The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Investigation

"But I'm tellin' ya, I got there too late to see who set the fire!" the teenaged drug dealer protested, his pockmarked face sincere.

Dee frowned and leaned back in her chair, fighting the impulse to look up at the two-way glass dominating the north wall of the interrogation room and shrug helplessly.

"You know something, Martin? You're not convincing me of your sincerity," she tautly noted, returning her hard gaze to the squirming young man. Who immediately blanched.

"I think you're feeding me a line of horse shit to save your worthless ass!"

"Are ... are you kidding me?" the young man husked. "You didn't see what I saw, cop. It was like something right out of the X-Files or something! Guys shooting fire and lightning from their hands, people exploding into pieces and that wall of fire." Tears appeared to quickly fill the teenager's eyes as his voice trailed off.

"Man, oh, man, I'll never ... never ..." And with that he broke down into loud sobs, finally no longer able to pretend he was some sort of tough guy. What he had witnessed was more than any one mortal had. And it was much more than his mind could handle.

Eyes narrowing as she watched the kid slump forward to sob hard into his hands, his entire body quivering with the force of his fear and memory of what he had seen, Dee frowned.

"Well, this was a waste of time!" she growled then looked up at the two-way glass mirror. "We're not getting a thing out of this kid until he sees a shrink. He's toast."

Broad-shouldered and ruggedly handsome, Lieutenant Colm McLaughlin frowned, his thick arms crossed over a barrel chest.

"Too bad," he softly muttered under his breath, too quiet for the three constables standing with him to hear. That makes three strikes on the witnesses." Then, a bit louder: "Might as well come out of there then, McMaster. I don't want the kid to suddenly go into seizure or something if we press him too hard."

"Right, leftenant," Dee's voice, tinny and cramped as it issued from the small speaker by the left side of the mirror, replied and with one last look at the broken and sobbing young man, she stood and stepped to the door.

Jerking it open, her face a thoughtful mask, Dee stepped through and closed the heavy, steel-shod door behind her, effectively sealing the young man inside the interrogation room. As if he was in any shape to try to go somewhere. She sighed as she looked up at McLaughlin, who was her lieutenant for her regular duties in Homicide. And immediately she grimaced at the dark expression on the big man's face.

"Let me guess: the Asian couple was a wash, too."

"Your taskforce is batting a thousand with this bunch!" McLaughlin snorted sourly. "They were so distraught when we finally got around to questioning them that they completely forgot how to speak English. So we brought in an interpreter, but the Chinese they spoke was complete gibberish too." He looked at the slumped over teenager in the interrogation room.

"They're as fried as that kid in there. We got absolutely nothing." He returned his gaze to Dee. "We found several other witnesses, but every one of them is now claiming to have seen nothing. Not a flare of light, nor a clap of thunder. Nothing! We're staring at complete zeros. That's gonna blow as much sunshine up Simpkins' ass as a seaweed enema."

Dee grimaced.

"I don't think she cares all that much about results, LT. This'll give her just one more opportunity to primp and preen in front of the camera while spouting off some bullshit about how close we are to solving this thing." Her eyes abruptly narrowed. "But it tells us something: the similarities between this event and the other three explosions are enough to put the four of them into the same case jacket now."