Red Blooded Murder

by Laura Caldwell

  I peered in the window to my right. I saw the chairs where Sam and Charlie and I had sat a few nights before. At the thought of that night, and the scarf shaped like a noose, I felt a chill travel through my body.

  I rang the doorbell again. Still no Jane. I called her. “Jane, I’m standing outside your house,” I said to her voice mail. “Where are you?”

  I waved at the cab driver, signaling for one more minute.

  He shook his head and yelled out the window, “I go!”

  “No, wait!”

  But he pulled away.

  “Damn,” I muttered, then pounded on the door. Even if Jane was home, we’d now have to hunt for a cab, which would take up valuable time.

  For lack of anything else to do, I tried the doorknob.

  It turned in my hand. The hairs on my arms stood up. Some internal alarm went off inside my body. I pushed the door, and it swung open, making a silent, invisible arc.

  What I saw inside formed the basis for another kind of moment. Not a mundane one, certainly not. But it was a moment that would crystallize and freeze in my mind.

  And this one would leave a deep, deep stain.

  24

  “J ane!” I yelled.

  She was lying on her side, beneath a hall table. From the position of her body, she looked, almost, as if she’d gotten on the floor to search for something-a dropped earring or a coin-and had lain down for a second. But she was eerily still, her head resting on one arm, the other arm lifeless, draped across the back of her neck.

  That arm was covered with blood. And then I noticed more-her hair matted with it; spatters of red over her white suit; a puddle of it underneath her face. For a surreal second, with that pool of maroon and the bright red splashes on the white backdrop of her clothing, she looked like a piece of art from the gallery.

  But then reality rushed in with a whoosh, and I heard screams of terror in my head.

  I dropped my purse and ran to her side. “Jane!”

  I knelt next to her, my mind careening, staggering, shrieking.

  I touched her waist. As if only a hairline string had held her in that position, her body turned over so that she was lying on her back. A gurgling sound came from her throat. She’s okay, I thought.

  But then blood bubbled from her mouth.

  “Oh my God!” I recoiled for a moment, shocked by the blood.

  I waited for a second to see if she would cough. Nothing. Her eyes were open. Tiny red flecks dotted the whites of them like bloody pinpricks. Her red scarf was tied tight around her neck, matted with blood.

  I felt her wrist. Cold. No pulse. I had to be wrong. I pressed deeper into her flesh. “Oh, God, please. Jane, please!

  “Help!” I yelled. My voice seemed to bounce off the taupe walls and lacquered floors and answered me with emptiness.

  I kept praying out loud, kept begging in my head to feel the beat, beat, beat that would mean Jane Augustine was still alive. Nothing.

  I was suddenly freezing cold. Panting with anxiety. Who had done this to her?

  It hit me then-whoever it was could still be here. My head jerked back and forth, looking around. But the place looked the same as when I’d been here two nights ago-a lovely town house, everything else in order.

  I looked back at Jane.

  What should I do? What should I do?

  Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

  I began to lean toward Jane, but that sickening burbling sound arose from her throat again. More blood.

  I leapt to my feet and found my purse, my hands shaking violently when I opened it, accidentally hurling its contents over the floor as I searched for the phone.

  “No!” My battery was dead. With Theo at my place last night, I’d forgotten to charge it, and with all the calls and texts I’d made to Jane, I’d depleted it.

  I bolted to my feet and hurried through the living room. Where was their house phone? I couldn’t find it.

  I darted around the town house-kitchen, dining room, back to the living room. My heart thundered, my eyes were wild. Finally, I spotted a small cordless phone on the bookshelf next to the fireplace.

  My fingers felt like unwieldy pieces of wood on the buttons. I panted, moaned. At last I dialed 911.

  “Chicago,” a man’s voice said. “Emergency call center.”

  “Jane Augustine,” I said. “I think she’s dead.”

  25

  H ow unbelievable that someone like Jane, someone who appeared as merely a pretty talking head, was, once you saw behind the exterior, one of the most-okay, the most-intensely sexual person anyone could imagine. To be with someone like that was intoxicating. No, intoxicating wasn’t a strong enough word. Being with Jane-being in her bed with that body, being in her head-was all-consuming, all-captivating, something you could never, ever get enough of.

  And when she asked you to wind that red scarf around her neck, God that was something incredible. First, she would tell you how. Then, when you were doing it, she would sigh and murmur, telling you to keep going. She would tell you to do it harder then, do it faster. Shoot me out of this world, she would say. You did it. Happily. Because you wanted to please her, you wanted to blow her mind, because if you did it the right way, if you did it enough, maybe, maybe, maybe she would let you stay in her world forever.

  The problem was there was always the sense with Jane that it would end. No, it was more than a sense. Jane had always been clear about her limits. She insisted on saying, this has to end, this is the last time, over and over and over. She would never shut up about it.

  And despite how badly you wanted it to go on forever, even if you were only let into her world every so often, Jane had been right. It had ended. What Jane would not have foreseen was that it was you who ended it, not her. It was you who decided to pull that scarf tighter and tighter around her neck. It was you who, one last time, shot Jane out of this world. In fact, it was you who shot her right to heaven.

  26

  I can hardly remember the next few hours. When I think of it, I see only bursts of memories-the police lights flashing like blue strobes, the shrieking sirens as the ambulance raced away with Jane’s body, the yellow slashes of crime scene tape, the neighbors standing stiffly, arms crossed in front of them as they watched the police swarm the area.

  I was questioned by one cop, then another. I know my mouth moved. I know I answered everything, recalling each detail about the night. I know I told them about the break-in Jane had a few days ago, the flowers, the scarf shaped into a noose.

  I was driven in the back of a police car to the Belmont station, where a detective asked all the same questions as the others. I gave the same answers. The detective left.

  I was in a square windowless room about eight feet around, painted all in white. One wall had a metal bench pushed against it, and above that, a steel ring bolted into the wall. I sat at a fake wood table in the center of the room, one chair on the other side.

  Another detective came in. He was a lean guy wearing brown casual pants, a light blue button-down shirt and an empty holster and expensive-looking running shoes. Something about him snapped me out of my fog.

  “We’ve met,” I said.

  “I’m Detective Vaughn.” He sat down across the table.

  “You and another detective interviewed me last fall when Forester Pickett passed away.” And you were an asshole, I wanted to add. Then due to my stop-swearing campaign I amended it. I mean, a total jerk.

  “Yep,” he said. “If I remember right, your fiancé hit the road, right?” This memory seemed to cause him some pleasure. A little smile played over his mouth and his green eyes crinkled a little. He looked as though he was trying not to laugh, and it made me remember precisely how much I disliked Detective Vaughn.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sam had to leave town.”

  “You rope him back in yet?”

  “He’s back.”

  “Getting married anytime soon?” His delight in this topic hadn’t seemed to wane.

&nb
sp; “Not right now. If we could get back to what happened tonight.” Suddenly a thought occurred to me. “Has anyone called Zac?”

  “The husband? We’re trying to find him.”

  “I think he’s in Long Beach.”

  “California?” His brows, thick and brown, moved closer together. His tone was conversational, as if we weren’t here because someone had bludgeoned Jane to death.

  Blunt trauma to head and neck, the other detective had said at some point, making it sound clinical, distant. Strangulation. We’re not sure which came first, but from what you said about the body positioning and the scene, it seems she had her back turned. Probably meant she knew the person who did this.

  “Long Beach, Indiana,” I said. “They have a house over there.” I remembered Jane’s words from Saturday after the break-in. “Long Beach is an hour and a half away.”

  “You have the number for the house there?”

  “No.”

  Detective Vaughn fell quiet, watching my face, then his eyes dropped.

  I followed his gaze. “Oh!” I said. My hands were in my lap. There was blood on them. Jane’s blood. I turned my hands over. Red-black smears stained the fingers of my left hand, the palm of my right and under the nails.

  I stood, really taking in the windowless room for the first time, feeling trapped suddenly, feeling the reality of everything whoosh back in. “I have to wash my hands.” I realized that I hadn’t been to the bathroom since earlier that night when I got ready for the party.

  “Sure.” The detective stood with me. “Let’s print you while you’re out there.”

  “Print me?”

  “Fingerprint you.” Again, that casual tone.

  “Why do you have to fingerprint me?”

  “Gotta figure out whose prints are in that house. Yours are probably all over, huh?” We both looked at my hands.

  I felt cold. “I guess.”

  The woman who fingerprinted me was bored. She yanked at my fingers, pressed them into ink, then a pad. “You’re done,” she said.

  But why did it feel like everything was just starting?

  27

  “W ho hated her?” Detective Vaughn said when I was back in the room. He was sitting, hands clasped on his abdomen, as if he were settling in for a nice, long chat.

  “Jane? No one.”

  He raised one of those thick eyebrows. “What happened to her was a crime of passion.”

  It was fitting in a way, because Jane was a passionate person. I debated whether to tell Vaughn about her affairs. The last thing I wanted was bad posthumous PR for Jane. She would have been mortified if the final information attached to her name was the fact that she cheated on her husband. She was so much more than that. Plus, I’d promised as a lawyer and a friend that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the games she liked to play with the scarf.

  I thought of Maggie, too. She was always telling her clients, Don’t speak to the cops. Never talk to them unless they arrest you.

  But I hadn’t been given a Miranda warning. I was just a witness to a crime, not a suspect. And yet I had been fingerprinted.

  “Is there any reason I need an attorney with me right now?” I asked Vaughn.

  “No, we’re just talking. I need to hear every possible thing you saw, so we can find out who did this to your friend. Most homicides have to be solved within the first few hours or they won’t be solved at all.”

  Won’t be solved… Flashes of Jane’s blood-spattered body filled my head again; I could hear my cries bouncing off the hardwood floors as I knelt by her.

  I nodded and swallowed down bile from my lurching stomach.

  He scratched one finger over his jaw. “So who would do this to her?”

  I made my face placid, but in my mind, I struggled. I wanted to say that she thought she was being followed by Mick, the writer. But if I said that, I’d have to explain why-because Jane was, as she had put it, red-blooded.

  Red-blooded. It had been almost funny when Jane said it over the weekend. Now, all I could think about was the blood that had covered Jane’s head and pooled around her body.

  Bile rose in my stomach again. I dropped my head into my hands willing away the image, the horror that went with it.

  “You okay?” His voice was resigned, as if he had to ask the question, but he didn’t really care about the answer. When I raised my head, I saw that his eyes were keen, studying me.

  I couldn’t decide what to do. Jane had worked closely with the cops for years, and she had been convinced that if they knew of her affairs, they wouldn’t keep quiet about it. “It’s been a very long day. I think I need to go home.”

  “Yeah, sure, just a few more questions, and we’ll get you out of here.” He clasped his hands on his stomach again. “Who was angry at Jane? She piss anybody off lately?”

  I thought of Jackson Prince in the studio that morning. “There was an attorney who was on Trial TV today. He left in the middle of his interview.” I shrugged. “He seemed very angry at something Jane said, and she told me later that she was working on a story that could rock him.”

  “What does that mean, ‘rock him’?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what she said.”

  “What was the story about?”

  “She didn’t tell me. And I have to say that this man is a well-respected lawyer. I don’t think he’d kill someone over a bad interview or a story.”

  “His name?”

  “Jackson Prince.”

  “Ambulance chaser, right?”

  “He’s a plaintiff’s attorney, yes.”

  “Yeah, makes a ton of dough, I heard. He’s always giving a press conference for something.” Detective Vaughn reached to his right and pulled a stack of forms toward him. He flipped through a few, his hands moving nimbly, clearly something he did on a regular basis. He jotted something down on one page. He asked about Trial TV, about who would have written the story about Jackson Prince.

  “Usually broadcasters write their own stories, but in the past Jane operated a little differently.” I explained how C. J. Lyons, her producer at the old station, used to do a lot of the writing for Jane. “But now that Jane had become an anchor at Trial TV, she was trying to write her own stuff, and she gave me the impression that this story was hers entirely.”

  He asked more questions about Jackson Prince. I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t much.

  “All right, so who else?” the detective said.

  “Who else?”

  “You know anyone else who was mad at Jane?”

  I acted as if I was thinking about the possibilities, but what I was really thinking was that Zac was mad at Jane. She told me that when we met for coffee on Saturday morning and again when I’d gone to her house Saturday night. I’d seen his anger myself when he came home. And Jane had mentioned issues with Zac just today. “Jane and Zac were having some problems,” I said, using her words.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “I don’t know the whole story. Like I’ve told you, Jane and I were only work colleagues. Well, we were until this weekend when we spent more social time together, but Jane did mention that she and Zac had gone through some tough times.”

  Detective Vaughn clicked the end of his pen, just looking at me. Click, click, click. I could hear nothing else-nothing in the hallway. I wondered if the rooms were soundproofed.

  “Was he in town when she found that noose in her house?” the detective asked.

  “Jane said that he was at their house in Long Beach on that day, too. He came home after Jane found the flowers and the noose.”

  Click, click, click.

  Detective Vaughn asked me more questions about Zac and Jane. I did everything I could to answer his questions without saying anything explicitly about Jane’s extramarital activity. I couldn’t decide whether or not it was the right thing to do, whether I should be more up-front. Every answer seemed like a misstep. Every answer made me feel guilty. I wanted to give them every bit of inf
ormation to catch whoever had killed Jane, but I wanted to protect my friend’s reputation, too.

  The intensity of it-the questions about who was mad at Jane, the warring in my mind of what I should tell him, all of it piled together with the searing images of Jane’s bloodied body-left me depleted.

  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.”

  28

  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.”