Chapter 13 - Interrogation
I was escorted into an interrogation room and made to sit down at the single metal table that stood in the center. Taking my cuffs in hand the police attached them to the table's surface, ensuring that I couldn't escape before leaving me alone in that cold space. An icy shiver ran over my skin, causing the hairs to rise and leaving goosebumps behind. There was a large mirror to my left that ran the length of the wall and beyond it I could see the presence of two souls silently watching me. I only recognized one of them being the woman I had possessed last night, while the other was unknown to me. If that woman was here, then the Hero Public Safety Commission was already involved. I turned away from my reflection in the mirror, biting my lip in irritation.
This whole damn situation I found myself in had to do with that blasted thumb drive that I had brought back with me last night. How they found it was missing and tracked it back to my apartment in such a short time, I hadn't the foggiest clue. It was a thumb drive for fucks sake! They go missing all the time. Buy another! They're not that expensive!
Was it the data? Could they have tracked the data when Ivan copied it over in my apartment? I frowned at this. No. He was too cautious for that to be a possibility. He had added security measures in my apartment for network encryption that had allowed him to download and upload sensitive data in the past and it never brought a hero to my front door.
My mind circled with other options. No way could they have tracked me. I can't be followed and I wasn't seen. There was nothing tying me to last night's activities - nothing but that thumb drive.
It all came back to that thumb drive. Had they detected the massive data transfer when Ivan originally downloaded the data onto it? If that was the case, then they would have tracked the leak to the woman's computer which would have brought on questions. Questions that she wouldn't have an answer for due to the lack of memory for the missing minutes while I had taken possession of her body. Logically they would have searched her office from there and have discovered the thumb drive missing - and no doubt Ivan's hacker dongle. That would have raised alarms for sure, but Ivan's dongle didn't trace back to me. Or did it? Internally I chastised myself for my stupidity. I had handled the dongle while still in my body before leaving the apartment. The thing had my fingerprints on it. But it also had the woman's when I used her body to install it. How good was their forensics department? Could they separate my fingerprints when they were under hers?
I instantly balled my fingers into fists, suddenly very aware of leaving fingerprints behind on the metal table for them to collect for comparison. As far as I was aware, they didn't have those yet and I wasn't in the system at all. But even if they had found the dongle and mysteriously had my fingerprints to compare it against, that still didn't explain how they tracked the thumb drive to my apartment. I was unregistered in the system courteous of Ivan's brilliant hacking. I had no name or address for them to find, and fingerprints without an identity to attach those to meant nothing. If anything they would have hit a dead end right there, leaving just the mystery of the missing thumb drive.
A thumb drive is just a thumb drive. People lose them everyday and replace them without a second thought. Plus, you can't track down a thumb drive, unless... My blood ran cold as I came to a stark realization. It had a GPS tracker in it. It was the most logical conclusion my brain could think of. Of all things to put a GPS tracker on, they had stuck one in a thumb drive. It would have led them straight to me like a homing pigeon.
"The Public Safety Commission must be very paranoid indeed to be adding trackers to the smallest of things." I growled in the back of my mind.
All in all things were not looking good. If I had any chance of getting out of here, I had to convince them that I was innocent, guilty only of picking up a flash drive off the street to return it to its owner. I had to stick to my original story that I had given to Eraserhead. Any deviation and they would get suspicious. Give them no cause to dig any deeper and I would be fine. I took a steady breath to calm my nerves. With my story sorted all I could do was wait and shiver in the cold air.
"Why does it have to be so damn cold?" I thought, rubbing my legs together under the table. I couldn't move my hands to rub some warmth into my arms as they were chained to the table's top, so my body was internally shivering. A quick glance to the mirror on my left and I saw that the two souls were still there waiting.
"What are they waiting for?" I squeezed my legs together, contracting the rest of my body inwards to conserve what warmth I could.
Answering my silent question, the door to the interrogation room swung open allowing Eraserhead and a lone police officer into the room. The smell of hot tea hit my nose hard and I noticed the paper cup Eraserhead was carrying had steam still wafting over the top. "What I would give to have that in between my hands!" I inwardly cried. Anything for just a little bit of warmth.
Mentally I slapped myself, giving myself a stern reminder about leaving behind fingerprints.
Eraserhead leaned over the table to set down the tea in front me before taking one of the empty seats. The police officer joined him at the table, opening the folder he had brought with him. But all I could do was eye the cup as it taunted me with its alluring warmth and smell. My fingers twitched outwards, but I clasped them tighter together and withdrew them as far as the cuffs would allow. When I looked up into the hero's eyes I saw there was a slight smirk within them as he studied me. My own eyes widened a fraction with realization.
"That ragged bastard!" I mentally screamed. He was purposefully taunting me with the warm tea. No doubt he was the one who had set the temperature of the room to be so cold in order to persuade me to take the cup and give them what they needed. Of all the dirty, crafty tricks - taunting me with hot tea had permanently placed this Pro Hero on my shit list.
Thankfully, the police officer next to Eraserhead was the first to speak up, drawing my attention away from the tea and the analyzing eyes of the hero.
"Your name is Evelyn Nishimiya, correct?" The police officer offered me a kind smile, calming my nerves slightly.
I nodded at the name. It was the name Ivan had cooked up to put on the lease for the apartment and it was what the other tenants called me whenever they saw me.
"Yes, that's me. Can I ask what's this about? If it's about the thumb drive, I swear I was going to turn it in." I spouted off the statements in a rapid fire. I wanted to appear meek. I hoped by acting timid I could coax out their more forgiving nature, and they would let me go with a warning.
"We don't doubt your intentions, Ms. Nishimiya," The police officer paused, flipping through some papers and looking back up. "It is Miss, not Missus? Correct?"
I nodded. Being unmarried at my age was not that unusual.
The officer crossed something off the page, and scribbled on the side of the paper. "Thank you, Ms. Nishimiya. Like I was saying, we don't doubt your intentions, but we do have some questions for you that we would like you to answer for us, if you could."
"Of course!" I nodded earnestly. "Anything I can do to clear up this misunderstanding."
"Thank you for your compliance. This shouldn't take very long."
"Tell us where and when you found the thumb drive." Eraserhead took over then, dispensing with the formalities and cutting right to the chase.
If he was hoping to catch me off guard, he would be sorely mistaken. I had time to think over my alibi and strategize.
I sat back in the chair, appearing to give it some thought. "I found it on the sidewalk that goes to the convenience store in my neighborhood. I think that was maybe around 10, maybe 10:30? I was out getting groceries."
"A bit late to do some grocery shopping, don't you think?" Eraserhead interjected.
"Well, I slept through the whole day," I chuckled, a bit ashamed. "I have a bad habit of playing video games for days on end, so I don't always get enough sleep. When I woke up after playing an all-nighter it was already dark out, and my fridge was empty. What can you do, right? Girl's gotta eat. Anyways, that's when I found it."
"Was it on your way to the store or back?" Eraserhead questioned.
"To."
"What did you get?"
"Huh?" I furrowed my brow in confusion.
"What did you get from the store?" Eraserhead clarified.
"Oh, um some milk, carrots, onions, a chuck roast, and a bag of chips." I listed off the items currently fresh in my kitchen. The first rule of a convincing lie was to stick to the truth as much as possible. If they went digging for facts to corroborate with my story, they would find at least find those ingredients.
"You do a lot of cooking?" The police asked quizzically, genuinely interested.
"Yah, it beats eating out constantly, and keeps the food bills down." I replied with a laugh. I went to lay my hands down in my lap, but was stopped by the chains.
"Are these really necessary?" I jangled the chains for effect.
"Yes." Eraserhead replied curtly.
"Sorry." The officer gave me an apologetic smile. "It's standard procedure until we know more about you."
"All right." I gave a shrug. "What do you want to know?"
"What is the nature of your quirk?" Eraserhead asked, leaning forward with interest on the table.
I bit my lip, remembering quickly what Ivan had listed it as.
"If I concentrate I can see the forms of other people through solid objects. Though I can't identify them. I just know that they're there."
"Can you tell us how many people are beyond that glass?" Eraserhead pointed to the mirror on my left. He was testing me to see if I was lying. Thankfully, I could at least pass this test.
I turned my head to the mirror, seeing my reflection and Eraserhead's intense stare as he watched me. I already knew how many people lay on the other side, but I had to keep the act up. And so I narrowed my eyes in a show of concentration. The same two souls were there - wait, a third soul had just entered the room.
"There were two people, but another one just showed up." I said, turning back to the hero.
Eraserhead's brow ticked in annoyance.
"So he decided to join us after all." He muttered darkly under his breath.
"Huh? Who's over there?"
"It's nothing." The officer quickly covered for Eraserhead's slip of the tongue.
I frowned, but let it slide. A new blast of cold air shot through the room and I gave a violent shiver.
"Hey...uh, any chance we could raise the temperature in here?" I gave them a show of my body trembling from the cold, hoping to play to their sympathies.
"If you're cold, then drink." Eraserhead said with a cool glare, indicating to the cup in front of me.
The nerve of that man. I wanted to tell him to take his drink and fuck off, but I had an appearance to maintain. Losing my nerve would cost me the friendly rapport I had established with the officer, and in turn any confidence that my story had.
"Thank you, but no." I told him through a strained smile.
The hero's face deepened with a smirk at my willful defiance. He knew that I was wise to his game. Not necessarily a good position for me to be in.
"Maybe we can ease up on the AC, Eraserhead?" The officer suggested. He too was beginning to shiver slightly and he had more layers on than me.
"No." Eraserhead quickly growled out, adding, "Getting back to the matter at hand. The reason you are here - " He dug out a plastic bag from his pocket and held it up for me to see. It was the thumb drive he had recovered from my apartment. "- is this."
Eraserhead slid the thumb drive in its evidence bag on the table towards me. "What I'm most interested in is how it got to your apartment, Ms. Nishimiya. Did you know that it has a tracker in it? That's how we were able to trace it to your apartment."
I shook my head no, but Eraserhead had at least confirmed my theory.
"The thumb drive's GPS tracker is unique in that it gives us its location, but also a history of where it's been." He went on, his eyes never leaving mine. "At 1:13 am it left the office of the president, proceeded down to the lobby, and then headed in a straight line to where we found it. In other words," Eraserhead gave a dark grin, "after leaving the Hero Public Safety Commission last night it flew right into your apartment."
With those final words he shattered right through the lie I had built. He had me and all hope for freedom evaporated.
"Now that I know what you look like when you're lying, how about telling us the truth about how it got there."
"Now, Eraserhead," The police officer turned to him, slightly uneased, "We don't know for sure if she did take it. Someone else could have brought it to her apartment and planted it there."
I was silently grateful to the police officer willing to defend me, but with my own admittance to finding the thumb drive on the ground I had unwittingly dug my own grave.
Eraserhead ignored him and continued to tear apart my lie.
"According to your quirk registry, your only registered quirk is being able to see people through solid objects as you just proved to us - not flying. So unless you have an accomplice you are willing to name..."
Immediately I thought of Ivan - my stalker, my partner, but most importantly my best friend. I would not betray him after all he had done for me over the years. How could I? I stayed silent and still, focusing my gaze on my intertwined hands to avoid Eraserhead's penetrating stare.
When it became clear that I wasn't going to give up a name, or try to defend myself anymore, Eraserhead let out an exasperated sigh.
"Very well." He sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. "We will have to assume then that it was you who stole the thumb drive and the classified data last night from the President's office. That opens up a lot of other questions, the very least of which is the extent of your quirk abilities. Providing false or incomplete information on your quirk registry bears with it a heavy fine."
"But not a prison sentence." I looked up from my hands. My heart was beating so fast in my chest from my rising anxiety that I could have sworn that everyone in the room could hear it.
"No, but possessing stolen commission property does." He leveled me with a cold stare. "Last chance to set the record straight."
The police officer gave me a worried look, pleading with me silently to say something - anything that could save me. But I didn't have anything more to give but my silence. My fate was sealed. Eraserhead's unblinking stare into my eyes told him everything he needed to know.
"Do it." He indicated to the man next to him.
The police officer glanced furtively between the hero and I, unwilling to believe what he had just heard. In his eyes I could see the doubt he harbored. I didn't look like a master thief capable of breaking into one of the most secure buildings in Japan, but the evidence Eraserhead had laid out was unshakable. There were still too many unknowns, but one thing was for sure - I was not innocent.
The police officer gave one last look at the hero beside him and saw that the hero stood firm with his decision. With a heavy sigh laced with regret, the officer stood.
"Ms. Evelyn Nishimiya." I couldn't bear to look at him as he continued. "You are under arrest for possession of stolen Hero Public Safety Commission property. You will be taken into custody while continued investigations reveal any and all other crimes you may have committed. These crimes may include illegal entry to the Safety Commission's President's office, attacking the President, hacking and stealing of sensitive information from the archives, and providing false testimony to police. We will also determine the true nature of your quirk to discover if you have supplied false information to the quirk registry department. Do you understand everything I have said?"
I numbly nodded my head in acceptance.
The door to the room opened and several police officers filed in carrying restraints and chains. I was freed from the table and made to stand while they attached shackles to my legs and placed a heavy collar around my neck. Chains led off of the attachments and into the hands of the police officers so they could lead me out between them.
"I am sorry about this." The officer grimaced as I shuffled past him. The weight of the restraints was bearing down heavily on my limbs, and every step I took made the clanking chains reverberate harshly around the room.
I looked into the officer's eyes, offering him a small smile.
"Thank you for being kind." I murmured.
His eyes widened slightly in shock at my words, but he nodded his head once to accept my thanks as I passed.
Eraserhead didn't move from his chair. Nor did he turn to look at me as I was escorted out from the room. His gaze was transfixed on the untouched cold tea left on the table before him. No one saw the slightly mournful expression in his eyes or the grip on his arms tighten in frustration when the door finally clicked shut.