Chapter 44
The cabin in the woods where Adam Cruz was staying didn’t have an address, so there was no way to enter one into the maps app.
But Jojo knew that part of the county, and she was sure she could find it.
When they pulled into the driveway and approached the house, they could see a black Ford pickup truck parked around the back.
They couldn’t see the license plate, but they knew from DMV records that Adam Cruz drove a Ford pickup truck.
They got out of Conor’s cruiser. It was mid-afternoon by that time.
The sun was shining out of a blue sky, and the temperature had warmed to the point that Jojo’s jacket was too hot.
She took it off and tossed it back into the cruiser.
They walked up the gravel drive to the trail that was worn in what wasn’t grass to the door of the cabin.
It appeared to be a typical hunting cabin—a place where men came on a weekend during deer season, brought a lot of booze and steaks to grill, ate well, got drunk, and if they were lucky, bagged a deer or two without shooting each other.
They hadn’t even made it to the front door when it opened, and a man they assumed was Adam Cruz filled the doorway.
Jojo thought, as she had thought many times before, that she’d never understand male/female attraction—why women fell for losers, or men let the good one get away.
Cynthia Cruz had been having an affair with David Blackburn, who was a nice enough looking man.
Cynthia thought he looked like Robert Redford on a safari, but in reality, he had an ordinary face, light blond hair, and a slight build.
The man standing in the doorway of this cabin, if he was Adam Cruz, looked like a lumberjack.
He had on a red plaid shirt, the cuffs were rolled up to reveal muscular arms with black hair, like the hair curling out from under the Pittsburgh Steelers cap he was wearing.
He was also wearing a black COVID mask. Why would a man as robust and healthy as he seemed to be wear a mask?
But that was another thing Jojo knew she would never understand—why did people still wear masks that amounted to a chicken wire fence to keep out a mosquito?
Cruz stood with his arms crossed, looking a little like a commercial for some product that Jojo couldn’t place.
Paper towels, maybe. They both had stopped when the man opened the door, and now they started back toward the house.
But he stopped them in their tracks. “What do you want? Why are you here?”
There was a steely look in his eyes and the tone of what he said was confrontational.
Jojo had seen it before, a reaction to a uniform that didn’t have anything to do with who was wearing it or why they wanted to talk to you.
There were a lot of people like that. She’d encountered them before and obviously so had Conor because he stopped, seemed to casually put his hands on his hips, but Jojo saw that his right hand, though it hadn’t closed over his pistol, was close enough to it to get there in a second.
Apparently, Adam Cruz had picked up on the move as well because the muscles in his neck had grown taut. “I want to know why you’re here. If you don’t have a warrant, I want you to leave.”
“Mr. Cruz, we don’t have a warrant, but we can get one if we need to,” Conor told him. “All we want is a few minutes of your time.”
Cruz’s arms were folded across his chest and if he was armed, it wasn’t obvious. Conor was tensed, too, with his right hand close to his weapon. This was the point at which Jojo needed to intervene. What she wanted to say was, “If the two of you are done peeing on bushes, could we talk now?”
What she did say was, “Mr. Cruz, we just want to talk to you. We’ve talked to a whole lot of people besides you before we got to you. And I’m sure we’ll talk to a whole bunch more after you. So could we just keep this civil? Or do we have to go through the whole legal rigmarole? It’s up to you.”
Jojo was pretty good at defusing situations and it was clear she’d poked a hole in this one. The air slowly began to drain out and the tension eased.
“What do you want to talk to me about? What do you think I’ve done?”
“We’re investigating the shootings at the Royal Oaks Ski Resort.”
Cruz didn’t blink. “Why do you want to talk to me about that?”
Jojo knew that Conor’s go-to was just to be direct. And she steeled herself, as he said, “Because we know that your wife was having an affair with one of the people who was shot and we’re looking into who might have a motive for murder.”
She watched carefully to see how that landed on Adam Cruz. What she didn’t see was surprise, just a tensing of his muscles, a tightening of the skin around his eyes.
“What does Cynthia having an affair with David Blackburn have to do with you coming to see me? You think I shot him just because he was banging my wife?”
“How long have you known she was having an affair with David Blackburn?” Conor asked.
“Pretty much from the beginning, I think. I’m not sure exactly when it started.
” He shook his head. “Cynthia is a terrible liar. There are people who are good at things like that, but she isn’t one of them.
And we weren’t getting along at that point, had some problems. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out what was happening. ”
“So a month, two months?”
“A couple of months.”
“And you said nothing to your wife during all that time?” Jojo asked.
“What was there to say?”
“You could have confronted her. You didn’t. Why not?”
He let out a breath. “She would probably tell you that the reason I didn’t say anything was because I didn’t care. Cynthia thinks I only figured it out a couple of days ago.”
“Why did you confront her then and not before?” Conor asked.
“I didn’t really confront her. I came home and found her crying and wanted to know what was wrong, and she felt so guilty she just blurted it out. And I didn’t confront her with what I believed to be true before that because I figured it wasn’t serious, and it would blow over.”
Jojo was surprised by the man’s demeanor and his responses. He didn’t strike her as the kind of man who’d roll over and play dead when he found out his wife was screwing around on him. But you never knew.
“So tell me, Mr. Cruz, where were?—?”
He held up his hand before Conor got to the rest of the question.
“We’re done here,” Cruz said. “I’m not saying another word. You want to talk to me? Arrest me. Take me in and I’ll call my lawyer. That’s all I have to say.” He turned around in the doorway, stepped back inside, and slammed the door behind him.
“Okay, I wasn’t expecting that,” Conor said quietly as he turned around and walked beside Jojo to the cruiser.
“I don’t believe that he didn’t care that his wife was screwing around on him,” Jojo said. “I think he cared a lot. I just don’t know what kind of caring it was.”
“What are the subcategories under caring?”
“Did he care because he loves her? We don’t have anything to go on but these few minutes with him.
Listen to what he does, not what he says.
He could have confronted her months ago, but he didn’t.
He was willing to wait it out. There’s a whole lot more depth to that kind of caring than a box of candy or some flowers.
” From what little she’d learned about David Blackburn, he struck her as a used-car-salesman kind of guy who couldn’t keep his pants on and was thrilled to have a beautiful woman like Cynthia Cruz tell him he looked like a movie star.
He struck her as shallow and petty, and Adam Cruz didn’t strike her as either one of those things.
But she didn’t trust the man. She could see his eyes and nothing else and they were the watchful eyes of a small animal in the presence of predators.
“Second subcategory under caring: she’s his. Adam Cruz seems like the kind of macho man who would kick ass and take names because some other man pissed on his bush.”
“So if Adam Cruz loved his wife or saw her as his property … Were either of those levels of caring enough to kill somebody over her?”
Then the two of them spoke in unison. “People have killed each other for less.”
They got into the car and as Conor pulled out of the driveway Jojo ticked off on her fingers the motives of the murder suspects they had identified.
“Since the shooter made it clear his motive was payback, where do our suspects stack up on that? Ethan Cole wanted payback because Rick Dalton had ‘destroyed the earth.’ Greg Barnes wanted payback for crippling his son. James Whitman wanted payback for stealing his inheritance. And maybe Adam Cruz wanted payback for screwing his wife.”
“So which is the most powerful motive? Were any of them enough to turn someone into a mass murderer?”
“Anything’s a motive for murder if you’re crazy.”
“I want to know a whole lot more about Adam Cruz. He’s not local. Where’d he come from? How’d he get here? The FBI can run facial recognition on his driver’s license picture. He gives off a kind of bad-boy vibe. I want to know if he really is.”