“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 scooped 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.