Page 24 of What Happened Last Night

I wasn’t expecting either of them to admit anything even if they had remembered it at this point, but I had to ask. It would have been complacent of me to not even bother, and besides, they might have started to wonder why the precinct had sent a homicide detective to talk to them about a car accident, and the last thing I wanted was for them to work out that I was testing them, because I didn’t know when I might have to use that trick on them again.

Carlotta shook her head.

“No, Detective,” William said. “And if we do, don’t worry, you will be the first to know.”

His voice sounded quieter than it had since he woke up, and there was the tiniest tremor to it. One that would have been almost impossible to detect if you weren’t used to listening for the smallest thing. His right eye twitched when he said it too, and my senses were tingling again.

I knew he had remembered something. I also knew he wasn’t going to tell me what it was yet, but something had definitely come back to him. I knew it with every fiber of my being, but I knew if I pushed him now, he was only going to clam up further. I knew I would get it out of him at some point, though. If I had to arrest him to do it, I was willing to do that. Just not yet. First, I wanted to give him a chance to think it through. Maybe he had only remembered a tiny snippet and he didn’t want to say anything until more came back.

I stood up and took my leave. I wanted to go and talk to a few of William’s co-workers to get a handle on what he was like as a person outside of his marriage. I checked my watch. I knew if I went there now, I wouldn’t have enough time to really talk to people before I would have to leave to get to the autopsy, and I didn’t want to half-ass this.

I debated calling Officer Stanford and asking her and Officer Dumont to pop out to William’s workplace and talk to his colleagues, but I knew that would never work. I needed to do it myself so I could gauge their reactions in much the same way as I had wanted to interview William and Carlotta myself. I trusted Officer Stanford, but I was still worried she would miss something that I would pick up on.

And if any of them raised any red flags, it would be strange if I went to follow up the questioning. It was one thing interviewing a potential suspect multiple times, but the chief wouldn’t be too happy if he thought we were harassing members of the public who were trying to help us with our investigation.

Going to question William’s co-workers would have to wait until tomorrow now, because there was no way I was palming off the autopsy onto someone else. Dr. Karloff was friendly enough with me that he would present any theories he had off the record, but I didn’t think he would do that with just anyone, and his theories often proved to be somewhat useful.

Chapter Thirteen

Carlotta

Isat beside William’s bed in stony silence after Detective Del Rey left the room. I had tried my best to make William feel comfortable, to show him that I still loved him. And all he had done was berate me. I was used to that, but it still hurt. And it still made me angry.

I really had nothing to say to William right now. In that moment, I came pretty close to hating him. But at the same time, I was sure that when Detective Del Rey had asked if we remembered anything from the night Candy died, William’s eye twitched slightly as he denied it. Did it mean he was starting to remember?

I didn’t know, and the way he had bitten my head off so many times since he had woken up made me reluctant to ask him. I was starting to feel guilty too. I had let my guard down this morning with the detective, way too far down, and I had told him way more than I had ever intended to. I had told him all about William’s affair, and I supposed in some ways, I had perhaps made him look guilty.

That knowledge was eating at me now. I had thrown him under the bus, however unintentionally. I had to fix this.

He had protected me and now I had to protect him.

The phrase kept on going around and around in my head like a mantra, my guilty conscience over what I had told Detective Del Rey eating at me.

I had to fix this, and I knew exactly how I was going to do it. The detective had said we were talking off the record, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that meant anything. He would still use everything I had told him against William and me if he could. But if I could destroy the proof of any such an affair happening, then he wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. It would just be William’s word against mine when he denied the affair, and I could play it in such a way that I just looked like a jealous and insecure wife. I didn’t relish playing that role, but I would do whatever it took to fix this.

I looked at William as my plan started to come together in my head. I was a little surprised to see that he had fallen asleep. I had expected him to be awake, raging that he was stuck in the hospital. The crash and the pain meds must have taken more out of him than he was letting on. I watched him for a moment. He looked so much younger when he was asleep, peaceful, with none of the stress of all of this playing across his face.

I reached out and gently stroked his cheek. He murmured something unintelligible, and he turned his head slightly so that his cheek nuzzled against my hand, but he didn’t wake up. I gently moved my hand away. William’s being asleep made my plan so much simpler, and I didn’t want to risk waking him up now.

He had begun to delete the texts and calls from Candy from his cellphone, and I was sure he would have ignored my advice and kept going with that. Although I was sure the police would be able to get his call logs, that wouldn’t tell them what was said in the texts. And more importantly, I could check his emails and get rid of the sexy thread between William and Candy, something I was sure William wouldn’t have parted with.

As quietly as I could, I pulled open the small drawer in William’s bedside cabinet and pulled his cellphone out. If he woke up now, I would say I was going to call work for him, and I had left my own cellphone at home.

I clicked into his messages. His inbox was empty except for two threads. The first one was a thread between me and him which contained nothing more exciting than random texts checking what time he would be home from work from me, or the odd text from William telling me he would be late. Anger surged through me again as I thought of all those texted lies, but I ignored it.

The second thread of messages was marked as Work and I felt my stomach rolling as I opened it. I needn’t have worried. It was just a group message between William and his team, and I knew without reading any of the messages that he wouldn’t be stupid enough to send any less than professional messages into a group chat.

I checked his call log and found that he had indeed erased all mention of Candy. She wasn’t even in his contacts anymore. That just left the dreaded email, the thing I had been putting off looking at again.

With a quiet sigh, I opened up his email inbox. I started to scroll down, looking for the old thread between William and Candy, but an unopened message caught my eye. Something about a new message. I clicked into it and I instantly felt sick. It was a message from a website that claimed to be a dating site, but everyone knew it was a hookup site. It was telling William he had several new messages.

Without giving myself time to talk myself out of it, I clicked the link and was taken to William’s profile on the site. Anger surged through me again. Not only was William cheating on me in the office, but he had a fucking profile on a hookup website. Wasn’t one hunting ground enough for him? Wasn’t humiliating me at his place of work enough without doing it out in the open where any of my friends might see it?

I clicked into his messages. The first one was from someone calling herself The Blonde Honey. I looked at her picture. She couldn’t be a day over twenty. I felt sick to my stomach without even having to read the messages.

I debated replying to The Blonde Honey, telling her I was William’s wife, but I just couldn’t bring myself to lay down another layer of humiliation on myself at William’s infidelity. Instead, I closed the app and went back to William’s inbox. I deleted the email because he would know it was open and that he wasn’t the one who had opened it. I could see several other alerts from the same website, and I debated deleting them all, but I decided against it.

If the police did ask for William’s cellphone and they saw this, then he would only have himself to blame. The message I had looked at had been new, sent just half an hour ago, so it wasn’t like William had even learned his lesson about cheating on me. It was fair game now. If the police found the messages, they wouldn’t be incriminating in the sense of showing that he’d had regular sexting conversations with Candy. But they would show everyone just what sort of a man he was. And that was enough for me.

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