Detective Knox sat across the table from her, watching her fidget and twitch with the impatience of someone with too much living to do. Sitting still made her nervous, and that was comforting to him. This was familiar, what he expected.

“How are you feeling? You look nervous.”

“How am I supposed to be feeling? My father's dead, and I'm sitting in this drab little box. Just this room is enough to bring me down.”

Knox had never thought about the décor before, he never thought it an important detail. But hearing her comment, he couldn't help but be drawn to the oppressive beige that surrounded him, the aggressive blandness that absorbed and hid any sense of life within the walls. They did not reflect the reality of the circumstances the people sitting in that room were dealing with, and perhaps, he thought, they forced people into the wrong frame of mind to be cooperative.

“I understand this is a difficult time for you, but we need to ask you some questions.”

“Whatever. Let's just get it over with.”

“How would you describe your relationship with your father?”

Tory tilted her head to one side, as if shaking the dust off the gears as her mind struggled to move the pieces. She hadn't given much thought to how to describe her life. Giving freely of herself was easy, but prying details about anyone else from her was a different story. It was something Detective Knox could appreciate.

“Don't all kids have difficult relationships with their parents at my age?”

“You tell me.”

Frustration was building in her, not because of what she might say, but because she was feeling the itch to escape. She needed to be doing things, not talking about them. There was a whole world out there calling to her to act, and while she understood why she had to endure the interview, that didn't mean she had to be happy about it.

“I don't know what you want me to say. I can sit here and tell you everything was just fine between us, that we sat on a rainbow every afternoon and ate unicorn hearts, but you'd get as sick of the lie as I would.”

“So why not just tell me the truth?”

“No one wants to hear the truth.”

Knox found the remark funny, because it was, in a strange way, the truth. People, he had found, wanted to hear their own beliefs reaffirmed far more than they wanted to know what really happened. The truth could be an inconvenient reminder of their own fallibility, and while it sounded great in theory, in practice it was an elixir that stirred with the violent concoction of emotions we carry inside.

“That may be true, but tell me anyway.”

“Fine. The truth is that my father and I didn't get along. We hadn't for a very long time. He could never accept that I wasn't his little girl anymore, and he made no secret of the fact that I was an embarrassment to him, not that I cared. I wasn't about to start living my life to please him, so I'm not going to apologize for making myself happy first and foremost.”

“Nor should you.”

“Thank you. Anyway, he kept trying to get me to change my ways. He would threaten to cut off my inheritance, he'd lock me out of the house when I did something that really offended him, and he even tried to arrange a marriage for me. Who does that these days?”

“It sounds like your relationship was volatile.”

“Believe me, there were times I would have beaten him with a tire iron . . . if I hadn't been locked out of the house. But we're family, so once emotions cool down, you get over it.”

“So you didn't want your father dead last night?”

“Wait, are you thinking I might have killed him?”

Knox watched her closely, looking for a tell. Her disgust at the thought of killing her father looked real, but it registered more slowly than he would have expected. This may have been significant, or it could have been a side-effect of the hangover she was fighting to hide. He filed the information away, thinking it might make sense once the details began filling in.

“It sounds like you have a motive.”

“Maybe, but I also have an alibi.”

“And what's that?”

“I was working all last night.”

“And what do you do?”

“I'm a dancer.”

“Where do you dance? We'll need to verify your story.”

Her face changed, her shoulders slumping as the words made their way down her tongue. She wasn't embarrassed by what she did, but she knew judgment was always coming from the other side of the conversation. She was tired of being told what was good for her.

“I dance at the Electric Club. Yes, I'm a stripper.”

“You don't need to defend yourself.”

“No I don't. I'm an artist, I bare my soul.”

“You do know your soul isn't found under your clothes, don't you?”

“Do you enjoy dicking around with people in the midst of their grief?”

“My apologies.”

“See, there's your problem. You're never supposed to apologize for being who you are. If my father could have realized that, we wouldn't be sitting here with you thinking I might be responsible for his death.”

“People can be responsible without committing the act.”

“I know. It's the story of my life.”

* * *

Detective Knox walked away from this second interview more bewildered than before. The picture being painted of the Hobbes family was confusing, and shed little light on the unfortunate ending to George Hobbes' life. He hadn't expected a confession to pour out of anyone's mouth, but speaking to the family gave him no insight into the man at the center of the mystery. George Hobbes remained a shadow unconnected to a man, a specter talked about as though he never really existed.

It would have been easier, Knox thought, if that was the case. The ordeal would be more tolerable for everyone involved if they had dreamed the entire sordid nightmare. What Knox knew was that despite the lack of anything resembling a clue as to the mechanics of the murder, George Hobbes was as real as any of them, and he could not be so easily written out of their stories.

Detective Lane was also confused. He struggled to understand how a family could be so unflinching in their apathy towards a man's death. Even if they hated him, most people would try to put on an act of contrition, so as to take the prying eyes off of themselves. It was surely telling that they didn't care about how they were perceived, but Lane didn’t know what this meant. At least, he thought, Knox was also no closer to uncovering the truth. As long as they were both in the dark, he felt reassured that there was little he could do.

“That's two down, Knox. One more to go.”

“I wonder what we're going to get this time.”

“With our luck, another psychopath.”

Detective Lane pressed down with more force, cutting off his oxygen just long enough for his mind to clear, resetting the apparatus. Maybe, he thought, it would all make sense if he could shut down and look at what he knew through fresh eyes. It was a futile hope, he knew, but one he patronized himself with regardless. He realized it was better to indulge himself in the unlikely event of a miracle occurring, as there really was no down side.

“All I know is I'm not sure how many more of these people I can talk to. There's something about all of them that is a little bit disturbing.”

“I think I know what you mean. You don't feel like you're talking to a human being.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe that's the answer. The murder is so puzzling because it was committed by an alien, or a robot, or a demon.”

“As crazy as that sounds, I'd listen to anything that made sense.”

“Yeah. Well, let's get this over with.”

* * *

Emerson Hobbes was the prototypical child of privilege, overly confident, with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Somewhere in his mind, he was convinced he was better than other people through no doing of his own, but simply by being who he was. To temper these thoughts, he didn't view it as his responsibility to cower to the resentment that came along with his bravado. If other people thought he was an arrogant prick, he took it as a compliment. No amount of criticism could dispel his self-belief.