying glass over it. “Take a look,” she said, stepping aside.
Tracy looked at the enlarged image as Wright spoke. “This is the best photograph depicting the tire tread. You can clearly see two defined paths in, and two defined paths out. The paths overlap in certain places, but cars, like people, don’t move in a perfectly straight line. You can see clearly where the paths deviated.”
“Could it have been two separate vehicles, one following the other?” Tracy asked, wanting to eliminate that possibility.
“No. Both sets of tracks were made by the same tires, and within a relatively short period of time.”
“How can you tell it was a short period of time? Why couldn’t it have been a week or a month apart?” Tracy knew that had not been the scenario because, according to Buzz Almond’s report, he’d taken the photographs the Monday after Kimi Kanasket had gone missing.
“Again, you have to look at the impressions. If the second vehicle had come at a time significantly after the first, I would have expected the photographs to depict bits of crumbled dirt. Remember, I said that in my opinion, to get this quality of impressions the ground had to have been wet and then frozen in a relatively short period of time. These impressions in the dirt would have hardened like a plaster-cast mold. If a second vehicle came at a later date, it would have torn up the first set of tracks and obliterated the first vehicle’s impressions. We would be seeing large clumps of chewed-up dirt. I don’t see anything like that here.”
“So the same vehicle had to have come back before the ground had time to freeze.”