Silent Boy [ENGLISH]

14.

''I think I've wandered off. I'm sorry," he blinked, trying to focus on what Scarlett was telling him. After a few days of painstaking investigation, he came to her again to discuss what he had learned. He was as tired as a dog - and he couldn't hide it.

"It's okay," she waved casually. "I have no problem repeating. We definitely have to go through all this one more time. "

Thomas laughed not so discreetly. "Excuse me, at what point did you become a police officer? I don't remember such a development. "

"You overslept it," she winked at him and smiled mischievously, then sat down next to him on the couch. She flipped through her notes and compared them to Thomas's.

"You're too active at eight in the morning," he took a sip of strong coffee, which instantly woke his sleeping body. He couldn't get used to spending the whole night in the office and not even having an hour of sleep. He did not protest – he knew it was for the greater good; but the body did not approve. It sought what was his - a sleep.

"I want to know the truth," he could hear a hint of excitement in her voice.

"I want that too, but we can't run into this without thinking."

"Good," she sighed. "So, to summarize. According to the autopsy report, girl was Clarissa Smith, a 22-year-old who was strangled with a rope. "

"Exactly, the same MO."

"Like Sebastian's."

"Yes," to his confirmation of what she herself knew, Scarlett fainted. "Are you not satisfied with the statement?"

"No," she shook her head reluctantly. "None of this makes sense to me."

"Sometimes things just don't make sense, no matter how hard we ask for it."

"Enlightening."

"Very."

She pursed her lips and immersed herself in her thoughts, hiding what she was thinking from Thomas. But it didn't take him much experience to realize she was thinking about Sebastian. She could not conclude why he would successfully kill and hide his traces for so long, and then, all of a sudden, he decided to leave the victims ID cards buried with their corpses. It just didn't make sense. And worst of all, it didn't make sense to Thomas himself.

"Maybe he just wanted us to stop him," Thomas began, bringing Scarlet back to reality. "Maybe he realized that he was doing terrible things and that the only way to stop him was to lock him up somewhere where he would never be able to get out."

"Maybe," she shrugged and, after a moment, asked him a question. "You never told me, how did you arrest him?"

Thomas thought briefly, digging through the drawers of his memory to see if he could find the right file to project before his eyes as if the famous arrest of the sinister Sebastian Carter was happening right now.

"It happened very quickly, in fact. We could not find him because his prints were not in any of the databases. At least we could not find anything new except the match with the print database that Walter Hayes Elementary School has. "

"Only with elementary school? That's horrible, "she said, her eyes burning with disbelief. "How is it possible that he didn't get into a situation where he left his print anywhere else except school's database? Didn't he have any documents? "

Thomas shrugged and pursed his lips, knowing he had no answer to that question. "Obviously not."

''Damn it.''

"After that," Thomas continued. "An expert from our team reconstructed how Sebastian's face would look like a man in his mid-twenties, based on the picture of a boy we got from the school base. After that, we published it in the media, and a few days later, a girl from a store called us because she could have sworn she saw him in the same store buying groceries. Turns out, she was right. "