This was the first night she’d slept on a bed since she had left her house. On that little bench of a bed in her little cell with the little pillow and little blue cup of water. It was early morning, possibly seven, when they opened the door. And the person to pick her up was not her mother nor her father and certainly not her sister, who she had still been ignoring. It was Matt. He was parked in front of the station and sat on the benches. She saw as much when she was being led through the station once more, in reverse. She did not look back on her way out. And she did not wait for him to stand. He looked back and forth, stood and chased after her, both towards the car. They walked some distance in silence through the front courtyard, the sound of a running waterfall somewhere near them but their heads stuck to the pavement as they walked down and a bit off from the precinct. A little away towards the streets, parked next to a bent meter. Homeless still dreary with the nights adventures, dozing and slump against the walls from the parking lots around them. They looked gentle.

Both stepped into the car. Matt opened his mouth.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kat said.

She did not want to argue how that the goose hunt for a photo or two hadn’t just been a complete waste of time. Matt sighed and started the car. They were headed for work. With all the normalcy you would have expected of some such newly rehabilitated girl. She was sleepy and often snoozed during that day, when she was awake she would hear the whispers of her co-workers. Little squibs here and there of her affairs in the cell, how she smelled of the other inmates. Though her room had been (surprisingly) lonely and with no neighbors at all. She had several coffees. Big cups she drank heavy into midday. She spoke little and she worked little.

Nearing the end of her shift she was messaged by the leading editor on the “Cement case” (they still hadn’t decided a proper name). It was from an email titled MEETING, NOW. She walked down the hall rubbing her eyes, other interns walked behind her and bumped her shoulder as they rushed through. When they got to the doors they shuffled into line and waited for the door to open. Inmates, little inmates with small necks and big guts and skin pale and eyes haggard. She fibbed through sheets in a folder at her chest. Notes too. Everyone moved in place and looked at the shadows through the foggy glass. After a few minutes standing in front of the broad dark door, it opened. A sliver. A face through the crack, a bug-eyed woman.

“Come in,” She said.

They burst through, sat. The room was small with a large table at the center. Kat sat in a folded metal chair near a corner-plant. Now she felt nervous. Sat with them all, the projector heated up and buzzing and the slides being moved back and forth in testing. They spoke about the case, the cement killer. The news had broken from a preemptive police statement about a potential body found in a potential tub of now hardened stone. Murder? Perhaps. Though suicide wasn’t ruled out. Slide click. Still developing, individual or group. Slide click. Do not presume that this was anyone. But if it was a killer. Slide click:

WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF ANYONE ELSE FOUND DEAD IN THIS MANNER THAT WOULD PRESUME THE KILLER TO BE A SERIAL KILLER.

- Commissioner E. W. Talon

She stood tall. It’s a murder. She fucking knew it down in her bones but they couldn’t be sure, none of them. Fact or not, it’d be a good story. Strange. To say good to this. To say the death of a young woman was anything more than feed for troughs, the slime of the city distilled to sludge for the pigs. Entertainment. Murder as entertainment. She didn’t feel good about it. But…exciting. She rubbed her eyes and slapped her hands and her leg paced up and down. She stretched her neck, the slides of the projector flickered with a little remote that even in her dreary daze she could see fully. Old photos of the house, old photos from the 70’s, old photos when there used to be a whole community up there on those mountains. Remnants of the gold rush, remnants further still of retirement homes bulldozed (everyone thought) when the city made an effort to preserve the mountains back in the 80’s. So the house was abandoned, half-pre civil war shed and half-post world war bungalow. Nothing but aerial shots from a drone. Tin roof top. Murder, check. Haunted hills, check. But what was the cause? Where was the meat?

“Kat?” The woman at the front asked. Kat blinked. The woman was a Leslie. She was leading the presentation and the articles themselves. People had their laptops out, the Cement Killer, Mason, Mountain Hill Massacre were all in bold and in red and sprawled out on the white board next to her. Yet everyone had their eyes turned to Kat, and the fluorescent images of their screens cut sharp features against all their faces. This is what holy judgment must look like. Odd, clay-shaped faces a dark room looking at her and waiting with shadowed frowns.

“Yeah?” Kat asked.

“You um, did you manage to get anything last night?”

They know. Her palms began to sweat.

“Um, no,”

“Damn, bummer,” She said. “Nice try though,”

Lukewarm smiles across, even some envy from some of them. Something felt light in her stomach. Her shoulders popped up. She even smiled and covered it with her folder. The other interns hated her a little, she could see the way they quickly turned and frowned. And she liked that they hated her.

When everyone was heading out and people made their long march to their last break, Kat was called. By Leslie of all people, who had her back against the wall and tapped the screen of her phone.

“Yeah,” Kat said.

“I heard everything about what happened,” She said.

“Who told you?”

“Why’s it matter? Everyone knows by now,” Leslie said. “Pretty brave,”

“Uh - Thanks,”

“So, so stupid though. You kept quiet right?”

“Y-yeah,” Kat said.

Her palms went sweaty.

“You know when they sent you over here, I was under the impression that you were just some left over. I read your resume, double majored in criminology?”

“Yeah, a few years ago,”

“How’d you end up writing about smart ovens then? New futons? That type of shit,”

“I don’t know,” She said. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I guess I just took the first thing offered,”

“Definitely stupid,” She said. “But I guess it brought you here so it couldn’t have been that bad of an idea,”

Kat looked down.

“Listen, there’s a little piece I want you to write. Some things for social media. Quick snappy things, picture captions, you know. I was thinking maybe you could do that,” Leslie handed her a folder. “I’ve got some notes here if you need the help, get it done by tonight please, and don’t tell anyone you’re doing this. It was supposed to be my job,”

It felt like being handed homework but she loved it. Busybody picture-making-caption-work. But it was something closer to journalism, something realer than what’d she ever done before. And she took the folder and felt invigorated by the binder. The pages something of an electrical shock, so much so that she missed her break reading over her notes. She even began editing stock photos on her phone. It carried on to her car. And even longer into the night, when she parked at a Buck’s Sporting Gear¹ parking lot, eating her plastic wrapped supermarket turkey sandwich. Dry.

And in the hustle of her work, she could ignore other things. Ignore the calls from her mother and sister, now reaching twenty five if the number at the top of her phone was to be trusted. She stopped work only to look for a room to rent. She stopped thinking of her bank account for once. She stopped everything that had to do with old-life blues. For it was time to settle into the slot of existence that at least resembled the shape of the person she wanted to be. She wanted to be alone. Truly. So that night, staring out the window onto the neon sign of the Buck’s, she decided that tomorrow on her day off she would go out and find a place to live.