4338.220 · August 8, 2018 AD
Thirty Seconds of Nothing
Half past eleven. Forest mud still on his boots. Someone else's blood dried into his shirt beneath a jacket he hasn't taken off. Stout sits down across from Gladys Cramer in Interview Room Three and asks her everything the investigation needs answered. She gives him the same monosyllable for every question — automatic, reflexive, barely functional. Then he reaches the one question where the monosyllable doesn't come back, and the silence that replaces it is a different shape entirely.
Interview Room Three. Recording commenced 23:32. Gladys in a custody tracksuit, scratches on her neck from the forest, plasters on her hand from the fall, a paper cup of water she hasn't touched. The tremor in her fingers is only visible in the surface of the water. She declined legal representation.
Stout starts with Karl. Not Sarah — and the fractional shift in Gladys's face tells him she'd been bracing for the other name. Traffic stop, Berriedale property, Collinsvale pursuit, Myrtle Forest, Jeffries Manor, Karl's disappearance. Each question receives its monosyllable — yes, no, no — fragments delivered from a woman operating at such reduced capacity the answers are barely functional. Luke Smith. Jamie Greyson. The same single syllable, arriving before the questions finish forming.
Then the last question. Do you know where Karl Jenkins is? Thirty seconds of fluorescent hum and trembling water. Every other question received its automatic no. This one receives nothing. And nothing is not the same as no.
Interview suspended 00:12. Stout walks into the corridor. Sienna is waiting against the opposite wall with her own folder — thicker, tagged, belonging to a different investigation. She reads his face and doesn't ask. Stout sits in the observation room in the dark and watches through glass as Sienna begins asking about Cody Jennings, and the woman who gave him nothing begins giving nothing to someone else.
