If you try to fake your own death without a plan, you will fail. And even if you have a plan, even if you think you have every possible problem and outcome accounted for, even if you write a plan that reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure book and seems waterproof, soundproof, bulletproof, you’ll probably fail anyway. Because even if everything goes perfectly, even if it all lines up like the contrived plot coincidences in an old Gothic romance novel, you still have to account for human nature. And if there’s one thing for sure about people, it’s that you can never be sure about people. Most humans are as unpredictable as a stick of old, sweating dynamite—you just never know when they might blow your ass to the moon.
Take Corey Wendt, for example. Back in 2005, Wendt decided he wanted out of the United States Army, after enlisting only a year before. Some of it was because the military is tough, and Wendt had always been something of a wimp. A poontang in the balls department, Loren might’ve said. Wendt had always been lazy, early mornings and hard work had never agreed with him, and besides, he’d only enlisted because his parents were pressuring him to do something with his life. So he’d joined up, then immediately regretted it, and he’d spent that first year trying to come up with ways to get free. He didn’t want to eat meals at the dining hall with all the other grunts anymore, he didn’t want to be deployed out to the Middle East like his commanding officer kept threatening, and he didn’t want to have to live in those shitty barracks down at Fort Carson. Wendt didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he was pretty sure what he didn’t want—to be a soldier.
He could’ve made them believe he was crazy—that wouldn’t have been too hard, his aunt was a certifiable loony-tune, thought she was married to Jesus, the actual Jesus Christ—or he could’ve pretended to be injured, but both those would’ve taken work, he’d really have to be dedicated, make himself seem nuts or hurt every hour of every day for as long as it took. A long time, probably, because once Uncle Sam got his hooks in a man it was nearly impossible to get free.
So Wendt decided, after not all that much thought, to fake his own death. He and a friend drove a few hours north of Colorado Springs one August morning, telling everyone they were going for a hike on Longs Peak, but Wendt never came back. His friend did, though, and made a frantic call to the police department once he could get cell phone service and said Wendt had slipped when they were scrambling over a particularly narrow pass and had fallen, his arms pinwheeling in the open air, seeming to be moving in slow motion.
How far did he fall? Maybe twenty-five, thirty feet, the friend said. Straight down, onto a bed of rock, and he’d screamed and cried, his leg bent at a strange angle, and there was so much blood. So the friend had gone for help, and he’d told the police that he couldn’t remember exactly where Wendt had fallen, that in his panic he’d gotten confused. This friend wasn’t much help at all, in fact, and the rescue teams had been forced to sweep the entire park; over three hundred people were involved in the effort that lasted an entire weekend, not counting the helicopters that flew overhead for hours, kicking up all sorts of dirt and gravel. The searchers did find one interesting thing—a bone that was later identified as a human femur, picked clean by animals, although it was quickly established that the bone belonged to either a child or small woman, not Corey Wendt. It was never discovered who that femur belonged to, and Wendt’s body couldn’t be found, either, and the authorities suspected he was dead. Lots of people die out in the Colorado backcountry, and some of those remains are never found. Animals drag the remains away, or the snow and rain sweep them to other parts, or searchers simply look in the wrong areas.
And everyone assumed that was the end of Wendt, until his friend came down with a debilitating case of guilty conscience and told the police what had actually happened, and less than an hour later officers found Wendt, napping in a queen-size bed in the Lyons Holiday Inn Express, no broken leg, no sign that he’d even been out to Longs Peak at all, and the news coverage of his own disappearance playing on the TV.
Corey Wendt might’ve gotten away with faking his own death, but he hadn’t accounted for one thing—human nature. Wendt’s friend was the unknown factor in the equation, he was X, and that’s the way it almost always plays out. You can never know what a person might do, and if you try to guess, you’ll almost always get it wrong. A person’s actions can’t be choreographed; life isn’t a ballet recital, after all, it’s a rave, and you have to keep your feet moving to the beat, keep your eyes open so you don’t get knocked to the floor.
Loren told Spengler the story of Corey Wendt before they each left to head home for the night. Because if they were going to believe that Marie Evans had faked her own death, he said, they’d have to take human nature into account. One is the safest number for keeping a secret, but it’s also the loneliest. Two’s better, if you find the right person, but how often does that happen? Once in a million years. Just about everyone is the wrong person, but everybody is looking to unload their secret onto someone else. A secret’s not really a secret until you share.
“And once two people are in on a secret, it’s that much more likely to get out,” Loren said. He was looking out his office window to the parking lot below, but didn’t seem to actually see anything. Spengler shuddered away from the look in his eyes. “It’s like that old saying: two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
He still had the file Ortiz had given Spengler in his hands, was smacking the rolled-up length of it against the flat of his palm. He was staring off into the distance and grinning, and Spengler wondered what he was seeing. What memories he was reliving.
“So here’s the question,” Loren said. “If Evans is right and his wife did fake her death, she told someone. It’s just a matter of finding that person.”