Here is chapter ten.

Disclaimer: I wish…

Lo sat across the table with her hands in her lap and her eyes glued on the table as if nothing else in the world mattered more. Her hair—for it was strawberry blonde, as Nick clearly saw—was pushed into her face so that it created a veil between the CSIs and her.

"We had a warrant for a sample of your hair, Miss Johnson-Gare," Warrick said as he neatly patted the papers into place.

"I know that already," Lo said quietly as she fidgeted with her hands. "You took a strand some time ago."

Nick pulled out a piece of paper with the DNA results on it. "You're right. We did take your hair samples a while ago. Now we have the results of the tests. Your hair was on Miss Chapman's body not long before she died. What do you have to say?"

Once again, the young woman started to fidget, but this time it was more obvious than before. "The day she died—I saw her."

"Wait a second," said Sofia said. She had been standing in the back of the room, and, until this point, had been silent. "From what my notes say, you told us that you did not see Regina the day that she died. Why did you lie?"

Silence filled the room like water in a tank. Finally, with a trace of reluctance, she said, "I did lie. However, I knew that if I told you that I saw Regina the day she died, then I would be a suspect. I cannot afford to be a suspect. I'm in a hard time financially, and I really needed this job."

Well, then," said Sofia, her voice contemplating what the girl had just said. "Carry on."

Lo chose her words carefully. "She came home early and was out of it. She seemed depressed about something. I thought that it would be a good time if I could ask for a raise. The job pained well, but I was just under the amount that I needed to support my family."

Warrick held up his hand to stop her. "That must have been after she came home from lunch with Bethany LeClaire. They had a fight earlier that day," he said to Nick, who nodded in agreement. "That was the reason why she was 'out of it.' "

"Then," Lo Johnson-Gare continued, "I asked her about my raise. Regina…uh, Miss Chapman… looked at me long and hard. 'I can't afford to do that right now'—that's what she said. Can't afford it?! She's rich, for Christ sake! I did not want a lot of money: only a small amount."

"So you killed her for it," said Nick.

Lo through her hands up into the air. "No!" Her voice was starting to rise. "I just pushed her, okay? All I did was push her slightly. It wasn't very hard—just a slight touch."

The CSIs looked at each other and then at the girl sitting in front of them. A deep frown was on her face, her brows furrowed, and she was gripping the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles had turned white. Deep lines of worry had creased across her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. Lo's eyes were a mix of pain, anxiousness, and despair.

"Your father worked for a company—Regina's father owned it, yes?" said Nick. "And from what we have learned, he was one of the many workers laid off from his job a few months ago. That is the reason why you have to work so many jobs. Your father has not been able to find one yet…. I am guessing that you freaked out when it happen. All of the responsibility of supporting the family was put on you now. Instead of being a young college student experiencing the world, you are stuck working so hard that you would worry about how you would survive the next day. All you needed was a little more money and life would be better. Maybe, when Regina refused to give you a raise, you snapped. You killed her."

"No!" Lo stood up and slammed her hands on the table. The sound echoed throughout the room. "I did not use seafood to poison her!"

"We…" started Warrick, his voice dying off. "We never told you that Regina died from consuming a deadly amount of seafood."

Lo took in a deep breath and froze.

"Sit down," Sofia said. "We need to ask you a few more questions."

The girl slowly sat down, letting her hair fall into her eyes.

"Why did you kill her, then?" asked Warrick. "Was it for the money that she would not give you?" It seemed like a harsh reason to kill a person, but they had seen worse happen to people.

"I did not kill her," Lo said loudly, but her voice wavered.

"I think that you got fed up," Nick said. "I think that you decided to take seafood, for you had admitted that you knew of her allergies, blended it up into a smoothie, and then put it in Regina's refrigerator so that she would drink it, not knowing about the ingredients. You wanted that money, so you killed her when you could not have it."

"That family," spat Lo, "is the whole reason for my troubles. My father was one year away from retirement and then he was laid off. Mr. Chapman laid him off! Now, we lost everything we had—all the money we had been saving up through points was gone because my father's job was gone…. And Regina knew, too, that it was from her dad's company that my father lost his job. She knew that I was working all those jobs. She knew everything, but when I asked for a small amount of money, to make my life easier, she said no. 'I can't afford to do that right now.' Bah!" Lo started to vigorously wring her hands. "So I snapped. I went out, bought a package of seafood and put into her smoothie that was in the fridge. I knew that she would drink it, but I did not expect her to die. I just thought that she would break out in hives, or something." Lo was looking at them with pain in her watery eyes. "When I went back later that day to see what would happen and I found her on the kitchen floor, dead. I freaked out and put her in her car, then placed a brick on the gas pedal, and let it hit a tree…. I didn't know that it would kill her."

"That," said Warrick as Sofia went to her with handcuffs, "is still murder."

***

The cases were a jumbled mess. Both the Roxanne Theseus case and the case of the Friars were intertwined. It was making life very hard for Catherine and Sara as they searched through piles of interviews, medical papers, and information about the victims that Brass had dropped off at the lab.

"Here's something," Sara said. She held up work info. "Roxanne worked at the Geico Company building as a secretary for the head of office of the department. It says here that she took almost every Saturday off to be with her child, Zoë…. Do you think that she took too much time off?"

Catherine waved the idea away. "That is not a very good motive—" she looked up from her own paper "—and it says here on the workers absent list that she barely sent any other time out of work besides Saturdays."

"So she was a caring, single mother that understood she needed to work as much as she could to pay the bills," Sara said to herself, "but at the same time realized her daughter was important to her, too…. It doesn't seem to give Zoë motive, either," she said, this time to Catherine.

The other woman started to search through another pile of papers. "Are you saying that Zoë could have lied about her account of the story?"

Sara shrugged. "It's possible; we have seen it before. She gave us the clues, too, and they turned out to be true."

"Well, then," sighed Catherine. "I think that it would be a good idea to question her about her home life. After, that is, we go to Roxanne's employer."

"We need some suspects."

"Or better yet, a killer."

To be continued…

What will Catherine and Sara find in Roxanne's office?

Lo Johnson-Gare is Regina Chapman's killer. Are you surprised and shocked? Does it make sense? Tell me! Please, just leave a review...

R&R