Doug’s smile dropped off his face. Where he had been pleasant, positive, upbeat, he was now cold. It was an act, of course, but it seemed to shake Jen some.

There was no communication. No words, as he read through what she’d written. On the front, in ‘Owen’s’ words, she’d expressed grief and anger, frustration and hopelessness. On the backside, in the same crude handwriting, she’d outlined how everything she’d put in front of him was bullshit.

He got up and he left the room, taking the file with him.

Let her believe we got her. A note with telling information. Or…

Nic looked at the pill bottle. Pills for anemia, which she’d barely touched. So long as she ate on the days she had more to drink, she didn’t need them. In this ruse of hers, she was making a gamble, an educated guess.

Owen, a physically and mentally disabled boy who was struggling through school, friendless and frustrated, had been on more medications than Nic had been able to count.

Nic was pretty sure she knew Jen’s type. A cousin who had been enchanted by her kitten, but when that kitten had grown up to be a cat, had emptied the food bowl into the trash or tainted the food, knowing the hungry animal would eat it. She’d seen it in certain parents and their kids. In kids with dependent parents.

It made sense that Jen would tamper. Switch the contents of one bottle for another, or empty a bottle and replace its contents with something innocuous. Hastening a disabled boy on his way as Nic’s cousin had tried to do to the cat, before being confronted. As parents who no longer wanted to be parents sometimes did. As children who no longer wanted to struggle to care for their parents sometimes did.

And if Jen hadn’t tampered, then they were simply pills. They wouldn’t mean anything.

But Nic could see Jen fidget. Her eyes didn’t miss a detail. Her ears didn’t miss the squeak of the chair, or how Jen seemed more bothered by that squeak in particular.

She could have pressed, applied even more pressure, and it would have worked. But if she’d pressed, she might have screamed, or shouted, or said something regrettable. She didn’t trust herself.

Silence is damning. Silence can tell just as much.

Long seconds passed, and then twenty-year-old Jen leaned forward, elbows on knees, head bowed.

That was it. The moment every interrogation was aiming for. The defeat, almost always the same decline of the head and slump forward, if she looked for it.

“He’s not an angel or anything, just because he’s disabled,” Jen said. “He—”