“Just hang on a second, okay? I’m going to drive down into Independence where I can get cell phone reception and make some calls to get some advice. I’ll find the local sheriff and ask him to take her into custody until I can get an arrest warrant that includes extradition back to Washington State. You don’t need to handcuff her. Where is she going to run? Just read her her Miranda rights and make sure she acknowledges them, but do not interview her. This is my case. Are we good?”
“Yeah, we’re good,” Fields said, smiling. “Like I’ve been saying, this ain’t my first rodeo.”
“Keys,” she said.
Fields tossed her the car keys. Tracy left quickly, crossing the wooden bridge and heading down the dirt path to the rental. She backed the car out and punched the accelerator, leaving a cloud of dirt and dust. She turned onto the paved road and drove down the hill with her cell phone in hand, alternately checking for reception and trying to keep the car on the road. Halfway down the mountain her phone had two bars. She’d missed three phone calls in five minutes, all from SPD. She also had one text message, from Faz.
Alternately shifting her gaze from the winding road to her phone, she read the text.
Call me ASAP. Development in Strickland. Important.
She pulled onto the shoulder and dialed the number. It seemed to take forever for the call to connect.
Faz spoke before she could say hello. “Professor, where the . . . you been? I’ve been . . . hold of you.”
“I’m out of cell range. You’re breaking up.”
“Professor?”
“Faz?” The phone beeped. The call had failed. “Damn.”
She gave a fleeting thought to hitting redial, then decided to get farther down the mountain. She pulled back onto the pavement and navigated the turns. Her phone rang in her hand. She hit the “Speaker” button. “Faz?”
“Yeah. Can you hear me?”
“You’re still breaking up.”
“We got . . . back.”
“Say that again,” she said.
“We got the computer . . . back.”
“You got the computer forensics back? Faz? What did it say?”
“Professor?”
“Faz, can you hear me?”
“You’re really hard to . . . trace the guerilla e-mail account and . . . Wi-Fi address. The e-mail . . . generated from a public address . . . a restaurant . . .”
“I missed it, Faz. Say it again.”
“A public address . . . Tacoma . . . Viola.”
The car drifted to the right, onto the dirt shoulder. Tracy hit the brakes, spraying dust and gravel, corrected, crossed the centerline, corrected a second time, and pulled to the shoulder and stopped. She sat stunned.
Fields.
Fields had been looking for Devin Chambers. My God.
“Professor?”
The phone. “Faz? Faz?”
He didn’t answer. “Faz? Faz, I don’t know if you can hear me. I’m in a small town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains called Seven Pines. Seven Pines. The closest town is Independence. Faz? Shit. Faz, call the sheriff. Tell him I’m in need of immediate assistance. Faz?” She had no way of knowing if the call was still transmitting, but at least it had not yet died. “Tell him it’s the green cabin with the red door. First right turn off the paved road. Tell him to . . .”
The line went dead.
CHAPTER 34
Tracy debated driving down the hill, into Independence, where there was reception, but that would take time and she’d left Fields alone with Strickland and Orr. Her stomach churning, she turned the car around and headed back up the mountain. It made sense now, at least some of it. Fields had presumed Andrea Strickland was dead. He would have known about the money from his investigation and believed Graham Strickland killed his wife for that money. When the money disappeared, Fields would have gone looking for Strickland and for Andrea Strickland’s only friend and learned that Devin Chambers had left Portland the same time Strickland disappeared, along with the money. Maybe Fields had withheld other evidence, evidence that convinced him Devin Chambers had taken the money, that she and Graham Strickland had had an affair. Tracy didn’t know for sure. What she did know was that to a bad cop, this was like the drug money Fields had spent a decade chasing in Arizona. It was free money. Strickland was presumed dead. Her husband was going to jail. If he could find Devin Chambers, he could find the money, half a million in cash for the taking.
Fields couldn’t use police resources to find Chambers, but he didn’t have to. He’d spent a decade pursuing drug dealers, living off the grid in the Arizona desert, and finding their well-hidden money. He knew how they laundered money and he knew how to get it. The money was right there. All he had to do was kill Devin Chambers and tell everyone she had absconded with it, and disappeared to points unknown. That’s why he’d stuffed her body in a crab pot, seemingly never to be found. Tracy thought again of her conversation with Kins while sitting in the processing room at the Medical Examiner’s office waiting for the autopsy. Kins had said a body in a crab pot was a first for King County, but it wasn’t a first. Pierce County had prosecuted a prior crab pot case, just two years earlier.