Till Murder Do Us Part Read online

  Lucas extends his hand to shake hers, but instead Kathi rushes forward and embraces him.

  “Thank you for believing me,” she says.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Without you, we wouldn’t even be looking at Eric Wright.”

  Kathi invites Lucas in and puts a kettle of water on the stove for tea. Lucas sits with her at the kitchen table and explains that he just interviewed Eric Wright.

  “How’d that go?” she asks.

  “You were right,” Lucas says. “He lies like he breathes air.”

  “So can you arrest him?”

  Lucas says his next step is to take the case to the grand jury in San Joaquin County, which will decide if charges should be brought against Eric. The grand jury can subpoena Eric Wright and compel him to testify. Lucas cautions Kathi that this could take a while—and he needs to do more investigating before he’s ready.

  “Did you mention me in the interview?” Kathi asks.

  “I didn’t,” Lucas says, “but he did. I think he underestimates you. Although if this investigation continues, he may start to worry about what you know, so you need to be very careful.”

  Detective Lucas says that he would like the names and contact info of anyone who could corroborate anything that Eric Wright—a.k.a. Steve Marcum—did that might be incriminating.

  “Especially the gold,” Lucas says. “Do you know anyone else who ever saw the gold before he sold it off? Or do you know where he sold it?”

  Kathi says he never kept her in the loop. Every once in a while, she would sneak a peek in the toilet and see that there was one bar fewer. Eventually, she opened the toilet one day in the late 1980s and all the gold was gone.

  To her knowledge, he used the money from the gold on himself—or for extravagances like vacations they took together. The house and her business were in her name, and none of the money from the gold was used for down payments on either. It was a source of pride for Kathi that she never needed a handout from her then husband to achieve her dreams.

  “He was so hung up on me not marrying him for his money that I made sure I never benefited from it,” she says. “If anything, he leeched off me over the years. I never really thought about it that much until we were divorced, but that’s what happened. He hitched his ride to my wagon and rode it as long as he could.”

  Detective Lucas thanks her for the tea and rises to leave. Kathi walks him to his car, and before he leaves, he says, “One more thing. Did he ever mention having PTSD from his time in Vietnam?”

  Kathi shakes her head no.

  “Depression? Nightmares? Anything like that?”

  “No,” Kathi says. “Nothing bothered him. He walked through life like he was playing a game and was always on the winning team. Why?”

  Lucas says that at the end of the interview, Eric mentioned that he had post-traumatic stress disorder from Vietnam. He theorized that it had contributed to what he called “a psychotic fugue state” during his disappearance.

  “He said that after your divorce, he learned a lot about himself,” Lucas says. “But I think he was trying to manipulate the conversation so he would come across as sympathetic.”

  “It’s a scam,” Kathi says with certainty. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s trying to work some kind of angle. You don’t believe him, do you?”

  “I didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth,” Lucas assures her before climbing into his rental. “But it’s not about what I believe. It’s about what I can prove.”

  Chapter 30

  Summer 1995

  Kathi is at the desk in the salon, trying to ignore the Ace of Base song playing over the speakers and concentrate on making phone calls. Most of the calls she makes are dead ends, but she’s trying to leave no stone unturned, as they say. Eric’s parents won’t speak to her, but Kathi talked to Eric’s former employer at the precious metals company, associates from the sheriff’s office he used to work for, employees at the BART station where his car was discovered. She’s talked to all their old friends in Colorado to see if he ever slipped up and said anything relevant. She’s gone back through their old phone records from when they were married and called every number she didn’t recognize. She’s contacted practically every used-jewelry store and pawnshop in Colorado to find out if anyone remembers a man fitting Eric’s description selling gold bars.

  She needs to find out everything she can about Eric Wright.

  She needs him in jail so she can get on with her life.

  Her long-distance phone bills, both here and at home, have gone through the roof, but she doesn’t care.

  As the Ace of Base song ends and the Elton John song from that Disney cartoon about lions begins—a slight improvement, Kathi thinks—the phone rings. She quickly answers it, hoping it’s a callback.

  “I know you’re having a lot of fun playing private investigator,” says the unmistakable voice.

  The hair stands up on the back of Kathi’s neck.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “This is a small town, Kathi. You’ve been running your mouth about me, telling people that my name isn’t really Steve Marcum, that I’m dangerous.”

  It’s true that Kathi hasn’t been particularly secretive about her ex’s past. When they first separated, she kept quiet, but lately she’s been telling anyone who will listen about what a charlatan the man she used to be married to turned out to be—though most people haven’t taken her seriously. They think she’s just a scorned woman looking to smear his name. But Kathi feels it’s her duty to warn people.

  “Eric,” she says, “you need to leave me alone. Stay out of my life.”

  “I swear to God, Kathi, if you don’t stop this, you’ll be sorry.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she says. “What are you going to do?”

  There’s a long pause, and Kathi wonders if he’s tempted to threaten to do to her what he did to that guy in 1980. Instead he says, “Remember that night when you first discovered the name Eric Wright? I could have ended you right there. Just turned out the lights.”

  “You come anywhere near me, and I’ll—”

  “I don’t have to come near you,” Eric says. “Remember that deer we had mounted in the living room? I shot that at four hundred yards. Hunting season’s coming up. You live next to the forest. I’d hate for there to be an accident.”

  “I’m calling the police,” Kathi says, her voice hoarse with terror.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “See who they believe. Everyone here thinks you’re some crazy bitch who can’t move on with her life.”

  Kathi doesn’t answer.

  “If you leave me alone,” Eric says, his voice suddenly more tender, almost caring, “I’ll leave you alone. Understand?”

  He waits for her to respond. She wants to say something tough, to sound strong, confident. But she’s afraid her voice will come out timid and weak.

  “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” he says, and hangs up.

  Kathi sits there, her body shaking.

  “Everything okay?” one of her stylists asks as she uses a broom to sweep up the hair on the floor.

  Kathi takes a deep breath and tells her that yes, everything is fine. Then she picks up the telephone and resumes her investigation.

  Chapter 31

  Fall 1995

  Kathi is raking her backyard, doing some overdue maintenance on the lawn. She’s trying to pile the leaves onto a tarp so she can drag them away. She’s breathing heavily from working in the cold. Each exhalation comes out in a visible white cloud.

  She takes an exasperated breath and looks around at how much more work needs to be done.

  She’s been neglecting everything about her home lately. The lawn is thick with pine needles and leaves. Branches lie strewn about from the last windstorm. The rosebushes needed to get trimmed this summer but she never got around to it. Her ex used to help her with this stuff; now he’s the reason she’s fallen so behind on it. She uses all her free time to dig into his
past. It’s a time- and energy-consuming endeavor, and the effort she’s put into it has taken its toll on her.

  The house isn’t the only thing that needs maintenance. Business at the salon is suffering because she’s been letting the place run on autopilot.

  But she can’t stop.

  All Kathi thinks about is the investigation. She can now understand why police work takes so long. It’s been more than a year since Detective Lucas came to Colorado to interview Eric, yet he says he still doesn’t have enough to take the case to a grand jury.

  She’d be more frustrated with him if she wasn’t seeing firsthand just how hard it is to conduct an investigation. She scours newspapers, makes phone calls, flies to California to interview people who knew Eric. She tracks down old police reports to search for other crimes that might be associated with him. Almost every road is a dead end, but once in a while, she’ll find a nugget of information that will open a new avenue of inquiry. It’s all she can do not to drop the rake right now and go back inside to keep looking.

  Come on, she tells herself. These leaves won’t rake themselves.

  As she bends over and drags the rake through the brown grass, the loud crack of a rifle report makes her jump. Her heart pounds in her chest, and her limbs fill with adrenaline.

  It’s not unusual to hear gunshots—it’s that time of year—but she can’t recall ever hearing one so close to the house.

  She looks out into the forest, trying to spot the orange of a hunter’s vest. Then, as if floodgates are opening, more gunshots split the air in rapid succession. She flinches and ducks her head.

  A high-speed whirring noise zips over her head, like a bumblebee flying a hundred miles an hour.

  Oh, my God, she thinks. That was a bullet!

  Another one flies just a few feet over her head.

  “Stop shooting!” she screams, waving her arms in the direction she assumes the shots are coming from. “Stop!”

  The shooting ceases, and in the silence afterward, Kathi hears only her own panicked breathing. She stares out at the meadow behind her house and into the woods beyond.

  There is no sound.

  No movement.

  “There’s a person here!” she yells. “Don’t shoot anymore, asshole!”

  She takes a cursory look at her house to make sure none of the bullets have hit it. Then she heads inside to calm her nerves. She has a drink of water and starts pacing around the house.

  She wants to believe the bullets were coming from someone, far out in the woods, unaware that a house was along the trajectory of his shots. But now that she has time to really think about it, she can’t believe it.

  She’s no expert on guns, but these shots seemed loud enough to have been fired within close proximity to the house. And no hunter actually interested in hitting what he was aiming at would fill the air full of lead like that.

  She remembers Eric threatening her about not needing to get close to cause “an accident.” Her eyes move toward the deer mount. After the separation, Eric didn’t want his hunting trophy and she never bothered to take it off the wall. But she stares at the empty space underneath the deer head.

  When he moved out, Eric did take his rifle.

  Chapter 32

  San Joaquin County, California

  Fall 1997

  Detective John Lucas steps into the courtroom, where the grand jury has convened. The judge’s chair sits empty, but the jury box is filled. Lucas is sworn in by the bailiff and takes a seat in the witness box. This is not his first time testifying in a courtroom, nor his first time testifying before a grand jury, but for some reason he feels more nervous than usual.

  The case is old and it’s strange, so he’s not sure what the grand jury will make of it. But more than that, Lucas feels that what he’s doing is important. Eric Wright has gotten away with his crimes for far too long.

  It’s time to bring him to justice.

  Lucas tells the whole story of Eric Wright—everything he knows about him, anyway. He constructs a narrative based on all the information he has. He doesn’t try to spin the facts. There are enough pieces of evidence—the scrap of paper, the gold bars, the statements from Kathi Spiars and Lester Marks’s son—for him to create a likely narrative of Wright’s actions and motives.

  As he talks, Lucas studies the members of the grand jury. Some seem skeptical. Others look surprised. All are riveted by the story—they’ve never heard any criminal case quite like this.

  Faked his own death?

  Stole gold?

  The CIA?

  And she believed him?

  “It sounds like the plot of a movie,” the foreman says finally.

  Lucas can’t argue with that.

  The foreman turns to the bailiff and asks if Eric Wright has been subpoenaed. The bailiff informs him that a subpoena was delivered but that Mr. Wright hasn’t arrived at the courthouse yet.

  “Do we have any idea if he’s on his way?”

  The bailiff shakes his head no. Then all eyes from the jury turn toward Lucas, every member registering what this might imply.

  “Excuse me,” Lucas says. “I need to make a phone call.”

  Chapter 33

  Kathi Spiars is changing a display in the salon’s front window, rearranging bottles of shampoo and humming along with the new Jewel song playing on the speakers. She’s in a good mood, knowing that the grand jury in California is finally hearing the case.

  Years have passed since she first called Detective Lucas, and two alternating concerns have occupied her life since. The first is an obsession with finding out everything Eric Wright did, every ounce of evidence that might be used to prove he is a thief and a murderer. The second concern is an all-consuming fear. She’s been gripped with crippling anxiety that Eric Wright will come after her to put an end to her search for the truth. Despite the fact that she changed her locks long ago and installed an alarm system, Kathi still has trouble sleeping at night, afraid that she’ll wake up to his hands on her throat. Whenever she tries to sit peacefully on her back deck, she fears bullets flying across the meadow.

  She’s thought many times about selling her house and her business and leaving Glenwood Springs. But now that the case is going to the grand jury, she hopes that won’t be necessary.

  Maybe her days of being afraid are almost over.

  Detective Lucas told her it would be unlikely that the jury would arrive at a decision for at least a few days. So when the phone rings, Kathi lets the stylist who’s flipping through a magazine at the front desk answer the call.

  “Kathi, it’s for you,” the stylist calls out after a few seconds. “Some cop from California.”

  Kathi tries not to feel anxious about the call. He’s just calling to give me an update, she tells herself.

  “How did it go?” she says when she has the phone, trying not to sound too nervous.

  “Well, I’ve got good news, bad news, and really bad news.”

  Kathi’s heart sinks. “What do you mean really bad news?”

  “Eric Wright’s in the wind,” he says.

  “In the wind?” Kathi says, unfamiliar with the expression.

  “We think he’s run off,” Lucas says. “Again.”

  Kathi feels ill. Her legs go weak, and she has to sit in order to keep from collapsing. Her shaking hands struggle to hold the phone to her ear.

  When Eric Wright didn’t show up at the grand jury hearing, Detective Lucas called the Glenwood Springs Police. They went to his residence and found his apartment cleared out. They checked with his landlord, who said Eric hadn’t been there for the past two weeks. Two weeks ago would’ve been about the time he received the court summons.

  “Goddamn it,” Kathi mutters, tears springing to her eyes.

  He’s going to get away with it, she thinks. That crazy lying maniac is going to get away with murder.

  “It’s not all bad news,” Lucas says.

  “Did they issue an indictment?” Kathi says, hopeful for at leas
t a silver lining.

  “No,” Lucas says. “That’s the other bad news. The grand jury didn’t think there was enough evidence to pursue charges. But they did say that they thought I was onto something. They encouraged me to keep digging.”

  Kathi struggles to see this as a silver lining.

  “I’ve been working on this thing in my spare time,” Lucas explains. “Now I can actually open the investigation. We can interview anyone who ever met Eric Wright or Steve Marcum. We’ll find more evidence.”

  Kathi is deflated. “What does it matter?” she asks. “He’s gone. Hell, he could be in Canada by now.”

  “He got away before because no one was looking for him,” Lucas says. “Once I can issue an arrest warrant, he’ll find it a lot harder to keep a low profile. We’ll get him. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “How much time?” Kathi says, unable to keep her tears at bay. “It’s already been three years.” It’s been years already, yet Lucas is saying that the investigation is only now going to officially begin?

  Lucas apologizes for the fact that the wheels of justice turn so slowly. As always, before he hangs up, he encourages her to be careful.

  “You okay, Kathi?” one of her stylists asks when she hangs up the phone, lost in thought, remembering Eric Wright’s hand around her throat, pushing her against the refrigerator. The look on his face as he was seconds away from killing her.

  Kathi’s voice cracks when she says, “I was thinking it’s time for me to leave Glenwood Springs.” She turns to her employee. “Know anyone who wants to buy a salon?”

  Chapter 34

  December 1997

  Kathi stands on her back deck—or what used to be her back deck; the sale of the home has just been finalized—and looks out over the meadow one last time. Part of her is sad to leave this house. But because she shared it with Eric, part of her is also glad to say good-bye to it.

  She’ll miss this view, though. That’s for sure.