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ALMOST TWO HOURS LATER outside the police station.
“I don’t know what I was worried about. That was a breeze. I thought it would be like giving a speech in school, but I just stuck to the facts and kept cool throughout my statement. I think I even impressed Detective Masters, and he looked like a guy that doesn’t impress easily. He kept staring at me like he couldn’t believe what we had gone through. In fact, in the end, I think I overloaded his thought process, and he could only handle yes and no answers,” said Danny.
“I know. I thought we would be in there for hours and it took less than two. Maggie was right, just keep it simple. Detective Bellows seemed impressed by my statement as well. He was hanging onto my every word. At times he seemed almost speechless. At one point, he looked like he couldn’t believe that the two of us could handle a situation so well with absolutely no training.” Kevin raised his hand toward Danny for a high five.
Danny smacked Kevin's hand. “I bet they are used to the more un-educated type of individuals. When they come across learned people such as ourselves, it throws them off their usual interviewing techniques and they have to use a different approach for us scholarly types.”
“Damn straight. Let’s take our scholarly butts off to brunch, I’m hungry,” Kevin said, and trotted toward the parking lot with stacks of pancakes whirling in his head.
Almost two hours later. Reality inside the station
“Christ, these Lexi security guards are star witnesses compared to those two morons. If I have to interview either one of them again, I’m going to eat my gun. I swear to God, there isn’t an assistance program in the world that can stop me from taking those two idiots out first and me afterward if I have to see or hear from them again,” moaned Detective Vincent Masters, an 18 year veteran of the Police Department. Masters appeared ageless. Even though he was 42, he could pass for someone in their thirties. He was a compact man with small and tidy features to match. Given his tiny, mouse-like nose and mouth, one almost expected him to sniff the air in the room before entering. After 18 years of being on the force and eight of those as a detective, he was a dangerous mouse that no one wanted to go against. Today, however, he looked like a beaten down man ready to collect social security.
“I know. I had to cut my interview short, I couldn’t take it anymore. My idiot was making sound effects throughout the whole interview. Kabang and kablooey, like it was a fucking Batman cartoon. Julie is going to kill me when she tries to transcribe this,” moaned Detective Frankie Bellows. He had 15 years in the police department, seven in the detective division. In comparison to Masters, Bellows was tall and skinny with a lean, long-distance runner’s body. He was 40 but looked older due to years of smoking and drinking which he tried to counteract by running. Consequently, he had lines on his round owlish face. His handlebar mustache and small dark eyes only contributed to his owl-like look.
“I know what you mean. My moron...” Masters looked, through his notes, “...Kensington kept falling into some sort of a trance. Julie is going to think the interview is over and then he starts up again, and when he does, it’s a bunch of incoherent garbage. I finally had to ask him to just give yes and no answers. Open-ended questions were either going to kill him or me. At one point I almost sympathized with Verassing trying to kill them.”
“Well at least we can clear them as accomplices. They spent more time hiding than anything else, and those security guys back up their story for the most part,” said Bellows.
“Don’t remind me about them. Mitchell and Roger were just as moronic as the other two. For a while, I thought I was being set up for some sort of joke I kept waiting for someone to enter the room and shout, “You’ve been had!” As soon as I asked those guards about a weapon that either Verassing or they had used, I was immediately sorry. I nearly had to pull the fire alarm to get them to shut up about the type of weapons, the type of ammo the history of the weapons, and C-4. It was like listening to the History Chanel on weaponry given by Elmer Fudd and his equally weird brother. This whole case is surreal. Give me a good old gang shooting any day,” Masters said wistfully as he and Bellows walked down the hall to the detectives’ office.