The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)(65)

“So what did he have to say?” Del asked.

“Someone used a guerilla e-mail account to make contact. Ordinarily, he won’t agree to work under those conditions.”

“What’s a guerilla e-mail?” Del asked.

“It’s a disposable e-mail address,” Faz said. “It’s like a burner phone for e-mail. People use it when they don’t want to use their real name or e-mail address. A random address is generated each time the person logs in, and the e-mail is automatically deleted an hour after it’s generated.” He turned to Nikolic. “What did they want your guy to do?”

Nik shrugged. “Asked him to find someone named Lynn Hoff. Said he was a relative.”

“So we don’t know if this person doing the asking was a man or a woman,” Del said.

Nikolic shook his head. “No way to know.”

“So how does the person on your end get information back to an e-mail address that gets deleted after an hour?” Del asked.

“They set up a time to communicate. The client told my guy he’d send another e-mail in seventy-two hours, and if my guy had any information he could e-mail him back. Personally, I like to know who I’m dealing with and won’t work that way, but not everyone has my same high degree of integrity.” Nik smiled.

“So what did your guy find?” Faz asked.

“He ran the name through the usual channels and came up with the same Washington State driver’s license you found. He also ran a credit report and found the name associated with an apartment complex in Oklahoma, along with utility records and a request for installation of a phone in that name for that address.”

“I’m assuming that was a false trail,” Faz said.

“Turned out it was.”

“So the person knew what they were doing?” Del asked.

“Hell, you can read it in books now or watch YouTube,” Nikolic said. “Internet is going to put us all out of business eventually. Computers will take over the world. But yeah, the person had clearly done some research or knew what they were doing.”

“The skip tracer gave the client this information?” Faz asked.

“He did. The client then said the person might be using a second alias,” Nikolic said. He glanced down at his notes in a spiral notebook. “Devin Chambers. He told my guy he might want to start in Portland, Oregon.”

“Devin Chambers?” Del said.

“That’s the name the client gave him.”

“Isn’t she Strickland’s friend?” Del said to Faz.

“What did he find?” Faz asked Nik.

“He ran the name through the system and came up with a driver’s license and an apartment in Portland. My guy takes a drive down to Portland and talks to the neighbors. She’d lived there, but the tenants said they hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. Two said she told them she was taking an extended trip out of the country.”

“Did she keep the lease?” Faz asked.

“It was month to month. When she didn’t pay, the landlord went through the channels and evicted her.”

“What did the landlord do with all her possessions?”

“Put everything in storage. She never came back for it.”

“So she didn’t care about it?” Faz said.

“Doesn’t appear she did.”

Faz gave that some thought. He asked, “Did Chambers tell any of the tenants where she was going?”

“One thought she said Europe, a long-overdue backpacking trip. She asked one of her neighbors to collect her mail while she was gone. Neighbor still had a big stack of it.”

“She didn’t ask the neighbor to forward it?” Faz said.

“Nope.”

He looked to Del. “Sounds like she didn’t intend to come back, but she didn’t want it to look that way.”

“Definitely,” Del said.

Nikolic checked his notebook again. “The skip tracer tracked down a relative in New Jersey, a married sister—Allison McCabe.” He spelled the last name. “He called her, said he was the building manager, and told her he had Devin Chambers’s furniture, personal belongings, and a stack of mail but didn’t know where to forward it.”

“What did the sister tell him?”

Nikolic smiled. “She said she hadn’t had any contact with her sister in several years and didn’t know what to tell him. The sister didn’t want anything to do with her. He pressed her a bit and learned Devin Chambers has a fondness for prescription drugs and a related money-management problem. She’d apparently borrowed money from the sister in the past and never repaid it. The sister got tired of it and cut her off. According to my guy, a lot of the mail collected was from creditors and collection agencies, past due.”

“Disappearing takes money,” Faz said.

Del looked to Faz. “The trust fund.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” Faz said. “Just wondering if the skip tracer knew. If Chambers and Andrea were pals, maybe Andrea was helping her out.”

Del shook his head. “Then why wouldn’t she just give her the money to pay her bills? That seems a lot simpler solution than both of them running.”

“Except Andrea needed to get away,” Faz said. “Needed people to think she died.”