One for the Team

34 | after

Detective Solomon has already chain-smoked his way through an entire pack of cigarettes without the clock having struck midday, and so he can only imagine what else he'll accomplish that day.

He figures closing the Brightly kid's case would be too good to be true, but he can at least try. Maybe figure out who did it, as a first step. He thinks that might be just good enough.

He sits behind his desk, a mug of coffee in his hand, a bagel gone bad in a paper bag by the computer screen, and a pile of files he has gone through more times than he wishes he had.

His eyes are locked on the screen, where two tapes line up in a file called main suspects interrogation. He'll get the third one later today, but for now, this is all he has. Naturally, they're named after each one of the suspects. He clicks on the one named Milo Wilds, and the video starts playing.

Of course, the detective didn't know Milo had smoked a blunt the size of an overweight kid's middle finger previous to the interrogation he had called him in for after they found the body, and of course, he would never know, but it didn't make it any less true.

Milo showed up in a vulgar t-shirt, which read get off my dick in the very back, which his lawyer, a highly qualified and highly paid for, courtesy of the big-time writer that was Milo's father, ordered him to take off before going in the interrogation room. Of course, Milo had nothing underneath and so the t-shirt had to stay on.

In the tape on Detective Solomon's computer screen, Milo sits down like sitting down for a class, uninterested and oblivious. His lawyer is the very opposite, focused, and sharp.

Detective Solomon doesn't need to hear himself speak, he knows exactly what he said to Milo that day, but he listens to the full tape all the same. Hearing what he knows and what he doesn't about this god-awful case always helps him connect the dots.

"I'm sure you know why I called you here today," he says in the tape.

Milo shrugs, "Not really. I told you everything I know already."

"Right, let me try something else then," the detective says, opening a file in front of him. Milo didn't want to look, but in the tape he does.

In the past few weeks, Milo has managed to shove what happened that night into the very back of his head, where he puts everything that's unthinkable. Like when he was twelve, and his dad stabbed his own leg with a kitchen knife right in front of him. Or when he was fourteen, and he dropped a pot of boiling water on his feet trying to cook pasta because his father wouldn't come out of his office, and he was hungry.

In the tape, his eyes wander to the file in front of the detective and find a picture of Levi's dead body on top of an autopsy table. He looks away. The detective notices.

"I'll tell you what I know. How about that?" he says.

"Sure," Milo shrugs.

"According to the autopsy, Levi Brightly died three hours after the party reportedly ended, due to severe head trauma and blood loss. According to our medical examiner, Levi could have either died right away or hours after the incident. There's no way of being sure since the body had been decomposing for days in those woods. We also have a CCTV image of his truck on the highway out of town around two hours after the party. Now, this can mean two different things."

Milo stops listening. In the tape, he looks calm, slowed down even, not all there. In his mind, thoughts run past so fast he can barely catch up to them. In his mind, what the detective just said means one thing and one thing only.

The trophy didn't kill Levi Brightly. They did.

But it doesn't stop there, with that one piece of information. The thoughts keep coming. He hears his father, back from his book tour, sitting behind his desk in his dimly lit office, his voice coming through the open door as he walks past in the hallway.