Page 35 of So Bleak

Tanya sniffled and said, “But if I talk to you, then what? You’re going to charge me anyway, right?”

Faith pulled up a chair and sat across from Tanya. "If there's one thing I hate almost as much as a serial killer, it's someone who wastes my time. So if you're innocent, I want very much for you to show me that you're innocent so I stop wasting my time with you and go back to finding the lowlife who did this. So this is your chance to convince me. Otherwise, you get a lawyer, and I guarantee you that the lawyer is going to tell you to shut up and not say a word to us, which means months of trials. Which means your name and face plastered on every news channel in the city as the suspect in the violent public poisonings of three prominent food critics. Then it doesn’t matter what you convince me. You have to convince a jury of your peers that you didn’t slip three people poison and get them killed. And I’ll be honest, Tanya. It looks really bad.”

Tanya swallowed and tried to rub her eyes, but the shackles stopped her. “But if I convince you I didn’t murder anyone, you let me go free, right?”

“You don’t get charged with murder. You still resisted arrest. I don’t know what your record looks like, but if it’s relatively clean, that probably means you leave in the morning with a court date. Then the judge either has a bad day and gives you community service or a good day and gives you a night in jail out on time served.”

“Lot better than three life without parole back to back,” Michael opined.

Tanya dropped her head to her chest and sobbed briefly. “Damn it. For fuck’s sake, why me?”

“I’m sure this is hard for you,” Faith said, “but I’m a lot more concerned with Eleanor Crestwood, Harold Grimes and Lila Vance than I am for you right now.”

“I didn’t kill them.” She bit her lip and looked over Faith’s shoulder, then said, more firmly this time. “I want a lawyer. I think… yeah, I’m firm with this. I want a lawyer. I didn’t murder anyone, and I trust that a jury of my peers and the American justice system will see that and acquit me.”

This wasn’t good. Faith wasn’t joking about the lengthy process that would occur if lawyers were involved. She appreciated the right that suspects had to representation, and she understood that right prevented many judicial and procedural overreaches that would otherwise land innocents in jail, but if Tanya wasn’t their killer, then they would be stuck wrestling with motions and arraignments and indictments and casework until the real killer struck again. If Tanya was the killer, then a lawyer was definitely her best option, but Faith wanted her to believe that her best option was to talk now. People could judge if they want, but Faith was advocating for the victims, not the suspects.

So she tried one last time. She leaned forward and met Tanya’s eyes. “I just talked to Lila Vance’s boyfriend. Henri. He’s a sweet guy. He was absolutely head over heels for Lila. Talked about her like she was a fairy tale princess. He wanted nothing in life but to love her. He saw her die, Tanya. He saw her take her last breath. He saw the light fade from her eyes and watched that light fly out of his life forever. The woman he loved died in front of him today. If you know anything about how that happened, you need to do the right thing and tell me. And if you don’t, you need to tell me that too, because somewhere out there is someone who thinks it’s okay to kill girlfriends in front of their boyfriends in the most vicious way possible, and that someone needs to answer for what happened to Lila Vance today.”

She fell silent and held Tanya’s gaze. Tanya’s lip trembled, and after a moment, she sniffled. “Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. She wasn’t supposed to take it right there, okay? I told her to go home and take it.”

Michael sighed and turned around, arms folded. Faith nodded and released a sigh of her own. “What did you give her?”

“Molly.”

Faith blinked. “What?”

“Molly. Ecstasy. It’s MDMA.”

“Yeah, I know what Molly is. I just… Molly?"

Faith's voice was terse. Behind her, she heard Michael's hands slap against his legs after he threw them in the air and let them drop. For a brief moment, she thought she had their killer, only to learn that she was just—

“You’re a drug dealer?”

Tanya shrugged miserably. “Rent’s fucking expensive here, okay? I don’t have a degree, and I don’t have any money but what I make working part-time at the café. It’s not enough to pay the bills. I’m just doing it to make ends meet. I don’t live in Rittenhouse either. I have a crappy room in Camden above someone’s garage. I take the bus to work because I don’t have my own car. I’m not trying to be a baller, I’m just trying to live.”

Faith sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Michael, do you happen to know if MDMA is a sodium channel blocker?”

“No, it’s an empathogen-entactogen.”

“English, please.”

“It affects the release of certain hormones. It doesn’t directly affect the nervous system.”

Faith sighed. “Could it possibly be mixed with a sodium channel blocker?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Who gives you your pills?” Faith demanded.

“I don’t know him,” Tanya said. “Some guy at a pharmaceutical plant in Newark. I meet him there once a month. The stuff’s high quality, though. I test it at home.”

“How do you test it?”

“I have a chemistry set. It’s not that hard to make ecstasy, it’s just hard to make a lot of it. But I take a pill from each batch and test it to make sure it’s not mixed with glass or something.”

“Glass?” Faith asked.

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