Till Murder Do Us Part Read online

  “Ms. Spiars?” says a voice. “This is John Lucas with the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office. We spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”

  “I thought you forgot about me,” Kathi says.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I just wanted to look into this thoroughly before I called you back.”

  “And?”

  Lucas pauses for what seems like ten seconds before saying, “Ma’am, I think you might be right about your ex-husband.”

  Waves of emotion pour through Kathi. Relief that someone has finally taken her concerns seriously, relief that she’s not in this alone. At the same time, she’s horrified to realize the kind of man she was married to. Sure, he always claimed to be a hit man—as preposterous as that sounds to her now—but he maintained that he’d killed only evil people and had committed those acts in the service of doing good. But the thought that she spent more than a decade sleeping next to a cold-blooded murderer feels different to her.

  Before, she always told herself that Steve was a good person at heart.

  Now she knows that’s not true.

  “What did he do?” Kathi says, her voice hoarse from her suddenly dry throat.

  Lucas explains that a small-time crook was killed a short time before Eric Wright fled California. The man owned gold bars that the police believed were made from melted jewelry that had been stolen—but they couldn’t prove it. Lucas searched through the old files and found the name Eric Wright scribbled on a note from the man’s office. There was a phone number with it, and Lucas called it and reached a precious metals firm in the Bay Area. Lucas interviewed the owner and discovered that Eric Wright used to work there and that he’d previously been a sheriff’s lieutenant.

  “A note with a name and phone number is a pretty flimsy piece of evidence,” Lucas says, “but it prompted me to dig a little deeper.” He goes on to tell Kathi that the son of the murder victim is currently serving time for armed burglary, and that he visited the man in prison.

  “I asked him about Eric Wright,” Lucas says. “He wasn’t sure about the name, but he said his dad had been talking about selling the gold to a dirty ex-cop. Those were his words. Dirty ex-cop.”

  Kathi is breathing fast. We’ve got you, you lying son of a bitch, she thinks.

  I got you.

  Lucas says that he feels it’s possible that Eric Wright talked with Lester Marks and made arrangements to buy the gold on behalf of the company he worked for. But instead of buying the gold, he murdered Marks and stole it.

  “When he left California, he might not have been running from the law,” Lucas says. “He might have felt he got away with it. He might have seen the gold as the means to getting a fresh start. Maybe that was his motivation for the murder to begin with. The gold was his ticket out of there.”

  “So you’re going to arrest him?” Kathi says, feeling triumphant.

  “I can’t arrest him,” Lucas tells her. “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lucas explains that the evidence linking Eric to the murder is tenuous at best: a scribbled note, the word of a convicted burglar, and Kathi’s story that he once kept gold bars in the toilet. Everything else they know about Eric Wright certainly paints him in an unsympathetic light—the lies, the fake death, the way he ran out on his family—but none of that is damning evidence in the case of the murder of Lester Marks.

  “Most of what we have is what they call circumstantial evidence,” Lucas says. “We need real, hard evidence.”

  “Like what?”

  “A murder weapon. Forensic evidence. DNA. Fingerprints.”

  “How do you get that?” Kathi asks.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Lucas says, further deflating Kathi’s balloon of hope. “The body was buried thirteen or fourteen years ago. If your ex still had some of the gold bars, that would help. But you said they’re gone?”

  “Long gone,” Kathi says. The adrenaline high she was riding turns into stomach-twisting dread. “So what now? He’s going to get away with murder?”

  “I need to come to Colorado and interview him, see what he says,” Lucas explains. “Maybe he’ll slip up and tell us something we don’t know. Maybe he’ll confess.”

  “Fat chance,” Kathi says.

  “He might not see a way out.”

  “He always comes up with a new lie to explain his way out of things. That’s what he does. He tells lies like the rest of us breathe air. It comes that natural to him.”

  “I think we’ll get him,” Lucas says. “This is the first step. You’ve done a good thing coming forward, Ms. Spiars.”

  Lucas says that he’ll keep her updated on the status of the case, but in the meantime, she needs to steer clear of Eric Wright.

  “If he finds out that we’ve been talking,” Lucas says, “you could be in real danger.”

  Chapter 26

  Summer 1994

  Detective John Lucas steers his rental car through winding mountain roads. To one side, huge peaks rise up outside his window; they’re topped with snow so thick it hasn’t melted all summer. To the other side, the shoulder drops off in a steep cliff. No guardrail separates the rental’s tires from a two-hundred-foot plummet.

  The air is thin this high up, and Lucas feels a dizzying sense of vertigo. He can’t help but be relieved when the road finally drops in elevation and the land begins to flatten out. Like Denver, where his plane landed, the town of Glenwood Springs is a mile above sea level, but it feels much lower now that he’s driven through mountain passes of ten and twelve thousand feet.

  Lucas drives directly to the local police station and is greeted by the police chief, a friendly middle-aged man with a mustache and an accent suggesting he’s from Texas, not Colorado.

  “Is he here?” Lucas asks.

  “Yep,” the chief says, hitching up his belt. “He came willingly. Didn’t make a fuss. We put him in the interview room for you. He didn’t bring a lawyer with him, although we informed him that was his right.”

  The chief leads Lucas into the back corridor of the station and points down the hall to the interview room. Lucas thanks him, and before they separate, the chief stops him with a gentle hand on his arm.

  “Something you should know,” the chief says.

  Lucas waits. When he called the chief and asked permission to come into his jurisdiction to conduct an interview, he mentioned it was a murder case but gave the man no specifics. He didn’t even say that Eric Wright—whom the chief knows as Steve Marcum—was the suspect.

  Just that he was a person of interest.

  “We brought Steve in about a month ago to question him about some forged checks,” the chief says. “Between you and me, I’d say he’s as guilty as sin, but we couldn’t make anything stick. Had to let him go.”

  Lucas nods. Falsifying documents sounds just like the Eric Wright he’s come to know through the investigation.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” he tells the chief.

  “No problem. But that ain’t why I’m bringing it up,” the chief says.

  He explains that when they brought Steve in that first time, before they officially started the interview, the man made an offhand remark that got the chief’s attention.

  “He comes in and says something like, ‘What’s this all about? Is California investigating me for a homicide? Did somebody find some bones in the water?’”

  A chill climbs up Lucas’s spine. If there was any doubt in his mind before that Eric Wright was guilty, there isn’t now.

  “He seemed relieved when he realized we was just asking him about some check forgeries,” the chief says. “Sure enough, he had a story for every one of our questions. When I asked him, on the record, about those bones he mentioned, he laughed and said he was just kidding. He’s a slick one, that Steve Marcum…or whatever you said his real name is.”

  Lucas asks if the chief will sign a statement saying exactly what he just said.

  “You bet,” he says. “I’ll go write it up right no
w as you’re interviewing the guy.”

  Lucas and the chief part ways, and Lucas pauses outside the interview room. There is a one-way mirror allowing him to look in on Eric Wright, and he studies the man for a moment.

  Eric Wright appears to be in his early to midforties, his hair thin on top and sandy blond on the sides. He seems to be in shape. He was probably quite lean through most of his adulthood but seems to be putting on a little weight now that he’s crossed into the land of middle age. He’s sitting back in the chair, his long legs stretched out under the table, his arms tucked behind his head, as though he’s in a beach chair getting some sun.

  Throughout his career, Lucas has seen plenty of people waiting in interview rooms like this, and they’re almost always nervous—even the ones who don’t need to be. They hunch over in their seats, trying to make themselves small, or they fidget. Or they visibly quiver. Or sweat an inordinate amount for the temperature in the room.

  But Eric Wright looks as cool as can be.

  Relaxed.

  From where he’s standing, Lucas can see Wright’s profile, not his full face. But the detective would swear that the corner of the man’s mouth is curled up in just the hint of a smile.

  Detective Lucas takes a deep breath and enters the room to face Eric Wright—a man he knows has gotten away with murder thus far, and who looks confident that he will again.

  Chapter 27

  Eric Wright pops to his feet as soon as Detective John Lucas enters the room, his expression friendly, his demeanor cooperative. He looks like a man who doesn’t have a care in the world.

  Lucas introduces himself and asks Eric to have a seat.

  “You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Wright.”

  Eric shrugs and smiles. “I guess the secret’s out. My ex-wife must be running her mouth.”

  Lucas doesn’t acknowledge this comment. It’s important that he doesn’t reveal that he and Kathi have talked—for her sake. He hopes his poker face is as good as Eric Wright’s.

  Lucas explains that the name Eric Wright came up in an old homicide investigation and that they traced the name to his hometown of Exeter, where someone said they heard he had changed his name and was living in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

  Eric frowns as if the whole situation is confusing to him.

  “How can I help?” he says.

  “Back when you lived in Oakland, did you know a man named Lester Marks?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Not when you worked in precious metals?”

  “No.”

  “Or when you were a lieutenant with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office?”

  Eric shakes his head. “Not that I recall.”

  There are classic tells that police use in order to detect liars: the eyes darting up and to the right, excessive hand gestures, throat clearing, looking away, touching the face. But Eric Wright does none of these. He keeps his body still and his eyes fixed on Lucas. He’s good at maintaining eye contact and seeming sincere, unafraid—like a man with nothing to hide. He knows how to lie not just with his words but also with his whole body.

  Detective Lucas knows that Eric will try to lie his way out of this situation. There’s no chance of getting him to confess. But he’s hoping that Eric will slip up, either give up some clue that will help the investigation or say something that can be used to show his unreliability when the case goes to court.

  Lucas asks questions about Eric’s work in precious metals, why he quit the police force, his whereabouts in the summer of 1980. Eric is initially cooperative but finally asks, “What’s all this about?”

  Without mentioning his conversation with Lester Marks’s son or what the chief just told him—and definitely not what he learned from Kathi Spiars—Lucas explains that a note with Eric’s name and phone number on it was found in the files from Marks’s office. When investigators followed up on the lead, they discovered that Eric Wright went missing shortly after Lester Marks’s body was discovered. That prompted the police to become more interested in finding him.

  “Look,” Eric says, for the first time using his hands to emphasize his words, “it’s possible I could have talked to this guy, whatever his name was. That was my job—I talked to people about buying gold. I can’t remember all their names. I damn sure didn’t kill him, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Lucas says he’s just trying to explore every avenue of the case. He doesn’t want to let on that, at this point, Eric is the only suspect.

  “You have to understand why we’d want to talk to you,” Lucas says. “You faked your own death, Mr. Wright. Would you care to explain why?”

  “I didn’t fake my own death,” Eric says, looking defensive for the first time. “I can explain what happened, but you probably won’t believe a word of it.”

  Chapter 28

  Eric Wright leans back in his chair, as if settling in to tell a story. He reminds Detective Lucas of a storyteller sitting at a campfire, preparing to captivate his audience. He certainly has the air of someone who can tell a good story—and knows it.

  Eric says that what happened was, he went to meet a man to buy precious metals. The deal sounded too good to be true, so Eric had the foresight not to bring any of the company’s money with him.

  “I thought I’d just go and test the temperature of the water,” Eric says. “If the sale seemed legitimate, I would go back to my boss and ask for the funds.”

  “Was the contact Lester Marks?” Lucas asks.

  “No.”

  “What was the person’s name?” Lucas asks, holding his pen over his notebook, pretending he’s ready to write it down.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Then how do you know it wasn’t Lester Marks?” Lucas asks.

  Eric hesitates, as if he’s walked into a trap. “Okay,” he says, “I concede that it could have been him. I don’t know. I don’t remember the name. The name Lester Marks doesn’t sound familiar. That’s all I know.”

  Eric says that the rendezvous was in a motel in Richmond, California, in the East Bay area of San Francisco. When he arrived at the motel room, two men drew guns on him and then assaulted him when they found out Eric hadn’t brought any money.

  “They punched me, kicked me. One of them whacked me on the head with the butt of his gun. The last thing I remember is staggering out to my car and sticking the key in the ignition.”

  Eric says he next remembers waking up at a bus station in Colorado with a terrible headache and no recollection of who he was or where he lived. He had amnesia and couldn’t remember his own name. However, he somehow had an ID that said his name was Steve Marcum.

  “In the precious metals business, I used to have various fake names and IDs to go with them,” he says. “It can be dangerous when you’re dealing with gold—as I discovered myself that night. But when I came out of the blackness and found myself in Colorado, I had a big blank in my memory, so I just assumed my name was Steve Marcum. My picture was on the ID, for crying out loud.”

  “Did you have any money?” Lucas asks.

  “Not a cent.”

  “No gold bars?”

  Eric Wright’s eyes narrow, trying to read the detective. “Who said I had gold bars?”

  “Lester Marks owned gold bars that went missing after his death,” Lucas says.

  “Oh,” Eric says, shaking his head and moving on. “Where was I?”

  He claims that he started to get his memories back but by then he’d already started a life in Colorado. He’d met a woman named Kathi and didn’t want to return to his family in California.

  “Now if you talk to my ex-wife Kathi,” Eric says, “she’ll tell you that I made up some cockamamie story about working for the CIA. It’s true—I lied. But that’s because I really couldn’t remember who I was back then.”

  By the time his past came back to him clearly, Eric claims, he and Kathi were already head over heels for each other.

  “I couldn’t very well tell her
the truth,” Eric says. “If I had said, ‘Oh, by the way, I didn’t really work for the CIA—I ran out on my family,’ she would have been gone. I liked the sex too much at that point.”

  Detective Lucas isn’t surprised that Eric has brought up Kathi in order to preemptively discredit her. He speaks as though he’s confiding in Lucas, as though they’re locker-room pals. You’re a fellow man, his tone seems to suggest. You know the lengths we go to in order to score with women. The way Eric talks about his ex-wife disgusts Lucas, but the detective realizes that’s probably the point. Lucas doesn’t have to like him. He just has to believe him. And if he doesn’t believe him, at minimum Eric needs to tell a story that won’t come back to haunt him if the investigation continues.

  “She’s a looker,” Eric says.

  “You told your ex-wife you worked for the CIA?” Lucas says, trying to sound surprised by this admission to keep up the pretense that the two haven’t talked. “And she believed you?”

  “I know, it’s ridiculous,” Eric admits. “But Kathi ate it up. I told her all kinds of crazy stuff. That my parents were dead. That I killed people for the CIA. That I went to prison. It seemed like the bigger the lies I told, the crazier she was about me. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, that one.”

  She was smart enough to lead me to you, Lucas thinks.

  Chapter 29

  Kathi is sitting on her back deck, looking out over the meadow, when she hears a car pull up in the gravel lane leading to the house. Fearing, as she always does, that it might be Eric, she quickly peeks around the corner of the house to see who it is.

  A nondescript car pulls up and parks, and out steps a man in a police uniform. It’s different from the one the police in Glenwood Springs wear, beige instead of dark blue, but he’s definitely a cop.

  “May I help you?” she asks, coming around the corner.

  “Kathi Spiars?” he asks.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Detective John Lucas with the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office in California.”