“Did anyone tell you what a vivid storyteller you are?”

“Do you get what I'm saying?”

Lane bit down on his pen, hard enough that Knox expected to see an eruption of black ink. The thin plastic held, sparing Lane the indignity of tasting the dark fluid.

“I think so. You're saying they're all so detached and self-absorbed that they don't understand what really happened, and how they're supposed to react.”

“More or less, yeah.”

“That must be a trip. I can't imagine what it must be like to not be fundamentally normal.”

“Trust me, you do.”

“Very funny. But seriously, what do you make of what they said?”

“I think they're all either very good liars, or they don't know anything. Either one is likely.”

“And what about that bit about him looking sick or tired? Could that mean anything?”

“Absolutely, it could. And equally it could mean nothing. We don't know enough right now to be able to say if it's important. We'll keep it in the back of our minds, and when we get more information, it might start to make sense.”

“We've been saying that a lot. It's getting frustrating.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

Detective Knox returned to his coffee as the conversation paused, regretting his verbal engagement with Lane, as a liquid matching the room's icy temperature passed his lips. Coffee needed to be hot, because it needed to be dangerous if it was to be effective. Cold coffee might be as potent, but not nearly as satisfying as surviving the danger of being burned. Finishing a cold cup did not feel like a victory over anything, except perhaps bad taste.

Thankfully, as Knox believed, he was interrupted before he had to endure the remainder of his tepid drink. A faceless drone caught the corner of his eye, racing towards his desk with all the haste of the tortoise, as the hare napped. Knox should have known the man's name, he realized, but between his own indifference to people, and his reputation for being cold and aloof, his knowing people was not something either side was keen on exploring.

He handed Knox a file, turning before Knox had secured it in his grip, retreating hastily. The drone seemed genuinely terrified of spending more than a few seconds in Knox's presence, which was not at all an unwelcome development, but did stir a line of thought that made Knox ask if there would ever come a time when his coarse exterior would rub someone the wrong way in a time of need.

Detective Lane got up, circling around Knox so as to read the file alongside his partner. As Knox’s partner, he was well aware that he would only be given the bare minimum of information, so he sought out the rest on his own. Knox would not take kindly to the invasion of his personal space, or the lack of trust the move indicated, but he was not going to protest and create a conversation that would last even longer.

Inside the creased manila folder, dented in the shape of white fingertips clutching with the power of a racing heart, sat a single sheet of paper. It was worn thin, as though it had already been through a lifetime of handling, and the ink was a gray shadow of what a proper document should have been. Like everything else in the city, the department's printer was dying, and he held the symptoms in his hands.

Reading with the care of a frenzied beast, Knox found the key words, skipping over the boilerplate language that made every paragraph three sentences longer than it needed to be. It would have been a waste of paper, he agreed, to simply print the three lines of important information on a page, but it would have saved everyone time and trouble. Knox could feel Lane's breath on his neck as his partner pored over every word. Knox shut the folder, not waiting for him to finish.

“Hey, I was reading that.”

“Then you should learn how to read.”

“I know how to read.”

“No, you don't know how to read reports. You read every word like they're all important.”

“They could be.”

“No, they never are. You have to understand, everything that's ever on a page was written by someone who thinks their words matter. That means there's going to be a lot more of them than there need to be, just because the writer wants to justify their own existence.”

“And you know this how?”

“Observation. It's what we do.”

“So while I was wasting my time, you read the important stuff. That's what you're saying.”

“Yes it is.”

“And if I ask you what that is, you'll be able to tell me.”

“Of course.”

“Go on.”

“It's a simple blood report. The blood we found in that building belongs to the deceased George Hobbes.”

“That's it?”

“Yes, that's it. Like I said, not every word is important, but the information is.”

“Because now we know that Hobbes was in that building, so we know the kidnapping was real. It wasn't just a story.”

“Finally thinking like a detective.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It means we have a lot more work to do.”

Chapter 19

A Monolith Of Murder

Over the years Detective Knox had learned that an investigation, unlike time, is not a linear progression. Facts had a way of spinning the world off its axis, sending him careening off into unexpected places. What at first appeared simple would later turn out to be an intricate lattice of lies, trip-wires waiting to rise up and cut off an investigation at the knees. The job, Knox knew, was not just about being able to wade through the muck and mire long enough for the truth to be forced to the surface, it was about seeing every possible route through the maze.

Detective Knox thought about how crazy it sounded in his head, that he was working a case in which a man murdered in a locked room had been kidnapped the day before, with no one knowing anything about either incident. Such a scenario was implausible, even for the myopic denizens of the city, but yet it appeared to be the truth. He turned the thought over in his mind, letting the dark, rich soil at the bottom come to light, hoping to find a buried molecule of reason amidst the tilling.

Detective Lane watched from across the desk, trying to figure out how the mechanism was turning in Knox's brain. Though he hadn't been a detective long, he was confident he had the aptitude and skill to succeed, but his partner was inexplicable. With each passing day, Lane's confidence in himself waned, bleached by the power of Knox's star. There was much he could learn from Detective Knox, but Lane grew frustrated that he was not being given the chance to prove himself, that he was not given the trust to be let in on the secrets of the process

Left to himself, Detective Knox would have spent the entire day lost in his own thoughts, oblivious to the world around him. It was a process Lane had watched before, one that he could not grasp. The art of detection, he was told, lay in looking past what you already know to make connections that are not always clear. By avoiding discussion, by removing the opportunity to see the evidence from more than one perspective, Lane felt that Knox was limiting himself.

Detective Knox thought that the process Lane preferred was flawed, that seeing new perspectives was not always enlightening, that it often opened doors that led straight into brick walls. Knox had solved enough cases in his career to trust himself, a feat he had not yet encountered with Lane. Knox did not doubt that Lane could be valuable, but he knew the likelihood of seeing the truth was greater if he focused on himself. He owed it to Lane to correct that, in time, but they were always entrenched in one case or another, and he was not going to jeopardize an investigation for the sake of being a good teacher.

Detective Lane was hesitant to speak, but he knew that Knox had blind spots, and needed to be pushed out of the way, before being run over.