COURTESY OF STAR-LEDGER OF NEWARK, N.J. The green Hyundai driven by Maureen Fields was found outside Death Valley Junction, Calif., but Fields wasn't. COURTESY OF STAR-LEDGER OF NEWARK, N.J. Maureen and Paul Fields on their wedding day. Advertisement

PAHRUMP -- It's 2,585 miles from North Arlington, N.J., where Maureen Fields grew up, to Highway 178 near Death Valley, where her little green Hyundai was found on a February morning in 2006, with no sign of her in it.

The keys were in the ignition, the driver's seat was reclined, religious pamphlets were fanned out next to a purse containing her wallet and credit cards. Slippers and eyeglasses lay under the gas pedal. There was a knotted pair of pantyhose, and a bottle of 30 tranquilizers lay empty.

Police assumed she was a suicide who had left her home in nearby Pahrump, driven to the desert, then wandered away to die. They combed the sagebrush for days -- used dogs, horses, helicopters, ATVs and a plane -- but never discovered a body.

That was 2-1/2 years ago, and the pretty 41-year-old bank teller still has not been found.

She left behind a husband, Paul, whom she met in Bloomfield; grieving parents and siblings in Randolph Township and North Arlington; and a frustrated sheriff's department in Nevada -- run by a retired Jersey City cop -- determined to avenge her.

She also left behind a warning. To nearly everyone she knew, she issued some version of this plea: "If I ever disappear, tell the police Paul did it."

Paul Fields says he would never harm his wife. He says she probably skipped town after staging a mock suicide.

"Why would I do all what I done for her, and try to hurt her?" he said. "What am I, stupid or something?"

Under police suspicion almost from the start, Paul says he would welcome his arrest. "I'm in limbo, as far as proving my innocence, until they charge me," he said.

No charges have been brought and none seem imminent. Yet the case remains a curious standoff in the desert. Police follow Paul around town each year on the anniversary of Maureen's disappearance to show they still believe he killed his wife.

When Paul and Maureen Fields arrived in Pahrump in 2004, among the items they unpacked was their troubled marriage. They had heard about the town a decade earlier from a Vegas waitress, and purchased a small lot.

Having pulled up stakes from Florida, where they had lived after their 1991 wedding, they had a new plan: Maureen could work at a bank, and Paul, a self-made man, could semi-retire from his used-car business while he recovered from lung-cancer surgery.

Maureen's best friend in Florida, Paula Cammarata, had tried to talk her out of the move to Pahrump. She worried about Maureen being isolated in a desert town with no friends and with a husband who could be jealous and tyrannical.

Paula remembers a cruise she and her husband took with them a few years ago.

She recalls Paul taunting Maureen after watching her chat briefly with the chef at the buffet's carving station. When she returned to their table, Paul said: "Are you going to have an affair with him? Did you give him your number?"

"He was delusional. He would actually accuse her of having an affair. He would time her and say, 'You were in that buffet line for 12 minutes,'" Paula said.

Paul Fields says he wasn't a jealous man, but rather one who simply ran interference for his wife when men mistook her friendly nature for flirtation.

Paula said Paul was suspicious of any time Maureen spent out of his sight. If Maureen stopped by Paula's after work, Paul would call 10 minutes after she arrived to make sure she was really there.

"It got so bad that she'd say, 'He's so jealous that one day he's going to kill me,'" Paula said. "She'd seen him go berserk over the littlest thing."

He says he called only one time, because his wife was bringing home a lot of cash for a car auction. "From that day on, that broad hated my guts," he said of Paula.

Maureen had always fallen for older guys, and Paul fit that pattern. He was 34 when they met; she was just 19. "She said -- she actually told me -- she felt like he was a father figure," says Kathleen Errico, her sister.

A strapping 6-foot-3 redhead back then -- his nickname remains "Big Red" -- Paul supported himself once he left Bloomfield High School after the 10th grade.

He scrounged a living running a small limousine company, a gas station and a rooming house. He eventually parlayed that into a collection of low-end real estate investments. He also fixed and sold used cars.

Paul had been married for five years in the early 1970s, and had two daughters.

His first wife, Linda, said that once they separated, she often would retaliate for missed child-support payments by denying him visits with their daughters. She'd soon find her windshield smashed or her tires slashed. One morning she went to start her car and discovered the entire ignition cylinder had been pulled.

Paul denies he did anything at all to her car. But he said he did slash the tires of the man who became Linda's second husband -- 15 times -- because he thought the man was coming between him and child visitation. "His tires, not hers," Paul said.

Linda said Paul gave her lots of trouble but wasn't a wife-beater.

"One time he gave me a black eye ... but I may have choked him," she said. "I can't stand a man who cheats on his wife." She asked not to be identified by her married name, for fear Paul could find her.

Paul confirmed he was unfaithful, saying that after a fight over a chicken pot pie -- it ended up on the ceiling -- he followed his wife's taunt to find someone else to cook for him.

Their two grown daughters are estranged from their father, one saying if he showed up at her New Jersey home, she'd call 911. He has never met his grandchildren.

After he married Maureen, her friends and family said he could be quite generous when spending money on her but was reluctant to let her do the spending. She had to turn over her paycheck to him, her friend Paula said.

Paul says he never received Maureen's paycheck; on the contrary, she had it direct deposited. He said he had no control over her money; in fact, early in their marriage she'd had to declare bankruptcy because of credit card debt.

As Maureen contemplated a Nevada move, Paula recalls, "I told her, 'It's too far away. You'll have no support. I don't think it's a good idea.'"

At some point Maureen must have become reluctant to go, Paula said, because one day Paula picked up the phone to hear Paul's voice:

"Ha, ha, ha," he announced without identifying himself. "I won. We're going to Pahrump."

Maureen, older sister Kathleen and younger brother Jimmy were raised in North Arlington by Jim and Barbara Fitzgerald. Dad was a Newark vice cop who left the force to work for the John Birch Society; mom was a homemaker.

They divorced when Maureen was 12; her father remarried and moved to Randolph. She was a 1983 graduate of North Arlington High School. College wasn't in the cards, but she had a good head for figures and quickly found work as a bank teller.

She was flat-out pretty -- the kind of woman who looks good in her driver's license photo -- but didn't seem to believe it. She was a compulsive consumer of beauty products. She never left the house without makeup; never wore jeans, shorts, or T-shirts in public.

She saw flaws where there were none. She had a nose job and liposuction. She had so many health concerns -- arthritis, multiple surgeries and joint problems -- that police suspect a touch of hypochondria.

She couldn't have children but claimed it didn't bother her. She was one of those crazy dog people and didn't care who knew it. Her pet was an abandoned pit bull that she had tamed and named Wolfie. She had birthday parties for Wolfie; play dates for him, too. She'd mail her mother photos of "Mommy's Wolfie" with a note saying, "I'm sending you a picture of your grandson."

At work, she was sweet and friendly, the kind of co-worker who would bring in doughnuts to share.

'IF I DISAPPEAR'

Paul and Maureen bought a mobile home in Pahrump and quickly got their lot rezoned so Paul could sell cars. However, the change in scenery proved to be no cure for their marital problems, according to her sister, who visited a few months after their arrival.

Kathleen said Maureen would give her a pretend "tour" of their garage, then cry. "She'd say, 'I can't take him no more. He's not the person he was when I married him.'"

And there was a new source of friction in the marriage: gambling.

Maureen had quickly developed a taste for -- even an addiction to -- video poker. Yet the couple persisted in dining nearly every night at the local casino, Terrible's Town. (That's pretty common in Pahrump, where the all-you-can-eat buffet is cheaper than cooking.)

The following September, her family was pleasantly surprised to learn she would be visiting New Jersey -- alone.

She spent the whole week searching through the phone book to find people to visit -- relatives, old school friends. She looked up Paul's brother and even one of his estranged daughters.

To nearly everyone she encountered, she repeated her warning about Paul.

It was such an unsettling statement, people didn't know how to react. Her brother says he asked whether Paul was hitting her; she said no. Paul's own brother found it especially eerie, given that Maureen quickly recovered her composure and stayed for dinner.

She told Kathleen she planned to see a divorce lawyer. "He's already threatened to kill me, and I think he's going to go through with it," Kathleen said Maureen told her. Yet she insisted she had to return to Pahrump -- her dog and her new job were there.

She also liked Pahrump. She wanted to leave Paul but stay there. She hoped Nevada's community-property divorce laws would entitle her to a portion of the properties -- now worth at least a half-million dollars -- they owned.

Her friend Paula tried to explain the danger in that. "I said: 'You can't have it that way. You have to make a move and get out. It has to be a clean break, and you have to have protection.'"

LAST SEEN

Valentine's Day of 2006, a Tuesday, was the last time police believe Maureen was seen alive. One of her colleagues at the Wells Fargo bank asked if she were going to have a good Valentine's Day. "No," she said.

By all accounts she was a basket case that day. She poured out her fears to co-workers and customers alike -- the pretty, weepy teller making for an almost irresistible damsel in distress.

Bank employees later told police of a gripping encounter between Maureen and a woman from her church. Maureen reached across the counter and grabbed the woman's arm with both hands. "Paul's not the man everyone thinks he is," she said. "Something's going to happen."

When she failed to arrive to work at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, bank employees called her home after just 20 minutes. No one answered, so they reached Paul on his cell. He said she had left for work.

Then he headed almost immediately to the police station.

Nye County's sheriff is Tony DeMeo, a retired Jersey City cop. He moved to Nevada to be near his aging parents, eventually finding himself elected sheriff of 18,000 square miles of Mojave Desert.

It's a big change. He deals with cattle rustling, water rights, nuclear test-site protesters, casinos and whorehouses. He jokes, "I used to arrest prostitutes; now I license them." He misses authentic pizza and good restaurants but enjoys a housing market that lets him own five acres, a goat and a sheep.

The lead detective in the case would be Lt. Ed Howard, a 28-year veteran of law enforcement. No backwater cop, he's the president of the state's Fraternal Order of Police. He notices subtleties, like the way Paul addressed his Valentine's Day card to Maureen: "WIFE," in big capital letters.

"Kind of caveman-y," Howard said.

When it comes to questioning suspects, DeMeo says of Howard, "He gets people to confess."

Howard's motto: "The truth never changes."

(To be continued)