“Kurt Schill,” Kins said.
“Right. He said he thought the body in the pot was a woman, though he’d only had a glimpse of her hand before towing it back to shore. I asked him how he knew and he said, ‘Her fingernails are painted.’”
“Bright blue,” Kins said.
“Right. But when I talked to Andrea Strickland’s aunt, she told me Andrea compulsively bit her fingernails, so much so that they bled.”
“They could be fake,” Faz said. “Or she could have stopped.”
Tracy shook her head. “I asked Funk. The nails were real. And if you’ve ever met anyone who compulsively bites their fingernails, you know it’s as difficult a habit to stop as smoking.”
“Got an aunt that was a nail-biter,” Del said. “After so many years it chipped her front tooth.”
They all sat back, silent, considering the information. Kins said, “So if it’s not Strickland, who do you think it is?”
“I think it could be the friend. I think it could be Devin Chambers. She disappeared the same time as Andrea and they were about the same height and weight, similar hair coloring.”
“Shit,” Del said. “This is going to complicate things.”
“We don’t know nothing yet,” Faz said. “So then, what? Andrea Strickland is dead somewhere on that mountain?”
“Don’t know,” Tracy said.
“You think the husband killed Chambers?” Del asked.
“Again, too early to know. What we do know is the woman in the pot was changing her appearance, and likely using the money to do it. If Chambers knew about the money, I could see why she’d want to change her appearance.”
“So, what then? She and the husband were working together, and he double-crosses her and kills her?” Del asked.
“Possibility,” Tracy said. “If he used the private investigator to find her, it would explain why he gave him the name Devin Chambers and asked him to try to hunt her down, and why she was changing her appearance and clearly on the run.”
“She wanted the money,” Del said.
“She didn’t need to run away to get the money,” Tracy said. “If she is the woman in the crab pot, she had to know about the alias, Lynn Hoff. And she had to know the bank accounts were in that name, and the passwords. She had to be running for some other reason.”
“She thinks the husband is going to kill her,” Faz said. “Got to be.”
Tracy nodded. “Maybe. But remember, Andrea Strickland told her boss she thought her husband was having another affair. What if the person he was having the affair with was Devin Chambers?”
“I thought they were friends,” Kins said.
“Exactly. What if Andrea Strickland found out her best friend is sleeping with her husband? The counselor I spoke with said Andrea could become vindictive, maybe even violent. What if the victim isn’t the victim at all? What if the victim is the killer?”
Again, they all sat pondering the ramifications of what Tracy was telling them.
“We don’t have the case no more,” Faz finally said.
“And if I go to Fields, especially without something more, he’ll just run to his boss and say I stole his toys from the sandbox again,” Tracy said.
“So we need to be sure,” Kins said.
“Funk took DNA from the corpse and Melton ran it through CODIS,” Tracy said, referring to Mike Melton, head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The prior night, she’d thought through how they could be certain.
“So they have the profile in their system,” Faz said.
“And Strickland has an aunt in San Bernardino,” Tracy said.
“And Chambers has a sister somewhere in New Jersey,” Faz said, sitting up and getting animated. “Shit, we could do this. Would Melton run the DNA?”
“If we can get DNA from the aunt and the sister, we can send it to a private testing lab,” Tracy said.
“I got an uncle served on the force back in Trenton for forty-five years,” Faz said. “I can ask him for a favor.”
“And I have a relationship with the aunt,” Tracy said.
“Yeah, but you’d still have to get Mike to release the victim’s profile to the private lab,” Del said.
Tracy shook her head. “No, I just need Mike to send me the profile. I can send it to the lab.”
“But what then?” Kins asked. “Say we get the tests and they prove it’s not Strickland and it is Chambers. Then what? Where do we go from there?”
“If we get the test and prove it isn’t Strickland and it is Chambers, I go to Martinez and Nolasco and tell them.”
“No offense, but that didn’t work too well for you last time, Professor,” Faz said, using Tracy’s nickname.
“If the woman in the pot turns out to not be Andrea Strickland, this case is going to generate even more media attention than it already has. It will become a national story. I don’t think the brass is going to risk the publicity they could cultivate from a national story about dedicated police detectives doing their jobs to solve a horrific crime, just to make an example of us,” Tracy said.