Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

I felt light-headed, then nauseous again. I hadn’t eaten anything, I realized, since lunch, and it was almost eleven.

“I think I need to go home now,” I said to Detective Vaughn. I needed to talk to Maggie tomorrow about how much to tell the police. Why hadn’t I called her before? It was just that things had happened so fast, and I had nothing to hide.

Detective Vaughn fell quiet, studying me with those keen eyes again.

“Is that okay?” I said, growing claustrophobic.

He tilted his head to one side, then the other. “You’re not planning on leaving town, are you?”

“No.” Why did I feel so defensive? I was a lawyer, but a civil one. I felt lost in a criminal interrogation, especially when I’d just found a friend dead. “I just want to go home.” I felt trapped inside that windowless room. I stood and glanced around. “My coat. I’m not sure where it is.”

“We got it,” he said. “Evidence. We’ll give it back to you after it’s been processed.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll drive you home.” He stood, too. He was a foot taller and he looked down at me with a powerful gaze. “I’ll see you again, though. Soon.”

T hat night, the fresh zing of my new life turned to sour despair. Jane, who had been part of that new life, was gone. Murdered.

The delight and adventure I had experienced the last few days-with Theo, with Trial TV-all seemed silly now.

Sam called as I walked in the door. I told him that Jane was killed. That I had found her.

“Jesus, Iz. Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Home.”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

He was there in eight.

It was unlike the last few months, where Sam and I had treaded gingerly around each other, giving the other space, never taking for granted that we would be together for a particular night, much less for a particular lifetime. Now, the fact that he had disappeared on me six months ago didn’t matter.

When Sam arrived, it was just us again. No questions. Nothing to figure out. Just Sam and me stripped to the core. Of us. Which had always been good.

Under the halo of my doorway, he held me while I sobbed. We moved into my dark living room. He sat on my favorite yellow chair and pulled me into his lap, tucking my head into the bend of his neck, stroking my hair. I breathed him in-the scent of home after a long trip away-and I waited for the calm and the order that Sam would bring.

But calm and order never arrived.

At 5:00 a.m., my cell phone rang. Somehow I’d managed to sleep by holding tight around Sam’s stomach, my head on his chest.

At the sound of the phone, I murmured, tuned back into where I was. I could tell from Sam’s breathing that he wasn’t sleeping, that he hadn’t slept, that he had been pretending to sleep for the last few hours. For me.

I lifted my head off his chest and looked at the phone, which was on top of my dresser.

Sam pulled me back. “Go to sleep.”

“What if it’s something about Jane?”

He said nothing, and I swung my eyes to meet his. He grimaced.

Sam curled himself around me, creating a nest. “Get some sleep, get some sleep,” he murmured.

But the phone wouldn’t stop. My house phone started next. I finally lifted the receiver off the nightstand.

“Izzy?” I heard a woman’s sharp bark.

“C.J.?” The voice of Jane’s ex-producer was unmistakable.

“What time are you getting in this morning?”

I sat up in bed. “What do you mean? Where?”

“To Trial TV,” she said, exasperated. “What time will you be here?”

“Uh…” I hadn’t even thought about work. To me, Trial TV had been all about Jane, and my new job had been erased somewhere in the horror of last night. But of course, the network would go on. It couldn’t stop for Jane’s death. She wouldn’t want it to.

“I guess seven o’clock,” I said. “That’s when I’m supposed to show up.”

“I need you here now.”

“C.J., you know about Jane, right?”

“Yes.” Her voice went somber. “Yes,” she said again. “And I heard you found her. That must have been hideous. I’m so sorry, Izzy.”

It was the first time I’d heard empathy, compassion or anything like it from C. J. Lyons. “Thanks. I’m sorry for you, too. I know you guys were close.”

“Yes. This is gut-wrenching.”

“I know.” I thought for a second. “C.J., I’m confused why you’re calling me. You don’t even work at Trial TV.”

“I do now. As of one this morning. And, like I said, I need you in here. Now.”

A mid a somber newsroom, C.J. was snarling orders and gesturing with a clipboard when I got there. She had short black hair and dark-rimmed eyeglasses that were pushed up on the top of her head. She was dressed, as she often was, in jeans, a fitted black jacket and no-nonsense shoes. Interns scurried away from her, scribbling notes. Reporters appeared shell-shocked, but they nodded and scattered to cover the stories C.J. was assigning.

She smiled a little when she saw me. “Izzy.”

She raised the one arm without the clipboard and gave me a fast embrace with a couple of quick pats on the back. Not the best hug I’d ever gotten, but the only one I’d ever received from C.J.

“Can you believe this?” Her eyes were full of agony. I could tell she hadn’t slept, either.

I shook my head. I felt like sobbing again. My eyes darted around the newsroom, and I saw people whispering, pointing. I would always be known as the woman who found Jane Augustine dead.

“Oh, girl,” C.J. said, spotting the tears in my eyes. “We’re all a mess.”

“I know. I’m sorry. And you knew her for so much longer than I did. How are you?”

I saw tears glisten in C.J.’s dark eyes. “I can’t talk about it. I feel like I’ll never be able to talk about it.”

I nodded. “I spent hours with the police yesterday, and it was just…it was just terrible reliving it.”

“C.J.!” someone yelled “You want a live shot on the Rivera story?”

She turned around and hollered back at them. Somehow it was a relief to have someone taking charge, doing their job, acting for even a second as if this was just another day at Trial TV.

“Here’s the deal,” she said when she turned back to me. “I got a call last night from Ari Adler. Tommy Daley quit after he heard about Jane.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He said that Jane was the only reason he had come onto the network, and without her he didn’t want to be here. So Trial TV lost two of its most important people in one night.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. The network has only been running for a day, and it’s falling apart at the seams. Ari asked me to come on and keep things moving.”

“I’m glad. This network was everything to Jane.” I thought of Jane this weekend, after she’d found the noose in her house. She wouldn’t even call the police because it would have meant bad press for Trial TV. She wanted to do everything she could to make the network a success.

“I’m here to do whatever I can to help,” C.J. said. “We’re running some taped segments now, but we go live again at seven o’clock.” She peered into my eyes. “Can you keep working?”

I glanced over C.J.’s head to the anchor desk. I could see Jane there yesterday, beaming her self-assured smile into the camera, looking pleased and proud and full of life, a new professional life with Trial TV.

“Yeah,” I said, but I think there was a waver in my voice. I couldn’t stop the warring images of the Jane of yesterday, bursting and alive, and the Jane of last night, the life bled away from her. The two visions battered themselves back and forth in my mind, as if competing for my last memory of her, the way I would remember her.