by JoAnn Chaney
First, Loren and Gallo, who’d been partners for going on five years, had a falling-out. Falling-out was not an explosive enough word for what happened, but it was what the paperwork put in each of their employee files stated. They were both reassigned and given new partners.
Gallo took Ortiz on as his. And Ortiz, young kid that he was, a dipstick still wet behind the ears, worshipped the ground Gallo walked on.
And then Gallo disappeared. His whole family did. And while most people decided Gallo had picked up and left town, bailed on everything, Ortiz was sure it was a case of foul play, and he’d narrowed his focus and the blame on Loren.
And man, he was right.
“This’ll blow over. Ortiz isn’t a bad apple, not like he used to be. He’s grown up.”
“Yeah,” Loren said, although his question was still hanging out there—do I have to worry about Ortiz? It didn’t matter to him if he was a bad apple or a good guy or a dancer in the motherfucking Lollipop Guild, he was only concerned if Ortiz was poking too deep into corners, if he was stirring up old ghosts that’d cause trouble.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal,” Preach said. “Ortiz’ll get tired of Denver soon enough and come home, and I’ll take care of him. You’re fine.”
Act normal, Chief Black had said. Keep yourself occupied until this blows over.
Do you think I did it? Loren wanted to ask, the urge so strong he had to close his fist and sink his fingernails down into his palm to keep his mouth shut. Because it sure as hell sounds like you do, old friend. Like all you motherfuckers are sure I did it. Like you think I’m guilty and you’re keeping a secret for me.
Good times and good ol’ boys like Preach, pulling together to protect their own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I don’t understand why you’re still in this same area,” Spengler said to the head of the search team. “You spent all day in this spot yesterday.”
“Oh, we’ve moved down about a hundred yards,” the man said comfortably. Loren liked the calm way he was handling Spengler. Most men saw a gun on a woman’s hip strapped beside the badge and crumbled, or got defensive. “Just trying to be thorough.”
“But if the victim was caught in the current, wouldn’t she be farther on?”
“That’s what everybody thinks,” Jackson said. “But a body sinks in fresh water, you see—”
Loren wandered away, no interest in a science lesson. He already knew what the man was going to say; he’d learned it years before, no need to hear it again:
A human body sinks in fresh water, and in a river ends up down at the bottom where there’s no current moving anything. So the body stays there until something physically moves it, or it begins to decompose and starts to float, rising up to the surface. But before that, when the body is fresh and the water is cold and hasn’t become swollen yet, it most likely hasn’t moved far from where it went under. A few hundred yards at the very most. Marie Evans had fallen off that cliff two days before, so she was just about as fresh as it got. If she was still in the water, she was somewhere close.
If she was in the water? Loren snorted. Where else would she be? A fall from 120 or 130 feet straight down to the rocks and water below, the chance she’d survived was zilch. And if the campers Spengler had spoken with were telling the truth, Marie Evans hadn’t just fallen. She’d been pushed.
What made you think a woman begging for mercy was a joke? Spengler had asked. There were three of them, young men with unkempt beards and beanie caps pulled low over their foreheads. Used to be that men with beards like that were thought to be either homeless or sexual predators, but times had changed. Loren had watched Spengler interview the men at the Estes Park station while he stood off to one side, his back pressed against the side of a humming vending machine. The three men were seated around a table and kept eyeballing him nervously. Spengler shot him a single glare and then didn’t deign to look at him again.
It didn’t sound like she was serious, one of them said. He spoke for all of them, like they were sharing one mouth. I swear, I thought I heard her laugh before the last scream.
She laughed?
I don’t know for sure. I might’ve just been hearing things.
That’s why you didn’t bother coming to see if anything was wrong?
Yeah. And it was getting dark out, and it’s no joke getting hurt out there. No cell phone reception and it gets cold at night. We listened and didn’t hear anything else.
No other screams for help?
Nope. It was quiet after that.
Were you gentlemen drinking that night?
They’d looked at each other and then back at Spengler.
Yeah, we were pretty sauced.
Smoking anything?
Yeah, maybe a little.
They’d gotten the statement and then they’d hiked down to this spot by the river, where a team had been working since first light, poking and prodding and dragging the river. It was only midmorning and the sky was still blue and clear, but the dark clouds building in the western horizon promised a storm. That was how it’d been for most of August, which was unusual. Fucking El Niño, causing all sorts of problems.
Loren walked away from the river and went toward the cliff base. It was sheer-faced rock for most of the way, smooth as if it’d been chiseled by a giant, and then, very near the top, was the rock platform. It looked like a person could jump on it hard and cause it to break and separate from the rest, and that was where Marie Evans had been standing when she went over the edge. It was like a diving board from hell.
He stood directly beneath the platform and stared straight up. It was hard to see anything from so far away and it was dark on the underside, especially with the sun almost directly overhead. Nothing but a sheet of unrelenting darkness.
Chief Black was right. Act normal, work a case. If Matt Evans really had pushed his wife, this was now a homicide investigation—Spengler’s first. And she’d need help. It would keep his mind off things. Ortiz would go back to Springfield and they’d find someone else to pin Gallo’s murder on, or it would stay open forever. Ortiz wouldn’t find anything to connect Gallo back to him.
Would he?
No. Loren had been careful. Maybe not as careful as he was these days, but still careful. He hadn’t left anything behind when he’d planted Gallo’s ass in the mud beside the river, and thirty years is a long time. Time was the best way to get rid of evidence, any cop could tell you—
“Loren?”
He jumped at Spengler’s voice and looked over his shoulder.
She was smiling, bemused. “You see anything interesting up there?”
“Give me a warning before you try to scare me into a heart attack, Spengler,” he said. His heart was thumping unpleasantly hard against his chest and he tried to keep from seeming like he was out of breath. She gave him a strange look and turned back to the water. He didn’t look up at the underside of the platform again. He’d startled and had twisted his neck at a strange angle, and in that sudden movement he saw something on the underside of the cliff. He looked down, rubbing and kneading the muscle in his neck, then turned his face up again.
“You see something?” Spengler asked, her eyes sweeping the rock.
“I … don’t know,” he said. “I thought I did. But maybe it was nothing.”
Spengler nodded and wandered away, and Loren dropped his head, rolled it around on his shoulders to try to work out the kink. He thought he’d seen a flash of silver up there, a glint of metal, but it was a nothing. The pain jolting through his neck and up to his brain, making him see that flash of lightning.
But at his feet—what was this? Slowly, Loren kneeled to get a closer look.
It was a single dot of what looked like blood. If it was blood it had to be fresh, within the last few days. Any longer than that and the blood would have oxidized and turned black. He looked up at the rock ledge again. It was directly over his head like a roof. He pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket and s
cooped up the rocks flecked with the blood. It immediately crumbled into a thousand pieces at his touch, but the lab geeks would be able to find something even in that mess. They always did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“You plan on sticking around for this investigation?” Spengler asked Loren as they headed away from the river, back up the trail. She didn’t look directly at him, but quickly glanced his way from the corner of her eye.
“Is it a problem if I do?”
“No, just asking. I wouldn’t mind learning a few things from you.”
“You definitely will.”
She shot him a withering glare then.
“I was going to say, I’ve heard you’re the best, although I haven’t seen any indication of it so far.”
“If you were a man I’d punch you in the head for that comment.”
“Please don’t let my lack of testicles keep you from trying it,” she said. “I have a good feeling I’d kick your ass all over the side of this mountain.”
Loren stopped in his tracks, shocked. Spengler ignored him and kept going up the trail. He laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had dared to smart off to him like that, unless it was Gallo—
That squashed the amusement faster than anything else could have.
They passed a tree with a trunk turned completely black and dead, bare of leaves. It looked like it’d been torched in a fire, leaving it twisted and warped while everything else around was left untouched. A hangman’s tree, Loren thought. With the one thick branch sticking off to one side like an arm, it was perfect.
“I’ve been thinking about what those campers said in their statement,” Spengler said slowly.
“What’s that?”
“They said they heard a woman beg, and then scream. And that was it.”
“I’m not following.”
“In his initial statement, Matt Evans said his wife screamed and fell. Then he said he’d gone to the edge himself and screamed her name. Said he shouted for help. He said he lost his voice because of how much he was yelling.”
“So if he’d been screaming, those guys would’ve heard him.”
“Right. Unless they were too drunk and stoned to hear anything. And that alone makes them unreliable witnesses.”
Loren shot her a look.
“I understand in cases like this the spouse is almost always the killer,” Spengler said.
“Yeah. I know,” Loren said. “How about less talk and more walk, eh? I’d like to get outta here. Nature gives me the creeps.”
* * *
Spengler drove fast, wove in and out of traffic like she had a demon on her ass, chasing her down the interstate. Loren liked that. He leaned the passenger seat back and stared out the window. A little red sports car shot by, going faster than Spengler’s little import could ever hope to go, and a minivan pulled up beside them. There was a girl in the backseat, no more than six or seven years old, with her hair cut so short she looked more than a little like Peter Pan. When she saw Loren looking she flipped him the bird. It made him smile.
Spengler thought he hated her, he knew. But he didn’t. He actually didn’t feel one way or another about her, and he treated her with the same indifference and derision he gave everyone, she just hadn’t realized it yet. She stayed silent as they drove, kept the radio set at a politely low volume. The bounce of the car as they sped along the road and the warmth of the muted afternoon light pouring through the windshield made him sleepy, and he didn’t fight the heavy lowering of his eyelids. He didn’t sleep much these days. Couldn’t sleep, that was a better way to put it. The insane were often insomniacs—or was it the other way around? Insomniacs were often insane?
He couldn’t remember.
His eyes shut and he didn’t quite fall asleep, but instead landed somewhere in between. He heard the soft notes coming from the car’s radio and the ticking noise of Spengler chewing her fingernails, but his mind was drifting like an empty raft on a calm sea. He thought of Chief Black telling him to keep busy. He’d gotten the same advice from the doctor he’d been seeing for more than fifteen years. Dr. Patel, a man with liquid brown eyes and discolored skin at his knuckles. He always had flecks of white spittle dried at the corners of his mouth, like he’d just had a glass of milk.
You have to keep busy, Ralph, Patel had said to him. His voice was soothing and melodic. A trace of a British accent around the vowels. An idle mind is the best way to fall into old habits.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Matt Evans had always had an appreciation for fine things, and that was probably because he’d never had any fine things of his own as a kid. He’d grown up poor. Not poor enough that he went hungry or wore rags to school, but poor enough to get the government-subsidized free lunch offering at his public school. Poor enough that his mother had bought most of his clothes at the Salvation Army thrift shop and he didn’t have his own car until he was well into his twenties and he didn’t have a checking account until after that—because if you don’t have the cash to put into the bank, what was the point? He’d gone to college for a business degree (just like every other bozo who had no idea what to major in) but had never finished, and then moved to Denver after Janice’s death and took the only job he could find—selling cars. He hated it, but here’s the thing: it’s almost always the case that a person is good at the thing he hates the most. And Matt was good. He sold a car on his first day—beginner’s luck, the other guys scoffed. You gotta let them get that first one so they’ll feel good about themselves. But then Matt kept selling cars, more every day, and the atmosphere at the dealership became like that of a shark tank, the water teeming with blood. Matt could sell any car on the lot, he’d attach every service plan available, every extended warranty. He sold heated leather seats and sunroofs and remote starts and car bras to keep those pesky bugs from smooshing against the hood and ruining the paint jobs.
No one could say no to Matt Evans.
That he was too talented for car sales was quickly apparent. And someone noticed—specifically, a gentleman who’d come in to simply browse the newest year’s models and drove away in a car he hadn’t intended to buy, one fixed up with every possible upgrade, as well as vouchers for three years’ worth of oil changes, prepaid and rolled into the monthly installment. He also came away with a new salesman for his team. He was head of a growing nationwide sandwich restaurant that’d started selling franchises, and they needed good men to sell them. For the mere price of $250,000, a person could sell artisan meats slapped between slices of freshly baked bread (a proprietary recipe!) to the hungry masses—but it wasn’t only about feeding people, although food is life, and good food is a godsend, it was also about the dream every person had of owning their own business. Being their own boss. It was the AMERICAN DREAM. (Matt’s sales pitches were a thing of wonder. He was as precise as a surgeon with a scalpel, passionate as a pianist performing at their career-making concert. The underlying message was always the same, but each pitch changed, even if just a little. Every meeting he took, every person he spoke with, he came prepared, and everyone needs something different. But in every pitch he used those words—AMERICAN DREAM—and in a way that the person on the other side of the table understood it was being said in all capitals, and bolded. Times change, and people change, but the ideal of the AMERICAN DREAM was forever, and it always worked. Hooked the target like a fish, and he reeled them right to shore.)
So Matt went from selling cars to selling businesses—or rather, the AMERICAN DREAM—and his paychecks went from no big deal to heavy hitters. He was suddenly able to afford things he’d never had before—a big house and designer clothes and fancy cars—and he found he took comfort in them. More comfort than he’d ever gotten out of Marie or their two daughters.
Love is fleeting, after all. But stuff—stuff lasts forever.
Like now, sitting in his kitchen with the two detectives from the Denver Police Department and answering their questions about what’d happened to Marie, he was a
ware of the dim gleam of the stainless steel front of the Viking fridge and the E. Dehillerin copper pots and pans hanging above the island and the minute movements of the hands of the twenty-thousand-dollar watch on his wrist. In fact, he kept swiping the pad of his thumb over the face of his watch. It was a tic, one that Loren picked up on right away. It took Spengler a little longer to catch it, but not much longer. It might mean he was lying, or that he was nervous. Both, or neither.
He’d finished telling these cops what’d happened to Marie—he’d told the park rangers, he’d told the cops in Estes Park, and now these two, third time’s the charm, he could only hope—and then they’d asked him to write it out and sign that it was complete and true, and that he was aware they’d also recorded an audio of his official statement.
“You said you took a picture of Marie before she fell,” Spengler said as she folded up the signed statement and tucked it into her pocket.
“Yes.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Yeah, hang on.”
He picked up his phone and swiped through a few screens before handing it over. It was a good picture. The wind had gusted just before he’d taken it, and Marie’s hair had flown into her face, covering most of it, making her laugh. Spengler smiled as she looked at it.