“So now he’s got bigger problems,” Kins said, pounding the bottom of the bottle. “The investigation prevents the insurance payout, and Andrea’s separate trust fund is gone, along with his girlfriend, but the creditors are still knocking on the door and he stands to lose everything.”
“And he’s wondering if the disappearance of the money and Chambers’s disappearance are related,” Tracy said, stealing one of Kins’s french fries. “So he uses a guerilla e-mail account to track Chambers down.”
“The skip tracer said the client initially asked to look for a ‘Lynn Hoff,’” Kins said. “How would the husband have known about Lynn Hoff?”
“Maybe Devin Chambers,” Tracy said. “If she and Graham Strickland were initially working together.”
“And if they weren’t?”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe he found something around the house that tipped him off.”
Kins bit into his burger and wiped his hands on the cloth napkin in his lap. “You think Andrea could have confided in Devin Chambers?”
“It’s possible. The boss said they were close, maybe Andrea’s only friend.”
“So when she finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband, why doesn’t she just take off? Why go up the mountain at all?”
“Two reasons I can think of. One, she’d confided in Devin about Lynn Hoff, so Devin would know how to track her and the money.”
Kins dipped a french fry in ketchup and ate it. “All right. What’s the second reason?”
“The counselor I spoke with said it’s possible the years of abuse resulted in a dissociative disorder, and that Andrea could become volatile if she were to suffer some acute trauma, or if she felt abandoned or desperate.”
“Like finding out your only friend is sleeping with your husband and is trying to rip off your life savings?” Kins said.
“So simply fleeing was not going to keep someone from pursuing her, nor was it going to allow her to get even with either of them.”
“So you’re saying, in this scenario, Andrea Strickland had to make it look like the husband killed her on that mountain and that Chambers was in on it,” Kins said, taking another bite.
“She takes out the insurance policy, consults the divorce attorney, and drops hints that the husband is cheating on her again,” Tracy said. “Then she uses the skip tracer to track down Devin Chambers. Chambers disappears and everyone thinks it’s the husband.”
“Why was Devin Chambers on the run?”
“Chance to start a new life with half a million in cash,” Tracy said.
“Maybe,” Kins said. “But don’t you think it’s more likely the husband killed Chambers, but Andrea Strickland moved the money before he could get to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think she’s still alive,” Kins said.
“We need to find the skip tracer. Maybe there’s some way to determine from where those e-mails originated. Maybe if we can narrow it to a city, we can determine whether it was the husband, or whether it was her.”
Kins put down the hamburger and continued munching his french fries. “I thought you said those e-mails were anonymous.”
“Nothing is completely anonymous. You remember that Harvard student who got busted for calling in a bomb scare to get out of taking finals?”
“Vaguely.”
“I looked it up the other night. He used a guerilla e-mail account and an anonymous server, but the FBI determined that he’d logged on to Harvard’s Wi-Fi server. We don’t have to link the e-mails to a particular computer. It might be enough if we can show they came from someplace like a Portland Starbucks near Graham Strickland’s house, or some other place where she’s in hiding.” Tracy tapped the two manila folders from ALS. “But the first thing we have to do is take this to Nolasco and Martinez and tell them the body in the pot is not Andrea Strickland. That means Pierce County has no basis to assert jurisdiction because there is no longer a connection between our murder and their—once again—missing person investigation.”
CHAPTER 26