RESEARCH ( barry berkman.. ) ✔

o13. thanks, officer mark..

"Miss Grayson, why was your blood found at the murder scene of one of the most sought after gangs in LA?"

The isolation built in the thick walls of a police station was the apogee of just how far they could go to make this place comfortable, while keeping it plainly annoying to the minds ought to think under stress between its boundaries. Frankly, Adelaide could feel the cold nip at her skin more like a cruel reminder that she was in trouble, rather than a relief she got away from people who'd rather kill her than interrogate her. 

"I invoke my Miranda right to remain silent and get a phone call," Adelaide repeated the words she has previously voiced before, right after she was taken into custody by the police, arrested off the street and read her rights in this interrogation room. Her wrists were handcuffed to the table and the feeling of incarceration was dawning on her as a nausea of confusion. 

The Officer assigned to the Burmese turning up dead in broad daylight case, John to his friends and Mark to the formal meetings, has been onto Adelaide for barely a day, since the DNA sample results were slow to come up. It was a boring case in his opinion, but it was the only one he had and he had to make the best of it despite the un-concerning violence involved. He turned off the recording, but did not get up.

With a sigh, he leant his elbows forward on the table, "You are not a suspect, Adelaide. Can I call you that?" John paused, but continued without much of a change whatsoever in his blank tone, "Knowing your past involvements, I am certain you are but a victim in this whole thing and it is towards your best interest to cooperate with me now and just tell me who killed those people while you made your escape."

Adelaide kept her silence, studying her hands, the handcuffs on them, biting ever so lightly her tongue trying to not clench her jaw and clink her teeth too harshly, while her patience was running thin and the restraints were bringing out a person she did not like.

"At least help me understand why they kidnapped you. Were they connected to this man?" John opened the second file he brought with him, a much older one he had to wait to receive from a different state. He pushed one picture under Adelaide's outstretched arm and forced into her view.

Adelaide had an immediate reaction of yanking herself back and closing her eyes. Her gaze opened on the door and she broke the promised silence, with pitiful desperation, "Don't show me that!"

"That's the man you ripped an eye from, the kidnapper. He definitely deserved it, as much as the death sentence he got one year later, but it's still fucked up what you did as a child. Is he involved with the Burmese? Do you think-?"

"Why the fuck did you show me that picture?" Adelaide interrupted him with a loud, piercing cry of extreme pain and especially anger. She kept shutting her eyes closed in grimaces, but the picture was once more imprinted onto her mind. That face... the face she forgot, was the key to memories Adelaide did not need resurface. Not then. Not ever.

John opened Pandora's Box and he pouted his lips in a thin line, disappointed, either way.

He took the photo, closed the file, then sat up with them. "Miss Grayson, you will be held for the next 12 hours. Try to register your gun next time you get one, even if you have a permit." Adelaide did not register the reasoning behind why she ended up in their empty cell, but getting her handcuffs removed released some of the numbness in her body, lost in fighting back the memories.

She sat down for a while, on the bench next to the solid, cold wall. That position implied her actually staring at her palms and each blink reminded her of how small her hands used to be, how filled with thick blood and other tissue she should have never seen they were.