CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

September 7, 2018

“It’s right through here,” Detective Spengler said. “We’ll just need you to take a look and make a positive ID. It might be a little disturbing—”

“I’ll be fine,” Matt said, and Spengler didn’t say anything, just blinked. That was the extent of her surprise, the lowering of her eyelids. But he guessed she’d seen just about everything during her time as a detective. Grief made people crazy, it made them act out of character, and he imagined she’d been trained to handle just about anything.

Loren, standing off to one side, grunted.

“Okay, then,” Spengler said. “Follow me back.”

She led the two men through the swinging metal doors, into a smaller room. They were in the basement of the Denver County Coroner’s Office, in the morgue. It was cold and airless down here, all cement and metal, the unforgiving white lights not allowing for any shadows. He hadn’t had to identify Janice, he’d never even seen what was left of the body that’d been pulled from the house. A briquette, that’s what Reid had said. She burned fast and bright, until there was barely anything left. Just a handful of bones.

He’d gotten the call from the PD the night before, sitting at home with a book open on his lap, trying to watch TV and not really seeing what was on the screen. They’d been searching for Marie for more than a week now and had found nothing. It was hard in the mountains, picking their way through the trees and scrubs and rock as they searched the water and along the shore, but at least now it was over.

There was a polished steel table in the center of the room with a woman laid out on it, a white sheet pulled up over the swells of her breasts, all the way up to the base of her throat. He could only see the top of her head from this angle, her dark hair and the messy wound where her skull had caved in. Marie had grown her hair out over the last year and dyed it to hide the gray, darker each time until it was nearly black. Whoever had laid her out on the table had smoothed it back from her face, and the length of it was coiled on the metal table beside her head. Like a snake.

“Are you okay, Mr. Evans?” Spengler asked. She sounded concerned, but Loren was smiling. Enjoying Evans’s discomfort. Getting off on it.

“Yeah, I think so,” Matt said. He stumbled to a stop a few feet away from the body. The smell of chemicals became stronger as he got closer, bitter and sharp and tangy all at once, scents that reminded him of the days his mother would get it into her head to clean the entire house, when she’d wrap her hair up in a bandanna and go through with her bucket of hot, soapy water and pile of rags and unending arsenal of sprays and scrubs and bottles and turn everything inside out and upside down. Those were days Matt knew to make himself scarce, to head to a friend’s house or at least lock himself in his room, and he sucked down a deep breath as the door closed behind him, remembering those days before his mother had passed, before his father had remarried and became one of those guys. Everybody knows them—the guys who fuck their secretaries, who leave their wives and families behind when they get a taste of something new, men who let their dicks lead the way, and that’s exactly what his father had become, and they’d grown distant over time, until the old man had died when he was a teenager and it’d been too late to mend things by then. And maybe that kind of behavior was embedded in a person’s DNA, could be passed down through the generations, because Matt had been heading down that same path himself, hadn’t he? Why, yes. Yes, he had. He’d been fucking a girl from the office, and his relationship with his daughters had become strained and awkward—enough so that when the two of them came home the week before to help in their mother’s search they’d both checked into a hotel instead of staying at the house where they’d been raised. East, west, home’s best—but not in this case. His own daughters treated him like a stranger, and it was easier when they weren’t around, but Marie had done the same thing over the last few years, hadn’t she? He’d sometimes come home from work to find her reading a book or bent over one of her never-ending quilting projects and she’d look up with surprise, like she hadn’t expected him to come home again. Like she hoped he wouldn’t come home again. Like he was some random man she just happened to sleep beside at night.

They’d been together for a long time; they had two daughters, two imported cars sitting in the driveway of their renovated house; they had a lifetime of memories together. They had everything, that’s what people said, but there were times it felt like nothing. Less than nothing. Matt would sometimes be on his way to work, driving his nice car and drinking the pricey latte he’d picked up at the coffee shop, and he’d think, This is it? This is the life I get to live, on and on, the same routine every day until I die? Maybe he was having the midlife crisis people were always talking about. He’d turned forty-seven on his last birthday, closer than ever to fifty and an AARP membership, and he’d started to get man-tits and the roll of lard around his middle that made it so he had trouble seeing his own cock when he looked down; his hips sometimes ached for no reason and there were nights he’d go to sleep and then wake up again for no reason at all, awake for the day. All because he was getting fucking old.

They’d gone to marriage counseling a few years back, and the therapist had suggested they keep the lines of communication open. Find time to talk to each other every day, she’d said. Tell each other how you’re feeling, what you’re worried about. Express your emotions. You have to feel connected to each other.

It was good, pithy advice, but like all advice, it was easier said than done.

A perfect example: when he’d mentioned his fear of getting old to Marie not long before, this fear that this was it, there was nothing else to look forward to, that it wasn’t enough, even though he had a big house with a man cave and a car with fine leather interior and thick hand stitching on the steering wheel, real craftsmanship, even though he had money in the bank and there was plenty of food in the fridge and the girls were well behaved and smart and polite. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis. But it still wasn’t enough, and Marie had been offended, as if he’d said she wasn’t enough. That was Marie for you—always making herself the victim, twisting a simple conversation so it’d turn into an argument. The therapist had said they should talk, communication would bring them closer, but those times instead turned into battlefields, strewn with land mines and trip wires, where a single misstep could blow up in his face.

He’d told Marie it wasn’t enough, but he hadn’t meant to make it about her, at least he hadn’t thought it was, but maybe it was about her after all, because he’d started sleeping with Riley while Marie was still angry about his comment and wouldn’t speak to him, during that stretch of days when she’d gone stalking around the house slamming cabinet doors and going to bed with her back turned. He’d been fantasizing about going to bed with Riley Tipton, who worked down in real estate at his office and wore those high-waisted skirts that clung to her thighs and had a wiggly way of walking when she pushed the cart that made men turn and stare, but he’d never thought it would happen, he’d never thought it was even a possibility. Oh, he’d slept with plenty of women over the years of his marriage, but Riley was so young and tight. Out of his league. An idle fantasy, that was all, the same way he’d imagined sleeping with the teller at the bank or the young women pushing strollers through downtown as they window-shopped. Completely harmless fantasies, but never going to happen. Not in the cards.

And then he stayed late at the office one night, trying to catch up on paperwork but really just avoiding going home since Marie was still pissed, and Riley came into his office after everyone else had left and he hadn’t been able to help himself. He’d had a few indiscretions over the years, usually when he was traveling away from home and alone in a hotel room, but he’d never done anything with any of the women in his office.

You don’t shit where you eat, George, the man who’d first brought him on with the company, hired him straight off the dealership lot, had always said. You need a woman, don’t look inside this building for her. That’ll cause nothing but trouble in the long run.

And Matt had managed to live by that rule until Riley showed up with her blouse unbuttoned low enough he could see the lace of her bra and her skirt hiked high up on her thighs and sat right on his lap. He didn’t put up much of a protest. Part of that was because he and Marie didn’t have sex very often anymore, she said her libido was down, probably hormonal, she’d promise to go to the doctor to check it out and would never make an appointment, but some of it was just because. There are no reasons, sometimes.

So Matt gave in, he pushed Riley up against the big window behind his desk and had her. Afterward, he’d spat in a tissue and wiped away the handprints she’d left behind on the glass, as well as the two smeary circles left by her breasts. It could’ve been a onetime thing, a foolish decision made on the spur of the moment, he knew that, but he hadn’t been able to stop, because Matt did need something more than Marie, although he’d never say that to her, not in a million years. He loved Marie, but he needed something more, and there was no way he would’ve been able to get out of his marriage in a normal way, not with the history he had with Marie, not with everything they’d been through together.

Now she was dead. And he was free.

Or was he?

“I know you’re not happy,” Marie had said. She’d come into the bathroom as he was brushing his teeth and perched on the counter beside the sink, folded her legs beneath herself. They were bare and toned, the golden hairs on her thighs barely visible in the fluorescent lights above the sink. They’d spent tens of thousands of dollars renovating this house, shipping pendant lights in from France and having them installed in the bathroom, and their light was soft and comforting. It didn’t strike him as bad until later that he knew more about those lights than he did about the thoughts going through his wife’s head. “And I think I understand why.”

“You do?” he’d asked, shifting the toothbrush from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Of course I do. I know you so well I can practically hear what you’re thinking.” His heart gave an uneasy thump at those words, because what he’d been thinking about was Riley coming into his office and kneeling between his legs while he sat at his desk and sucking him off like she had just a few hours before, but Marie was smiling, she couldn’t have known. Could she? “You need some excitement in your life, and I know just how to give it to you.”

Years before, that smile and those words would’ve made his heart race and given him a raging tent in his pants, but he was older now. Maybe not any wiser, but wise enough to know that when Marie wanted to do something exciting it couldn’t be good. Like the time she’d said she wanted to do something different in bed and asked him to put his hands around her throat as their bodies ground into each other, to squeeze until her face had gone purple and swollen and full of blood. And he had, he’d put both hands around the delicate stalk of her neck and clamped down until her eyes had bulged from her head and she was clawing at his hands, trying to signal at him to let go, and he’d come so hard he’d nearly passed out. It was the control that made it so good, he figured. If he’d held down on her neck for a minute longer—thirty seconds longer would’ve done it—things would’ve been different. But there was a time and place for everything, and he’d held off.

“You could’ve killed me,” Marie had said, rubbing the rising circlet of bruises around her throat. Her voice was hoarse for days after that, like she was coming down with a chest cold.

“Maybe I should kill you,” Matt said, and she’d laughed.

“I’d haunt you from beyond the grave,” Marie said. “You’d never get rid of me.”

No big deal, that’s how they’d always talked to each other, they’d joked about those things, wink-wink nudge-nudge, but in the past week Matt had tried to remember if they’d ever talked like that in front of anyone, or had they only done it when they were alone?

He wasn’t sure.

“I don’t need any excitement,” he’d told his wife, holding his toothbrush out in front of him like a weapon, the bubbles from the toothpaste filling his mouth and squirting out the corners, but he didn’t spit, he didn’t want to take his eyes off Marie, even for a moment.

“Yeah, you do,” she’d said, and he’d felt his balls shrinking up into his body. Did he love his wife? Yes, he did. He sometimes thought he’d come to love her more over all the years they’d been together, he even admired her, but he was also a little scared of her because once Marie got an idea in her head it was as good as done. He was supposed to be the brilliant salesman but he sometimes thought it was the other way around, because Marie had always been able to talk him into anything.

Spengler and Loren stayed where they were, near the examination room’s door, and Matt crept around the side of the table until he could see the woman’s face. It was swollen and bruised—she looked more like an inflated ball of uncooked bread dough than a human. She was unrecognizable.

“Is it Marie?” Spengler asked. Her arms were folded across her chest.

“Just curious, but was it like this when you identified your first wife after she was murdered?” Loren asked. He was grinning. Matt’s hand jerked involuntarily, and Loren’s grin widened.

“No,” he said. “They never asked me to look at Janice.”

Matt came to the table and grabbed a corner of the plain white sheet and lifted so he could see the rest of her body. When they’d first married, Marie had always slept naked, and he used to lift the bedding in this same way to get a look at her in the middle of the night, ripe and rounded, and more often than not he’d wake her up for a little roll in the sack. She’d never complain about being woken up, she never said anything at all, just let him do what he wanted. The bedroom was the only place she ever gave in, sat back and let him take control. Encouraged it. I don’t mind taking one for the team, Marie used to say, and he always hated that, because it didn’t feel like they were part of a team in bed, but like he was by himself, using her for what he needed. What he wanted.

The woman’s body wasn’t in much better shape than the face. Swollen and broken, cuts and sores dotting the rubbery flesh. Her nipples had gone a grayish color, her fingernails were black and crumbling away at the tips, there was a long slash across the bottom of one foot.

Loren’s cell phone rang, and he left the room. Spengler stayed. Matt kept looking. It seemed to him that his vision had begun to swim in and out of focus, like a camera lens trying to readjust.

There was a mole at the base of her left breast, the kind that’s raised and dark brown with the texture of a raisin, sitting right where a bra would nuzzle up against the skin. Matt had kissed that mole the week before, nibbled on it, and she’d laughed and pushed him away. He’d been at her place, saying their good-byes because Riley was going on a trip to South America. She’d always wanted to go, so he’d had Jill book the trip. She’d screamed when he told her, jumped into his arms and nearly bowled him over. Riley was supposed to be in Machu Picchu now, out of cell phone range as she explored the ancient ruins, but she wasn’t. She was here. Here. Dead. Her face beaten and swollen, her hair a thick rope on the cold metal table.

His vision swam in and out of focus, and it felt like the volume on everything had been turned down, too. Spengler said something, but it was muffled, as if he had pillows pressed against his ears. Maybe this was shock.

He dropped the sheet. It caught the air for a moment, billowed out like a cloud before it settled again, slowly, as if by magic. The door opened and Loren stuck his head in, said something to his partner. Spengler nodded and left, shot a long look at Matt before closing the door behind her.

Matt’s cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. He slowly pulled it out, looked at the screen. He was getting a call from an unknown number. He considered declining the call, letting it go to voice mail, but then answered it anyway. Because he knew who it was. She’d always had impeccable timing.

“Hello?” he said. Cautiously, because he thought it might be a hallucination, his own mind playing tricks on him. It wasn’t all that far-fetched, not after everything that’d happened in the last few days. He might be imagining the phone was ringing—hell, he might be imagining the phone altogether, and if he pulled it away from his head and looked, he might be holding a banana up to his ear. That thought made him giggle hysterically, and he clamped a hand down over his mouth, because how would it look, for the cops to hear him laughing like that? “Hello, is anyone there?”

There was a crackle of static from the phone, and a hiss, as if the call was being beamed to him from a great distance. Outer space, maybe, directly to his ear. Incoming call for Matt Evans; Denver, Colorado; Denver County; State of Colorado; United States of America; the Earth; the solar system, the universe.

The eye of Marie.

“Matt?” a voice said. There was a buzz of feedback, and an echo, so it sounded like someone had shouted his name down a long tunnel. “Matt? Matt? Matt?”

“Who is this?” he said, clutching the phone so hard his knuckles had gone white and numb. “What do you want?”

There was another blip of static and then it was suddenly gone, and the voice in his ear came through crystal clear.

“Matt?” she said, using that breathy, high-pitched voice he hated so much, the one that sounded a little like Marilyn Monroe. He heard that voice in his dreams, sometimes. He’d recognize the voice of his wife anywhere. “Didn’t I say you needed some excitement in your life?”