The interrogation room smelled of bleach and men’s deodorant that was trying too hard. It was a small, windowless box painted a color that could only be described as “institutional despair.”
I sat on the metal chair, my hands resting on the cold steel table. They weren’t cuffed, but they might as well have been. The air in the room was heavy, pressurized by the glare of the mirror on the wall—the one-way glass where I knew, with absolute certainty, Julian was standing.
Watching. Helpless.
Sheriff Miller paced the length of the room. Click. Clack. Turn. Click. Clack. He was enjoying this. He was a man who liked simple lines and clear narratives, and I was the messy ink stain he had been dying to scrub out since I rolled back into town.
“You know the drill, Ms. Vance,” Miller said, stopping his pacing to lean against the doorframe. He crossed his thick arms over his chest. “You’ve written enough articles about this. You know how it goes.”
“I know I haven’t been read my rights,” I said, my voice steady despite the tremor in my knees. “Which means I’m not under arrest. Which means I can leave.”
“You can leave,” Miller agreed, a shark-like grin spreading across his face. “But you won’t. Because you want to know what we found.”
“I want to know why you’re treating a witness like a suspect.”
“Witness,” Miller scoffed. He pushed off the wall and walked to the table, pulling out the chair opposite me. The legs scraped against the linoleum—a shriek of metal on vinyl. “You’re always first on the scene, aren’t you? First to the girl in the woods. First to the library archives. First to the riverbank.”
“I’m a journalist,” I said. “It’s my job to be first.”
“And the private knowledge? The details about the poses? The blindfolds?”
“I told you,” I said, leaning forward. “The killer is targeting me. He’s using my history. Of course I recognize the scenes. They’re my memories.”
Miller laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. “Right. The ‘Sandman.’ The ghost story. Julian told me about your theory. The feral boy in the walls.”
He leaned in closer, his face invading my personal space. I could smell coffee and mints on his breath.
“Here’s my theory, Elara. I think you came back to town because your career in Seattle was stalling. I think you needed a big story. A Pulitzer story. And when you didn’t find one, you decided to write it yourself.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “You think I killed three women for a byline?”
“I think you’re sick,” Miller said flatly. “I think you had a rough childhood, and you came back here and snapped. Maybe you didn’t swing the hammer yourself. Maybe you got some drifter to do the dirty work. But you’re the architect.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Then explain the cup.”
He dropped a manila envelope onto the table. It landed with a heavy slap.
I stared at it. “What cup?”
“The teacup,” Miller said. “From the Albright scene. The one superglued to the victim’s hand.”
He opened the envelope and slid a photo out. It was a close-up of the pink plastic cup, dusted with black fingerprint powder.
“We ran the prints,” Miller said, watching my face for a reaction. “We pulled your prints from the soda can you drank from at the station yesterday. Julian thought he was being slick, throwing it out for you, but I fished it from the bin.”
He tapped the photo with a thick finger.
“They match, Elara. A perfect, twelve-point match. Your right thumb and index finger.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered. “I didn’t touch anything at the scene. Julian was with me the whole time. Ask him.”
“I don’t need to ask him. The prints are there. On the murder weapon. Or… the murder prop.”
“I didn’t touch it,” I repeated, my mind racing. “It’s a mistake. Or a plant. Someone could have lifted my prints…”
“From where?” Miller interrupted. “From a glass in Seattle? Transferred them to a curved plastic surface without smudging? Come on. This is CSI fantasy land. In the real world, prints mean contact.”
He sat back, looking satisfied. “You were there. Maybe not when we found the body, but before. You set the table, Elara.”
I looked at the photo. Really looked at it.
The black powder highlighted the ridges of the fingerprints against the pink plastic. But it also highlighted something else.
The rim of the cup.
It wasn’t smooth. There was a jagged indentation on the edge. A series of small, rough marks.
Teeth marks.
A memory flashed in my brain, bright and searing.
1999. The crawlspace. The boy is handing me the tea set. I’m nervous. I’m chewing on the plastic cup while he tells me the rules of the game.
Don’t let go, Princess. Or the monster gets you.
I had chewed that cup. I had gnawed on the rim until my gums bled.
And I had held it tight. So tight.
“It’s old,” I whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“The print,” I said, looking up at Miller. “It’s old. It’s twenty years old.”
Miller rolled his eyes. “Fingerprints don’t last twenty years, Elara. They’re oils. They evaporate. They degrade.”
“Not if they’re kept in the dark,” I said, my voice gaining strength. “Not if they’re kept in a climate-controlled environment. Like a wall cavity. Or a sealed container.”
“You’re reaching.”
“Look at the rim!” I pointed at the photo. “Those are bite marks. Child’s bite marks. That cup isn’t from the General Store. It’s mine. It’s from my toy chest. The one I told you was raided.”
I stared at Miller, desperate to make him see.
“He kept it,” I said. “Elias. He kept the cup I drank from. He kept it for twenty years, protected, untouched. And then he glued it to Ms. Albright’s hand.”
“So now the imaginary friend is an evidence tech?” Miller sneered. “He preserved your prints for two decades just to frame you today?”
“Yes! Because that’s how obsession works! He didn’t wash it because I touched it!”
The door to the interrogation room banged open.
Julian stood there. He looked furious. His face was flushed, and his tie was loosened as if he had been fighting for air.
“That’s enough, Miller,” he barked.
“Get out, Thorne,” Miller snapped, not looking away from me. “You’re conflicted. You’re off this interrogation.”
“I said that’s enough,” Julian stepped into the room, placing himself between me and the Sheriff. “You have a match? Great. But you don’t have a timeline. You can’t prove when those prints were placed.”
“She just admitted it’s her cup!” Miller shouted, standing up. “She admitted possession!”
“She admitted she owned it as a child,” Julian countered, his voice icy. “That creates reasonable doubt. If that cup has been in her house, accessible to an intruder, then the prints are circumstantial.”
“It’s on the victim’s hand, Julian!”
“And unless you have a print of Elara holding the glue bottle, you can’t prove she put it there.” Julian turned to me. “Don’t say another word, Elara. Not one.”
He looked back at Miller. “You can hold her for twenty-four hours on suspicion. But if you book her now, with this flimsy narrative, any decent lawyer will shred this case before it hits the DA’s desk. And then the real killer—the one watching us right now—walks free.”
Miller stared at Julian. The air between them crackled with a lifetime of small-town politics and buried resentments. Miller hated the Thornes. He hated their money, their influence, and he hated that Julian was a better cop than he would ever be.
“You’re making a mistake, Thorne,” Miller spat. “She’s playing you. Just like she did in high school.”
“If I’m wrong, I’ll turn in my badge,” Julian said. “But right now, she’s a person of interest. Not a perpetrator. Let her go.”
Miller’s face turned a shade of purple I hadn’t thought possible. He looked from Julian to me, his eyes narrowing.
“Fine,” he grunted. “Twenty-four hours. But she surrenders her passport. And she doesn’t leave the county lines. If I see her car on the interstate, I’m putting out an APB.”
He snatched the photo off the table and stormed out, slamming the door so hard the glass rattled.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Julian turned to me. He didn’t look relieved. He looked terrified.
“You have to stop,” he whispered.
“I can’t,” I said. I looked at the empty space on the table where the photo had been. “He kept it, Julian. He kept my cup.”
“I know.”
“Do you understand what that means? He has a collection. A shrine. If he has the cup… what else does he have?”
Julian leaned down, his hands gripping the back of the chair Miller had vacated. “The lab is running a carbon date on the plastic degradation. If they find out that cup is twenty years old, it proves your story about the prints being ancient is… plausible. But until then, you are suspect number one.”
“I need to go back to the house,” I said.
“Are you insane? Miller just let you walk.”
“The crawlspace,” I said, my voice low. “I didn’t finish searching it. I found the wrapper. I found the hole. But I ran before I could check the rest of the tunnel.”
“Elara—”
“He lived there, Julian. For years. If he kept the cup… if he kept the Walkman… then the rest of his collection is in that wall. The proof that he’s Elias. The proof that he’s real.”
I stood up, my legs shaking but holding.
“If I find something that proves Elias Thorne is alive,” I said, meeting his eyes, “will you arrest him? Or will you let him go because he’s your brother?”
Julian flinched.
“I’m a cop, Elara.”
“You were a brother first.”
He looked away, toward the mirror where his own reflection stared back, distorted and gray.
“If you go back to that house,” he said, his voice hollow, “you’re on your own. I can’t protect you there. Miller has pulled my detail. He wants you to slip up.”
“I won’t slip,” I said. “I’m going to climb.”
I walked to the door. My hand hovered over the handle.
“Julian?”
“Yeah?”
“The cup,” I said softly. “It was pink. It was my favorite. I used to pretend it was magic. That if I drank from it, I couldn’t be hurt.”
I looked back at him.
“He didn’t glue it to Ms. Albright to mock me. He glued it to her to protect her. In his twisted mind… he was giving her a shield.”
Julian didn’t answer. He just stared at the steel table, seeing ghosts I couldn’t name.
I opened the door and walked out into the bullpen. The eyes of every cop in the room followed me. They saw a killer.
But I knew the truth. I wasn’t the killer.
I was the muse. And the muse was done posing.