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“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 theonlyone. 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 lifetogether. 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.”
