by Kate Gable
She's getting off track. I can't tell if she's just trying to avoid talking about it or she actually doesn't want me to know. I glance down at my phone. I realize that I've been here way longer than I had planned on and I have to rush this along if I still want to make it to all of the other places I have to go.
At the same time, I know how these types of interrogations go. It's better not to rush things. Sometimes the most mundane details are the ones that become important.
"What happened there? What happened at the house?" I ask.
"She walked up, she knocked, no one answered. She waved me over, I approached as well. She tried the doorknob. They were in the backyard in the pool naked, him and his girlfriend."
"Oh my God, really?"
"Yeah. There's something else," she says quietly.
"What?"
"There was baby stuff all around the house. That woman, Margaret Layne, she had a child, his child."
"Really?"
"Yeah. We looked it up later. He told her what her name was and we looked her up on social media and the baby looks just like him. She confronted him about it and he finally admitted it."
"So, what happened? What does this mean then? Were they breaking up?"
"They had all these fights. Their relationship was very complicated. At one point, we stopped talking for a good week or ten days. I think it was because she called and was talking to him again. They were going to be working on their marriage and she didn't want to tell me what was going on."
"Really?" I ask.
She nods and admits, "It's all very toxic, but we had this plan, this business trip, planned a while ago for months. We were going to stay in the same hotel room and all."
"How was the trip?"
"It was good, inspiring. She got really interested in trying to sell the candles again and she made this whole list of all these people she was going to reach out to, like all of her old contacts, old friends, and that kind of thing. The last time I heard from her was when I dropped her off at home. That's it."
"Okay. What happened then? What happened that day?"
"What do you mean?"
"The doctor's appointment?"
"Oh, yeah." Her face falls and she takes another big bite of her cake.
I wait for her to swallow. She plays with her fork for a while, smashing the little bits, the little crumbs into the frosting over and over again.
"I had this terrible feeling when I dropped her off. Maybe it was an ominous kind of thing or whatever, but I just really didn't want to let her go. I remember hugging her so tightly and I even asked her if she wanted to come and stay at our house, but she didn't. She said that she had the doctor's appointment in the morning and she was going to confirm whether or not she was actually pregnant before telling Robert."
"Confirm?" I ask. "She already took a pregnancy test?"
"Yeah, she took about seven. I think she bought one of each at the pharmacy just to make sure and they all came back pregnant, but she wanted to get a blood test from her doctor, and she wanted to do it before telling Robert about it."
"What was she thinking? Was she going to keep it? Was she going to try to make it work with him?"
"I don't know what she was thinking. I think she was just hurt and confused about everything." She chews slowly and then takes the spoon in her tea and stirs, making a loud dinging sound on the sides of the cup.
I don't stay much longer after that. I give her my card and I ask her to call me if she remembers or hears anything else. She promises that she will and she asks me to give her a call as well when I find out anything, anything at all.
I walk back to my car lost in thought. Elin was the one who encouraged Robert to call the police. She was practically the one that made the initial call and he was reluctant to do so.
Does that mean that he was involved? It wouldn't be the first time that a husband killed his wife, especially if she were pregnant with his child and he had already moved on with someone else.
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, Karen is just missing. Maybe she just left him. Took off. Took a break.
But if she is dead, it was probably the husband who did it.
Why kill her though? Why kill your wife? Why not just get divorced and move on? Why ruin so many lives in the process?
After all of these years on this job, I feel like people have become even more of an enigma to me than they were when I got started. I thought that I would try to right all the wrongs that came my way and that's what would make this job worth doing, but in reality, there’re so many unknowns.
There are so many reasons why people do certain things that make no sense at all and never will. Psychologists try to explain. They try to frame it in the context of who this person is by what they went through and that's why they did this. Most of the time, that hardly makes sense because there are people who live similar lives but don't do half the evil things that others do.
Is Robert one of these people? Elin has her suspicions. As far as motive goes, I guess there's that, too. He had a new girlfriend, new baby, and he wanted to move on, but is that enough for a man like him to kill his wife?
12
I call the doctor's office as I'm running late and ask if she'll still be there fifteen minutes from now. They reschedule me for an hour and a half later, so I decide to swing by the Kaslar apartment building again and see what I can find out from the neighbors, perhaps even their cameras.
I'm lucky with parking and I find a spot directly across from their house. I head to the downstairs neighbor’s place first and knock on the door. A young woman who looks to be about nineteen opens, wearing nothing but a bathrobe.
I show her my badge and ask her if she has a few minutes to talk. She says that she's running late to an audition, but I can come in and wait inside. Her apartment is almost identical in layout to the Kaslars’ and I sit down on her frumpy couch while she changes in her bedroom and comes out a few minutes later.
She asks me for my name again and sits down across from me, crossing her legs. I jump right in and ask her what she knows about her neighbors.
"Yeah, I see Robert around," she says casually with a little shrug of her shoulders.
"What about Karen?"
"Kind of, just a brief hello here and there."
"So how long have you been living here?"
"About a year. When I moved in, they were very nice. I think she might've even stopped by with a pie or something like that, but our schedules are really different, and I don't see her much."
"She's mainly home, right?"
"I guess so. I'm very busy."
I nod. I can't tell if she's lying or she's trying to keep something to herself.
"Is there anything else that you can tell me about them? Did you hear anything suspicious or seen anything suspicious on Monday, day or night?" I look at my notepad and give her the precise date.
"No, I wouldn't say that. I was actually not home that day. I had an audition, but it wasn't in LA. It was in Phoenix."
"Would you have any cameras set up anywhere?" I ask.
She shakes her head. I thank her for her time and get up to leave, but she stops me when I get to the door.
"You know that she thought that Robert was cheating on her, right?" she says.
This statement stops me dead in my tracks.
"How do you know that?"
"Well, I kind of overheard her and her friend talking when they were out on the landing. Her friend was kind of this big chubby girl, long hair, and pasty skin."
Elin.
I nod.
"I don't know her name," she says with a shrug, "but I heard them talking about it. They were pretty loud. She was upset."
"When was this?"
"I don't know, like a week ago or something. I was just coming in, bringing some groceries from Trader Joe’s and I think the friend was smoking and that's why they were outside, but they were pretty loud. She was really upset."
"What did they sa
y exactly?"
"Just that she suspected something and put something on his car. She wanted her friend to follow him with her."
"To follow Robert?" I ask.
"Yeah."
Okay, so there's some corroboration, I say to myself.
"Was she going to confront him about this?"
"It didn't sound like it. I mean maybe, if she caught him, but it didn't really sound like she would and I saw them afterward, like getting in the car together, going somewhere and everything was very cordial."
"Cordial?" I ask.
"Yeah, you know, friendly but not like perfect though. People get into cars all sorts of ways."
I nod my head and thank her for her time. After giving her my card, I walk out 100% certain that Elin was telling me the truth. Now the question is when I'm going to confront Robert with it.
I look at the time and realize that I'm running late for my postponed appointment with her OBGYN. I'll interview the rest of the neighbors later. I arrive at the office right on time and the woman at the front desk ushers me to some back room where a woman with a small stature and chopsticks in her hair the way that I used to wear mine back in the nineties gives me a nod. She has perfect skin, a perfect figure, and her white coat is tailored to her body just so.
She introduces herself as Dr. Rothfluss and I catch her up on what I know so far.
"Oh, wow. I can't believe that she's missing. Two days?"
"Yes," I say. "She had an appointment to see you the day of her disappearance. I just wanted to confirm that and whether or not she ever showed up."
"As you know, I can't share her medical records without her consent."
"Yes, of course," I say, "but can you at least confirm whether she had the appointment to see you? Her friend insists that she did and she's not sure if she ever went."
Dr. Rothfluss hesitates. She's not an attorney and it's a big thing to share medical records without the consent of the patient. I can see her wondering whether this is indeed the case in what I'm asking her to do.
"Please," I say, leaning closer to her. "She took about seven or so pregnancy tests and she found out that she was pregnant. Each one confirmed it. She had the appointment to get a blood test at your office and I guess to see you. I just need to know whether this happened or not, not the results of anything.”
Dr. Rothfluss nods her head, pulls out her iPad, and scrolls through her records. She licks her lips as she goes through and searches for Karen's name and holds her chin up slightly in the air as she searches.
"Yes, it looks like she did make an appointment at eleven o'clock but she did not show up," she says. "I can't tell you anything else without a court order."
"I understand," I say. "Thank you so much."
"What do you think happened?" Dr. Rothfluss asks. "Do you think she just left?"
"It's hard to tell," I say. "Did you know her personally?"
"She came in here to..." Dr. Rothfluss hesitates.
I know that this is a delicate issue and that it's difficult for her to skirt that line, but I also get the sense that she wants to tell me something.
"Well, we met in a yoga class," she says. "It was that same one that Elin attended. I was Elin's doctor with her baby and she introduced us, so we were sort of on friendly terms."
"Okay, okay, that's good.” I nod. "What else?"
"Well, she talked to me personally, not as a doctor but about how much she wanted to have children and her husband didn't, but they were trying, reluctantly."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I guess they weren't using protection, but he wasn't fully on board with it."
"Oh, okay. Got it. How long had they been trying for?"
"About a year and a half, but from what she told me, as a friend, they were only having sex once every two months, three months, or so. I'm not sure that they were exactly trying."
I give her a nod and agree, "Yeah, that doesn't sound like actually trying. Anyway, when was the last time that you saw her?"
"Probably a week ago. She didn't mention anything about scheduling an appointment and she must've called on her own to my office, but she did mention about wanting to possibly consider IVF."
"She did?" I ask.
"Yeah. This was just when we were in yoga and I tried to tell her that it's unclear whether she would need that kind of intervention because, well, she and her husband were just not being sexually active enough, but she said that she wanted to talk about it.”
"Okay. Do you remember precisely what day this was?"
"I don't know, like the fourteenth, maybe? Let me see.” She looks at her schedule. "It was the Monday before last."
I nod. I look at my own calendar on my phone and realize that this was right before she caught her husband cheating with Elin.
So, perhaps things have changed since then.
I thank her for her time and leave her office with a lot of thoughts on my mind. The timeline must be that she was trying to get pregnant. She was considering IVF, but she was still suspecting her husband of infidelity.
Then that Saturday, she found out the truth.
The question is what happened between that Saturday and the day that she disappeared?
Did she confront Robert? No, because she was at her conference, but what happened at her conference?
What happened when she appeared? What happened when she came back? She came back that evening and I have to find out whether there are any cameras from any of the neighbors showing her coming and going.
13
I return to their apartment building and knock on a few more doors. Two of the neighbors don't answer, but an older woman who lives downstairs does.
She doesn't welcome me inside but agrees to talk through the half-opened door. I get the sense that she's a bit of a hoarder from what I can see peeking inside and she doesn't want me to see it.
I ask her the same questions I asked Delia, the actress, and she also says that she rarely sees the Kaslars.
The older woman is dressed in sweats, but her face is nicely made up and pulled back, filled up with fillers. She makes a few references to the older model Mercedes parked in front of her apartment and when I finally comment on it, her face beams and she smiles from ear to ear.
"I just bought it," she says. "It's a 2005, but it is a Mercedes."
"Congratulations," I say, knowing that the car couldn’t have cost more than three thousand dollars. "Does it run well?"
"Of course it runs well. What kind of question is that?" She gasps.
I realize that was a mistake. I apologize quickly, but it doesn't seem to reverse her scorn toward me.
"Mrs. Ossap, I'm really just trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Karen. The last that we know is that she came back from a business trip, but now she's missing and no one has seen her for two days. I was just wondering if you remember anything," I plead and appeal to her because I need her help.
She hesitates for a moment and it looks like she's about to slam the door in my face.
"Listen, I told you about my car."
"Yes, I understand," I say.
"No, you don't.” She shakes her head. "I know that a lot of people are interested in it, even though you may not be."
I nod, not entirely sure about where this is going.
"You know, it still means something to drive a Mercedes," Mrs. Ossap says. "To make sure that no one damages it, or accidentally bumps into it, I set up some surveillance equipment."
"You did?" I gasp.
She looks like she is in her eighties and I had no idea that people of that age knew how to set this kind of stuff up.
"Yes, my grandson was going to do it, but he was asking me about my will and he was really just generally getting on my nerves, expecting me to give him money that he doesn't deserve. So, I did it myself."
"Would you mind showing me what you have?" I ask.
She crosses her arms and shakes her head.
"Please, Mrs. Ossap, you may hav
e the key to her disappearance."
"Okay, fine, but only because you apologized." She points her manicured finger in my face, the tips are pointy, long, and kind of remind me of Cardi B's, which is another incongruous thing for a woman of her age to have.
People are strange.
She waves me inside and finally lets me into her space. There are boxes of things from floor to ceiling, but only in the front. When I walk past the narrow hallway in between the boxes, it opens up to a rather spacious, minimalist style living room. It's like she wants other people to think that she's this crazy old cat lady hoarder but in reality, she's got this sleek, perfect little space that looks like it belongs in the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog.
She walks me over to a big computer table made of glass with a Mac desktop positioned in the center. She clicks around and opens the files with the recordings.
"Wow, you have quite a setup here,” I say.
"I work online."
"You do?"
"Yeah."
"What is it that you do?"
"I'm a photographer. For many years back in the sixties I did black and white fashion photography, but then men dominated that business and it was hard to get through. Now, finally, I'm getting the recognition I deserve. I have social media and I have a website. I have a lot of clients and my photographs have appeared in Vogue, National Geographic, and lots of online magazines. Recently, I've been doing a lot of real people portraits. I'd like to do one of you.”
I hesitate.
"I've never done one of a cop before."
"It would be unprofessional for me to do that given that I'm on this case and I'm interviewing you for work."
"Yeah, I get it," she says. "Well, how about after the case? Would you consider it?"
"Yes. I've never actually had a professional picture taken before," I say.
"You're missing out. I'd love to show you the ropes," she says.
I steer her attention back to Karen and she shows me the surveillance videos. Thankfully, she keeps them all for a month, just in case. She scrolls over to the date and time that I tell her. We try in the evening and I see Karen coming back home, looking tired while pulling a suitcase behind her. She scrolls through her phone as she walks and then disappears upstairs.
