by JoAnn Chaney
“If you’ll forward that to me, I’d appreciate it,” she said. She held the phone to Loren, but he only gave his head the tiniest shake. He hadn’t said one word the entire time, not even to introduce himself. He just looked, his eyes ticking back and forth as Spengler asked questions and Matt answered, and his silence was worse than anything. Matt was a man who’d built his entire fortune on words, using them like a prod and a sword and a gentle touch, and the only people he’d never been able to sell to were the silent ones. Silence wasn’t just golden—it was the best defense there was.
After a moment Spengler handed the phone back to Matt.
“Of course,” he said.
“There is something we should tell you,” Spengler said. “Three men have come forward, claiming they heard your wife begging before she fell.” She flipped open her small notepad and glanced at the words there. “‘Please. Don’t. No.’ That’s what they claim they heard her scream.”
“I didn’t hear any of that.”
“In your statement you said you shouted your wife’s name several times after she fell, then screamed for help?”
“Yes.”
“These men never mentioned hearing you at all.”
“I don’t see how they couldn’t have heard me. I shouted several times.”
“Three men are claiming they heard your wife beg for mercy, then fall. Then silence. Three men against you.”
“They’re lying, then.”
“Why would they lie?” Spengler was watching him curiously. Her eyes were light brown, slanted down at the corners. They made her look sad. Loren abruptly stood up and began wandering around the kitchen.
“I don’t know. People do strange things for no reason at all.”
“Like murder their wives?” Loren asked absently, running a finger along the edge of the granite countertop. Matt flinched at his voice. He’d learned to be prepared when heading into a sales pitch, to have all his ducks in a row, to know more than the other side. But this was a different situation, one he hadn’t been able to prepare for, and it threw him off, made him nervous. It was a feeling he didn’t like much.
“Are you accusing me of something, detective?”
“I’d never accuse anyone of anything,” Loren said, grinning. In the light shining down from the can lights overhead his teeth looked gruesomely yellow. So did the whites of his eyes. Matt had never noticed it before, but the lights threw a sickly cast down on everything. Asylum lighting. He’d have to replace the bulbs when he had the chance. “But I do have a question. Did you push your wife off that cliff?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Loren started wandering again, opening up the cabinets as he passed by and peering inside. Spengler was watching him, frowning hard, a deep line appearing between her brows.
“Okay?” Matt asked. “I’m confused.”
“What don’t you understand?” Loren asked. He opened the silverware drawer and pulled out a fork. Examined his reflection in the backside and then dropped it back in with the others. He tried to slam the drawer, but it was a soft close and gently drifted shut. “I asked a question, you answered it. What’s confusing about it?”
“Uh, nothing, I guess.”
“Good. But I do have another question for you.”
“Okay.”
“What’s a place like this set you back?” Loren asked. “Big house in a historic neighborhood close to downtown, fully renovated, all the bells and whistles. It had to have been a pretty penny.”
Matt looked from Loren to Spengler and then back again.
“Do I have to answer that?”
Loren pursed his lips and shrugged.
“Just curious,” he said. “Real estate in Denver is so outrageous these days. What’d you nab this place for? A million?”
Matt coughed lightly.
“A million three.”
Loren whistled through his teeth.
“That’s quite a mortgage.”
“It’s not too bad.”
Matt looked at Spengler again. She was watching him thoughtfully. If he were selling to these cops, Loren would be the impossible close. There were plenty like him, guys who’d come to sales seminars and take meetings claiming they were curious about the possible business opportunity, and they’d partake of plenty of the free refreshments and they’d flip through the literature, but when push came to shove, they’d walk. Pack it up and leave. Those guys had all sorts of questions and would try to lead you in circles by the nose, try to confuse things and cause problems just for the sheer fun of it. You had to learn to avoid guys like Loren, who took a certain cruel glee in making people squirm, because they didn’t want to be closed. They couldn’t be brought over the finish line, even if you held their hand and tried to lead them across the damn thing.
But Spengler—he’d be able to close Spengler. Don’t pitch the bitch, a line from a movie that everyone in sales repeated, and it was mostly true. But there were those women who could be worked, and he had a feeling Spengler was one of those. It was the way she was looking at him, the way she’d sat back from the table and crossed her legs so he’d get a good look at her long stretch of thigh encased in tight denim. The feeling was nothing but the lightest tickle, but it was there, and if he’d learned one thing over all his years in sales, it was to trust those feelings.
“I do have a few more questions, if you don’t mind,” Spengler said.
“Not at all.”
“How long have you and your wife been married?”
“Twenty-two years. We were in Estes to celebrate.”
“Romantic getaway?”
“That’s how it was meant to be.”
“And you have two kids, don’t you?”
“Two girls, yes.”
“You have pictures? I’d love to see.”
He opened up his phone again and clicked to a photo of the girls, then slid the phone across the table so Spengler could see.
“Hannah’s on the left,” he said. “The other one’s Maddie.”
“They look like good girls.”
“They are.”
“They didn’t come home when they heard about their mother?”
“They did.”
“They’re here?” Spengler glanced toward the staircase that spiraled up to the second floor.
“No,” Matt said slowly. “They rented a hotel room together.”
“You have a big house here. Why wouldn’t they just come home, save the money?”
“I don’t know. They tend to do whatever they want. You’d have to ask them.”
Spengler made a small noise he didn’t know how to decipher and tapped the end of her ballpoint pen against her teeth.
“You’re a lucky man.” Spengler looked at the picture on the phone again, then smiled and slid the phone back across the table. “Beautiful girls. The older one looks a lot like your wife.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Okay, just a few more things, standard stuff, and we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Yeah, of course. I’m more than happy to answer whatever.”
Spengler asked her questions. It was more than a few, and every new one made his insides shrivel. He’d expected questions, but not this many, and not thrown out so casually, one after the other, so fast. It was like being peppered with bullets from a machine gun.
When had they arrived in Estes Park for their vacation?
How long had they hiked that day?
Was Marie on any sort of medication, had there been any marital discord recently?
We’ll need your daughters’ cell phone numbers so we can contact them.
They were simple questions, and Evans had all the answers. Finally, Spengler flipped her notepad shut with a small sigh.
“It’s been a long day for us, Mr. Evans,” she said. “We’ve taken up enough of your time.”
She stood, her chair squealing as it slid against the wood floor. He stood, too. It was over, thank god. They’d leave and h
e could be alone.
“If there’s anything else I can do, please let me know,” he said.
“Actually, there is something you could do,” Spengler said. Matt saw then he’d made a mistake. He’d thought Spengler would be easy to close, she’d be the one to fool, she was eating his story right out of his hand, but he’d underestimated her. He saw it in the way she was gazing at him now, still smiling, but she might’ve been looking at a pile of dog shit she’d stepped in. “Could you come into the station tomorrow to take a polygraph? It’s up to you, but it’ll certainly help move our investigation along.”
“But it’s Labor Day weekend.”
A vertical crease had appeared between her brows. Faint, but it was definitely there. That was her entire reaction, that single wrinkle. And then it smoothed out and was gone.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you have plans tomorrow? More important than helping us investigate your wife’s death?”
“No,” Matt said. “I just thought you might be off for the holiday.”
“Oh, no. We’ll be at the station there, first thing. So we’ll see you tomorrow?”
“I didn’t push my wife off that cliff, you know.”
The words came before he could stop them. It was the wrong thing to say, he realized immediately. Too defensive. Spengler had been putting away her notes and paused with her hand still in her pocket, her gaze on him thoughtful.
“No one said you did,” she said. “But we do have to cross every possible scenario off our list. Just going down the checklist, crossing off what’s done.”
“Then I’d be more than happy to take a lie detector,” he said. No hesitation.
“Then I’ll have one of the detectives call you and set up a time to come in,” Spengler said pleasantly. She held eye contact for a beat too long. “Thank you for your time.”
He walked them out, through the kitchen and the formal living room and into the foyer. It’d been sunny that morning but was now raining, a fine mist that seemed to blur everything. It was late enough that the streetlights had turned on, and the rain gave the impression of glowing halos around the bulbs. Loren flipped up his collar and went barreling right into the rain, but Spengler took a travel-size umbrella from the pocket of her jacket and unfurled it above her head. She hesitated, seeming ready to say something else, but instead walked down the steps to her car without another word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Evans house was an old brick place set close to the street, the kind of place everyone calls historic, a house that’s been renovated on the outside to look less new and more like the way it was when it was first built. It had ropes of ivy creeping up one side, stained-glass windows that had to be original, and a wrought-iron fence surrounding the property. Inside was a steep staircase with nothing but a spindly railing to hold on to. Spengler knew there were people who liked this sort of old-timey architecture, but she was not one of them. She’d grown up in a place like this, an old house that’d been split into several separate apartments, and she still remembered the drafty winters and the high, cathedral ceilings, and the washer and dryer in the cold, dank basement that all the tenants shared.
But the Evans house wasn’t that way inside, because they had money to sink into it, the funds to turn a crappy old place into something nice. The kitchen was brand-new, every surface sparkling, and the hardwood floors gleamed warmly. The house was casually decorated but still tasteful, so she knew a professional had done it, telling the Evanses just where that burgundy throw pillow should sit, or how the tapered candles on the mantel had to be cut to different heights to give the room dimension. And there were plenty of books. You could tell a lot about a person from what they read, Spengler knew. There was old stuff—Twain and Chandler and Christie—and there was newer stuff, too. Shelves and shelves of everything you could imagine, propped up with marble bookends made to look like classical Greek sculpture.
It was like living inside a Pottery Barn catalog. Except you didn’t see police scrambling around the pages of a catalog, asking questions and taking notes and smiling grimly. And you’d certainly never see the detective in charge of the case walking slowly through the house toward the door, her hands behind her back, stopping every few steps to look at things, saving the images like snapshots in her brain. There was a statue sitting on an end table near the front door, a piece that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the house but was there anyway. It was a sculpture of a fox, its tail curled around its delicate legs and its sleek, handsome snout pointed right at her. Her mother used to tell stories about a fox, but that story was about an evil spirit, a woman transformed into a fox with nine tails, a demon that would seduce men and then kill them. Children’s stories from Korea, but that had been her mother, hadn’t it? Always telling stories, so you could never quite tell the truth from the make-believe.
“Do I look like Dad?” she used to ask her mother. “Do I have his smile?”
She used to ask this, and her mother told her something different each time. That her father was an American spy and she’d never actually seen his face; that her father was famous and rich, an American prince, and you could see his face everywhere if you just looked; that her father was a ghost who’d come to her at night and put a baby in her belly—a sort of Virgin Mary origin story, Spengler had always thought. But finally, tired of her daughter’s never-ending questions, she dug a Polaroid from deep in the zippered pocket of a suitcase Spengler had always thought was empty.
“He didn’t talk a lot,” her mother said. “He would just smoke. Sit at the table and smoke one cig after another.”
That didn’t tell Spengler a lot about her father, and the photograph, the only one they had, didn’t say much more. The man in that photo was leaning against the side of a Buick, dressed in military fatigues, a cap pulled low over his forehead and mirrored aviator sunglasses covering his eyes. He had a mustache, a dark line against his upper lip, cut short and straight. There was nothing in that photo that gave her a clue about the man her father had been before deciding domestic life was for the birds and hightailing it out of there. She’d tried looking for him after her mother died, spent hours on the internet and combed public records, but her father didn’t seem to exist. Or he didn’t want to be found. Maybe there wasn’t much of a difference.
“You drive,” Spengler said, tossing Loren her keys as they walked away from the Evans house. “I need to check something.”
She paused to look back at the house. One corner was rounded and rose up to a turret, the kind you’d expect a princess to live in. It was a beautiful house. But there was something old and knowing and sinister about it, too, like a house from a fairy tale where an old witch lives, busily spinning her sugar and spells and inviting children to lean into a hot oven. But maybe it wasn’t the house itself that gave her the creeps, but the owners. Dogs and their owners started to look alike after a while, and maybe houses and the people who lived in them did, too.
“You plan on standing there with your thumb up your ass all night, or can we get going?” Loren demanded.
She climbed in and buckled up, then brought out her phone. Like most people, she spent too much time on it. Calling and texting and fooling around on news sites—it was all such a pointless time suck. But there were times like now when it came in handy.
“That prick is lying his ass off,” Loren said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Spengler said, quickly typing a few words into the search engine bar. “But all we’ve got so far is statements from three men who were drunk that night, saying they might have heard Marie Evans begging for help. That’s not enough to stand up in court.”
“It’s not enough to stand up anywhere. You should’ve given him more shit in there.”
“Oh, the way you did? ‘Did push your wife off that cliff? How much did you pay for this place?’”
“Why’d you pitch your voice so high to mimic me?”
“Because that’s how you sound.”
Lo
ren snorted as he flipped on the blinker and turned onto Colorado Boulevard. Someone honked, and he waved dismissively.
“And what exactly did you get? Because as far I can tell you got just about diddly squat.”
“Are you ever not an asshole?” she asked frankly. “Because it doesn’t seem you know how to function otherwise.”
“Oh, you know, anything worth doing is worth doing right.”
“Here it is,” she said excitedly, holding up her phone. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“I knew there was something weird about that guy.”
“What’d you find?”
“When I was working Sex Crimes, I’d run names through our system at the station and come up with nothing. But you plug them into Google, you get back all sorts of stuff you weren’t expecting. It’s amazing. You can’t have a mysterious background these days, not with everyone watching.”
“Jesus-pleezus, Spengler. Spare me the lesson on the wonders of the internet and just do your fucking job. Did you find anything on him?”
She cleared her throat and quickly scrolled through the results on her phone.
“Okay, here’s what we get with a quick search. Matthew Evans, age forty-seven. Lives in Denver. Executive vice president of sales for the Sandwich Company, LLC. And then the latest stuff in the news about the search for his wife.”
“We already know all that.”
“Okay, but how about this: He never said he was married previously, but he was. Her name was … Janice Roscoe. Oh, man.”
She stopped.
“What is it?” Loren asked.
“Here, I’ll just read it to you, it’s from a newspaper article. Public records show Matthew T. Evans married Janice M. Roscoe on May 16, 1995, in Madison, Wisconsin. On September 3, 1995, an unknown assailant broke into their home and attacked Evans, tied him up. Evans freed himself and got away, but Janice was killed and the house burned down.” Spengler began to read faster, her voice rising with excitement. “An arrest was made, but it seems there were doubts about the suspect.”