– dead. Sons – missing. And she just used the present tense.
‘I think my boys are still alive,’ said Catherine, as if she was reading Ren’s mind.
Ren could sense Catherine Sarvas’ rising panic. She had just revealed her terrible secret to a stranger and had heard for the first time how her story sounded out loud. Catherine Sarvas’ surge of courage had hit its peak and was starting to waver. She was like a bird paused in mid-flight.
‘Please, can you help me?’
Ren paused. ‘Mrs Sarvas, I am so sorry to hear what you’ve been through. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. And we will do everything we can to apprehend this man.’
‘And my boys?’ said Catherine. ‘My children. The rape doesn’t even seem important compared to getting my boys back.’
‘Are you happy to make a full statement? Would it be easier for now to get the statement your husband made to El Paso PD?’
‘I can talk now,’ said Catherine. ‘I can talk to you. I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m not comfortable going to El Paso PD.’ She paused. ‘I think they think that Luke and Michael had something to do with Gregory’s death …’
‘I’ll go through everything they’ve got.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It was very brave of you to call,’ said Ren.
‘What have I got to lose?’ said Catherine. ‘But you’ve been very kind, thank you. You made it easier.’
I have no idea how.
‘Can we still do this over the phone?’
‘Yes,’ said Ren. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’
‘OK.’
Thirty minutes later, Ren put down the phone. She turned to her computer and read ten different articles on Gregory Sarvas’ murder. The lead investigator was a man called Kenny Dade from El Paso PD. Ren called him and asked him to email her everything he had on the Sarvas family.
She pushed back from her desk and shouted out to the rest of the team.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I just got something on Erubiel Diaz.’
Colin put down his phone. ‘And I got a sighting on our number two, Francis Gartman: around midnight last night, waving a gun at a bar in Five Points.’
‘Any sign of Natalie Osgood?’ said Ren.
‘He was alone,’ said Colin.
‘And Erubiel Diaz?’ said Cliff, turning to Ren.
Ren let out a breath. She picked up her notes and recounted the harrowing details of Catherine Sarvas’ violation, the pages and pages of notes on what Erubiel Diaz did to a kind, gentle, mother-of-two in the walled-off courtyard of her quiet suburban home.
A Denver winter stretched on for months and March was its snowiest. Blizzards whipped up out of nowhere, plans were ruined or stalled or put to bed under a blanket of snow. But it could make everything beautiful. And for a place like Mardyke Street, lined with hundred-year-old homes and towering oaks, a thick layer of snow, glowing under the streetlights, created a special kind of magic.
Ren pulled up outside Annie Lowell’s house. It was eight p.m., she had taken a break from the office. There were appointments you could bend or break, but calling on a beloved eighty-year-old woman was sacred.
Annie welcomed Ren with a hug that brought a rush of memories from a time when their height difference went the other way. Annie was five feet tall; Ren was five seven.
Everything about Annie Lowell was warm and pastel-colored and soft-focus.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you before now,’ said Ren.
‘Sweetheart, do not give that a second thought,’ said Annie.
‘Thank you,’ said Ren. ‘I am so honored you asked me to do this. The motel is killing me.’
Ren took in the house: a William Lang, designed in the late 1800s. One of Denver’s most famous architects, he had built the homes of the rich and famous until the Silver Crash swept their wealth away. Lang fell from such a height that he never recovered and died a pauper, a thousand miles from the city where he had made such a mark.
Annie led her into the formal living room and sat on the hardbacked sofa with her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands in her lap. Ren smiled.
What a lady. And what an uncomfortable sofa.
Annie had bought the tumble-down house and restored it with money from a life insurance policy she didn’t even know her late husband had. She had been widowed as long as Ren had known her and in all that time she had never looked at another man. On her ring finger were the same three beautiful rings she had always worn – engagement, wedding and eternity.
‘Did you know that this home was Edward’s last gift to me?’ said Annie. ‘I feel as though he led me right to this door. In the jacket pocket he was wearing when he died, there was a little ticket for a yellow tie he had left at the laundry. I loved that yellow tie, so I went to pick it up. I know that sounds a little silly, but I didn’t want to leave it there. On my way back to the house we had been living in, I took a wrong turn and I ended up outside here.’ She stared off into the past. ‘It looked as broken as my heart.’
‘I never knew all this.’
‘I think messages are around us every day – you just have to be open to them.’
‘I must have been sending one out to you from my motel room,’ said Ren.
Annie smiled. Her gaze wandered to a spot on the wall opposite them.
‘Oh my goodness,’ said Ren, getting up and walking over to the faded photo. It was Ren, her parents and her three older brothers, Matt, Beau and Jay.
‘You must have been five years old there,’ said Annie. ‘Look at you.’
‘Look at the boys,’ said Ren. ‘All sandy brown like Dad. And then me. Do you know, when I was in school, the kids used to tease me. Not in a bad way – it was funny. They’d say, “So … your mother obviously had a visit from the mailman – Big Chief Little Stamps.”’ She pointed to her mother in the photo. ‘I mean, even Mom hasn’t really got my eyes.’
Ren was an ethnic mystery to most. She had passed for Hispanic, Italian and French. But in the shape of her striking brown eyes, the one heritage no one could deny was Native American – from a distant Iroquois past somewhere on her mother’s side.
‘You were such a cutie,’ said Annie, ‘and those boys adored … adore you.’ She squeezed Ren’s hand.
‘We always loved coming here.’
