Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

I tiptoed in my high heels toward the van. Between the shoes and my black suit, I wasn’t able to move fast. Which gave me enough time to wonder what on earth I was doing. Why was I tailing a van and creeping around an alley for a part-time job? Was this really what I was supposed to be doing with my life? Not to mention the fact that a friend of mine had died-had been murdered-and I found her. I could sense layers upon layers of sorrow and fatigue, bewilderment and shock, deep inside me. Why wasn’t I tuning into those and just falling apart? Why wasn’t I telling Mayburn I couldn’t possibly work at a lingerie store and sneak around at night, looking for who knew what?

But I kept tiptoeing, and as I did, I came upon the answer. I didn’t want to tap in to those emotions that lay heavy inside me. I didn’t want to sink into them and let them overwhelm me. And so, going on with everyday life, despite its absurdity, felt good. It felt exciting, even, and I liked that excitement a hell of a lot more than those intimidating emotions.

When I got to Steve’s van, I saw that the garage he had parked next to was lit up now, while the house in front of it was dark. It seemed clear he’d gone in the garage, which was big enough to hold two cars. I wondered why he wouldn’t use it to park the van. But then maybe multiple tenants lived in the house, sharing the garage?

Whatever was in the garage, though, couldn’t be seen from the alley. All the windows were covered with newspaper. I tiptoed around the entire structure. Two small windows on either side of the stand-alone garage. All four blocked out. I stood still, listening, but there were no sounds from within. Maybe he lived there? A garage apartment?

I glanced at my watch. I’d been gone ten minutes. I had to get back. I looked around for the address, then memorized it for Mayburn.

As a last ditch-effort, I tried to study the newsprint in one of the windows. Maybe the date on the papers would tell Mayburn something. We’d know, at least, how long ago Steve had hung them there. It seemed a miniscule bit of information, but I came back again to Mayburn’s persistent metaphor about investigations being made up of puzzle pieces.

I couldn’t quite see the date on the newspaper, so I took out my cell phone and flipped it open so the light came on. I held it up to the newspaper-the Chicago Tribune, dated about one year ago.

Then I noticed something. I slipped my phone back in my pocket and bent down. There was a small space, maybe half a centimeter wide, at the bottom of the window that the newspaper didn’t cover.

I peered through the space, making out a wooden bench of some sort. There were materials strewn across it. Was this where the pearl thongs were made? Suddenly, I worried about the cleanliness of the one I’d worn.

Wham! I felt a smack on the side of my helmet. It caught me off guard, pitching me forward.

The helmet cracked hard against the side of the garage, my head rattling around inside, and I fell to my knees.

D etective Vaughn walked the hallway at the Belmont police station. Everyone hated when he did this-paced the halls-but he wasn’t a sitter. He couldn’t just sit and ponder like some detectives; he needed to be moving. Plus, the area around the station wasn’t the most scenic, to say the least, certainly not at night. The problem was that all he had to ponder on this case, at least right now was supposition and gut feelings.

Like the one he had about Izzy McNeil. He hadn’t liked her when he first met her-after her fiancé took off. He couldn’t say why, because he got the feeling that just about everyone liked Izzy McNeil. Which might have been why he didn’t like her. It irritated him to no end when beautiful women had everything handed to them, and from what he could tell that’s exactly what had happened with her. That Forester Pickett had given her all her work and now she’d somehow landed a network news job. People like that frustrated someone like him, to whom nothing had been easy-not his mom’s death when he was twelve, or his dad’s three months later; not the series of foster homes he got shuffled around to; not the five years it took him to graduate high school; not the five years it took him to get into the CPD police academy; not the nights he’d worked as a bouncer at a bar on Division while going to the academy; not the decade that it had taken him to rise to the rank of detective.

But then again, now that he was here, Vaughn was a good detective because he knew that gut instincts, while often right, weren’t everything, and he knew that just because he didn’t like someone like Izzy McNeil didn’t mean she was a perpetrator. There was just something off about this Jane Augustine case, and his questions kept circling back to McNeil, the time the two had spent before Jane’s death, the way she’d slipped right into her “friend’s” anchor chair not even twenty-four hours after her death. Then there was the fact that just six months ago, her fiancé took off with thirty million dollars’ worth of her boss’s property, and she’d claimed not to be involved then, as well. It was too coincidental. And he didn’t believe in coincidences.

“Hey, Vaughn!”

He stopped pacing and looked up the hall to see Erin Cutter, the forensics person on the Augustine case. He’d specifically asked for her because she was the best. She never acted on gut instinct or supposition, and the way things were going for Chicago detectives these days-with accusations flying around about forced confessions and arrests without probable cause-he needed Cutter’s hard-core factual approach to balance his own.

Back in the day, Vaughn used to be able to roll with his gut instincts in this job. Maybe pull in a witness, maybe scare the shit of him, maybe ice him for a while by letting him sit for a day or four in a windowless room. But now, ever since a few detectives had taken it too far, they’d fucked it up for the rest of them. And so Vaughn needed people like Cutter to make sure that he had the backup he required to roll with those gut instincts. Or to get him rolling in another direction.

Cutter came bustling down the hall at him. She was Northern Irish, with white skin and black hair, and she did the bustling thing really well. The skirt of the suit she wore, an olive-green one he’d seen at least fifty times, swished against her legs as she came toward him.

“You got the lab report?” he asked her.

She grinned. “You’ll have it this afternoon.”

“Christ, you’re the best.”

DNA lab reports on the average murder case took at least a week, often much longer, but when you had a high-profile case like Augustine’s, and a ballbuster like Cutter, you might be able to get it in a day or two.

She stopped when she reached him. “I hope you’ve got something to show for making me rush it.”

He gave her a wicked grin. “You’ve definitely got something to show.”

She punched him in the shoulder. They laughed. Both of them were married, and neither fooled around on the side, but this was the way they worked.

“This case is fucked up,” he said. “I can feel it. You did DNA sequencing for the bedroom fluids, right?”

“Right,” Cutter said. “Full results aren’t back yet, but when the ET took the samples, they were wet. Augustine had sex the day she was killed.”

“The day her husband was supposedly out of town,” Vaughn mused.

“You know what Nietzsche said about cheating?”

“God, I love a woman who quotes Nietzsche.”

She smacked him again, but he wasn’t kidding. He and his wife had gone stale years ago. He’d never been unfaithful, but he’d thought about it. A lot. And if he were to stray, it would be with someone like Cutter, someone both sexy and smart as hell.