Chapter 4

Chapter Four

Jamie

I woke up to the insistent shrill ringing of my cellphone. I yawned and wiped the sleep out of my eyes, and then I picked up my cellphone and looked at the screen. It was the chief calling. I glanced at the time, sure I must have overslept, but I hadn’t. It was six a.m. and I knew this was no welcome back call.

“Detective Del Rey,” I said, taking the call.

“Jamie, good to have you back,” the chief said. His small talk ended there, and he was all business when he barked out the rest of his sentence. “We’ve got a body. Suspected homicide. It’s your case, Del Rey. I’ve got officers questioning two potential suspects. How soon can you get here and take over? ”

“How old is the victim?” I asked.

I knew it wasn’t the question I should be asking. I shouldn’t be asking questions at all. I should be answering the chief and getting moving, but the very idea of another child’s murder on my plate made me want to curl up under the duvet and never leave the house again.

“We have a positive ID on the victim. She’s nineteen,” the chief replied.

He didn’t berate me for asking the question, and I thought I had even heard a note of sympathy in his voice when he answered me. Nineteen was still pretty young. Too young to die. But it wasn't like she was a child. I could do this.

“I’ll be there within half an hour, Chief,” I said, fully awake now and raring to go.

I hung up the call and shook my head, half smiling. It felt better to be back than I had thought it would, and this was exactly what I needed. A case to get straight into. It would stop my dwelling on my last case and remind me of what it was I loved about my job. I loved making the streets safer for people, of course, but it was more than that. It was the thrill of the hunt, putting together the pieces of the puzzle, and narrowing in on the guilty party.

I got out of bed, showered, and got dressed in record timing. I grabbed my things and drove to the precinct. I took a deep breath before I went in, ready for the barrage of questions as I made my way through the corridors. None came. Instead, I was patted on the back and had my hand shaken, my colleagues telling me they were glad I was back. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like their treating me with kid gloves, but I supposed I should have seen it coming. It’s exactly how I would have reacted in their shoes.

Now this case meant even more. I wanted to catch the killer and get justice for the victim, of course I did. But now it was about more than that. It was about proving to my colleagues that I was back. Properly back, in mind as well as body.

I made my way to the chief’s office and tapped on the door.

“Come in,” he called.

I opened the door and stuck my head around, but I didn’t go in. The chief looked up and smiled when he saw me. He looked older than I remembered him looking. The smattering of gray in his hair was more prominent than it had been before I left for Europe, and he had lines around his eyes that I didn’t remember him having. I guess the child murder case had taken its toll on him too.

“Just checking in, Chief,” I said. “What have you got for me?”

The chief checked a piece of paper on his desk.

“Officer Dumont and Officer Stanford were the first on the scene, and they’ve been running the show ever since. Relieve them of that duty and get briefed but keep them on your team. Let me know if you need anyone else, all right?”

I nodded. “Thanks, Chief.”

I left the chief’s office and made my way to the kitchen. I stopped in long enough to pour myself a large coffee and then I headed back along the corridor to my team’s incident room. Officer Dumont and Officer Stanford were waiting for me, and they both jumped to their feet when they saw me. I laughed and indicated for them to sit.

“I’m not the president. We’ll have none of that shit,” I said. “While you’re on my team, I expect you to do as I ask, and I expect you to give your all to the investigation. But I don’t expect you to kiss my ass.”

“Works for me, Detective.” Officer Stanford grinned.

“So, what do we have?” I asked.

The information was all displayed on the huge whiteboard that covered one wall, but I wanted to hear it from them. I always did better listening to someone talk than I did reading over reports. It was funny how often something triggered in my mind, something one of the officers said that likely wouldn’t have been in their report. A throwaway comment, a hunch, the things we talked about off the record but couldn’t include them in preliminary reports with no evidence in case our theories were wrong and negatively influenced the case. Those were the places I often found my inspiration and the key to cracking a case.

“Female victim aged nineteen. Candy Xavier. Her father has been informed and he’s confirmed the victim’s identity. She was found on the lawn of 1216 Winter Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. Address belongs to a couple, William and Carlotta Alden,” Officer Stanford said.

She reeled the information off without having to keep checking her notes, which I liked. I had a feeling I was going to enjoy working with her. She paused in her narrative and Officer Dumont took over.

“The victim had been pushed from a second-story window. The injuries she sustained were too intense to have come from a fall. She hit the ground with too much force to have merely fallen. She went straight through the glass, so obviously, her body has several lacerations, but she had a small cut on her hand that wasn’t consistent with the others. We believe it came from a knife and the wound could be defensive. No knife was found at the scene.”

“How long was the victim dead before you got there?” I asked.

“Without the coroner’s report, I can’t say for sure, but I’d guess around three to four hours,” Officer Dumont said.

“Which would have given the couple plenty of time to have disposed of the knife,” I mused. “Carry on.”

“We brought both William and Carlotta Alden in for questioning as they were both present at the time we arrived on the scene. An early morning jogger spotted the broken window. He moved in for a closer look, looking for signs that a burglary was in progress. He said he didn’t want to waste the police’s time if it appeared to be an old broken window that just hadn’t been fixed yet, and it was too early to knock on the door and ask the residents if they knew about the broken window. That’s when he saw the body and called us,” Officer Stanford said.

“And what do they have to say for themselves?” I asked.

“I interviewed William Alden. He was shifty and he was being very evasive. He’s distancing himself from the whole thing, but I can’t decide if it’s because he’s guilty or because he’s in shock. He was particularly evasive about knowing the victim. He tried to claim he didn’t know her at all, but when I pressed him, he admitted to knowing her in passing,” said Officer Stanford.

“Do we have anything to suggest whether she was known to him?” I asked.

Officer Stanford nodded.

“Yes. Candy was working as an intern at the firm where Alden is an architect. He could be telling the truth about not knowing her very well, and maybe at first, her name didn’t register with him. The company is big, and Alden is high enough up the chain that he probably doesn’t know half of the interns there.”

“But?” I prompted Officer Stanford, sensing she wanted to say more but was holding herself back.

“But I don’t trust him. There’s something about him I don’t like. He seems shifty. ”

I nodded and thought for a second.

“So it’s a he said, she said?” I asked. “He’s blaming the wife and she’s blaming him.”

“No, actually. They aren’t blaming each other, and this is the one major point that their stories agree on. They both claim to have been so drunk that they collapsed into bed and don’t remember any of what happened.”

“Convenient,” I said with a sigh. I turned to Officer Dumont. “Did you interview the wife?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “Carlotta Alden. She was a little bit more forthcoming with how she knew Candy, although she is sticking to the blacked out drunk alibi. She instantly admitted that Candy worked for her husband. She claimed not to know her well, but she told us a story about Candy coming to her house one day to collect some paperwork for William. That’s how she recognized her, and it is why William’s story about not knowing who she was at first is a little shaky. If he sent her to his house, he has to know a little bit about her. I’m damned sure I wouldn’t be sending some intern I didn’t know to my house to collect something from my wife.”

I was inclined to agree with that.

“Anything else?” I asked .

“The way Carlotta’s voice changed when she spoke about Candy stood out to me. She talked about her like she really hated her, although she claimed to barely know her. I honestly don’t know what’s going on with these two, but nothing is exactly as it seems with them.”

I nodded my head. This was going to be tricky. It would be hard to get them to turn on each other when they both knew there was no witness to the crime other than themselves, and if they truly were too drunk to remember what had happened, then neither of their testimonies would hold much weight in court.

“Has anyone tested them to see if they’re telling the truth about the amount of alcohol they consumed?” I asked.

The two officers nodded, and Officer Stanford began talking again.

“We had both of them tested when they first came in. Obviously, some time has passed since their last drink. If their story is to be believed, then they were both already passed out when Candy was killed, which was roughly between two and three a.m.. By the time we tested them, based on those timings, at least five and a half hours had passed since their last drink. Obviously, alcohol affects everyone differently, and we have no way of proving one way or the other whether they truly can’t remember the events of that night, but the reports came back, and they do seem to support their stories. William still had enough alcohol in his system this morning to knock a horse out. Carlotta had slightly less than William, but still a significant amount. Toxicology has confirmed that the alcohol levels could cause alcoholic amnesia, or then again, it could just be a convenient cover story.”

“Do we have any idea why Candy was there last night?” I asked.

“No,” Officer Dumont said. “There was a broken window in the basement that Candy could have used to enter the property. But it could also be that she was invited in and the broken window is a coincidence. Forensics are still on the scene, so hopefully they’ll find something that can clear that up one way or the other. The victim’s father didn’t seem to know who the Aldens were, and he believed Candy was in bed asleep until we woke him up to tell him otherwise.”

I shook my head. It was a right mess of a case. Two witnesses, both intoxicated, both potentially willing to lie for the other one. A victim who didn’t seem to have enough of a tie to the suspects to be at their house at all. Did she have some sort of beef with the architectural company that she and William both worked for? But if that was the case, why go after William and not the company’s CEO or her direct manager or whoever she was pissed at?

There was only one way I was going to get to the bottom of this, and it wasn’t going to be by sitting and chatting with the officers before me. They both seemed sharp, like they knew what they were doing, and I found that I trusted their perceptions and opinions. But I wanted to hear the answers from the suspects myself. I wanted to observe their body language, their facial expressions as they talked. And try to find out if they were lying about any of this. And of course, which one of them actually pushed the victim out the window.

I stood up rather abruptly, causing the two officers to share a look. I laughed softly.

“This is how I roll. When there’s something I decide to do, I tend to just act quickly like that. You’ll get used to it. But don’t worry. If I have any sort of problem with anyone on my team or what they’re telling me, they’ll be the first ones to know,” I reassured them.

My words seemed to put the officers at ease a little bit, which I was glad of. It seemed that the newer officers believed me to be a bit of a dick and were treading carefully around me. I hoped to be able to change their minds over the course of the investigation, but it was far from my main priority right now. Some detectives worked well with a bunch of drones who were too afraid to speak their minds. I preferred to treat my team as equals and have them speak freely.

“I want to talk to the suspects,” I said. “See if they trip themselves up or begin to contradict each other. I’m going to talk to Carlotta first as something tells me she’ll be the first of the couple to crack. She’s already given away more than her husband. Officer Dumont, you can accompany me,” I said.

Officer Stanford opened her mouth to protest and I held up my hand for silence.

“It’s nothing personal. If you’re there, she’ll be extra-careful not to trip herself up. If I take someone in who hasn’t already questioned her, she might drop her guard a little,” I explained. “And then after Carlotta, I’m going to talk to William and you can accompany me, Officer Stanford.”

“Let’s go,” Officer Dumont said, getting to his feet.

I led the way across the incident room, and I glanced back as we reached the door. Officer Stanford was already engrossed in the files again, looking over them no doubt for about the fifteenth time, looking for something, anything that we could have missed.