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Aaron Blanding made eye contact with both of us in turn and nodded. Six feet tall or close, he was slope-shouldered, milky pale, lightly zitted, had his father’s soft, bulky build.
Waxy blond hair long on top awned a tightly clipped side fade that jugged his ears. Huge dark-blue eyes and moist lips that failed to completely cover his incisors suggested a newborn calf. A bile-green polo shirt bore a single food stain above the navel; something tomato-based. Brown cargo pants sagged over graying white Vans. Give him a few decades and he might be a master of Milo-chic.
Milo said, “Hey, Aaron. Do your folks know you’re here?”
“Of course not.” The boy’s metallic-edged voice began at alto, dropped to baritone, then cracked and ended up as something you couldn’t characterize.
“Why of course?”
“They’d try to stop me so why would I tell them? Don’t worry, Lieutenant Sturgis. I checked and you’re allowed to talk to me without their consent because I’m here of my own volition.”
Milo suppressed a smile. “You got yourself a legal opinion?”
“Wikipedia,” said Aaron Blanding. “I find it for the most part accurate.”
Milo unlocked the office door and swung it wide. “As you can see, there’s no room for three of us in here, so how about we talk in one of the interview rooms.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “One of those dark places where you interrogate suspects?”
“Interview and interrogate,” said Milo.
“What’s the difference?”
“How we feel about the person we’re talking to. And FYI, Aaron, no one uses dark rooms. That’s movie bullsh— movie fantasy for visual drama.”
“Oh.” Grave expression, as if listening to a weighty lecture.
Milo said, “So you’re okay with that?”
“Sure. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
“Then c’mon. Thanks, Detective Bogomil.”
Alicia saluted and hurried off toward the stairs.
The three of us took the same route, Aaron Blanding walking between Milo and me, bright-eyed and looking around like a spectator in an exotic zoo. Milo unlocked the second door we came to, switched on the lights, and began rearranging the layout from table in the corner meant to isolate and intimidate to three chairs arranged in an open triangle that saidWe’re all friends.
“Sit wherever you like, Aaron. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thanks, Lieutenant Sturgis.” Blue eyes studied fluorescent ceiling panels. “I see what you mean about light. Does it help?”
“Help with what?”
“Getting perpetrators to crack.”
“Hmm,” said Milo. “I guess if they come in already tired it might nudge them a little.”
“So you didn’t plan it that way.”
“Personally? No. This is basically government one oh one.”
Studious nod. “I should’ve known better. About the dark rooms. You’re right, in the movies it’s always dark with a spotlight shining down, but on the true-crime shows it’s like this…one thing I’venoticed is that guilty people often try to fall asleep before they’re questioned. Why’s that?”
Milo looked at me.
I said, “They’re putting themselves in another place to avoid stress.”
“A dissociative reaction,” said Aaron. “That’s a psychological term.”
