“That’s you and Julia. I have five more of these stills if you don’t believe me. There’s also the actual video footage. Now, there’s no audio. But it doesn’t take audio to see that the two of you are in a very not-festive conversation. In fact, it looks as if you’re screaming at each other. What’s going on here?”
The professor keeps staring at the picture, her jaw set. Finally, she lets out a sigh and slides the picture back across the desk towards me.
“Look, this is pretty embarrassing for me to talk about. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I would really like to just put it behind me. But since you insist on digging it up and seem to think that this indicates in some way that I had something to do with her disappearance, I will tell you. You asked me about the rumors that I was seeing one of my TA’s. I was,” she says.
“But you denied it,” I say. “You said they were just rumors.”
“Of course I did. I was standing right there with my partner. Who, by the way, I’ve been with since before this incident. So, as you can imagine, I don’t want information about a brief and completely ridiculous indiscretion becoming public knowledge. Once the rumors started getting more pervasive and it seemed we were going to get found out, Timothy and I broke things off. I realized how absurd I was being. I was a grown woman, and he was young enough to be my son. Besides, I was in a strong relationship with a wonderful man, and I didn’t want to compromise that. I would think you would be able to commiserate with me,” she says.
“So, why the fight?” I ask. “What does Julia have to do with any of that?”
Professor Murillo sighs and pushes herself up from her seat to walk over to the coffee maker on the bookshelf at the edge of the office.
“Before coming to my senses, I was extremely wrapped up in my relationship with Timothy. I guess any woman getting that kind of attention from such a young and attractive man will go a little out of her mind. I was jealous and possessive. Some of the rumors had shifted and became that Julia and I were seeing the same man. More accurately, that I was being manipulated for grades and paid teaching assistant hours, while he got what he really wanted from her. He completely denied it. He pointed out that she’d manufactured a relationship with another TA at her first college, and that this was just par for the course for her. But I saw them together a couple of times and it just pushed me over the edge. So, I confronted her about it. It was embarrassing. It was out of line. And I really regret doing it. Is that satisfying enough for you?”
“I have another question,” I say.
She takes a sip of her coffee, and her shoulders drop under another sigh. “What is it?”
Sifting through the other images in my hands, I pull out another and hold it out to her. “Julia was there that night bringing a little girl to see Santa. There are a couple of images in the footage that seem to show her talking to someone, but the other person is never visible. Do you know who this little girl is?”
Murillo takes the picture from my hand and stares down at it for a second, then hands it back, shaking her head. “No. Did she have a sister?”
“No.”
She shrugs. “I have no idea. When I saw her, she was coming out of that store and she didn’t have a child with her. I’m sure you saw on the footage that we met up right outside the store, talked, and then I walked away, leaving her there.”
It’s an accurate description of the footage and I nod. “Thank you.”
I start out of the office and she calls after me. “You don’t need to talk about this to anyone, do you?”
I don’t even dignify that with a response.
Getting back out to my car, I call Sam. He answers wearing his uniform and it looks as if he’s on a call.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “Just more training with the new officers. Did you talk to Murillo?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just got out of her office. Turns out, she was lying about sleeping with a teaching assistant, and she thought that Julia was sleeping with the same TA. She was just jealous and confronting her about that. I asked her about the little girl, and she didn’t know who she was.”
“I’m sorry you hit another dead end,” he says.
“Not a dead end. Just a detour. I’m still going to figure it out.”
I pull away from the curb and drive away.
“What are you doing now?” he asks.
“I want to go to the store where Samantha Murray was found. When I was talking to Jeremy, he named the neighborhood where he followed Julia. I looked it up, and that neighborhood and the store are pretty close together. I want to see how the two are connected. The night that Julia wrote about seeing him is the same night she apparently borrowed that scarf. I want to see how they all fit.”
Getting to the spot where the abandoned store once stood takes driving a few minutes off campus. It’s one of the areas of the city that was largely abandoned and rundown thirteen years ago but has undergone some revitalization since then.
I find the address that was once the store where Samantha Murray’s body was discovered, then use my GPS to find the easiest route to the street Jeremy described. It’s a historic neighborhood filled with houses rather than the apartment
