As fitful as my night had been, C.C’s long interrogation and jail cell night left him exhausted. I insisted on driving . C.C. and I were in one car, and Detective Pearson followed closely behind in his.
“C.C. from his time with you last night , even Pearson knows more about what ’s going on than I do. We have at least forty five minutes before we reach West Winds Retreat. What is going on with you, and what have I been drawn into?”
“O.K.”, C.C. began. “Lindsey is my wife. She is safe and staying with Mom and Jesse. I was dating Karla, my senior year in college. It was she who you met, who pretended to be Lindsey, and who was killed in your apartment . Lindsey was her roommate in school. In a nutshell, I went to pick Karla up for a date ; she wasn’t there….had gone out with another guy, actually. She left Lindsey with the task of giving me the bad news. The rest was simple. Lindsey and I fell in love, graduated from school, got married, and never thought of Karla again. That is she hadn’t crossed our minds until about three weeks ago. Karla showed up at our door. How she found us I don’t know, but she whisked in and without any explanation told us that if we didn’t help her she was a dead woman. She was always full of drama and half truths, so neither of us took her entirely seriously.”
I interrupted, “So Lindsey who I don’t know is your wife; Karla who I met and who claimed to be Lindsey is and old girlfriend . She obviously knew she was in real trouble to go to the trouble of seeking out you and your wife.”
C.C. began again. “What she wanted from us was money. She needed to disappear for a while. Lindsey always has been a soft touch, so we scraped together what we had, just six hundred dollars. I figured that was the last we’d see of her or the money, but I really just wanted her gone. She gave Lindsey a hug good bye and left as quickly as she had come.”
“Wait”, I said, “How did she end up in my apartment?”
“Justine,” he replied, “None of this was supposed to come to your doorstep. Little did we know how much she had even entangled us in her problem. With her good bye hug she had slipped a small key taped to a slip of paper into Lindsey’s pocket. She found it as she was getting ready for bed. All the note said was that Karla would call for the key to be mailed to her when she was safe. At that point we looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief. The next day belief came all too easily. Lindsey arrived home from work about half an hour before I did. Our place was wrecked. Someone had torn up our apartment . She ran downstairs and waited for me at the building entrance. The only explanation we could muster was that someone seriously wanted to find that key. My thought was to get Lindsay somewhere safe and to find out if we were in danger. To do that I had to find Karla.”
C.C. swallowed hard and asked if I had anything to drink in the car. “Water”, he said, “No frills; my life is complex enough.”
