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

landing, losing sight of Gipson behind a carport. She descended the stairs and crossed the parking lot. When she reached the carport, she stopped and removed her Glock. Kins was slowed by his bad hip. They stepped around the corner. Tracy crouched to look beneath the cars. Kins moved to the back of the carport and pulled on doors, likely storage units, though most were padlocked shut.
    “Hey,” he whispered and held up a black backpack.
    Tracy heard what sounded like the rattle of a chain-link fence and hurried across the parking lot. A fence separated the apartment complex from what looked to be an undeveloped piece of property full of thick brush and trees.
    “We’re going to need the dogs,” Kins said. “I’ll radio it in and follow the fence line in case he doubles back.”
    Tracy found a toehold in the chain link and dropped on the other side. She kicked free of blackberry vines snagging the cuffs of her jeans and pushed through the foliage to a horse trail of matted grass. The trail lead to a grove of trees—Douglas fir, cedars, and maples. The tops swayed in gusts of wind.
    “Walter Gipson?” she yelled, wiping rain from her face. “You’re making this more difficult than it needs to be. We just want to talk.”
    She looked for movement and unnatural colors in the underbrush, but the fading light and increasing rain made it difficult to see. A hundred yards in, the brush and trees thinned to rolling pasture. In the near distance, horses had lifted their heads, ears perked, watching her. About to walk back out and wait for the dogs, she heard a branch snap behind her. She spun and raised her Glock. Horses crashed through the brush, veering at the last moment, hooves pounding the ground as they sped past her.
    Tracy’s heart hammered, and she had to take a moment to catch her breath and realized that the snapping branch had spooked the horses, not the other way around. She looked at the brush the horses had come through and took a blade stance but kept the barrel of the Glock pointed at the ground. “Walter Gipson?”
    No answer.
    “Mr. Gipson, you need to think of your wife and your daughter. I’m armed, and in about five minutes this place is going to be crawling with dogs and police officers. We don’t want an accident here, Mr. Gipson. We just need to talk. Walter?”
    “Okay. Okay.” Gipson stood suddenly from his hiding place.
    “Freeze,” Tracy yelled, taking aim. “Do not move! Do not move!”
    Gipson continued forward.
    “Freeze!” she yelled, louder. “I said, do not move!”
    Gipson froze. “Okay. Okay.”
    “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
    Gipson’s hands shook. His arms started to drop.
    “Keep your hands up!” she said.
    “All right. All right.”
    “Where’s your gun?”
    “It’s . . . it’s in the apartment.”
    “Do you have any weapons on you?”
    “No.”
    “Just keep your hands where I can see them.” Tracy removed her handcuffs, stepped behind Gipson, and quickly cuffed him.
    “I didn’t do it,” Gipson said. “I swear to God I didn’t kill her.”

CHAPTER 10
    T hey placed Walter Gipson in one of the hard interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of the Justice Center. A windowless box, the room seemed to radiate beneath white fluorescent lights. They’d let Gipson “cook” for twenty to thirty minutes. With the door shut, the walls closed in quickly, as did the thought of spending years in a room just like it.
    Rick Cerrabone, a senior prosecuting attorney and member of MDOP, joined Tracy and Kins, all of them watching Gipson from behind one-way glass. The teacher sat hunched over the nicked and scarred table. He looked older without the baseball cap.
    “How’d he know her?” Cerrabone asked. Faz had once pointed out that Cerrabone was the spitting image of former Yankees manager Joe Torre—balding, with a hangdog look about him, dark bags beneath tired eyes, and a heavy five-o’clock shadow.
    “She was a student in his writing class