by JoAnn Chaney
Detective Loren was testing her. They all were. They were trying to see how far she could be pushed before snapping. She’d overheard two of the detectives calling her the new girl the week before, then making a crude sexual comment about her. It wasn’t the joke that bothered her so much as being described as a girl. But that’s how they treated her—like a girl. Even though she’d been a detective longer than many of them and had made more arrests. And from what she’d seen she had bigger balls than most of the men in the department.
But unfair as it was, that was the way things worked. She’d been through this same thing every time she’d been promoted or changed departments, not that it made it any easier. There was always a period of weeks or months of hazing, but things always calmed down and she was accepted as a member of the team, or at least a part of the scenery. The same thing would happen here, but only when Loren let it. He was the ringmaster of the whole production, directed the traffic, made sure everyone danced to his piping—even if it was unofficial. He was technically a lieutenant detective, a title that put him higher than anyone else in Homicide, but even without it he’d still crack the whip and the other guys would come running. There’s always one person in a group who stands out as the leader, the one who becomes the linchpin that holds it all together—and that was Loren. She had to win him over to assure her spot in the department, and a part of her wondered if that would ever happen.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t understand why you were sent out here at all,” Jackson said. “Aren’t you from Denver Homicide?”
“Yes.”
“The husband didn’t come out to search this morning.”
“I know. I’m just here to check things out.”
“When did this turn into a murder investigation? It seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. That couple went on a hike and the gal slipped and fell off the cliff. Accidents like that happen all the time out here.”
Spengler sighed again. Shaded her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand and looked up at the cliff. It was impossible to see the top from down here—it was nothing but a solid wall of rock that shot straight up into the sky. The cliff itself jutted out like a finger, coming away from the rock so there was no support beneath. If life were a cartoon, Wile E. Coyote would’ve set a trap for the Road Runner up there, but when his bomb went off he’d be the one to plummet all the way down as he stood on that thin rock platform.
Spengler had watched a lot of TV when she was a kid.
“Husband and wife go on hike and the wife falls off the edge to her death,” Spengler said. “No witnesses around, no one to back his story. Seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it?”
“Like I said, these things happen all the time. Sounds like you folks have extra payroll to burn if you’re being sent out here for this.”
“I’ve been a cop a long time, and there’s one thing that’s the same in every case,” she said, turning away from the river. The whistling sound of it and the reflections playing off the water were giving her a headache. “Things are never exactly what they seem.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Things might never be what they seem, but this was how they were: This might not be a murder investigation at all. Jackson might be right. This might be a simple case of an accident. These things happen all the time, especially in Colorado’s backcountry. Fall off a cliff, get caught in an avalanche, get lost in the forest and die of exposure.
But like the saying goes: your accident can be another’s good luck. And some people don’t wait for good luck, they make their own.
Had Matthew Evans taken luck into his own hands?
“You leaving already?” Jackson asked when he spotted Spengler walking toward the trail. He jogged over, his arms tucked close against his sides.
“Already?” She laughed. “I’ve been out here a while.”
“It’s slow work. We’ll be wrapping up soon. If you want to stick around we could hike up together, maybe have a drink in town?”
She gave him a small smile.
“Thank you, but I have to get back to the station. But I’ll give you my number—could you call if you find anything I should know about?”
She didn’t want the drink, but she wouldn’t have minded company on the hike back to the top, except she was forced to sit and rest every few minutes because of the excruciating pain in her feet and she didn’t want anyone along to see that. The shoes had rubbed the skin on the backsides of both her ankles away, leaving behind juicy red slashes of meat on the pinch of tendon, and the top of her right foot had a similar spot, just above her second toe. She paused any time she spotted a good place to sit—usually a rock or a fallen tree. Once she ended up sitting in the dirt, her knees giving out and dropping her on her ass. She’d peel off her shoes for a few minutes and wiggle her toes in the air, carefully rub the joints to try and work out the pain. She’d slipped these shoes on this morning because they were comfortable for sitting behind a desk or walking around the office in, not going on a full-blown hike. Now her feet and ankles were swollen and bruised, and she thought the shoes would most likely end up in the trash the minute she got home. Even after her feet were completely better she wouldn’t want to wear them again—just looking at them would be enough to bring back some phantom pain.
By the time she got back to the parking lot the sun was much closer to the western rim of the sky, turning the blue the bright red of fresh blood. Another hour or two and it would be twenty-four hours since Marie Evans had taken a tumble off the cliff and slipped into the river’s waves. Her husband had told the park rangers it’d happened at dusk, when the shadows thrown down by the trees were long and the summer heat had cooled. This part of the park was supposed to be closed well before sundown, but there were always people who ignored the rules.
Maybe that’s why she fell, Matt Evans had said to the park rangers. It was getting dark. She couldn’t see the edge and miscalculated.
Miscalculated. She thought it was an odd word for a man to use to describe his wife’s fall off a cliff.
Spengler went to her car and sat on the passenger seat with the door open, turned so her legs stuck out. The parking lot was packed—Estes Park patrol units and mud-spattered jeeps from the park’s rangers—and a BMW sedan. It was black and sleek and new, with windows tinted as dark as a hearse. It belonged to Matt Evans. Somehow, maybe in the panic of his wife slipping and falling over the cliff side, he’d lost his car key. He’d left his car here for the time being, until he could get back with a spare or have someone pick it up.
She rummaged through her glove box and found alcohol wipes and bandages, then tended to her wounds. She had a pair of flip-flops tossed on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Cheap plastic things, but better than her flats or nothing at all. She jammed the rubber thongs well in between her toes, made sure her purse was still hidden out of sight beneath the seat, and locked up the car again. It was about a mile hike to the cliff’s edge, according to what the park rangers had said. Most of the way was along a well-used trail of packed earth, with an easy incline. Easy going, but even so her feet hurt so badly she almost turned around, but by the time she’d decided to turn back she was practically there.
The rangers had roped off this section of the park to visitors while they searched for Marie Evans, closing the trail with strings of official yellow tape, so she was alone. It sometimes felt like the only place she was ever alone these days was when she was in the car, and that didn’t feel like being alone at all, not when she was surrounded by thousands of other people sitting alone in their own cars, everyone creeping along the interstate together. She’d sometimes find herself desperately wanting solitude and silence, and when she got it she’d be hit with a strange loneliness. But out here wasn’t so bad. The quiet out here was waiting, it seemed, listening for something to happen.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, she thought bemusedly, if a woman slips off a cliff to her death and no one bu
t her husband is there as a witness, was it actually an accident?
Matt and Marie Evans had come this way that day, the rangers said. The main trail headed deeper under the canopy of big pines and aspens and evergreens and was a good place to spot deer rummaging through the undergrowth for a tasty morsel. Most tourists went in that direction. There was a waterfall about a mile farther on, and it made for a charming spot to rest and eat lunch. But the Evanses hadn’t gone that way. They’d instead stepped off the main trail onto an unmarked arm. It wasn’t on any of the park maps. You’d have to be looking for it to know it was there, or else stumble across it by happy accident.
Spengler only found it because one of the rangers had given her a good description of where to go, and even though she was walking slow and looking, she still passed by it and had to double back. But when she finally spotted it, the path was unmistakable. The foliage had been pushed back and the wild grasses trampled flat. She pushed aside a branch and veered off onto this makeshift trail. It was steeper this way, and rocky. More than once her feet slid right out of the flip-flops and scraped across sharp rocks, and she had to reach out and grab branches to hold her balance as she gathered herself. And then, just when she thought it might have been a terrible idea to try to find her way to the top of the cliff, she pushed through a patch of tall weeds and ducked under a low tree branch and she was there.
The sheer height of the cliff was the first thing she noticed. It was one thing to be told it was over a hundred feet from where she’d been standing not too long before, because that was just a number. It was a very different thing to actually be that high up.
When Spengler had caught her breath, she stood up and walked slowly toward the rim of the cliff. She wasn’t afraid of heights, never had been, but she’d also never been on an edge like this before. The sun had momentarily slipped behind a few clouds before coming back out, golden and bright, reminding her of a woman parting a set of lace curtains in a window and peering through the opening. They’d had curtains like that when she was a kid, and her mother would check on her when she was riding her bike outside, her tired, beaming face appearing in the apartment’s smeary window. Like a ghost. Like the sun.
Spengler had grown up in Kansas—most of her life she’d lived in Dodge City, a town most famous for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. It was a flat place, where the wind was always blowing hard, carrying the smell of manure and farmland with every gust, and the eighteen-foot-high slide at Doc’s Yee-Haw Water Fun Zone was the tallest thing around, so she’d never experienced anything like this. From this spot she could see for miles. Over most of the park, she thought, acres and acres of trees and rock and land, all the way to the little town of Estes Park, where there were already small lights twinkling. Beyond that would be Denver and home, but that was lost in a mist that blurred the horizon. It reminded her of the first time she’d seen the ocean, sitting in the passenger seat during a road trip to San Diego: the Pacific had been on her right as they headed south on the freeway, but it hadn’t looked real. It couldn’t be real, she’d thought. It looked like a painting or some strange special effect on TV. But there were ships out there, seemingly motionless on the water, and it stretched on forever. She found it terrifying. Her mother, an immigrant from South Korea, had laughed at this.
I spent hours and hours in a plane going over the ocean to get to America, she always said. It’s just water.
This view from the cliff gave Spengler that same creeping fear she’d gotten from the ocean. As she left the safety of the tree cover, still fifteen feet away from the edge, she was doused with an unnerving wave of nausea. Her palms and the soles of her feet were slick with sweat. She went a few steps closer before her feet refused to take another step. She leaned, feet planted wide and firm, and tried to peek over the side. From where she was she could see part of the river below, and some of the men who were still searching. From this far up they looked like ants. Earlier, there’d been plenty of chitchat and laughter between the men as they worked, but from up here she couldn’t hear any of it. If they screamed she’d probably hear it, but all that came to her now was the roaring of the water, and she felt a fine spray of moisture on her cheeks. The wind had picked up and she didn’t dare go any nearer to the rock’s lip. She didn’t think it could blow her right off, but she didn’t want to take any chances.
She tried to imagine going out to the very edge to look over and couldn’t. Matt Evans said that was what Marie had done. She’d wanted to look straight down, and Evans had retreated into the brush to relieve himself. He hadn’t seen her fall, he said. He’d heard her scream, and when he’d come running out with his zipper open and his pants loose around his hips his wife was gone, swallowed up by the dark waters below.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Spengler took the interstate to work and back home again every day, a straight shot up and down I-25, and every evening she was sure to look at the big electronic billboard hanging over the southbound lanes. This was the message it flashed, only a few words at a time, so it read like some strange poetry:
Be Careful
Drive Safe
Number of Car Deaths This Year
In State Is
137
Buckle Up
Pay Attention
She’d first started paying attention to the sign a few weeks before, although she’d been driving the same way to work every day for almost a year and it had probably been up that whole time only she’d overlooked it. Now she looked for it every day to see if the number had changed, if more people had died. There were days when it didn’t change at all, sometimes a week when that number didn’t move, and then suddenly it would, jumping up, ten or fifteen at a time, and she’d think that life is often that way. One day there’s nothing, and the next day it’s everything.
* * *
Tony was still awake when she got home. She saw his silhouette in the open door as she pulled up to the house, the outline of his nose and the curl of his hair where it’d grown too long on his neck. They’d met five years before at a bar downtown, close to the police station. Tony had been working behind the bar, she was a customer. It was a Tuesday night—slowest night of the week—and she’d ordered water and a Cobb salad.
“Nothing to drink?” he’d asked, gesturing at the rows of glittering bottles on the mirrored shelves behind him. He leaned over the counter on his elbows and grinned. “I can mix you anything you’d like.”
“Anything?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. It was the familiar ebb and flow of flirting, comforting as the back and forth sway of a rocking chair. She’d never known how to flirt until she’d gone undercover, casing a sex trafficking ring operating out of Denver, and then she’d only gotten good out of necessity. “What if I ask for something you don’t know how to make?”
“Then your dinner is on the house.”
“And what if I can’t stump you?”
“Then you have to buy me dinner. But not in this place.”
“Deal.”
“What’ll you have?”
She considered.
“I once went out with some coworkers and they ordered a Corpse Reviver. I’d like one of those, please.”
Three minutes later he was carefully sliding the drink onto a cocktail napkin in front of her. She tweezed out the sword toothpick that’d been stuck through a cherry and took a deep drink, then sighed in satisfaction.
“How did you know how to make it?” she asked.
He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled. Winked.
“Looks like you owe me dinner. Tomorrow night work for you?”
Years later, after they were married, Spengler thought of that drink and asked again. Tony grinned and ducked his head.
“I had fast internet on my phone,” he said. “I had to look up recipes that way all the time. But I must’ve mixed it right. It got me that dinner.”
“I have no idea if it was right,” she said, grinning back. “I’d never had one before that night, but it was pre
tty damn tasty.”
Now Tony came out the door and down the driveway to meet her. He took the travel coffee mug and the small stack of mail she’d collected from the lockbox around the corner, then held out his hand to help her from the car. She took it gratefully.
“Long day?” he asked. Tony was the only man she’d ever dated who hadn’t had a problem with her job. Most men were either afraid of cops or they had weird sexual fantasies about being handcuffed and beaten.
“Yeah.”
“You’re limping,” he said. He looked down and frowned. “You didn’t wear flip-flops to work this morning, did you?”
“No. It’s a long story.”
“Dinner’s ready. I waited to eat with you.”
“Is he still awake?””
“Nope, been asleep for hours. He wouldn’t take a nap earlier, so he crashed hard.”
She went upstairs. Their bedroom was on the right, two others on the left. One was open—Tony’s office. It was where he worked on the freelance writing jobs he got, although she’d noticed those had been coming less and less over the last few months. She hadn’t asked about it; she didn’t want him to think she was worried. They’d both agreed that she would go back to work after Elliott was born and he would stay at home. He couldn’t make as much money as she did, and it just made sense. It’d been Tony’s idea to begin with, and he handled the whole thing with good grace, but she could sometimes feel him bristling at the idea of being stuck at home with a toddler, cooking dinner and cleaning.
You’re such a progressive family. That’s what one of the mothers at the park had said to Tony not long before. And you’re comfortable with your wife being the main breadwinner? That’s so neat.