As Long as We Both Shall Live

by JoAnn Chaney

  “So your wife watches crime TV and reads some books, and that’s how we know she’s faking her death?” Loren looked incredulous. “Dude, I’ve been around the block more than a few times, and I’ve never heard anything quite as stupid as this.”

  “Don’t you think I know how it sounds?” Matt said. “That’s why I didn’t say anything from the beginning. It’s all so unbelievable, I can’t expect you to buy it. But it’s all the little things. The jokes she’d make about disappearing, the things she’d say.”

  “So let’s say Marie did fake her fall off that cliff,” Spengler said, leaning forward and cupping her chin in her palm. “How would she have done it? I’ve been up there. There’re only two ways to get down—either back down the trail or straight off the side and into the river. If she didn’t pass by you on the trail, she would’ve had to go over the side. How could she have survived it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not good enough, Mr. Evans,” Spengler said. “If you’re expecting us to believe that your wife is alive out there, you’ve got to try a little harder than that. I’m going to ask again. How would Marie have gotten down off that cliff without you knowing?”

  Evans hesitated. The briefest of pauses, nothing more. But Spengler caught it, and so did Loren.

  “I don’t know. But I didn’t kill my wife.”

  “Your wives, you mean?” Loren asked. He was smiling again. “You’ve had two of them, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Evans said. “That’s exactly what I meant. You can’t kill Marie. She’s like a goddamn cockroach.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Evans’s mouth opened, then closed again.

  “Have you seen Marie?” Spengler asked slowly. “Talked to her? How are we supposed to verify any of this?”

  Evans thought. Then he closed his eyes and sighed.

  “There’s something you should know about my first wife,” he said. “She—”

  The room’s door opened and another officer stepped in, followed by a man in a suit, carrying a nice briefcase. He brought a cloud of heavy cologne in with him.

  “As your legal counsel, I’m going to advise you to stop talking right now,” the man said. Evans fell into silence and the man spread his lips over perfectly capped teeth. “Detectives, I’m sure you don’t mind if I have some time alone with my client.”

  “Fucking shyster lawyer,” Loren spat.

  “Idiot meathead cop,” the man said pleasantly. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, I believe your time with Mr. Evans is up.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “Fuck this guy,” Loren said once they were in the hallway.

  “He’s not telling us everything, that’s for sure,” Spengler said thoughtfully. “But I think we should consider the possibility that part of it might be the truth.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Loren barked laughter. “You actually believe the bullshit coming out of his mouth?”

  “I said some of it might be true,” she said. She started walking, heading back to the bullpen and her desk, and Loren had to hurry to keep up. Pissed him off, his legs moving fast like he’s a toddler trying to keep up with mommy. “Blast the wax out of your ears and pay attention for once in your life, Loren.”

  “No way he’s being honest about any of it,” Loren scoffed. “This guy’s a piece of work. He killed his girlfriend and gave his wife a shove off that cliff. And as soon as he realized that was his girlfriend in the morgue and felt the heat under his ass he came up with this story. Desperate times create desperate men, Spengler. Happens all the time.”

  “But let’s just say maybe Marie Evans is alive,” Spengler said. “Oh, good. The Evans file was put together like I asked.”

  She snagged a folder off her desk and flipped it open, pulled out a photograph of Marie. It was the one Evans had taken on the cliff before she fell, the wind blowing her hair in her face as she laughed. “She was in great shape. Look at her legs. She ran and did yoga, kept herself healthy.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if she was goddamn Spidergirl,” Loren said. “That cliff is a hundred feet high, straight up. No way she climbed down, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “But she did get down somehow,” Spengler mused.

  “Yeah, straight into the water.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “But Evans says she’s alive. He believes he’s telling the truth. I don’t need a polygraph to tell me that. I saw it in his eyes. He says he didn’t see his wife fall off that cliff, he doesn’t know how she got down and won’t tell us why he thinks she’s alive—”

  “So he knows more than he’s letting on.”

  Spengler sighed impatiently.

  “Yes, I already said that, Loren,” she said, flipping through the file again. “He’s not just saying she’s alive because he thinks so. He knows she’s alive somehow.”

  “You think he’s seen her? Talked to her?”

  “I don’t know. But I talked to all of Marie’s friends and her daughters, and there’s something—weird about the whole thing. People were afraid of the things Marie would do. And if she’d found out Evans was cheating and getting ready to leave her for another woman, she might’ve gotten mad enough to plot revenge. Faking her death sounds like it might be right in her wheelhouse. And think how easy it’d be to set him up—she married a guy who’d been suspected of murdering his first wife and was cleared, so he already seems guilty. All she had to do was disappear, and out in the mountains that’d be easy enough. Then she could start over. Their daughters are grown, she doesn’t have a job or any other family, nothing holding her down here. Except her marriage.”

  Loren stared at her, frowning. But Spengler saw something in his eyes, deep down. The beginnings of belief, or maybe it was a memory rising to the surface.

  “This still sounds like ten pounds of bullshit to me,” he said, troubled. “Why go to all the trouble? Just file for divorce and be done with it.”

  “That’s a good question,” Spengler said, still flipping through the case file. “But maybe she wanted it to hurt.”

  Spengler handed him another sheet of paper. It was the coroner’s initial report on the body that’d been pulled from the river. The woman who Evans claimed was Riley Tipton.

  “Cause of death appears to be blunt force trauma to the skull,” Spengler said. “Traces of chrome were found in the head wound, possibly from a golf club. Maybe a baseball bat.”

  Loren looked at her.

  “Evans’s secretary said Marie had stopped by to pick up his clubs. She was getting them engraved.”

  “Okay, so we might have the weapon and we have the motive,” Spengler said. “Where’s the suspect? If she did manage to get down off that cliff, I’d think she’d be long gone by now. Halfway across the country and never looking back. We might never be able to find her.”

  “So let’s pull her cell phone records, take a close look at their bank statements. See what purchases she’s made in the last six months, or if she’s done a lot of cash withdrawals. Not that I think this shit is likely. And we’ll have to go back out to the cliff ourselves and take a closer…”

  Loren trailed off, his eyes jumping back and forth in their sockets. He looked like a man desperately trying to think of a word that was on the tip of his tongue and very quickly slipping out of reach.

  “Loren?”

  “Shut your cakehole for two seconds, Spengler,” he said. “I’m trying—oh, man.”

  He pushed past her, practically running for his office. She was right behind him. Every person in the bullpen turned to watch, but neither of them noticed.

  “Where is it?” Loren said, pushing the papers around on his desk. A stack went flying, scattering in every direction. “I don’t think I took it home—”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Ah, here it is,” Loren said, pulling a small plastic evidence baggie out from under a stack of books. It had about an inch of dirt a
nd gravel along the bottom.

  “What is this?”

  “There was blood under that cliff,” Loren said. “One drop of it under the ledge, away from the river,” Loren said. “I collected it when we were there but forgot to turn it in. But if Marie did fake her death, I have an idea how she might’ve done it.”

  “How?”

  Loren shook his head. His eyes were glittering with excitement. It was the hunt, Spengler thought. It was on.

  “I’m not exactly sure, but I have some ideas. Let’s head out there first thing in the morning. Tonight let’s have all the phone records pulled, all the financials. For both of them. Location pings on their cell phones for the last few weeks and credit card transactions. There’s gonna be something there, I’m sure of it.”

  “What about Evans?”

  Loren waved his hand dismissively.

  “Let that asshole cool his jets in holding. We can keep him here for forty-eight hours, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  AS I WATCHED HIM ON THE STAGE MY HANDS WERE CLENCHED IN FISTS OF RAGE

  If you try to fake your own death without a plan, you will fail. And even if you have a plan, even if you think you have every possible problem and outcome accounted for, even if you write a plan that reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure book and seems waterproof, soundproof, bulletproof, you’ll probably fail anyway. Because even if everything goes perfectly, even if it all lines up like the contrived plot coincidences in an old Gothic romance novel, you still have to account for human nature. And if there’s one thing for sure about people, it’s that you can never be sure about people. Most humans are as unpredictable as a stick of old, sweating dynamite—you just never know when they might blow your ass to the moon.

  Take Corey Wendt, for example. Back in 2005, Wendt decided he wanted out of the United States Army, after enlisting only a year before. Some of it was because the military is tough, and Wendt had always been something of a wimp. A poontang in the balls department, Loren might’ve said. Wendt had always been lazy, early mornings and hard work had never agreed with him, and besides, he’d only enlisted because his parents were pressuring him to do something with his life. So he’d joined up, then immediately regretted it, and he’d spent that first year trying to come up with ways to get free. He didn’t want to eat meals at the dining hall with all the other grunts anymore, he didn’t want to be deployed out to the Middle East like his commanding officer kept threatening, and he didn’t want to have to live in those shitty barracks down at Fort Carson. Wendt didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he was pretty sure what he didn’t want—to be a soldier.

  He could’ve made them believe he was crazy—that wouldn’t have been too hard, his aunt was a certifiable loony-tune, thought she was married to Jesus, the actual Jesus Christ—or he could’ve pretended to be injured, but both those would’ve taken work, he’d really have to be dedicated, make himself seem nuts or hurt every hour of every day for as long as it took. A long time, probably, because once Uncle Sam got his hooks in a man it was nearly impossible to get free.

  So Wendt decided, after not all that much thought, to fake his own death. He and a friend drove a few hours north of Colorado Springs one August morning, telling everyone they were going for a hike on Longs Peak, but Wendt never came back. His friend did, though, and made a frantic call to the police department once he could get cell phone service and said Wendt had slipped when they were scrambling over a particularly narrow pass and had fallen, his arms pinwheeling in the open air, seeming to be moving in slow motion.

  How far did he fall? Maybe twenty-five, thirty feet, the friend said. Straight down, onto a bed of rock, and he’d screamed and cried, his leg bent at a strange angle, and there was so much blood. So the friend had gone for help, and he’d told the police that he couldn’t remember exactly where Wendt had fallen, that in his panic he’d gotten confused. This friend wasn’t much help at all, in fact, and the rescue teams had been forced to sweep the entire park; over three hundred people were involved in the effort that lasted an entire weekend, not counting the helicopters that flew overhead for hours, kicking up all sorts of dirt and gravel. The searchers did find one interesting thing—a bone that was later identified as a human femur, picked clean by animals, although it was quickly established that the bone belonged to either a child or small woman, not Corey Wendt. It was never discovered who that femur belonged to, and Wendt’s body couldn’t be found, either, and the authorities suspected he was dead. Lots of people die out in the Colorado backcountry, and some of those remains are never found. Animals drag the remains away, or the snow and rain sweep them to other parts, or searchers simply look in the wrong areas.

  And everyone assumed that was the end of Wendt, until his friend came down with a debilitating case of guilty conscience and told the police what had actually happened, and less than an hour later officers found Wendt, napping in a queen-size bed in the Lyons Holiday Inn Express, no broken leg, no sign that he’d even been out to Longs Peak at all, and the news coverage of his own disappearance playing on the TV.

  Corey Wendt might’ve gotten away with faking his own death, but he hadn’t accounted for one thing—human nature. Wendt’s friend was the unknown factor in the equation, he was X, and that’s the way it almost always plays out. You can never know what a person might do, and if you try to guess, you’ll almost always get it wrong. A person’s actions can’t be choreographed; life isn’t a ballet recital, after all, it’s a rave, and you have to keep your feet moving to the beat, keep your eyes open so you don’t get knocked to the floor.

  Loren told Spengler the story of Corey Wendt before they each left to head home for the night. Because if they were going to believe that Marie Evans had faked her own death, he said, they’d have to take human nature into account. One is the safest number for keeping a secret, but it’s also the loneliest. Two’s better, if you find the right person, but how often does that happen? Once in a million years. Just about everyone is the wrong person, but everybody is looking to unload their secret onto someone else. A secret’s not really a secret until you share.

  “And once two people are in on a secret, it’s that much more likely to get out,” Loren said. He was looking out his office window to the parking lot below, but didn’t seem to actually see anything. Spengler shuddered away from the look in his eyes. “It’s like that old saying: two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

  He still had the file Ortiz had given Spengler in his hands, was smacking the rolled-up length of it against the flat of his palm. He was staring off into the distance and grinning, and Spengler wondered what he was seeing. What memories he was reliving.

  “So here’s the question,” Loren said. “If Evans is right and his wife did fake her death, she told someone. It’s just a matter of finding that person.”

  THINK ABOUT IT EVERY NIGHT AND DAY

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  September 7, 2018

  “So you’re the new hotshot addition to Homicide everyone’s talking about,” the man sitting behind the desk said. He was leaning back in his chair, his feet kicked up. The tarnished gold plate nailed up on his office door said DETECTIVE PAUL HOSKINS, COLD CASES, but she’d already known who he was when she took the long elevator ride down to the basement. She’d walked out with Loren—get some sleep, he’d said, we have an early morning—but had doubled back and gone downstairs.

  If it takes two to keep a secret, was someone holding one for Loren? And she figured there was only one possibility: Paul Hoskins.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, reaching out her hand to shake. He put down the tennis ball he’d been tossing back and forth and took her hand. His hand was dry and hot, smooth. “Marion Spengler.”

  “Good to meetchya.”

  “I’m glad I caught you before you went home.”

  Hoskins made a noise that might’ve been a laugh.

  “Oh, this is it for me,” he said, throwing out his arms. “Nice and cozy down h
ere, don’t you think? I just need to hang one of those needlepoints above the door. ‘Home sweet home.’”

  She smiled thinly but didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure what to say. This man had spent a long time as Loren’s partner but now worked down in the basement, going over the old cases no one really cared about anymore. Chief Black had been trying to get him back upstairs, but he’d refused every offer. Rumor was that Hoskins preferred the dark. The chill of the cement walls.

  “You and Loren must have the same decorator,” she said, looking around the little office, at all the papers and photos posted on the walls. It was a tiny space, claustrophobic. No windows, no sunlight. Nothing to keep the air moving. If anything it was even worse than Loren’s office: smaller, more cramped. More gory crime scene photos on the walls. It was a room that could drive a person crazy. Or maybe it was the other way around: a crazy person had made the room. “No extra chair I can use while we chat?”

  He started tossing the tennis ball again.

  “You’re here visiting me unannounced,” he said. “If you wanted to sit, you should’ve brought a chair with you.”

  “Sounds like you learned your manners from Loren, too,” she said.

  “That’s what I hear,” he said wryly. “Now, what can I do for you? I have an idea you didn’t come all the way down here this evening for my fine company.”

  “I was approached by a detective from Loren’s hometown—”

  “Ah, Ortiz got to you, too? That guy is a total shithead.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “I imagine it was the same thing he said to you. Gave me a copy of the file, asked if I’d try to get Loren to admit he’d killed his partner. I told him to pound sand or I’d put my foot so far up his ass he’d taste leather.”

  “But what do you think?”