Known Associates

by Halfpenny

If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.

12. Chapter 12

Reissued warnings from previous chapter. Explicit incidents of self-harm, dissociation, and panic attacks. Discussions of suicide and murder. Graphic depictions of murder scenes and general bloodshed. Violence and sexually suggestive dialogue. Engage with care.

2 of 2 of 'Richard's Class Reunion/Kogoro's Class Reunion Murder Case.'.

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There was actually a boring epilogue to the red soda and fried tofu story that Craig had neglected to include in the retelling to Rachel. What happened was that after her incredibly masculine father had bombastically yawped and then cried on the Judo judge, her mother had stood up from the audience, shouldered her purse, and had stalked down the aisle to drag him off to the men's bathroom. There'd been a man in the stall and another at the sink that'd promptly ditched out of dodge at her expression. She'd blocked the door after them with the trash can, stood by with her foot tapping as Richard had journaled the rest of the day's failings into the toilet, cleaned him up with her handkerchief, then propped him into a sitting position against the wall by the sinks and seized his face to mash their foreheads together. "You can defeat," she'd gritted, anger as intimate as a kiss, "every single combatant in that room with your eyes closed, Richard. And yet you are in here and they're out there. Why."

"I don't know."

"When are you going to let yourself move past this? What are you so afraid of?"

Dried apricots honestly. They'd been in the granola bar she'd been trying to refeed him with and she did this on purpose to punish him for oversharing his stomach's opinions with others. "He is not here," Eva had enunciated. "Do you understand? He's not a part of your life anymore. He's not in the stands, he's not in our apartment, he's not even in the same city."

"I know that."

"Then why are you still letting him get to you?"

"I'm not."

The door rattled. "Oh my god, the diarrhea is just everywhere," Eva screamed, and the jostling stopped.

Richard had sullenly thumbed the dried apricots out of the remainder of the granola bar until Eva took it away and set it up on the register. This time when she'd taken his face in her hands it'd been gentle as Richard breathed gaseous landfill breath on her. "Talk to me," she'd said.

"I think I'm gonna quit. It's either that or wait until Craig kicks me off. I'd rather do it on my own terms."

"He's not going to kick you off."

"This is the third time."

"He's not going to kick you off. I already talked to him about it."

"Who don't you talk to?"

"Your father."

Later on as a prosecutor she'd spend at least fifteen minutes a day railing to him about much she wanted to hit the suspects in the groin until apologies fell out. "Great."

Eva had thumbed damp hair from his temple with her thumb. She'd said, just as abruptly, "I give you permission to fail."

"What?"

"My permission. You have it to fail."

"You called me a useless parasite feeding on the weeping asshole of society this morning when I put tinfoil in the microwave."

"Yes, I know, and frankly you are, and please don't get me started on that microwave, but I won't do that anymore," she'd said. "If you earnestly try and fail, I won't say a word. I won't be disappointed as long as you try again. Knowing that, it's no longer necessary for you to have any stage fright, so this should be the last time this happens. Eat your granola bar. And the apricots. They'll help with your blood sugar."

The weapons-grade audacity had sniped the snot out of his sinuses. "And while we're on the topic, unless you are married to your father, you have no reason to seek out his approval anymore either," she'd added as an afterthought. "I'm your wife, and my opinion should matter the most. And since I'm of the opinion that trying is more important than winning, you should feel comfortable acquitting yourself in the competitions from this point forward, so there's no need to resign from the club."

"I can't tell if you're being serious right now."

She'd gripped his chin and tilted it up to command his full attention, and overall this was their worst problem, maybe. They had several worst problems but mutual jealousy was the one that'd set the most landmines. "Is it so hard to believe I want to be the one you think of when you're out there and not him?"

"I'm not afraid of him."

"You're afraid of Craig. Who you can also defeat blindfolded. You're terrified of failing, Richard. Your paranoia is holding you back. I'm telling you that you don't have to be afraid. Who do you believe, them or me?"

Richard spent the next seven years going back and forth on who he believed. He didn't end up quitting Judo but didn't end up winning either, so they were both wrong. The switch that toggled up for effort and down for apathy had fortunately stayed up through the entirety of his career and through most of Rachel's early childhood. He'd kept trying to parent after he'd failed to prevent Rachel from bashing in two of her baby teeth out on their barstool and he'd kept trying to spouse after he'd failed to remember their fifth anniversary. Jimmy had stolen Rachel's cheese crackers from her lunch box in kindergarten and instead of ripping out his liver for making her cry, Richard had tried harder to crime-solve until he'd discovered that the babysitter the Kudos had hired for the weekend hadn't shown up, leaving Jimmy to fend for himself in an empty house. Richard had cooked up risotto with fresh tomatoes for him that night and went out to buy an extra bedroll for him to stay the remainder of the week and Jimmy probably didn't even remember a single ounce of that, the colossal bag of minced shit.

After he'd shot Eva in one leg and she'd walked out on them with the other one, he'd remarried himself to alcohol poisoning and failure for the next two weeks and had come to the conclusion that the reason things had fallen apart was that he'd broken their cardinal rule. He hadn't blamed her for failing – he'd blamed her for trying. He'd flipped down his own switch by flipping down hers.

He could feel Rachel's anxious gaze on his back as he retraced his initial investigation of Jamie's corpse and he didn't have the wherewithal to explain this recycled dysfunction to her. He maneuvered Jamie's toes again and relearned what working with an on-switch entailed. The on-switch was fucking loud. The rain stampeding across the roof bothered him and there was a window cracked someplace around them that was changing the airflow in the building enough to bring kitchen smells to him and that bothered him. He reflexively compared how Jim was speaking now to the way he spoke under the fireworks and also he saw how Nancy was biting through all her nails on her right hand and also he saw how Scott hadn't made eye contact with her in at least a half an hour, twisting his ring around on his finger with his thumb, and it bothered him. What used to be white noise was now a curtain of bullets.

He moved on to Jamie's ankles while Scott spoke again behind him. "— do until the cops get here? Are we really just supposed to leave her?"

"We've already disturbed the scene enough." Craig sounded exhausted but tolerant. "I want to give her dignity as much as you do, but they have to be able to document this properly to give closure to her family."

"Oh god, they won't show her mother those horrible pictures, will they?" Nancy blurted. "She won't be able to take it – Craig, she's in her seventies, the heartbreak would kill her."

"We've already identified the body, so there won't be any need for her to see it if she doesn't want to. The cops'll take care of the rest when they get here. We've done our job."

"Sons of—" Scott jammed a fist against the wall. "I don't understand why it's taking them so long. Sure it's raining, but I can't imagine a huge crowd is still out there under this downpour. What if this had been an emergency and she'd been fighting for her life? We'd just be expected to wait two hours for an ambulance to wander by?"

"Complaining about it won't help." Jim in contrast had occupied the opposite corner, knees hiked to a shelf as he massaged his forehead against his folded arms. "I'm sure they're going as fast as they can."

"There should have been medical personnel standing by anyway for the fireworks crew. You're telling me they couldn't find a way to get here on foot like we did? It takes, what, a quarter hour to get here? Half? Did they stop for ice-cream on the way?"

"Dad," Rachel murmured.

Richard hadn't realized she'd drifted that close. She slid a hand onto his elbow and tugged until he consented to stand with her. Her hands were frigid and unsteady and it bothered him. "Come away, okay?" Rachel said. "I know it's hard to let go, but this can't be… healthy for you to keep staring at her like this. We know how she died. Just… walk away with me. Just for a while."

He let her tow him back. The chill had deepened so he tucked his hands in his robe to defrost them as conversation sideswiped him like traffic. "Maybe we should go downstairs," Rachel said to the group. "We can't do anything for Jamie anymore. Maybe it'd be best for everyone if we get something hot to drink while we wait for the police to arrive."

"I don't want to leave her alone." Nancy hunted around for a tissue. "Oh, Rachel, I know it's silly, but we left her alone once and I just can't bear to do it again."

"I'm the one with the badge, so I need to stay to preserve the integrity of the scene," Craig said. "If any of you want to leave, I'll be just fine. I can hold things down here. To be honest, the fewer people in here when they arrive the better. Maybe Rachel's got a point."

The blood was a graffiti constellation across the room. There was something in the back of his head that wasn't a bullet but felt like it. The blood was still more rust than brown despite the hours that had passed and none of the pools on the floor had congealed yet when Richard had first plopped a knee into them. In the hour that had passed since, the centers had soaked into the floorboards and the raised edges of the pools were tacky enough to pass as paint and it bothered him.

"Hey, Richard?"

It took a long time to unfuck himself from his mental spiral. He blinked down eventually. "What."

Conan was craning up the acres between them with wide-eyed curiosity. "How did Ms. Hummelford shoot herself in the head?"

The room went silent.

Richard stared stupidly down at the child who'd cornered him twenty-four hours ago with an age-inappropriate discussion about PTSD and gun violence while Richard had been trying to drown himself in 82 proof and syndicated cleavage. "Because you keep talking about it but I just can't figure out what it looks like," Conan said. "Can you show me?"

"Oh, god, Conan." Rachel broke free from her paralysis. She rushed forward. "Oh my god, shh."

"I mean it. How did she shoot herself? It's all so scary! Won't someone show me how she did it?"

"Richard, he shouldn't be here." Nancy surfaced from her lagoon of tears and snot. "He's just a little boy, he doesn't understand. I can take him—"

"Kid stays." Still awestruck, Richard made a pistol with his hand and tapped the finger-barrel to his temple. "It's not obvious?"

Conan shook his head vigorously. "No," Richard said when Rachel again tried to coax Conan away. "I refuse to believe any kid living under my roof is this stupid. You see a different homicide every week, how do you not know this."

"I don't know why I don't know, I just want to know and nobody will tell me!"

"You can't say all that crap to me last night and then turn around and expect me to believe you don't know how someone offs themselves with a pistol. It's not neuroscience, you just press the gun to your head and you pull the—"

Rachel stopped manhandling Conan and looked up at his tone.

The grief nearly came up his throat with pureed pretzels. Richard swayed in place and caught himself on the wall, every switch in him crammed upright on his mental dashboard. Blood at standing height. A bloody slide down the wall.

Conan let go of his leg.

Richard stumbled across the room and dropped when his knees gave out, skidding by chance within range of Jamie's corpse. The hairs over her temple had cemented together with gore; one caught and broke off in a notch in his fingernail when he tried to organize the mass away from the bullet hole and again the pretzels jockeyed for space in his mouth. He palpated around the wound just in case, feeling pricks of shattered bone rummage under spongey frigid flesh and the entire time he was here, he was running old engines, he was haunting the scrap yard of his own muscle memory for parts that fit ten years later.

He became aware of Craig trying to pull him away by the shoulder. "Hey Craig," he said, not taking his eyes off her. "When people commit suicide with a pistol, they put it right to their head, right?"

"As far as I know. You just fell over. Rachel's right. Let's get you out of here, get you and Nancy some juice or something to shore you back up."

"So you agree."

"Yes I agree. Come on. We've done all we can here."

"What happens when they pull the trigger against the skin?" Craig's thumb was digging incidentally into the nerve on his shoulder and it fucking hurt. Richard anchored onto the stability pain provided because therapy was too expensive. "Because if Jamie committed suicide, there's something vital missing from the wound."

Craig's grip loosened. He began to speak, reread Richard's expression, and closed his mouth. He followed Richard's lead and shifted the mat of Jamie's hair aside to get another look.

"What." Nancy had balled her fist up against her chest. "Oh god, now what."

Richard watched. Craig's eyes flared with surprise and narrowed just as quickly. He sank back onto his heels. "Shit," he murmured.

"Yep."

"If that's the case, we're dealing with something completely different. We're going to need to let the cops know."

Scott was clipped. "Someone mind explaining to the civilians what's going on?"

"When you fire a pistol, a high-temperature flash comes out of the barrel along with the bullet," Richard said. "Long story short, if Jamie put the gun to her head, there'd be burn marks. The fact that it's not there—"

"Means someone else did it," Rachel breathed. She unconsciously reached out to stabilize Nancy as Nancy burst into fresh tears. "Oh, Dad, no."

"It wasn't suicide." Nancy bucked against her hands. She sounded both relieved and horrified. "She didn't kill herself, we weren't too late, she didn't mean to say goodbye."

"Someone cared enough to both shoot her and try to make it look like a suicide to cover up the crime." Richard kept his eyes on the splatter pattern. "This wasn't random. Birinmon is surrounded by dense woods. No random burglar would make that kind of effort when they could've just escaped out the window. The person who killed her is still staying at this inn."

"So what are you saying." In contrast to his wife, Scott's face had gone stoic and mulish. "Because from here it sounds like you're saying that one of us is a suspect, Richard."

"Not one of you. All of you."

Jim made a strangled noise in the corner. "Moore, come on." Craig sputtered out a startled laugh and again clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Quit messing with them. Don't you think they've been through enough? We all know it wasn't one of us."

"He's not messing with anyone," Conan said grimly. He was still posted by Jim, watching the scene unfold with unerring attention. "Everybody in this room is a suspect. Same with the rest of the staff at this hotel. This was a murder case, not a suicide, which means everybody is going to be questioned by the police once they get here."

"Shut up," Richard said, finally exasperated into distraction. "The only thing you've killed in the past twenty-four hours is the bathroom. Go unwedgie your underwear somewhere else."

"Dad, is this for real?" Rachel was tentative. She soothed Nancy's back with distracted strokes. "You really think someone in this room killed Jamie?"

Richard began to answer and broke off in a grunt when Craig shoved his shoulder. "Don't worry," Craig told them all firmly, standing. "Did we already tell you? Jamie died around three this afternoon. That would've been during the time we were all playing table tennis. The only person who left the room during the time she would've died was Jim, and he came back from the bathroom in two minutes. There's no way that any of us could've committed the crime."

"So you're saying someone snuck in to the hotel and just happened to kill her?" Scott demanded. "I thought we decided this wasn't a random crime."

"That's one working theory, but we can't rule anything out yet." Craig pushed around Richard to get to the window. The swell of rain-swollen air displaced the heat as he leaned out to crane his neck. "Long shadowy veranda out here," he reported. "No footsteps – rain would've washed those away a long time ago. But this could easily be traversed by an intruder. It's probably a good idea to question the staff to see if they saw anything suspicious."

Richard absently massaged his shoulder until the nerve stopped bitching. Occupied with his own distress signals, it took him a long moment to realize the rest were looking at him with their own. "What," he said. "It's a good idea. Let's split up and round up the staff."

"If there's a murderer wandering around, I don't know if I feel very safe on my own," Nancy said. "Wouldn't it be better to move as a group?"

"Scott will protect you. Personally, I'm guessing the murderer got what they came for already. Once we get the staff rounded up in one place it'll be easier to get a picture of who we've got in the building. The faster we do that, the less likely it'll be that they'll slip away under the cover of the storm."

"If they haven't already," Craig muttered. He extended a hand to leverage Jim up. Jim took it, clumsily shifting stiff legs to rise. "C'mon, we'll work in pairs. Let's herd everyone into the main atrium. Check the other rooms too to see if there are any guests around and try to get down there in fifteen."

Rachel physically collared Richard before he could get out the door. "You're not going a single step out there without me," she said tersely. She kept her finger crooked in the fabric as she ducked her head to parse the tangle of feet. "Conan, I want you to stay with—"

"I'm going with Jim and Craig!" Conan applied some hog snot to his stride to grease past her restraining hand. "I wanna see a real police officer in action and Mr. Newberry will keep me safe pinky promise protect Uncle for me okay bye!"

"Oh my god." Rachel closed her eyes briefly at the ceiling as the room emptied out. Her whisper was hoarse. "Please just make this stop."

"Go to bed if you're bored." Richard towed her down the hallway in the opposite direction and then flailed like a bratty turbine until she let go of him. "Lock the window apparently."

"Dad, where are you going."

"Back deck." He'd seen the telltale flicker down in the garden during his own turn at the window. He followed his nose now and took a right in the pervasive darkness at the base of the stairs, guessing at the layout as he wound down the unoccupied halls. Sure enough he spotted the silhouette through the closed glass doors leading out to the back patio, a firefly's wink of a cigarette nearly hidden under the weather canopy.

The receptionist was huddled under a bulky non-uniform jacket and cap when he opened the doors. She didn't move as he approached, only sparing him a reluctant glance when he was a few steps away. There was a hint of resentment in her eyes. "I don't care if you tell the owner."

"I'm not telling anyone crap as long as there's a cigarette somewhere in there for me."

Her laugh was a reluctant bark. Her eyes flickered over his shoulder, presumably at Rachel, before she shrugged and fished in her pocket. "I don't light cigarettes for men."

"It's fine." He lit his own, and when hers was out and crushed underfoot and the next one was in her trembling hand, he used his lighter to take care of hers too. Their smoke braided together up to the apex of the canopy before getting swept out in the eddy.

They stood under the shelter until the starlight sprinkle of festival lights clicked over on their timer. Richard watched the garden come alive under the influx of gold and silver light. There were ornamental bushes as high as his shoulder off to their right and a river of blue hostas making whorls around the fountains. The path leaned out of sight around an ivy-loaded trellis. "It's pretty when it snows," the receptionist said. "We get fog up here a lot. When the lights are on in the fog it looks like you're in another world. Everything around you glows like magic. It'll probably happen tonight too after the rain stops."

"And being able to hide your cigarette smoke better definitely isn't one of the perks, right?"

She laughed again. She smelled like stale perfume and the complimentary pretzels his body kept trying to throw up. The edge of the uniform skirt sticking out under her coat was dark with rain. "Is that your daughter by the door?"

"On weekdays."

"And do you usually hit on women with a wedding band on and your daughter watching from the door?"

"On weekends."

"I didn't see anything, you know," she said. "I know that's what you're out here to ask. Just your friends, and the one other couple who went out to the fireworks."

"You're sure?"

"I'd say if I had. I've got nothing to hide."

Richard flattened smoke along the edge of his front teeth. "I think I'm going to quit," the receptionist said. "The owner is already blaming me for not hearing the gunshot. As though she wasn't in the same exact building doing two hundred percent less work than I was doing all afternoon."

"We're going to be gathering the staff in the atrium to tell them what's going on. We split up to round everyone up."

She shook her head. She inhaled tremulously and let it out in a harsh, quick stream.

Cigarette in the crook of his mouth, Richard lifted his head to give Rachel a signal over her head. To his surprise she'd already retreated inside, shutting the glass door behind her and leaving them alone on the patio. He knew better than to know she'd leave him unsupervised for long but it was anyone's guess what her priorities currently were. He hoped that if Rachel encountered the murderer she would leave them alive long enough for Richard to chisel some answers out of them. "Did she really commit suicide?" the receptionist asked. "Your friend."

"No. Someone shot her."

"I kind of figured." She raised her cigarette again, hesitated, and lowered it. "Was it you?"

Richard keel-hauled a stream of smoke up a sinus cavity and splashed it out in a cough. "I mean, we're alone back here with no cameras," the receptionist said. "I figured if you were the murderer there's not much I can do to stop you."

"I didn't kill my friend."

"Okay." She looked down at her sensible work shoes, at the rain-speckled stones under them. "I'm sorry she died. I wish I could've helped."

"You didn't do anything wrong. Craig and I work for the police – we knew what to do. The Birinmon PD are on the way. This'll be cleared up by morning, I promise."

"Okay," she whispered.

He worked his cigarette down to the nub until he figured enough time had passed for the others to have done most of the work of witness-gathering for him. "Thanks for spotting me," he said. And because it was in fact the weekend and he'd been multitasking since puberty, he gave her his business card so he could offer her his contact information and also hit on women on weekends. "Go ahead and call the office if you remember anything."

"Wait." She tucked it away and reached for her breast pocket. "Party smoker or intervention-level?"

"Coal mine."

"Looks like you'll need two then." She handed the cigarettes over. "In honor of your friend."

"Thanks. I really appreciate it."

Her fingers still jittered a little when she drew out her own, but her thumb was steady on the rivet of her dragon-shaped lighter. The iridescent scales threw cheap prisms as she clicked flame out of the mouth.

Richard was nearly to the door when his pilot lights came back on. He turned on a heel. "Did you say the owner blamed you?"

She barely glanced up at him. "What?"

"You said she blamed you for something. What for?"

"She said it was my fault I didn't hear the gunshot. It was a shitty thing to say. Like I could've saved her or something even if I had heard it right away? She shot herself in the head."

"How quiet was the lobby at three p.m?"

"I mean, pretty quiet, I guess. The owner doesn't allow me to have the radio on during work hours. If you're going to start in on me too, give me back my cigarette."

"No no no." He hastily retreated, fumbling in the semi-darkness for the frigid door handle. "Just asking. Thanks."

"I'm not coming to the meeting," she said. "If she says I have to, tell her to fuck herself. I mean it. I can just work at my family's antique shop this summer instead."

Rachel was leaning against the opposite wall to wait for him when he shouldered his way back through the door. She pushed herself off it and hurried to close the distance as he closed it behind him, sneezing at the displacement of dusty air. "Did she see anything?"

"No. Where did you go?"

"I had to make a call."

He didn't bother to quest further. Teenage girls always had to make a call and his wallet didn't have to care about this one. "Cmon, we'll be late. They'll have all already gathered by now."

"So you got nothing from her at all?"

"I got three cigarettes." The hallway was poorly lit and he caught his toe twice on the floor rug on their journey back up the hall. The smoke had collected in him like high tide and drowned some of the jittery withdrawal, but his brain for once didn't feel any different. He was still above the water line. "Where was the phone?"

"Just in one of the nearby rooms. I didn't go very far, I could still see you from the window. These hallways are so creepy. I have no idea whose idea it was to pack them so full of these morbid statues and then turn off all the lights at night."

"I dunno, something to do with culture and Birinmon's history or whatever. It's the reason most people choose to go to the chain hotel up the street. Cheaper, easier to book, run by a big corporate overhead so everything's standardized."

"Do you think Jamie would still be alive if we'd gone to the other one?"

"I mean, probably not, unless one of the statues killed her."

"I hope Conan's okay." Rachel stayed glued to his shoulder as they walked. He could feel her hair brushing his wrist. She spoke barely above the volume of a breath but he could pick it up easily in the silence of the hall. "I should have gone after him when he ran. That was stupid of me."

"He's fine. Craig'll watch him."

"You said someone in this building is a murderer. We have no idea who's 'fine' and who's not."

Fresh blood and the stench of a recently discharged pistol. Richard didn't feel floor underneath him when he walked. Three p.m. Unlocked window but no rain on the sill. He'd placed his knee down into blood and he'd been too distracted to feel if it'd been warm or not. Three p.m. The atrium had been deserted when they'd rushed out for the fireworks after six. At three the team had been tucked away in the recreation room with the doors closed. He'd been with Jamie for around twenty minutes after they'd started playing. If he'd been on the outside looking in, it was pretty clear he was the prime suspect and had been all along. With that delay he'd have had ample time to shoot Jamie, clean it up the way he wanted, and come down to play table tennis with the others to celebrate a job well done. He had no idea why Craig hadn't mentioned it yet unless Richard was so below the level of suspicion it hadn't occurred to Craig that he might be capable of murder. He would've interrogated himself first thing in Craig's place.

He only became aware Rachel had pulled them to a stop when she took his face and jostled it. "Are you hearing me?"

"Huh?"

Her expression crumpled. "Dad, you're scaring me."

"What do you want? I'm busy."

"I've been talking this whole time, you really didn't hear me at all?"

"Are you talking about something actually important or are you just flapping your gums until they fly out of your mouth?"

"What's going on with you?"

"I mean, my friend is dead if that's what you're asking," he said. "Look, hon, I'm busy. I've got a lot on my mind."

"I know that, but Dad, I've watched you solve cases before. Bad ones. Really really bad ones. You weren't like this. I don't even… recognize you right now."

"I'm right here."

"No, you're not, you're… I know you're upset and hurt but you're acting really strange and I'm worried about you, okay? Would you please be serious?"

Three p.m. He revisited the building's blueprint in his head as he drew her against him. She muffled her panicked breaths against him as she tried to be strong for him and the murderer really didn't have to use the veranda at all with a deserted upper floor, actually. How the hell had they stifled the gunshot right above a dead silent atrium that wasn't even allowed to play podunky radio stations to pass the time? The team had made a lot of noise but it'd all been tucked behind pretty robust wooden doors – not nearly enough to compete with a gunshot. The receptionist had said there were no security cameras out back. The only security he'd seen had been an ancient CCTV unit in the lobby, but if he'd seen it that meant the murderer had too. "I'm here for you, okay?" Rachel murmured against him. "Just remember that I'm here. Conan too. You don't have to feel alone. You don't have to shut off like this."

"I'm not shutting off."

"You are, you're just not seeing it. We're here for you, okay? We want to find Jamie's killer just as much as you do. Don't shut us out."

In the midst of all his recently reinvented machines, Richard surfaced enough from his industry to really get a good look at her in the gloom. She still smelled like firework smoke and bug spray, hair curled with sweat around her ears. They'd both been barreling full-tilt since five that morning and unlike him she hadn't conked out on the train ride halfway through. He was wearing Jamie's blood on him and he hadn't even consoled Rachel about any of it yet. Had she opened the door during the fireworks she would've been the first in line to see the massacre and he hadn't raised stupid enough children for this to not have already occurred to her.

He was bad at it but he ousted himself from his head to try to find words to comfort her. Rachel stepped away from him and palmed her eyes clear. She wrung her hands, parted them, gathered up the seams of her robes, wrung the fabric between her fingers. "I wish Jimmy was here," she whispered helplessly. "He'd be able to fix this, I just know it. I wish he was here."

A window closed somewhere in his head. It'd been getting drafty anyway.

---

.

Richard logged two cooks, two female maids, an elderly women made out of sentient pissants and chewed toothpicks, and the adult son of the owner who apparently doubled as their bookkeeper and resident electrician. "You're doing a lousy job," Richard said. "The lights flicker every time I turn on the bathroom faucet."

"It's an old building, everything's interconnected inside those walls," the son said. "We're up to code. Sometimes you just have to get along with history instead of always trying to reinvent the wheel."

"I just need to know if anyone saw anything suspicious. Or heard anything suspicious. Weird noises, sounds, unusual lights, weird people checking in. Anything could be important."

"I was here at three p.m," the owner said. She'd been looking at him with filmy intensity since he'd started the meeting like she was trying and failing to place him. "I took a break around then and went outside. I didn't see anyone suspicious."

"Well did you at least—"

"Oh." Her fist hit her palm. "Oh, now wait. Yes, there was something. That girl. That one right there."

He followed her gesture towards Rachel's baffled expression. "That girl," Richard said, just to be clear.

"That's the only girl standing there."

"There's two girls."

"The young one."

"They're both young."

"Thank you, Richard," Nancy sighed.

"The teenage one," the woman said impatiently. "And that little boy with the head like a watermelon."

"Wow, you're really gunning for it, aren't you," Conan said.

"What were they doing." Richard flagged her down until her attention returned to him. "What did you see?"

"Well, they ran upstairs like a swarm of bats was after them. Thumping and panting like they'd just run a marathon. At first I was going to tell them to quiet down, but they left soon after so I decided it wasn't worth the bother. Normally we ask that small children be accompanied by an adult, you know. At the very least your son shouldn't be wandering around unattended. It disturbs the other guests."

"Right, all two of them, sorry about that," Richard said. "So just to be clear, this was the girl right here that you saw."

"Yes, that's correct."

Rachel's expression was colorful. "Well?" Richard said, turning to face her.

She tore her gaze away to blink at him. "Well, what."

"State your alibi, kid."

"Huh?"

He waited. Rachel's half-smile faded as she searched his face. "Oh," she said, then blanched. Her fist flinched up in front of her chest. "Oh. I'm a… that makes me a suspect, doesn't it. Um, okay. Okay, you're right. Um, well, remember? I came back to wake Jamie up since the fireworks were starting. I… Conan was with me, we both went up to see Jamie. We were hurrying because we wanted to get back in time to make the show."

"What time was that?"

"Oh, gosh, I don't know, Dad, um… maybe between six-thirty and seven? And we weren't… we were just up there for a minute, because Mr. Newberry appeared and he told us not to wake her up. So we went back down to get back to the fireworks."

"Richard." Nancy was very quiet. "This isn't necessary. We all know she didn't do it."

"We know. They don't." Richard gestured curtly towards the staff with a flap of his hand but let it go. He zeroed in on Craig across the room. "Didn't tell me you ran into them trying to wake up Jamie."

"Yeah, I did," Craig said. "Right there at the table. You knew I'd stayed behind for a bath, same as the others. When I saw them trying to wake her up, I told them to back off because of her temper. I didn't want it splattering on them."

"Sweet of you," Richard said. "Any reason you didn't wake her up?"

"You kidding me? After the crap she started earlier? I wasn't gonna put myself through that. I didn't owe her that."

"And you?" Richard turned a flat gaze to Scott, who immediately bristled. "You guys also took a bath, right? For whatever reason."

"Yeah, we did." Scott was short. "Nancy has a chronic condition and catches chills easily. If we'd taken off at the time we'd meant to, we would've had enough room to bathe and change and make the fireworks with you. But I wasn't about to have her go out in sweaty clothes and sit out by the water for an hour."

"It was my fault," Nancy said, reaching out for Richard's sleeve and stopping just short of actual contact. He couldn't remember her ever hesitating like that with him before. "After the bath I felt a little dizzy, so I told him I didn't want to push my luck and risk stranding us out there. I told him to go, but I couldn't convince him to see the fireworks without me. I'm sorry, we didn't mean to abandon you. I just didn't feel up to it."

"Well?" Craig told Richard. "Finished alienating everybody in the room? We got nothing to hide, Moore. Thought you would've figured that out already, track record for accuracy like yours."

"It's standard procedure to get everybody's alibi."

"You know what, I'll buy that," Craig said. "And while we're on the topic, how about you spend some time talking about what you were doing at three p.m? Just to set all the records straight. You know how it is."

"We're talking about the fireworks right now."

"Don't see why, considering you and I both concluded that Jamie died at three. Care to think of anyone who was around her during that time, Detective Moore? Or would you like a little help?"

"Hey," Conan said brightly, appearing at Richard's feet with casual civilian witchcraft. "I have a question!"

"Conan, not now." Rachel's intervention was faster this time. "Let the adults talk."

"But it's a really good question!"

"Tell us." Craig's eyes were trained on Richard's from across the room. He was very gentle. "Let the whole class know what you were doing at three p.m."

"Craig, would you just cut it out?" Gargoyled in a corner until now, Jim suddenly broke in with a harsh tumble of breath. "We all know where Jamie was. She didn't make it a secret who she wanted. Who the hell cares where he was? Who the hell cares what they were doing? We all know he didn't kill her. All this is doing is getting us off track while we point fingers at each other."

"That reminds me." Craig's smile didn't abate. "Meant to bring this up earlier. You've been acting real squirrelly too since even before we found her body. Anything you want to share? Because it seems like you might've seen something before any of us knew there was a problem."

"It wasn't anything."

"Sure about that? Maybe run it by us just to be sure."

Jim jammed his glasses up his nose. He shoved himself away from the wall to stumble towards the exit.

Still a little winded by Craig's fusillade, Richard shook himself out of stasis in time to snag Jim's shoulder. "I didn't kill her!" Jim exploded immediately. "Why are you all looking at me like that? I didn't do anything!"

"If you didn't kill her then there's no need to run." Richard took a hold of Jim's lapels to get a better grip and felt something splintering around them as they ran up against each shatterpoint. Memories collected underfoot like broken glass. "Were you the one? Did you kill Jamie?"

"No," Jim choked out.

"You want everyone in the room to keep pointing those fingers at you or do you want to tell us what the hell you saw, Jim?"

"I just went to the bathroom, that's a-all I did, please let go."

"What did you see."

"Nothing."

Shouts bounced off him like rain. Jamie said let me know when you figure it out and Richard's composure abruptly snapped. He hauled Jim up higher to shake him until Jim's resistance shuddered apart under the assault, until he began weeping in horrible wrenching gulps. "What did you see?" Richard yelled.

"I didn't—"

"Tell me what you saw or I swear to god—"

"I saw Jamie!"

Richard's eye sparked and his ear rang. He didn't realize Nancy had slapped him until he'd already let go and Jim was stumbling away from him with Nancy's help. "Jim." Nancy shot Richard a furious glance and gathered Jim's red face up. He hiccupped at her through his tears, sliding his shaking hands around her wrists. "Tell us," Nancy pleaded. "No more secrets. It's okay. Just tell us the truth."

"I just went to the bathroom." Jim croaked out the words. "I… it was after five, she was supposed to be dead already, but she wasn't. I saw her."

"You saw her where, Jim."

"I saw her glaring down at the table tennis room from the second floor."

"That's impossible." But Nancy sucked in a breath. "You didn't imagine it? You're sure?"

"It was her. I'd… I'd know her anywhere. Any crowd, any country. Any planet. I know Jamie."

The staff was wavering with confusion. Eye still watering, Richard caught the son muttering to the owner before beginning to move towards the exit. "Stay in the room," Richard snapped, more than happy to share the wealth of his misery with worthy charities. "Nobody leaves until the police get here."

"Excuse me, but this is my establishment," the owner said sharply. "While I am very sorry for your loss, I was led to believe this was a suicide. We've been more than cooperative with your demands. Why are we here?"

"This is ridiculous." Craig ignored them all. He was pacing in front of Jim. He stopped and skewered an index finger at him over Nancy's shoulder to speak through gritted teeth. "This is ridiculous. You know better. You couldn't have seen her. She'd already been dead for two hours."

"I know that," Jim yelled. "Why do you think I didn't want to tell you? If she wasn't dead yet, then everything we know is wrong, but if she was dead that means I…"

"There's no such things as ghosts, idiot." Scott's words belied soft-pawed attempts to get past Nancy. She ceded the space and Scott took Jim's shoulders for himself. "Can't believe you've been holding all that in," Scott muttered. "We could've told you from the start that it was nothing. We were all tired from the trip and all of us had been drinking. I'm not surprised you thought you saw her through all those reflections in the glass, especially when she's on your mind so much."

"I want you to be right." Jim's glasses came off. He buried his face against the sleeve of his robe. "I really, really want you to be right."

"All right, enough." The owner's son finally raised his voice above the cacophony. "Will someone please explain what the hell's going on? Ghosts, alibis, what is this? When Anna called the police she reported a suicide. Why are we here as suspects?"

"My friend was murdered with a pistol up in her room while you were all in the building," Richard said absently. "We're trying to figure out who did it so nobody else dies before the police get here to collect the body."

The staff recoiled and he heard a muffled shriek from one of the maids. "Dad." Rachel's recrimination was a thunderclap. "My god, could you have handled that any worse?"

"Well, he's not wrong." Scott looked at the overhead analog, mouth in an irritated line. "And the more they take their sweet time…"

Five o'clock. Every inch of his skin was a miserable hopping livewire. Five o'clock. Richard felt a little light above the neck. He palmed the nape of it but there was no sting to direct him and hadn't been one for weeks. There was a strange ozone between his teeth that buzzed in his sinuses when he tried to swallow. In a daze, he wandered towards the first floor bathroom and was arrested halfway by the owner's son. "The murderer isn't one of us, is it?" the man demanded. He shoved Richard back when Richard tried to amoeba around him. "Are you saying one of us did it?"

"No." He tried again and this time the hit was violent enough to make him stumble. The man crowded his space with the panic of prey, working his fists into Richard's robe to manhandle him. Richard spotted Rachel's deadly expression as she closed the distance and realized he needed to tune back in properly if he didn't want to explain her actions to a grand jury. "Okay, no no no, wait. Just wait. Wait." He got his hands up between them peaceably. "Of course it couldn't be any one of us. Detective Newberry already concluded that the murderer must've snuck in from outside. We just have to keep everybody locked down so the police have no reason to suspect any of us. That's all we wanted. For your safety, sir, and for ours."

The man missed nothing. "So we are going to have to talk to the police?"

"Yes, but since we're all innocent it's going to go fast. Look, not to put too fine a point on it, but my eyeballs are paddling in the deep end here," Richard said. "I have to use the bathroom. I'll be right back. Detective Newberry's the professional here – he can answer all your questions. Craig, all you, buddy. Take it away, officer."

The son whirled away from him as the rest of the staff converged on Craig. Craig leveled a look of quiet smiling fury at him before he was swallowed.

Richard passed by a statue riddled with arrows and a bay window with a vista nearly completely obscured by an overgrown wisteria outside. He heard his name and running footsteps and then he had to lean against a wall for a second to recollect his stimuli. I should call Meguire. Rachel was right. He was probably going to get yelled at for being around a dead body but on the other hand yelling was preferable to the roaring misdirected traffic in his head now blowing past all his stoplights. His face stung and underneath Nancy's mark he still felt Jamie's kiss on his skin, so he dug his thumb into it to let the nail dig it out until the sensation displaced the last of the ringing in his ear. I wish Jimmy was here. Five o'clock. Two hours after projected time of death. That rearranged—

"—ctive!"

"Go away." He actually did need to wring himself out pretty bad and this time shrubbery was optional. "Rachel will be looking for you."

"I have to talk to you."

"Go away."

"Richard, I get that you're kind of a mess up there right now, but you have to listen," Conan said. "Isn't it too early to decide if it's an outside job? Why did you tell them nobody in there was a suspect?"

"Go away." The pressure Craig had applied to the nerve still ached when he turned his chin. After that and Nancy he just needed to collect two more souvenirs from Jim and Scott to make a complete set.

"We can't assume anybody is innocent yet. There may not be cameras in the back, but the gate around the property makes it almost impossible to get in without risking serious injury. If the murder did happen at three, it would've still been light out and there are tons of people walking by on the road outside to get to the festival. Being up on the hill only hides us so much. It would've been a really stupid time to come in and try to burgle the hotel, especially when he would've been able to see you in your room at that time too. We can't assume that—"

Richard hurled over the Benkei statue and the stand holding it. The carpet muffled the worst of the crash but the impact snapped one of the stone arrows off to ricochet off the wall. Conan hissed a startled curse, skittering back, staring at him with bewilderment and alarm.

Richard hit the wall and then hit it again when nothing stopped him. It felt extremely great. There was no one around to lecture him about maladaptive coping mechanisms so he dug into the wall and felt the air snap out of his knuckles like tiny therapeutic gunshots.

Conan had frozen behind him.

"Shut up." Richard made sure to enunciate. "Cop shows, things you 'watch on TV', books you read – you know jack shit about the real world. 'Outside job', you think I'm that much of an idiot? You really think I'm going to buy that some random dipshit scaled that fence in broad daylight, stole nothing out of Jamie's room, murdered her, took the time to camouflage it as a suicide, and left with no one seeing him? One of my friends killed Jamie. Jim, Scott, Craig, Nancy – any one of them could've pulled that trigger and every last one of them had a motive. I don't need a roadmap to get to a conclusion, I need you to fuck off and give me space so I can figure this out!"

Conan was silent.

Richard wrenched away from the wall. He could feel immediately that he'd knocked something in his hand off-kilter but there wasn't a lot he could do about it right now. He braced his neck with it and took unsteady gulps of air while Conan watched every second of his weakness like he'd bought a season pass to his stadium of fuck-ups. Why are you here. The fireworks show might as well have happened to someone else. In the darkness of the hall, his daughter's confession still in his ear, Richard flat-out couldn't place Conan in this timeline. The alien silhouette in front of him was so familiar that nostalgia was swinging at him from all his blind spots. "I'm not letting anyone walk out of here until I figure out what trick the murderer used and I string them up for it myself," he said shortly. "I don't need you buzzing in my ear and I don't need you trying to handle my business for me. This is my responsibility to solve. Do you understand?"

Conan kept his mouth shut.

Richard emptied every ounce of liquid misery out of himself with a winning tag-team of the trash can and the toilet. He then cracked a window and smoked in the bathroom and the smoke lodged in him like a physical tide so he threw that up too so the sink wouldn't feel left out. He wished he had time to change out of his robes but Jamie's blood was ultimately the better motivator.

Conan was still stationed in the hallway by the time Richard left the bathroom, closer to the pool of light at the mouth of the atrium. He had a hand on his forearm above the watch, rubbing the tense cord of muscle there slowly.

Richard righted the statue and its stand and hid the broken arrow in a potted plant. He half-expected Conan to speak or for once fuck off as instructed, but Conan did neither. He didn't acknowledge Richard's presence at all, thumbing his arm rhythmically, fixated on the statue of Benkei. Rachel had tinkered with his robe since arriving, cinching it up off the ground with clothespins and rubber bands, but the material still gulped down most everything but fingernails. The sandals poking out from the pinned-up hem were the only indication he terrorized Beika on foot at all.

For a split second, gerrymandering reality up away from illusion to skew his own numbers, Richard couldn't tear his attention off the sandal he'd fixed. Conan had covered Rachel's ears throughout the entire twenty minute show and had held onto Richard's shoulder for support as Richard had worked on the twine, using the free one to occasionally massage his own ears. He hadn't complained, but Richard suspected they'd been ringing from the trauma as much as his own.

Conan's glasses were bright enough to nearly be opaque.

"Quit making this harder," Richard said instead of fuck off, and something in his head clunked into place with a scrape of rusted gears.

He didn't pass out solving this case either.

---

.

"Dad." Rachel's head shot up immediately as he regained the room. She broke from the throng of staff and crossed the distance at a hurried trot. "The others went upstairs. Craig said he didn't want to leave the body alone in case the murderer came back to try to hide any of the evidence."

"All of them went?"

"I don't think either group really trusts the other one. I didn't want to leave you behind and I was afraid the staff would try to escape if there wasn't someone watching them. Craig didn't seem to care if they were left on their own, but…"

"It's fine." He walked past her but did get a hold of her elbow to steer her ahead of him. "He's right. It's not the staff."

She looked startled. "You know who it is?"

"Not the staff. C'mon." He shoveled her up the stairs and glanced over his shoulder cursorily to make sure Conan was en route. "Stay out of the way up here. Hang out by the door, keep an eye on Conan."

"Dad, what's happening? You're acting like you know something. What did you figure out?"

"I'm about fifty percent there. Just keep your eye out and don't get near enough to anybody to let them grab you." He could send her to her room and on the other hand guns didn't care about walls this thin. She could disarm an armed opponent as well as he could and he'd prefer to put her in a position where she could see and hear her danger.

"Conan," Rachel said softly, and Conan silently increased his pace in order to come up beside her. "I know, I'm tired too," she soothed when he stumbled. "It'll be over soon. Just stick by me and try to be quiet."

Richard crested the landing to hear Scott's snappish exhaustion floating from Jamie's open door. "I understand that, but why would a burglar shoot her? If they wanted to steal something, there was plenty of other empty rooms where we'd all left our bags. Why go into the one occupied room and risk having things go sideways?"

"I mean, they didn't steal anything in the end," Nancy said. "So maybe what Craig is saying makes sense. It feels like they just wanted to hurt somebody and didn't care who it was. What I don't understand is how none of us heard the gunshot while we were playing table tennis. It's such a quiet building, you'd think we would've heard that kind of commotion."

"And knowing Jamie, she would've fought back if she'd seen an intruder. She wasn't shot in bed – she was standing up. If the burglar wanted to stop her from screaming, why would he have gotten her up against the wall and then shot her? If anything, the bed would've helped muffle the sound."

"It could've been she left her room and came back mid-heist." Craig was leaning against the wall closest to Jamie, rubbing the stretch of skin between his brows with a thumb, when Richard entered the room. He spared a curt flicker of a glance up but otherwise didn't acknowledge it. "That would explain why she was naked under her robes. Maybe she'd come back from the bath."

"If that's the case, wouldn't the blood have been by the door?" Nancy looked between Craig and Scott a bit helplessly. "Am I… am I looking at it wrong? Why was it on the opposite wall if she surprised him?"

"Could be that he hid against the wall by the door until she walked in, waited until she'd crossed the room, then shot her," Craig said. "There are a million scenarios. A person panics and he doesn't always think rationally. It might've started out that he thought all the rooms were empty, and he just had the bad luck to pick the one room whose occupant planned to come back early."

Richard crouched down by Jim in the corner. Jim didn't at him, back to his huddle on the floor, knees hiked and arms folded over them to create a cradle for his chin. He didn't react to Richard's proximity at all. "I'm sorry," Richard said.

Jim's reply was quiet but prompt. "Don't worry about it."

"I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry."

"We're all on edge. It's okay, Richard. Really."

Because he was a masochist, Richard went ahead and let his mind's eye resurrect the time they'd teamed up for charades and Jim had made him laugh so hard with his impression of Eva riding a donkey that Richard had pulled a rib muscle. Richard brainstormed all the places Jim was going to be in five years. The list was anywhere but here. It'd take a few years until he'd no longer be able to pull the sound of Jim's laughter up from his memory, but probably fewer years than it'd take to forget the way Jim had broken apart and sobbed in terror while Richard jostled him around like a vending machine. "Wish things had turned out differently."

The sheen in Jim's eyes redoubled. He blinked to keep it in check and maintained his smile. "Me too."

Richard straightened in time to tune Scott back in. "And then Jim says he saw her at five o'clock anyway – is there any chance you two were wrong? That it could've been later? Because Richard was up here after three and he didn't hear the gunshot either. It had to have happened when he was down with us, and that was closer to four."

"Rachel, do me a favor." Richard's hairline itched incessantly. He scratched off the film of sweat and bug spray and tried not to fall over. "Check out the window in the hall and tell me what you see. We're at a weird angle, but make sure to take a good look up and down the hill for cars."

"Okay." She didn't question it. She squeezed Conan's hand, probably a warning, and jogged out.

"Craig." Richard kept scratching to hide himself behind his wrist another minute. He lowered it to meet Craig's gaze across the room. "Rachel said she'd come back with you to the fireworks, but you took off before you got to me. I want you to tell me where you went."

"Back to me, huh." There was frigidity knifed underneath Craig's smile. "You know, I could ask the same thing. We can't even prove you stayed at the fireworks as long as you said you did. It'd be easy once Jim left for you to double back and shoot her. It's not like your kids'll speak up against you. You've got no alibi either."

"Where did you go?"

"Got a snack and rested in my room until you all came back. Pretty hard to prove. Lucky for me I don't need to prove it. Jamie died at three. No idea why you keep fixating on fireworks."

"Because fireworks are noisy," Richard said. "The only thing noisy enough to hide a gunshot in a quiet hotel. The pistol we found didn't have a silencer. They didn't use a pillow to cushion the sound either. The receptionist was down here between three and four, there were no other guests, and we were in the rec room. Jamie didn't die at three. She died during the fireworks – the only time a gunshot could be camouflaged."

"For the love of – would you be serious," Craig said. "You were right there examining the body with me. We couldn't even get a wriggle out of her fucking toes. Jamie had been dead for hours by the time we found her."

"That's what the body tells us, but that's not what the evidence is telling us. A lot of factors affect the progression of rigor mortis. We haven't considered them all yet for us to be able to rule out the possibility we're wrong about time of death."

"Fine." Craig leaned himself against the wall in an exaggerated display of patience. His tone was flint. "You know what? Floor's all yours. Tell the team about those factors. Maybe I'll learn something."

Richard thought, factors. He stared at Jamie's destroyed face and thought factors, and suddenly the traffic in his head was back and none of the lights were working. He could feel a roomful of eyes on him and this was the problem with trying. He'd had factors just a few minutes ago but now the lead seemed too abstruse to bother with. Conviction had smoked straight out of him like dry ice.

Craig's smile was fulsome.

Traffic won. Richard took a step backwards and nearly donated another dead body to the crime scene when he stumbled over Conan's spatial unawareness. "Hey Uncle!" Conan lunged and hung off Richard's arm, folding Richard nearly in half. "C'mon, Uncle Richard, we've been doing all this sad adult stuff for forever. Won't you play with me now? I've been waiting all night!"

Richard was so earnestly fucking flabbergasted that he forgot how to make mouth sounds. "I want to play," Conan whined. "I didn't get to play table tennis earlier with the grown-ups and I'm really sad about it because I wanted to try the move that Jamie did in the photo. I know I can do it but I can't do it myself, can you please please play with me?"

"Conan Edogawa." Rachel burst back into the room in a typhoon of panic. She peeled Conan off him. "Oh god, Conan, what is wrong with you."

"I wanna play!" Conan squalled in her grip. "You said I could play when I'm older, and guess what, I'm three whole hours older, so I can play now. I've been really really super patient and I want to try out the thing Jamie always does. Remember? The shake hand! I want to try the shake hand!"

"Dad I'm sorry." Rachel was utterly colorless with horror. She collected Conan in her arms and tried to hug him out of existence while he flopped around her like a wet hog. "I'm so sorry. I'm going to take him to bed."

"Like this!" Conan freed a hand and made a pistol with it, thrusting it up at Richard. "This this this! Just like Jamie, see? I saw it in the photos in the yearbook. She always used the shake hand technique when she played and I really really want to play like her. Can't we try it out? It's not like I've had a bath yet, I'm still sweaty from the fireworks so it wouldn't be a big deal to play and get sweaty again!"

"I'm sorry." Rachel's thousand yard stare was the nihilism of a fallen god. She calmly hugged Conan harder until his babbling was muffled against her chest and his hand was weakly pistol-whipping the air over his head. "I didn't see cars but there were lights in the fog at the top of the hill. I think the police are almost here. I'll put Conan to bed. Thank you. I'm sorry. Good night."

"Look, maybe you should all just go ahead and do that," Craig sighed. He scrubbed his face down and dug his fingertips around in the corners of his eyes. "This is going to be really rough and I think you've all been traumatized enough. It'll take a while to process the crime scene anyway and since we all discovered the body together, we all have the same eyewitness accounts. Maybe you should just let me talk to them and have them come to you if they need more information."

"I don't think that's going to work."

Craig straightened. He tucked his hands in his sleeves and slowly turned to regard Richard, and Richard realized it was because he'd said it out loud. "Oh yeah," Craig said. "Why not."

"Because I know who murdered Jamie."

Jim looked up sharply from his huddle on the floor. "And unless I'm mistaken, if there's only one of us in the room, the whole story's not going to get told right," Richard said. "So I think I'll stay right here along with everyone else."

"Richard, please tell me you're not joking." Nancy stumbled away from Scott to cling to Richard's arm. "Please tell me you really know who did it and this nightmare can finally be over."

"I don't know about ending the nightmare, but I can at least solve the case," Richard said. "Craig, you wanted factors, right? Here's a factor. Ever heard of Benkei?"

Craig's eyes flitted towards the window lining the opposite side of the hall. Richard didn't turn but could guess what was reflections were probably flashing there. "No," Craig said. "I'm sure you'll tell me all about it though."

"I mean, I don't know shit about him except he was a warrior that died because he didn't know how to duck. Got shot full of arrows during a battle and kept going until he died on his feet. Frozen that way forever. They have a statue of him downstairs that I might've broken and hid pieces of."

"Richard, come on," Scott said. "Quit messing around and just tell us who did it."

"Context is important," Richard said. "Jamie used the shake hand technique to play – it's part of what made her so hard to beat. When Craig and I examined her, I'd estimated over seven hours had passed since her time of death because of the advanced state of rigor mortis. But I forgot the exception: when you die suddenly in the middle of exercising, that process gets sped up. The protein in the muscles hardens easier and the body stiffens up at an accelerated rate. Just like the dumbass who died with a bunch of arrows porcupining him."

"Fascinating," Craig said. "Except Jamie didn't die on her feet and we're not playing around with hypotheticals here this late in the game. There's a murderer on the loose and you're trying to muddle up the time of death on a half-baked theory. This is how innocent people get falsely convicted, Moore. Guys like you trying to prove they're the smartest in the room and pulling evidence up out of their asses. This shit ruins lives."

"It's been medically proven you can die on your feet," Richard said. "Exercise shaves hours off rigor mortis. Unlucky for Jamie, you know that as well as I do."

Somewhere behind him, he heard Rachel suck in a breath.

"Don't you," Richard said.

Craig said, very softly, very gently, "Careful, Richard."

"Craig." Nancy looked between them. She took a tremulous step back into the circle of Scott's arms. "Craig, what does he mean."

"Just blowing hot air as usual." Craig's fury fulminated under the light tone. Richard could see his biceps tensing under the robe as he clenched and unclenched his hands. "Except this time he's fucking around with people's reputations to feel better about his own. Always needs to be the smartest person in the room. Makes sense for the guy who went around bragging about being the 'Judo Kid' when he couldn't even stand in front of a judge without blowing chunks. You haven't changed an inch, Richard. I thought you were pulling it together, but looks like I gave you too much credit."

"You killed Jamie," Richard said. "You knew about the trick. It's why you stayed behind – so you could make her exercise and pull off the deception by the time I came back to help you examine the body."

"Idiot, how can I make her exercise in her room? She was in here the whole time, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you doing this?"

"You didn't have to make her exercise in her room. You made Jamie play table tennis with you right up to the moment you killed her. It's why her finger froze on the paddle and why you couldn't bend it around the trigger of a gun."

"Craig." Scott was tense. He folded his arms around Nancy. "Say something, man."

"What you probably did," Richard said, "was promise to meet Jamie in the rec hall after we all arrived. But then of course you blew that up when you asked us all to go, and she got so angry she ran away to her room. After six when everyone was gone, you guys had the meeting you'd put off. Had something private to talk about? Something you didn't want the rest of us getting in on?"

Craig's lips were white. They barely moved when he spoke. "Enough."

"You bullied Jamie into playing with you. You made her exercise long enough to get a good sweat going, lured her back to her room, and shot her in the head like a coward."

"Enough."

"You had the perfect alibi in me. I'm too good at determining the stages of rigor mortis – down to the quarter hour. I was known for it in the department. You had to have something convincing enough to fool me, and you found it. My expertise made me an easy accomplice."

"So I—" Jim broke in with a desperate gasp of relief. "So w-when I saw her at five—"

"That was her," Richard said. "Not a ghost, not a hallucination. You saw Jamie in the flesh and blood an hour before she died. Sorry I didn't believe you. That was on me."

"Dad," Rachel murmured. She'd loosened her grip on Conan and was staring up at him like she didn't recognize him. Conan, tantrum forgotten, maintained a sniper's line of sight on Craig.

"Jamie was still alive and waiting on the second floor for Craig to be alone. She was killed between six-thirty and seven when the fireworks started. That's how Craig disguised the sound of the pistol discharging. If he'd left the sweat on it would've ruined everything, so he cleaned her body, took off her underwear, put a robe on her, and that's when he hit an unexpected snag: Braindead Prime and Braindead The Sequel came barreling up here on a failed retrieval mission I warned them not to take. This was when he used the window. Stopped his work, left this room, used the veranda to climb into his own, and caught them out in the hallway just before they opened the door."

"Oh my god." Rachel's hand slid over her mouth. She looked queasy. "I was right next to him. Conan was right next to him, and the whole time Jamie—"

"He wouldn't have hurt you," Richard said, watching Craig's expression shift in pallid fractions. "His only target the whole time was Jamie. Fireworks were a roadblock but it was unavoidable once he ran into you, so he let you drag him down to keep up appearances. He ducked out early to finish the job, but by the time he got back, Jamie's body had stiffened too much for him to be able to maneuver her much anymore. That included her trigger finger. Breaking it would've caught the same amount of attention as having the finger off the trigger, so he took a chance and left it knowing it was a fifty-fifty split either way whether I'd catch it."

"Craig," Scott gritted. There were tears in his eyes. "Craig, damn it, say something."

Craig leaned back against the wall with a slow exhalation. He looked down at Jamie with considering eyes. His expression was almost tender.

Richard strung his focus across the chasm of his own fugue. He kept himself in front of Rachel and hoped she got the hint to stay put. Craig smoothed a hand over his bald head, rubbed tension out of the base of his neck. He watched the floor near Jamie's feet for a while and Richard knew what was coming in the same way his healed fractures told him when storms were coming.

Craig said, "So what you're saying is that you also knew about this trick."

"Don't be stupid. I had zero motive to do this."

"Oh sure you didn't," Craig said. "Where I'm standing, I see a wedding band on your finger and a custody battle right there on the floor holding another custody battle. And we both know ten years is a really long time to have no hands on your deck."

Rachel recoiled. "Quit it," Richard said. "You know that's not what this is about."

"You could've done this just as easy as I could. Even easier, because I'll bet if they do a sweep of your room, they'll pick up traces of Jamie all over that bed. Won't they."

Richard said nothing.

"Maybe Jamie scratched that itch for you and you didn't want custody battle One and Two hearing about it, so you decided to off her afterwards to keep her mouth shut instead of keeping your dick in your pants—"

"Craig, shut up," Scott snapped. "His kids are right there for god's sake, quit talking like that in front of his daughter."

"Fine. I made my point." Craig tossed up his hands. "Either of us could've done it. And unless you have evidence – real evidence, not conjecture – this discussion is over."

Both of Rachel's hands were pressed over her mouth. Tears slipped to her knuckles.

Richard recognized this sensation as the one in front of the pistol in the alley. All processes ceased to be a go. He couldn't prove Craig was there at six, he realized with impersonal dread. Not in the rec room, where there were no cameras. Not in the garden. Not on the veranda. Not in Jamie's room. Jamie had spent the final hours of her life trying to carry her luggage over the breach to put next to his and Richard had given her a baggage claim ticket. He'd been the last human interaction Jamie had had in this world that didn't end with a bullet in her skull. He'd been her last chance.

I should've taken your hand. He worked the side of his fist over Jamie's kiss until his jaw ached. I could've taken you to the fireworks, you manipulative perfumed shit. He couldn't even tell her he'd figured it all out. His failure was a closed feedback loop.

Craig let out a long sigh and pushed himself from the wall. "Have to say I expected more from the great Detective Moore. So your almighty evidence is that… what. Anyone could have done it if they'd done the research beforehand? Is that right? Is that what you're closing with?"

Richard said nothing. "It's been a while since you were stripped of your badge, so let me remind you of our procedure," Craig said. "On the force – where we do real investigative work – when we accuse people of a crime, we have to have evidence first. All I've heard is conjecture. From this end, it sounds to me like you've got a lot of suspicious knowledge on this topic. Your mistake was thinking that none of us noticed that you and Jamie were up here for that long together. And you know what? It's okay to admit that, Moore. People get lonely. It's been ten years since Eva left. Nobody here's gonna judge you two for hooking up."

Conan squiggled out of Rachel's lap.

I figured it out, Jamie. Richard was bizarrely on the verge of laughter. Craig took a step into his space and Richard ceded it clumsily, forgetting where he'd put his feet. "Now, let's all just cool our heads," Craig said soothingly. "The police are finally here, we're all exhausted. We already decided someone came in through the window. There's no need to turn on each other. You had knowledge of this, I had knowledge of this. Neither of us wanted to see Jamie dead, so let's put the blame on the real criminal."

Richard listened to Rachel's miserable traumatized gasps at his feet.

Craig extended his hand. "Come on. Truce. Shake on it. Let's pack up all this shit between us and leave the rest of the investigative work to the locals."

Richard thought about passing out actually. He was crushingly tired and it wouldn't take a lot to manually shut down and skip the rest of the bullshit on tap for that evening. There was no sting on his neck or voice in his head to tell him what to do. He'd tried and failed and it'd hurt exponentially worse than not trying and allowing Jamie to walk out the door.

Craig's eyes were friendly as he reached across the space.

Richard—

---

.

Conan said at his knee, "You sure are stupid, Uncle."

Okay. The bile in his throat somehow still tasted like pretzels and he sensed he wouldn't be touching pretzels for a long time after this.

"There's no that great police officer could ever be the murderer. Why, he's so smart that he already knew Jamie was dead just from seeing a little blood on her!"

Okay, Richard thought.

"When was the last time you made a swell deduction like that just from seeing someone across the room? He didn't even touch her! He just said, 'Only Moore and I can enter the room since I'm a police officer and he's a detective!' It's like he already magically knew it was too late. When have you ever used cool cop magic like that, Detective Moore?"

Craig blanched. The smile dropped from his face as he straightened.

Okay, Richard thought tiredly. Okay.

He thought, okay.

---

.

Jim was back on the floor in seconds as Craig rolled him off his shoulder, coming down against a nightstand and breaking one of the feet off with a splintering snap. "I didn't want to kill her!" Craig yelled. "Jamie and I had been together for eighteen years, I was going out with her until that marriage was arranged for me!"

Nancy sat with her back against the wall and wailed with fury against her knees.

Craig scooped Scott's fist out of the air with an uchi-mata. Scott fought like he didn't care if he lived and the scuffle that resulted slammed Craig violently against the closet door as he tried to keep his feet. Wooden slats clattered like teeth to the floor. Craig rebounded, twisted with an uki-otoshi that ended with an elbow to the back of Scott's head to drive it against the hardwood, and Scott was left cradling his face on his side with blood leaking between his fingers. "I proposed to her a million times and every time she said no," Craig snarled. "And then when the arranged marriage came up—"

Jim launched himself back with a roar. Craig was both cleaner and more brutal with him this time, clapping the heel of his palm against his cheek and snapping Jim's head into the wall before taking his feet out from under him. This time Jim stayed down. "Murderer," Scott spat through blood beside him. "You fucking disgrace—"

"I had no choice, she was crazy, she came after me and my fiance. 'There's no way I'm going to let you be the only happy one'. Letter after letter after threatening letter. Phone call after phone call after phone call. My fiance was terrified. I had to pretend I didn't know her because if I admitted to dating this psychopath they'd have never gone through with the match. And then she said she had a cache of intimate photos we took when we were together and she told me if I didn't pay her for them, she'd give them to my fiancé and spread the copies all over the station. I would've been ruined."

"Why didn't you just turn her into the police?" Nancy pummeled her legs with bruising fists and screamed against the fabric of her robe. "What is wrong with you?"

"She was a selfish bitch." Craig stumbled away from all of them. He nearly went out the window to the veranda and then seemed to change his mind, hurling the tea table away from him. The teapot exploded and the shards skittered to a stop against Jamie's leg. "She was a selfish, greedy bitch and all of you still love her because you didn't have to deal with her for eighteen years."

Jim rolled over onto his stomach and hid his face with moans that sounded like I'm sorry, Jamie.

"That bank robber's gun fell out at my feet and everything came together. Even the cosmos wanted that bitch dead. Couldn't have sent a clearer picture if it'd put the gun right in my hand. So you know what? For the first time in eighteen years, I took charge. I got her out of my life. I cut her out like a tumor. That's all she was. And you know what? I'm glad she's dead. If you knew her as well as I did, you'd be glad she was dead too."

Rachel mouthed something to herself over and over on her place against the wall. Her gasps were dry of tears.

"You're right, Richard," Craig said. "That's what you wanted to hear all along, right? 'You're right'. That make you nice and hard? I said I was going to come right up and take the pictures out of her bag and nothing she could do would stop me. Of course she runs right up here, so I followed her up and finished the job. You should've seen her face when she saw the gun. Eighteen years of beating me down and she realized too late what she should've known all along. I had the power the whole time. She died learning that lesson."

Richard could see the reflections bouncing from the other bank of windows in the hall as the police vehicles congregated at the front of the building. "Nothing to say, huh." Craig moved with grim purpose. "Didn't have the balls to screw Jamie so you had to screw me over instead. You don't know what she was really like. She gave you all the sweet parts. The funny parts, the cute parts. Postcards, birthday letters, late night phone calls, what the fuck did she give me? Eighteen years of licking her feet because she couldn't have you. I wasn't good enough because I wasn't you."

Nancy made a retching noise against her knees. "Bastard," Scott choked. He was weeping into the cradle of his arm. "Evil stupid bastard, what the hell have you done."

Richard let Craig hit him. It felt great in the way punching the wall had felt great. He arched his spine to let his arms and shoulders absorb the collision against the wall and heard Rachel scream. "Every time I tried to leave she'd pull out the same stops." Craig was crying too. Richard couldn't remember ever seeing him emote this way. It almost distracted him from the wallop to the gut. "'I'm going to kill myself if you leave.' 'I'll follow you to the ends of the planet and make sure you're as miserable as I am'. You have any idea how many relationships she sabotaged? How many times I tried to leave only for her to hire a private investigator and harass me with letters and midnight crank calls? I couldn't take it. I couldn't take it. She was a demon. I didn't have a choice."

Richard sputtered out a laugh. It was unintentional. It was a bad time to laugh.

Craig seized him by the lapels and launched him up onto his toes. Richard had a feeling he was about to be handled a lot less gently than Jim and Scott and for a second he genuinely considered letting Craig do what he wanted. Attacking Scott and Jim could be handwaved as self-defense but Richard wasn't fighting back, and there was still a chance with a badge in his pocket that Craig wouldn't get nailed by all this the way Richard needed him to get nailed. These were second story windows. Angling himself through one of them when Craig flipped him would at least help seal assault charges. Richard could bleed some quiet evidence around the premises for a while until the police got there and with any luck the attempted murder and the fact that all of them had heard Craig's confession would put him away for at least a while. "You don't understand." There were tears in Craig's eyes as he shifted his weight in preparation to follow through. He was almost pleading. "You've never understood what it's like to not be good enough."

He was preparing to fly when Rachel screamed with her entire body, "Dad, what are you doing," and just like in the alley, Richard's isolationist agenda once again butted up against all his self-made embargos.

Okay, he thought, exhausted, and moved.

---

.

Craig heaved and sputtered with vomit. Richard turned him over so he wouldn't choke to death on it. "Fuck you," Craig bit out against the stained floorboards. "You've always had everything. Fuck you. Fuck you."

Conan had propped a supporting hand behind Richard's knee to keep it from caving. Richard stood in the eddy of the open window and breathed in the whorls of displaced air as heat and fog jockeyed for the space. Jamie's kiss hummed on his jaw.

"You were always the one person Craig couldn't beat," Nancy said with a little whimpering laugh, clutching her bleeding husband as the medic flashed a penlight between his eyes, and click went the switch in—

---

.

The cluck of the nearby fountains told him his face was wet.

"Dad."

The rain had stopped. His cigarettes were out here somewhere and he'd been looking for them for a while. He couldn't throw up because there were no more pretzels in his body. He reached out to pad around the shadow and felt his hand plunge into fountain water instead. He shook it off with irritation.

Hands seized his face. "Daddy." Rachel's voice finally broke.

She hadn't called him that since second grade. Richard felt gears putter a little in his head. "Dad, it's late, you're freezing, please just come inside with me." Rachel guided his hair up out of his eyes. "Okay? Will you do that?"

"I'm fine."

"Why didn't you tell me you were leaving the room?"

"I wanted to walk. Go in without me."

"Dad."

He really was tired but his cigarettes were still somewhere in the garden. He still had the memorial cigarette for Jamie but it seemed like the exact wrong time to light it. A nap would improve his concentration so he could make cleaner calls. He tried to lay down on the fountain and she disallowed it because she was all the worst parts of her mother and a fairly solid collection of his. "I can't find my cigarettes," he explained to her for the eleventh time.

"I'll get you a new pack at the store. But only if you get up."

Conan mentioned something about calling the ambulance back to the hotel. The receptionist's name had apparently been Anna. She'd told Richard that the garden glowed under the fog with the fairy lights and he wished she was still around so he could tell her how right she was. He didn't even have specific plans to hit on her. He just thought she might appreciate being right.

Rachel was still talking at him. Richard had no idea when he'd left the room but part of the reason had been to get away from this specifically. He leaned his head against the fountain's stone swan spigot while the world moved around him. The last time he'd been this tired there'd been a newborn baby involved. Eva hadn't screamed even a fraction as much as the Judo team. Just glared at him between gasps of pure hatred until Rachel had been born as an afterthought.

He closed his eyes and fucked off and this time Rachel let him. After an indeterminate amount of time passed he heard new voices in the garden and he roused himself enough to decide enough was probably enough. He either needed to get horizontal somewhere or find his cigarettes and then get horizontal.

He pushed himself away from the fountain and stood up and his legs went out from him like they'd been sucked down a drainpipe. "Yup." Meguire intercepted him with a breathless grunt before Richard hit the ground. He manhandled him down to the cobblestones at a more controlled pace, propping his back against the fountain and steering Richard's head down. He was bundled in a thick jacket and cap and smelled like emergency take-out road trip cholesterol. "Saw that coming. Easy does it."

"The fuck are you here," Richard asked academically from between his knees.

"I called him." Rachel supervised them both as she paced, wringing her hands. She was back in jeans and a windbreaker. "When you were out under the canopy with the receptionist. Please don't be mad."

"It's a three hour drive, Joseph."

"Yeah, and you want to know how I knew to come out? Your daughter called me with this miraculous goddamn thing called a goddamn phone," Meguire said. "Your seventeen year-old follows instructions better than you do. I called Eva too so she knows. Breathe."

"Jamie's dead."

"I know. Eva knows. Breathe."

Richard watched the ground zoom in and out of focus. Meguire thumped his back with a crisp jolt that jackrabbited his engine. Richard drew in ragged breaths that coughed on the way out while Rachel continued to pace in the background. Jamie was dead. He'd figured it all out and he'd tried and she was still dead. "It's okay." Meguire was back down to a mutter. He rubbed a brisk palm between Richard's shoulder blades. "It's okay."

He was aware of Conan somewhere off to the side spending zero energy finding his cigarettes. "Rachel, you guys all packed?" Meguire said.

"We were supposed to stay the night, but I still got most of our stuff back in our bags so we could leave first thing in the morning. I didn't realize he was missing until I went to pack up the bathroom, so I still have some toiletries in there."

"Go ahead and grab the rest and bring your bags down. Take Conan with you to help."

"Okay."

"I need to call a taxi," Richard said. His voice sounded very normal between his knees. There was blood pulsing behind his eyeballs. "There's no train that runs this late."

"I'm driving you home."

"Jamie's dead."

"I know, Dick."

"I wasn't even on a boat this time."

"I know." There was a note of bottomless fury in Meguire's tone that made the words shake on the way out. He kept a hand steady between Richard's shoulders and the contrast between that and the frigid stones of the fountain sent Richard on another sensory spiral that ended between his knees. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"Jamie's dead."

"I know. You did everything you could."

Then why was Jamie still dead. He hadn't even technically failed and he'd still gotten everything important wrong. "You caught her murderer," Meguire said. "There won't be any drawn-out search for the killer, no media circus, no family having to wait on pins and needles. You gave them closure and that's more than what a lot of families get, especially with this kind of situation. If you hadn't been here, Craig would've gotten away with it."

"I didn't want closure. I wanted to save her."

"You tried," Meguire said, and that was somehow the best and the worst thing to say but mostly the worst, wasn't it. Failure soft like an empty palm instead of a fist. Failure that smothered like fog instead of cleansed like rain.