Good Girls
By Hillary Leftwich
In my first few months working as a private investigator, I avoided high-profile murder cases until Rose’s case came across my desk. Opening up her file, a stack of photos sat on top of a lengthy police report, and as I began to sort through them, I understood. This was the case that might break me. The first photo, which corresponded with the coroner’s report, indicated [Victim #1] splayed out on a slanted metal table while [Victim #2] is displayed on a tiny tray next to [Victim #1]. Rose’s unborn baby’s father isn’t listed on the police report. The coroner for the county once told my boss the dead like to keep their secrets safe. The blood from the autopsy condensing on the table looks fake, something you might see in a B-rated horror film. But it isn’t fake. Neither are her hands, sliced from every angle. Defensive wounds, my boss tells me. He bites into a pink and orange frosted donut while we examine the crime scene photos spread across his desk. It’s one of the first cases I’m assigned to as a private investigator that doesn’t involve criminal mischief, assault, battery, stalking, or marijuana. It’s my first murder case, and sure, all murder cases are bad, but this one went beyond anything I had seen on TV or in the movies.
I peer down at a picture of her face. Tangled dark hair sticks against maroon-stained skin. The coroner’s report states dismemberment [see p.3 Evidence #10], and the body parts transferred into a green plastic storage container [see p.5 Evidence #12]. My boss cracks a joke, and I leave the room, the taste of acidic cold coffee bubbling up my throat. He later tells me in the break room I better start learning how to find a way to numb myself to the horrors of this job, or I won’t last. You’ll lose your mind. His eyes lock on me. He shoves half a tuna melt on rye into his mouth, chewing loudly. A scene from the movie Benny and Joon surfaces to my mind, the part where Joon is having a mental breakdown on a bus in the middle of rush hour traffic. She’s pacing up and down the aisle, hands chopping the air, screaming. Later, I stifle my sobs in the bathroom stall, but they break free, crashing, big as waves against the cold tile. A woman in the stall next to me asks if I need a tampon, if I’m okay, and I tell her no, and no.
At night, I scroll through the victim’s Facebook profile. Rose. Making poetry in motion, the caption under her photo states. She’s young, less than twenty, older than sixteen, and somewhere in between, she met a man who wanted her for himself and no one else. I’ve had my share of stalking cases since I took the job, but never murder. The small office in Aurora, where I work, has a strong connection with many of Colorado's top criminal defense attorneys. The owner, Ted, is an ex-Texas prison warden alongside a previous Colorado State Patrol trooper, Richard, as his sidekick. Together, they took me on, shoving out the last woman in my new position who secretly took other cases on the side. I wasn’t that bold, and they knew it. During my interview, Richard told me he could tell if I was lying just by my body language. I sat tense on a leather sofa that was too soft in the middle, feeling myself sinking in and repeatedly having to adjust myself. They offered me the job the next day.
Folks in the business will tell you there’s always a case that breaks you, and they’re right. I worked dozens of cases previously, learning the ins and outs as I continued to be tested, Richard acting as my mentor while Ted did more meetings and courtroom work. Between Richard and me, we soon became a “pretty solid team,” as Ted commented one morning. He’d decided to treat us to a Keurig coffee maker and a water cooler to make the appearance of our tiny ’70s office more legit. Until this point, I’d made plenty of mistakes, big ones, and was in constant fear of losing my job after seeing how quickly they let the woman before me go. Once, Ted threw a CD with a client interview on it and told me to “trash it; it’s a done deal,” I hesitated. If anything, Richard had taught me nothing was ever a done deal, but I threw it away anyway, feeling the need to unclutter my desk from too many pieces of paper and sticky notes. The next day, Ted flew out of his office, demanding the CD back, that the trial had taken a turn, and he needed the interview, realizing there was an important piece of information overlooked. I froze in my seat, knowing the trash had already been emptied and taken away, considering jumping into the dumpster and clawing open all of the garbage bags inside until I found it as long as Ted would stop murder-staring at me. But it was too late. With a slam of his office door, my time was up. Richard approached my desk, a giant smirk on his clean-shaven face. Learn your lesson? My face was numb, my body a balloon floating far away. He patted me on my shoulder, laughing, always laughing. It’s okay. He’ll figure it out. He doesn’t need that interview; he can work around it; he’s just a lazy piece of shit. My hands trembling, I forced a smile back, feeling the fragile, thin line between panic and relief slowly fade.
Most of the people we help investigate for their attorneys are arrested on bullshit, added-on charges to make their case harder to dismiss, or they really were innocent. The racially profiled woman charged with bank robbery facing a lifetime in federal prison, her boyfriend already locked up in connection with the crime. Over 48 hours of listening to police radio communications proved an incorrect license plate, transposed by one digit, and I caught it. I remember sitting her down, and the three of us, me, Richard, and Ted, told her the charges had been dropped, she was cleared. Moments like these were worth the other terrifying realities of the job, the things I couldn’t unsee. I keep telling myself it’s worth it. But the client who nearly beat to death an old man known as “Santa Clause” in a shower stall at the local YMCA couldn’t be researched into innocence, no matter how many times I read through the police reports. The former marine stalked his ex-girlfriend and threatened to kill her via the Jimmy Hendrix song, “Hey, Joe,” then turned his rage on me, saying he could stalk me at the office and follow me home. Do the same to me. The eight-year-old boy who hung himself in his closet, his parents, arrested for growing marijuana plants over the legal limit, their son growing cold at the county coroner, unable to arrange a funeral for him. Interviewing male inmates at the Arapahoe County Detention Center alone, because if anything, Ted and Richard ensured I was treated as equal and fair as a man would be in my position. But they didn’t recognize or want to acknowledge that I am a woman in a detention center filled with men. There is no fairness in what a male inmate can do while sitting across from me in a small room as I interview him, alone, with only a panic button behind me and a camera overhead to save me. My body covered in neutral clothing to “lessen the temptation,” as Ted tells med, of arousing any thoughts in our male inmate clients. But I also know the boy I interviewed, barely eighteen, arrested for assault and battery and attempted murder, could crack my neck in less than five seconds.
Then there was Richard, my mentor, who I later found out was fired from his job as a state patrol officer after being caught pulling women over and blackmailing them, promising if they agreed to meet with him at a motel room, he would dismiss their charges. The officers who arrested him found a collection of BDSM sex toys in the trunk of his patrol car, and it was all over. Working for Ted was his last hope, a lifesaving opportunity. After his wife divorced him, he moved in with his mother and thought about putting a bullet in his brain. I think about how whenever I accomplish something worthy of praise, Richard always calls me a good girl. Good girl, he says, careful not to touch me. But the implication was there. It’s still there, resting, waiting to be placed gently in my lap. I should take a compliment and tuck it away with the other well-meaning words that don’t offer anything but discomfort.
Rose was a good girl, too. Her killer, a previous boyfriend, is arrested along with his mother, who helped her son dismember Rose’s body and stuff her inside a storage container. He told detectives Rose had broken up with him after a month of dating and that she wanted nothing more to do with him. When she begged for her life and her unborn child’s life, he couldn’t contain his rage at the thought of her with another man’s baby inside of her. That another man had touched her. I watch the interrogation tapes over and over, watching Rose’s murderer as he leans back, arms crossed, a look of satisfaction on his face. But he isn’t our client. His mother is. And as I watch her being questioned by detectives, I see a woman willing to do anything for her son, including making herself an accessory to murder. Including giving up her life for a man who would murder a woman out of jealousy and rage.
Rose rests in my mind as if she found her own space to occupy, tossing my other memories aside. She remains, a dying root refusing to be unearthed. Don’t let it bring you down, Richard sing-songs to me, forcing a fake smile while he saunters past my desk. It’s only castles burning. I ask myself every day, how long will I last? How long until something snaps, sending me over the edge?
At night, I dream of curling my body around Rose. I hold fast to her, both of us resisting the pull of the current. Meeting someone new, Rose’s last Facebook post stated, her face glowing and hopeful. I work on her murderer’s case nonstop for weeks. Scanning text threads, Facebook posts, interviews, the 911 call, cellphone tower pings. The final ping on Rose’s cellphone near where she was last seen on her way to meet the someone new. She never made it. There was no way to call for help, no panic button for her to push. One minute she was walking down the street, and the next minute she vanished. That’s what happens to women. We vanish.
There’s another scene in Benny and Joon that sticks with me, one where Joon goes mad and gives in to her own mind.
Richard and Ted decide to give me a break from the case after I start making simple mistakes. After they tell me I’m focusing more on Rose than our client. I can’t unravel myself from the feeling of being an accessory to helping a murderer’s mother get a lesser sentence or entirely dismissed. I call in sick one day and the next, the next. I can’t stop thinking about the autopsy photos, the last post on her Facebook, her face, warm and expecting, looking something like hope.
In my dreams, Rose and her baby are alive. The moon swings back and forth, a pendulum on a rope, hypnotizing us. She whispers words to me while the sun rises and sets outside. Years pass. When I look at her, her eyes are two burned-out coals. I wake up screaming, knowing there is no going back. That it’s always more than the one case that breaks you, it’s the people who break you and the people who broke them. There is no justice. There can’t be. The scales will always tip to one side, or the other will never balance. And Rose, making poetry in motion, I can hear her singing,
Don’t let it bring you down. It’s only castles burning.
Hillary Leftwich (she/her) is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM 2019, Agape Editions, 2023, republish) and Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022 and Blackstone Audio Publishing). She is the founder and owner of Alchemy Author Services & Writing Workshop & Community Coven. She teaches creative at the University of Denver, Colorado College, Lighthouse Writers for both adults and youth, and is a classroom facilitator for Art from Ashes—a local nonprofit that encourages creative empowerment through artistic expression for struggling youth. She focuses her writing on class struggle, single motherhood, trauma, mental illness, the supernatural, ritual, and the impact of neurological disease. She is an advocate for her son and others who live with epilepsy, and other survivors of DV. She teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities and writing. She was born and raised in Colorado Springs and currently lives in Denver.