Stan Fields looked like a holdover from the seventies, with slate-gray hair pulled back in a short ponytail. A bushy mustache drooped below the corners of his mouth as if weighted by the heat. Fields wore a dark-blue polo shirt that bore the department’s emblem—the words “Pierce County Sheriff” stitched in gold over snow-covered Mount Rainier.
Tracy introduced herself and Kins. “I got a table inside,” Fields said. He raised the cigarette to his lips for the final extended drag of a chain-smoker about to go cold turkey for at least half an hour, then blew a stream of smoke into the sky and flicked the burning cigarette into the gutter.
Viola had glass doors pulled back on runners to allow for outdoor seating, though today no one sat at the sun-drenched wrought-iron tables and chairs. The open doors allowed the heat, sticky as syrup, to seep inside, and the overhead ceiling paddles looked sluggish in their effort to offer relief. Tracy removed her sunglasses. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkened interior. Fields led them to a booth near the kitchen, the brick walls adorned with colorful Impressionist paintings.
Tracy and Kins slid across the booth from Fields onto a leather bench seat. Sweat trickled down Tracy’s back from the short walk and caused her shirt to stick to her skin.
Fields nodded to two glasses on their side of the table. “I ordered you water—figured you’d be thirsty after the drive.”
Tracy and Kins thanked him. Each took long drinks. What Tracy wanted was to run the cool glass over her forehead and down her neck but decided it would be unprofessional.
“I moved here to escape the heat,” Fields said, sounding perturbed. Most Northwest transplants complained about the rain and overcast gray skies. It rang odd to hear someone complain about the heat—though Seattleites were quick to blame their changing weather patterns on global warming, or what Faz unapologetically called “global whining.”
“Where’re you from?” Tracy asked.
Rich smells of garlic and butter and sage wafted from the kitchen.
“Phoenix,” Fields said, “but I moved around a lot as a kid; my dad was in the army.”
“The hottest summer I ever spent was a winter in Phoenix,” Kins said.
“Tell me about it.” Fields had a habit of twitching his mouth, which made his mustache move like the whiskers of a mouse, likely a tic. “I started out running the borders down there with INS, then moved to narcotics, mostly undercover. Spent more time than I cared to in the desert tracking drug runners.”
Fields had the weathered face of someone whom the sun had baked for a few years. With the ponytail and gravelly voice of a smoker, he fit the part of an undercover narcotics agent, and Tracy was picking up the cocky demeanor those officers needed to be convincing.
“Tough gig,” Kins said. “Wears you out after a few years.”
“Yeah, you do it?” Fields asked.
“Two years,” Kins said.
Kins had grown out his hair and a wispy goatee, and someone in narcotics had christened him “Sparrow” after the Johnny Depp character in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The nickname stuck. Unlike Fields, however, Kins had been eager to cut his hair and shave when he left narcotics.
“When did you move to Tacoma?” Kins asked, running a finger along the condensation on the outside of his glass. Tracy sensed he was giving them all a chance to settle in, while also getting a feel for Fields. Fields was likely doing the same.
“Just about a year ago. I lost my wife and needed a change of scenery. I was tired of the heat and the sun. I was looking for rain and fog. Seattle wasn’t hiring detectives but Tacoma was.”
“Sorry about your wife,” Tracy said.
Fields gave a curt nod. “She was undercover too, got too close. Someone ratted her out. They shot her and left her in the desert.”
The news gave Tracy a different perspective of Fields, who at first impression didn’t evoke much sympathy. Losing a spouse was horrific under any circumstances, but losing a spouse in the line of duty, and in that manner, could eat at a person. No wonder Fields had left Arizona.
“Did they get the people who did it?” Kins asked.
Fields gave them a sidelong glance, intended to convey they’d done more than arrest the killers. “Yeah. We got ’em.”
The waitress appeared and Fields shifted his gaze, grinning at the tall young woman like she was on the appetizer menu. “You got the company card?” he asked Tracy, meaning the ability to expense the meal.
“Yeah,” Kins said.
“Then I’ll take a sixteen-ounce pale ale and your linguini and clams,” Fields said without considering a menu. “Tell the chef I like enough garlic so my cat won’t love me for a week.” He gave the waitress a wink. The young woman responded with an uncomfortable smile and quickly looked to Tracy and Kins’s side of the table.
“Diet Coke,” Kins said. “And a bucket of water I can throw over my head.”
The waitress smiled.
Tracy said she was good with the glass of water.
Fields gave the waitress’s backside a lingering once-over when she turned and walked off, which was not only disrespectful but ridiculous. He was old enough to be the young woman’s father, but in Tracy’s experience that didn’t stop some men from thinking they had a chance.
Fields reengaged Tracy. If he was self-conscious Tracy had busted him, he didn’t show it. In fact, she got the impression he enjoyed getting caught. Pathetic.
“Nothing to eat?” Fields said. “Best perk of the job.”
“We stopped for a late lunch,” Tracy said, feeling nauseated.
Fields draped an arm over the back of the booth. “So, Andrea Strickland is dead . . . again.”
“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.”
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“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.
“Thank you, darling,” Fields said when the young woman finished. As the waitress departed, probably to take a scalding shower in disinfectant, Fields looked to Kins and Tracy. “You sure you don’t want anything? It’s good food. I come here at least once a week.”
The waitresses must have been thrilled about that.
“We’re good,” Kins said.
Fields twirled his fork in the pasta and brought a ball to his mouth. He wouldn’t have to worry about his cat. From the smell drifting across the table, the garlic was strong enough to kill a grizzly.
“What more can you tell us about the husband?” Tracy asked.
Fields wiped his mustache on his napkin and sipped his beer. “Like I said, a big shot. Drove a Porsche and wore those suits that look like they’re a size too small. Smarter than everybody too, always looking for the next big deal just around the corner, and believed it was just a matter of time before one of them paid off. Big bullshitter. I think he convinced the wife this was their ticket. They pretty much liquidated all their community assets and put it into the store. He’d also maxed out their credit cards and the creditors were calling. And like I said, the bank found out about the forged letter from the law firm, and he was looking at criminal prosecution and maybe a little jail time if he couldn’t pay back the money.”
“So you thought he was after the wife’s trust?” Kins said.
“I did,” Fields said in between another bite of his pasta. “Seems that money disappeared from Andrea’s personal account.”
“Disappeared where?” Tracy asked.
“Don’t know. The husband swears he had nothing to do with it and has no idea where it went.”
“What about the trustee?”
“Same thing. No idea.”
“You think the husband and wife could have been trying to hide it from the creditors?”
“Yep. You said she had a Washington license under a different name?”
“Lynn Hoff,” Tracy said.
“Then I’m betting that’s where you’ll find the money.”
Tracy recalled the receipt for the Emerald Credit Union she’d found in the garbage can at the motel room.
Fields sat back with a shit-eating grin. “Then there was the little issue of the girlfriend.”
“I figured that was coming,” Kins said.
“There’s always a girlfriend. Am I right?” Fields used a hunk of bread to wipe up sauce from his plate.
“You talk to her?” Kins asked.
Fields shook his head. “Haven’t determined who she is yet. Andrea told her boss she thought her husband was cheating on her, but she didn’t say with who.”
“Any evidence that was the case?” Tracy asked.
“I was still running it down, but apparently it wasn’t the first time. He’d been banging a little hottie from his law firm before they got married and I guess didn’t think a wedding band should inhibit that activity.”
“You talk to her?” Tracy asked.
“Ain’t my first rodeo, Detective.” He popped a piece of bread into his mouth.
Tracy really didn’t like this guy.
“She says she broke it off when she found out he’d gotten married. Apparently, he’d kept that little trinket from her for a couple months.”
“Sounds like a dirtbag,” Kins said.
“Yeah.” Fields nodded. “The wife also told her boss she was going to consult a divorce lawyer.”
“Did she?” Tracy asked.
“No evidence she did.”
“I think I’m seeing her motivation for disappearing,” Kins said.
“Divorce doesn’t get her out of the debt with the personal guarantees out there,” Fields said. “And because Oregon is a community-property state, Andrea was jointly liable for all the debts.”
“She was worried she’d lose her trust,” Tracy said.
“He declares bankruptcy, no big deal,” Fields said. “He’s got nothing but debt. Her? She’s sitting on a big pile of money the creditors would love to go after.”
“Why’d they take out a loan in the first place?” Kins asked.
“Like I said”—Fields took another bite of the linguini—“she wouldn’t let him use the trust money.”
Kins looked at Tracy.
“Yeah,” Fields said, reading the look. “The guy’s got motivation up the ass to kill her.”
“In which case, he would have just shoved her off the mountain,” Tracy said, thinking there had to be something more to it.
“It was the perfect setup,” Fields said, shrugging. “People die on that mountain every year. I think that’s why it was just the two of them—no guide. Husband claims wife’s death was a tragic accident. Who was going to be any wiser?”
“But he’s a lawyer,” Tracy said, still not completely convinced. “He had to have at least realized that the bankruptcy, the insurance policy, and the bad marriage, not to mention the girlfriend, would be pret
ty solid circumstantial evidence it was no accident.”
“He claimed he didn’t know about the insurance policy,” Fields said. “Or about any girlfriend.”
“He says it was her idea to take out the policy?” Tracy asked.
“And to climb the mountain,” Fields said. “Like I said, I was sure he killed her. Now? Well, she’s unhappy too, right?” Fields said. “So maybe she sees this trip up the mountain as the perfect opportunity to fake her own death, get out of a bad marriage, and stick the husband with the bills and headaches.”
“And maybe get even for the girlfriend while she’s at it,” Kins said.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Fields said, wiping the corners of his mustache with the napkin.
“Maybe,” Tracy said. “Or maybe she suspected the husband didn’t intend for her to make it off the mountain and beat him at his own game.”
“Why would she go if she knew he was going to try and kill her?” Kins said.
“She has to go if she wants to fake her death to get out of the marriage and the debt,” Tracy said.
Kins shook his head. “She could have just run.”
“Running doesn’t mean she’s dead,” Tracy said. “This way, she hides the trust money, plants some seeds—like the insurance policy—and tells her boss the husband is cheating on her and she wants a divorce. When he goes to sleep, she walks off knowing everyone will blame the husband.” She looked to Fields. “The ranger says she had to have help getting off the mountain.”
“Yeah, I know, but I don’t know who that would have been. Her parents are deceased and the only relative is an aunt in San Bernardino who hasn’t been in contact with her since Andrea left for Portland. Number’s in the file. There’s the husband—”
“Who we can rule out,” Kins said.
“—her boss, and one friend,” Fields said.
“Who’s the friend?” Tracy asked.
“Devin Chambers. They worked at the insurance company together.”
“You talk to her?” Tracy asked.
The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4) Page 9