“I’m more than willing to look into it, but—”
“But what?”
Cutler slumped against the leather of the high-backed booth inside Tang. The sensational murder had played out fourteen floors above, in the steel-and-glass obelisk hotel known as The Grange. Tang’s brutal critique had been delivered by restaurant blogger Timothy Powers. For two decades, Powers had served as a scourge to fine dining establishments across Metro Denver, with the occasional whack at swank pompous eateries in mountain villages too. Powers was a nom de food. When the newspaper industry shrank like a boiled chicken, Powers agreed to a buyout and took up work as a PI with his given name, Wayne Furlong. But Timothy Powers never stopped writing restaurant reviews. It was his gift to the universe. One well-protected anonymous blog page. One Instagram account with 45,000 followers. To Furlong/Powers, saving the masses from overpriced and artless cuisine was as important as helping wives nail cheating husbands or, every now and then, assisting in a murder case.
In fact, Furlong/Powers at that moment was sitting in the same booth where he had dined during one of three visits he made to confirm the fact that Tang was tasteless.
“But I’m not terribly optimistic about finding something, given all the scrutiny to date.” If Cutler had video surveillance of her austere dining room, as inviting as a Turkish prison, she could have spotted Furlong’s sizable frame on repeat visits and noticed that he had sent main courses back on the first two occasions and quietly shoved the contents of meal number three into a paper bag for further postmortem of the crisis-level mélange back in his modest home kitchen. Except Cutler would have to see through a few disguises to spot the repeat customer. Thick glasses. A change of clothes. A hat. Etcetera.
“Glendale police,” said Furlong. “They brought in Denver police too. And the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. And all the reporters who—”
“Reporters.” Cutler hissed it. She sat back up. “Leaches. Nosy fuckers.”
“Well, I—”
“You can’t really think a reporter can solve a crime like this, do you?”
“Not necessarily, but asking the right questions—”
“Oh, please,” said Cutler. “That’s like a mystery writer’s wet dream.”
At fifty-two, Katy Cutler was feisty. Furlong liked her edge. But, like the food at Tang, she was overly complex. Too many bracelets on one wrist, a tattoo of a fork on the other. Severely tweezed eyebrows. Chunky mascara. One thin gold necklace weighed down by a heart-shaped emerald stone that rested on her bony sternum and dared anyone to ponder the plunge in her neckline. When she had greeted him at first, the word stork popped into his head, given her height and angularity. She had a birdlike manner of shifting her head around, looking at him from different angles.
“Whether a reporter or a PI,” said Furlong, “it seems to me that all the questions have been asked. Asked and answered, as the lawyers say. Someone is lying. Goes without saying, even though I just did.”
Furlong caught a whiff of bleachy cleanser, not one of his favorite restaurant aromas. He glanced down at the white tablecloth and noticed a faint purple smear where a blueberry had once lost its life. Tang had just opened for lunch, yet an elderly couple in a booth across the way were turning to statues while waiting for a server to greet them. Not much had changed, despite the Powers savage review, which had been titled “Junk Feed: Tang Flat.”
“Podcasts too,” said Furlong. “One seven-part series already. I mean, going to the trouble of hiring actors.”
“And another producer came sniffing around last week.” Cutler shook her head, turned her mouth down in disgust, as if she had just had a bite of Tang’s indigestible matelote, with its chewy eel. “We politely told them to take their microphone and go, well, interview themselves. Though interview might have been a different verb.”
“Noted.” Furlong smiled. “It’s been seven or eight months of relative quiet in the media, especially once they got that first-year-anniversary story out of the way. Why now?”
“I want you to find the killer. That’s all.”
“What’s your theory?”
“The only one that makes sense.”
“The only one that makes sense,” said Furlong, “except for the superb alibi?”
“That one,” said Cutler. “Tyler Hyde. Golden boy. Ken Doll of the spreadsheets, I called him. Right? Nothing else makes sense, yet of course we are bound to look elsewhere. Right? If we want closure.”
“Bit of an elusive concept,” said Furlong. “Don’t you think?”
Cutler gave it some thought. “Not so sure. This is a whole different animal.”
This involved three facts that added juicy bits to the story. One, decapitation. Two, rugby. Three, that the murder happened in the enclave of Glendale — a hole the size of one M&M candy in the fat gooey donut of Denver. Glendale was home to 5,000 residents. Denver proper, 750,000. Metro Denver, an ever-burgeoning 2.8 million.
In the early 1950s, Glendale leaders had fought and won the right to prevent being annexed by the expanding state capital. As a result, over the ensuing decades, Glendale ran with a special flair. Two strip clubs. When pot was legalized, they stayed open until midnight. Apartments galore. A singles-ish vibe. And self-proclaimed RugbyTown USA, given the fact that in the early 2000s, the city built a stadium and athletic facility devoted to the niche sport.
The city, more recently, had hired Billy Duncan as a marketing guru. His specialty was sponsorships, particularly naming rights for the stadium and corporate branding for athletic gear and stadium advertising. Duncan was murdered on his ninth extended stay at the fourteen-story Grange Hotel. He was in the process of moving from San Francisco but appeared to be in no rush to do so. Duncan’s partying lifestyle seemed like a one-man campaign to keep the Glendale economy afloat. He was a frequent visitor at both strip clubs, had managed to bed several women from each of the two spots, spent piles of cash at restaurants all over the tiny burg, and developed a carousing lifestyle with a growing circle of male friends including a few rugby players who were also known for their partying ways, all of it well-documented on Instagram. Want to party? Find Billy Duncan. Bring money.
By day, however, he was a hard-nosed shark. He delivered professional and well-prepared reports in public and private meetings with the city. He did his job. City leadership was thrilled — and were equally entertained by his wild-side exploits.
Using software that searched for irregularities, Duncan found something fishy with city revenues. The stadium complex included an extensive event and conference center, with a variety of options for large and small occasions. It was also home to a sports center that drew hundreds of workout warriors every week to a gleaming gym and a smorgasbord of classes from Zumba to yoga to indoor cycling. Duncan, unsure of where the problem was located, or how high up the organizational chart, had quietly brought his evidence and suspicions to the district attorney for Arapahoe County, Glendale’s governmental mother ship. Party boy by night, straight-arrow businessman by day.
The problems seemed to point to the person in charge of city finance, a man named Tyler Hyde. Single. Blond. Trim. And the opposite of Billy Duncan — a quiet bureaucrat. The allegations of financial irregularities, however, depended on an algorithm that analyzed actual income versus projected revenues. There were no hard facts. Then, Duncan’s grisly demise. Yet on the night of the murder, Hyde was in a long meeting online and had the recording to prove it.
The upside of cracking the Billy Duncan case was obvious — helping solve a nasty murder and improving Wayne Furlong’s reputation as a PI. The downside would mean giving Tang another chance to foist mediocre food on the masses. Sure, a murderer might go free. But how to balance one bloody night with years and years of overpriced, crummy grub?