“Especially if we’re right,” Kins said. “They’d have a public relations nightmare.”
“Besides,” Tracy said, not able to fully suppress a smile as she looked at each of them. “If the woman in the pot is not Andrea Strickland, then Pierce County no longer has jurisdiction.”
Kins sat back, slowly shaking his head and chuckling. Faz and Del caught on. Soon they were all laughing.
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” Kins said. “When did you figure that out?”
“Last night.”
Faz raised his glass of port. “Are we going to do this?”
Del raised his glass. “Hell, yeah, I’m in.”
“Me too,” Kins said, his glass joining the other two. “If there’s positive publicity to be had, yours truly can use it.”
Tracy looked at them but did not raise her glass. She did not want them in trouble for something she had done. “Faz, you’re close to retirement. Del, you have alimony, and Kins, you have three boys.”
“You said we were family,” Faz said. “This is what family does. We do dumbass shit, but we do it together.”
CHAPTER 25
Securing the DNA samples had not been as simple as Tracy would have otherwise predicted. When Tracy called Penny Orr the following day, Saturday, the woman had responded to Tracy’s name with caution.
Tracy had given considerable thought to her approach before calling. You didn’t just tell a relative over the phone that the niece she thought had died—not once, but twice—might still be alive. You never gave them that kind of hope until you were certain. Tracy had hoped for twenty years, against all reason and odds, that they’d find Sarah alive someday. Even after she’d become a homicide detective and knew that the chances of Sarah being alive were infinitesimally small, she clung to the thought that her sister would beat the odds—so much so that when they did find Sarah’s remains, it had devastated her.
She told Penny Orr they wanted to get a positive identification through a DNA confirmation and explained they could do so through Orr.
To her surprise, Orr expressed reluctance. “What would I have to do?”
“It’s completely noninvasive,” Tracy said, thinking perhaps Orr was under the impression she’d have to give bone marrow, or blood. “I’ll overnight you a DNA kit. The instructions are self-explanatory. I’ll also provide you with a return shipping label so you can send it straight back to me.” That label would have the personal PO box to which Tracy had all of her mail sent.
Orr sighed, still sounding uncertain, and Tracy couldn’t completely understand her reticence. “It’s just that, if it isn’t her, then it raises doubt again about what happened to her. I’m not sure I can go through that again,” Orr said.
“I understand this has been difficult,” Tracy said. “But if it isn’t Andrea, there’s another family out there possibly wondering the same thing—what happened to their daughter. They deserve closure too.”
Orr seemed to give that argument some thought. After several long moments she said, “Okay. Go ahead and send it.”
Devin Chambers’s sister, Alison McCabe, had also been resistant, but she too ultimately relented. Tracy suspected that whatever bad feelings had developed between the two sisters, blood remained blood.
The following week, both women shipped back the tests and, with the DNA samples secured, Tracy drove to the squat concrete building on Airport Way South that housed the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The facility, located in an industrial area south of downtown, looked more like a food-processing warehouse than home to the state’s high-tech crime lab responsible for analyzing the evidence to convict murderers, rapists, and other miscreants.
Mike Melton sat in his office. Today he was not strumming on his guitar or singing. When Tracy knocked, Melton was taking a bite out of a homemade sandwich that reminded Tracy of the cheese sandwiches her mother used to make her and Sarah—two slices of white bread, mayo, and a slice of Velveeta. An apple, an uncapped bottle of water, and an open brown bag sat on Melton’s desk.
“Looks like I caught you at a bad time,” Tracy said from the doorway.
Melton waved her in as he chewed and swallowed, washing the sandwich down with a sip from the bottle. “Just eating a late lunch,” he said. “I was over at the courthouse working on some last-minute prep work for the Lipinsky trial.”