The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(107)
“I’m sorry,” Penny Orr said.
So was Tracy. She now understood what Orr had been alluding to, why Andrea Strickland had been so desperate to get away.
The inside of the small cabin looked like an independent bookstore that had outgrown its space. Stacks of books cluttered the furniture, the kitchen table, and the bench seat beneath leaded-glass windows that distorted the view outside. They filled crates in the corners of the room, and overflowed bookshelves. Tracy saw hardbacks and paperbacks of every genre, novels and nonfiction, autobiographies.
Tracy asked Andrea Strickland and Penny Orr to sit on a two-cushion couch while she went to the bedroom closet to secure an old, 12-gauge, Crack Barrel Shotgun, the kind her father had used in shooting competitions. The gun was not loaded, and it didn’t look as though it had been fired anytime recently, though it was kept in good condition. She also took a box of shells from the closet shelf. She handed the shotgun and shells to Fields, who set the shells on the mantel and leaned the barrel against the river-rock fireplace hearth. Tracy moved a stack of books from the window seat and sat directly across from the two women. The two-room cabin consisted of the living room and a kitchen area with a tiny wood-burning stove and a refrigerator. In the back, the bedroom was not much bigger than the queen-size wrought-iron bed. In the living room, two wooden posts extended from beneath the floor to wood ceiling trusses, and the room retained the smell of burned wood from the blackened fireplace.
“Andrea inherited her love of reading from my mother,” Orr said with a sad smile. She gripped Andrea’s hand. “Grandma would come here and read three books in a day. She wore out the library in Independence, but she didn’t like having to return the books, so she bought crates at used bookstores and brought them up here.”
Andrea Strickland did not raise her gaze from the bearskin rug on the wood-plank floor.
“It looks like a wide variety,” Tracy said. “Do you have a favorite genre?”
Strickland glanced at Tracy, then back at the floor. “No,” she said softly.
“How far along are you?” Tracy asked. She’d noticed the telltale bump beneath Andrea’s stretch pants.
Andrea lifted her head again. “Just a little more than six months now.”
“And your husband doesn’t know.”
Andrea shook her head. “No.”
Andrea Strickland was not crazy or vindictive. She had, however, been desperate to get away from an abusive husband intent on killing her, and, unknowingly, her unborn child.
“Andrea, your aunt didn’t want to tell us where you were. I found the birth certificate for Lynn Hoff. I figured it out,” Tracy said.
Strickland nodded. Orr squeezed her niece’s hand.
“I think you can imagine we have some questions, Andrea, about what happened. Will you speak to me?”
“Does she need a lawyer?” Orr asked.
That was always the $64,000 question for the witness and the police officer. Strickland was not in police custody so her right to an attorney under the Fifth Amendment had not been triggered. She had also not been charged with a crime, which meant her Sixth Amendment right had also not been triggered. Given the location of the cabin and the condition of the Jeep, Tracy now had serious doubts Strickland could have killed Devin Chambers or Megan Chen. She’d faked her own death, but to do so was neither a federal nor a state crime. She had not illegally recovered any insurance proceeds, nor was she seeking to avoid paying state or federal taxes. She’d used a fake identification to open bank accounts, but not to commit forgery or fraud, since the money belonged to her. As for defaulting on the bank loans and the lease, her husband had admitted to forging her name on the personal guarantees. Whether her separate property was susceptible to those creditors remained a civil, not a criminal, issue.
In other words, Tracy had no basis to arrest her.
The ugly issue of jurisdiction had also resurfaced again. Tracy and Fields had crossed state lines to speak to a witness, who had led them to another witness. Without a court order, they did not have authority to arrest Andrea Strickland or to extradite her back to either Oregon or Washington, even if they decided they had a basis to do so.
Andrea Strickland had run because she was pregnant, her husband had planned to kill her, and she’d decided she could not risk him killing her baby, or raising a child with such a man. Inside, Tracy was applauding her decision.
“At the moment we just want to talk,” Tracy said. “If you prefer to have an attorney present, I’ll honor that request. It’s up to you.”
Orr looked to her niece, who glanced up but gave no indication of her desire. Orr reconsidered Tracy. “Can we have a minute?”
“Sure,” Tracy said.
Tracy nodded to Fields and the two of them stepped outside. Fields immediately reached for his pack of cigarettes and lighter, lighting up and blowing smoke into the air. In such a pristine location, it seemed a fundamental violation of the beauty of nature.
“What do you think?” Fields asked. “Personally, I think she’s nuts. The aunt might be too.”
Tracy bit her tongue. Fields was so predictable. “I think she’s a young woman who the world shit on who didn’t want the same thing for her child.”
“You’re a bleeding heart, Crosswhite.” He took a drag and blew smoke into the sky. “What do we do if she won’t talk? If we leave, she could run again. She’s got all that money hidden someplace, and the aunt had her bags packed and ready to go. I’m not buying the trip-to-Florida story.”