The apartment is small but quite nice, recent construction with a hardwood entry, slate-colored tile on the kitchen floor, granite counters and stainless sinks, completely at odds with the couple’s furniture, which I’m guessing is a mix of family hand-me-downs and big-box economy buys selected with an eye to comfort, not looks. The kind of place Charlotte would turn her nose up at, but exactly what I’d expect, given what I know about the Thomsons’ history. I’m guessing this is where Stephanie landed after the divorce, and Joe moved some of his things in when they remarried.
At the back of the hallway there’s a bedroom and bath on one side and a small home office on the other. I step into the office, noting a dusty-screened computer and a stack of printouts which turn out to be real estate listings annotated in loopy, feminine handwriting. In the corner, a half-open closet door beckons. Behind a series of Men’s Wearhouse suits, mostly black and blue solids, I find several rifle cases. Inside one, a padded plastic case, I find a bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope. The next contains a flat-top AR-15 carbine with a telescoping stock and a nice acog sight on the rail. The third case is a short nylon number with narrow pouches on the side for extra magazines. About the right size for a swat-style 9mm submachine gun, but I can tell from its slack droop that the case is empty. I unzip it anyway just to be sure.
Across the hall, I note the rumpled bedcovers, the framed wedding and honeymoon photos on the dresser – dating back maybe five years at most, making the original marriage more recent than I’d supposed – and a tangle of dirty clothes on the floor. On Thomson’s nightstand, there’s a stack of paperback books, including a new-looking copy of The Kingwood Killing with a bookmark halfway through. Inside the cover, a receipt from Murder by the Book, a local independent on Bissonnet specializing in all books crime-related, dated last Saturday, the day after I joined the Morales investigation. So Thomson was doing his homework. Inside the nightstand drawer, a loaded.357 Magnum snub nose, one of those weightless titanium numbers that’s easy to carry and excruciating to shoot, fitted with a Crimson Trace laser grip.
As I close the drawer, Bascombe leans into the bedroom, waving his phone. “Can you sit with her, March? I’ve got to take this outside.”
He exits the apartment, leaving me alone with Stephanie Thomson. She slumps sideways in the recliner, exhausted, quiet apart from the occasional sniffle. I know from experience she’s not done crying. It’ll come in waves, interrupted by surprising, clearheaded stillness, a constant ebb and flow between mind and heart.
“Has Joe been depressed recently?” I ask.
“Not the past couple of days. But before that, yeah. For the past week, it was like living with the old Joe. The bad one. We only got back together a few months ago, and he seemed like a changed man – the one I married, instead of the one I divorced.”
“He’d taken up art, I hear.”
She gives me a long look. “He’d taken up something, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Please,” I say. “The more information I have about his state of mind, the better.”
She wipes her eyes, gives her nose a hard rub, sitting up straight in the recliner. “Then here’s the story, for better or worse. Just recently something changed, and the old Joe was back. He said he wasn’t drinking, but I knew better. He has this duffel bag he carries his gear in, and I looked inside and found something.”
“What was that?”
“A soft white cellophane-wrapped package. I don’t know what it was, but it looked like drugs to me. Cocaine, whatever. I don’t have any firsthand experience of that stuff. But I figured he was using again.”
“Did you confront him?”
“Not about that.”
“But you did confront him about something?”
She nods, then coughs back a fresh flow of tears. “You mentioned the art. Well, it was a therapist who put him up to that, before we got back together, and he really took it seriously. Rented a studio at this place over in Montrose, and he’d spend hours over there, sometimes all night, working on his sculpture.” Her mouth wrinkles at the corner. “I know nothing about art of course, but it wasn’t anything I’d call artistic, just globs of clay and all these faces that looked like they could’ve been made by a kid. I mean, the man can’t draw a picture to save his life, so I don’t know what kind of artist he could really be.” She pauses, thinking over the words. “But it made him happy, so…”
“You were saying you’d confronted him?”
Again with the nods. “Like I said, he reverted back to his old self, and the way he was when I left him, and that first time the problem wasn’t just the substance abuse. It was the other women. Don’t get me wrong, when I married him I already knew he was a bit of a stray dog, you know? But that was then. I expected him to put that stuff behind him, and when he didn’t, that was it for me. I couldn’t trust him. So my first thought when all this happened was, he’s seeing somebody. And there’s this cute little thing down at the studio, the girl who rented the space across from his.”
“You thought they were having an affair?”
“An affair?” She smiles at the quaint term. “You could say that, I guess. But when I brought it up, he denied everything. He said it was just trouble at work. And I… it sounds crazy, but I wanted to believe him. I wanted more than anything to be wrong because what we had, I didn’t want to lose it again. You can’t possibly understand how special he was to me, all the plans we had, the way we could be together.”
She doesn’t cry or convulse with grief. She’s talking about him now like he’s ancient history, like the news of his death came to her years before.
“You said the past couple of days, things were back to normal?”
“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself. She looks down, noticing the shirt she’s wearing, pulling the fabric up for inspection. She sniffs the sleeve, then lets out a small but terrible sigh, smelling his scent and realizing how soon it will fade.
The conventional wisdom is, when a suicide makes his final decision, a sense of peace follows. He loses interest in the everyday world, and as a result becomes capable of beautiful gestures. Taciturn men suddenly confess to acquaintances how much their casual encounters have really meant over the years. Treasured objects are given away as the suicide divests himself of things which now mean nothing.
Stephanie Thomson’s description of her husband’s rebound doesn’t quite fit the pattern. After a dry spell, they’d been “intimate” again – her word – and he’d apologized for being distant. Things would be better from now on, he said. They were even looking for a house.
“But I knew it couldn’t last.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“I got a phone call,” she says. “A really strange one, out of the blue. Some guy acting all friendly, asking questions about Joe, saying he wanted to get in touch with him. It was trouble, I could feel it. There was something creepy about him.”
“Did he give you a name?”
She shrugs. “If he did, I don’t remember. I got scared, though, thinking maybe it was connected to the drugs in his bag or something.”
The truth dawns on me. “This call, did you tell Joe about it?”
“No,” she says. “I called Tony and he said he would take care of everything. He told me not to worry.”
“Tony?” My pulse races. “You mean Antonio Salazar?”
She nods calmly, the most natural thing in the world. “They work together on the same squad. They’ve been friends for years. Tony’s always looked after Joe. Even in the bad days, he tried to get me to stick it out for Joe’s sake, that’s the kind of friend he is. This… this is going to just devastate him.”
I sit back on the couch, suddenly weary. So the day after I visit Salazar’s office, hoping to touch base with Thomson, Stephanie calls Salazar, telling him about my conversation with her. The next day, some random Latino banger dangling information on my case tries to punch holes in me. And early the next morning, Joe Thomson is dead, apparently by his own hand.