Had he only intended to kill his wife, or had he actually carried out his intent?
Strickland said he’d been unable to carry through his plan, though it wasn’t because of a change of heart. He’d said he physically couldn’t function, that he’d felt drugged, lethargic, and could not wake from sleep.
Tracy wrote and circled drugged? on her notepad. A thought came to her. Under that word she wrote, Genesis Inventory?
If Andrea Strickland did have the idea to climb Rainier, and it had been her intent to frame her husband for her murder, her first problem would have been walking off the mountain without him knowing. This would have been especially difficult given Ranger Hicks’s statement about it being next to impossible to sleep the night before an ascent with your body amped on adrenaline and anxiety—not to mention even a sociopath like Strickland had to have some anxiety about what he intended to do. So to get off that mountain without her husband knowing it, if she had indeed done so, Andrea Strickland would have needed to knock her husband out—and she had ready access to the drugs to do it.
Tracy rolled her chair back to her cubicle, brought her computer to life, accessed the Internet, and typed in “Genesis, Portland,” and “marijuana.” The website for the business remained active. She clicked her way through it to the Menu tab and scrolled through Flowers and Edibles. She stopped when she came to Concentrates. Reading further, she noted how marijuana could be ingested in the form of a tea or other type of drink, and remembered her interview of Strickland, still playing on the earphones.
T. Crosswhite: Did you do anything before you went to bed?
G. Strickland: We had a prepackaged dinner and drank some tea.
T. Crosswhite: Who made the dinner and the tea?
G. Strickland: Andrea.
She exited the website and Googled “liquid THC,” pulling up thousands of hits. She clicked on several and finally found one that described the physical effects. THC could make a person lethargic and impact their ability to concentrate, their coordination, and their sensory and time perception.
She sat back. Graham Strickland could have been drugged.
If that were true, the next question was how Andrea Strickland got off the mountain. According to Glen Hicks—the man who would know best—it was unlikely Strickland had acted alone. Tracy went back to the worktable and wrote the next question.
Who would have helped?
The obvious answer would have been Devin Chambers—except, according to Graham, Devin Chambers had been the person who planted the seed that Graham could get the trust money if he killed Andrea. And, according to Hicks, Chambers had receipts proving she’d been away that weekend. Maybe that was one of Strickland’s lies to help his defense down the road. As Kins had said, Strickland could say he’d been forthcoming, that he’d copped to being an adulterer, but that didn’t make him a murderer.
But Tracy didn’t think it was a lie, and for the reason she’d already told Kins. Admitting to an affair with Devin Chambers provided a thread between Strickland and Chambers that otherwise did not exist. So lying about something like that didn’t make a lot of sense. Alison McCabe had also said her sister was a con artist addicted to prescription drugs, something Devin Chambers’s credit card balances appeared to confirm. That evidence supported, to some extent anyway, Graham Strickland’s statement that Devin Chambers suggested he could solve his problems if he killed his wife. If that were true, it clearly would not have been in Chambers’s interest to help Andrea off the mountain. It would have been cleaner and neater for Chambers to let Graham kill his wife, providing Chambers with unfettered access to the money. Andrea would have been dead, and Graham Strickland couldn’t very well run to the police and say, I think my wife’s best friend stole the money I was hoping to steal when I killed her. In fact, as Graham Strickland said during the interview, he recognized that any attention he directed to Chambers had the very real likelihood of circling around like a boomerang and hitting him in the ass. With all the other circumstantial evidence pointing to him, the last thing he needed was a con artist telling the police she was sleeping with him, and maybe even that he had confided to her that he intended to kill his wife by pushing her over a ledge.
Bye-bye, Graham. Hello, money.
So, the simple answer was Chambers was probably not an ally, and not likely the person who helped Andrea Strickland off the mountain.
Brenda Berg? Possible, but Tracy didn’t think so. For one, Berg had a newborn baby to consider. Why would she risk it?
Berg had confirmed Graham Strickland’s statement that his wife didn’t have any other friends. That left relatives or strangers.
Alan Townsend, the psychologist, knew about the trust fund. Tracy wrote and circled his name.
Both of Andrea Strickland’s parents were dead. She had no siblings.