Till Murder Do Us Part Read online

  His eyes look so dark, so evil. How could she not have seen it before?

  “You think you’re clever, finding out a few things about me?” he says. “You don’t know a goddamn thing. You don’t know who I am, what I’ve done. There are people out there who will make trouble for me if they know I’m here.” He leans even closer, boring into her with his paralyzing gaze. “If they make trouble for me, I’m going to make trouble for you.”

  Kathi tries to maintain his stare, but she’s terrified. Tears are welling in her eyes.

  “Do you understand?” he asks menacingly. “I want to hear you say it.”

  Kathi hesitates. She doesn’t want to be intimidated by his threats, but the truth is she’s scared of the man sitting across from her.

  “Here you go, hon!” says the cheerful voice of the server as she plops a plate of steak and eggs in front of Eric.

  As if a switch has been flipped, he transforms in an instant from a frightening and intense brute to the charming, happy-go-lucky gentleman everyone in the community knows.

  “Thanks so much,” he says, smiling and spreading a napkin across his lap, as if he and Kathi have been talking about something as innocuous as the weather.

  Kathi uses the distraction of the server to make her escape, but she’s only about three steps away when Eric calls out, “Oh, Kathi,” almost singing the words.

  Reluctantly, she turns to face him.

  “We had some fun, didn’t we?” he says, beaming with the same magic smile she fell in love with.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “All those memories are ruined now.”

  Eric shrugs and lifts a knife and fork to dig into his steak.

  Looking at him, she realizes that he feels no sympathy for her, no empathy—no normal human emotion. He can’t understand how he’s hurt her.

  Or he doesn’t care.

  “I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a replacement for you,” he tells her matter-of-factly. “But you won’t find anyone as fun as me. I can promise you that.”

  “You know, Eric,” Kathi says loudly enough to attract looks from fellow patrons, “I see you for who you really are. You’re nothing but a scared little boy who’s afraid no one will like him, so he lies about who he is. I pity the next person who falls for your scams, but it damn sure won’t be me.”

  With that, she spins on her heel and struts out of the restaurant, holding her head high.

  Chapter 22

  Fall 1993

  Kathi Spiars can’t sleep. She notices that the blackness outside her window is starting to turn blue. It’s nearly dawn, and she’s pretty sure she hasn’t slept a wink.

  She rises from her bed, wraps herself in a flannel robe, and descends the stairs to the living room. The weather has been pleasant for this time of year, but it’s still Colorado, so the house is cold first thing in the morning. She boils a kettle of water to make herself a cup of herbal tea. When it’s ready, she steps out onto the back deck and watches the world slowly come more and more into focus. Clouds cling to the peaks of the blue mountains. In the meadow before her, a herd of elk move without a sound through the morning fog, their silhouettes like phantoms in the morning light.

  It’s been months since the separation, and Kathi is a mess.

  She’s willing to admit that to herself.

  It doesn’t help that Eric is still around. She thought he would move out of Glenwood Springs—on to his next adventure—but apparently he plans to stay. She’s passed him driving down the street. She’s seen him at the grocery store. She heard from a client that he got fired from his job for saying something inappropriate. Someone else told her that he was working as a masseur now, going to people’s houses to give massages.

  Their old friends can’t believe Kathi and Steve split—“You two were perfect together!” they all say—and Kathi has been tight-lipped about what led to their breakup. She thought it would make it easier if she didn’t gossip behind her ex’s back, but actually, it’s only made her feel alone.

  She got the house, her business, all the physical things that meant anything to her. But she’s still grieving for what she lost.

  She lost her husband, and her best friend.

  The fact that Steve was an illusion doesn’t help matters. In fact, it only makes it worse that the man she loved turned out to be a mask and the real person underneath such a lowlife. She’s embarrassed that she could’ve been duped so easily. She’s ashamed at her gullibility. But grieving the end of the twelve-year marriage and suffering emotionally from the betrayal aren’t the only reasons she lies awake at night.

  She can’t help but think that there’s more to Eric Wright.

  He’s running from something more than a couple of ex-wives, a few kids, and years of missed child support payments. She’s sure of it. Now that she no longer thinks he worked for the CIA, she has a feeling the reality is something much simpler.

  Eric always included some truth with his lies. He did serve in Vietnam. That was true. And he did grow up in Exeter. He even drove her to the city. He could have made up any city in California, any city in the country, but he actually took her to his real hometown.

  It was as if he needed a grain of truth to make the lies convincing.

  Sure, the CIA story was BS, as she assumes was the claim that he went to prison for getting into a bar fight. But maybe there was a grain of truth to those tall tales. Maybe he really did kill someone—just not as a hit man for the CIA and not in some bar fight. Maybe faking his own death wasn’t just to run out on his wife and family responsibilities.

  Maybe he killed someone and ran away so he wouldn’t get caught.

  When he talked about murder, he was always very convincing. Of course, he was convincing in all his lies, but she has the added experience of having looked into the man’s eyes when he had his hand around her throat. In that moment, she certainly believed he was capable of murder.

  It sounds far-fetched, but she just can’t shake the feeling that Eric Wright is getting away with something.

  As Kathi sips her tea and lets the sun warm her, she thinks about what she can do. She’s not a cop. She’s not a private detective. What can she do?

  But she remembers her dogged determination while scrolling through issues and issues of old newspapers on microfiche. Maybe she is the right person to look into the past of Eric Wright. She probably knows him better than anyone now. She knows the fake Steve Marcum, and she knows the real Eric Wright.

  If she’s not the right person to look into his past, who is?

  Kathi rises from her seat on the deck and stares out at the meadow behind the house. The sun peeks over the distant mountains and bathes the landscape in bright orange light. The silence begins to awaken with birdsong.

  Kathi feels better than she has in a long time.

  You messed with the wrong girl, she thinks, staring at the sunlight bathing the morning in gold. You’ll regret the day you ever lied to me.

  Part 3

  Chapter 23

  Winter 1994

  Detective John Lucas of the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office sits at his desk on his lunch break, eating a Jack in the Box fried chicken sandwich with curly fries. As he dips a cluster of fries in ketchup and pops them into his mouth, his phone rings, the red light flashing with an incoming call.

  He swallows the bite and answers, “Detective Lucas.”

  “John, this is Tracy from the front desk,” a familiar voice says. “We’ve got a woman on the line from Colorado who wants to know about unsolved murders from 1980.”

  “Nineteen eighty?” he says, quickly doing the math in his head. “That was fourteen years ago.”

  “You were around back then, weren’t you?” Tracy asks. “Would you mind talking to her?”

  Lucas consents and takes a sip of root beer before the call is transferred. Most of the time, calls like this turn out to be wild-goose chases. But Lucas tells himself to have an open mind.

  “Detective Lu
cas,” he says when the call is put through. “How may I help you?”

  The woman identifies herself as Kathi Spiars from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and says she’s spent the past few months calling every law enforcement agency within a hundred miles of Oakland to ask about unsolved murder cases from 1980.

  “Most of the officers haven’t taken me seriously,” she admits. “I hope you will.”

  “I’m listening,” Lucas says, eyeing his sandwich and wishing he’d been able to finish it before taking the call. He’s been starving all morning.

  The woman on the phone says that she met a man in October 1980 and fell in love with him. He was very mysterious, she says, claiming he’d been in the CIA and was on the run.

  Lucas almost rolls his eyes. This is a wild-goose chase, he thinks.

  The woman goes on to tell him that although they were married for twelve years, their whole relationship was built on lies. It turns out she didn’t even know his real name. She explains that the man’s real name is Eric Wright, and he was a former sheriff’s lieutenant in Alameda County who faked his death and ran out on his wife and child, plus an ex-wife and two other kids.

  “Did you talk to the ex-wives?” Lucas asks.

  “Not yet.”

  “Did you talk to the Alameda County sheriff’s office he used to work for?”

  “They said they’d look into it,” she says, “but I’m afraid they think I’m just some jaded woman with an ax to grind.”

  Detective Lucas can’t blame them. He knows from experience that investigators are constantly overwhelmed, juggling cases and trying to find evidence—real, hard evidence. A detective has to look past the conspiracy theories to find facts. And some woman calling from several states away who’s mad at her ex-husband is exactly the kind of time waster you have to tune out sometimes.

  His stomach growls. The sooner he can end the call, the sooner he can go back to his sandwich. But there’s no sense in being rude. The least he can do is listen to her and try to get off the phone without hurting her feelings.

  “What exactly are you hoping I can do for you?” Lucas says as politely as possible.

  “Honestly,” she says, “I think he killed someone. I want to know about any unsolved murders from around that time. I was blind to who he really was for years, but now I see him clearly. I just have a hunch that he’s done something really bad.”

  Lucas takes a deep breath and fills his cheeks with air before blowing it out. He explains that what she’s asking isn’t as easy as it might seem. The truth is that crimes—including murders—go unsolved all the time.

  “What you have is a murder suspect and no crime to go with him,” Lucas says. “That’s not normally how we do things. Usually it’s the other way around—we have the crime and we look for suspects. We can’t simply go back through every unsolved murder from around that time and add him to the suspect list,” Lucas explains. “That’s not how it works. I’m sorry. We just need more to go on than a hunch that he did something bad.”

  She’s quiet for a moment and then says, “I understand.” He can tell by her tone that she’s disappointed. He’s just another person in law enforcement who isn’t taking her seriously. Once again, she’s getting nowhere. “It’s just,” she starts, “this guy was so mysterious. I’m telling you, he’s hiding something. He faked his own death. He changed his name. He hid gold bars in the toilet. He—”

  Detective Lucas sits up in his chair. “What did you say?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “He faked his own death. There—”

  “No, no. About the gold. What did you say?”

  The woman says that Eric Wright—a.k.a. Steve Marcum—used to hide unmarked gold bars in their toilet tank because he was afraid the house might burn down and he wanted the precious metals to be safely submerged in water.

  “I’m telling you, nothing about this guy was normal,” she says, and when there’s no reply from the officer, she asks, “Did we get cut off?”

  But Lucas is there, lost in thought. At the mention of gold, his heart rate picked up and began galloping.

  He remembers divers going into the canal outside Tracy to find a body that two fishermen spotted in the aqueduct. The scene is as clear to him as if he saw it yesterday. He might have forgotten a lot of faces, names, and facts in his two decades on the force, but he remembers all the dead bodies. You don’t forget those.

  This one was weighed down with a heavy chain, which kept the corpse submerged but able to drift slowly down current, making it difficult to determine where it had been dumped into the aqueduct. The body was in the water for weeks, its chest bloated with gas, the hands and feet swollen and wrinkled. The man’s skin was pale white in some places, greenish black in others, and chunks of flesh were torn away where the chain had rubbed against the body, leaving gray gouges in the muscle. The smell was so rank, it was difficult not to vomit.

  The body was decomposed enough that the medical examiner found the cause of death inconclusive.

  But the police were able to identify the body—a man whose gold went missing after his death.

  “Ms. Spiars,” Detective Lucas says, “can you give me a phone number where I can reach you? I want to check on something and get back to you.”

  After he hangs up the phone, Lucas hurries out of his office, leaving the remainder of his chicken sandwich uneaten on his desk.

  Chapter 24

  Detective John Lucas walks through the dark shelves of the evidence storage facility, looking at case numbers on rows and rows of cardboard boxes. The boxes are covered in dust—everything in this row is more than a decade old. Lucas is alone in the quiet room, which is roughly the size of a basketball court. Each row has its own line of fluorescent tube lights, and Lucas has switched on only the ones in the rows he’s searching, leaving most of the storage area in complete darkness. Cold air emanates from the concrete floor.

  When he finds the case number he’s looking for, Lucas pulls the cardboard box down off the shelf and walks to a desk in the corner. He sits under a pool of fluorescent light and opens the box.

  This is the case for the unsolved death of a man named Lester Marks. The sheriff’s office did its best to look into it, but the case soon went as cold as the corpse they pulled out of the aqueduct that August of 1980. As Lucas goes through the files—the crime scene photographs, the medical examiner’s report, a pile of paperwork taken from Marks’s office—the details of the case come back to him.

  Lester Marks, fifty-seven, had been considered a small-time criminal in the area. He was a precious metals dealer, and police believed he worked as a fence for stolen jewelry, melting the pieces down into ingots and selling them. When police arrested him in 1979, they confiscated five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewels and gold. Marks pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property but avoided jail time due to his heart condition. Among his collection were seven gold bars, each weighing two and a half pounds, that the police had no way of proving were stolen. They ultimately gave the gold back to him. A year later, Lester Marks was murdered.

  The gold was never found.

  At the time of his death, the bars were worth two hundred thousand dollars.

  Sheriff’s investigators always assumed that someone had killed Marks for his gold, but they were never able to figure out who. Now, as Detective Lucas reads through the documents in the folders, he searches for any potential connection between Marks and Eric Wright.

  Unfortunately, he doesn’t see any. And without a connection, he can’t reopen a case that’s so cold it’s practically frozen in ice.

  The fact that Eric Wright disappeared from California shortly after the murder is certainly intriguing. But the word of a woman in Colorado claiming that her ex-husband used to own gold bars is not enough. Kathi Spiars said the gold bars were long gone, so there’s no way to compare them to the photographs in the case file.

  Lucas scours the paperwork from Marks’s old office: papers with handwritten notes about gol
d values, telephone conversations, some of them random phone numbers or dollar amounts with no context.

  The detective’s fingertips have gone black from handling the old documents. His stomach rumbles, and he’s reminded of his uneaten lunch sitting back at his office. Yet something tells him to keep looking. The chronology and proximity of Lester Marks’s death and Eric Wright’s disappearance doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

  Lucas moves faster and faster, now only skimming the documents. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for but is sure he’ll recognize it when he sees it.

  His eyes pass over a document, and he almost flips it over to put on the pile of papers he’s already gone through, but then he does a double take.

  He lets out a long, relieved breath.

  There it is, he thinks.

  The name Eric Wright is scrawled in ink on a handwritten note taken from Lester Marks’s office.

  And there’s a phone number next to it.

  Chapter 25

  Kathi is annoyed. She spoke with that detective at the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office three days ago and hasn’t heard from him since. She believed him when he told her he was going to look into the case. But it turns out he was only trying to get her off the phone. At least the other cops had the decency not to give her any false hope.

  But that guy, Detective Lucas, made her believe he might help.

  She knows now that she has to keep digging. Kathi sits down at her kitchen table and sets the cordless telephone next to her. She’ll badger every damn cop in California if she has to.

  As she reaches to make her first call, the phone rings, startling her. She has a sick feeling that it’s Eric, breathing heavy into the phone and about to say, I heard you’ve been making calls about me, Kathi.

  She tells herself to relax and answers the phone.