“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?”
“Well, initially, I wasn’t sure, but then, when the detective started to ask me about the insurance policy naming me as a beneficiary, and about how Andrea’s employer said I was cheating on her, my first thought was that Devin and Andrea had set me up to make it look like I’d killed Andrea, and they’d taken the money and gone somewhere.”
“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?”