Besides, Tracy suspected she already knew that answer. Without some evidence tying Graham Strickland to the private investigator searching for Chambers, evidence linking him to the missing money, or evidence proving that the gun used to kill Chen also killed Chambers, the DA would not opt to go forward.
The forensic examination of the PI’s computer was still not complete, and a forensic accounting had only confirmed what they already knew—someone had emptied Lynn Hoff’s bank accounts after Devin Chambers had been killed. From what they could determine thus far, the money had been wired out of the country, to a bank in Luxembourg, which fiercely guarded customer privacy. Not that it mattered. It was unlikely the money had stayed there long, or that the person had used a name they would know. Likely they’d used a corporate name and quickly rerouted the funds. Locating where it went would take a lot more time and expense, without any guarantee the result would provide the necessary evidence to convict.
“What about Andrea Strickland?” Tracy asked Nolasco.
Nolasco shrugged, and Tracy knew Andrea Strickland was already becoming an afterthought. “Unless the husband admits he killed her, or the glacier up there gives up her body, she remains a missing person. That’s Pierce County’s problem. Not ours.”
Left unsaid was that neither Andrea Strickland nor Devin Chambers had family who’d push for answers or make a stink that the investigations into their death and disappearance were not receiving the proper attention. In other words, there were no squeaky wheels demanding to be oiled.
“We know who killed them,” Nolasco said, as if to justify the decision, but which only sent shivers of irritation up Tracy’s spine. “We just might not get the chance to prove it. Sometimes that’s the way it is. You all know that. The most important thing is Strickland is going to jail for the rest of his life.”
In the interim, Nolasco told Tracy and Kins to provide the Portland Police with whatever support they needed in their investigation and prosecution of Strickland.
Tracy spent her days working her other files, but she remained distracted, and for a reason she never would have anticipated. As much as she tended to tune out what Nolasco said, something he’d said early in the investigation, something that Kins had repeated, kept circling through her thoughts, like a repeating message on a Times Square billboard. She doubted Nolasco had meant it as a pearl of wisdom. To the contrary, he’d likely meant it to disparage Tracy, but still, she couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. He’d said, “Sometimes these cases aren’t as difficult as you make them. Sometimes the answer is as simple as it seems.”
In the case of Megan Chen, that certainly appeared to be the case. Tracy kept thinking about that concept with respect to Devin Chambers and Andrea Strickland. Had she made those investigations too complicated? The facts were complicated, no doubt, but what about the human element—the motivation? She’d concluded that, if Andrea Strickland were still alive, she’d acted out of a desire for revenge. Chambers’s actions, it seemed, had been fueled by her addiction and greed.
After the other members of the A Team had left for the day, Tracy spread out the contents of the case file on the worktable in the center of their bull pen. Over her years in Violent Crimes, she’d developed the method as a way to help get her unstuck during an investigation. More visual than analytical, laying out the evidence helped her to see connecting threads between the evidence. Her intent was to do what Nolasco suggested, to break the case down to its simplest questions and see if she could find answers.
The first question she wrote on her notepad was the question Graham Strickland had posed. Who had elevator and front door access code?
She wrote Graham Strickland in block letters. Beneath his name she wrote Andrea Strickland, Megan Chen, Cleaning Lady, Landlord, Other?
Tracy circled Graham Strickland and wrote, Case Closed.
But what if it wasn’t Strickland who’d entered using the code? What if Graham Strickland was telling the truth? What if he hadn’t killed Megan Chen?
She drew a second line, put an arrow on the end, and wrote Not Strickland.
She crossed out Megan Chen’s name. She also crossed out the cleaning lady. That left Andrea Strickland, the landlord, and Other. Of the two known people, Andrea Strickland was a far more likely suspect than the landlord. Random killings were rare, except in the case of psychopaths. The landlord didn’t strike her as a psychopath.
Next, Tracy contemplated her interview of Graham Strickland. She sat in her desk chair, put in her earphones, closed her eyes, and listened to the recording of her interview, allowing herself to hear and contemplate Strickland’s answers without the stress of the situation. She’d been cautious during the interview. She knew sociopaths sprinkled lies and half-truths into their stories to try to throw off an interrogation, confuse the issues, or raise a basis to argue reasonable doubt, if their prosecution ever got that far.
What were the lies and half-truths Strickland had sprinkled in with the truth?