by JoAnn Chaney
“You’re sure it’s our Matt Evans?”
“There’s a photo. It’s definitely him.”
“So did Evans kill his first wife?”
“It looks like he was never officially charged, but the good people of Madison felt differently than the investigators. Seems people made him pretty uncomfortable, and he ended up leaving town after a while and moving to Denver.”
Loren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and nodded.
“We’ll have to put in a call to the Madison PD and see if they’ll send over the file,” Spengler said. “Maybe it was a coincidence. Bad luck. Still not enough to arrest him.”
“Two dead wives?” Loren said. For some reason he sounded happy, but when Spengler glanced at him sharply he was looking away, over his shoulder as he changed lanes. “Women have a funny way of dying around this guy. That’s not bad luck. That’s murder.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
September 2, 2018
At fifteen, Spengler was walking dynamite, big in all the places men like best—breasts, ass, lips. Not that she was beautiful, just built like a woman, and there were times she’d walk down the street and cars would slow and voices would float out the open windows, men’s voices speaking with the steady tones of chanting monks, floating up to the clouds like prayers. Hey baby baby I got what you want exactly what you need you’d like everything I have to give you. And there were other times, like when the kids found out she was only half white and that her mother was Korean, and they asked her if she always took off her shoes at home or if she only had sushi and rice at dinner, and once, a boy told her that Asian chicks had pussies that turned sideways instead of up and down, but since she was only half was hers set at an angle? He offered to check for her, leering, and his friends had been laughing and elbowing each other. She was cornered in a hallway at the high school by a half-dozen teenage boys, pressed up against a row of lockers during the seven-minute passing period, and the teachers that walked by acted like they didn’t see anything at all. Safer that way, maybe. Because groups of men were like rabid dogs in heat, she’d learned it at a young age, and nothing had ever made her change her mind about that.
That boy, he’d been waiting for an answer, so she’d smiled and stepped close, reached between his legs, and he’d thought he was ready to get lucky, he’d grinned when he felt her hand slip down the front of his pants and her fingers tickle the underside of his balls, that stupid grin hadn’t left his face until he felt her grip close down on him, pinching and painful, tight enough that he’d screamed like a pig. She hadn’t let go, even when the boy started hitting her over the head and trying to get away and the rest of the boys were shouting and calling her names, and later there would be bruises on her back, scratches on her face, but none of that mattered, except for the soreness in her forearm from keeping her fist closed so tightly for so long.
“He won’t talk to a girl like that again,” her mother had said that night, while she was dabbing at her cuts with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol. Spengler had been suspended for what she’d done, a week at home for punishment, but the group of boys had gotten away with nothing more than a lecture. If something like that happened these days it would be all over the news and all the families would’ve ended up in court, but that had gone down twenty years before. It might as well have been the Stone Age. Boys will be boys, the principal had said, and the case was closed. That was Spengler’s first real lesson in unfairness, but not her last. If you were a man you could do anything. If you had a dick and balls dangling between your legs, that gave you a free pass to do whatever you wanted, and people would shrug and look the other way. Make excuses. Boys will be boys.
The only other time her mother had ever mentioned that time was after Spengler had graduated from the police academy, when they were standing together for a picture, and her mother had wrapped an arm around her shoulders and whispered into her ear before turning and smiling for the camera.
“You squeeze all their balls now,” she’d said.
Less than a year later her mother was dead from breast cancer. She had kept the lumps and the pain to herself. Spengler was never sure if that closemouthed tendency was a Korean thing, or if it was particular to her mother, because she’d never known any other Koreans. I’m too busy for friends, her mother had always said, and that was probably true, between all the double shifts she’d worked housekeeping at the Ramada Inn to support them and the ESL classes she occasionally took at night. Constantly busy, and the only time Spengler usually saw her mother was when she’d fallen asleep on the sofa after a long shift, when she’d gently ease her mother’s tattered white sneakers off her feet and toss a blanket over her. That’s most of what she remembered about her mother now—the soft sound of her exhausted snores from the couch, and what she’d said to her at graduation.
You squeeze all their balls now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Detective Spengler?”
She turned, the heel of her shoe slipping clumsily on the wet sidewalk. It’d rained steadily in the night and through the morning, and the sky was steel gray. Coffee weather. They’d spent most of the morning on the phone with the Madison PD, who’d immediately emailed them the case file on Janice Evans. It looked fairly straightforward. Janice’s boss had been obsessed with her and had broken into their home one night, then murdered her before turning the gun on himself, although he’d lived. It looked like nothing more than bad luck, for Evans to have had his first wife murdered and his second fall off a cliff.
When Loren asked to speak with the detective who’d run the investigation, there was a snag. Detective Abe Reid had retired five years before and was spending his remaining years in the dry heat of the Arizona desert. No one had heard from him in a while, but they’d try to track him down, have him give them a call. Spengler had managed to pin down Evans’s daughters and would be speaking to them that afternoon, but first was the polygraph test. Evans had shown up about fifteen minutes before and was in the process of being hooked up to the machine and prepped, and she had just enough time to duck out and grab a latte. Loren had turned down her offer to pick him up one, saying he only drank coffee if he was backed up and needed to take a dump. Crude, but she’d heard much worse come out of Loren’s mouth, even in the last twenty-four hours.
“Yes?” she responded. “Can I help you?”
This man, whoever he was, had been waiting for her on the front steps of the police station, and for a while, by the looks of it. His hands were jammed deep in his pockets and the rain had beaded up on the fabric of his coat, and his lips had gone purplish-blue from the cold. He wasn’t from around Denver, she could tell by how violently he was shivering. It wasn’t that it was exactly cold outside—she was only in a thin sweater and there were plenty of pedestrians walking by in less—but he was still stomping his feet and rubbing his hands together like he was standing in a blizzard. It was the altitude and the thin air in Colorado that caught people by surprise, gave the chill in the air a sharp edge, made the cold seem worse. If you lived here you adjusted, but it took time.
“Detective Peter Ortiz,” he said. He gave her his badge. There were two trees printed on the leather case, their branches entwined while a sun hovered in the sky behind. He wasn’t smiling in his ID photo. “I’m visiting from Springfield, Ohio.”
She handed him his badge. One quick movement and it disappeared into the folds of his coat.
Of course he’d be a cop. It was the way he dressed—nice wool peacoat, because a coat was what most people noticed first, and hopefully all they’d notice, and cheap leather shoes from a discount department store, the kind that pinched around the toes and had crappy arch support but were easy to replace. And it was the way his eyes moved back and forth over the people walking by on the sidewalk. It was his smile, too. Someone once told her you can tell a cop by their smile. This was before she went on her stint undercover. A cop’s smile has a hard edge, like a rusted razor blade. A jaded smile, maybe t
hat was the right word for it. Or bitter. Either way, a cop had to learn to hide that smile or it would give them away in a heartbeat. But this man hadn’t yet learned that lesson, or he just didn’t care. He was giving off his copness like a radio signal, the justice wafting off him in cartoon stink lines.
“Enjoy your vacation,” she said, and turned to walk away, but he scooted around fast so he was again blocking her path.
“I’m actually here on business,” Ortiz said. “I’m investigating an open homicide case, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I don’t know anyone in Ohio.”
“It’s where your partner is from, actually.”
She frowned.
“Ralph Loren?” Ortiz volunteered.
“We’re not partners.”
“But you’re working together?”
“Yes. What exactly is this about?”
Ortiz opened up one side of his coat and for a moment Spengler had the idea he might be naked beneath, this was a joke, and he’d flash her and run and she’d be able to get coffee. But instead he groped around in his coat’s inner pocket and brought out two things. The first was a manila folder that’d been creased in half vertically and the other was a tin box with a hinged lid. He handed her the file, and then flipped open the tin, fished out a hand-rolled cigarette, and jammed it into the corner of his mouth.
“That’s your copy,” he said, reaching back into his pocket and pulling out a lighter. He cupped his free hand around the tip of the cigarette to protect it from the wind and rain, and his face was lit up briefly as it caught. He never looked away from her as he did this. His eyes were dark, nearly black, and the pores on his nose and cheeks were like the craters on the moon—deep and perfectly rounded, as if someone had scooped the skin off his face with a tiny melon baller. “I don’t need it back.”
“What is it?”
“I think you’ll find it to be an interesting read. Thirty years ago, Ralph Loren murdered a family of three and buried them in shallow graves,” Ortiz said. He took a long inhale and then blew out the dense smoke, and for a moment it hid his entire face except for the cigarette’s glowing tip, like a beacon of light in the center of a thick cloud of fog.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It made suspects nervous to have cops in the room with them while taking a polygraph, so they watched the test from another room down the hall, on a TV that’d been hooked up with a video feed. The technician, an unassuming older woman, had taken her time clipping the nodules to Evans’s fingers and chest and temples, where they’d best measure his body’s reactions to the questions asked. Evans was polite and pleasant.
“Mr. Evans, have you ever taken a polygraph test before?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall when?”
“About twenty years ago.”
“Do you recall the circumstances surrounding that polygraph?”
“Yes.” That was all. Evans wasn’t the type to volunteer anything. The tech made a small noise through her nose, or maybe it was only an exhalation and not meant as a judgment.
“Just to review, I’ll first be asking you yes or no questions, and I’ll then have you give me the details of the night your wife died. You are aware this session is being video-recorded?”
Evans’s eyes flickered up to the camera above his head.
“Yes.”
“Do you have any questions before we begin?”
“No.”
“I’ve never seen someone look so damn comfortable,” Spengler said.
On the TV, the female technician nodded.
“Great. Let’s begin, then.”
Loren grunted and kept watching the screen. Spengler had the file Ortiz had given her rolled up and tucked under her arm.
“Why are you giving this to me?” she’d asked Ortiz out on the street when he’d first shoved it in her hand. “What do you want from me?”
“I need your help. Men open up to their partners and share things.”
“I told you before, I’m not his partner.”
“Close enough. Look, I don’t want much. Just read the file, maybe ask Loren a few questions. See if you can find out anything that might help my case.”
“Have you spoken to Loren yet?”
Ortiz had a grin like a shark.
“Oh, that’s coming. I’m trying to build my case first.”
“Have you ever met Loren? He’s not exactly an open book.”
Ortiz had smiled in a way she didn’t much like.
“But surely a pretty young woman like yourself could get him to open up.”
And then she understood. She’d heard plenty of this sort of bullshit before. Use your feminine wiles, Spengler. Charm a confession out of him. Flutter those eyelashes, reach out and touch his hand. Bend over more often than you need to. As if she was nothing more than tits and ass with a badge. A pretty young woman like you. How many times had she heard some variation of that over the years? Too many to count. Every time it happened she’d tried to tell Tony about it, turn it into a joke, but it always upset him. Not that trying to make it funny did much for her, either. Whoever said laughter was the best medicine had obviously never been told to tighten their bra straps and thrust out their chest while interviewing suspects.
Ortiz had found out who she was but hadn’t dared to come into the station to talk to her—Loren would’ve seen him and known what was up. So he’d waited for her outside, watching for her so he could spring his trap. Like one of those spiders that hides under a rock until the unsuspecting prey wanders by to be snatched up.
She wasn’t going to be snatched up by anyone.
“Mr. Evans, were you born in 1971?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have two daughters?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a particular reason you never told the detectives you’d been married before?”
Evans blinked rapidly. He might’ve been surprised, or maybe he had something caught in his eye.
“I didn’t think it was pertinent,” he said slowly.
“Did you murder your wife?”
Evans turned to look at the tech.
“Pardon?” he asked politely. “Marie wasn’t murdered.”
The tech glanced down at her notes.
“Not Marie, Mr. Evans. Your first wife. Janice Roscoe Evans. Do you have any idea who was behind her murder?”
“What does this have to do with Janice?”
“If you could just answer the question, Mr. Evans.”
“I added a few questions to the list,” Loren said. He was excited. There was nothing that’d perk Ralph Loren up faster than throwing a shock into someone. “Just to shake things up a bit.”
“Janice’s boss was arrested for her murder,” Evans said. “Jesse O’Neil.”
“And you do believe Jesse O’Neil was responsible for the death of your first wife?”
Evans stared straight ahead again. He didn’t move, but there was something about his posture that said he was thinking, hard. The wheels were turning so fast there was smoke coming off them. He looked like a stray Spengler had once watched get chased down by the dogcatcher, his eyes bright and shining with fear and intelligence. He was cornered, that was what the look on his face said, and he was desperately trying to think of a way out but was coming up empty.
The polygraph machine would capture all the info about his pulse and heart rate and even how much he was sweating, but Spengler wished she was in there, too. When a person spins a lie there’s a change in the air a machine can’t measure. It made her think of the old console TVs. When she was a kid she could tell when someone turned one on in her apartment building—not because of anything she heard, but because of the low buzz in the back of her head, like a whine that came to her brain instead of her ears. She wondered if she’d hear that buzz coming off Evans if she was in there now.
“Mr. Evans?”
There’s an old saying: life turns on a dime. It can go one way or the other, or
lose its balance and topple over completely, and Spengler had interviewed suspects before and seen that moment of decision, when things could go one way or the other. This way or that. It’s those moments that lead to confessions—or not. The truth or a lie. You’d never be able to guess which way the dime would spin, gleaming dizzily as the light bounced off the silver face.
This time, the dime spun away from them, out of reach.
“I don’t know,” Evans said. “I don’t know anything about Janice’s murder. The police handled all of that.”
“Did you murder your first wife?”
“No.”
“On Tuesday, August twenty-eighth, did your second wife, Marie Evans, fall off a cliff in Rocky Mountain National Forest?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see her fall?”
“No.”
“Did you push her off that cliff?”
“No.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
There was a long pause. Through the TV’s speakers, Spengler thought she could hear the wet, smacking sound of Evans’s lips separating as he finally spoke.
“Didn’t you just ask me that same question?” he asked.
The tech shrugged, noncommittal.
Evans’s eyes flicked up to the camera, and Spengler didn’t have to be in the room with him to feel the old buzz in her head.
“No,” he said. He dropped his eyes again. “I’ve never killed anyone.”
He was lying.
And the questions went on.
* * *
“You know these questions you gave me are highly unorthodox and will never hold up in a court of law,” Judy, the tech who’d run the polygraph, said. Evans had already left.
“I don’t need any of it to stand up in a court, you sweet thang,” Loren said. Judy, who had to be at least seventy years old, glared at him. “What’d the test tell you?”