I looked down at the mangled body, back facing up to me. I had interviewed the girls who were on the scene; they all said that a girl named Karen jumped on the victim and another girl named Alice hit her constantly. After that, she just collapsed. However, upon examining the body, it looked as if she had a stab wound in her back. The girls told me they never carried knives, but one of them must have that night.
Back at my desk I fiddled with the nametag that said who I was; Detective Inspector Kristen Cotance. I had stacks of paperwork to finish, but my “done” pile was even bigger. I had a telephone on my desk along with a lamp and laptop.
I had just finished typing up the case file when my assistant, Robert Berns, came in with some papers. He threw them down on my desk and said,
“Here is all of the first-hand accounts of what happened from the girls. I’m going to go back and get the accounts of The Butterflies, as they call themselves.”
“Thanks, Robert. You’re a big help,” I said.
“No problem.”
He left the room and I started to look through the papers. Each of the girls pretty much said the same thing; Karen jumping on her back, Alice hitting her. None of them said anything about a stab wound or something about a girl carrying a knife. Something was incredibly wrong.
I moved onto The Butterflies’ accounts of what happened that night. The strange thing is that their accounts told about the events leading up to the fight, while the other girls’ accounts only told about the fight. The Butterflies’ descriptions helped put the whole thing into perspective. They were having a turf war. That would be reason enough to stab someone, but who would want to? It couldn’t have been a Butterfly killing one of her kind, could it? It would be more likely for one of the other girls to have killed her, but why? Why would someone want to kill a girl over some territory that wasn’t legally theirs?
These were the questions that I had to figure out. First, I had to find the two attackers, Karen Shields and Alice Walker. Why would they flee if they hadn’t killed her? Maybe they actually believed they killed her by hitting her and jumping on her back. I had no clue whether or not one of them was carrying a knife that night, so I couldn’t know for sure if one of them stabbed the girl. This was a most frustrating case. My two greatest suspects had disappeared and I kept hearing the same account of what happened over and over again. No one had noticed any other detail, or if they had they weren’t telling me. The girls probably thought this whole thing a joke. They couldn’t understand the seriousness of the case. They were only teenagers.
I sat back in my chair and tried to clear my mind. How would I find these girls? I got an idea just then. I called in Robert. He came.
“Robert, I want you to organize a search of the city. Make sure the press doesn’t get involved; the people will be scared enough hearing there was a murder. I want K-9 units. Gather your own little crew and search in a ten-mile radius of where the murder took place. They can’t have gone far. Tell George, Ronald, Archie, and Miles to get their teams and search on a larger scale. I don’t want anyone to come back until they’ve found those two. Understand?”