The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(28)

“Apparently so,” Tracy said.

The mustache twitched. “I’d have bet my badge the husband gave her a little shove off the mountain. I was sure he killed her.”

“Maybe he still did,” Kins said.

“Maybe,” Fields said.

“Can you fill us in on your investigation?” Kins asked.

The waitress set Fields’s beer and Kins’s Diet Coke on coasters. Fields took more than a sip and wiped foam from his mustache with the paper napkin. “His story didn’t add up.” He set down his beer and sat back, again draping one arm over the back of the booth. “It stunk. Wife gets up to take a pee and he doesn’t get up with her? Or wonder where she is? You talk to people who climb that mountain and they’ll tell you they don’t sleep well, if at all, the night before they summit. They lay down when it’s still light out and the adrenaline and anxiety are pumping, but this guy says he slept so soundly he didn’t even know she was gone? Come on. So my radar was already pinging before I ever met the guy.” He looked at Tracy and his eyes took a quick dive to her cleavage. “And my radar is rarely wrong.”

“What’d you find?” Tracy asked, her skin now crawling for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

“Turns out the wife took out an insurance policy naming him the beneficiary shortly before they climbed. Quarter of a million bucks. That was the first red flag.”

“Did he take out a policy naming her?” Kins asked.

“Nope,” Fields said. “He said she had some kind of trust fund from her parents and, according to him, he and the wife figured if anything happened to him she’d be fine. That was his story, anyway. Me? I’m thinking that he’s thinking: Why pay a second premium?”

“We understand they’d climbed before,” Tracy said.

“Once, and didn’t take out policies,” Fields said, finishing her thought. “And the wife worked for an insurance company before they opened the marijuana shop.”

“So she knew the ins and outs of the business?” Tracy asked.

“She was a flunky, but according to her boss, she was smart, picked up things quick.”

“You consider they could have been in on something together?” Kins asked.

“I was working under the strong premise he killed her, but yeah, I was open to that possibility.”

“Did the husband recover the insurance proceeds?”

“Not yet, not with the investigation active, but he wasted no time filing for the benefits after he got off the mountain. I made a call. His claim is still under investigation. Looks like it will be a while.”

Tracy looked to Kins. “If the husband and wife had been working together—the delay might not have been something they’d anticipated.”

“Or the husband could have made the wife think they were in it together, then killed her. Since she was already technically dead, and no one was going to find her body in a crab pot, no one would be any wiser,” Kins said.

“Maybe,” Tracy said. “But if that was the case, why wouldn’t he just push her off the mountain? Why wait to kill her?”

“The husband’s one of those guys that’s just easy to not like—you know the type?” Fields said over the sound of banging pans and voices coming from the kitchen.

Tracy did. She was sitting across from one of them. “Anything else set off your radar?” she asked.

“Yeah. Their new business venture wasn’t doing well. In fact, it had tanked,” Fields said. “No surprise there. Husband set it up in a high-rent district in downtown Portland thinking they’d be a more upscale establishment and capture all the business-crowd potheads. Here’s a fun fact: turns out Portland has more medical marijuana dispensaries than almost any other city in the country. What a surprise, huh? Well, shortly after the law went into effect legalizing marijuana, a city ordinance allowed the dispensaries to sell retail. Two were close to the Stricklands’ store. Portland also has a robust black market—meaning the non-business crowd had a readily available and cheaper source.”

“How bad was it?” Tracy asked.

“I got the sense talking with the wife’s boss that Andrea Strickland had been more than reticent about the business, but the husband had talked her into it. She had a large trust—”

“How large?” Tracy asked.

Fields smiled. “The principal was half a million dollars.”

“No shit,” Kins said.

“No shit. But the terms prohibited her from using it to start a business,” Fields said.

Kins whistled.

“Tell me about it,” Fields said. “So they borrowed $250,000 from the bank, and signed personal guarantees on both the lease and on the loan. Also turns out the husband lied on the loan application.”

“Lied how?” Tracy asked.

“Said he was being made a partner of his firm, with a substantial increase in salary—even presented a letter from the managing partner. Turns out he forged the letter. The firm had already told him to hit the bricks.”

The waitress arrived with Fields’s linguini. He lowered his arm and asked for grated cheese. Tracy watched him eye the woman’s breasts as she worked the hunk of Parmesan over the grater. The long hair and mustache weren’t the only things Fields had kept from his undercover days; some of the sleaze had also rubbed off on him. Any sympathy she’d felt for him for having lost his wife had quickly waned.