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* * *
“Last time I saw you, there was a lot more of your insides on the outside.”
That’s Randy’s opening salvo as I walk through the door. I want very much to hit her with the clipboard I’m carrying, but I’m a professional and I manage my impulses.
“Hello, Ms Carrick,” I say, taking a seat on the other side of the table. “Chief tells me you have some information on the whereabouts of a missing NYPD detective.”
Randy smirks at me, her eyes dancing with a secret. The secret to interrogation is finding a pressure point. Usually that is the threat of imprisonment, but Randy is far too comfortable around officers of the law and in the system in general. She knows we don’t really have anything on her.
“I’m going to make the Brooklyn Mothman as legendary as the Point Pleasant sighting,” she says. “I have a story dropping any day now.”
“Here’s the thing, Randy,” I say. “Nobody cares about monsters in Brooklyn. Point Pleasant is a sleepy little rural backwater. They get excited by fast food chains. You’re never going to make a name for yourself trying to panic people around here.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe not. Maybe I have sources who swear that they saw an NYPD detective half naked in the sky, having sex with a monstrous mothman.”
“Alright, so your theory is we’re down a detective because she’s off having sky sex. And that’s the story you think is going to ignite Brooklyn.”
“No,” she says. “I think the picture I have of that event happening is going to ignite Brooklyn.”
“So you’ve got some weird photoshopped porn.” I sigh. “Dammit, Carrot. I thought you might actually have something of use, but all you’ve got is the usual tabloid trash. We might as well let you go.”
“People are going to care,” she says, defensively.
“They’re not going to, though, are they? We both know it. You could risk your life for years getting scoops and making enemies, all for most people to pay more attention to a fifteen-second video where an attractive twenty-two-year-old performs lackluster dance moves demonstrating nothing.”
Randy’s face falls. I’ve hit her where it hurts. Even trashy exploitative journals like hers aren’t immune to the ongoing media collapse. People are tired of news. They want entertainment. For a while that worked in her favor, but now they’re turning away from her brand of trash too.
She recovers bravely. “I still get paid per click.”
“Not on NSFW images, you don’t. Try to run ads on those and it will be the last thing you ever do with that account.”
“You know a lot about online advertising.”
“I know a lot about a lot,” I reply. “But we’re not here to find out what I know. We’re here to find out what you know about the disappearance of Sally Holmes.”
“Sally’s disappeared?” Randy’s face is smug and surprised at the same time.
There’s a banging at the one-way mirror and a second later, Chief Connor barges into the interview room and damn near pulls me out.
“I told you she’d get more out of you than you got out of her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me she didn’t know specifics of who went missing?”
“I did. I said she knows one of our detectives went missing. I didn’t say which one. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?”
Shit. He’s right. It is pretty clear. I’m making stupid mistakes which is really annoying because I do not make stupid mistakes. I make smart mistakes.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re right.”
He softens. He does that with me a lot. Because of the leg. Because he doesn’t want to tear strips off a crippled girl. That’s what I am to him, and to a lot of people. It’s almost worse this way, being pitied in the middle of a deserved dressing down.
“Go work some other angles,” he says. “I will deal with Ms Carrick.”
I nod and slink away as best I can on three legs. Randy Carrot knows something, and I am no closer to finding out anything.
* * *
Idecide to take Obigor for a walk. He still likes to go out and bumble around the nearby park, if only because it indulges his lifelong passion for peeing on literally every upright structure he sets his eyes on.
