The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(100)
In the interim, Nolasco told Tracy and Kins to provide the Portland Police with whatever support they needed in their investigation and prosecution of Strickland.
Tracy spent her days working her other files, but she remained distracted, and for a reason she never would have anticipated. As much as she tended to tune out what Nolasco said, something he’d said early in the investigation, something that Kins had repeated, kept circling through her thoughts, like a repeating message on a Times Square billboard. She doubted Nolasco had meant it as a pearl of wisdom. To the contrary, he’d likely meant it to disparage Tracy, but still, she couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. He’d said, “Sometimes these cases aren’t as difficult as you make them. Sometimes the answer is as simple as it seems.”
In the case of Megan Chen, that certainly appeared to be the case. Tracy kept thinking about that concept with respect to Devin Chambers and Andrea Strickland. Had she made those investigations too complicated? The facts were complicated, no doubt, but what about the human element—the motivation? She’d concluded that, if Andrea Strickland were still alive, she’d acted out of a desire for revenge. Chambers’s actions, it seemed, had been fueled by her addiction and greed.
After the other members of the A Team had left for the day, Tracy spread out the contents of the case file on the worktable in the center of their bull pen. Over her years in Violent Crimes, she’d developed the method as a way to help get her unstuck during an investigation. More visual than analytical, laying out the evidence helped her to see connecting threads between the evidence. Her intent was to do what Nolasco suggested, to break the case down to its simplest questions and see if she could find answers.
The first question she wrote on her notepad was the question Graham Strickland had posed. Who had elevator and front door access code?
She wrote Graham Strickland in block letters. Beneath his name she wrote Andrea Strickland, Megan Chen, Cleaning Lady, Landlord, Other?
Tracy circled Graham Strickland and wrote, Case Closed.
But what if it wasn’t Strickland who’d entered using the code? What if Graham Strickland was telling the truth? What if he hadn’t killed Megan Chen?
She drew a second line, put an arrow on the end, and wrote Not Strickland.
She crossed out Megan Chen’s name. She also crossed out the cleaning lady. That left Andrea Strickland, the landlord, and Other. Of the two known people, Andrea Strickland was a far more likely suspect than the landlord. Random killings were rare, except in the case of psychopaths. The landlord didn’t strike her as a psychopath.
Next, Tracy contemplated her interview of Graham Strickland. She sat in her desk chair, put in her earphones, closed her eyes, and listened to the recording of her interview, allowing herself to hear and contemplate Strickland’s answers without the stress of the situation. She’d been cautious during the interview. She knew sociopaths sprinkled lies and half-truths into their stories to try to throw off an interrogation, confuse the issues, or raise a basis to argue reasonable doubt, if their prosecution ever got that far.
What were the lies and half-truths Strickland had sprinkled in with the truth?
Had he only intended to kill his wife, or had he actually carried out his intent?
Strickland said he’d been unable to carry through his plan, though it wasn’t because of a change of heart. He’d said he physically couldn’t function, that he’d felt drugged, lethargic, and could not wake from sleep.
Tracy wrote and circled drugged? on her notepad. A thought came to her. Under that word she wrote, Genesis Inventory?
If Andrea Strickland did have the idea to climb Rainier, and it had been her intent to frame her husband for her murder, her first problem would have been walking off the mountain without him knowing. This would have been especially difficult given Ranger Hicks’s statement about it being next to impossible to sleep the night before an ascent with your body amped on adrenaline and anxiety—not to mention even a sociopath like Strickland had to have some anxiety about what he intended to do. So to get off that mountain without her husband knowing it, if she had indeed done so, Andrea Strickland would have needed to knock her husband out—and she had ready access to the drugs to do it.
Tracy rolled her chair back to her cubicle, brought her computer to life, accessed the Internet, and typed in “Genesis, Portland,” and “marijuana.” The website for the business remained active. She clicked her way through it to the Menu tab and scrolled through Flowers and Edibles. She stopped when she came to Concentrates. Reading further, she noted how marijuana could be ingested in the form of a tea or other type of drink, and remembered her interview of Strickland, still playing on the earphones.
T. Crosswhite: Did you do anything before you went to bed?
G. Strickland: We had a prepackaged dinner and drank some tea.
T. Crosswhite: Who made the dinner and the tea?
G. Strickland: Andrea.
She exited the website and Googled “liquid THC,” pulling up thousands of hits. She clicked on several and finally found one that described the physical effects. THC could make a person lethargic and impact their ability to concentrate, their coordination, and their sensory and time perception.
She sat back. Graham Strickland could have been drugged.
If that were true, the next question was how Andrea Strickland got off the mountain. According to Glen Hicks—the man who would know best—it was unlikely Strickland had acted alone. Tracy went back to the worktable and wrote the next question.