Once more, the two agents fell silent. “Detective Brown tells me the police will release the scene tomorrow. You should be able to move back home the next day.”

  “Oh, I’m not going back there,” he said. “I’ll never go back to that house. I’ll always smell that smell.”

  ***

  It was nine o’clock when the detectives dropped the three of them off at their hotel. It wasn’t as spartan as Faith expected, given the Boss’s unhappiness with their liberal use of the Field Office’s expense account. It wasn’t palatial by any means, but it was comfortable enough, and the Wi-Fi connection was strong, which was more important than comfort anyway.

  They reviewed the files while Turk ate some of the food Faith had packed for him.

  “Well,” Michael said, “once more, there doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two victims other than that they were both married women who were home alone.”

  “That’s probably important,” Faith said. “It’s more than we had with Greenwood at first.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still not much,” Michael said.

  “I’m interested in the wedding rings,” Faith said. “If this killer is taking wedding rings, then he clearly has a type.”

  “What, married women between thirty and forty-five?” Michael said. “That doesn’t really narrow it down.”

  “Baby steps, Michael,” Faith reminded him. Michael was notoriously impatient, especially at the start of a case when things moved slowly.

  “Yeah, I know,” he groused. “So, what’s our next baby step?”

  “We talk to Mr. Navarro,” Faith replied.

  “Tonight?”

  Faith nearly said yes, then stopped. She called Derek at the number he left on his card. “Chapman,” he answered on the first ring.

  “Derek, it’s Faith,” she said. “Do you have eyes on Mr. Navarro?”

  “Not at the moment,” he said. “Is he a suspect?”

  “If he’s at home, then maybe,” she said. “If he’s not home, then definitely. Unless you’ve already ruled him out.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Gave him the don’t leave town speech until we can follow up on his alibi.”

  “What alibi is that?” she asked.

  “Survivalist trip,” he said, “North Vancouver Island. I guess he saw it on a TV show and wanted to try his luck.”

  “Hmm,” Faith said. “I’m guessing he doesn’t have proof he was there.”

  “His GPS,” Derek answered, “but that can be tampered with. Cybercrimes is looking at it.”

  “Got it. Can you have uniforms make sure he’s home?”

  “I’ll do you one better,” he said. “I’ll go myself and stake out the place. If he’s not there, or if he leaves, I’ll call you.”

  “And they said you were just a pretty face,” Faith said with a smile.

  Derek laughed and said, “You two get some rest. I’ll get the grizzly bear to drop off your vehicle in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Faith said.

  She hung up and said, “It’s throwing spaghetti at the wall, but maybe we’ll get lucky. Besides, I’m tired as hell.”

  “Me too,” Michael said. “In fact, I’m going to go to bed. Wake me up if you need me.”

  Faith headed to bed herself, but she lay awake a long time before heading to bed. She thought of Benjamin’s face when he talked about the smell. It brought up an unpleasant memory of the smell of her own blood as Jethro Trammell severed the tendons in her knee.

  Let’s see you bleed, little girl.

  Eventually, of course, her eyes had to close. Perhaps because the memory of the smell was still fresh in her mind, her sleep was troubled and fraught once more with nightmares. These nightmares were the same as all of her other nightmares with one difference.

  In these nightmares, Jethro wore a wedding ring.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I see the kid’s still here. I guess that means the husband didn’t run.”

  Travis spoke of Derek with an almost fatherly affection. Faith had to smile. Derek was older than she was and less than ten years younger than Travis, but he spoke of him as though he were his son. She glanced over at Michael and smiled. It was good to be close with your partner. Some believed it was dangerous to develop affection for someone you worked with, but Faith didn’t believe that. You worked better with someone you liked than someone you didn’t.

  They were at Katherine Navarro’s house. Travis was driving the vehicle the Department was loaning the two agents, and since he didn’t have his own car, Faith and Michael had given him a ride to the house to meet Derek.

  Travis left with Derek, promising to be available if they needed him. Faith, Michael, and Turk proceeded up the front steps and knocked on the door.

  Gary Navarro answered right away. He was clean and dressed and appeared to be expecting the agents, which he confirmed when he said, “Good morning. You must be the FBI.”

  “That’s us,” Faith said, “I’m Special Agent Faith Bold, and this is Special Agent Michael Prince. May we come in?”

  “Of course,” Gary said, standing aside and allowing the agents to pass.

  The first thing Faith noticed when they entered was the lack of smell. That didn’t surprise her since the police had already released the scene, but the second thing she observed was more interesting.

  Benjamin Montgomery was a broken man. He carried a weight of grief which Faith knew would never fully leave him. Gary Navarro carried no such weight. He didn’t seem happy or relieved, emotions which Faith would have associated with guilt, but he seemed neutral about the whole thing, far more accepting than Benjamin was. She knew that he could simply be past the initial flush of grief and decided to reserve judgment until after she questioned him.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Navarro,” she said.

  “Please, call me Gary,” he said.

  “Gary,” Faith said, “we were hoping to ask you a few questions.”

  “Of course,” he said, “would you like some coffee? Water?”

  “No thank you,” Faith said.

  He shrugged and led them to the living room, gesturing for them to sit on the couch. They did, and he sat opposite them on a massage chair that Faith speculated cost as much as a new economy car. Everything in the house spoke of wealth. Not extreme wealth, but comfortable wealth, much like the residents of the Cedar Hills neighborhood from their previous case.

  “Gary,” Faith said, “can you please tell me where you were the night your wife was murdered?”

  “Driving home,” he said. “I got there three to five hours after she died according to the officers, so that would put me somewhere around Kingman.”

  “Any reason you didn’t fly?” Michael asked.

  “I needed room for my gear,” he said. “I was on a solo trip to North Vancouver Island.” He smiled. “I guess I didn’t trust myself to go out there with nothing like the guys on TV.”

  “Probably wise,” Michael said. “You don’t have helicopters waiting to pull you out.”

  “No sir,” Gary said. “You a fan of the show?”

  “Can’t say that I am,” Michael replied.

  “Gary, can you describe what you came home to?”

  His smile faded, and Faith saw the first sign of real grief. “The front door was unlocked. That was the first clue that something was wrong. Katherine always left the door locked, even when she was home.”

  “Was there any damage to the door?” Michael asked.

  “No, but our bedroom window was broken. I realized that second. That’s when I knew someone had broken in.”

  “Were you concerned for your wife’s safety at that point?” Faith asked.

  “Honestly, no,” he said. “I assumed she was at her lover’s house.”

  Michael lifted an eyebrow.

  “She was cheating on you?” Faith asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Gary said. “I found emails back and forth between her and a guy named Antonio. Good-looking guy. Very big, if you know what I mean. I can see why she liked him.”

  “What did Katherine say when you confronted her?” Faith asked.

  “I didn’t confront her,” he said. “I planned to divorce her, and my lawyer advised me not to confront her until we filed.”

  “Tell me about finding her body,” Faith said, “and we’ll get back to the affair.”

  “Yeah,” Gary said, “well, I saw the open window, then looked down and there she was.” Another flash of grief crossed his face. “She was torn up badly. Have you seen the pictures?”

  “We’ve seen them,” Michael answered.

  “Well, then you know,” Gary said. “I saw her and immediately called the police.”

  “What were your feelings when you saw her like that?” Faith asked.

  He shrugged. “Anger, grief, frustration.”

  “Why frustration?”

  His lips thinned slightly. “Have you ever been cheated on, Special Agent?”

  Faith shook her head. Michael, she noticed, nodded slowly. She raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t known that about him.

  “Well, then you know,” Gary said, nodding at Michael.

  “Tell me anyway,” Michael said.

  Gary sighed and, for the first time, showed the grief that Faith would have expected from a man who just lost his wife. “You meet someone, and you fall in love. They’re perfect. They’re everything you want them to be, everything you imagine them to be. You tell yourself that you’ve finally found your someone, and you make yourself believe it. Things are wonderful at first. For a long time, even. You can’t imagine a way you could ever be happier.

  “Then things change. The texts and phone calls throughout the day dwindle. You come home, and they’re not excited to see you anymore. They stop asking how your day was. You ask how theirs is, and they give you one-word answers. You go out every now and then, and sometimes things are good for a moment or two, but it’s only for a moment.

  “You keep going, though. You keep going because she’s it. She’s the one. She’s the only one. You love her, and you can’t imagine not loving her. Even in the dark moments when you examine your own feelings and can’t find the spark you used to have, you tell yourself you love her.

  “Eventually, you don’t believe it anymore, but you tell yourself you do because you have to. You have to believe that you still love her because you’ve invested your entire life into the marriage. You’ve given everything you have. You’ve structured everything around her and your life together. You can’t admit that it’s over because it can’t be over. She’s the one, it can’t be over.

  “Then one day, it is. One day, you open your internet browser and see a picture of a naked man on your wife’s email with a caption that says, ‘All for you, baby.’”

  He laughed bitterly. “And you still don’t believe it. Not right away. Not until you open more emails and see that your wife has shown Antonio as much as he’s shown her.”

  “Antonio?” Faith interrupted. “Tell me about him.”

  “That’s all I know,” he said. “He’s hot, in shape, has a nice you-know-what, and my wife was sleeping with him.”

  “Where did she meet him?”

  “I don’t know,” Gary said. “I tried to find out, but I could never find more than pictures and a first name. That and a lot of banter back and forth about how lousy I am in bed.”

  “Did she spend significant time outside of the house?” Faith asked. “Where did she work?”

  “She didn’t work. She went to the gym four times a week. Girls’ nights on weekends. Lunches throughout the week. As long as she could get away from me, she was game.”

  “I don’t mean to step all over your grief,” Michael said, “but everything you’ve just told us sounds a lot like motive. You mind helping us understand why we shouldn’t think that?”

  “Sure,” Gary said, “I didn’t want to kill Katherine. I wanted to leave her. I wanted to embarrass her in court and in front of our friends and families. I wanted everyone to know exactly what she was and why she lost me. I wanted her to get nothing from me, and she wouldn’t have. I wanted to watch her struggle and refuse to help her. I wanted her to realize what a mistake she made leaving me. I didn’t want her to die.”

  “The police are having difficulty confirming your alibi,” Faith said. “Can you see why that might make us suspicious?”

  “Of course,” he said, “and I can’t think of anything I can do to make that easier for you. I’m just going to sit here and cooperate until someone tells me I’m off the hook. Other than that,” he lifted his hands and let them drop, “not much more I can do.”

  “You’ll have to do better,” Faith said, “because honestly, I’m a half-step away from taking you in right now.”

  Michael’s phone rang then. He glanced at it, then answered. Faith looked at him, and he lifted a finger as he listened. After a moment, he sighed. “All right. Thank you.”

  He hung up and said, “They cracked the GPS. It wasn’t tampered with. Mr. Navarro really was on North Vancouver Island for two weeks. He arrived home late the night of his wife’s murder.”

  “How late?” Faith asked.

  “Too late,” Michael said.

  She nodded and turned back to Gary. “Well,” she said, “it looks like you weren’t lying to us.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said with a touch of sarcasm.

  Faith let the jibe go unanswered. “Can you tell me who else might have wanted to hurt your wife?”

  Gary let the implied slight go as well. “Maybe she had someone else on the side. Maybe Antonio didn’t like that. Maybe she wouldn’t leave me, and Antonio didn’t like that either.”

  “Besides Antonio,” Michael said, “who else might have wanted to hurt her?”

  “Hell if I know,” Gary said. “I found out about her and Antonio months ago. I haven’t really been involved in her life since then.”

  “What about before?” Faith asked.

  He shook his head. “Everyone loved her. I was the lucky one. Everyone told both of us that. She was pretty and nice and amazing, and I was the dumpy guy who got lucky. I used to agree with them.”

  Faith and Michael shared a glance. Faith looked at Turk and said, “Turk, find him.”

  The dog stood and trotted to Gary. Gary tensed, but relaxed when Turk only briefly looked him over, then trotted to the bedroom. They followed him and found him standing in front of the closet.

  Faith opened the closet and looked inside. It was bare.

  “The cops emptied it out,” Gary explained. “Evidence. I haven’t been very motivated to fill it again.”

  Faith sighed. “We’ll be in touch, Mr. Navarro. For now, I’d appreciate it if you remained in the area.”

  “Will do,” Gary said. “Not that you care, but I wasn’t a fan of roughing it after all. I think I just needed some time away from her. I have all the time in the world now.”

  Michael and Faith didn’t answer. The three of them left the room and headed for the door. They stopped when Gary spoke.

  “I loved her,” he said. “I really did. I still do a little, I guess. I just hold onto the anger because it’s easier. I just … I keep hoping I’ll wake up, and it’ll be ten years ago, and she and I will be happy and in love again. I just …”

  He didn’t finish. Faith spared one last backward glance and saw the anger was gone. Only the grief remained.

  ***

  Back at the hotel, they compared notes.

  “Well, we have a suspect now,” Michael said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far yet,” Faith said. “Let’s say person of interest.”

  Michael shrugged. “Potato, potahto. Let’s look up this Antonio character.”

  “It has to be someone she interacts with on a regular basis. One-night stands happen with strangers, but long-term affairs are conducted with people the cheater knows.”

  A look crossed Michael’s face, and Faith knew he was thinking about his own affair. She took a breath and said, “Let’s see if we can find a connection between Amanda and Katherine. Maybe they went to the same gym.”

  “I’ll call them.” Michael made the call, and after a brief conversation, he smiled. “Thank you,” he said, “Thank you very much. Hey, while I have you on the phone, do you have an employee by the name of Antonio?”

  A moment later, he said, “Thank you. Is he working today?”

  Another pause. “Ah, I understand. Well, thank you anyway.”

  He hung up. “Both Katherine and Amanda had memberships at the gym, and they do have an employee named Antonio, a personal trainer. Evidently, he’s quite popular.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Faith said drily.

  “Well, they won’t give me a home address, and they won’t confirm his schedule, but I’ll bet he’s probably there. Either way, we should check out the gym and see what we can see.”

  “I agree,” Faith said. “Turk, come on, boy. We have work to do.”

  Turk leapt up from where he sat watching a cartoon about a giant red dog. He trotted over to Faith, and she scratched him behind his ear.

  They headed for the gym. As they drove, Faith glanced at Michael and saw the same look on his face he wore when they discussed Katherine’s affair. She knew what he was thinking. Katherine was cheating on her husband but wouldn’t leave him. Ellie was cheating on her husband, but would she also refuse to leave him?

  You tell yourself that you’ve finally found your someone, and you make yourself believe it.

  Like so many things in life, that only works until it doesn’t.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He tapped his finger on his steering wheel as he stared at the house across the street. His eyes fell to his ring finger, still bare. His fingers were long and slender, or at least he thought so, but neither of the rings he had taken fit, not even past the first knuckle.

  That infuriated him. Why did they deserve to have such pretty things? They hadn’t earned them. They had scorned the marriages that gave them those rings. He hadn’t scorned his marriage. He had remained faithful. Why should the cheaters of the world get to wear their trinkets, but he couldn’t?