Free Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) by Robert Dugoni

equally well with both hands.”
    Great, Tracy had thought.
    Cerrabone said what Tracy had already deduced. “We’re not going forward.”
    She respected him. Unlike some prosecutors who cherry-picked which cases to try to preserve their win-loss percentage, Cerrabone wasn’t afraid to try a case he might lose. But this was a reasoned decision. They did not have enough evidence, and the last thing they wanted to do was to move forward with an evidentiary hearing and give the media another reason to criticize them when a judge ended up setting Gipson free and the murder of another young woman remained unsolved.
    After hanging up with Cerrabone, Tracy walked around the corner to Nolasco’s office to make a request. She suspected she knew the answer, but she wanted to note in the file that she had tried.
    “We want to put a tail on Gipson,” she said.
    “Do your job and I don’t have to authorize an unnecessary expenditure of funds,” Nolasco said.
    Early that evening, Walter Gipson, aficionado of prostitutes and fine motels, and skilled creator of intricate fishing flies, walked free from King County Jail.

CHAPTER 14
    T racy returned to her desk to go through crime scene photographs, hoping she’d see something she’d missed. From across the bull pen, Faz muttered one of his famous sayings, breaking her concentration.
    “Kick me in the nuts—hey, Professor?”
    “Rather not, Faz. A few other people I can think of that I’d like to, however.”
    Faz frequently called Tracy by the nickname given to her at the police academy.
    “I think you might want to come see this.”
    Tracy rotated her chair. It was just the two of them. Kins had left for the day to have dinner with the family. He’d already missed too many, which wasn’t helping the strained relations at home. Del, too, had departed, leaving a pile of papers, food wrappers, and coffee mugs on his desk.
    She pushed away from her desk and walked to Faz’s cubicle, looking over his shoulder. Faz was peering over the top of half-lens reading glasses at his computer screen. Tracy recognized the dark and blurred image of the Pink Palace parking lot captured by one of the two surveillance cameras. She’d also reviewed the surveillance video from inside the club, but it had been focused on the cash register and, more specifically, on Nash’s employees handling the money. It didn’t record the patrons.
    “Tell me what you see,” Faz said, tapping his keyboard.
    She leaned closer to the screen but pulled back when she detected garlic, a lot of it. Whatever gum Faz was chewing wasn’t close to conquering the smell. She waived at the air. “You expecting an attack by vampires, Faz?”
    “It ain’t Italian food if you don’t reek,” he said.
    “Mission accomplished.”
    Faz vacated his chair. “You sit. I’ll stand and try not to breathe on you.”
    Tracy took his seat and hit “Play.” The video was poor quality, largely because the lights working in the parking lot were sporadic, creating patches of dark shadows. The club’s pink stucco walls looked pale gray, and when the neon marquee and Jumbotron flashed, everything on the video washed out. Nash had no doubt skimped on the security cameras when running the budget for his “gentlemen’s club.”
    After thirteen static seconds ticked off the timer in the lower right corner, a man in a cap and a woman with a red handbag slung over her shoulder walked out from behind the building. “Gipson and Schreiber,” Tracy said, feeling slightly unnerved watching the final moments of Schreiber’s life, like some sort of deity peering down from the heavens, knowing what was about to happen. The couple held hands, swinging their arms like high school sweethearts strolling on a warm summer evening and reveling in the feel of each other’s intertwined fingers. Gipson pulled Schreiber to him to sneak a kiss. He looked like he wanted more, but Schreiber leaned away, putting a hand to his chest. She glanced back