“We can certainly accommodate you with that as well,” he said. “I hope you weren’t hurt too badly?”
“I was in the hospital and rehab for a while,” I said.
“Well,” he said, blushing. “You rehabbed nicely, if I can say so, Lynn.”
I leaned closer to the desk, allowing my shirt to open just a peek lower. “That is so sweet of you, Kevin,” I said.
CHAPTER 15
Thursday morning, with a subpoena for Lynn Hoff’s bank records tucked into his file, Faz pulled open the car door and slid into the passenger seat, bumping shoulders with Del as the two of them struggled to pull seat belts across their bodies.
Someone had once commented that Faz and Del in the front seat of the Ford looked like two grizzlies squished in a circus clown car. Faz just laughed. He and Del knew they were the comic relief around the Violent Crimes Section and they embraced that role. They provided a diversion from an often stressful and disheartening profession. After nearly twenty years, Faz knew from experience that detectives witnessed the worst that humanity had to offer, the carnage the sick and depraved left behind. They did not have the luxury the rest of the population had to cover their eyes or look away. They had to rummage through that carnage in the most minute detail and, when they had finished, when they had put the murderer in jail, they got to do it all over again. There would always be another murder, as sure as taxes and dying, as Faz’s mother liked to say. People had been killing one another since Cain killed his brother Abel. Since they had been the world’s first two births—according to the Old Testament anyway—and since only Cain had survived, Faz figured the capacity to kill was part of every human being’s DNA.
When his kids were young, Faz had often struggled with what to tell them he did for a living, about how he spent his day. He’d done his best to shield his sons from the worst of his work, but he couldn’t shield himself. His job was to look closely, to try to get into the minds of criminals. He’d hunted serial killers, killers who had dismembered bodies, jealous husbands, and the gangbangers who’d shoot someone over a dime bag of dope. Then he’d driven home, where he was expected to help with the homework, and get the boys ready for dinner. Some nights, he’d driven home and sat in the car, a block from the house, just trying to make sense of it. Some people asked why he and Del made jokes. They asked how they could laugh about such things. Faz didn’t know. He just knew he would have gone crazy a long time ago if he hadn’t found a reason to smile, maybe even a moment of laughter amid the horror. Some days that was the only thing that made him feel human.
Del pulled into a strip mall that included a teriyaki restaurant, a fitness studio, a UPS store, and the Emerald Credit Union.
“Bank to go,” Del said. “You can eat lunch, work it off, and make a deposit or withdrawal.”
“One-stop shopping,” Faz said.
Del maneuvered the car into a spot reserved for bank customers and partially shaded by the building overhang. Since they were ten minutes early for their appointment, Del kept the engine running, blasting the air-conditioning.
“So why’d she bother to open a corporation?” Del asked. “Why go to that trouble?”
The prior afternoon, Faz had run down the account on the receipt Tracy found in the motel-room trash. Conversations with the bank manager revealed both a personal account for Lynn Hoff and a business account for a company called Running Free. Faz had looked up Running Free, Inc., on the Secretary of State’s web page, uncertain he’d find anything. Turned out Running Free existed—a subchapter S corporation formed in Delaware in March 2017, two months before the Stricklands’ final excursion up Rainier. The timing further confirmed that Andrea Strickland had planned her disappearance, and she’d been meticulous about it.
“It’s one more layer between her and anybody looking for her,” Faz said. “You can do all the paperwork online so you can remain anonymous.”
“I take it she chose Delaware because they do a lot of business?” Del asked.
“More companies incorporate there than any other place in the world,” Faz said. “You come up with a business name, decide on the type of entity you want to form, pick and designate a registered agent in the state of Delaware from a list, pay the fee, and wah-lah, you get your certificate of incorporation.”
“So a safety-in-numbers sort of thing?”
“Maybe, although now computers make it easier to track, which I suspect is why she didn’t designate herself an officer or shareholder.”
“You think the officers are fake?”