Lies Left Unsaid

Detective Brandon

Having worked as a detective in Chicago for 18 years there were few things that surprised me. The city didn't earn the title "murder capital of the U.S" for nothing. I'd seen little kids caught in the crossfire of a gang battle, with bullets in their heads, and the body of a woman whose throat was slit as she walked down the street in broad daylight of what was considered a "safe" neighborhood. When I first joined the force, I did it because I wanted to make the world a better place for my possible future children, but the longer I was a detective, the more I realized how sick and twisted people could be. It was one of the reasons I wound up never having kids. I didn't want them to be raised in such a fucked up world.

Over time, the job wore on me. There's only so much blood and guts one man can take. It was because of this that I jumped at the chance to take a job in the quiet upscale suburb of Highland Park. There was, in fact, so little crime going on there that I often spent my days doing more police work than detective work. But days spent writing speeding tickets to men racing their Porsches down the road in order to satisfy their mid-life crisis, were beginning to wear on me. The day-to-day minutiae of being a cop in a safe town just didn't give me the same thrill I felt solving cases and catching bad guys, which is why I have to admit I was more than a little excited when the Caitlyn Coates case came across my desk. It had everything great murder cases often do: intrigue, fascination and mystery. A beautiful young rich girl mysteriously disappears and all that's found of her is her right pinky finger, a pair of stained panties and a clump of hair. It was the kind of story the media would eat up, and it was evident they already were based on the swarm of reporters that had set up camp near the crime scene. I could actually see the journalists salivating at the mouths. The excitement in their eyes over her murder was sickening, but my disgust came in the fact that I was just as excited about the case as they were.

While the case provided the perfect story for gossip magazines, it presented many challenges from an investigative standpoint, most notably, the absence of a body. With the parents reporting her missing a week earlier, it was easy to assume whose finger it was when a jogger in Rosewood Park discovered it. Fingerprint records from a summer she tried to intern at a school on the West Side of Chicago proved a match to the bloody tip of the mangled appendage.

The community had already started their own search party. It always made me laugh that citizens thought they could do a better job than the police, but if they wanted to do my job for me, so be it. My time would be better spent trying to find a lead.

When I arrived at the crime scene, there wasn't much of a crime scene to be found. Like I said, there was a chunk of auburn colored hair, which somehow retained its shine despite what, God only knows, the girl went through before it was ripped from her scalp. And of course there was, what would become, the infamous red silk thong. It was smeared with stale cum, which would have to be sent to the lab for confirmation. That damn thong derailed the investigation for weeks and became the center of a swirling salacious news story that seemed to consume the entire country that spring. Eventually the story even made the cover of People magazine. I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I saw it, while standing in line at the grocery store trying to purchase some toilet paper and shaving cream. There were Caitlyn's beguiling eyes, staring right back at me. "Help me," she seemed to say. At first those eyes tore my heart in half. They were beckoning me to find her, to save her, although it looked like it was too late for that. But the longer the investigation went on, the more annoying that photo became. It was plastered on bus stops and billboards. It was shown on television programs nationwide. "What's your problem?" the photo would say. "Why haven't you solved my murder yet? What are you, some kind of idiot?"

Of course all of that would come later. Right now, I was the man in charge, cocky and self-assured. I had taken over the investigation once the finger was discovered and it was determined we were looking at a possible homicide verse a disappearance. It was left to me to assess the crime scene and begin doing interviews. To my dissatisfaction, our Captain had recently assigned me a new partner. He was a rookie; a cop who'd recently been promoted to detective. I wasn't exactly the type of guy who enjoyed taking people under my wing. I was more of the, stay-out-of-my-way-and-don't-ask-too-many-questions, kind of mentor. So I told him to shut up, listen well and take good notes. He wound up only doing one of the three.