“Nothing. I see nothing.”

“What's so special about that? This place is empty.”

“It's too empty. Look again, the entire middle of the room is bare. There's not a shard of glass, or a piece of dust, to be found. It looks like someone swept it up, and not long ago.”

Detective Knox hated to admit it to himself, much less to Lane, but the observation was keen. The scene did look too clean, too organized for being in the middle of a rotten husk of a building. He stepped forward into the center, wincing as he knelt to the floor, getting a closer look.

“Something happened here.”

“Do you think this is where he was taken?”

“I do now.”

Knox spotted a discoloration. He moved closer, to verify his instincts. Putting a handkerchief over his finger, he touched the spot, then held the red blot to his eye.

“Is that blood?”

“Yes, Lane, it's blood. Get a sample, and we'll send it to the lab. We'll have to wait for confirmation, but I think we found what we were looking for.”

“A clue.”

“Yup. Now we have something to work with.”

“So we might just solve this case after all.”

“There's hope.”

“See, I told you optimism pays off.”

“Work pays off. Optimism just makes you unaware of how miserable you are until you get there.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“I always do.”

Chapter 16

Unreflected Sunshine

Home for Detective Knox was not where the heart was, it was a distraction from his work, an unwelcome pause in the obsessions running roughshod through his mind. He had been told it was important to have balance in one’s life, but there were times when trying to act like a good and normal person got in the way of what he truly wanted and he struggled to muster the effort to engage in personal interaction.

For him, being antisocial was not a choice, it was a genetic predisposition. People were an allergen, and isolation was the only medicine he knew of. The others at the precinct wondered how he had ever acquired a life outside of work, since he displayed no desire to have one. The truth of the matter was that everyone and everything that mattered to him outside his job had been acquired before there was one. In those days, when he did not have an endless string of puzzles to consume his every waking moment, he had had the energy to put on a brave face and attempt human intimacy.

Remnants of his former life lingered, mostly in the form of his wife, Kat. She was an odd choice to stand by Knox's side, a ray of sunshine that had no surface to reflect off. Anyone who saw the two of them together was left confused, and the inevitable jokes would ensue about how much Knox had to pay her to stay. She understood, because Detective Knox was not the man she had fallen in love with, nor the one she had married. That man, Dylan, was a different animal than the one she now found herself stuck with.

They had met before Knox's bitterness had fully brewed, when the depths of his cynicism were still covered up by the honeyed taste of hope. Back then, she swore, he was a happy person who sometimes played the part of a misanthrope. Now she could only remember the shape of his smile, though she swore the man he once was still resided inside him. He loved her for this, because she was the only person in his life who could see anything in him other than the grizzled old cop who lived inside his memories.

Their life together was not without its challenges, mostly due to Detective Knox's inability to decipher human feelings. For a man who spent his life putting clues together to form solutions, Kat was a puzzle he was unable to solve. As frustrating as it was for her to spend her life with a man who did not understand many of the basic tenets of her foundation, she had to admit a sense of pride in being the one mystery her husband had yet to solve. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, that was why he stayed with her. He simply couldn't leave a mystery unsolved.

Detective Knox drank his scotch in oversized gulps, not worrying about the flavor of the cheap liquor, using it merely as a conduit to a different state of mind. Alcohol, he decided, was not an art that needed to be loved and savored with every sip and drop. To him, alcohol was a tool, so it didn't matter to him if he was drinking the finest example of distilling technology, or gussied-up paint thinner. As long as he got to the point where he could no longer remember who he was, or why he started drinking in the first place, he was happy, or at least as happy as he could ever be.

Knox heard footsteps behind him, the muted sound of skin on wood. They were not the light approach of a covert operative gaining position without being detected. Kat was not afraid of him, even when he was in no mood to put up with any human, her included. She knew enough about him that the distraction of having to turn on the part of his brain required for caring enough about another person, even as an act, would help him escape the labyrinth of troubles he had trapped himself in.

“I know you're there.”

“I'm always here. You're the one who forgets to come home.”

Knox expected the remark to come with that tone of voice he hated, the one that reminded him of his many failings as a man and husband. Instead, she spoke with the soft inflection of a nurse consoling a dying man before he stepped into the light. Whatever his faults, she refused to let him believe he had erased the memory of who he once was.

“It's not that I forget, or that I don't want to be here. You know how I get. I become so focused on the problem that I can't sleep until I make some sort of progress, or at least come to the conclusion that there isn't an answer to be found. If I can't sleep, I might as well be at work trying to figure it out.”

“You say that every time, and it's still not an excuse. Drinking yourself to sleep so you can deal with a problem doesn’t work. Why don't you try talking to someone instead?”

“You're referring to yourself.”

“It doesn't have to be me. I'd like to think you could talk to me, but I just want to make sure you're not going to have a nervous breakdown because you're trying to fix the whole world by yourself.”

Knox put a hand to his knee as he rose, holding the joint in place, not wanting Kat to notice even a hint of weakness in him. He walked over and wrapped his thick hand around the bottle, throwing a wave of bitter ambrosia into the glass, crashing off the side before settling with the stillness of a crime scene. He turned to look at Kat, whose eyes had never left him. Guilt washed over him, and he rested the glass on the table.

“I just don't see what good talking about this is going to do. We're not going to solve the problem tonight, and the last thing I want to do is put ugly thoughts in your head.”

“So you being insolent is for my benefit?”

“You're doing that thing again where you let me hang myself with my own words.”

Kat smiled, one corner of her mouth turning up like a caricature of the devil. Knox saw the glint in her eye, the evil that shone through her sweet exterior, the thing that initially drove him to love her. He was powerless when she wielded that weapon; he had no armor to protect himself from being taken.

“Then maybe you should stop tying the noose.”

She was enjoying the repartee, because she always emerged the victor. In all their years together, Detective Knox had never won an argument with his wife, nor had he become enough of a better man to be worthy of her affection. His development was as slow as the speed of evolution, the fossil record of his love identical from the first sparks until that moment. The phrasing was odd, but Knox liked to think of Kat as the woman who made him feel small, and he was thankful for that, because only when humility was fully engaged could he understand all the ways he was lacking as a man.