Page 13 of What Happened Last Night

I ended the call and turned back to Officer Stanford. I told her what the crime scene officer had told me.

“It sounds like she was definitely a jilted lover hell-bent on revenge and that she broke into the house rather than being lured into it,” I added when I finished telling her about the swatch of fabric.

“Yeah, it does. And now we have to work out whether Candy was pushed out the window in anger by one of the couple or if it was self-defense. We know there was a knife wound on Candy’s hand, but we don’t know for sure who brought the knife to the scene.”

I nodded. She was right, but first, I would settle for finding out for sure which of the couple actually killed Candy. It wasn’t going to be easy to find out. If neither of them remembered what happened, we might never get to the bottom of this mess.

“I’m going to start working on my preliminary report,” I told Officer Stanford. “Can you start pulling phone records for William? I want to know how much contact he really had with the victim and see if we’re on the right line with the jilted lover thing. Pull Carlotta’s records too. It won’t hurt to see if she’s had any contact with the victim that she’s failed to mention.”

Officer Stanford nodded and turned in her chair to face her computer. I stood up and moved to the back of the room to my desk. I began to type up a report, being sure to only include facts that we knew for sure, even though I was beginning to build up a much more detailed picture in my head.

I could see Candy sitting at home, getting more and more pissed off that William had discarded her like a used toy. I could imagine her angry with him for doing that to her, angry with Carlotta for demanding that William end the affair. I could imagine her plotting her revenge, deciding to go to the house and confront the couple once and for all. Maybe taking a knife with her for reassurance, or maybe planning on taking her revenge to the next level if she wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. Had William promised her more than he had been willing to give, or was Carlotta right and she had been delusional, believing the fling to be more than it was?

I imagined her moving through the darkened house and into the couple’s bedroom, maybe throwing on a light, dazzling the couple. Did she lunge for one of them and end up going through the window as either William or Carlotta defended themselves?

That was the bit I had trouble picturing. Whether Candy attacked first or whether she truly was the victim in this. And more frustrating than that, I couldn’t picture her attacker as more than a black shadow. I couldn’t decide whether I was leaning more toward Carlotta having killed the girl or William having done it. My gut told me Carlotta had more of a motive. She was the scorned woman, but she was also slightly more forthcoming with information than William, which made me very suspicious of him.

And the alcohol-induced amnesia was a sticking point for me. There was no way to prove it wasn’t true, not after the toxicology report on the couple confirmed their alcohol levels were high enough for it to be a possibility, but it felt too convenient to me that neither of them could remember anything about an event so traumatic it should have at least partially sobered them up.

The alcohol-induced amnesia complicated things whether it was true or not. It effectively meant there were no witnesses to the crime, because even if their memories came back, which sometimes they did after a time, could they be trusted? The memories would likely be fragmented, and I knew that everything that had happened since could potentially taint the memories, producing false memories that wouldn’t feel like lies but still might not be an accurate description of what had really happened.

And even then, even if the memories came back fully, no jury would view either of them as reliable witnesses. They were both admittedly intoxicated at the time of the crime, and they both had a lot to lose from this.

None of that changed the fact that one of them had killed Candy Xavier, though, and I intended to do everything in my power to find out what had really happened to her in that house and get justice for her. I just didn’t know how to get to the bottom of it all. At least not yet. But I would. I would get to the bottom of it all if it killed me.

I shook my head, trying to shake away the swirling thoughts in my head. I wasn’t getting any further by dwelling on them. It was just the same old information going around and around in there and giving me nothing new to work with.

I forced myself to focus on my report, and I soon had it completed. There were a lot of gaps, but I had recorded everything we knew about the case so far, which in black and white, didn’t look like a lot.

I hit Print and shrugged my shoulders. It was still only day one, and not many of my cases got solved that quickly. Cases that were cut and dry enough to be solved on day one didn’t usually reach my desk. They were solved by the officers who got called to the scene.

I looked up as I waited for my report to print, surprised to see Officer Stanford writing on the whiteboard on the wall. I really must have been focused on the report because I hadn’t even heard her moving around, let alone heard her on the phone obtaining access to William and Carlotta’s phone records.

Officer Stanford must have felt my eyes on her because she turned around and smiled at me.

“All done?” she asked.

I nodded my head.

“All done,” I confirmed. “Any luck with the phone company?”

“No,” she replied. “They’re both with the same company, which is a bonus, but as I suspected, the company is refusing to release the records without a court order. I’ve filled in the paperwork and emailed it to Judge Green. I’m just waiting for him to respond, and then I’ll go and collect the court order and get back in touch with them. I just thought I might as well update the board while I was waiting.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Let me know the moment we have those records.”

I stood up as my report finished printing. I walked over to the printer and retrieved the pages which were still warm from the machine.

“I’m going to take these to the chief,” I said.

I left the incident room and made my way to the chief’s office. I knocked, but there was no answer. I tried the door and found it unlocked, so I slipped inside and left the report on the chief’s desk. I knew he would spot it and call me if he needed anything clarified, although there was so little to be reported at this point that I was sure I wouldn’t hear from him yet. There was really nothing for him to question except my lack of ability to get to the bottom of this, and that call wouldn’t come for another couple of days yet, and by the time it did, I would have something more for him. I hoped.

I left the office and began to make my way back to the incident room. I stopped off for a coffee on the way. I sat in the kitchen sipping the coffee and thinking. I was pulled from my thoughts when my cellphone rang again. I felt a knot of dread in my stomach. The chief must have found something in my report to question.

I took the call, relieved to see it wasn’t the chief calling me at all. It was the coroner’s office.

“Detective Del Rey,” I said.

“Hi, Detective. It’s Sharon Lloyd, secretary to Dr. Karloff, here.”

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