In The Moonlight

"This is a slam dunk case," Detective Williams leaned back in his chair. "The Waterson chick has been placed at the scene of the crime, and there is nothing more for us to do. Everything has been turned over to the Prosecutor. Easiest murder case ever."

"A little too easy, don't you think?" I asked. Something about the case nagged at the nether regions of my mind. It should have been enough the killer was caught and in jail, but something wouldn't let me enjoy this victory. "Shouldn't we at least look at some other leads?"

"Why? We have the videotape that proves Waterson did it. Nothing else matters, why waste our time?" He stood up and yawned. "I want some coffee and a donut. All of this policing has taken a lot out of me."

As he tromped out of the office, I put my face in my hands. A small voice scared me, "Hello. Sorry to bother you but I have information about the Chandler investigation that I think will help."

A petite young woman, no more than 21, stood in the door frame. I sat straight up and fixed my tie. "And what do you think is so important? We have the suspect in tape committing the crime."

"I know for a fact that Suzanne Waterson didn't kill Mr. Chandler. She couldn't have, because she was with me."

The girl, Abagail Stockard, insisted that she was telling the truth. Williams and I both warned her that lying to the police to help a friend could lead her to face charges of her own. She produced a picture from the night of the murder. There was no timestamp on it. She tried to get us to subpoena Snapchat records, but Williams had made a good point, video doesn't lie. Suzanne Waterson pulled the trigger that ended a life.

Abagail left, defeated. She almost made me believe her, but I had watched the footage with my own eyes. Even if the Waterson girl had gone to the bar with her friend, it was after she killed a guy. Truth be told, if I killed someone, I would probably need tequila to live with myself too. "Should we have her charged with Obstruction?"

"Maybe. At least we should let the D.A. know so that he isn't shocked when they present this as a defense in the case," Williams chomped on the donut he had procured. "Then again, she is a pretty little thing. Maybe we should encourage her to come to talk to us again. You do need a date."

"I am not going to date a witness in one of our cases. Again."

On a whim, I grabbed the video and played it again.

Suzanne Waterson looked directly at the camera and fired off her gun. Mr. Chandler slumped over, and blood pulled around him. A flash of blue crept into the screen. Then blackness when the recording ended. What was the blue?

"Someone edited the video!" I said excitedly. The easy case was no longer so easy. There was more to the mystery than what we knew. "Yes, Suzanne Waterson pulled the trigger, but maybe she had an accomplice."

"Stop looking to make more work for us. We are heroes, we caught the killer. I did not become a cop to find the truth," Williams shoved the rest of the donut in his mouth. "I became a cop, so I could sit on my ass and eat donuts, without my wife bitching about me growing fat."

"I'm going to look into what I can find. Maybe it's nothing, but shouldn't I try?" Williams lifted his shoulder as I left.

The drive over was easy, there was almost no one on the road. While the blood had been cleaned up by our forensics team, the stench of death still filled the mansion. The flash of blue seemed to come from the patio by Chandler's office, so I went over and looked at it. Somehow, everyone had missed a credit card sitting beside the plant. I pulled on rubber gloves and picked it up. Suzanne Waterson. Chase Bank. Nothing out of the ordinary except for the expiration date. 10/2028. "What the actual..."

"Must be a typo," I kept repeating this to myself as I tried to process what the implications could be. The card being at the scene of the crime was just more evidence that Waterson has killed Mr. Chandler. It was my job to take this back to the precinct and enter it into evidence. There was a loud sound from outside. "What the..."

Before I could finish my sentence, Suzanne Waterson was standing in front of me. "You're the cop who had me thrown in jail."

"Which is where you should be right now. How are you out?"

"Oh shit. I forgot. Right. Yeah," Suzanne talked to herself. Her eyes scanned me, and she kept mumbling things to herself. "So you've heard of time travel right?"

"The Science Fiction trope that almost no one gets right? Yeah, I've heard of it."

"Here's the thing, it's real. You won't believe me. You'll think I'm crazy. I'm not. One of the projects that I worked on in the future is a time-traveling machine. First, we just messed around for fun. Then we realized we could save the future if we did this. Mr. Chandler was going to destroy the country. I came back in time and took care of it myself."

"Maybe you had a bit too much tequila. Though, I do have to admit it's a helluva story,"

"Believe what you want. I'll be acquitted because people saw me at the bar at the time of the murder. It's really the perfect crime."

Williams walked in. "Oh hey, Suzanne what's up?"

"What's going on here?"

"I have an affair with her in the future. She asked for my help in killing Chandler. Typical lover stuff."

Nothing about this was typical.

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