4338.222 · August 10, 2018 AD
Every Door She Opened
Stout has fingerprints in a bedroom that should have been empty, CCTV stills of a silver-haired woman walking through a police station at one in the morning, and a hair caught in a baseboard gap. He has a folder designed to pin someone to a wall. The woman sitting across from him in Interview Room Two has declined a solicitor and doesn't appear to need one. The problem with Beatrix Cramer is that she doesn't give you walls. She gives you doors.
Interview Room Two. Beatrix Cramer voluntary attendance. Fitted jacket, silver hair pulled back, small leather handbag. She's assessed the exits and registered the cameras before Stout reaches reception.
Fingerprints in Karl's bedroom — she offers the Timeless Treasures foreclosure, October 2015, a spare key and boxes of Brody's belongings. Silver hair in the baseboard — she notes she's not the only woman in Tasmania with silver hair, though she'll grant there aren't many in their thirties. Adelaide alibi covering the dates of Karl's disappearance — she stayed with Luke Smith's family, collected their dog from Craigmore Animal Care Centre. Every detail specific, verifiable, and dependent on people Stout can't currently contact. Broken Hill visit to Paul Smith — house closed up, wife and children gone to Queensland. Every name she volunteers is another missing person.
Then the CCTV stills. The badge almost laid on the table — Stout's mouth opens and the sentence dies before it reaches his teeth. And Beatrix sees the hesitation, and four sentences about brooches turning up in coat pockets tell him, on a recorded interview, that she knows what he's carrying and she knows he hasn't told anyone. The ground of the interview shifts beneath him without the tape registering a sound.
Two interviews. Two Cramer sisters. One gave him silence. The other gave him everything. The result was the same.
