They sat at a table in their favorite Italian restaurant just south of the point on Beach Drive. Out the window, the sunlight faded behind the islands and the distant Olympic Mountains. The red roses, now arranged in a vase, stood on the table, but Tracy couldn’t take her eyes off the ring adorning her left hand, or the man who’d placed it there. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Everything was so beautiful. How did you get this all done?”
“Well, at the risk of not starting this relationship off with complete honesty, I didn’t go into the office this morning.”
“I figured that. How did you get them to let you use the lighthouse?”
“I have a friend who works with the Coast Guard and is tight with the commander. He had one of the guards leave the gate unlocked and came after closing to arrange the flowers. I called and gave him the cue to light the candles for me. I owe a few people some really good bottles of wine. So, did I do good?”
He’d blown her away. She’d thought they’d get married, but she thought it would be a decision they made together, and then they’d drive down to the courthouse. She never expected Dan to propose, to go to so much effort to surprise . . . and amaze her. She couldn’t stop smiling. She couldn’t recall the last time her face hurt from smiling so much.
“You did good,” she said.
She twisted her ring in the fading light coming through the window, watching the diamonds surrounding the large center diamond sparkle and flicker. Out the window, gentle waves rippled on Puget Sound, and sailboats tacked into and against the wind. It was perfect. The entire night was perfect, until she realized the view was almost directly in line with the honey hole where Kurt Schill had pulled up the crab pot containing Andrea Strickland’s body.
CHAPTER 23
Thursday morning, Tracy arrived at the office tired from a fitful night’s sleep. After dinner, she and Dan had returned home and made love. Getting to sleep had not been a problem, but she had awakened at just after three, out of breath, her nightshirt soaked with sweat, the way it used to get when she’d been dreaming of Sarah. This time, the nightmare had nothing to do with her sister. This time, in the nightmare, Tracy had been sitting in Kurt Schill’s boat on Puget Sound, struggling to raise the crab pot, arms straining to pull the line through the block at the end of the davit pole. It seemed she’d pulled forever, yard after yard of rope winding in a neat circle around her feet until, finally, the crab pot breached the surface. She tied off the rope and carefully slid across the seat, feeling the boat tip off balance. Carefully, she stretched out her arm. The boat inched closer to the water’s surface. She strained to reach the cage, fingers twitching, just inches from the metal.
A hand shot out from between the bars, the polished blue fingernails gripping her arm, yanking her overboard, into the dark waters.
Tracy had lain in bed, unable to get back to sleep. Her mind churned over the evidence in the Andrea Strickland case, something about the dream bothering her, though what exactly she couldn’t be sure. She read on her Kindle until six o’clock, then got up and made Dan breakfast in bed—which seemed a poor trade for all the effort he’d gone to the day before. After they’d eaten, she made her way into the office.
Tracy stepped off the elevator, in no hurry now that Pierce County had taken back her only open murder. The A Team was back to working their regular schedule. Two months on day shifts, then they’d work a month on nights. She’d do the legwork on her other violent crime cases, and get those that didn’t plead prepared for trial. As she walked the hallway, her section came alive. She smelled the bittersweet aroma of coffee and heard the voices of her colleagues and of the morning newscasters from the flat screen. Mentally, she was settling into the thought of a relaxing morning when she entered her bull pen and saw the yellow sticky note on her computer monitor summoning her.
See me in
conference room
immediately when
you get in!
Knowing Nolasco, with the Strickland case no longer filling Tracy’s plate, he’d give her some administrative crap—a tedious project like digging through boxes of old files he’d been avoiding but would now say he needed ASAP.
The blinds on the windows had been drawn, preventing her from seeing into the conference room. She reached the open door, about to knock, but caught herself when she saw others seated at the table. She momentarily thought she’d walked in on a meeting. Nolasco sat on the far side of the table beside Stephen Martinez, the assistant chief of criminal investigations—Nolasco’s immediate superior. On the other side of the table, the side closest to the door, sat Stan Fields and an officer Tracy could venture a good guess was Fields’s captain—a pale, pudgy, officious-looking man bearing an expression like his shorts were too tight and riding up on him.