The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(101)

Who would have helped?

The obvious answer would have been Devin Chambers—except, according to Graham, Devin Chambers had been the person who planted the seed that Graham could get the trust money if he killed Andrea. And, according to Hicks, Chambers had receipts proving she’d been away that weekend. Maybe that was one of Strickland’s lies to help his defense down the road. As Kins had said, Strickland could say he’d been forthcoming, that he’d copped to being an adulterer, but that didn’t make him a murderer.

But Tracy didn’t think it was a lie, and for the reason she’d already told Kins. Admitting to an affair with Devin Chambers provided a thread between Strickland and Chambers that otherwise did not exist. So lying about something like that didn’t make a lot of sense. Alison McCabe had also said her sister was a con artist addicted to prescription drugs, something Devin Chambers’s credit card balances appeared to confirm. That evidence supported, to some extent anyway, Graham Strickland’s statement that Devin Chambers suggested he could solve his problems if he killed his wife. If that were true, it clearly would not have been in Chambers’s interest to help Andrea off the mountain. It would have been cleaner and neater for Chambers to let Graham kill his wife, providing Chambers with unfettered access to the money. Andrea would have been dead, and Graham Strickland couldn’t very well run to the police and say, I think my wife’s best friend stole the money I was hoping to steal when I killed her. In fact, as Graham Strickland said during the interview, he recognized that any attention he directed to Chambers had the very real likelihood of circling around like a boomerang and hitting him in the ass. With all the other circumstantial evidence pointing to him, the last thing he needed was a con artist telling the police she was sleeping with him, and maybe even that he had confided to her that he intended to kill his wife by pushing her over a ledge.

Bye-bye, Graham. Hello, money.

So, the simple answer was Chambers was probably not an ally, and not likely the person who helped Andrea Strickland off the mountain.

Brenda Berg? Possible, but Tracy didn’t think so. For one, Berg had a newborn baby to consider. Why would she risk it?

Berg had confirmed Graham Strickland’s statement that his wife didn’t have any other friends. That left relatives or strangers.

Alan Townsend, the psychologist, knew about the trust fund. Tracy wrote and circled his name.

Both of Andrea Strickland’s parents were dead. She had no siblings.

She had only an aunt. Tracy wrote, Penny Orr.

Orr claimed that she’d been estranged from Andrea since Andrea’s move from San Bernardino to Portland; that she didn’t even know Andrea had gotten married.

So she’d said.

As far as Tracy knew from the Pierce County file, nobody had followed through to determine if Penny Orr was telling the truth. Nobody had pulled Andrea’s phone records or e-mail—primarily because Stan Fields didn’t think she was still alive. He thought Graham had killed her. If Andrea was alive, if she’d orchestrated the disappearance of her trust, she’d also likely not used her cell phone or her e-mail account to do it.

Tracy sat back, considering Andrea Strickland and Penny Orr. Both, in a sense, had been abandoned under traumatic circumstances and, as Tracy had deduced between Devin Chambers and her sister, blood created a strong bond difficult to ignore or to break. As crazy as it seemed to even consider Penny Orr, Tracy could not dismiss it. For one, who was left? A random person Andrea had paid? Too risky. The person could run to the media first chance they got, seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. Alan Townsend? Maybe.

During their interview, Orr had told Tracy she felt guilty about what had happened to Andrea while under her roof. Could helping Andrea to start a new life have been Orr’s way to cleanse herself of her own perceived sins?

What did Tracy really know about Penny Orr?

Nothing.

She went back to her cubicle, hit the space bar on the keyboard, and brought her monitor to life. She logged on to the Internet, pulled up the website they used to conduct LexisNexis searches, and input information to run Penny Orr through the system. The search provided a history of the person’s past employers, former addresses, relatives, and prior criminal history.

The history for Penny Orr was short. She’d moved twice, from the San Bernardino home address to a townhome, to the apartment complex. She’d had one sister, deceased. She had no prior criminal history. She’d had one employer.

Tracy’s stomach fluttered.

Penny Orr had spent thirty years working for the San Bernardino County Assessor. Sensing something, Tracy opened another Internet page and searched for the Assessor’s website. Pulling it up, she clicked her way through the pages until she came to a page announcing that, effective January 3, 2011, the offices of the County Assessor, County Recorder, and County Clerk had been consolidated. To the left of that announcement was a light-blue drop-down menu for the departments’ various services, including a link to obtain certified copies of a birth certificate.





CHAPTER 31


The following morning, Tracy prepared for the pushback she was certain she would receive from Johnny Nolasco. She’d spoken to Kins on the telephone the night before and told him what she’d found. He agreed it was a lead worth pursuing. Unfortunately, he was in the Lipinsky trial, the start of which had been delayed, and he would remain in court for at least the remainder of the week, likely longer.