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“Are you ready for us to send everyone back in?” the nurse asked softly as she handed me a small cup of water.
No, I wanted to say. Why did I have to speak to a detective the moment I woke up from a coma, especially after my mother and brother died. I had not even been afforded a moment to experience a bit of grief or process things.
“The doctors tell me that you are ready to talk,” the detective said. He looked at my father. “Given that you are still a minor, your father will be in the room. He’s waived legal counsel on your behalf.”
He had?That was news to me. From the time I could remember, my father told all of us that we didn’t talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Now, he stood next to me, his firm hand back on my shoulder. “Carla is a victim, and we want to find who killed my wife and son.” His voice cracked slightly at the end. “So, we will participate as much as we can.”
Though I had no plans on telling the cop anything, I nodded. The second lesson we learned was that if you did speak, you lied.
“Do you remember what happened?” the detective asked.
Inhaling sharply, I thought about that night. “I came home, and I found them.”
“Dead?”
“Obviously.”
The detective was being hostile on purpose, and I tried not to let this rattle me. His lips pursed. “And?”
I closed my eyes as I thought about what happened that night. Things were foggy. Trying to focus felt like trying to push a boulder up a hill. But every time I got close to something, the boulder slipped back slightly. “The killer was still there.” A chill raced down my spine, and my fingers went to my neck. “There were two men there.”
My father’s fingers squeezed my shoulder, and I tried not to wince. This was his warning.Say nothing else.
“Two?” The detective’s nose wrinkled, and he wrote something down. “Were they both men?”
“We know that there was more than one person involved,” my father said, cutting off the question. “One man wouldn’t be able to take down my entire security and gun down my wife and son.”
The grief was gone from his voice. My father had slipped into the persona of Capo.
“And why did a businessman such as yourself need so much security?” The question was a legitimate one. My father pretended to be a Hollywood investor, not that anyone knew what that meant. But our house was locked down like Fort Knox.
Which begged the question, how the hell did anyone get in the house?
“I think it is pretty obvious.”
No one could argue with that. The detective turned his attention back to me. “Do you remember taking the GHB?”
The question threw me for a loop. “What?”
He released a sigh. “You had GHB in your system. At first, we thought maybe you’d been drugged, but we were able to find footage from you at the club you attended. We spoke to your boyfriend, and he mentioned that you were arguing with your mother…”
“You spoke to Caleb?”
Clearly he hadn’t told the detective the truth. He’d been the one who slipped me the drugs. GHB. My stomach rolled once more. Why the hell would Caleb give me a depressant? We’d played around with certain substances before, but he’d never given me anything I hadn’t agreed to before.
“We did. He told us that you and your mother weren’t close.”
I blinked. “Are you accusing me of having a hand in this?” He’d skirted around it, but I wanted him to come out and say it.
“You are the only witness to a very heinous crime,” the detective said, as though I needed a reminder. I was the one who found my mother and brother. The sight of their bodies would be one that I took with me to the grave. “You should be able to identify someone or something—”
This was my father’s cue, and he stepped forward. “The doctor made it clear that Carla does not know anything. The drugs in her system coupled with the trauma of the attack has caused memory issues. She did not even recall what happened when she first woke.”
A stare down ensued between the two of them, and I worried that the detective was going to win. Something about the older man reminded me of a pit bull, and this felt like he’d found his bone.
After a moment, he looked away, releasing a small, frustrated huff out of his nose. He reached into his jacket and handed my father a card and a small key. “That will release the cuffs. You can leave it with the nurses’ station, and I’ll have someone pick it up.”
