Detective Abraham Reid, now retired, stood up in the interview room to greet them, but it was slow. He rested his weight on his hands, palms flat on papers on the table in front of him, his knuckles red and swollen. Those hands might’ve been quick with a gun at one time, but those days were long past. If he held anything these days, it was a golf club on a course in Phoenix, or a glass of iced tea. And this old man, Spengler thought in wonder, his face deeply lined and what was left of his hair nothing but delicate baby wisps clinging to his spotted scalp, had driven the twelve hours from Arizona alone.
“I’m eighty-nine years old,” he said, recognizing the look on Spengler’s face. “But I’ve still got a few brain cells rattling around in my upstairs. Enough to steer a car, anyway.”
“I hope the drive up wasn’t too bad,” she said, sitting. Loren stayed by the door, his arms folded across his chest.
“Nah. Nothing but interstate, and the Caddy just about drives itself.”
“If it’s okay, I’d like to skip the small talk and get straight to the point,” Spengler said. “I’d like to get back home to my son.”
“Of course,” Reid said. “And I’d like to head back myself. I love Colorado, but I can feel the humidity in the air right now and it’s not agreeing much with my joints.”
He held up a hand to show her. He had a candy pinched between his fingers and he fumbled it, sent it tumbling to the floor. Spengler leaned over and picked it up. It wasn’t a candy at all, she saw, but a cough drop. She handed it back to Reid and he held it in both hands, bent fingers worrying the wrapper until it came loose. The process took long enough that she considered asking if he needed help, but kept her mouth shut in the end. No need to offend the old man.
“I still call my squad out in Madison once in a while to catch up,” Reid said. “About once a week. The newbies like to pick my brain if they have a head-scratcher come through. Old-timer like me has plenty of advice to give, I guess. And when I called yesterday, they mentioned some detectives out in Denver had asked to take a peek at the Janice Evans case.”
“They sent it right over,” Spengler said. “It looked pretty clear-cut.”
“Did they send any photos?”
“No, just copied and pasted the text of it into an email.”
“Of course they did.”
Reid chuckled, which turned into a harsh, grating cough. Alarmed, Spengler stood to get water but Reid waved her down.
“I’m fine,” he gasped. “I’ll be better when I get home.”
“Okay.”
“You’re right,” Reid said once he could speak again. “It does seem pretty clear-cut. Husband and wife get attacked in the middle of the night. Wife is killed, husband escapes. The woman’s boss is arrested for the murder, case closed.” Reid grinned. His teeth were too big and perfect to be real. “Easy to follow, easy to swallow, am I right?”
Loren laughed and came to sit down at the table.
“I like that,” he said.
Reid winked.
“I thought you might. So it was case closed, my boss makes me move on. But there were things that didn’t quite add up. Evans’s story, and the bullet wounds. It was almost perfect, and I wanted to keep going, see what I could come up with, but the chief wanted to move on.”
“I’ve heard that plenty of times before,” Loren said.
“We all have. For the head honchos it’s less about justice and more about controlling costs. So we moved on. Jesse O’Neil couldn’t remember anything of that night on account of the bullet that plowed through his head, and it was easier to put the blame on him. Use him as a scapegoat. But it still bothered me. And then, about six months after Janice’s murder, when the case had been closed and Matt Evans had already moved out to Denver, I saw her.”
“What do you mean, saw her?” Spengler asked.
“I saw Janice Evans, in the flesh,” Reid said. “I’d stopped by the A&P on my way home to pick up a quart of ice cream for dessert—my wife had a weakness for mint chocolate chip, god bless her—and I saw Janice there. Standing in the frozen foods, right in front of me. I’d spent the last half year staring at her photo and there she was, ten feet in front of me, belly all full of baby. It took me about ten seconds to get over my shock and then I marched right up to her, called her Janice.”
“And what did she say?”
“Oh, she just looked at me real innocent and said she didn’t know anyone named Janice. Her name was Marie, she said, and she had to get home because her ankles were so swollen.”
“Marie? Is that what you said?”
“That’s right,” Reid said. “She said it like it was the honest-to-god truth, but I got a good look in her eyes when I called her Janice. Fear is the most honest emotion there is, nothing else sticks to it, and that’s what I saw. That woman, that was Janice Evans. But if Janice was alive, whose bones had been pulled out of that house? We’d assumed it was Janice, because who else would it be? We had no reason not to think it was her.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” Reid said. “We might not ever know. No local girls were reported missing, but that doesn’t mean much. Girls disappear, and half the time no one gives a damn. And as soon as the remains were released they were cremated. So I went to see Janice’s mother. She was living west of Madison, out alone in the middle of nowhere, and I asked what’d really happened. If her daughter had actually been killed. And I asked why there was a cute little red sport coupe in the driveway parked next to her truck. Why, I asked, does a woman who lives alone need two cars? She asked me to leave, but I saw the fear in her eyes, too. She was nervous. Already had a cocktail in her hand even though it wasn’t even the lunch hour. And I heard someone moving around upstairs. A person trying to be quiet, but back then these satellites picked up everything. When I asked who was up there, her mother looked over my shoulder, wouldn’t even meet my eyes, and said it was my imagination. You must be hearing things. But these ears had never steered me wrong before.” Reid yanked on one of his lobes. “Janice was up there hiding out, waiting for me to leave. And you know what I think? As soon as I did leave, I think she got in that car and disappeared. Out to Denver, I presume.”
“Matt Evans told us today that his wife faked her death and is trying to set him up for murder,” Spengler said.
“And I believe it,” Reid said. “But I’d guess it’s not just her—it’s both of them in on it. They’ve been careful enough for the last twenty years, but I’ve found that if a person gets away with something once, they’ll most likely try it again.”
Reid flipped over the paper in front of him and slid it across the table. It was a photograph, blown up to eight-by-ten, a nice glossy of a woman standing in front of a tree, her hair blowing lightly in the wind. A posed photo taken by a professional.
Spengler took her phone out and pulled up one of the pictures of Marie Evans she had saved and looked back and forth between the two. Marie’s hair was darker than the other woman’s, and she was much thinner and had more lines in her face, but both of them were smiling, both had their heads tilted a little to the right as they gazed into the camera. And both women had a small scar on their chins, almost perfectly in the center. Small things, but that’s life. That’s police work.
“The devil’s in the details,” Loren said. He sounded like he was going to be sick.
“That’s right,” Reid said. “This picture was taken a little over twenty years ago.” He tapped a bent pointer finger against the photo he’d laid on the table. “That’s a young Janice Roscoe, about a year before she married Matt Evans, and about a year before she faked her own death and started going by another name. And it seems to me that she’s back to her old shenanigans.”