Page 27 of Everyone Is Lying to You
Transcript of Detective Jim Walsh Interviewing Witness Elizabeth Matthews
Det. Walsh: You haven’t seen Mrs. Sommers at all today?
E. Matthews: No. We were supposed to have breakfast this morning, but she never called or texted. So I went to her room and knocked and she wasn’t there. I got worried that she overslept.
Det. Walsh: Did you have a lot to drink last night?
E. Matthews: Define “a lot.”
Det. Walsh: I don’t like sass.
E. Matthews: It was a lot for me. I don’t normally drink more than a glass or two of wine.
Det. Walsh: Was it a lot for her? Do you think she could have driven a car after what she had to drink?
E. Matthews: I honestly don’t know. Maybe. But probably not. Like I said, I was worried that she overslept so I banged on the door and I called but there was no answer.
Det. Walsh: Did you think that was strange?
E. Matthews: I thought she had already gone downstairs, and I went down to find her.
Det. Walsh: But she wasn’t there?
E. Matthews: She wasn’t there.
Det. Walsh: When did you learn about what happened to Grayson Sommers?
E. Matthews: After the police arrived at the conference. It didn’t take long for people to start talking and chattering, even as the room got locked down. Eventually someone got ahold of the pictures…
Det. Walsh: What did you think when you saw the pictures?
E. Matthews: That whoever did that to him must have really fucking hated Gray Sommers.
Chapter Nine
Lizzie
Every time I try to talk to one of the officers passing me in the hall of the police station my throat tightens. It feels as though someone is choking me. The words won’t come. I just want to ask when they think I can leave. My phone has no service and I’ve been here for hours. There are no windows in the station, which feels like such a cliché, but it’s true. I have no idea if Grayson Sommers’s death has made national news. Not that he’s famous per se, but Bex is well-known enough, and more important, she’s a beautiful white woman who may have murdered her husband, which will be catnip to every attention-starved news network on the planet.
I’ve never been interrogated before. It lacked all of the hokey charm of the gazillion seasons ofLaw & OrderI’ve watched since college. Detective Jim Walsh had none of Stabler’s charisma or his sexy eyebrows. Walsh was a short, round man with a round head that had hair only around the periphery and none on thetop. He didn’t wear a uniform, just dirty blue jeans and a denim button-down shirt, more reminiscent of a ranch hand than a detective.
I’m still in shock about everything—the fact that I’m in a police station at all; the fact that Bex’s husband is dead, possibly brutally murdered; the fact that she is likely the prime suspect.
I think back to the moment the henfluencer told me that Grayson Sommers was dead.
“How do you know?” I’d asked.
“Eliza Jane, over there.” She had nodded in the direction of another table. “She’s got a cousin who’s a cop out by the Sommers place and he just tipped her off.”
The woman continued to stare down at her phone. “This is insane.”
“What? What else?”
She tilted her screen toward me and that’s when I saw Grayson. Or rather, what was left of him.
“Isn’t it illegal for a cop to text photos of a crime scene?”
She shrugged but didn’t take her eyes off the small screen.
