by Kate Gable
"Where? At the observatory?" He asks.
I clench my jaw.
"Highly unlikely, because we've never looked there and he would be pointing us in that direction, but yeah, he buries her somewhere."
"How does he get her there?" He asks.
"What are you talking about?"
"How does he physically take her from that park near the observatory to this other place? He has only a scooter, remember? So, does he drape her body over it?"
"I don't know, but we have to look there."
"Deputies are already doing that, remember?" he says, reminding me of what the captain mentioned offhandedly.
"I have to go and look there, too," I say.
"You're not going to be able to find anything tonight unless it's the body and I'm sure that the sheriff's deputies can do that very well without you, but the thing is, Kaitlyn, that this doesn't make sense. We were never looking for her in that spot. So, why would he come here and confess this thing to your mom, unless everything he said was true? He was there. They did have a picnic. Then he dropped her back off. That's it. End of story."
I pace from one side of the room to another processing what he is saying. My blood pressure is elevated. I feel tense and nothing seems to make sense, except that something keeps gnawing at me.
"You know as well as I do that people tend to come forward with only a part of the story. They tell a million half-truths and you have to keep interviewing them to get the rest of it. They're not going to come right out and admit that what they did is rape and kill this girl. He's going to say something else, he's going to place himself at the scene because he's worried that we're going to find some evidence of him being there anyway. He's just going to preemptively explain it away. We have to keep digging and keep getting more information in order to find out what happened."
"Listen, if you want to think that, that's fine, but I'm going to wait for the sheriff's department to do their search and see if they do actually find any evidence of them being there, let alone a murder taking place."
I slow down my pacing back and forth and take a few deep breaths to calm down. I sit on the edge of the bed.
"There's something else," he says. "Natalie."
I nod.
"She's still missing. If you think this kid killed Violet or had anything to do with her disappearance, then you probably think he has something to do with Natalie's disappearance. What are the chances of a thirteen-year-old making two of his friends disappear? Doesn't that sound like a job for an adult?"
I nod. I know what he's saying is right.
"What if he was involved?" I ask.
"Yeah. He may be involved and I'm not saying that he's not capable of it. I am. I know that plenty of thirteen year olds have committed murder and many more will continue to do so, but the thing is that they're both missing. We found nothing, no evidence, no fingerprints at either scene, no camera presence from the neighbors’ Nest cameras, no witnesses, no sign that they were abducted, let alone killed."
"What does that tell you?"
"If Neil is involved, he's involved with somebody else."
"So, what do you think happened?" I ask. "You think that it was some shadowy figure driving around grabbing girls from their porches?"
"Yeah, that's possible, but again, we don't have any strange cars on cameras recorded in the neighborhoods. The canvassing didn't result in a single lead about a stranger being there. It's a mystery and until we get more information, it's going to remain a mystery."
I swallow hard. I wanted to keep this information to myself, but now I realize that I can't.
"There's something else," I say. "Captain showed me her computer. She had all these videos of them making out, having sex.”
"Yes, I know." He nods his head.
"You know?"
"They turned over all of their files to me and my team. I watched the videos. Violet is there in the basement recording them and they're very well aware of the fact that she's there. It is not a hidden camera."
"Why though?"
"I don't know. I don't know why teenagers record and make pictures of half the things that they do, but whatever they were doing, it was at least consensual from what I can tell from the video footage."
"Don't you think that gives Neil some sort of motive?"
"Yeah. If anything, it gives Natalie motive because of how society is. A boy gets with a hot girl and he's made out to be some charismatic Casanova. If a girl does it, then she's damaged goods. There's nothing on any of those videos that seems like he or they are doing anything without their consent. Even if Neil didn't want those videos to get out, there's no evidence that Violet was planning on releasing them. She, in fact, is the one who's the creepy one in the videos, standing there and recording everything."
"There's one with her and Neil, too," I say.
"There is.” He nods. “I saw that. It's still not clear how any of this is related to their disappearance. We're going to have our computer techs work on it. Maybe they were uploaded somewhere to some site. Maybe that will lead us and give us some clues, but so far, it seems like all the evidence is pointing to a stranger taking them or..." His voice drops off.
"Or what?" I ask.
"Or them going somewhere on their own."
"No," I shake my head, "absolutely not."
"I know that you think it's unlikely, but you also know that Violet has had a secret life, and that doesn't mean that there aren't more secrets to uncover."
21
I get a call from Captain Medvil and I immediately answer to find out that Robert Kaslar is coming in to speak to them without a lawyer at eight a.m. the following morning.
Medvil is brief and he gets to the point right away.
"Can I come? Will I be there to do the interview?" I hesitate briefly and he senses that.
He says, "I can assign someone else to this case, Kaitlyn, you know that?"
"I know," I say, "but this is my case and I've done all the other interviews, so I need to do this one."
"Okay, but only if you're here on your own time and you're fully committed, because I just can't have this going back and forth, you know?" he asks.
I nod.
“Carr?” he asks, and I suddenly remember that he can't see me.
"I'll be there. The investigation here has kind of reached a bit of a pause. So, I'll be there, and I'll do the interview 100% committed, sir."
He hangs up without a goodbye. I exhale slowly.
I know that this is the right thing to do. I’ve already gotten a lot out of him and I think that, in a different environment, with cameras and a little bit of pressure, I can push him over the edge and get him to tell me what he did to his wife.
"So, you're going back?" Luke asks.
I nod and answer, "I can't let him re-assign this case. Robert already told me a lot, and I think he's kind of afraid of me. I probably have the best chance of getting him to open up."
"Hey, you don't have to explain it to me."
"Besides, if I get re-assigned then I may catch a murder investigation and you know how those are. There's the additional pressure from the forty-eight-hour time clock so everything's accelerated."
"Listen, I know exactly what you do, and what you need to do. I get it," Luke says, but I sense a pulling away from him. I know that he doesn't want me to leave, at least that's what it feels like.
"I want to apologize for the argument that we had earlier, but the problem is that I'm not sorry. It's good that we disagreed. It's good to have opposing opinions just in case things don't go as planned."
"Listen, I have to tell you something," Luke says, sitting down next to me on the edge of the bed. I grab the remote control, turn on the TV, and let it bathe us in a deep blue light. Luke reaches over and flips it off.
"What's wrong?" I ask.
"I don't know how to say this to you exactly because I wasn't expecting us to get together earlier, but I actually have a date tonight and I have to go." "What?
"
His words sound jumbled and I'm not entirely sure if I understood what he's saying.
“What are you talking about? What do you mean you have a date? Who do you even know here?"
"It's not here. It's down in San Bernardino. My cousin lives in Riverside and she set up this double date with her and her boyfriend a while ago. I can't cancel. This is her friend and... I don't know. I just can't cancel. It's been set up for like a month, way before us."
"Okay." I nod.
"Nothing's going to happen. I mean, I like you."
"I like you, too, but, you know, this isn't serious or anything. You don't have to run anything past me," I say defensively.
Now it's his turn to look surprised. His eyebrows rise and he nods very slowly and suddenly I regret what I had said.
"Well, I just wanted...I just wanted to let you know, to be a nice guy, but I had no plans for it to be a real date, but my cousin..."
"Listen, you don't have to explain anything," I cut him off. "You have a date, fine. Whatever. We're just friends, right?"
"Well, I thought," he starts to say.
“If you thought that we're more than that, then why are you going on this date?"
"I told you, it was something that was set up earlier."
"Okay, well, then go. That's totally fine. You go on your date and I'm going to drive back and get some sleep before my interview tomorrow."
I start to head toward the door, but he grabs my hand.
"Listen, I told you, if you want to go, go," I snap.
His eyes dart from side to side but focus on mine. He's basically asking me to stop him, but I refuse to play that game. We're not together and if he doesn't want to go on this date, then he has to stop himself.
"Listen," I pull my hand away from him, "you don't owe me anything. You can go and do whatever you want."
He nods and bites the inside of his cheek. I want to take that back. I shouldn't have said that, but I grab my purse, zip up my jacket, and I walk out into the cold.
I feel lost. I'm not certain of anything. I'm not certain of my own instincts or what feels like the right thing is. I knew that Luke and I weren't officially together, but I had no idea that he was making other plans, other dates. I know that he's not lying when he said that his cousin had set him up on this date before we even met and he's just going on it as an obligation.
I turn on the music and I turn it up really loud, to try to drown out my own thoughts. It works for a little while, but every time I come to a stop sign, to a light, or just a little bit of a traffic jam, my thoughts immediately return to him.
Was I a fool for acting like that? Did I make a mistake?
Did I push him away when he really wanted me to stay close? This wouldn’t be the first time.
The history of my relationships is a battlefield of bad decisions. Yes, there have been a few that were unhappy with my working schedule, but those boyfriends have been sparse.
Most of the time, I can't commit. I can't put myself out there.
When someone asks, "Be mine, just mine. Let's try to make a life together," I'm afraid. I know that it probably goes back to my childhood and how uneven and unstable it was to be my mother's child.
Sometimes everything was fine, we were a happy family. Other times she'd come home from work and everything would be wrong, mismanaged, and just off.
My father didn't add to the general good feeling in the house. He would drink, he would do drugs, and he would disappear. Being with him was probably what made my mom so worried about the future and uncertain of the present.
Some days they'd kiss, hug, and watch a movie on the couch. Others he'd be gone, partying, selling drugs, just not spending time with us.
You never knew what you were going to get. For some people, that was probably a source of excitement, but not in my family.
It made my mom crave stability and it made me crave independence.
I would not be like her and my happiness would not depend on a man. It wouldn't matter if I had one or not. They can come and go.
I could have a good time, but I would have no connections. That has always been my motto. That's why I always ran.
Stability was just not worth the price that it required you to pay. My thoughts return to Luke. Something is different about him. He's quiet, reserved, and unassuming. Other people wouldn't think that he's very fun, but I do. I kind of like that. He makes me laugh.
The world seems okay when he's around, but the minute that he told me that he had a date, a switch went off, and suddenly everything changed. Reflecting back on that moment in the motel, I realize that I tend to walk on thin ice.
The minute I see a crack I make a jump for it and run away, but that's not always right, right? A crack doesn't always mean that something is terribly, irrevocably wrong. Sometimes it's something that can be fixed.
When I get to my apartment and climb under the covers, I'm filled with nothing but regret for how I acted. He told me that he had a date and instead of talking to him, I ran away. I told him that it didn't matter that he had a date and that I'd be fine either way.
Now he's out there meeting this girl without problems, without baggage, someone who can love him for who he is, and I pushed him away. I pushed him into her arms and it's all my fault.
I sleep like a rock and I get to work early the next morning to go over all of my notes and prepare for the interview with Robert. Captain Medvil is happy to see me and offers to walk me through what we have on the case so far. It's not much, just a lot of suspicious talk and uncertainty.
"Frankly, we don't even know whether or not she's missing of her own volition," the captain says.
"Looking over the case file, we can assume that she isn’t, given the fact that she's not using her phone or her laptop," I say.
"No, I don't think so." He shakes his head. “She could be running away from him. Maybe he was abusive and no one knew. Maybe she doesn't want to be found. Maybe she got a burner phone at Walmart with no registration with the phone company.”
"That's plausible, I guess," I say, "but what about her friend? What about her doctor's appointment? Why would she just disappear right after the trip? Why wouldn't she at least tell her friend not to worry?"
"I guess that's what we have to find out from Robert."
"No, I don't have a good feeling about this," I say. "I think that if she's gone, she's not gone of her own volition."
We sit with that for a few minutes around his desk with neither of us saying anything and both of us burying our eyes in the case file even though what we look at is nothing in particular.
"What about her parents? Also, were you able to get anyone in the media interested in this case?"
"That's the thing," I say. "Her parents are across the country in South Carolina. So, the local stations ran a few reports about her being missing but there's no one to interview. There's no one locally besides her friend to participate in the search. So, they're having trouble gaining interest in her story."
He looks at a recent picture of Karen, smiley face, tousled hair, and features that aren't exactly selling a lot of newspapers. Neither of us wants to say it but we know why the media isn't interested.
She didn't have much of an online presence and she didn't have many friends. She also doesn't have family members to interview and cry in front of reporters. There isn't any concrete evidence or even enough to make an accusation against her husband.
"I mean, she is pregnant," I say. "They always like the stories about pregnant women."
"Yeah, that's true. Has that been confirmed?”
“We need a warrant to access her medical records, otherwise the gynecologist won't tell me anything. Just between you and me, she did give me a wink, so to speak, but she won't go public with it."
"Well, she did take all of those pregnancy tests that she told Elin about, right?" the captain asks.
I nod.
He takes a long sip from his canister, undoubtedly filled with the
darkest, blackest coffee imaginable.
* * *
"So, what do you want me to ask him?" I ask Captain Medvil. "Anything specifically to focus on?"
"You know what to do," he says confidently. "You're good at this."
I nod. I've been having doubts and I appreciate him saying this.
"Just press what you know about from Elin and the doctor. Push him to say anything about seeing her even a little bit, even for a short time after she got back from her business trip. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe they had a fight and he didn't mean for anything to happen."
That's the usual technique when it comes to these interrogations. First, you get the person to admit that they were there. Then you get them to say that whatever happened was an accident.
People are more likely to admit to an accident than doing it on purpose. Once you have that on record and on file, you press harder. You show them all the ways that it could never have been an accident. That's when the confession usually occurs. They try to prove you wrong. They talk themselves into a corner. They admit to more things that happened to try to show you that they are right and that's when they get in trouble. That's how they slip up.
My only purpose here is to get Robert to do this, to get him to tell us what happened to Karen, and what he did to her. I have one chance at this, technically, more than that. There’re infinite chances, but people get frustrated when you ask them the same questions and they either give you the same answers or they clam up entirely.
No, with him I have to show myself to be just the right type of person, the kind of person that he would open up to.
I have to challenge him, but not so much that it forces him to shut down.
I have to be his friend, but not a pushover.
It's a fine line to walk.
22