CHAPTER NINETEEN

August 30, 2018

The men stood on either side of the river, gazing into the water. Some of them had long sticks and poked them down into the rocks and sand, prodding at the bottom. They’d tried to use a boat, but the water was running too high and strong to make it worthwhile. There’d been enough rainfall over the state in the last three weeks, there wasn’t a single body of water not over capacity, and the risk of losing a member of the team was too great.

“No one seems in much of a hurry,” Detective Marion Spengler commented. She’d forgotten her sunglasses, and the light glinting off the surface of the water was playing hell on her eyes. “Does everyone usually move this slow?”

Jackson, the man in charge of the search team, looked at her in surprise.

“I didn’t think we had a deadline,” he said. “She’s not gonna get any more dead, you know.”

Spengler sighed. It was true, the dead stay dead, but she still didn’t understand the leisurely way the men moved as they searched for the body of Marie Evans. She had several photos of Marie saved on her phone, mostly scrounged off her online social media accounts. She was a striking woman, but you wouldn’t call her beautiful. Brown hair cut to frame her heart-shaped face, perfect smile. Bright, intelligent eyes. She wouldn’t look so nice once they hooked her out of the river.

The search team was laughing and joking with each other, taking frequent breaks to grab sweating bottles of water from the cooler that’d been dragged down to the shore. The whole thing seemed more like a summer party than a search for a dead woman. If there were a few inner tubes floating in the water and a barbecue grill going, that’s exactly what it’d be. But maybe this was how things always were and she just didn’t know it. She’d worked so long in Sex Crimes that she might’ve become insulated from the process in every other department.

“Can I ask you a question?” Jackson said. He was wearing a fluorescent orange vest and a baseball cap. He took off his sunglasses as they spoke and perched them on the cap’s bill, and she saw his eyes dart up and down her body. She was wearing nice linen slacks and a blouse that’d already been splattered with mud, but in her defense she hadn’t planned on driving up to Rocky Mountain National Park when she got dressed that morning. And she certainly hadn’t thought she’d be forced to walk down the side of a mountain, following the orange ribbons someone had tied intermittently around tree trunks so no one would get lost on their way down to the river. It was the only way to reach the cliff base unless you hopped in a canoe and floated down the river or piloted a helicopter. Oh, there was one more way to reach the spot, and that would be headfirst from the top. You’d ride the wings of gravity all the way to the bottom, 120 or so feet to the roiling waters of the Three Forks River. That’s how Marie Evans had come down. Headfirst. The short, fast way.

“Go for it.”

“Why’d you wear those shoes? Didn’t anyone warn you about the terrain out here?”

It’d taken Spengler about two hours from the parking lot to get down to this spot, and she had marched every step of it in her brown leather ballet flats, despite the dubious looks the park rangers had given her feet when she first climbed out of her car. There was hardly any traction on the soles and she’d slipped more times than she could count. And she’d fallen, mostly backward, onto her ass, but once she’d actually gone forward and had caught herself on her hands, then sat for five minutes to pick the gravel out of her palms.

Still, she had every intention of hiking all the way back up without complaint. It wouldn’t matter if her shoes were filled with blood by the time she got to her car, she’d grit her teeth and wouldn’t say a word.

“No one mentioned I’d be hiking this far.”

“You think they forgot?”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.” She smiled thinly. “They forgot.”

She imagined someone could forget to mention she’d be hiking to get to the crime scene, but she was pretty sure Detective Loren hadn’t forgotten, and he’d been the one to hand out assignments that morning. He hadn’t told her to go change shoes because that was the kind of man he was. Mean as a snake, crooked as a picture hanging on a slanted wall. She had the distinct feeling he wanted to see her fail, although she couldn’t figure out why. He didn’t know her, they’d never even met before she’d joined the department. Unless Loren was one of those men who hated women solely because they were women, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t run across plenty of those before. Law enforcement was rife with them.

Detective Loren was testing her. They all were. They were trying to see how far she could be pushed before snapping. She’d overheard two of the detectives calling her the new girl the week before, then making a crude sexual comment about her. It wasn’t the joke that bothered her so much as being described as a girl. But that’s how they treated her—like a girl. Even though she’d been a detective longer than many of them and had made more arrests. And from what she’d seen she had bigger balls than most of the men in the department.

But unfair as it was, that was the way things worked. She’d been through this same thing every time she’d been promoted or changed departments, not that it made it any easier. There was always a period of weeks or months of hazing, but things always calmed down and she was accepted as a member of the team, or at least a part of the scenery. The same thing would happen here, but only when Loren let it. He was the ringmaster of the whole production, directed the traffic, made sure everyone danced to his piping—even if it was unofficial. He was technically a lieutenant detective, a title that put him higher than anyone else in Homicide, but even without it he’d still crack the whip and the other guys would come running. There’s always one person in a group who stands out as the leader, the one who becomes the linchpin that holds it all together—and that was Loren. She had to win him over to assure her spot in the department, and a part of her wondered if that would ever happen.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t understand why you were sent out here at all,” Jackson said. “Aren’t you from Denver Homicide?”

“Yes.”

“The husband didn’t come out to search this morning.”

“I know. I’m just here to check things out.”

“When did this turn into a murder investigation? It seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. That couple went on a hike and the gal slipped and fell off the cliff. Accidents like that happen all the time out here.”

Spengler sighed again. Shaded her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand and looked up at the cliff. It was impossible to see the top from down here—it was nothing but a solid wall of rock that shot straight up into the sky. The cliff itself jutted out like a finger, coming away from the rock so there was no support beneath. If life were a cartoon, Wile E. Coyote would’ve set a trap for the Road Runner up there, but when his bomb went off he’d be the one to plummet all the way down as he stood on that thin rock platform.

Spengler had watched a lot of TV when she was a kid.

“Husband and wife go on hike and the wife falls off the edge to her death,” Spengler said. “No witnesses around, no one to back his story. Seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it?”

“Like I said, these things happen all the time. Sounds like you folks have extra payroll to burn if you’re being sent out here for this.”

“I’ve been a cop a long time, and there’s one thing that’s the same in every case,” she said, turning away from the river. The whistling sound of it and the reflections playing off the water were giving her a headache. “Things are never exactly what they seem.”