Lies Left Unsaid

Detective Brandon

There it was. Staring me in the face. Making a mockery of me. Miguel Ryan Martìnez. I could hear his words echoing in my head from the first time we met. He cracked a stupid joke about never trusting someone with two first names. I thought he was talking about me. I was wrong. Dead wrong. And it may have cost both Caitlyn and Dr. Patrick their lives.

I continued searching through his file hoping that I was just being paranoid, that this was all some sort of weird coincidence, but then I saw something else that I couldn't ignore. Prior to coming to Highland Park, Martìnez was a cop in St. Louis. Madison said that Caitlyn got pulled over by a cop when she spent that year at Thomas Jefferson in....St. Louis. Was that just a coincidence as well? Unlikely.

I was trying to piece it all together in my head. Martìnez knew Caitlyn prior to coming to Highland Park, that I was sure of. He had to have been the cop that pulled her over that night. That's why none of the cops at the precinct by Thomas Jefferson knew what I was talking about when I mentioned her drunk driving incident. But what happened from there, I couldn't quite put together. Madison mentioned something about Caitlyn looking white as a ghost when she got home that evening. Had he done something to her? Is that why he never charged her with drinking and driving? Did he become infatuated with her? Did he follow her to Highland Park when she left Thomas Jefferson? Is that why she left abruptly without saying goodbye, because she was being stalked or harassed and she couldn't go to the cops for help because Martìnez was the cops. Maybe that's why she convinced her mother to take her back. Maybe she pretended that she was okay with her mother's affair in order to get away from Martìnez. Maybe that's why she made up the fake gay boyfriend, to try and get him to leave her alone. Jesus Christ! Martìnez had specifically requested to be put on her case. Was that his sick way of trying to figure out if we were on to him, or his way of trying to derail the investigation? I thought back to the morning that we arrested Terry. Martinez had specifically asked to be the one to search Terry's things and when he discovered the toe, Terry had recoiled in disgust. That's not normally the reaction of someone who enjoys keeping a toe as a souvenir. At the time, I had assumed it was his way of trying to pretend he didn't know it was there, but he legitimately looked surprised when Martìnez pulled it out of the drawer. And Martinez covered his mouth and nose as if the smell was overwhelming. Wouldn't a human toe that had been sitting in a desk for a month smell so atrociously that people would have smelled it when they entered Terry's office? That is, unless....oh jesus...that is unless it hadn't been there for a month at all because Martìnez planted it there during the search! Is that why he left so suddenly? Did he know that eventually I would put it all together? But the toe had Terry's DNA on it. Why? Were they in on this together and Martìnez got out when he saw the opportunity to frame Terry? Or was Martìnez the one that Terry paid to kill Caitlyn? Is that why he never went down to the hospital to do interviews and always had some reason why he couldn't go with me, because he was worried I'd be able to tell that he and Terry knew one another? 

It all added up to one disturbing fact: in one way or another, Martìnez was involved in Caitlyn's murder. How could I not have seen it? How could I have been so fucking stupid? My head was spinning and I thought for a minute I might puke. The only thing keeping me focused was that there was one piece of information that I couldn't make sense of. It was obvious now that Martìnez's father was Dr. Ryan: the same Dr. Ryan who had worked closely with Terry and who had been rumored to have been the culprit behind the stolen pain medication. I couldn't quite figure out how this worked into the equation. The nurse and Terry's administrative assistant said that they had never seen another cop, other than me, interviewing hospital personnel about Caitlyn, so why did Martìnez lie about doing the interviews? What was he hiding and what else had he lied to me about? Perhaps Martìnez followed Caitlyn back to Highland Park and then became jealous when he realized that Dr. Patrick was having an affair with her. Did he know she was pregnant with Dr. Patrick's child? Is that why he killed her and framed Terry? My head felt like it was going to explode from the stream of endless questions that buzzed through it at a rate of a million miles per minute. There were numerous possibilities pointing in a myriad of directions, but one thing was for sure; I was going to kill that little shit Martìnez when I got my hands on him. He'd made me look like a damn fool and he would regret it.