The response was a sneer. “I’m not saying anything without a lawyer. I went to a decent high school, we got an intro to law in tenth grade. We all saw the video breaking it down. This. Nothing I say can support my case, but you’ll twist it around or use pieces of it to screw me over and make me out to be the bad guy.”

“It’s just a conversation, Jen,” Doug said. “You can leave at any time. For right now, until things are settled, we think it’s best you’re here and not in the pit.”

The pit. The floor with all of the desks and phones, where the most informal of interviews were held.

“Of course you do.”

“When you were sitting out there and she passed by you, your stepmom started screaming at you. None of us want that. Not at this time of night. Or, worse, we get a situation where you’re outside waiting for your cab when she comes across you and there’s nobody around to hold her back.”

Jen’s response was a shrug.

“The stepmom. She’s very emotional,” Doug observed.

Anyone would be.

“It doesn’t help her, acting like that while making accusations,” he said. The friendly, good looking officer, playing nice. Jen didn’t bite.

No bite, but she did twist around to look. The woman in the other room was dabbing at her eyes with a kleenex.

“Oh god,” the monster said.

“Right?” Doug asked, smiling.

Their suspect responded to the smile by retreating, arms folding, settling into the chair. Reminding herself she was talking to the enemy.

Doug pressed, “Look, she won’t be much longer. A lot of the people here, we were up at six this morning, got our coffees, breakfast sandwiches, ate our oatmeal, ran through our routines. And we’ve been up for fifteen hours. We aren’t interested in anything that’s going to take hours. We want this done and out of the way. We’ll wrap up the interview with the stepmom, send her home, then we’ll let you go. Then we get back to you in a few days to let you know where things stand.”

That wasn’t really how it worked. Some started late and worked late. But it made for a good story.

Jen, the monster in the chair, turned and looked up at Nic, who was pretending to watch ‘the stepmom’.

“How long have you had to put up with that?” Doug asked.

“I won’t answer any questions until I have my lawyer.”

“I’m trying to kill time, that’s all. Trust me, a guy who’s been working for fifteen hours is not the guy who would be interrogating you. We already got your statement.”

His finger tapped the paper.

“I’m not saying anything,” Jen said.