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She was barely a woman. A girl with soft brown hair, tangled and long. The ends dusted the small of her back when she turned to look at the camera. Nervous, obviously, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands. They fluttered over her lap, her fingers moving as if playing a piano before she lifted them to the table. They fluttered there as well. Constantly moving. It was the first thing I noticed about her.

“This tape is roughly four hours long. The investigator wasn’t able to get much out of her. I think - well, he thought and I agreed that there’s something off about her.”

Without taking my eyes off the screen, I thumbed the myriad of reports and photographs in the brown file folder Detective Grenshaw handed me several minutes prior. Evidence bags were strewn across the table, a war room staged for the investigation of a party gone horribly wrong. I hadn’t yet reviewed the materials or asked for many details. It was too important to take an unbiased look at my subject first.

“Pretty thing, isn’t she? You don’t see many girls like that in Clayton Heights.”

Grenshaw was your typical television cop. Deep, gritty voice, observant eyes - a man hardened by years spent working murder cases in a small town a half-hour south of Chicago proper. The first feature I noticed about him was a brown suit that looked cheap, something you would find left dusty on a bargain rack in a strip mall thrift store. I wouldn’t have been surprised if sleeping in the damn thing had put the wrinkles in his jacket, but I wouldn’t hold it against him.

Life for homicide detectives wasn’t easy when gun violence was on the rise and more than forty percent of your cases sat unsolved. Clayton Heights. I knew of the neighborhood’s existence only because it was one of those areas you never visited on purpose, and if you ever found yourself there after taking a wrong turn, you never stopped for red lights. Just keep driving. A ticket is better than being carjacked or mugged.

I agreed with his assessment of the woman on the screen. She was far too delicate to be living in such a dangerous place. Her features were small, eyes uncertain. If anything, she screamed Victim. “How do you think she survived living in such a place?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, but if I had to guess based on her toxicology reports-“

Lifting a hand, “No, don’t tell me. I want to watch this first interview blind. It’ll be better for me to put my finger on what you and the other investigator consider as ‘off’ about her.”

His leather belt creaked beneath a gut that had seen far too many late night pizzas, sugar loaded coffees and cellophane wrapped pastries while sitting hunched over a desk. I didn’t envy him for his career choice. Staring at death day in and day out tended to wear on a person’s quality of life.

“Like I said: the tape’s about four hours long. I was there when it was recorded, so it’s no use to me to watch it again. I’ll let you do your thing, and you can get with me in my office before heading to Ms. Day’s house. Sound good?”

Without looking at him, I waved him off, my interest stolen by the girl’s behavior when the investigators finally entered the room. Frightened more than defensive, she tapped the fingers of her right hand over a mark just beneath the inside of her left elbow. A habit more than intentional, that touch. Squinting my eyes, I couldn’t quite make out the mark. Noting it on a yellow pad, I relaxed in my seat, crossed a leg over a knee and clicked the end of my pen.

“Ms. Day,” the investigator started, his suit jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, collar unbuttoned. The time stamp on the tape read two thirty five in the morning. Given the late hour, I wasn’t surprised he appeared casual. “My name is Leonard Drake, and you’ve already met my partner, Timothy Grenshaw. We’d like to ask you a few questions regarding the party where your four friends were killed.”

One blink, long lashes fluttering much like her hands. Her lashes were a dark brown fan over her pale, almost translucent, skin. She had a smudge of red bruising around the orbital of her eye and over her cheekbone. It would turn a darker color as the days marched forward.

One blink, and one blink only, after the verbal reminder that four of her friends were now dead.

It was as if she didn’t understand, either shock or guilt rendering the interview unbelievable. Give me something, Ms. Day. How were all your friends brutalized, and yet you lived to tell the tale?

“What would you like to know?”

My brows lifted with surprise at the sound of her voice, deep and husky, the kind of voice you would expect from a woman working a sex line. But this girl wasn’t a desperate single mother balancing an infant on her hip while telling the caller to give it to her good. No, Rainey Day’s voice was all natural, full lips parting on words spoken with a hint of fear splashed over a toxic mixture of nervousness and concern. I’d expected something higher pitched, more desperate to be noticed.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the questions being asked nor the answers she gave. We would go over the material again when I interviewed her in person, my thoughts unpolluted by the information being pulled from her now.

What stole my attention was her mannerism when faced by two bullheaded officers in a room full of mirrors. Not once did she glance at her own reflection. I noted it. Most people can’t help but look at themselves from time to time. It meant she was comfortable in her skin, unworried about whether a hair was out of place or if makeup was smeared across her cheek. Not that she was wearing makeup.

This interview was conducted after she’d been released from the hospital.

Pausing the tape, I opened the folder on the table and pushed the reports aside to review the scene photographs. They were what you would expect to see when hearing four people were bludgeoned to death. Blood splatter on walls. Pools of it on the floor.

One person was found on the couch, the girl’s face crushed in while her body was mostly left untouched. Another body on the opposite side of the living room was a heavyset male with what my grandmother would have called bruiser shoulders, guessing him to be of old Irish stock. He had to weigh at least seventy pounds more than Ms. Day. The back of his head took the most damage, skull crushed in, brain matter exposed. How would a girl her size have subdued him?

Pushing play on the video, I watched her movement. She had pain on her left side, obvious from the way she winced when leaning in that direction. A bandage covered the forearm of her right arm, another one on her shin. Her bottom lip was swollen from a split on the right hand side, another bruise blooming along her jawline. She didn’t escape injury from what I could see.

Glancing at the police report, I read that she was found unconscious and bound to a bed in a first floor bedroom, bleeding from a gash on the back of her head. That explained the significant matting I noted in her hair.

The last photograph was of two people found in an upstairs bedroom, naked. The male was found with his head crushed in on the bed, the female found slumped against a wall, her face, like the girl downstairs, had been the area that took the most damage.

Interesting. I turned the tape off. What was ‘off’ about the girl being interviewed was a lack of common sense or intelligence. She was slow in her affect; seemingly dim-witted I would guess, but somehow keenly aware of her surroundings.

What I found most fascinating was that she didn’t seem to care about the demise of her friends, but again, that could be explained away as shock from having lived through an attack.

Speaking to her in her own environment was the best approach. She would be more relaxed, would have had more time to digest her recollection of the event.

I gathered the materials together, popped the video from the disc player and walked to Grenshaw’s office to report.

“Well,” he yanked his legs from atop his desk, his wooden chair screeching over old springs. He pulled off wire-rimmed glasses that were too small for his face and tossed them where his legs had been. “What did you think of our girl?”

“Off is an accurate description, but murderer off, I’m not sure.” I was in a hurry to get to her house for our first meeting and chose to lean a shoulder against his doorframe rather than walk in to take a seat. “How would a girl as small as her overpower four people? Especially two men. The one downstairs-“

“Michael Higgins,” he filled me in.

“Michael then, how would she have taken him down without alerting the other people? He must have yelled.”

Nostrils flared, Grenshaw sucked in a deep breath, shaking his head. “I have no fucking clue.” He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, his movements exhausted. “I’m not sure that she had anything to do with it. We’re only interested in excluding her entirely. Finding out exactly what she knows. She gave us nothing in that interview.”

“Which could be a result of shock.”

His brows shot up. “Very well could be. That’s why you’ve been called in to talk with her.”

Nodding, I checked my watch. “I have twenty minutes to get to her house.”

“Keep me updated.”

“Will do.”

Waving as I walked off, I was more than ready to sit down and have a long talk with Ms. Rainey Day, an admittedly beautiful girl who’d not only survived five years in Clayton Heights, but also the scene of a rampage style murder.