“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 that 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.