Till Murder Do Us Part Read online

  The meadow is covered in snow, gleaming in the sunlight as if sprinkled with glitter. Animal tracks crisscross the white landscape, and a breeze blows snow snakes across the frozen surface. A lone hawk circles the meadow, gliding through the blue sky. Kathi takes a deep breath of icy air and feels the cold scorch her lungs.

  She’s going to miss the air, too—the crisp coolness of it.

  She’s not yet sure where she’ll end up, but she’s thinking someplace warm. She doesn’t know where in the world Eric Wright is now, but if he comes back to Glenwood Springs looking for her, he’ll find no trace of her.

  In the past few months, Kathi has sold her business, auctioned off most of her belongings, and sold the house that she once thought she would grow old in. She’s crammed everything she has left into her Ford Explorer. Once she gets where she’s going—wherever that is—she’ll sell the SUV, too, and buy a new vehicle.

  And there’s something else she plans to change: her name.

  Kathi is aware of the irony that she was married to a man who changed his identity because he was on the run, and now she’s changing her identity because she’s on the run from him.

  She’s vowed that until Eric Wright is behind bars, she’s going to stay in hiding. She told Detective Lucas that she’ll check in with him periodically and let him know where she is, but she plans to keep her whereabouts a secret from everybody else. She can use calling cards and pay phones to reach friends and family without telling them her location. They might think she’s being paranoid, but they didn’t see the look on her ex’s face that day when she first called him Eric Wright. They still think he’s probably harmless. Sure, he told tall tales, people have said, but we never believed his stories anyway.

  “You didn’t really believe him, did you, Kathi?” some old friends have asked, shaming her for being blind to his deceptions.

  My eyes are wide open now, she thinks.

  Kathi heads to her driveway and climbs into her SUV, fires up the engine, and drives away. The tires crunch noisily over the snow covering the driveway.

  Tears blur her vision as she wonders how long it will be before she can come back to Colorado.

  Part 4

  Chapter 35

  An undisclosed location

  April 28, 2002

  Kathi Spiars—now known as Betty Hoffman—slides a DVD into her player and sits back on her couch to watch the film. She rented the movie from the Blockbuster Video that’s within walking distance of her trailer. It’s some car racing movie called The Fast and the Furious, which sounded entertaining enough. It was between this and A Beautiful Mind, but she figured the recent Oscar winner would be too heavy. She just wants something mindless to distract her from her thoughts for a couple of hours.

  Before the movie begins, she sits through the trailers for upcoming new releases. One of them makes her sit up on her couch—The Bourne Identity. She laughs, remembering reading the book way back when she and Steve were dating, long before she knew the truth about him.

  God, was that really twenty years ago?

  I can’t believe it. How time slips by.

  For years, Kathi beat herself up for ever trusting Eric Wright. But she’s learned to cut herself some slack. She was young and naive. She wanted to believe that the man she loved was some kind of cool spy.

  The reality turned out to be something far worse.

  And definitely not cool.

  Ever since leaving Colorado, Kathi has been bouncing around the United States, never staying in one place for very long. She stretched her savings about as far as she could and worked various odd jobs under the table to make ends meet. For the past six months, she’s been living in this trailer park, serving drinks down the street at the local VFW.

  Twenty-two years after meeting Eric Wright, she’s back to serving drinks and listening to drunk men flirt with her. The only difference is that back then she was turning the heads of twenty- and thirty-year-old guys with money to burn. Now she catches the eye of seventy-year-old World War II veterans who sip a single beer over two hours and leave a twenty-five-cent tip.

  When she’s not working, Kathi rents movies from Blockbuster, reads books from the library, or goes for long walks in nature. Mostly, though, she spends her time teaching herself to be a detective. She spends hours at the library doing internet searches, or on the phone digging up whatever she can about the man she used to be married to. She requests county records and court transcripts and police reports. She uses what little money she has to fly to California to conduct interviews.

  She found out that shortly after their separation, Eric Wright forged her signature to buy a minivan, which explained what wrecked her credit for years.

  She found out that Steve’s former wives’ names both began with a K—Kate and Kristy—and that both were petite blondes, just like her.

  She found out that Eric’s alias, Steven Marcum, came from a death certificate he bought illegally. The real Steve Marcum died as a baby the same year Eric was born, making his identity a suitable one to steal. Equipped with a real Social Security number from a deceased child, Eric was able to fabricate a new identity that looked legitimate to government agencies, employers, and banks, not to mention to Kathi herself.

  Pretty much none of what she’s found out has matched up with the kind, caring man she thought she was married to.

  Sometimes she pulls out the Exeter yearbook and looks at the boy who would grow up to become the liar, swindler, and murderer she now knows him to be. She imagines him as a teenager realizing that he didn’t experience the same kinds of emotions other people did. Realizing that he lacked empathy—cared nothing at all for the feelings and well-being of others. She pictures him practicing how to manipulate people: how to lie believably, to cry on cue, to be the puppeteer pulling the strings of those around him.

  Did he always think only of his own self-interest and self-preservation, never concerning himself with the pain of others he left in his wake? Or was that a skill that he honed as he grew into adulthood?

  Kathi bought a cell phone a year ago, which makes it easier for her to keep in touch with Detective Lucas—now a lieutenant—and share whatever new information she’s found. She sometimes wonders if he’s just humoring her by taking her calls. Has he given up hope? He has other cases to occupy his thoughts.

  But there are no other cases for Kathi.

  On the screen, a beautiful young actress is crying because the handsome blond man she’s fallen in love with has turned out not to be who he seemed. Kathi is only remotely aware of what’s happening in the film. Her mind drifted away minutes ago. She can’t seem to take her mind off her mission.

  Her obsession.

  She pauses the movie and goes to the bathroom. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and, as she often does, wonders where the adventurous young woman she used to be has gone. She doesn’t think she looks too bad for a fifty-two-year-old who’s been in hiding for years. She’s still got a good figure for a woman her age. Sure, she’s got some wrinkles and age spots, but she knows how to make the most of her makeup. And she has her health. Besides her feet and knees aching after a long shift, she feels quite good for someone who’s walked the earth for half a century.

  Still, Kathi laments wasting the best years of her life on a liar.

  When she returns to the couch, she doesn’t turn the movie back on. Why bother? Since she left Colorado, not a day has gone by that she hasn’t thought of Eric Wright or the mess he’s made of her life. She tries not to be bitter. But it’s hard when she knows he’s out there, who knows where, doing who knows what. She doubts he thinks about her half as much as she thinks about him. Probably not even a fraction as much.

  Her cell phone rings.

  The first thing she wonders when she answers, as always, is whether she’ll hear Eric Wright’s voice on the other end. It doesn’t make logical sense. There’s no way he could get her number. But still she feels that initial fear every time her phone goes off.<
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  She tells herself not to be afraid and flips open the phone.

  “Betty Hoffman speaking,” she says, using her latest alias and trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Kathi,” Lieutenant John Lucas says, unable to hide the excitement in his voice, “I have news. We know where he is.”

  Chapter 36

  Guaymas, Mexico

  April 29, 2002

  Eric Wright walks along the beach on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Holding a pair of flip-flops in his hands and wearing a droopy sun hat to cover his scalp, he walks close to the water’s edge so that when wavelets wash ashore, the lukewarm water splashes his ankles before retreating back into the ocean. The bay, an incredible cerulean color, is full of boats coming in and out of port. The smell of salt water fills the air.

  Guaymas is a port community for shrimp fishing and industrial shipping. It’s positioned where the Sonoran Desert meets the sea, creating a sharp contrast between the dry desolate earth and the brilliant blue of the ocean. Some tourists visit Guaymas for its sports fishing opportunities, but it’s not nearly as crowded with visitors as nearby San Carlos, with its expansive beaches and fancy hotels. Guaymas flies under the radar, as they might say in America.

  And that’s what Eric likes about it.

  He turns from the beach and heads toward the street. Before stepping from the sand onto the pavement, he drops his flip-flops and slides them on. He’s a little out of breath. Physically, Eric Wright is not what he once was. He’s over fifty years old, and Father Time has finally caught up with him. The thin, athletic man has been replaced by an overweight, hunched-over version of himself who is more out of breath shuffling through the dirt roads of this sea-level Mexican town than he was when he once hiked the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains. He knows he’s the one to blame for his slide toward flabbiness. Besides his daily walks along the beach, he isn’t particularly active, certainly not the way he once was.

  Life has become a bore.

  He subsists on a two-thousand-dollar monthly check from the United States. It turns out Uncle Sam is as gullible as his ex-wife. Ever since he filed the disability paperwork claiming he had PTSD, he hasn’t had to work at all. For a while, he thought about running a few scams: forging traveler’s checks, buying over-the-counter medication and telling Americans it was some miracle drug that they can’t get in the U.S., duping tourists to pay up front for fishing expeditions and then disappearing before the trip (he wouldn’t even need to own a boat). But he quickly realized that any of those scams would draw too much attention to himself. And besides, two thousand dollars a month goes a long way down in Mexico.

  As he walks among the adobe buildings, children coated with dirt and sweat crowd around him, offering to sell him gum. He waves them away. He could teach these kids a thing or two about making a living. There’s always a scam and someone willing to fall for it—whether it’s a government agency or a young woman looking for love.

  Back at his apartment, he kicks off his flip-flops, grabs some leftover quesadillas from his tiny refrigerator, and eats them cold while sitting up in bed. The window air conditioner blasts cool air directly onto him. He picks up the remote and scans the channels. He doesn’t understand half of what anyone is saying. His Spanish has become proficient enough to get by, but he’s still far from fluent.

  Outside his window, over the sound of the TV and the whir of the air conditioner, he can hear the bustling activity in the streets: children laughing and yelling, men and women bartering, cars zipping up and down the road, their engines whining. All of it blends together in a comforting white noise, and Eric finds himself getting sleepy.

  He stretches out on the bed and lets his eyes drift closed. He falls into a dreamless sleep.

  When he wakes up, he can tell from the sunlight coming through the window that a significant amount of time has passed. He feels groggy. It was one of those deep naps that it’s hard to climb out of. But even though he tells himself it’s just that he’s not quite awake yet, something feels off.

  The noises outside—the kids yelling, the adults arguing, cars driving by—are all gone except for a few distant voices outside.

  It’s too quiet.

  Eric rolls out of bed and crouches—he curses himself for letting his belly grow so big—and strains to reach under the bed. Feeling a little paranoid, he grabs the duffel bag that he keeps hidden under there; it’s filled with money, a few changes of clothes, and all the documents he needs to start over somewhere else. His motto has always been to err on the side of caution, and that philosophy has kept him safe all these years.

  As he rises to his feet, a terrible crash against his apartment door makes him flinch. Wood splinters around the handle, and the door clatters inward. Uniformed men follow, shouting at him in Spanish and aiming rifles and pistols at his chest. Eric doesn’t need to be fluent in Spanish to know what they’re saying.

  He’s under arrest.

  Eric drops the bag and puts his hands in the air. He isn’t scared. He can talk his way out of this. Or bribe his way out. Or promise a favor of some sort. This is Mexico, after all. Aren’t all the cops corrupt?

  He can tell from the uniforms that this is the Policía Federal Preventiva—the national police force—and not the local cops. Still not a problem. They can be paid off with money or favors just like anyone else.

  A man in a white tie and sport jacket pushes through the police holding a bundle of paperwork in one hand.

  How can he wear that suit in this heat? Eric thinks. I’m sweating my ass off in shorts and a T-shirt.

  “Mr. Wright,” the man says in unaccented English, “do you understand what is happening to you?”

  “Whatever it is,” Eric says, “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He smiles at the man to show him that he understands how this works and is willing to make an arrangement. He’s confident in the power of that smile. He’s been winning people over with it all his life.

  The man looks at him seriously and pulls a badge out of his jacket and shows it to Eric. The letters FBI are clearly visible.

  Eric’s smile disappears.

  I guess that explains why he doesn’t have an accent, Eric thinks.

  He realizes for the first time that this might not go his way after all. He assumes they found him because he used his real name when collecting his government disability checks. He had to. Steve Marcum never went to Vietnam—Eric Wright had to be the one to claim PTSD. It was careless, but honestly, he didn’t think they would bother to track him all the way here. Eric figured Kathi and that cop from California would give up eventually. He certainly didn’t think they’d get the FBI involved.

  The FBI agent puts away his badge and holds up the packet of papers he was carrying when he walked in. It’s actually three different documents that he shows to Eric one by one.

  “This is your arrest warrant from the United States,” the FBI agent tells him. “And this is your arrest warrant from Mexico. And these”—he holds the final document close to Eric’s face so he can see it—“are your extradition papers. You’re going back to the United States, Mr. Wright. Tonight.”

  Chapter 37

  San Joaquin County, California

  July 30, 2002

  Your Honor, the prosecution calls Kathi Spiars as its next witness.”

  Kathi walks into the courtroom, and all eyes turn to her. Except for those of the defendant. Eric Wright keeps his back to her as she walks past rows of people. In a weird way, she’s reminded of her wedding day—walking through a crowd with all eyes on her, Eric at the end of the aisle—only this time, instead of a tuxedo, he wears a red jumpsuit with the word JAIL stenciled on the back.

  The courtroom is crowded with journalists, including reporters from major news outlets. Once the details of the case came out—not to mention the fact that the wife of the killer was a big reason for his capture—the national media couldn’t resist.

  As Kathi walks past the defendant’s table, E
ric looks up. He doesn’t smile, not with his mouth, but there is a twinkle in his eye. It’s not a hostile look that he gives her, but something more playful. As if he’s a good sport after losing a hand in poker—but maybe he still has an ace up his sleeve.

  Time has changed him. His hair has grown darker and thinner on top—although he hasn’t given up using the comb-over technique—and he’s put on quite a bit of weight. He’s thicker all around, and his once chiseled jawline sits atop a flabby neck. He’s not particularly handsome anymore, if he ever was.

  But he still has the same expression she always saw on his face, the same mischievous look, even if he isn’t smiling with his mouth. The look unnerves her. She expected him to be humbled. Frightened, mad, forlorn—to show something other than this same look saying, Isn’t this all a big joke?

  Her legs feel weak as she raises her right hand and swears to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help her God. Her voice wavers at first, but as she gets through the oath, it grows stronger.

  She’s looked forward to this moment for years. Kathi relishes the chance to finally get out everything she has to say about Eric Wright—to get it all on the record.

  This is the preliminary hearing in the murder of Lester Marks. There is no jury, only the judge, and the hearing is to determine whether there’s enough evidence for the case to go to trial.

  “Ms. Spiars,” the district attorney, Thomas McGowan, says, “do you know a man named Eric Wright?”

  “Yes,” she answers.

  “And how do you know him?”

  “I was married to him for twelve years,” she says. “He went by a different name back then, but he’s the same person.”

  “Do you see him in the courtroom today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you point him out?”

  Kathi lifts her arm and aims her index finger at the man she once thought she would spend the rest of her life with. He looks back at her with a smirk on his face and a twinkle in his eye.