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.”
Loren 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.”
“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.”