“All true,” Kins said.
“We also know he cheated on her and, if you believe what Andrea told her boss, that he was continuing to cheat on her—maybe with her best friend.”
“Was he, or did she just want people to believe he was still cheating on her because it fits the profile of a man who’d have reason to kill his wife? Like the insurance policy he claims he knew nothing about.”
“Let’s say he was cheating on her,” Tracy said. “What if the person he was cheating with was Devin Chambers? It gives him a motivation to kill Chambers.”
“It gives Andrea a motivation to kill her also,” Kins said. “If Andrea’s still alive, and I’m thinking she is—somebody moved that money.” He pulled out of the parking space. “Let’s get something to eat. Maybe food will help us think through this.”
“I know a place,” Tracy said. “My academy class used to go there.”
She directed him to the Tin Room Bar on Southwest 152nd Street in downtown Burien. A tin shop when the street had been lined with industrial businesses, the building was bought by a local entrepreneur who turned half of it into a movie theater and the other half into an eclectic bar and restaurant. The tools from the tin shop were mounted on the walls and the workbenches cut into tables. The renovation had started a revival on the street, which now included half a dozen other restaurants and bars.
Tracy and Kins took a table beneath an Impressionist painting of Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones’ front man. She ordered the fish tacos and an iced tea. Kins ordered a hamburger and Diet Coke. “Modern Love,” one of the late, great David Bowie’s best-known songs, filtered down from the overhead speakers, and several men and women sat at the bar watching a Mariners game on the flat-screen televisions.
“We’ve come full circle, haven’t we?” Kins said. “We’re looking at three options. Either Strickland did kill his wife and staged it to look like an accident. She died on the mountain and it was an accident. Or, she outsmarted him, walked off the mountain, and tried to frame him for her murder—and is still alive.”
“Let’s start with the first scenario,” Tracy said. She sipped iced tea, set it aside, and used a paper napkin and a pen to diagram her thoughts. “On the brink of financial disaster, he pushes his wife off the mountain thinking he’ll recover the insurance money and get access to the trust money she’s been keeping from him. But the Pierce County DA names him a person of interest, the insurance company won’t pay the life insurance benefits, and the wife’s money disappears. In that scenario, the obvious person who took the trust money is Devin Chambers, right?”
“That would appear to be the case. She paid cash to have her face reconstructed and took over Strickland’s alias.”
“Okay, so in that scenario, the husband hires the skip tracer,” Tracy said. “The skip tracer finds Devin Chambers, the husband hunts her down, kills her, and drains the bank account.”
“So far, I agree,” Kins said.
“Scenario two,” Tracy said. “He’s intending to kill Andrea, or maybe he isn’t, but in any event she somehow dies in an accident.”
“My opinion is that’s the most unlikely of the three scenarios, but just for argument’s sake, everything else would remain the same,” Kins said.
“Agreed,” Tracy said. “So that leaves scenario three.”
“She outsmarted him. She figured out he was going to kill her on the mountain, staged her own death, walked off the mountain, took her trust, and is still alive somewhere,” Kins said. “So when does the husband realize he’s been set up—when he wakes up the next morning in the tent?” Kins said.
“Maybe, but probably more likely when Fields comes knocking on his door asking about insurance policies he’s the supposed beneficiary of but knows nothing about, and telling him his wife was meeting with a divorce attorney and making allegations he was cheating on her again.”
The waitress returned with Tracy’s tacos and Kins’s burger. Tracy slid the napkin to the side to make room. Kins grabbed the bottle of ketchup and doctored his hamburger.
“So now he’s got bigger problems,” Kins said, pounding the bottom of the bottle. “The investigation prevents the insurance payout, and Andrea’s separate trust fund is gone, along with his girlfriend, but the creditors are still knocking on the door and he stands to lose everything.”
“And he’s wondering if the disappearance of the money and Chambers’s disappearance are related,” Tracy said, stealing one of Kins’s french fries. “So he uses a guerilla e-mail account to track Chambers down.”
“The skip tracer said the client initially asked to look for a ‘Lynn Hoff,’” Kins said. “How would the husband have known about Lynn Hoff?”
“Maybe Devin Chambers,” Tracy said. “If she and Graham Strickland were initially working together.”
“And if they weren’t?”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe he found something around the house that tipped him off.”
Kins bit into his burger and wiped his hands on the cloth napkin in his lap. “You think Andrea could have confided in Devin Chambers?”
“It’s possible. The boss said they were close, maybe Andrea’s only friend.”
“So when she finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband, why doesn’t she just take off? Why go up the mountain at all?”
“Two reasons I can think of. One, she’d confided in Devin about Lynn Hoff, so Devin would know how to track her and the money.”
Kins dipped a french fry in ketchup and ate it. “All right. What’s the second reason?”
“The counselor I spoke with said it’s possible the years of abuse resulted in a dissociative disorder, and that Andrea could become volatile if she were to suffer some acute trauma, or if she felt abandoned or desperate.”
“Like finding out your only friend is sleeping with your husband and is trying to rip off your life savings?” Kins said.
“So simply fleeing was not going to keep someone from pursuing her, nor was it going to allow her to get even with either of them.”
“So you’re saying, in this scenario, Andrea Strickland had to make it look like the husband killed her on that mountain and that Chambers was in on it,” Kins said, taking another bite.
“She takes out the insurance policy, consults the divorce attorney, and drops hints that the husband is cheating on her again,” Tracy said. “Then she uses the skip tracer to track down Devin Chambers. Chambers disappears and everyone thinks it’s the husband.”
“Why was Devin Chambers on the run?”
“Chance to start a new life with half a million in cash,” Tracy said.
“Maybe,” Kins said. “But don’t you think it’s more likely the husband killed Chambers, but Andrea Strickland moved the money before he could get to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think she’s still alive,” Kins said.
“We need to find the skip tracer. Maybe there’s some way to determine from where those e-mails originated. Maybe if we can narrow it to a city, we can determine whether it was the husband, or whether it was her.”
Kins put down the hamburger and continued munching his french fries. “I thought you said those e-mails were anonymous.”
“Nothing is completely anonymous. You remember that Harvard student who got busted for calling in a bomb scare to get out of taking finals?”
“Vaguely.”
“I looked it up the other night. He used a guerilla e-mail account and an anonymous server, but the FBI determined that he’d logged on to Harvard’s Wi-Fi server. We don’t have to link the e-mails to a particular computer. It might be enough if we can show they came from someplace like a Portland Starbucks near Graham Strickland’s house, or some other place where she’s in hiding.” Tracy tapped the two manila folders from ALS. “But the first thing we have to do is take this to Nolasco and Martinez and tell them the body in the pot is not Andrea Strickland. That means Pierce County has no basis to assert jurisdiction because there is no
longer a connection between our murder and their—once again—missing person investigation.”
CHAPTER 26
Tracy and Kins met with Del and Faz over the weekend to discuss the DNA results, and how best to present the information to Nolasco and Martinez. All agreed that, given the volatility of Tracy’s relationship with Nolasco, it would be best if Kins took the lead explaining the DNA results and the potential ramifications. None of them believed for a minute Nolasco or Martinez would not see through the ploy, but they hoped two factors would at least make them look past it. Tracy had hinted at the first factor in her earlier meeting with Nolasco—the case was continuing to generate publicity. Most recently, the national news media had picked up the story, and it was a certainty that media coverage would only intensify when news broke that the woman in the pot was not Andrea Strickland, but her friend Devin Chambers. Second, Nolasco and Martinez would not be able to deny Tracy’s reasoning that Pierce County no longer had a basis to assert jurisdiction.
The four of them asked for a meeting with Nolasco and Martinez Monday afternoon and walked, en masse, into the conference room. Nolasco and Martinez joined them minutes later, confirming that the two men had met prior to the requested meeting, probably to speculate on its purpose. Nolasco and Martinez continued to the far side of the table and settled into chairs. Rather than the four detectives all sitting together on the same side of the table, like rival gangs drawing a line in the sand, Del sat at the head of the table, Tracy at the far end, and Faz and Kins directly across from their superiors.
Nolasco seemed mildly surprised when Kins, not Tracy, handed each of them a copy of the first report from ALS and explained how that report came to exist. Nolasco slid on cheaters, alternately considering the report and looking over the top of his glasses as Kins spoke. Martinez remained hunched over the report, his meaty forearms pressed to the table.
“During one of our end-of-the-day meetings, Tracy was going over what she’d learned talking with Penny Orr, Andrea Strickland’s aunt,” Kins said. “The aunt said Andrea was withdrawn and prone to anxiety, that she bit her fingernails until, at times, they bled.”
“That made me think about the autopsy photographs,” Faz said, just as they’d rehearsed, though it didn’t sound that way. “One in particular—the one of the victim’s hand—jumped out at me. She was wearing blue nail polish.”
“You thought of this?” Nolasco said.
“Yeah,” Faz said, sounding slightly indignant and doing a good job of making it seem authentic. “I was thinking maybe if she’d put the polish on recently—it might be evidence she had a date and was concerned about her appearance, that maybe she knew her killer. But when Tracy mentioned what the aunt said, I said ‘holy shit’ and pulled up the photograph.”
“Funk confirmed the nails are real,” Kins said. “That got us all thinking that the body in the crab pot might not be Andrea Strickland.” He directed his final comment to Martinez, who’d remained silent and maintained a poker face.
“Why wasn’t this revelation in the report provided to Pierce County?” Nolasco said.
“For the reasons I’m about to explain.” Kins picked up a stapled document from the manila file. “What you have before you is a DNA profile of Penny Orr, Andrea Strickland’s aunt. The lab compared that profile with the DNA profile the crime lab developed for the woman in the crab pot. There’s a 99.95-percent probability that the two women are not related.”
Martinez looked up from the report. “It isn’t Strickland?”
“It is not,” Kins said.
“So you were wrong,” Nolasco said, directing his comment to Tracy.
“No,” Kins said. “We were right. The woman in the crab pot used the name Lynn Hoff to obtain facial reconstruction surgery. Lynn Hoff is the alias Andrea Strickland used when she went into hiding. It’s her picture on the driver’s license.”
“Then how can it not be her in the pot?” Nolasco asked.
“I’m going to explain that now,” Kins said. He handed the second report across the table. “This is the DNA profile of a woman named Alison McCabe.”
“Who’s she?” Nolasco asked.
“She’s the sister of Devin Chambers. Devin Chambers was Andrea Strickland’s best friend.”
“It’s Devin Chambers,” Martinez said. He’d flipped to the last page quickly to read the conclusion in the report. “How the hell did she end up in the crab pot?”
“That’s what we hope to find out, sir.”
“What do you mean you hope to find out?” Nolasco said, his gaze shifting between the four of them.
Martinez raised a hand and sat back from the table, looking at them like a bemused grandfather considering his grandchildren. Those in the department knew Martinez to be a cop first and a bureaucrat second. The fact that he insisted on wearing the uniform every day reflected how he perceived and projected himself. Tracy was banking on that perception now, banking on Martinez understanding that every good cop wanted to clear his or her cases, not to pad personal statistics. They owed it to the families of the victims.
“What your detectives mean, Captain, is if the woman in the crab pot is not Andrea Strickland, then Pierce County does not have jurisdiction, because the woman who went missing in their county is not the woman in the crab pot,” Martinez said. “Therefore they have no basis to assert a continuing investigation. Am I right, Detective Crosswhite?”
“I believe you are, sir,” Tracy said.
“Detective Rowe?”
“Makes sense to me.”
“Perhaps you can explain how you obtained the DNA profiles of these two individuals,” Nolasco said, holding up both documents, “when you no longer had jurisdiction.”
Martinez again raised his hand. “I’m suspecting your detectives forwarded DNA kits to the individuals and there was a time lag between when they were sent and when they were obtained for analysis. Am I right?”
“You are,” Kins said.
“You want this case,” Martinez said, now shifting his gaze between the four of them.
“It’s our case,” Tracy said.
“You understand the ramifications . . . that this will become an even higher profile investigation when we advise the media that the body is not Andrea Strickland.”
“We do,” Kins said.
“Which is going to mean greater pressure that we get this done.”
“Understood,” Kins said.
“Good, because when we go to bat for you and get this case back, I’m going to expect it.” Martinez turned to Nolasco. “Captain, your detectives want this case. Let’s make it happen.”
Tracy followed the three other members of her team out of the conference room and back to their bull pen. They refrained from high-fives or chest bumps. To the contrary, Faz, Kins, and Del all looked as though they’d just walked through a minefield but somehow managed not to take a wrong step—their good fortune more to do with blind luck than skill.
Now they had to wait. They couldn’t work on the investigation until, and if, they officially got the case back from Pierce County, but they all agreed they had a moral obligation to advise Penny Orr that the woman in the crab pot was not her niece, and to tell Alison McCabe the more difficult news, that her sister was dead. The first news could be delivered over the phone. The second could not.
“No one should hear that over the phone,” Tracy said, remembering the call from the King County Medical Examiner’s Office advising her that two hunters had stumbled across human remains in the hills above her hometown of Cedar Grove.
“I’ll get my uncle to make a drive back out there and tell her in person,” Faz said. “God knows he’s done it enough times before.”
Tracy would call Penny Orr. “Let’s reconvene in an hour and go over what we’re going to need and want going forward.”
Penny Orr’s reaction to the news that her niece was not the woman in the pot had been subdued. Tracy couldn’t blame her. She’d now grieved, potentially unnecessarily
, twice, and Tracy could not tell Orr with any conviction that Andrea was or was not still alive. She ended the conversation with a promise that the next time they spoke she would have a better answer for Orr.
That afternoon the A Team reconvened at the table in the center of their bull pen with their list of things to do. They needed to have the skip tracer’s computer analyzed. If they could determine the location of the sender of the guerilla e-mails, they might be able to conclude whether it had been Graham Strickland, Andrea Strickland, or possibly, though not likely, an altogether different person. They decided to use the FBI to perform a forensic analysis of the skip tracer’s computer and Tracy tasked Faz with bird-dogging it.
Faz and Del would also have to recanvass the buildings and marinas, this time with a photograph of Devin Chambers.
“Run the photograph by Dr. Wu while you’re at it, confirm Chambers was his patient,” Tracy said to Faz.
Tracy and Kins would work with Pierce County, who, according to Fields, had subpoenaed Graham Strickland’s cell phone and credit card records, as well as his bank statements. They’d look for evidence tying him to Devin Chambers. The fraud unit would continue working to track the location of the trust funds.
“We should also get a search warrant for the husband’s home,” Kins said. “I have a contact at Portland PD, Jonathan Zhu. Good guy. We worked a case up here last year. He can help facilitate getting a search warrant with a local judge. When do you want to talk to the husband? I’ll call Zhu and coordinate so we can do both at the same time.”
“Let’s wait at least until we get his credit card records back from Pierce County,” Tracy said. “Unlikely we’ll get another shot.”
“What do we do about Andrea Strickland?” Faz asked.
The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4) Page 25
