Or the only?

The interrogation room here at the Samhattan Police Department is nicer than the one in Chaps, where Carla McGowan physically assaulted a woman accused of burglary, a suspect she was entirely sure of. In that room, the table was plastic, stained with coffee rings and ashes. The floor that table stood upon was cracked and the lone overhead bulb buzzed like a single large fly. The woman was on video inside the electronics store after hours. She was the only person on tape and McGowan was long tired of loopholes sinking sure things. Truth is, she was tired of proof in a general way. Sometimes things were just obvious. Clear as Kansas skies. Sometimes you had to acquiesce to common sense, a thing that felt lost to her, sucked up into the vent and devoid of the bureaucracy of law enforcement. It had been some time since she trusted the system, any system but her own.

Yet two days after blackening both the suspect’s eyes, the Chaps Police Department received an anonymous tip that the robbery had been an inside job, and that the woman was a middle-aged and homeless runaway from Illinois, coerced into the store (and onto that video) at gunpoint by the actual perpetrator.

McGowan had been so sure…

“I’m gonna ask you until you answer, Peter,” McGowan says now, sitting under a quieter light, in a cleaner room. But feeling a lot like she did that day. That is, close to the line. “Who else loves her?”

Lords has already been questioned inside out. Why he was in the Lamb house (to watch Kit die), what connection he has to the ballers (none), what he knows about the chances of Kit Lamb or any other Samhattanite being targeted in any way.

This last answer is consistently the same:

Daphne.

The deaths of Kell Darren and Nicole Welsh are similar to that of Belinda from Chuck Larson’s story in the car. And all three mirror the current tragedies.

Is Samhattan really so inept, as a city, as a whole, that only the detective spotted the similarities?

“Who else loves her?” McGowan asks.

Lords smiles fondly. As if he likes the word “love” when used in reference to Daphne.

“You’re afraid to say her name,” he says. It’s quite sudden and boyish, and McGowan imagines slamming his face to the metal table.

“Three girls dead,” she says. “Speak. Now.”

“Everybody loves Daphne.”

McGowan thinks to get up. She’s wasting time. This man is as vague with her as the city has been. Yet as Chief Pollen asked her just minutes before McGowan entered this room, when would have been the right time to bring up Daphne? The woman has been dead for nearly thirty years. Does McGowan need to know the details of every closed case prior to her arrival?

And is the detective sincerely weighing the elements of a local ghost story?

“You’re glad we’re all thinking about her,” McGowan says.

Lords nods yes. McGowan knows he is. That’s how the ghost story goes. The one she was never told.