Light Me Up

I sat in the interrogation room while Miller questioned Lucas. He’d been such a help in this investigation, so I told him to take the lead. He seemed damn proud, which made me all the more confident I was making good decisions in this department.

We’d gone over the fires. The evidence. The video. He wasn’t talking, but he also didn’t lawyer up. To know we got this guy off the streets was a comfort, but it was dragging on and I was getting pissed.

“So, you’re some renegade environmentalist. Who uses arson to make a point. Seems pretty counterintuitive to me, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, there sure are better ways to make a point.” Miller added.

“Right now we have people looking at your activity in Portland. We have people combing through your online accounts. Anything and everything you’ve done that we could possibly get you for, consider it a promise. You’re going to prison for a damn long time.”

He shrugged and looked away.

I slammed my fist down on the table.

“Tell me why you went after Sara. She wasn’t interested in you, so you wanted to hurt her, is that it?”

He didn’t answer, just turned back and smiled smugly at me. I wanted to punch his teeth out.

“Was it you this whole time? The phone call? You threatened her.”

His smile slipped, just a hair. But he still didn’t say anything.

“You sent her a package to get her attention. You thought you’d scare her as punishment.”

I opened the file I’d brought in with me and pulled out a close-up photo of the tongue. Then I laid it carefully on the table in front of Lucas. He didn’t look down right away. Just kept staring at me with that dumb smirk on his face. But then it happened.

His eyes flicked down, just for a second. His brows knitted together. His mouth dropped open, and he looked again. I watched the realization hit him as he figured out what he was looking at. His facial expressions shifted through a cycle of emotions. He didn’t say a word, but his face said it all.

“What, you’ve never seen a tongue cut from a living person before? It’s pretty gross, huh? Bloodier than you’d maybe expect.”

“What the fuck, man?”

“Ah, now he speaks,” Miller said.

“Why the fuck are you showing me this?”

“You sent it to Sara. You wanted to scare her.” I knew now that he hadn’t, but I needed to make sure, get him to talk about what he had done.

“I never sent her shit. Especially not a tongue. What the hell.”

“I don’t know if it matters much, right?” I asked Miller. He shrugged. “We have you here for this, she was targeted multiple times and then you set her property on fire. Seems like a jury will agree you did it all.”

“Yep, that’s an easy case. Hospital hasn’t had any patients come in missing a tongue, so it’s fair to say we could go for murder charges too.” Miller added.

“All right, no. I didn’t cut anyone’s fucking tongue out and I didn’t send anything to Sara. I’ll talk, okay? I set those fires. And yeah, I was pissed at Sara, but I just wanted to fuck up her garden. I’d heard how much she loved it and it felt like a good ‘fuck you’ to do to her. I didn’t account for the wind—it spread the fire too fast. So whatever. But the other thing?” He pushed the photo back toward me, his face disgusted. “That wasn’t me.”

I wanted to punch him even more now. But his answers were useful. Even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Because as relieved as I was that the arsonist was off the streets, it couldn’t compare to the fear of knowing Sara was still in danger.