Roomies

The Celly Michelle and Angela were never allowed to discuss the case with those who were somehow involved. However, once cases were closed, they shared many case stories with Jamie and me. Some were very sad, others were scary, and, believe it or not, a few were actually quite funny. One of the things that enticed Michelle into becoming a detective was that while she knew she would see a lot of horrifying and depressing things, there was never a dull moment. You just never knew what to expect as a detective, as she would say. Every case was the same, but every case was different. Such as the day she went undercover in the local jail one time. It involved a female inmate I’ll call Samantha. She was 27 years old, and it was believed that she knew much more about the murder of her boyfriend than she was letting on. The idea was for Michelle to be thrown into the cell with her as her cellmate and pose as an inmate who was in on a drug charge. Michelle eventually got the information she was looking for, but she also got a lot more than that along the way. As she said when she told us the story of her little undercover jailhouse adventure, she knew instantly that Samantha was hot for her. While it wasn’t funny to her back then, she would later come to laugh whenever she would tell the story of her “cellmate” Samantha. Michelle was particularly uncomfortable because she had to go along with pretending that she was flattered by Samantha’s flirtatious ways, yet not so far that things got out of hand. Michelle didn’t want to seem as unflattered as she truly was because she feared that would push Samantha away and lessen her chances of getting any vital information that could help the case. So Michelle was tasked with the tricky job of finding just the right balance of faking mutual interest while keeping the inmate at arm’s length. Samantha would eventually learn that Michelle was an undercover cop and that she’d been deceived. In fact, she would get this rude awakening at court. It was when Michelle took the stand as a witness to testify against her while much of their secretly recorded conversations were played, much to Samantha’s horror and surprise, that the woman broke down in tears. “I thought you loved me!” Samantha cried. “I really, really thought you loved me!”