The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4)

by Robert Dugoni

  “No,” Strickland said, “but she could have used her false identity.” Again, he looked pleased with his reasoning. Fields was accurate: Strickland believed he was smarter than everybody.

  Tracy thought Strickland’s speculation of a rental car unlikely, but she made a mental note to find out. “Assuming she didn’t, can you think of anyone who would have assisted your wife?”

  “Andrea was an introvert,” Strickland said. “I was the more outgoing one.”

  “She didn’t have any friends?” Kins said.

  “It wasn’t that. It was just that mostly her friends were my friends . . . our friends.”

  “So no close girlfriend who may have helped her?” Tracy pressed, wondering why Strickland was being evasive about Devin Chambers.

  “Not that I can think of . . . I mean, for someone to do that . . . It’s a pretty terrible thing to do to someone.”

  “Do you mean to Andrea or to you?” Kins asked.

  “To me,” he said. “They would have had to really hate me to let me go through something like this. I could have spent the rest of my life in jail.”

  “What about someone named Devin Chambers?” Tracy said.

  “Andrea and Devin worked together,” Strickland said, seemingly unflustered.

  “Were they close?”

  “I don’t know. I think it was more of a work relationship.”

  “Did you speak to Devin Chambers after your wife’s disappearance?”

  “Why would I have done that?”

  “Did you speak to her when you learned your wife had walked off the mountain?”

  “No.”

  “Did you speak to anyone when you received the news?”

  “Just Phil.”

  “Your wife had a trust, did she not?”

  “Yes,” Strickland said.

  “It was in excess of half a million dollars?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did you obtain that money after your wife disappeared on the mountain?”

  “No, and I have no idea what happened to it.”

  “It’s gone?” Tracy asked.

  “Apparently.”

  “And you don’t know where it is?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You said you and Andrea loved the outdoors?” Tracy asked.

  “We did,” Strickland said, though he definitely didn’t strike Tracy as the outdoor type.

  “What did you do besides climbing?”

  “We hiked quite a bit. Skied in the winter.”

  “Water-skied?”

  “On occasion.”

  “Can you drive a boat?” Kins asked.

  Strickland shrugged, meeting Kins’s gaze, and in that brief moment letting Kins know he knew exactly where Kins was going, and he had already beaten him there. “Just about anyone can drive a boat,” he said.

  After another thirty minutes, Tracy looked to Kins, who gave her a slight shrug. They weren’t going to get much more out of Strickland. He was slick, as Fields had warned, and he had Montgomery running interference for him. She thanked both Strickland and Montgomery and handed them a card. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, you can reach me at that number.”

  As they left the building, stepping from air-conditioning into a quickly warming day, Tracy said, “You knew he didn’t own a boat.”

  “I just wanted to know if he knew how to drive one,” Kins said.

  CHAPTER 14

  After leaving the DOL, I practiced the name, saying it out loud and in sentences like, “Hi, I’m Lynn Hoff.” I drove to Renton, which was on the way back to Portland. I’d found a bank online the previous night called Emerald Credit Union. I stopped in a gas station restroom and applied mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick. I also brushed out my hair and removed my wedding band.

  Inside the bank, I approached the counter and told the woman I was hoping to open a new bank account. She directed me to four desks at the back divided by cubicle walls. Two of the desks were empty. A woman who looked to be in her midthirties sat at the third desk. At the fourth sat a guy who looked about my age, with wisps of hair above his upper lip. The nameplate said “Branch Manager.” I quickly approached.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling brightly. “I’m hoping you could help me open an account.”

  He looked up from his computer and smiled. His eyes ran down my body. I knew I looked as good as I ever had, with the weight loss and the workouts in preparation for climbing Mount Rainier. “I’d be happy to,” he said.

  “I just recently relocated,” I said, sitting and moving close so that I could lean an arm on the edge of his desk. “So I have a temporary driver’s license.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, still smiling. His gaze dropped for just a brief second to the V in my blouse before reengaging my eyes. “What brings you to Washington?”

  “Work,” I said. “My company transferred me here to open an office.” I reached out and shook his hand. “Lynn Hoff.” I liked how the name just rolled off my tongue.

  “Kevin Gonzalez,” he said. “I’m the branch manager. What kind of work do you do?”

  “It’s an outdoor apparel company, a start-up.”

  “What’s it called?” he asked. “Maybe I’ve heard of it.”

  “Running Free,” I said, having thought of the name the night before.

  “Great name.” He opened his desk drawers and removed paperwork. “How much will you be depositing with us today?”

  “In that account?” I paused. “Just a few hundred dollars. My company will be wiring me additional funds once I provide them with the routing and account numbers, and I’ll be making frequent online deposits, probably daily.”

  “We can certainly do that,” Kevin said. “I noticed you said, ‘that account.’ Will you be opening another account?”

  “I want to also open a personal account,” I said. “It’s quite a bit of money, a settlement from a lawsuit. I was in an accident several years ago. Now that I’m moving here, I want to transfer the funds.”

  “We can certainly accommodate you with that as well,” he said. “I hope you weren’t hurt too badly?”

  “I was in the hospital and rehab for a while,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, blushing. “You rehabbed nicely, if I can say so, Lynn.”

  I leaned closer to the desk, allowing my shirt to open just a peek lower. “That is so sweet of you, Kevin,” I said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Thursday morning, with a subpoena for Lynn Hoff’s bank records tucked into his file, Faz pulled open the car door and slid into the passenger seat, bumping shoulders with Del as the two of them struggled to pull seat belts across their bodies.

  Someone had once commented that Faz and Del in the front seat of the Ford looked like two grizzlies squished in a circus clown car. Faz just laughed. He and Del knew they were the comic relief around the Violent Crimes Section and they embraced that role. They provided a diversion from an often stressful and disheartening profession. After nearly twenty years, Faz knew from experience that detectives witnessed the worst that humanity had to offer, the carnage the sick and depraved left behind. They did not have the luxury the rest of the population had to cover their eyes or look away. They had to rummage through that carnage in the most minute detail and, when they had finished, when they had put the murderer in jail, they got to do it all over again. There would always be another murder, as sure as taxes and dying, as Faz’s mother liked to say. People had been killing one another since Cain killed his brother Abel. Since they had been the world’s first two births—according to the Old Testament anyway—and since only Cain had survived, Faz figured the capacity to kill was part of every human being’s DNA.

  When his kids were young, Faz had often struggled with what to tell them he did for a living, about how he spent his day. He’d done his best to shield his sons from the worst of his work, but he couldn’t shield himself. His job was to look closely, to try to get into the minds of criminals. He’d hunted serial k
illers, killers who had dismembered bodies, jealous husbands, and the gangbangers who’d shoot someone over a dime bag of dope. Then he’d driven home, where he was expected to help with the homework, and get the boys ready for dinner. Some nights, he’d driven home and sat in the car, a block from the house, just trying to make sense of it. Some people asked why he and Del made jokes. They asked how they could laugh about such things. Faz didn’t know. He just knew he would have gone crazy a long time ago if he hadn’t found a reason to smile, maybe even a moment of laughter amid the horror. Some days that was the only thing that made him feel human.

  Del pulled into a strip mall that included a teriyaki restaurant, a fitness studio, a UPS store, and the Emerald Credit Union.

  “Bank to go,” Del said. “You can eat lunch, work it off, and make a deposit or withdrawal.”

  “One-stop shopping,” Faz said.

  Del maneuvered the car into a spot reserved for bank customers and partially shaded by the building overhang. Since they were ten minutes early for their appointment, Del kept the engine running, blasting the air-conditioning.

  “So why’d she bother to open a corporation?” Del asked. “Why go to that trouble?”

  The prior afternoon, Faz had run down the account on the receipt Tracy found in the motel-room trash. Conversations with the bank manager revealed both a personal account for Lynn Hoff and a business account for a company called Running Free. Faz had looked up Running Free, Inc., on the Secretary of State’s web page, uncertain he’d find anything. Turned out Running Free existed—a subchapter S corporation formed in Delaware in March 2017, two months before the Stricklands’ final excursion up Rainier. The timing further confirmed that Andrea Strickland had planned her disappearance, and she’d been meticulous about it.

  “It’s one more layer between her and anybody looking for her,” Faz said. “You can do all the paperwork online so you can remain anonymous.”

  “I take it she chose Delaware because they do a lot of business?” Del asked.

  “More companies incorporate there than any other place in the world,” Faz said. “You come up with a business name, decide on the type of entity you want to form, pick and designate a registered agent in the state of Delaware from a list, pay the fee, and wah-lah, you get your certificate of incorporation.”

  “So a safety-in-numbers sort of thing?”

  “Maybe, although now computers make it easier to track, which I suspect is why she didn’t designate herself an officer or shareholder.”

  “You think the officers are fake?”

  “No doubt. If you need to sign a lease or open a bank account, you say you’ve been relocated and the company is paying your living expenses. That way, the lease agreements and bills for utilities, which enterprising persons such as us use to track people down, aren’t in your name. Another layer of deception. And the name of a company also gives the landlord the warm and fuzzies that they’re guaranteed payment, especially if the bank is local.”

  Del looked out the window at the glass-door entrance to Emerald Credit Union. “Might be local, but I’ve never heard of this place. I take it that was also intentional?”

  “Easier to make a personal connection with the branch manager and teller at a small bank.”

  “But I thought the whole point was not to draw attention to yourself.”

  “You want to avoid the wrong kind of attention, like going through an airport security checkpoint, or customs, with a bag full of cash.”

  “So she dumps it in a bank account,” Del said.

  “Not all at once. The banking laws are designed to prevent people from hiding large amounts of cash. Anything over ten grand and the bank has to fill out paperwork and report it to the feds.”

  “So she makes sure to make deposits under $10K,” Del said.

  “And the feds countered that strategy with the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires a bank to file a report if it suspects a person is making multiple cash deposits to avoid the reporting requirement.”

  “So you’re saying she goes into the local bank and makes nice so they’re less inclined to report her.”

  “I’m betting she had a ready-made story to dump that much cash into one account without triggering the reporting requirement.”

  “So then what? She slowly withdraws the money in that account and deposits it into the business account?”

  “Bingo. At the same time, she withdraws money from the business account, as if paying business expenses or whatever, but what she’s really doing is transferring it to a different account in a different bank, in a different name. Layer by layer, it disappears.”

  “How the hell does a woman with a high school education figure this out?” Del said, shaking his head.

  “You kidding? You can buy books that tell you how to do it step-by-step.”

  “Too much trouble,” Del said.

  “Yeah, you got to know how to read.”

  “Only books I read are on the Civil War,” Del said. Faz knew Del had a collection that would make a librarian blush. “If they had that category on Jeopardy, I’d be on a beach in Greece.”

  “Greece is bankrupt.”

  “Exactly. I’d be like a tycoon over there.” Del killed the engine and checked his watch. “Let’s you and me go figure this out.”

  Inside the bank, they walked past the three bank teller stations to a cluster of four desks. Del stopped at the obligatory table with Styrofoam cups and complimentary coffee and snacks. He snagged a couple of miniature chocolate chip cookies, popping one into his mouth.

  A female bank employee was waiting on a customer at one of the four desks. The other three desks were empty. On one of those empty desks sat a nameplate holder with a plastic removable sign. “Branch Manager.”

  “Why is it removable?” Del said.

  “Maybe it’s the guy’s name,” Faz said. Del gave him a look. “Hey, it would save money on business cards.”

  Faz noticed a gangly young man standing behind the teller stations glance in their direction. “I’ll bet that’s Branch right there,” he said.

  The young man took paperwork from a teller and walked to the far end of the bull pen, emerging from a rear door and proceeding to the branch manager’s desk.

  “Detectives?” the young man said, inadvertently drawing the attention of the person seated at the adjacent desk. He lowered his voice, though he would have needed to use sign language to keep the others from hearing—the desks were that close. “I’m Kevin Gonzalez, the branch manager.”

  Gonzalez looked to be mid- to late twenties but with one of those prepubescent faces still fighting acne, and a wispy mustache that made him look sixteen.

  Faz introduced them both. They all took seats.

  “You have the subpoena?” Gonzalez tried to be all business, then added in an almost apologetic tone, “I called the home office and they said you would have a subpoena.”

  “Where’s the home office?” Faz asked, hoping a routine question would help Gonzalez relax. The manager was doing his best to look professional, but he couldn’t completely hide the nervous shake in his hands or his voice.

  “Centralia,” Gonzalez said, referencing a small town about an hour and a half south of Seattle.

  “How long has this branch been open?”

  “About five years, I believe.”

  “And how long have you been the branch manager?”

  “Nine months.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Gonzalez paused, as if uncertain what to say. Then he smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Did you work here before becoming the branch manager?” Faz asked.

  “I was a teller for two years. Can I offer you some coffee?”

  “We’re good,” Faz said.

  “Makes me sweat in weather like this,” Del added. “And I don’t need any help in that department.”

  Faz handed Gonzalez the subpoena. He doubted the young man had ever seen a subpoena before, but Gonzalez took the time to make
it appear he knew what he was doing. “We’re concerned about the privacy of our customers,” Gonzalez said.

  “Don’t be,” Del said. “This customer is dead.”

  “Oh.” Gonzalez looked and sounded both surprised and saddened.

  “Did you know Lynn Hoff?” Faz asked.

  “Yes,” Gonzalez said. He appeared frozen for a moment. He shook free. “Wow. Sorry. I opened her accounts.”

  “The personal account and the business account?” Faz said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about the personal account.”

  “She deposited a large settlement from a car accident, more than $500,000.”

  “Do you remember the day she came in?” Faz asked.

  “It was March twelfth.”

  “No, I mean do you remember that day?” Faz noted Gonzalez was not wearing a wedding ring and guessed the young man had recalled an attractive young woman like Andrea Strickland.

  “Oh, uh, yes. Sort of.”

  “Tell us what you remember,” Del said, taking out a small spiral notebook and pen.

  Gonzalez’s gaze flicked to the pad and pen, then back to Faz. “Just that she wanted to open the two accounts. She said she’d been relocated by her business.”

  “Did she say what type of business?” Faz asked.

  “It was an outdoor apparel company, I believe.”

  “Did she say where she’d moved from?”

  “Somewhere in Southern California, I believe. I remember because she joked about the company having more clients since it rains so much here.”

  “What else do you recall?” Faz asked.

  Gonzalez glanced away as if trying to remember. “She said she’d just divorced and was tired of the guys in Southern California. She said the whole scene was too superficial for her. She said she was staying with a girlfriend until she found her own place.”

  And Faz was certain that nugget of well-placed information had piqued Gonzalez’s interest, just as Andrea Strickland, aka Lynn Hoff, had intended it to. High school education maybe, but she was smart and she knew how to play the game.

  “You helped her open the accounts?” Faz said.

  “I did.”