Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

Blunt trauma to head and neck, the other detective had said at some point, making it sound clinical, distant. Strangulation. We’re not sure which came first, but from what you said about the body positioning and the scene, it seems she had her back turned. Probably meant she knew the person who did this.

“Long Beach, Indiana,” I said. “They have a house over there.” I remembered Jane’s words from Saturday after the break-in. “Long Beach is an hour and a half away.”

“You have the number for the house there?”

“No.”

Detective Vaughn fell quiet, watching my face, then his eyes dropped.

I followed his gaze. “Oh!” I said. My hands were in my lap. There was blood on them. Jane’s blood. I turned my hands over. Red-black smears stained the fingers of my left hand, the palm of my right and under the nails.

I stood, really taking in the windowless room for the first time, feeling trapped suddenly, feeling the reality of everything whoosh back in. “I have to wash my hands.” I realized that I hadn’t been to the bathroom since earlier that night when I got ready for the party.

“Sure.” The detective stood with me. “Let’s print you while you’re out there.”

“Print me?”

“Fingerprint you.” Again, that casual tone.

“Why do you have to fingerprint me?”

“Gotta figure out whose prints are in that house. Yours are probably all over, huh?” We both looked at my hands.

I felt cold. “I guess.”

The woman who fingerprinted me was bored. She yanked at my fingers, pressed them into ink, then a pad. “You’re done,” she said.

But why did it feel like everything was just starting?

“W ho hated her?” Detective Vaughn said when I was back in the room. He was sitting, hands clasped on his abdomen, as if he were settling in for a nice, long chat.

“Jane? No one.”

He raised one of those thick eyebrows. “What happened to her was a crime of passion.”

It was fitting in a way, because Jane was a passionate person. I debated whether to tell Vaughn about her affairs. The last thing I wanted was bad posthumous PR for Jane. She would have been mortified if the final information attached to her name was the fact that she cheated on her husband. She was so much more than that. Plus, I’d promised as a lawyer and a friend that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the games she liked to play with the scarf.

I thought of Maggie, too. She was always telling her clients, Don’t speak to the cops. Never talk to them unless they arrest you.

But I hadn’t been given a Miranda warning. I was just a witness to a crime, not a suspect. And yet I had been fingerprinted.

“Is there any reason I need an attorney with me right now?” I asked Vaughn.

“No, we’re just talking. I need to hear every possible thing you saw, so we can find out who did this to your friend. Most homicides have to be solved within the first few hours or they won’t be solved at all.”

Won’t be solved… Flashes of Jane’s blood-spattered body filled my head again; I could hear my cries bouncing off the hardwood floors as I knelt by her.

I nodded and swallowed down bile from my lurching stomach.

He scratched one finger over his jaw. “So who would do this to her?”

I made my face placid, but in my mind, I struggled. I wanted to say that she thought she was being followed by Mick, the writer. But if I said that, I’d have to explain why-because Jane was, as she had put it, red-blooded.

Red-blooded. It had been almost funny when Jane said it over the weekend. Now, all I could think about was the blood that had covered Jane’s head and pooled around her body.

Bile rose in my stomach again. I dropped my head into my hands willing away the image, the horror that went with it.

“You okay?” His voice was resigned, as if he had to ask the question, but he didn’t really care about the answer. When I raised my head, I saw that his eyes were keen, studying me.

I couldn’t decide what to do. Jane had worked closely with the cops for years, and she had been convinced that if they knew of her affairs, they wouldn’t keep quiet about it. “It’s been a very long day. I think I need to go home.”

“Yeah, sure, just a few more questions, and we’ll get you out of here.” He clasped his hands on his stomach again. “Who was angry at Jane? She piss anybody off lately?”

I thought of Jackson Prince in the studio that morning. “There was an attorney who was on Trial TV today. He left in the middle of his interview.” I shrugged. “He seemed very angry at something Jane said, and she told me later that she was working on a story that could rock him.”

“What does that mean, ‘rock him’?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what she said.”

“What was the story about?”

“She didn’t tell me. And I have to say that this man is a well-respected lawyer. I don’t think he’d kill someone over a bad interview or a story.”

“His name?”

“Jackson Prince.”

“Ambulance chaser, right?”

“He’s a plaintiff’s attorney, yes.”

“Yeah, makes a ton of dough, I heard. He’s always giving a press conference for something.” Detective Vaughn reached to his right and pulled a stack of forms toward him. He flipped through a few, his hands moving nimbly, clearly something he did on a regular basis. He jotted something down on one page. He asked about Trial TV, about who would have written the story about Jackson Prince.

“Usually broadcasters write their own stories, but in the past Jane operated a little differently.” I explained how C. J. Lyons, her producer at the old station, used to do a lot of the writing for Jane. “But now that Jane had become an anchor at Trial TV, she was trying to write her own stuff, and she gave me the impression that this story was hers entirely.”

He asked more questions about Jackson Prince. I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t much.

“All right, so who else?” the detective said.

“Who else?”

“You know anyone else who was mad at Jane?”

I acted as if I was thinking about the possibilities, but what I was really thinking was that Zac was mad at Jane. She told me that when we met for coffee on Saturday morning and again when I’d gone to her house Saturday night. I’d seen his anger myself when he came home. And Jane had mentioned issues with Zac just today. “Jane and Zac were having some problems,” I said, using her words.

“What kind of problems?”

“I don’t know the whole story. Like I’ve told you, Jane and I were only work colleagues. Well, we were until this weekend when we spent more social time together, but Jane did mention that she and Zac had gone through some tough times.”

Detective Vaughn clicked the end of his pen, just looking at me. Click, click, click. I could hear nothing else-nothing in the hallway. I wondered if the rooms were soundproofed.

“Was he in town when she found that noose in her house?” the detective asked.

“Jane said that he was at their house in Long Beach on that day, too. He came home after Jane found the flowers and the noose.”

Click, click, click.

Detective Vaughn asked me more questions about Zac and Jane. I did everything I could to answer his questions without saying anything explicitly about Jane’s extramarital activity. I couldn’t decide whether or not it was the right thing to do, whether I should be more up-front. Every answer seemed like a misstep. Every answer made me feel guilty. I wanted to give them every bit of information to catch whoever had killed Jane, but I wanted to protect my friend’s reputation, too.

The intensity of it-the questions about who was mad at Jane, the warring in my mind of what I should tell him, all of it piled together with the searing images of Jane’s bloodied body-left me depleted.