The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4)
Page 29
He nodded, looked at the recorder, and said, “Right.”
“Why did you continue to see her then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever tell Andrea about you and Devin?”
“No.”
“Did Devin tell Andrea?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think so. I don’t know why she would.”
“So did you formulate a plan to kill Andrea on Mount Rainier?”
Montgomery looked as if he was about to say something, then stopped.
“Well, like I said, when I got back to the loft Sunday night I apologized to Andrea,” Strickland said. “I brought her a couple of gifts, a book and some flowers, and I said I was sorry.”
“Were you? Or were you just saying you were sorry?”
“Probably both. I didn’t have anywhere to go. And we talked about the stress of the business and how we’d grown apart and that’s when Andrea brought up climbing Mount Rainier.”
“Out of the blue?”
“Yes.”
Tracy wasn’t sure she was buying it.
Strickland continued. “I was surprised because I didn’t think she enjoyed climbing it the first time. She said it would be something for us to do together, that it would help our marriage.”
“But you didn’t want to?”
“Initially, I said I’d think about it, but only because I didn’t want to start another fight.”
“When did you start to think about the possibility of pushing Andrea off the mountain?”
Again, Montgomery remained silent.
“The route Andrea wanted to take wasn’t popular. More people died on that route than any other. I began to think that could work.”
“What could work?” She wanted Strickland to say it.
“It was just a thought, you know? Like, what if she fell?”
“When did you start to think about it seriously?”
“When Devin brought it up.”
Tracy tried not to pause and give Montgomery time to stop the interview. “Devin brought up the subject of killing Andrea?”
“One night, in bed, she said, ‘You do know all your problems would be solved if you could just get access to the trust funds.’”
“When was this?”
“It was some time after, maybe a month?”
“Where were you?”
“In a hotel in Seattle; we’d taken a trip to avoid being seen.”
“Tell me what she said, exactly.”
“Just what I told you. She said that the bank wouldn’t prosecute me if I paid back the loan, that what they really wanted was their money, but I already knew that so I said, ‘That’s great, but Andrea won’t let me use it.’”
“And she said, ‘What happens to the money if anything happens to Andrea?’”
“Did you know?” Tracy asked.
“No. I’d never seen the trust documents. But I knew Andrea had no relatives, and Oregon is a community property state.”
“So what happened then?”
“I found a copy of the trust documents in the house, and from my reading, if anything happened to Andrea, the money would go to me under community property laws—unless she had a will, which I didn’t know but doubted.”
“Did you tell Devin what you’d found out?”
“Yes.”
“What was her response?”
“She said, ‘What if Andrea didn’t come off the mountain?’”
“And is that when you formulated a plan to push her?”
Strickland nodded. “I did some research.” He paused. “Can I get a glass of water?”
Montgomery obliged him from a pitcher. Strickland took a long drink. Then he said, “I decided I could do it the morning we set out for the summit from Thumb Rock. That’s the least likely place they would find her body, and if they did, it would be easy to say she fell.”
“What exactly did you intend to do, Mr. Strickland?”
He swallowed hard. “I was going to shove her off the edge as we got close to an area called Willis Wall. It’s a thousand-foot drop.”
“So what actually happened?”
“Just what I told that other detective. We went to bed that night and I remember being exhausted. I could hardly raise my head. I felt drugged.”
Tracy remembered what the ranger had said about people being amped up and unable to sleep the night before they were to summit. “Do you know why?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It could have been the altitude, but I don’t know.”
“Did you do anything before you went to bed?”
Strickland shrugged. “Not really. We had a prepackaged dinner and drank some tea.”
“Who made the dinner and the tea?”
“Andrea.”
“Then what?”
“Then we crawled into our bags and I fell asleep. I have a vague recollection of Andrea getting up and saying she was going to go out to use the bathroom.”
“Did you say anything to her?”
Strickland shook his head. “I was really out of it, lethargic. I remember my head felt weighted. I fell back to sleep.”
Tracy thought again of the ranger’s comments. “You were planning on killing your wife and you fell back to sleep?”
He shook his head. “I know how it sounds, but that’s what happened. Maybe I had altitude sickness again. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Did you set an alarm?”
“I thought I did.”
“Did you check when you woke up?”
“I don’t remember. I remember waking up and feeling groggy, like I had a hangover, and then I realized Andrea wasn’t in her sleeping bag.”
“Did you look for her?”
“Of course. I called out her name. When she didn’t answer I got dressed and went out looking for her, looking for signs of her, but it had snowed that morning and I couldn’t see any tracks.”
“How long did you look for her?”
“I don’t recall how long.”
“What did you think happened to her?”
“I didn’t know for sure. I guess I thought she’d wandered off and maybe that she’d fallen.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“I wasn’t feeling or thinking anything, really, except getting down off the mountain and what I would say.”
“Okay, so what did you do?” Tracy asked. She’d read the reports of the interviews Strickland had given Glenn Hicks and Stan Fields and decided to run him through the questions again looking for inconsistencies in his story.
“I packed up and went down to the ranger station and told him what had happened.”
“What did you tell the ranger?”
“Exactly what I told you.”
Tracy took a moment. She decided to change subjects. “Did you talk to Devin Chambers when you got back home?”
“Not right away.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . didn’t. I was really confused. I didn’t know what to think. And the police department was keeping me busy, asking questions, searching the loft.”
“Were you worried about how it might look if there was an investigation and your cell phone indicated your first calls were to the woman you were having an affair with?”
“Yeah, I’d thought about that.”
“Did you ever talk to Devin?”
He shook his head. “No. When I tried, I found out she was gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘she was gone’?” Tracy asked.
“I called her.”
“When?”
“I don’t remember when, but she didn’t answer her phone. So I went by her apartment and knocked. She didn’t answer the door and her car wasn’t there. The next day I went to her work and waited outside the building for her, but I never saw her. I finally called the office and asked to speak to her. I was told she no longer worked there.”
“Can you think of any reason why she would have left?”
“Did you know about the insurance policy naming you as the beneficiary?”
“I knew about it, but that was Andrea’s suggestion. And she said she didn’t need a policy because she had the trust.”
“Did you know Andrea had consulted a divorce attorney?”
“Not until later.”
“When did you realize Andrea’s money was also gone?”
“When I realized Devin was gone.” Strickland glanced at this attorney. “Phil told me the money was missing.”
“Did you suspect Devin took the money?”
“Yes.” Strickland shrugged. “But what was I going to do? The other detective was asking me why I didn’t try to find the money . . . Who was I going to tell? What was I going to say?”
Who indeed? Tracy thought. “Did you try to find Devin?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “By then I’d hired Phil and I knew I was a suspect in Andrea’s death. It was in the papers and on the news. Reporters were outside the loft, calling me, following me. The last thing I needed was to be looking for the woman I’d had an affair with who’d stolen Andrea’s money.”
“You didn’t hire a skip tracer to find her?”
“A what? I don’t even know what that is.”
“A private investigator.”
“No.”
“What about now, Graham? Do you think Devin and Andrea planned this?”
“I really don’t know,” Strickland said. “But I didn’t kill anyone and that’s the truth.”
“Who else knew the code to your building and your apartment? Who would have known the elevator code?”
Strickland looked at her, and for the first time during the interview, his eyes appeared to focus. “Just Andrea,” he said.
When Tracy finished interviewing Graham Strickland, it was close to eight thirty. They’d spoken for nearly three hours. In the lobby, Tracy summoned Zhu and told him he could go up. Zhu handcuffed Strickland and escorted him out of the building to the back of a police vehicle that would take him to the Multnomah County Detention Center Jail. He would be booked on suspicion of the murder of Megan Chen. In the morning, he would be arraigned, formally charged, and based on what he’d told Tracy, plead not guilty. Then the wheels of justice would spin, though not with any great urgency. Whether the King County Prosecutor charged Strickland with the murder of Devin Chambers remained to be determined, and only after what Tracy anticipated would be many hours of discussion.
They now had a link between Devin Chambers and Graham Strickland, but the evidence that he had killed her remained thin and mostly circumstantial. If a jury convicted Strickland of murdering Chen, the powers that be in Seattle could decide there was no reason to spend taxpayer dollars to try him for Chambers’s murder. As for Andrea Strickland, in the absence of a body, she remained a missing persons case, and she had no family members pushing that investigation.
Tracy spent another two hours at the Portland Bureau briefing Zhu and his partner on her conversation with Strickland. An IT specialist transferred the recording of her interrogation from her phone onto their system. At the end of it all, tired and frustrated, Tracy returned with Kins to their hotel. The bar in the lobby restaurant remained open. They took a table in a corner. Neither of them had eaten since lunch.
“Kitchen still open?” Kins asked the waiter.
“Let me check. Probably a limited selection. Any idea what you want?”
“A very large burger,” Kins said. “Tracy?”
“Huh?” Her brain felt fried. Her adrenaline had been pumping during her interrogation of Strickland; she’d been focused on any subtleties in Strickland’s responses and on his posture, trying to detect whether he was lying.
“Do you want to order something from the kitchen?” Kins repeated.
“What are you getting?”
“Hamburger.”
She didn’t feel like eating something that heavy. “Caesar salad?” she asked the waiter.
“Let me get those orders in quickly. Anything from the bar?”
“Jack and Coke,” Tracy told the waiter.
“Make it two,” Kins said.
“I don’t want to believe the guy,” Tracy said to Kins. “I really don’t, but I also don’t want to not believe him because of my personal feelings about him.”
“You don’t buy what he’s saying though, do you?”
“I have questions.”
“It doesn’t sound like he gave up anything he hadn’t already said or that we hadn’t already suspected, Tracy. Think about it. Bottom line, he didn’t admit killing anyone.”
“He admitted he intended to kill Andrea, and he admitted he had a relationship with Devin Chambers.”
“It’s circumstantial. He’s a lawyer; he knows that,” Kins said. “And he has a criminal defense lawyer to consult. They both know he can’t be convicted for thinking of committing a crime.”
“It gets us one step closer to both his wife and to Chambers . . .”
“Which we both know he may never be prosecuted for if they convict him of Chen.”
“He wouldn’t necessarily know that.”
“It doesn’t get us anywhere,” Kins said, shaking his head. “Without some further evidence linking him to her death—”
“Same-caliber gun,” she said.
“But without the bullet that killed Chambers there’s no way to tie that gun to her murder or to him for that matter.”
“So why does he kill Megan Chen? We can come up with a motive for killing Andrea Strickland and Devin Chambers, but what’s his motive for killing Chen?”
“Maybe he admitted something to her, and when we came calling he got worried she’d say something.”
“So he kills her in his own bed? How does that make any sense?”
“It’s like you said, maybe he makes it seem so obvious we’ll conclude he couldn’t have done it.”
The waiter returned with their Jack and Cokes. “Your dinners should be up soon.”
Tracy sipped her drink, which was sweet, though she could still taste the sting of the Jack. She set the glass on the table, not wanting to drink too much on an empty stomach. “That’s a hell of a risk to take for a guy who, up until then, had been that careful, Kins.”
“So is having a third woman connected to you disappear under mysterious circumstances. Where there’s smoke, eventually there’s going to be fire.” Kins kept his glass in hand and sat back in the booth.
“Did Zhu say whether anybody in the building saw or heard anything?”
Kins shook his head. “Nobody else was home yet.”
“What about the businesses on the first floor?”
“Separate entrance. According to Zhu, nobody heard a gunshot. It appears the killer used a pillow to muffle the sound.”
“That’s fairly sophisticated,” she said.
“Not for anyone who watches TV.”
“Any security cameras?”
“One in the garage, but not in the elevator or the building lobby. Footage from the camera in the garage shows Megan Chen driving in and exiting her car in the direction of the elevator. Half an hour later, Strickland arrives.”
“No other cars?”
“Nope.”
“The person had to know the code to get into the building and into the loft.”
“Exactly,” Kins said. “And Chen didn’t try to run or get away, a pretty good indication she knew the killer.”
Tracy sat back, pushing her tired mind to focus. “So then why was she on her stomach?”
“Maybe she was hiding under the covers, like you said.”
“On her stomach?”
�
�He could have positioned her that way.”
“No way. We would have been able to tell from the blood spatter.”
Kins shrugged. “Maybe she fell asleep waiting.”
“He says he called out when he walked in.”
“Which could be a lie,” Kins said. “He could have been trying to sneak up on her. She could have also been drinking before their anticipated romp. Toxicology will answer that.”
They sat in silence again, Kins staring up at the flat screen, which was tuned to ESPN. Tracy could tell because of the distinct music—which she only heard in her house when Dan visited. The waiter returned with their food.
Kins grabbed a knife and proceeded to cut his hamburger in half. “Not that I would ever deliberately quote Johnny Nolasco,” he said, “but maybe we shouldn’t complicate this. Sometimes these things are exactly as they seem.”
“That’s the problem,” Tracy said, stabbing at her salad. “This appears to be a simple murder in what, up to this point, has been anything but simple. It seems too easy, Kins, like someone wanted it to look like it is exactly as it appears.”
CHAPTER 30
For the next two weeks, the wheels of justice turned, but Tracy couldn’t shake the thought that the death of Megan Chen was just too simple, as would be convicting Graham Strickland for that crime. And as the murder of Chen proceeded, it appeared the murder of Devin Chambers and the disappearance of Andrea Strickland—and her money—would be pushed to the back burner.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Nolasco confirmed Tracy’s concern when he entered their bull pen on a Wednesday afternoon to advise that a decision had been made—“by people with a much higher pay grade than me”—to keep the Devin Chambers matter open but only to monitor as the Megan Chen proceedings moved forward. In other words, the King County DA was going to ride Portland’s coattails. With evidence mounting that Strickland killed Chen, the Oregon DA had charged Strickland with aggravated murder, meaning he could face the death penalty. In light of that possibility, Strickland might be persuaded to seek a deal, admit to killing Devin Chambers—and maybe even his wife—in exchange for life in prison, thus saving the King County taxpayers millions in costs for a full-blown murder trial. If Strickland didn’t admit to killing Chambers, then the same powers that be would reevaluate whether the anticipated cost justified a separate murder trial. You could only kill a person once—Andrea Strickland being the apparent exception.