As Long as We Both Shall Live

by JoAnn Chaney

  There’ll always be people who can sniff out the bad shit you’ve done. Be careful of them.

  Ortiz was one of those people, Loren thought. Always had been. Loren remembered his old man’s words and still hadn’t been careful enough, and now it might be ready to bite him in the ass.

  “The lo mein here is pretty good,” Loren said. “Thick noodles, nice and greasy.”

  Ortiz pushed aside the menu without giving it a single glance.

  “I don’t get it, but maybe you can help me understand. No one likes you, Loren. No one has ever liked you. In fact, people seem to actively hate your ugly face. But they still won’t tell me anything. It’s like they feel some kind of loyalty to you.”

  Loren laughed. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass wall behind the bar, moving behind the long row of white plastic cats with one paw up in the air, waving back and forth in unison.

  “You’re still the same hateful, petty prick you were thirty years ago, aren’t you?” Loren said. The waitress came by and slid a bowl of egg drop soup in front of him and walked away. Ortiz had refused to order anything, but Loren wouldn’t let that affect his appetite. “I bet the only time anyone is nice to you is when you’re in the backseat of your car with a hooker, isn’t it? And then they’re done with your sorry ass once you open your wallet and pay.”

  “I keep asking questions about you and what happened to Gallo, and no one will give an inch,” Ortiz said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. “I can’t figure it out. Why would anyone care about protecting your ass?”

  “What if they’re not protecting me?” Loren asked. He slurped loudly at the soup, making Ortiz turn away in disgust. “Have you ever considered the fact that I’m innocent?”

  Ortiz flicked the lighter a few times before a flame appeared. It was a cheap plastic one a person could buy at any gas station. It reminded Loren of his father, who’d smoked like a chimney for as far back as he could remember. Even in Marv’s last few years alive, when he was toting around a can of oxygen, he’d still smoke, left lit butts all over the house, balanced on the edges of ashtrays and propped up on saucers, forgotten, and the old man had constantly been misplacing his lighter. He kept a drawer of those cheap ones in the kitchen so he’d never be without, right alongside the silverware.

  “You still smoke?” Loren asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Cigarettes are for assholes,” Loren said. Loren had smoked a few times before, but he didn’t like it much and the habit never stuck. Most men looked like complete idiots when they smoked anyway, pinching the filter between their fingers and then sucking so hard their cheeks looked hollow and pinched, like they were sucking down a big ol’ cock. Effeminate, that was the word for a man smoking. Cigarettes would kill you, they’d turn your lungs black and your teeth yellow, but they’d also make you look like a jackass while they did their work.

  “Putting a bullet in your partner’s skull is for assholes, too.”

  “I didn’t put a bullet in anyone’s head, jackass. Blast the wax outta your ears and listen for a change. You might surprise yourself.”

  “You’re still going to keep up this charade?” Ortiz asked. He said charade all fancy, pronounced in a way that made Loren want to hit him, and Ortiz already had a punchable face. Sha-rod. “We both know it’s only a matter of time before this whole house of cards comes tumbling down around your head.”

  “Did you love sucking Gallo’s dick this much? Enough to follow me across the country after thirty years? Get over it.”

  “I’m not doing this for Gallo. I’m doing this because you’re a killer and I’m the police. It’s my job to arrest the bad guys.”

  “That’s why you’re here now?” Loren snorted. “Because you think I’m a bad guy?”

  “You’ve spent your entire career chasing down criminals,” Ortiz said. “Killers. The worst people out there. The irony doesn’t get to you? The guilt?”

  “Guilt?”

  “Yeah. The guilt of knowing that it’s your job to protect people from the scum of the earth, and you’re just another one of them. You’re a killer, Loren—you know it. And I do, too. And once I prove it, none of the guys back in Springfield will be able to protect your ass anymore. They all keep saying how nice you are, what a great cop you were. But Gallo told me all about you. How you were porking Connie, trying to take over his family. Ready-made wife and kid, all you would’ve had to do is step in.”

  “None of that’s true.”

  “That’s not what Gallo told me. You were his favorite topic.”

  “Gallo was off his fucking rocker,” Loren said. The waitress had come by again with his plate of Kung Pao chicken, and he saw her raise her eyebrows at his language. He winked at her and she smiled. All the staff here knew Loren, they had gotten used to him. Plus, he was a good tipper. “He was always making up stories.”

  “It’s funny you say that, because I’ve heard the same thing about you,” Ortiz said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Loren asked. He turned the full brilliance of his grin on Ortiz. Loren wasn’t a smiler, never had been—a look of joy on his face had a predatory quality about it, something hard and glittering and dangerous. It was the smile of a shark, of a skull bleached white by the sun. In primary school Sister Mary Agnes had prayed over that grin, and his mother had wept over it. Later, the men Loren arrested felt their balls tighten up at the sight of it. There were only two people who’d never shuddered at his smile—his father was one. Connie Gallo was the other. “What kind of things have you heard?”

  “I’ve heard about the crazy shit you do,” Ortiz said. “The way you act and talk to people. The way you make up bullshit and remember things all wrong. Twist it all up in your head. I heard you go hunting your suspects, start acting like them. Doesn’t that remind you of someone else?”

  “I don’t have a clue, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “Gallo used to do that same shit,” Ortiz said. “You learned from the best, didn’t you? Then you killed him, and did you start turning into Gallo? I’ve heard of that happening. The murderer takes on his victim’s quirks.”

  Loren’s fork paused halfway up to his mouth, the tines loaded up with chicken. The corners of Ortiz’s mouth were twitching with amusement.

  “I bet people out here either think you’re a genius or some sort of freak for acting like that, but I’d also bet you never tell anyone you learned how to troll victims from the man you killed in cold blood,” Ortiz said. He leaned over, so the edge of the table cut into his chest. “Does anyone else know, Loren? Do any of them know you’re a killer? Has it been hard living with that secret for so long?”

  Loren put the fork down slowly. He tried to keep his hand from shaking, but Ortiz saw, and it made him smile.

  “I remember you swaggering around back in Springfield, all puffed up, a real Billy Badass. Just the same way Gallo always did. Did you think acting like that would help you win Connie over—and then she still didn’t want you?” Ortiz said.

  “You don’t know shit,” Loren said roughly. “Do you know why cops like you get stuck working cases thirty years cold? Because you don’t have any imagination.”

  Ortiz laughed.

  “Imagination? That’s what you think I need?”

  “Yeah. You know how much creative juice I think you got? None. Zero. Zilch. And without that you can’t even begin to understand what happened thirty years ago. You’re never going to find anything to pin Gallo’s death on me. You might as well be trying to catch a whiff of a fart that left my ass six months ago.”

  Ortiz’s smile actually widened.

  “Oh, we’ll find something,” he said. “It’ll take some time, but my team back home is thorough, and testing is much different than it was back when we were young pups. If you left one hair on Gallo’s body, one fucking hair, your ass is grass. So it looks like you’re wrong. I don’t need imagination, all I need is a little patience.”

  He doesn’t have anything,
Ralphie, his old man whispered. He came out here to poke at you.

  “It sounds to me like you got a whole lotta nothing, Ortiz,” Loren said, as confident and mocking as he ever was, but the Kung Pao had turned to tasteless ash in his mouth. “Did you come all the way out to Colorado just to talk shit? That’s what it seems like. You should’ve saved those airline miles for a trip to Hawaii. What a waste.”

  “I do have one more question, Loren,” he said. “Were you in love with Constance Gallo? Did you love her, and killed her because you couldn’t have her for yourself?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  September 4, 2018

  She was standing on the edge of a cliff, the rock rough on the bottoms of her bare feet as she stared at the rushing waters below, mesmerized by the shining peaks and ripples, until she heard a twig snap behind her. She turned, slowly, but before she could see what was coming she was flying through the open air, weightless, her arms pinwheeling uselessly—

  And then she was awake.

  One thirteen in the morning, according to her cell phone. Elliott was crying in his room. By the sounds of it he’d just started and was gearing up to start screaming if one of them didn’t go in. Tony jerked up and started to swing his legs out of the bed, but she shushed him, gently pushed him back down. He never woke up and wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

  She shrugged into a robe and hurried across the hall, scooped Elliott out of his bed, and held him cradled against her chest. He woke up often during the night, wanting to be soothed. Tony’s mother always said they should let the boy cry it out, they were raising a needy wimp by responding to his every need, but Spengler found that she couldn’t do it. She’d been woken up by enough nightmares herself over the years, her heart pounding and her throat squeezed down to nothing, and she wasn’t going to let her son wake that way with no one to comfort him.

  She paced the room, patting his back and murmuring the nonsense all mothers do, and in less than five minutes he was asleep again. She put him back in bed and went downstairs. She wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, not for a while, if at all. She padded into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water from the sink and reached into her soft leather briefcase, pulled out the file Ortiz had given her. She still hadn’t looked at it, but the thought of it had burned in the back of her brain all night. Like an itch she couldn’t quite reach. She’d have to read it sometime, so why not now?

  She let herself out on the balcony and sat in one of the patio chairs. The back of the house faced west toward the mountains, that was part of the reason they’d bought this place to begin with, but there was nothing to see now, not at this time of night. Just a few dark shadows against the sky that you could only see from the corner of your eye, which disappeared when you tried to look straight at them.

  It was chilly and damp outside. The sun had finally broken through that afternoon and warmed things up, but the temperature in Denver had a way of dropping like a rock when the sun went down. The bare skin of her arms prickled and tightened with goose bumps, her nipples twisted and hardened. She cupped her hands over her breasts and hunched over, like she was curling in on herself. She’d seen plenty of people sitting that way before, she realized, but not necessarily because of the cold. It was a natural reaction to try to protect yourself, to bend over and cover your most sensitive parts. During her years working sex trafficking cases she’d seen lots of women sitting like that, even when there was no one else around, because it became a habit to be wary of getting a punch in the stomach, of having a hand creep around your breast and pinch down. It was the worst thing in the world when violence became typical, when a person flinched away if you put your hand up because they were used to being smacked around. A person got used to expecting things, to being on constant watch for pain, and she wondered if Matt Evans was the type of guy who inspired that sort of reaction from the women around him.

  Women have a funny way of ending up dead around that guy, Loren had said.

  She took a sip of water. The inside of the glass had a flat, fishy smell that reminded her of the Three Forks River. The team was still searching for Marie Evans; they’d be back at it again once the sun came up. Two or three more days of searching and they’d call it quits. They had a budget to consider, and other cases the men should be working, and it might be that they’d never find Marie at all. Rivers all over the state were swollen enough that several people had drowned and their bodies remained unrecovered, and this might be another one of those cases. But even if they found her body, it might not give them any more information than what they already had.

  Do you think Dad killed her? Hannah had asked.

  “Yeah, I think he probably did,” Spengler muttered. A cricket chirped nearby, as if in response. She’d spent the night before putting out all sorts of feelers—requesting records from Evans’s banks and credit cards, his insurance companies. Money was one of the big reasons people killed, and Matt Evans had a lot of it, a lot of access to it. And it had always seemed to Spengler that the more money a person had, the more debt they had, and the more desperate things got when it all went south. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, Loren had said when they’d first pulled up in front of the Evanses’ home for the first time. If Evans was in some sort of money trouble, that might be his motive. Kill his wife, collect the life insurance, move on.

  But it might not be about money, so they’d do their due diligence. On paper, Evans didn’t raise any red flags. Good job in sales, nice house. A seemingly stable marriage, two daughters in college. A handsome man. The kind of guy who took care of himself, who worked out and used sunscreen and knew that a person’s appearance was important. He was college educated, paid his bills on time, hadn’t gotten so much as a traffic ticket since 1998, when he’d been pulled over for going ten over the speed limit.

  Oh, from all outside appearances, Matt Evans was a normal guy.

  But Ted Bundy had seemed normal, too, even nice, and he’d killed more women than anyone had ever thought possible.

  But it was almost always the person you least suspected who was the most horrible—Spengler had learned that from her time in sex trafficking. It was the men who looked the most pulled together who liked the worst things, the guys who wore good suits and carried Italian leather briefcases and used proper grammar who requested the youngest girls and boys for their vile needs. These were the guys who kept the most disgusting things on their computer history, who liked to use people as their own personal slaves, who did things to other human beings that Spengler would never say out loud.

  And then there was Ralph Loren. The minute Loren opened his big mouth you knew he was a man capable of anything, but it didn’t mean he’d done anything. Sure, he’d done things—Loren liked to mouth off and fight and enjoyed nothing more than to light a keg of gunpowder under your ass and sit back to watch the sparks fly—but part of that might be his own insecurities, or his strange sense of humor. Guys who blew the most smoke were almost always full of hot air, and that might be the case with Loren. Or not. She didn’t know. That was the awful thing. Even if you knew a person well, even if you considered their life to be an open book and you knew their family and their middle name and how they liked to take their coffee, it didn’t matter. You still couldn’t know what was inside them, in the deepest hidey-holes of their heart.

  Maybe Loren was a killer. Maybe Evans was a killer. Maybe Marie hadn’t even known that her husband had been married before. It was a possibility. His own daughters hadn’t known, either. And maybe Marie hadn’t known that her husband’s first wife had died gruesomely, so she’d been unprepared when she felt his hands against her back, shoving her over the edge of the cliff and into open air, hurtling her to her death below. But even if Marie had known, would it have mattered? Maybe not, because you never knew until you really knew, and by the time that happened someone was almost always hurt.

  Or dead.

  Spengler opened up the case file Ortiz had given her and started reading.
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br />   CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Matt Evans’s office didn’t look toward the mountains. Loren was surprised by that, because that seemed like the only thing people in this neck of the woods wanted: open concept homes, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, and a view of the Rockies. Instead, Evans’s office looked toward downtown—he could see the ugly white façade of Republic Plaza from the windows, and the odd curving outline of the Wells Fargo Center. Not a great view, but interesting enough.

  “That’s Writer Square,” Jill said. This woman worked as Evans’s assistant, and had been more than happy to show Loren around since Evans was still out of the office. She’d let Loren into the office but wouldn’t leave him alone, and now came up to the big window and gestured at the plaza seven stories below them. There was a lot of action going on down there—little boutiques with racks of clothes pushed into the sunshine to lure in customers, and a coffee shop with bistro tables set up on the cobblestones outside, shaded with big striped umbrellas. “It’s pretty this time of year with all the flowers blooming.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Loren said, turning away from the view and looking over Evans’s desk. It was the biggest one he’d ever seen—it had cost over thirty thousand dollars, Jill had told him in an awed half whisper. Handcrafted by an artisan in Santa Fe. Please don’t touch it. “This thing is big enough, you could have an orgy on top and still have room for chips and dip. Not exactly the most sanitary setup, but useful.”

  “Pardon?” Jill said, frowning. He knew she’d heard him right but was just too polite to let on otherwise.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Could I ask you a few questions about your boss?”

  “Sure,” Jill said, smiling brightly. “Anything I can do to help. I know this is a tough time for him.”