Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

Vaughn kept talking. “And boy, then what does Theodore tell me? He says that he used to sleep with Jane. And now you two are together.”

I swallowed hard. “We’re not together.”

He laughed. “Yeah, whatever. You were obsessed with Jane. You had some weird love triangle going on.”

I pictured Maggie screaming at me, and I finally clamped my mouth shut.

“Look,” Vaughn said, “the point is, we didn’t have a problem getting this warrant, even before I heard from Theodore. We told the judge everything about you, and we told her some other interesting tidbits about Jane and the crime scene, too.”

“Like what?” I couldn’t help it. It shot out of my mouth. Interesting tidbits about the crime scene. What did that mean?

“Don’t worry. All I’m saying is we had way, way more than we needed to get this.” He held up the warrant again. “So it has been issued, and now you and I and those guys outside…” He jerked a thumb at the door. “We’re going upstairs to your apartment.”

I felt terrified suddenly. “You’re not going in my condo until my lawyer gets here.”

Again that cold smile. “Doesn’t work like that. We don’t have to wait for anything. And under Illinois law, we can force you to be there while we conduct the search.” He opened the front door. “Let’s do it,” he said to the two cops.

E verything I owned was pawed through, shaken, opened, poked at.

Initially, Vaughn mostly stood around while his uniformed cops did the dirty work, and somehow that was worse. He walked back and forth from cop to cop, looking over their shoulders as they rifled through my shelves, ran their fingers over my clothes, dug their hands deep into the drawer where I kept my underwear. Vaughn watched it all-a voyeur who seemed to get off not from the act of the search but from my reaction to it. I could tell that he read my face, that he saw my mortification, my sense of violation.

I kept calling and texting Maggie. Where was she?

I walked, arms crossed, from room to room, helpless, watching them.

I stopped in my living room and over the bar top saw a cop paw through my kitchen drawers.

My phone rang. Mayburn.

“You did it!” he was saying as I answered. His voice was loud and happy.

“I did what?”

The officer closed the utensil drawer and started on my cabinets.

“You nailed Josie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just got off the phone with the lab who analyzed the thong.”

“You got them to do it on a weekend?”

“They owed me one. So guess what they found? The pearls on the black thong you lifted-you know what they’re made of?”

“Plastic?”

“Cocaine!”

“Are you kidding me?” My mind shot to my own pearl thong. “But mine…The one I had…?” When I wore that thing, did I have eight-balls lining my ass?

“No, I told you this week-the kind you had was made of plastic. Anyway, this is great. I mean, it’s not great for my client to find out that her manager was selling cocaine out of her store in the form of a pearl thong, but she knew something was wrong, and it turns out, she was right. Now she’s got to decide how to deal with it. But the thing is we did our job. Or I should say you did.”

“Thanks.” At least I hadn’t been fired from this gig. I was about to tell him the cops were at my house when my phone beeped. Maggie. “Mayburn, gotta go.”

I answered the phone. “Mags!” I turned my back and dropped my voice. “The police are here.”

“Got your messages. Sorry. I’ve been with Wyatt.”

“With Wyatt, like with Wyatt?”

“With Wyatt, like breaking up with Wyatt. What’s happening over there?”

“I’m standing in my living room, watching a cop go through my kitchen.”

Over the bar top, I could see the cop bending down, digging through the drawers next to the stove. He was a burly black guy. When he heard me mention him, he stood up and gave me a just-my-job kind of a look, then bent down again. He seemed like the nicer one of the two. The other one I could hear guffawing with Vaughn in my bedroom. They’d probably found the pearl thong.

“Did they show you the warrant?” Maggie asked. “They have to have it in their hand and show it to you.”

“Yeah, he showed it to me.”

“Okay, and you haven’t said anything, have you? Anything that could be construed as a statement?”

“Well…” I said again.

“Oh, no.”

“He asked me whether I’d ever seen the Emmy Awards.” I thought about it. “No, I take that back. He asked me if I had ever seen an Emmy Award.”

“What? Look, don’t say anything else. Nothing, okay? I’m on my way.”

Maggie arrived fifteen minutes later. She was still wearing jeans. With her lack of makeup and her red eyes, she looked like a forlorn teenager. But she didn’t act like one.

She gave me a quick hug. “Jesus, those newspeople are tenacious,” she said, standing on her tiny tiptoes to grab me tight around the neck. “Is Vaughn here?”

“Yeah.” Gratitude filled me. No matter what happened here, I wasn’t alone.

She let me go. “Vaughn!” she bellowed. Maggie can be surprisingly loud for such a small person.

Vaughn came out of my bedroom, wearing one of his patented smug looks.

“Where’s the warrant?” she demanded.

He reached in his pocket, handed it to her.

She flipped through the pages. “How did you establish probable cause?”

“Easy. I already told your friend here.”

“Well, her attorney is here, so tell me.”

“Nah. You know as well as I do, the only person I’ve got to explain something to is the judge. And I already did that.” He nodded at the warrant. “It’s all there.” He turned and walked toward my office.

I drew Maggie toward the door. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

She looked at the warrant, reading. She flipped to the complaint and affidavit attached to the back. “It says here they’re looking for any evidence of a relationship, romantic or sexual, between you and Jane Augustine. They can take any information or data stored in the form of electronic or magnetic coding.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they can take your…”

Right then the not-so-nice cop walked by. Carrying my computer.

“…Computer,” Maggie finished, watching him, her eyes dropping back to the affidavit. “And any correspondence or communications between you and Jane, including chat logs, e-mails, letters. And they’re also looking for awards or trophies,” she said, still reading, “specifically, an Emmy Award, described as a gold statuette depicting a winged woman holding a globe.”

“What is that about?” I said.

“I don’t know.” More squinting as Maggie kept reading.

“Why is the address for Trial TV listed on there?”

“Probably because they started working on this when you were still employed there, and it got thrown into the order.” She flipped another page and bit her lip. “Huh.”

“Huh, what?”

“The warrant also allows them to take secondary standards.”

“What are standards?”

“Fingerprints, hair samples, stuff where they can get your DNA.” Maggie’s head snapped up. “What else have they taken out of here other than the computer?”

“Nothing that I know of.” Right then, the not-so-nice cop came back inside and headed for the office.

“Have they been in your bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see them looking at anything like your toothbrush or hairbrush?”

“Yes.”

She took off running. “Vaughn!” she yelled.

I followed her. He and one of the cops were in my office, going through file folders-copies of work documents I used to keep at home when I still represented Pickett Enterprises. “Those are privileged,” I said.