Stabbed in the Back

Trevor rushed over to me, yelling from the other room.

“Put the TV on!”

“What’s going on?”

He turned on the news and my heart sank in dread; we had a homicide case to solve, and the victim was a minor. The ME was standing over the body when we arrived at the school as a couple was holding each other while crying on a bench. Trevor went to talk to them and I approached the ME.

“What have you found?” I asked.

“The victim is Amber Stevens, aged 16. She has seven stab wounds on her torso.”

“Was the murder weapon found?”

“Not yet.”

The body was rushed to the morgue, while Trevor and I swept the crime scene. We only found one thing: a size-six footprint. Amber’s parents had no valuable information to give us, so we moved on to her classmates and teachers; all of them had nothing but praise for her. Later that day, the ME told us that the murder had taken place somewhere between midnight and 2:00 a.m. Moreover, she said that Amber was six weeks pregnant at the time.

We then visited her house and went through her belongings; Trevor came across her journal. In it, Amber had mentioned a guy called ‘X’. According to what she had written, their relationship seemed serious. However, when we questioned her parents about this, they had no clue. Trevor and I took her laptop and found that Amber was dating a boy named Max who was at the same school.

We interrogated Max, but he seemed innocent; he seemed genuinely oblivious to the pregnancy. When a DNA test was done, however, we stumbled across something interesting: the results were almost identical to Max’s. Max had a twin brother called Mitch—his DNA was a 100% match. We interrogated him as well, and, although he admitted to tricking her into thinking he was Max and seducing her, he denied taking her life. Mitch said he wasn’t aware that Amber was pregnant as well.

The window for the murder was late in the night. Therefore, we had to assume that the killer was someone Amber knew closely, as there were no signs that pointed at an abduction. We had just one suspect left: Amber’s best friend, Natalie. Talking to other students, Trevor and I found out that Natalie had a crush on Mitch. We assumed that she may have found out about what had happened between Amber and Mitch and attacked her. To make things even more interesting, her shoe size was six.

All we had was a theory, but luck shifted our way when the murder weapon was discovered in Natalie’s locker. She had cleaned the knife, but there were still traces of Amber’s DNA on the handle. We had her. We asked her why she killed Amber when it was only an accident, but she seemed convinced it was intentional. Natalie was sent to a juvenile correctional facility.