(slowly, like a dream, or not)
The ocean defies language.
A little dog becomes a piece of a castle wall as a tree in a park becomes thick arms around a woman, who turns into a hair style noticed at a funeral. See a steering wheel remembered from a childhood trip and it becomes a little dog smiling and begging before it barks off into a mouse and then drifts into a cloud. The shapes of the foam on the Atlantic are as endless as its roar.
Every shape and every sound mix and merge together, making pictures of all that has lived or will live. Commandment and memory, future and past, conscious and dream, the surface of the sea is an eternal movie of white noise and foamy shapes. Created forever by the deep unseen and the wind only felt, this is the pulse of the Earth, a view of life's creation.
The Atlantic scours the land and steals the air, then carries its booty to the little places, by the cracks in the edge of the continents. There in these shallows, the stolen things are prepared and set to rest, amidst the dying but restless energy of calming water's innocent violence. The first cells formed here once, when the sun was smaller, an eon ago. Today the crabs and the birds flourish, paying homage with their lives to the beating of the Earth. "I am life", the sea says, "and am so by my living.".
One could measure the ocean and calculate its depth, perhaps drop long ropes in deep places, or blast it with powerful waves of sound. That would get some numbers. Then, a skilled mind might arrange these numbers into an image of the ever changing shape of the bottom of the deep, saying, if it were drained away, this is the ocean. Or one might cast a net to raise things up, or send a submarine down below, saying, here is a dead thing from the sea, in my net, or in my claw, and that is the ocean. Between a pile of dead things and a fantasy of the earth ripped of its sea, one could perhaps claim to know the ocean, but then knowledge isn't always about those things, is it? Measuring is merely a kind of counting, and counting is a kind of a breaking of things. There is a difference between utility and understanding. There is a difference between trivia and truth and the best truth is sometimes a mystery.
And while we rip dead sea things from nets and claws and arrange our numbers to imagine the ocean drained, the sea flashes its secrets, by not telling them at all. It only hints at the void of deep by the sounds of its waves and the pictures that float upon them. The ocean lives, and says so, and there is not much more one could know about the ocean than what it says.
Now listen...
Ms. Winston, the DA, stands on the beach. She watches the waves and hears the ocean's argument for a moment in the midst of a peculiar case. Although she has never put to sea, it could still be honestly said that hers is not an admiration of it, but a kinship.
There is a case, yet another mystery, a family slain, children and a pregnant mother among them, partially cooked, devoured, left as if cat's prey with unpalatable bits and pieces by the water. It is not so dramatic of work as the radio would make them out to be, but it can be gruesome. Policeman and detectives report to her as they search for clues. A detective approaches her.
"We can get this one, Ms. Winston", he asks, adding, "You haven't done detective work since you were sworn in."
"It's an election year.", Ms. Winston flatly notes, "and the people demand that I be out fighting crime. Look at the headlines complaining..."
"Is that why we're keeping the children in this one under wraps?"
"No", she says, "its so we have some details in case the killer contacts us, or in particular, me."
Ms. Winston leaves her sentence midstream and scans the scene. She runs her hand through her hair for a moment as the late afternoon sun admires her face with its golden hue and decorates her body with its warm spots and shadows.
A reporter notices from beyond the stripe, and pauses to enjoy a look. He is perhaps a bit too long, at least to interest Ms. Winston, anyway. She glances back at him, makes then breaks eye contact, and he turns himself slightly away, as if to refocus on his notepad. She smiles and laughs, yelling over the conversation of the waves, "Hey, it happens all the time!"
The reporter shrugs his shoulders and smiles gratefully back. He turns and tries to find his way to officers moving through the police tape.
The detective nods and smiles. "Fair enough.", he concedes and asks, "What's your take on this then?"
"I would have someone at that breakwater. Have a look in the rocks and the sand by it, where the water is, that's where everything gets mixed."
The detective adds.. "I'll buy that." Then he turns to his men and yells, "HEY! Ross, take Pete over to the breakwater and see what you can make of it."
"Hey", yells an officer moments later. Ms. Winston runs over. "There's a foot in the sand, here..." he says.
Ms. Winston is digging in the sand. Her hair sometimes comes down falls around her face. She would push it back but she kinda likes the way it shields her face from the hot beach sun. They are digging in the sand to get the clues out, and to find the rest.
Ms. Winston is digging in the sand. "We have to find clues", she says. She has a little tiny shovel, the size of a teaspoon, with which she removes from the site a tiny bit of sand at a time. Still it pours, and it's a miracle, with every tiny grain of sand a hard little rock, but the lot them feels soft. She pours a handful, smiling at the contradiction of rocks that pour.
Ms. Winston wonders: A teenager's musing, she says to herself - Is water just sand but with smaller grains? "Atoms Ms. Winston!", her physics professor would say, "and you are here to learn the secrets of them!" Are the sea and the beach so different? Are the biggest boulders but grains of sand to giants? She pours the sand and the pours the ocean water and she imagines herself a giant, pouring boulders on the beach as if they were grains, then Gunter still, pouring mountains and then bigger still, planets and the stars they whirl about.
Is the universe solid, or does it pour? "I am the Alpha and Omega", that is what God said he will say about the Universe, as he prepares to destroy it.
Little Lauren Winston is hunched over, legs crossed, digging in the sand. This is Ms. Winston in time behind, enjoying a nice day at the beach with her father, and her mother, and her sister. The sisters dig in the sand, and Little Lauren stops sometimes to listen to the soft splashes and smell the sweet Pacific. She is digging a trench from the ocean to a castle she is making, and is fascinated by the mixing of the water and the sand as the incoming tide moves in shifting whites and luminous greens up through the channel, and to the end of it. There she digs farther, working her channel and building her castle with her sister and their plastic purple shovel and pail.
"We must find the clues.", she says.
"Look at our little detectives", says her Dad from his beach chair.
"Beautiful, the both of you", says her Mother to her children. Dad holds Mother's hand for a moment, and then she returns to her book. Dad returns to watching the children and the waves along with a beer.
"Look what I found in the pail", says the sister as she hands Lauren something icky. "Is it a spider?"
"No, its a little crab.", Lauren says, "it looks like a baby horseshoe crab. They have blue blood that we can use in the lab to determine the toxicity of various agents. It's expensive though."
"It's walking backwards, should we help it."
"No some baby horseshoe crabs just walk backwards, its OK."
"Look what else I found in the pail"
"It's a pistol", Lauren says, "Colt 45 1911 semi-automatic", describing flatly as she chambers a round. "It has a muzzle velocity of 830 ft/sec and a 7 round magazine. It's a good design."
And Ms. Lauren Winston takes the pistol into her hand, and holds it, and shoots her mother in the head. Mother's corpse thuds into the sand.
"You should run Lauren", says her sister, "before Dad finds out."
And then Lauren is running on the beach.
The shadows of things and the placement of the water, the color of the sand and the yellow of things that should be white, are all the chimes of nature's clock as it chimes a different time. Lauren runs among parasols and blankets and grown ups and kids and the occasional dog, past more than a few lifeguard towers. This is a different beach now, and she sees families playing with a hard ball flying, while a light kite is broken, a blue cooler with a white top and a white cooler with a blue top. She sees a bent older man with a straight younger daughter, giving him the news while an orange radio with a bent antenna, talks a lot of little.
Is that a baseball game that's on, or are they just talking about one?
A dog pants on a blanket as a man pets her and gives her some ice out of his soda. Some construction worker's families play with a sand castle while their children stand and talk. Two lifeguards, a man and a woman, glance at each other awkwardly, and walk away from each other quickly. Do they know each others regrets, Lauren wonders? And one man yells at his radio while another gazes at a woman next to him in silence.
"Silly people!" Lauren thinks, but of all of these people there are none for her to meet. Of all of these places there are none where Lauren may go.
"They are not my family" she thinks, noting how she misses her own. But, then she remembers that she shot her mother. "I thought she died of cancer", she thinks, but remembers the bullet and the shot, and feels that Daddy will be upset. Certainly she cannot go back! She is a grain alone, in a sand of people, pouring with them, and very afraid. She is thirsty, and then little Ms. Lauren Winston looks down and sees she still has the pistol in her hand.
"At least I have six bullets left.", she thinks.
The Altoona Works, or Juniata Shops, is its own body of American industry. If located on a map centered upon the titanic furnaces of Pittsburgh steel making Juniata would be to the right, set amidst the vast coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. The Juniata Shops is where the Pennsylvania Railroad creates new locomotives and services old ones. Hundreds of the K4s and M1s superheated steam locomotives have been manufactured there and now the works churn out a steady stream of the powerful new R1 turbine units.
Juniata's business of locomotive construction employs thousands of people, and there is a mixing here too by them, and among them. Like at the ocean's edge, but of metal and sinewy exertion and mind and fire's flickering caress. But no man perceives himself as afforded the ocean's ample eons to be so random as the sea. Lesser for it, perhaps, the facility is a reflection of his need for haste and demand for efficiency.
It thus, that the brilliant mind of humanity is firmly applied to the problem of modern, efficient transport:
The Juniata shops are laid out in clean lines, along a thick network of rails, beating purposefully and steadily according to every checked design and plan and vision of its masters. It is an animal whose purpose is to create trains. The shops are its organs, the people, its nerves, the rails and machines, its limbs. And in each of these places, something is mixed, little waves cresting to form a larger one smashed against a mountain to splash locomotives out.
The brains of the place are centered in its engineering places, where locomotives are drawn to the most exacting of detail describing the shape and purpose and placement of every part. Men argue and discuss with feigned politeness the various merits of differing designs. Should the wheels be larger? Smaller? How many turns of coiled metal will the boiler need? Should the engine have four or three driving wheels per side? Should older iron be used or should the potentially stronger but less proven new steels be used? These arguments, thoughts, and discussions and the final concord and decisions are translated into drawings by engineers and draftsmen alike, for handing off to managers and foremen of the yard. They, in turn, have at their command so many other shops laid out for their purposes.
There is more than one smith shop, where metal is melted and mixed and poured and beaten and twisted into the rough forms of parts. The fires inside that place may be seen through its vast grid of windows glowing from far away and the smoke settles down upon the yard like a thick dusty coat of choking brilliant black. Farther along, there are machine shops that mill and grind, with hands human and mechanical, half formed shapes into the pistons and boiler tubes and above all the Parson's style turbine blades needed for the modern locomotive. There are shops to store those parts with exact tracking, inventory that they may be fetched as needed. And there are counters and trackers who record all of this on paper, and there is a building to house that paper, and paper and men and women to track that paper too.
The wonder of wonders is a shop like a cavern, which houses many locomotives in varying states of assembly under a steel girder roof, with a massive crane across. It is madness and genius, to see 175 ton locomotives hauled skyward with the clank of chains and hiss of the crane, and almost beyond comprehension to imagine that something the size of a small hill could move so silently under its own power, and yet be so humble as to be measured, let alone weighed.
A heart beats alive to these works, and that is the power plant. It says I am alive, but its breath is a sort of hell made by the very Christians that condemn it, dismal of fire and of steam. In those red and burning smoking places of the Power Plant, engines fueled by the mix of fire and water pump a steady nourishment of pressure and electricity to drive the tools and devices that the thousands of men of the yard use for their work.
We turn then to the paint shop. Locomotives are painted in PRR colors, to earn the trust of passengers by due reminder of the consistency and safety with which these machines are fabricated. And, there is a place too where the locomotives are photographed, and inspected, and numbered, as if named.
Finally, there is track too, along which the engines are dispatched to serve the growing nation all along the Pennsylvania Railroad, as new raw materials are brought in, to make more.
It is early on a Tuesday morning when Ms. Winston receives a sort of invitation on her RadioType. It is running low on pressure when she extracted the tiny machine from her pocket to check the buzz. She pushes a lever on the side of the brass and steel unit and there is a faint hiss. Tiny wheels clack and write these words on a sort of glass metal screen.
"I LOVE THE SEA YOU KNOW, SO NICE TO WASH WITH."
Ms. Winston pauses, wonders if this is the killer or a mere impersonator. She hopes the publicity about the case will work.
"I AM VERY GOOD WITH HUMAN CHILDREN, ESPECIALLY THE ONES IN MOMMY", the text continues.
An ocean wave smashes up against a rocky breakwater. Things mix, but below the whirling surface. There is only flotsam and foam on top, as Ms. Winston glances briefly about the office, whispering to herself, "it's him." That there were kids, no one knew. That mommy was pregnant, was a closely held secret. She slides a lever, and from the box emerges a small keyboard unfolds, of wire keys with flat Bakelite tips.
Ms. Winston types: "I LOVE THE OCEAN AND CHILDREN TOO, SHALL WE MEET?".
"COME ENTERTAIN ME, I AM SO HUNGRY FOR YOU.", the killer types.. and then, to Ms. Winston's great surprise, the killer sends an address, an address quickly to match the trace via message to the trace authority. She runs out of the office and immediately hails a taxi.
It is quick matter to reach killer's flat, but she is not fast enough. Ms. Winston bursts into an empty flat. The killer is gone, and there is but the sound of a whirring ceiling fan, and the mechanical noises of the refrigerator, entering its chill cycle. As she conducts a quick but careful search of the premises, she spies a children's shoe by a basket, filled with other children's shoes, laid next to a closet door. Immediately recognizing the shoe as that matching the one discovered at the beach, she pushes it away slightly with her foot, and notices that the basket is filled with shoes each missing the other for the pair. She sighs, and pushes the basket out of the way of the closet door as she aims her pistol at it. With a free hand she gingerly opens the door and out from behind tumble hundreds of children shoes, again, each missing one of the pair.
Ms. Winston lowers her Raygun and gazes at the pile of shoes before her, reflecting for a moment, biting slightly on her lower lip and allowing herself only the smallest tear as the seas roil within her. She extracts the RadioType from her purse and types to the killer:
"OF COURSE THIS CHANGES THE NATURE OF OUR RELATIONSHIP."
Ms. Winston returns the RadioType to her purse and continues through the flat, into the kitchen and to a bedroom, with her Raygun drawn again. She notices an indentation on a blotter on the coffee table, writing, but certainly alien. She extracts a Cellograph from her purse, and pushes a button. There is a clanking of a gear and a small cellophanish sheet emerges from the Cellograph suspended between two steel telescoping rods. A light flashes and she fetches the paper, upon which, the text has been imprinted, but with translation written in blue below the black imprint. It is an address and she pockets this. She pushes a few buttons on the Cellograph and a copy emerges, with some adhesive on the back and an annotation above the copy. She sticks it to the wall.
The RadioType vibrates, and she receives a message from the killer.
"I AM SADDENED THAT YOU DID NOT LIKE MY PRESENT."
Ms. Winston pauses, then writes, "I JUST WISH YOU WERE HERE." She continues her search around the room, and then glances into the trash. She finds a train schedule. The Cellograph reveals where the finger was most likely on the schedule. She types a message to Headquarters, and in minutes, begins receiving key portions of the Killer's phone calls, transcribed for her on her RadioType. Between the Cellograph papers and the phone logs, Ms. Winston is readily able to deduce where the killer is going, and on what train.
The RadioType buzzes to life, and it's Bob. "WHERE ARE YOU?" Ms. Winston is about to reply, but the RadioType clacks another message on the screen.
"I LIKE YOUR PICTURE IN THE PAPER MS. WINSTON."
"I'M GLAD", Ms. Winston replies. "DO YOU HAVE A NAME I CAN CALL YOU."
"I AM SO SHY", the killer replies.
"WRITE A SECRET NAME.", Ms. Winston replies, "A PRETTY NAME THAT IS OUR SECRET."
"CALL ME ABEL"
"BIBLICAL - I APPRECIATE THE HOMAGE TO OUR CULTURE."
"THANK YOU", types the killer. "I ENJOY YOU. YOU ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL."
Ms. Winston continues her search for a moment. She reaches into a drawer and finds a pistol. It is a Colt 1911 Semi-Automatic, with 7 bullets left. Ms. Winston smiles, picks it up with a napkin, and then types. "I WANT YOU SO BAD."
Then, Ms. Winston puts the RadioType away and ignores the rest of the Abel's messages as she hurries to the fastest train there is, the turbine powered Broadway Limited.
Ms. Winston arrives with moments to spare at the Broadway Limited. Normally she would not travel in such luxury but in this case the modern engine is simply the fastest option there is and she needs to win a race.
The Locomotive is nearly silent, with the occasional huff of steam. There is a faint hum and vibration from the turbine and the smell of smoke. Behind, at the door of each of the cars, freshly and uniformly painted, porters in white uniforms guide the passengers. The entire system, from the soaring stonework of the terminal and the stained glass stories of progress that decorate it, to the porters in fresh pressed suits, the engineer and fireman in clean coveralls, the conductor's immaculate manicure and clean shave, to the polish of the rails of the baggage carts pushed to the train, conveys confidence and invitation. "It is such a manly thing, the rails", Ms. Winston smiles, and then allows a porter to help her board, though she does not need it, and tips him, though she has no bags.
Ms. Winston is riding on the train. There is only the slightest clack of the wheels as the train glides turbine powered across the countryside and she leans against the window.
Ms. Winston is riding on the train. She looks around for a second. Where did the porters go? The window is open and she smells the smoke and soot from the old steamer as she peers out and allows the hair to blow around her. She surveys the fields in the country, and cows, and with contempt as she scowls at her father.
"Is this all there is?" she says. "There's nothing here!"
"It's Kansas, or Texas", says her father. "it's where my new work is."
"I had no idea it would be this empty."
"It's more money... the best I can do."
Lauren Winston glances down at her side, and sees the pistol, with 6 bullets left. She gazes down to find herself standing knee deep amidst a pile of shoes that stretches from one end of the car, to another.
"I have to get through these shoes, but they are so heavy", she thinks, and she struggles a moment to open a freight door on the side of the passenger car, and reaches into the tender to extract a coal shovel, with which she starts to shovel shoes out of the door. "I have to get to the engine and get the train to go faster, by getting the shoes off of the train."
She shovels each shoe, and realizes they are made heavier by a foot within each. As she scoops up each shoe, blood leaks out and runs down the edge of the shovel and onto the floor. She struggles to balance the shovel and keep the blood in it, but the shovel keeps tipping, spilling again and again and the floor of the car soon slickens from the blood. It smells of rotted eggs and other rotten things. She fights the urge to cry but can't. Tears ensue as Ms. Winston shovels her way, each shoe making musical notes as if from a child's xylophone, a drum, or a doll, or a mother's voice, to the front door of the car.
Through the door!
"You left mom. You haven't been around...", Ms. Winston says to her father.
"She's mentally ill. Don't you remember when she chopped down the Christmas tree?"
"She's still my mother, Dad... couldn't you at least help pay for her doctors."
"The doctors won't save her." Her father pauses, then glancing out the window, "If you really wanted it though, I'd guess I'd do it for you, but you need to choose college."
"Dad", Lauren Winston protests, but then falls silent. The waves crash and waters roil and Lauren Winston looks out at the flat emptiness and occasional back-broken farmer, turns and notices the threads ripped on her father's pants. She sees the thinning fabric by the knees, the bent frame of his glasses, knobby hands all stitched together by a face worn by the weight of too much work and not enough love. The sea churns, and Lauren Winston pauses not even to say "damn", but to merely shrug it, but for her father, it is nearly enough. He starts to puts his arm around her shoulder for a moment, but then pulls it away, and turns to stare out the window alone. He bites his lower lip for a moment, an ocean in him too.
Through the door!
Ms. Winston crosses into the next car to find a birthday party with empty tables and melted candles and rotted cake and weeping blue mothers and listless gray fathers, each holding a single child's shoe. Ms. Winston can only quickly move to the next car door, humiliated and silent. She does not belong, and she has not helped. She passes her sister, who tends to her mother's IV. They are seated by the window, dressed as clowns, holding half inflated balloons, nearly float-less and almost pale.
"We're sorry we could not entertain you.", they say.
Through the door!
"Ms. Winston!" barks the professor, "When you wake up, could you please kind enough to inform our class what element has a visible emission spectra of 434NM and 486NM"
"It's hydrogen", Ms. Winston replies, "and, sir I believe you forgot the 656NM line, which I find interesting because it is red."
"Indeed", said the professor, "now if only I could interest you in this world!"
"Maybe there is lots of hydrogen in mine", Ms. Winston says, flicking her hair back off of her neck. The class laughs.
"There are no doubt atoms undiscovered in your world, for certain.", says the Professor, adding "but random and unknowable worlds are a useful segue to our next classes topic. We're going to discuss some of the newest ideas in a new branch of physics where probability rules the atom."
The class bell rings and Ms. Winston stands in time with the class, but glances furtively to notice her professor looking at her. She obliges by lithely making her way to the door, and opens it. More than one pair of eyes follow her, and she recalls that she enjoys it.
She thinks of a long kiss with a groundskeeper. What was his name? With his hands it didn't matter!
Through the door!
Ms. Winston is in the cabin of the locomotive. Through the window she can see big clouds and small hills, tall grass and short trees, tired farmers and running horses and a bright sun set against a dark blue sky. Guages flicker and hum, but she is alone with the machine. "I wonder how I got over the tender", she thinks, noting the giant coal and water filled car behind her.
"You need to be fed", Ms. Winston says, flicking a lever. A machine makes a screw sound, a motor's whine, and an auto-feed moves coal into the firebox as water is pumped into the boiler. She notes the guages, and can see the pressure rising slightly, so she levels it off. Ms. Winston seats herself in the engineers seat, and nudges the throttle forward. The engine races down the track and Ms. Winston occasionally blows the whistle and waves at the people she passes.
"I'm driving the train", she thinks, feeling the pulse of the pistons. Riding the iron horse, Ms. Winston feels the wind blow across her face and through her hair. Riding the iron horse, Ms. Winston leans and dreams through the country side racing by. The seas are calm and gently splashing, water just playing wave tagging wave and the flotsam spells nothing. Riding the iron horse, Ms. Lauren Winston pushes the throttle full forward, and as the locomotive surges ahead, she says this to herself:
"This is excellent, just excellent!"
What a joke it is to say that a board game is a metaphor for life. A chess game? What of it! There's no standing on squares. Life is not organized that way. Queen takes pawn? It goes like this, a flash of smokey-like air bubble trails and the whish of a powerful tail, a swoosh where only the strongest of eyes can see the teeth too late. Seized by a grip too strong, kicking and twisting and thrashing in futile protest, then a broken back and dying eyes seeing lastly the futile awkward floating tossed of being gulped down into darkness and digestion.
Many are just eaten alive, just getting eaten alive, and just dying. There is no sense in trying.
In life, they wrestle and push, body on body, moving, hundreds, thousands of them, fish, people and their ideas and their dreams, testing each other and falling into line. This illusion of unison is like a single piece of music, filled with notes testing each other while sharing, pushing, and moving, colors set against each other in a picture or a painting. One color, one note, one thought and one man or woman, is in front, the strongest and the strident. Others follow, hoping to find some bits of whatever the first one finds, pushing, and testing, but not so much. They know their place is behind, and that is the truth of the inside the sea.
Ms. Winston stands at the station in shadows, as the scheduled train for Able pulls to a stop. She hunts among the small line of passenger cars and notices a man looking around frantically. "Johnny!", she screams, and cries, "has anyone seen my son! Help me!" A local officer runs to her, but Ms. Winston continues looking, and she notices a man walking with a string hanging out of his pocket... a string? No, a shoelace.
"Abel!" Ms. Winston yells, emerging from the shadows.
He turns instinctively towards the sound, pretends to not notice Ms. Winston, but Ms. Winston is far too observant for that. She runs towards him. He runs, followed by Ms. Winston. "DA - Weird Tales Unit! You are under arrest!", she yells, running and flashing her badge at other law enforcement.
Abel bounds away from the train to the front of the station, turning down a small hall, but there is no exit, and he is cornered by Ms. Winston. He turns to face her.
"So are you going to try and cuff me now", he says.
"No", says Ms. Winston, as she pulls out Abel's gun.
"You won't do it", Abel says, "you don't have it in you."
The ocean roars. Lauren Winston stands in her graduation cap... "I would like to thank my father, and my mother and sister who made enormous sacrifices but could not be here today..."
"You have no idea what's in me.", Ms. Winston says to Abel, and pulls the trigger, six times. Abel falls to the floor, dead. Ms. Winston puts the gun in his hand, fetches the shoe, and takes out her raygun. "Over here!", she yells.
A few moments later the local sheriff arrives. "He killed himself", Ms. Winston says, "when I cornered him....DA Winston...", flashes her badge and adds, "We'll deal with this, this is our case. He killed that mother's little boy. You'll find his foot somewhere along the tracks. He's killed hundreds...I followed him from the city."
She hands the officer the shoe, who twirls it around in his hand for a moment, examining it.
The sheriff says "I have to tell Betty... the mother. Damn. I'll have my people get this cleaned up... then you can have the body when I get the paperwork."
"Thank you", says Ms. Winston.
The sheriff walks away, then pauses a moment and looks at Ms. Winston. "He shot himself six times?"
"He wasn't human", says Ms. Winston.
The sheriff glances back at the shoe, says "Works for me.", and leaves.
Camera bulbs flash as DA Winston gives a simple statement. "I'll take a few questions now boys", she says.
Q "How many victims did you say there were?"
A "It was in the hundreds .. we found hundreds of victims shoes that are being matched up."
Q "How did he..."
A "He's the kind that can eat fast."
Q "Now Ms. Winston, don't you think he deserved a trial?"
A "Of course he deserved a trial, that's what our justice system is about."
Q "Care to comment on the report that says you cornered him and he shot himself six times?"
A "Well, I promise that if I'm re-elected, as your next DA, I'll work a little bit harder to make sure monsters don't kill themselves!"
(laughter among the press pool)
"Congratulations on getting re-elected", says Detective James, "How about we celebrate with you buying us a scotch?"
"Bob", Ms. Winston laughs, "that wouldn't be a celebration, that would be a wake! Now let's get to the next case, shall we?"