“Did the husband recover the insurance proceeds?”
“Not yet, not with the investigation active, but he wasted no time filing for the benefits after he got off the mountain. I made a call. His claim is still under investigation. Looks like it will be a while.”
Tracy looked to Kins. “If the husband and wife had been working together—the delay might not have been something they’d anticipated.”
“Or the husband could have made the wife think they were in it together, then killed her. Since she was already technically dead, and no one was going to find her body in a crab pot, no one would be any wiser,” Kins said.
“Maybe,” Tracy said. “But if that was the case, why wouldn’t he just push her off the mountain? Why wait to kill her?”
“The husband’s one of those guys that’s just easy to not like—you know the type?” Fields said over the sound of banging pans and voices coming from the kitchen.
Tracy did. She was sitting across from one of them. “Anything else set off your radar?” she asked.
“Yeah. Their new business venture wasn’t doing well. In fact, it had tanked,” Fields said. “No surprise there. Husband set it up in a high-rent district in downtown Portland thinking they’d be a more upscale establishment and capture all the business-crowd potheads. Here’s a fun fact: turns out Portland has more medical marijuana dispensaries than almost any other city in the country. What a surprise, huh? Well, shortly after the law went into effect legalizing marijuana, a city ordinance allowed the dispensaries to sell retail. Two were close to the Stricklands’ store. Portland also has a robust black market—meaning the non-business crowd had a readily available and cheaper source.”
“How bad was it?” Tracy asked.
“I got the sense talking with the wife’s boss that Andrea Strickland had been more than reticent about the business, but the husband had talked her into it. She had a large trust—”
“How large?” Tracy asked.
Fields smiled. “The principal was half a million dollars.”
“No shit,” Kins said.
“No shit. But the terms prohibited her from using it to start a business,” Fields said.
Kins whistled.
“Tell me about it,” Fields said. “So they borrowed $250,000 from the bank, and signed personal guarantees on both the lease and on the loan. Also turns out the husband lied on the loan application.”
“Lied how?” Tracy asked.
“Said he was being made a partner of his firm, with a substantial increase in salary—even presented a letter from the managing partner. Turns out he forged the letter. The firm had already told him to hit the bricks.”
The waitress arrived with Fields’s linguini. He lowered his arm and asked for grated cheese. Tracy watched him eye the woman’s breasts as she worked the hunk of Parmesan over the grater. The long hair and mustache weren’t the only things Fields had kept from his undercover days; some of the sleaze had also rubbed off on him. Any sympathy she’d felt for him for having lost his wife had quickly waned.
“Thank you, darling,” Fields said when the young woman finished. As the waitress departed, probably to take a scalding shower in disinfectant, Fields looked to Kins and Tracy. “You sure you don’t want anything? It’s good food. I come here at least once a week.”
The waitresses must have been thrilled about that.
“We’re good,” Kins said.
Fields twirled his fork in the pasta and brought a ball to his mouth. He wouldn’t have to worry about his cat. From the smell drifting across the table, the garlic was strong enough to kill a grizzly.
“What more can you tell us about the husband?” Tracy asked.
Fields wiped his mustache on his napkin and sipped his beer. “Like I said, a big shot. Drove a Porsche and wore those suits that look like they’re a size too small. Smarter than everybody too, always looking for the next big deal just around the corner, and believed it was just a matter of time before one of them paid off. Big bullshitter. I think he convinced the wife this was their ticket. They pretty much liquidated all their community assets and put it into the store. He’d also maxed out their credit cards and the creditors were calling. And like I said, the bank found out about the forged letter from the law firm, and he was looking at criminal prosecution and maybe a little jail time if he couldn’t pay back the money.”
“So you thought he was after the wife’s trust?” Kins said.
“I did,” Fields said in between another bite of his pasta. “Seems that money disappeared from Andrea’s personal account.”
“Disappeared where?” Tracy asked.
“Don’t know. The husband swears he had nothing to do with it and has no idea where it went.”
“What about the trustee?”
“Same thing. No idea.”
“You think the husband and wife could have been trying to hide it from the creditors?”
“Yep. You said she had a Washington license under a different name?”
“Lynn Hoff,” Tracy said.