Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

The truth was, he loved his work. And he was good at it. His instincts were almost never wrong. He’d known in this case a woman was involved. So many things pointed to it, especially the DNA evidence from the bed, and then there was Isabel McNeil with her obvious crush on Jane, and all things Jane.

In order to figure out if his instincts were right, the law gave a certain amount of latitude to detectives like him. He could, for example, lie his face off to a witness during interrogation and hey, if that witness was being processed at one station and then suddenly taken somewhere else for booking and shuttled to a whole other place for holding, that was fine. And hey, if that witness’s attorney and family members couldn’t find them for a while, that was fine, too. The law, he figured, treated him well and let him pretty much do what he wanted. What he didn’t like right now was that he was being told what to do. By his own suspect.

He stopped a guy with long hair turning the corner, a coffee mug in his hand.

“Excuse me,” Vaughn said. He didn’t need to show his badge. The officers behind him gave him more than enough credibility. “Do you know where Isabel McNeil is?”

“Yeah,” the guy said, his eyes a little jittery. And it wasn’t from the coffee. You could tell he was excited by the presence of the police. He was in the news business, after all. He probably loved to get the scoop on everything, whether for work or not.

“She here now?” Vaughn asked.

“She’s in an editing suite.” He pointed. “Down that way. Past the offices. Or I can take you the short way, through the kitchen.” The guy gestured behind him.

“Let’s do it.”

Vaughn followed the guy to the left, through an empty staff kitchen and into a hallway beyond that. He would find out what was going on here at Trial TV, because he had a new instinct, one that told him that Isabel McNeil was about to go up in flames, right here in front of him.

I felt C.J.’s hand snake around my wrist, warm and yet hard. It squeezed me, cutting off the blood flow.

“C.J., please don’t.” My words were as calm as hers, but my body was at once vividly alert.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “Ever. Ever. Ever.”

She kept repeating the word like a creepy mantra-Ever, ever, ever. She squeezed my wrist tighter. I could hear her breathing; could smell a trace of something coming off her, something like sweat, something like fear. I wondered if she could smell mine.

“You hated that Jane got the glory.” My voice was low, but it wouldn’t matter if I raised it. With the booths being soundproof, no one would hear us.

“Shut up.” Her words snapped into the air with such force, such crisp enunciation that I flinched. She tightened her grip around my wrist. “Do you know how much of an idiot you are?”

I said nothing, which just made her squeeze harder, lean closer.

“Do you know how little you know about life?” she asked. “How little you know about the news, about the law, about anything?”

“Yes.” If there was one thing I’d learned over the last year, it was how little I actually knew, compared with how much there was to know about the world. The thing was-I had thought there was a lot more time left to figure it out.

C.J. yanked my wrist, pulled me close to her. I felt alarm swoop in, felt my mind careening wildly.

“Do you know how little you know about love?” C.J. hissed.

“Yes,” I said again. Another easy answer. “C.J., did you love Jane?”

“Shut up.” A pause. “Who did you tell?”

“Tell what?”

“That you think Jane and I were lovers.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” The bones of her fingers pressed tighter into my flesh. I ignored the pain, the fuzzy feeling in my fingers. “Did Jane end your relationship?” I asked. “Or did she try to?”

Fingers tighter. “Why do you ask?” Her voice was calm again. So calm.

“On the day she died, Jane told me she was going to see a friend. She also said she had to tell the friend that she wouldn’t be around much because she needed to focus on her marriage.”

C.J. laughed, although it sounded more like a choke. “She was always talking like that.”

“But was it more real this time?” I thought of everything I knew about C.J. and Jane from working with them, from what Jane had said. “Because Jane had already left you professionally, right? First by winning the Emmy a few years ago and leaving you out, and then by going to Trial TV without you?”

“I understood that Jane needed to grow up. I understood she needed to experiment.” C.J. sounded slightly wistful, almost like a mother, one who has to watch her kid make mistakes.

“You looked after her.”

“When she let me.”

“And you loved her because you knew everything about her. You were one of the few people.”

“I told her she had to stop sleeping around with random guys.” Her grip got tighter. “I told her it would get her into trouble.”

“What do you mean, trouble?” I said the question quietly.

“You can’t do that,” C.J. said. “You can’t cheat on your husband and fool around with different people and not have it come back to haunt you. I was always trying to warn her about that.”

“How did you warn her?” Then it occurred to me. “Were you the one who left the flowers? And the noose?”

I heard a sound in the dark, something coming from C.J.’s throat, a combination of a groan and a grimace, a sound of someone in pain.

“How do you know about that?” she asked.

“Jane called me when she found them.”

She tugged on my wrist, her hand tightening even more. “I can’t believe she called you,” C.J. said. “You.”

“We were friends.”

“No, we were friends. She was supposed to call me, the person she always called, the person she always relied on.”

“She was always turning to other people,” I said. “She was always leaving you behind.”

She yanked my wrist then.

Instinctively, I yanked back hard, and she fell partially on me. I tried to shove her, but she was so much bigger than me that she wouldn’t budge. “Who did you tell?” she said, and her voice sounded like a growl.

“I…”

Suddenly, her hands slipped around my neck.

I struggled against her, but she was as strong as a man and pressing down hard with the weight of her body, the grip of her hands.

“How do you like it,” she said, her hands constricting my neck even more. “Does this make you feel good? It was good enough for Jane.”

I heard myself choking, tried to swallow against the pressure, but my throat was blocked.

“Who did you tell?” Her voice was now tinged with tranquility. Still, she squeezed my neck.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” I managed to choke out, pushing hard with my arms. It was true. I hadn’t even told Maggie my suspicion that C.J. had been the one who was having a relationship with Jane. C.J. was the one who worked closely with Jane on a professional basis. Jane won an Emmy one year, and C.J. should have won one, too. She did most of the work on that story, but the station screwed up. Jane got all the glory. Then Jane left C.J. behind to come to Trial TV. Jane said she wanted only staff with legal backgrounds, but she was also trying to step out into her own as a reporter and an anchor. But C.J. didn’t like that. And my guess was that C.J. really didn’t like it when Jane told her their personal relationship was over, too. Probably Jane had told her this before. Probably this was why C.J. had tried to scare Jane by leaving a noose in her house and the flowers. She thought Jane would turn to her. But she didn’t. Jane still wanted to end things. She was trying to tell C.J. that on the day she died.