“You are,” Kins said.
“You want this case,” Martinez said, now shifting his gaze between the four of them.
“It’s our case,” Tracy said.
“You understand the ramifications . . . that this will become an even higher profile investigation when we advise the media that the body is not Andrea Strickland.”
“We do,” Kins said.
“Which is going to mean greater pressure that we get this done.”
“Understood,” Kins said.
“Good, because when we go to bat for you and get this case back, I’m going to expect it.” Martinez turned to Nolasco. “Captain, your detectives want this case. Let’s make it happen.”
Tracy followed the three other members of her team out of the conference room and back to their bull pen. They refrained from high-fives or chest bumps. To the contrary, Faz, Kins, and Del all looked as though they’d just walked through a minefield but somehow managed not to take a wrong step—their good fortune more to do with blind luck than skill.
Now they had to wait. They couldn’t work on the investigation until, and if, they officially got the case back from Pierce County, but they all agreed they had a moral obligation to advise Penny Orr that the woman in the crab pot was not her niece, and to tell Alison McCabe the more difficult news, that her sister was dead. The first news could be delivered over the phone. The second could not.
“No one should hear that over the phone,” Tracy said, remembering the call from the King County Medical Examiner’s Office advising her that two hunters had stumbled across human remains in the hills above her hometown of Cedar Grove.
“I’ll get my uncle to make a drive back out there and tell her in person,” Faz said. “God knows he’s done it enough times before.”
Tracy would call Penny Orr. “Let’s reconvene in an hour and go over what we’re going to need and want going forward.”
Penny Orr’s reaction to the news that her niece was not the woman in the pot had been subdued. Tracy couldn’t blame her. She’d now grieved, potentially unnecessarily, twice, and Tracy could not tell Orr with any conviction that Andrea was or was not still alive. She ended the conversation with a promise that the next time they spoke she would have a better answer for Orr.
That afternoon the A Team reconvened at the table in the center of their bull pen with their list of things to do. They needed to have the skip tracer’s computer analyzed. If they could determine the location of the sender of the guerilla e-mails, they might be able to conclude whether it had been Graham Strickland, Andrea Strickland, or possibly, though not likely, an altogether different person. They decided to use the FBI to perform a forensic analysis of the skip tracer’s computer and Tracy tasked Faz with bird-dogging it.
Faz and Del would also have to recanvass the buildings and marinas, this time with a photograph of Devin Chambers.
“Run the photograph by Dr. Wu while you’re at it, confirm Chambers was his patient,” Tracy said to Faz.
Tracy and Kins would work with Pierce County, who, according to Fields, had subpoenaed Graham Strickland’s cell phone and credit card records, as well as his bank statements. They’d look for evidence tying him to Devin Chambers. The fraud unit would continue working to track the location of the trust funds.
“We should also get a search warrant for the husband’s home,” Kins said. “I have a contact at Portland PD, Jonathan Zhu. Good guy. We worked a case up here last year. He can help facilitate getting a search warrant with a local judge. When do you want to talk to the husband? I’ll call Zhu and coordinate so we can do both at the same time.”
“Let’s wait at least until we get his credit card records back from Pierce County,” Tracy said. “Unlikely we’ll get another shot.”
“What do we do about Andrea Strickland?” Faz asked.
Tracy gave his question some thought. They’d already mistakenly sent out her picture to all the news services and local and national law enforcement. At present, she remained dead, and Tracy hoped to talk to Graham Strickland without him knowing otherwise. “Let’s leave that alone for now.”
Late in the afternoon, Nolasco appeared in their cubicle. He had removed his tie and rolled up the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. “You got jurisdiction,” he said. “Pierce County is transferring the file back up here.”
“They put up much of a squawk?” Del asked.
“That’d be putting it mildly.” Nolasco looked to Faz. “They wanted to know how you got the DNA profiles, and don’t think for a minute I believed that crap about you remembering an autopsy photo, Fazio.”