Part 4:
The interrogation of Willow Rosenburg
It was early morning when I returned to the office. The sun had barely risen over the horizon, but I hadn't been able to sleep all night. This case had me hooked. And I suppose my fiancŽ's snoring didn't help either. I just couldn't seem to put together the pieces of my puzzle. Sure, I had managed to put Xander Harris together with Buffy and Dawn Summers and the hole, the call, the shovel, the clown and the olive, but the slime was still a mystery. Had it been on the clown's suit before he had gone to the meeting? Was it from a previous engagement Skittles had had? The lab analysis hadn't helped much. A bunch of chemical formulas that made absolutely no sense to this case, or me. And the burning of the shovel...so many mysteries still left to solve! Luckily, I still had some time to figure it all out before the chief assigned me to another case,and consigned this one to the huge pile of Sunnydale's unresolved crimes.
My head was just beginning to spin, when I heard footsteps outside. 'At this hour?' I asked myself. No officer in my department was an early bird, Sunnydale made you want to sleep in forever. The footsteps neared my office, and then someone put their hand on the doorknob. I reached for my gun. The door opened slowly, as if someone was trying to sneak in and I aimed my revolver towards the person who'd entered my office.
I was face to face with a woman. Well, my gun was. A redhead stood in front of me, seeming very much surprised at my presence. She seemed really familiar, but I couldn't place her.
"Um...hi?" she hesitated, staring at my gun for a moment.
"Oh, sorry!"
I hadn't realized I was still aiming my gun at her. I lowered the weapon. She seemed harmless.
"Can I help you?"
"No, I mean yes, I'm...I'm..." she stuttered.
This implied some sort of guilt, that is if she didn't always talk with a stutter. She cleared her throat.
"I'm Willow Rosenburg."
"Sorry, doesn't ring a bell,"
I knew her, but I didn't know where from.
"Are you here to report a crime?"
"No, I'm here to talk to you about that clown being killed."
I realized now where I'd previously seen her, at the Summers house when I'd told the two sisters they had to report downtown for interrogation. Still, that familiarity wouldn't go away. I knew her from somewhere else as well. But where?
"Skittles? You're friends with the Summers sisters, right?"
I sat down in my chair, putting my gun away. I had nothing to worry about. She wasn't there to kill me or anything. She had come here looking for something, but since she'd found me here, she'd gone a different way. I wondered how she'd gotten past the officer that was on duty at the front desk. They didn't usually just let people through. Identification and a pass are usually required.
Later, I would find out that no Willow Rosenburg or any other person for that matter had passed by the front desk that early in the morning.
"Yeah...I just, I wanted to tell you... I, um, was in the park that night also, and I saw them and they were nowhere near the clown."
The way Willow Rosenburg spoke, it seemed as if she could be making the story up as she went along. She was fidgeting, and it seemed as if she would never sit down. She seemed like a nice down-to-earth young woman, but somewhere, underneath that girl-next-door appearance something seemed to rumble, a power that was struggling to erupt. She made me feel strange. Like she was trying to get inside my head. I dismissed the idea as being way too far out.
"You were in the park? And...what were you doing there?"
I shook my head. I just didn't seem to be able to focus on her. It was as if something was preventing me.
"I...went for a walk."
Everything she said was an obvious lie, and I couldn't understand why she was being so obvious. She hadn't even prepared for this meeting, because she hadn't expected to find me there. I tried to figure out what she might have wanted from my office. The most obvious guess would be the evidence, of course. Maybe the shoe that proved that Dawn Summers had been in the cemetery and in the park that night? Without the shoe, Dawn Summers couldn't have been placed there, and with a convenient change of confession, everything would point towards her innocence. Now I was getting somewhere! Why would they try to steal evidence if they were innocent? This of course implied that Willow Rosenburg was part of the plan. It was totally unexpected!
"After midnight? That's a pretty strange habit."
I left my thoughts unspoken. I wasn't about to scare off the only witness that might crack.
"Well, I'm a strange person."
She smiled, but seeing as I didn't react, her smile immediately faded.
"I was...um, heading home..."
She made up an excuse. I suddenly felt as if I was a parent interrogating the teenager that was gone all night.
"From where?"
"I went out to...buy a late birthday present," she eventually said.
"Again, after midnight?"
Her story was so fake! Birthday present? Please!
"That's why I came back empty handed."
She decided to finally sit down. I think she feared that she would start pacing if she'd still stand.
"So let me get this straight. You're very close friends with the Summers sisters, and I believe you also live in their house and you forgot Dawn Summers's birthday?"
I was being more than a little skeptical.
"I haven't really been feeling like myself these days. I tend to forget a lot of things."
She looked down. What was she? A junkie? An alcoholic?
"Ever considered rehab?" I asked her, thinking that must've been her problem.
"Oh, you could say I just got out of rehab."
She looked up at me. For a moment there I was about to believe her, but then it hit me.
"How could you forget about her birthday with all the party preparations?"
Every word she said was a lie. If she'd been Pinocchio, her nose would've been all the way down the main street by now. She was practically incriminating them all! Ha! All I needed was to get some slick D.A to get her up on the stand. She'd confess everything. Murder, accomplices, why she went to rehab. Okay, so that last one was my own little curiosity.
"Um, well it was more like an extra present. She-she told me how much she wanted these...earrings and, and how no one got them for her, so I thought I should get them for her, cause I felt like I had to make it up to her anyway, but... the antique store was...er...closed." she finished.
She just couldn't look me in the eye. That was the sign of a guilty person.
"Why did you have to make it up to her?" I was curious.
"Bad pre-rehab stuff."
She felt uneasy talking about it. Had she done something so terrible to Dawn Summers that she now would've gladly helped her out in her scheme to kill Skittles? Had she originally been in the plan? Or had she only recently joined this conspiracy? Had Dawn Summers only asked for her help when it came to retrieving the evidence that was incriminating? And had she really been after the shoe? Or did I hold something that was even more precious and I didn't know it?
"Okay, so you just assumed the store would be open around midnight?" I asked suspiciously.
I was wondering if she had really been out that night. The present excuse was definitely phony, but if she did go out that night, where to?
"I thought it was earlier. Like ten pm. I didn't see what time it was when I left the house."
"Were Buffy Summers and Xander Harris at the house when you left?"
I was hoping she hadn't gotten around to talk to the two and maybe she would've betrayed their story somehow.
"No, Buffy walked Xander home."
Oh! And I was so close!
"After you saw the store was closed, you walked back home and passed through the park?" I asked, as I rubbed my face.
I hate it when something doesn't go the way I want it to.
"Yes, and that's when I saw them. Oh...and the clown too." she added, as an afterthought.
"You saw Skittles? And the two Summers sisters? In the same park? At the same hour?"
Yes! This was what I needed! A place, a time. A shoe!
"Umm, yeah. Except Buffy and Dawn were walking on the other side of the park than the clown."
She actually seemed to be telling the truth. This could mean only one thing. She had really been in the park that night! Another person. This wasn't what I was looking for, this scenario was getting more and more complicated with every hour that passed. A fourth person would definitely turn my whole theory upside down again. And after I'd worked so hard on it. But, suppose Willow Rosenburg had been accidentally involved. What if she was the one who burnt the shovel? After Buffy and Dawn Summers had gone, and the burying was left for Xander Harris to do, after which he would return to the Summers' home? She had foiled their plan? Maybe she hadn't known about Xander Harris. Maybe she hadn't known about anything until the previous day when Dawn Summers had probably asked for her help, seeing as she was the one who ruined their plan and even more had things to make up for.
"You saw Skittles?" she nodded. "What was he doing?"
"Just sitting around. Doing nothing. Probably waiting for someone."
She seemed much more comfortable making conversation now. She thought I was more interested in Skittles, as she had apparently been the last person to see him alive. But what had stopped her from committing the murder? Why couldn't she have killed Skittles? She was in the park, at the right time and she owed Dawn Summers. A strong enough motive? Perhaps. But why would she give away her location, the time, if she didn't know she was innocent? That was the real question.
"Did you happen to notice if he had a hand bandaged?"
I put my thoughts aside and concentrated on her.
"I don't think he did. I saw him light a cigarette," she explained.
Skittles smoked? That was new. It explained why the lab reported said his lungs were blacker than coal though. As I looked at her again, I finally realized what was so familiar!
"Has anyone told you...you look a lot like a woman that ran amuck through Sunnydale a couple of months ago? If you had black hair and way freakier eyes, I could swear you were her," I told her, and she suddenly tensed.
"Must've been someone else."
She forced a smile. But maybe she knew the woman. Maybe they were relatives and that's why they looked so much alike.
"Can I ask you a question Miss Rosenburg? I just want an honest opinion."
"Go ahead," she agreed to answer my question.
"Do you think either Dawn or Buffy Summers is capable of murder?"
That's when something weird happened. The room seemed to twist and turn sround us, and the only thing that was left intact was Willow Rosenburg sitting calmly in her chair.
"I want you to get one thing straight, Detective..."
Her voice echoed in the room, and it felt like my ears would explode. I reached out to cover them, but I couldn't feel my arms. It was like I nothing but ears and eyes. Eyes that saw only Willow Rosenburg.
"Buffy did not kill the clown. And Dawn did not kill the clown."
Her words entered my ears and seemed to penetrate my skull and mind, settling somewhere inside. I blacked out.
When I woke up, the phone was ringing. I started when I looked around me. Everything was back to normal. Only one thing was different. Willow Rosenburg was gone. I looked at the clock. It was 8 am. I had slept for two hours? Everything seemed like a dream and I was beginning to question the existence of Willow Rosenburg. Had she really been there? Or had I been so tired that I had fallen asleep, and dreamt of a witness that would solve all my puzzles? No, the room was still full of her scent. Lavender and...magic. Magic? I'm laughing even now at the word that had come to my mind.
Poor girl, I must've fallen asleep while we were talking. What must she have she thought of me? To be make sure she had actually been there, I looked at the chair. It still held the shape of the last person who had sat there. But it could very well have been that of Xander Harris who had been the last person there before Miss Rosenburg.
Just to be sure, later on I called the Summers' home and talked to her, apologizing for falling asleep while we were talking. She accepted my apology, confirming the fact that she had been in my office. So I knew, she hadn't been an aberration of my mind after all.
I spent the rest of the day between donuts and coffee trying to figure out what had happened that morning, as well as on the night of the murder of Skittles. The strange thing was, try as I might, I couldn't seem to find Dawn or Buffy Summers as suspicious as I had before...
End Part 4
The interrogation of Willow Rosenburg
It was early morning when I returned to the office. The sun had barely risen over the horizon, but I hadn't been able to sleep all night. This case had me hooked. And I suppose my fiancŽ's snoring didn't help either. I just couldn't seem to put together the pieces of my puzzle. Sure, I had managed to put Xander Harris together with Buffy and Dawn Summers and the hole, the call, the shovel, the clown and the olive, but the slime was still a mystery. Had it been on the clown's suit before he had gone to the meeting? Was it from a previous engagement Skittles had had? The lab analysis hadn't helped much. A bunch of chemical formulas that made absolutely no sense to this case, or me. And the burning of the shovel...so many mysteries still left to solve! Luckily, I still had some time to figure it all out before the chief assigned me to another case,and consigned this one to the huge pile of Sunnydale's unresolved crimes.
My head was just beginning to spin, when I heard footsteps outside. 'At this hour?' I asked myself. No officer in my department was an early bird, Sunnydale made you want to sleep in forever. The footsteps neared my office, and then someone put their hand on the doorknob. I reached for my gun. The door opened slowly, as if someone was trying to sneak in and I aimed my revolver towards the person who'd entered my office.
I was face to face with a woman. Well, my gun was. A redhead stood in front of me, seeming very much surprised at my presence. She seemed really familiar, but I couldn't place her.
"Um...hi?" she hesitated, staring at my gun for a moment.
"Oh, sorry!"
I hadn't realized I was still aiming my gun at her. I lowered the weapon. She seemed harmless.
"Can I help you?"
"No, I mean yes, I'm...I'm..." she stuttered.
This implied some sort of guilt, that is if she didn't always talk with a stutter. She cleared her throat.
"I'm Willow Rosenburg."
"Sorry, doesn't ring a bell,"
I knew her, but I didn't know where from.
"Are you here to report a crime?"
"No, I'm here to talk to you about that clown being killed."
I realized now where I'd previously seen her, at the Summers house when I'd told the two sisters they had to report downtown for interrogation. Still, that familiarity wouldn't go away. I knew her from somewhere else as well. But where?
"Skittles? You're friends with the Summers sisters, right?"
I sat down in my chair, putting my gun away. I had nothing to worry about. She wasn't there to kill me or anything. She had come here looking for something, but since she'd found me here, she'd gone a different way. I wondered how she'd gotten past the officer that was on duty at the front desk. They didn't usually just let people through. Identification and a pass are usually required.
Later, I would find out that no Willow Rosenburg or any other person for that matter had passed by the front desk that early in the morning.
"Yeah...I just, I wanted to tell you... I, um, was in the park that night also, and I saw them and they were nowhere near the clown."
The way Willow Rosenburg spoke, it seemed as if she could be making the story up as she went along. She was fidgeting, and it seemed as if she would never sit down. She seemed like a nice down-to-earth young woman, but somewhere, underneath that girl-next-door appearance something seemed to rumble, a power that was struggling to erupt. She made me feel strange. Like she was trying to get inside my head. I dismissed the idea as being way too far out.
"You were in the park? And...what were you doing there?"
I shook my head. I just didn't seem to be able to focus on her. It was as if something was preventing me.
"I...went for a walk."
Everything she said was an obvious lie, and I couldn't understand why she was being so obvious. She hadn't even prepared for this meeting, because she hadn't expected to find me there. I tried to figure out what she might have wanted from my office. The most obvious guess would be the evidence, of course. Maybe the shoe that proved that Dawn Summers had been in the cemetery and in the park that night? Without the shoe, Dawn Summers couldn't have been placed there, and with a convenient change of confession, everything would point towards her innocence. Now I was getting somewhere! Why would they try to steal evidence if they were innocent? This of course implied that Willow Rosenburg was part of the plan. It was totally unexpected!
"After midnight? That's a pretty strange habit."
I left my thoughts unspoken. I wasn't about to scare off the only witness that might crack.
"Well, I'm a strange person."
She smiled, but seeing as I didn't react, her smile immediately faded.
"I was...um, heading home..."
She made up an excuse. I suddenly felt as if I was a parent interrogating the teenager that was gone all night.
"From where?"
"I went out to...buy a late birthday present," she eventually said.
"Again, after midnight?"
Her story was so fake! Birthday present? Please!
"That's why I came back empty handed."
She decided to finally sit down. I think she feared that she would start pacing if she'd still stand.
"So let me get this straight. You're very close friends with the Summers sisters, and I believe you also live in their house and you forgot Dawn Summers's birthday?"
I was being more than a little skeptical.
"I haven't really been feeling like myself these days. I tend to forget a lot of things."
She looked down. What was she? A junkie? An alcoholic?
"Ever considered rehab?" I asked her, thinking that must've been her problem.
"Oh, you could say I just got out of rehab."
She looked up at me. For a moment there I was about to believe her, but then it hit me.
"How could you forget about her birthday with all the party preparations?"
Every word she said was a lie. If she'd been Pinocchio, her nose would've been all the way down the main street by now. She was practically incriminating them all! Ha! All I needed was to get some slick D.A to get her up on the stand. She'd confess everything. Murder, accomplices, why she went to rehab. Okay, so that last one was my own little curiosity.
"Um, well it was more like an extra present. She-she told me how much she wanted these...earrings and, and how no one got them for her, so I thought I should get them for her, cause I felt like I had to make it up to her anyway, but... the antique store was...er...closed." she finished.
She just couldn't look me in the eye. That was the sign of a guilty person.
"Why did you have to make it up to her?" I was curious.
"Bad pre-rehab stuff."
She felt uneasy talking about it. Had she done something so terrible to Dawn Summers that she now would've gladly helped her out in her scheme to kill Skittles? Had she originally been in the plan? Or had she only recently joined this conspiracy? Had Dawn Summers only asked for her help when it came to retrieving the evidence that was incriminating? And had she really been after the shoe? Or did I hold something that was even more precious and I didn't know it?
"Okay, so you just assumed the store would be open around midnight?" I asked suspiciously.
I was wondering if she had really been out that night. The present excuse was definitely phony, but if she did go out that night, where to?
"I thought it was earlier. Like ten pm. I didn't see what time it was when I left the house."
"Were Buffy Summers and Xander Harris at the house when you left?"
I was hoping she hadn't gotten around to talk to the two and maybe she would've betrayed their story somehow.
"No, Buffy walked Xander home."
Oh! And I was so close!
"After you saw the store was closed, you walked back home and passed through the park?" I asked, as I rubbed my face.
I hate it when something doesn't go the way I want it to.
"Yes, and that's when I saw them. Oh...and the clown too." she added, as an afterthought.
"You saw Skittles? And the two Summers sisters? In the same park? At the same hour?"
Yes! This was what I needed! A place, a time. A shoe!
"Umm, yeah. Except Buffy and Dawn were walking on the other side of the park than the clown."
She actually seemed to be telling the truth. This could mean only one thing. She had really been in the park that night! Another person. This wasn't what I was looking for, this scenario was getting more and more complicated with every hour that passed. A fourth person would definitely turn my whole theory upside down again. And after I'd worked so hard on it. But, suppose Willow Rosenburg had been accidentally involved. What if she was the one who burnt the shovel? After Buffy and Dawn Summers had gone, and the burying was left for Xander Harris to do, after which he would return to the Summers' home? She had foiled their plan? Maybe she hadn't known about Xander Harris. Maybe she hadn't known about anything until the previous day when Dawn Summers had probably asked for her help, seeing as she was the one who ruined their plan and even more had things to make up for.
"You saw Skittles?" she nodded. "What was he doing?"
"Just sitting around. Doing nothing. Probably waiting for someone."
She seemed much more comfortable making conversation now. She thought I was more interested in Skittles, as she had apparently been the last person to see him alive. But what had stopped her from committing the murder? Why couldn't she have killed Skittles? She was in the park, at the right time and she owed Dawn Summers. A strong enough motive? Perhaps. But why would she give away her location, the time, if she didn't know she was innocent? That was the real question.
"Did you happen to notice if he had a hand bandaged?"
I put my thoughts aside and concentrated on her.
"I don't think he did. I saw him light a cigarette," she explained.
Skittles smoked? That was new. It explained why the lab reported said his lungs were blacker than coal though. As I looked at her again, I finally realized what was so familiar!
"Has anyone told you...you look a lot like a woman that ran amuck through Sunnydale a couple of months ago? If you had black hair and way freakier eyes, I could swear you were her," I told her, and she suddenly tensed.
"Must've been someone else."
She forced a smile. But maybe she knew the woman. Maybe they were relatives and that's why they looked so much alike.
"Can I ask you a question Miss Rosenburg? I just want an honest opinion."
"Go ahead," she agreed to answer my question.
"Do you think either Dawn or Buffy Summers is capable of murder?"
That's when something weird happened. The room seemed to twist and turn sround us, and the only thing that was left intact was Willow Rosenburg sitting calmly in her chair.
"I want you to get one thing straight, Detective..."
Her voice echoed in the room, and it felt like my ears would explode. I reached out to cover them, but I couldn't feel my arms. It was like I nothing but ears and eyes. Eyes that saw only Willow Rosenburg.
"Buffy did not kill the clown. And Dawn did not kill the clown."
Her words entered my ears and seemed to penetrate my skull and mind, settling somewhere inside. I blacked out.
When I woke up, the phone was ringing. I started when I looked around me. Everything was back to normal. Only one thing was different. Willow Rosenburg was gone. I looked at the clock. It was 8 am. I had slept for two hours? Everything seemed like a dream and I was beginning to question the existence of Willow Rosenburg. Had she really been there? Or had I been so tired that I had fallen asleep, and dreamt of a witness that would solve all my puzzles? No, the room was still full of her scent. Lavender and...magic. Magic? I'm laughing even now at the word that had come to my mind.
Poor girl, I must've fallen asleep while we were talking. What must she have she thought of me? To be make sure she had actually been there, I looked at the chair. It still held the shape of the last person who had sat there. But it could very well have been that of Xander Harris who had been the last person there before Miss Rosenburg.
Just to be sure, later on I called the Summers' home and talked to her, apologizing for falling asleep while we were talking. She accepted my apology, confirming the fact that she had been in my office. So I knew, she hadn't been an aberration of my mind after all.
I spent the rest of the day between donuts and coffee trying to figure out what had happened that morning, as well as on the night of the murder of Skittles. The strange thing was, try as I might, I couldn't seem to find Dawn or Buffy Summers as suspicious as I had before...
End Part 4