This is a Test

Ch. 24 - The f-king end

Cashe paused in thought while Dr. Mason moved to the table to replenish his coffee. Once he returned to the desk, Cashe had coalesced his ideas well enough to feel confident in starting. "Well, of the suspects inside the building and not including any other people creeping through the building's bowels, we have Alan, Dante, Karina, Lia, and Miranda. The first thing that bothered me was that Miranda is a doctor, to where her foremost priority should be the health of a person, yet she did not do anything to see if Roger needed help. I don't know if India has an equivalent to the Hippocratic oath..."

"They operate under similar rules, yes."

"Okay, but I didn't like the fact that she didn't make a move to see if he had a pulse."

"So, that makes her a suspect...?"

"No. In my mind, that does the opposite."

"How?" Mason held up a finger. "Wait." The man's eyes shifted in different directions before he smiled. "I get it. She didn't want to approach the body because she would be afraid she would mess up the crime scene, leaving fingerprints or DNA."

Cashe nodded. "As she said before, she has watched all the crime shows. In my opinion, she was cognizant about the fact that she might leave some of her hair behind or something. Yet, if she was the killer, then even if she knew Roger was dead, as she was the one who made him dead, then her going to the body to check for a pulse would be rational and seen as humane while covering up for anything incriminating she may have left behind on the scene. I feel, if guilty, she would be more inclined to move towards his body, not less. This removes her from my list."

"I can see the logic in that. Anything else?"

"Well, there was one time I did try to figure the crime out was when I asked Karina if Alan had said anything about being the killer. When she said, 'No,' that eliminated another suspect for me."

Mason squinted and shook his head. "Just because he didn't say anything to her at the time, that doesn't mean didn't do it."

"I wasn't talking about him." Cashe sat up straighter. "I waited until Karina was calmer, and asked her slowly so she didn't spontaneously respond. I was asking if the person she killed had said anything about killing Roger. If she had killed Roger and killed another person who she said was trying to assault her, wouldn't saying that if he stated he had killed Roger serve two purposes?"

"I follow." Mason raised a finger again to silence Cashe. "She would be saying she killed a man who just said he had killed someone she knew, which would be a stronger argument than killing a rapist, all the while laying the crime of the initial death at another person's feet. It would cover her not only for the first murder, but strengthen her self-defense argument for the second."

"Exactly. She seemed calm enough to think rationally, so she was the only one I was able to eliminate earlier. I felt confident in this, as my concern was that by removing a person from a suspect list would make me not consider them a threat, but as I knew definitively that she had killed someone, that meant I had to think there were two killers in the facility and be more cautious."

"I see. Anything else?"

Cashe paused in thought. "There was. At one point, Lia had worn one of her shirts inside out."

"We are aware," Mason said, grinning.

"Right." Cashe recalled stating it aloud in her back room. "Originally, I thought she had done this by accident, but, now, I am not sure. I never saw her wear anything else but red shirts with the Chinese flag on it. She implied to me she was almost certain that you all were no longer watching, and right after this moment is when she wore the shirt that way. This might indicate that she was happy to be free of Chinese control, so she was trying to express that by no longer being a walking advertisement." Cashe stopped and leaned back. "When she showed me a map with red all over China and she was quite happy...,"