Lies Left Unsaid

Detective Brandon

Emily Jugenheimer seemed less like Caitlyn's best friend and more like a frenemy. I think she knew more than she let on about Caitlyn's life the past year but I needed to find out some information from the boyfriend and speak to Caitlyn's mother again before I interrogated Emily further.

Unfortunately, the identity of Caitlyn's boyfriend had somehow been leaked to the media before we got the chance to interview him. So much for the element of surprise. We still hadn't found Caitlyn's body, but we didn't have to. As soon as the media got wind of the boyfriend, the case was solved in the public's eye. They branded Colin Thomas with the title of "potential suspect," even though we hadn't officially established him as one. It was a label he would spend his entire life fighting. I'd seen it more than once throughout my career, a case in which a man was wrongly accused. Just because the charges are dropped or he goes free doesn't mean it's all over and put behind him. Watching an innocent man go free wasn't always rewarding. More often than not, they were broken and lost. Sometimes they never recovered from the lie. It followed them around like a stray dog, desperate for attention.

I have to say though, that all the negative attention didn't seem to be getting Colin Thomas down, at least, not yet. I had been following him for a day and was surprised at his brazenness when I saw him coming out of the movie theater with a girl that, by the way he was grabbing her ass, couldn't have been his sister. It was hard to decipher if this was the callous motive of a cold blooded killer moving on mere weeks after the disappearance of his high school sweetheart, or if it was simply the raging hormones of a teenage boy. I chalked it up to the latter. There was something I couldn't put my finger on with Colin, but there was nothing about him that made me think he was even remotely capable of the terrible things he'd been accused of. I felt bad for the kid, although by the looks of it, he seemed to be fairing just fine. Because of his branding as a suspect, he had left his golden boy status behind and upgraded to the title of "bad boy." What is it about girls and bad boys? The only thing they seem to like more than Mr. Perfect is Mr. Not-So-Perfect, Mr. Slightly Dangerous, Mr. Don't-Bring-Me-Home-to-Meet-Yo-Mama. I'd seen it a million times over the course of my career. The girl, who thinks her boyfriend will leave his wife for her, and then once he does, she believes that he would never do the same thing to her. Or the girl who visits the convict in prison and spends her days writing letters, vowing to wait for him. There was always some girl, low in self-esteem, waiting to take on a project like Colin. Women always think they can fix a man, but they never can. It's a lesson every woman seems hell bent on learning the hard way.

Not only did I have the media up my ass inquiring about Colin, but the Cap was on me as well. Martìnez had been doing a lot of bitch work lately and the Captain called me into his office to yell about giving him more responsibility. Sometimes I think he just liked to hear himself scream. So I told Martìnez he could ask some questions when we interviewed the boyfriend. I went over the questions with him ahead of time. Colin was going to have a lawyer present so we had to be careful what we asked or his lawyer might shut it down. This was an important interview and Martìnez's big mouth had the potential to screw it up. But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised that his big mouth wound up being the reason we got Colin to admit two huge secrets.