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.