Knock! Knock! The door to the interrogation room was pushed open from outside and a young female officer came into the room with a brown file in her hand. The officer peered at Ava before she extended her hand which held the file to the stubborn detective. She continued checking Ava out with these jitters in her eyes. She was scared but couldn't pull away her gaze from Ava's stoic face.
Then a scoffing echoed. The detective attracted everyone's attention in the room. He smiled in irritatingly smug and took an extreme close-up towards Ava.
"I think you get all fuzzy up here," said the detective with his index finger pointed to one side of his temple. He meant to say that Ava was sick mentally, insane and a psychopath.
It turned out that the brown file contained Ava's psychiatrist record. The police dug out every single details about Ava and they found out about Ava's psychiatrist treatment which she attended since she was in middle school. The record stated the Ava's difficulty to feel like most humans were and also the tendency she might go violent if she couldn't control her anger well on top of those hallucination she had.
"Let me ask you again...you got that injury from punching the wall or...when you knocked down the victim?"
"People like you...are monster...you kill for fun...because you're bored of your dull life."
"You definitely killed the victim because of..." He poked at Ava's chest and then continued, "the hatred within you...the victim knew that you're becoming a monster...that's why she cried right?"
The detective tried to manipulate the facts with his twisted theories.
There were no use entertaining this headstrong detective's sickening imagination so Ava decided to keep mum. However the detective interpreted wrongly Ava's unwillingness to answer. He thought that he managed to break into Ava's defensive wall when he belittled Ava's mental illness and would soon get a confession from Ava. He just needed to push Ava into a corner and then triggered Ava's violence. So the detective was getting aggressive.
He bent down to Ava's eye level and creepily provoked her.
"You want hit me right? I successfully expose your true face so you feel threatened. You feel like punching me like what you did to the victim."
"That monster inside you...it must be thirst for more...you want more to get it satisfied...here I give you the chance...punch me and then you'll feel very good."
He then went behind Ava and spoke very close to her ears in a low and raspy voice, "C'mon you won't get another chance. This is the time."
In that dramatically underlit room with one source of lighting from the medium sized fluorescent hanging on the ceiling, the detective took over the devil role to incite the monster inside Ava to come out.
Ava felt an increasing sensation of her throat tightening and distressingly became edgy. Her fingers curled into trembling fists as she swallowed the itching feeling to punch someone. This stupid detective managed to get under her skin. But Ava knew better to not resort to violence so she inhaled a deep breathe, held her breathe for ten seconds with her eyes closed and then exhaled it composedly.
Seeing Ava's reaction to his little taunts, he leveled up his bait.
"Here, I have this" said him as he put down the unloaded gun onto the table next to Ava's curled fists after he silently took out the bullets. At least he wasn't that stupid to play with loaded gun.
"You must be eager to try a new way. Guns are more fun, isn't it?"
"Go on. Nobody will stop you."
Those little evil voices inside her head easily took the bait. They persistently forced Ava to take up the gun.
'C'mon Ava. Let's try this gun. He gives the greenlight. You should take it.'
'Punching wall isn't as fun as the gun. Hurry before he takes away the gun.'
But Ava had very strong self control. She had been dealing with these tiny voices since she was a young kid. If she was that weak, she would have done many heinous crimes following these voices' taunts but she didn't. After her first outburst recently, she was conscious of the danger for losing the control. So she rationalised her urge.
'Shut up' Ava mentally roared at these voices.
While Ava was stuck in that interrogation room, Sophie just got the news. The reporters wrote up sensational articles about the dead body at the Rainbow Cafe and they also got the wind of Ava's ties with the dead victim so they speculated the possible motives for the murder.
Sophie tried to get in touch with Ava but failed. She was very worried so she decided to contact Ryan.
"We're too late. The police have detained Ava. Most probably they will detain her for 24 hours at least." said Ryan.
"Can you do something about it? Ava definitely won't do stupid thing like that." plead Sophie.
"Don't worry. You just stayed at home and I'll give you updates. I'll try to contact my police friends if they know more about this."
Sophie hummed weakly before she cut off the line.
"So the woman last afternoon was the killer?" asked Gabs who was next to Ryan when Sophie called him.
"She's the primary suspect but that doesn't necessarily mean she's the killer, Gabs. I'll need to make few calls." Ryan excused himself and then walked out to the veranda to make the calls. He was busy pressing several numbers to get the latest updates about Ava.
Meanwhile, Gabs searched for the news on his phone. He got anxious too.
"Her hand...that dry blood" Gabs murmured to himself as he was reminded by Ava's appearance last afternoon. There were nothing abnormal except the injuries.
"No. She didn't look like a killer. That lifeless eyes... they're not monsters. She's different." His guts told him.
It was now 3 in the morning but he wasn't sleepy at all. He felt like he also had to do something. Although he had forgotten about her, he couldn't help but to be concerned as well.