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A leery expression slipped over his rather plain features. “Yes?”
“We’re—”
“Detectives,” he broke in without even looking at the card Jonah held out. “I can tell. Is something wrong?”
Jonah didn’t bother correcting him about their professions. For the moment, “detective” was close enough. “Yes. We’re here about your wife.”
He gripped the door frame. “Where is she? Why’d she leave me? Why didn’t she ever call or come back for the rest of her stuff?”
“She couldn’t come back,” Francesca said. “She was murdered over a year ago.”
His jaw dropped. “She…what?”
“Her body was found in Dead Mule Canyon last month,” Jonah said. “It’s taken us all that time to identify her remains.”
Terrance shoved a hand in his hair, holding the long, curly locks back from his face. “No wonder I never heard from her. I thought it was all because of that last big argument. She walked out with a suitcase she’d packed right then and there, and I never saw her again. But…I never dreamed that…that she couldn’t call me.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?” Jonah asked.
“It’s been fourteen months. She never showed up for work after that, but…I thought it was because she’d left the area.”
“You mentioned an argument,” Francesca said. “What was it about?”
Drawing a deep breath, he allowed his hair to fall naturally. “She wanted us to quit our jobs and take off, see the world. We used to talk about it while we were dating, but…I thought it was a pipe dream, you know? I didn’t see how we’d ever make enough money to travel like that. But she said we’d pick up odd jobs until we could save enough to move on to the next place. She said if we didn’t leave now we’d become resigned to a life of drudgery like everyone else. She was scared to stay and I was scared to go. But I wish now that—” words failed him as tears gathered in his eyes “—that I’d had the guts to go for it the way she did. Maybe she’d still be alive.”
To give him a modicum of privacy in which to deal with his emotions, Francesca studied the floor.
“Here I’ve been kicking myself for what I said that night,” he went on. “Over and over, ever since. And praying she’d come back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked my answering machine, hoping to hear her voice. I thought she might contact me when she had her fill of adventure, if only to tell me how great it was. But I finally decided a little while ago that I had to let go of the past and move on, that she must’ve found someone else.”
When Terrance dropped his head in his hands, Jonah motioned to the couch inside. “Maybe you should sit down for a few minutes.”
Leaving the door open, Terrance crossed to the living room, where he fell onto the sofa and stared off into space.
Jonah nudged Francesca into the apartment. Other than the sofa, a chair and the weight set they’d been able to spot from the door, there wasn’t much furniture, but large amateurish paintings covered the walls.
“She did all these,” he said, following Francesca’s gaze from a large sunflower with thick globs of yellow paint on each petal to a windmill towering over blowing grass to a portrait of Terrance himself. Although Bianca hadn’t been a very good artist, each painting revealed a love of nature and an exuberance that made Francesca sad to think this life had been extinguished.
Jonah sat on the weight bench while she took the chair. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked Terrance.
“I don’t know. Her being dead feels so…unreal.” He pulled strands of his beard through his fingers. “I guess it helps to know she might’ve come back to me if she’d been capable of it, that she might’ve missed me as much as I’ve missed her. But to think she was hurt and I wasn’t there…that, in a way, I caused her death because of that stupid fight…”
“You didn’t cause it,” Francesca insisted.
“She wouldn’t have been out there alone if we hadn’t argued.” His eyes suddenly filled with anger. “Who did it? And why?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Jonah said.
The hand fingering his beard grew idle. “You don’t know?”
“No.” Francesca’s iPhone rang with a few strains of “I’ll Stand by You.” Adriana was trying to reach her. Unwilling to step outside, she silenced it instead of taking the call. “We’re hoping you can help us find the person who’s responsible.”
He spread his hands. “How? Just tell me how.”
“Have you ever heard the name Butch Vaughn?”
“Never.”
“You’re sure?”
