“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?”