she protested, ducking away. “You’ll get my hair all chalky.”
“Lo siento,” he apologized. “What are you up to now, twenty miles a day?”
“Five. Well, sometimes seven. All on dirt trails to protect my knees. Coach Tania says the climbing-running combo is good—upper body, lower body.”
“Sounds like you’re totally dialed in, as per usual. All that’s left, it would seem, is for you to take over the world and dial things in for everybody else on the planet, too.”
Chuck crossed the room to his soft-sided gear duffle. The navy bag rested on the floor next to Rosie’s purple duffle and Carmelita’s burgundy climbing-team bag. He toweled the chalk off his hands, pulled his fleece top over his head, and changed from climbing shoes into sneakers. He retrieved his phone from the bag. Its screen lit up with text messages the instant he turned it on.
WHAT IS HAPPENING AT YOUR PLACE??? read the most recent text, from Beatrice Roberts, the elderly widow who lived next door to the house Chuck had picked up in Durango’s historic Grid district a decade ago, several years before marrying Janelle Ortega, the then-single mother to Carmelita and Rosie, after a whirlwind romance.
He scanned the other texts in backward time order.
The second-most recent: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.
Again, minutes earlier: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.
Ten minutes before that, an initial message from Beatrice: Chuck are you there? Do you know anything about the sirens?
Shoving his phone into the pocket of his climbing sweats and waving for the girls to follow, Chuck sprinted for the parking lot.
* * *
He sped south on Main Avenue minutes later, hands locked on the wheel of his big, blocky, Bender Archaeological crew-cab pickup truck. Carmelita sat opposite him in the front seat. Rosie hunched forward on the rear bench seat behind
Carmelita, peering past her sister’s shoulder. It was midday, the second Saturday in October, the cloudless sky brilliant blue, the temperature edging into the low seventies, the leaves on the cottonwoods lining the primary thoroughfare through town golden yellow.
“What’s going on?” Carmelita demanded as Chuck blasted through a caution light well above the speed limit.
“We’re about to find out,” he said through gritted teeth.
Turning off Main into the Grid neighborhood, he slung the pickup around tight corners, left, right, left again.
“Whoo-hoo!” Rosie cheered from the rear seat, flopping from side to side with the swerving truck.
Chuck slid around a final corner and roared onto their block. Several black-and-white Durango Police Department sport-utility vehicles crowded the street ahead. The police SUVs were parked at haphazard angles in front of the house, their bar lights flashing.
Chuck slammed the truck to a stop in the middle of the street, hopped out, and ran for the house.
Janelle had left home at five that morning for a fill-in paramedic shift with the Durango Fire and Rescue Department, taking the place of a full-timer who needed the day off. Her shift wasn’t over yet—but what if she’d returned home for some unknown reason while he and the girls were at the climbing gym?
He charged up the sidewalk. A twenty-something police officer in uniform blues, brass badge gleaming on her chest, stepped off the covered front porch of the house. The officer’s skin was the color of mocha, her dark brown eyes lined with black makeup.
“Slow down,” she warned Chuck, raising her left hand as she crossed the front yard. Her right hand hovered above the pistol holstered at her waist.
Inscribed on a tag beneath her badge, her last name, Anand, identified her as East Indian, an anomaly among Durango’s mostly white citizenry interspersed with Latinos and Native Americans.
“This is my house,” Chuck said as he reached her on the sidewalk, aiming his chin at the one-and-a-half-story brick Victorian behind the young police officer. His throat was tight, his breath constricted. “My wife.”
“You’re Mr. Bender?”
“Yes.”
“ID.”
“What?”
“I need to see some identification.”
He slapped his hands to the side pockets of his sweats. “I left my wallet in my bag in the truck.”
“You’ll have to go get it.”
“Not a chance.” Chuck shoved his way past the officer.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, following him.
He yanked his phone from his pocket. Its screen glowed with the texts from the police department. He waved it behind him at her as he walked. “I came as soon as I saw these.”
She huffed as she trailed him across the front yard. When he neared the porch, she said, “Not that way. Around back.”
Changing course, Chuck put his shoulder to the faded wooden gate at the side of the house, slamming it open and striding along the narrow passage beside the head-high wooden fence separating the house from Beatrice’s house next door.
“What can you tell me?” Chuck demanded over his shoulder to the officer.
“I’m on perimeter.” She jogged to keep up. “You’ll have to talk to the others.”
They reached the back of the house. A single-car garage filled one corner of the compact backyard. In the other corner, the branches of an apple tree extended over a fallow, raised-bed garden.
Between the garage and garden bed, the gate that led through the back fence to the rear alley stood open. On the cracked asphalt of the alleyway, framed by the open gate and covered by a white sheet, lay what was, based on its shape, clearly a human body.
Chuck came up short in the middle of the yard, staring through the gate.
The body lay on its back. Red stains spotted the sheet, which stretched over the human form from head to toe. A sizable stomach pressed the sheet upward at the middle.
Chuck quaked at the sight of the corpse, his legs growing weak with a combination of relief and horror. The dead body was not Janelle; it did not have her slender frame. But who was it?
He resumed walking toward the back gate, his eyes locked on the body. A uniformed police officer stepped from the alley into the yard and swung the gate closed behind her, blocking his view.
The officer was Sandra Kingsley. Like Chuck, she was in her mid-forties. She was tall and willowy, her sandy brown hair falling from her Durango Police Department ball cap to her chin in a blunt-cut bob. “It’s okay, Chuck,” she said, stopping in front of him. “It’s not her.”
“Who
