The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation by M. R. Sellars Page A

the metal chair then
rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to
jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two
fingers on my right hand, grasped them with my left, and held
tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the
pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really
understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t
like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was
grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small
amount of relief from the biting restraints.
    I glanced around at the blue-green walls in
search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this
chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed
at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By
that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply
didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my
shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but
another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this
futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was
bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see,
other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the
room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite
side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.
    Settling back in, I hung my head and spent
some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with
more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even
want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your
brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set
about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own
accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.
    As I sat staring at what I had decided was
most likely the fossilized remains of a coffee spill, I could hear
one of the ballasts on the fluorescent light fixture above me
humming toward extinction. It wasn’t terribly loud just yet, but I
suspected it would be in the not too distant future. Hopefully, I
would be out of here by then and wouldn’t be around to hear it when
it finally died. Of course, given my current predicament, there
were probably worse places I could be.
    The officer who had brought me here
referred to the building as The
Bureau . I hadn’t seen much of it, but judging from
what I had glimpsed, I assumed this was where the detectives were
based as opposed to the uniformed officers. That wasn’t much of a
surprise either. Given that I had cajoled my way into a sealed
crime scene, it stood to reason that I had raised more than a few
eyebrows in all the wrong places. I’m sure I had probably managed
to make myself a suspect of some sort.
    My sleep-deprived brain mulled that over for
a moment before forcing me to let out an involuntary harrumph. So
far, Felicity had been accused of the murders, new evidence pointed
to the real killer being a half-sister she never knew she had, and
now I was up to my neck in the wrong side of the investigation. I
suppose there was nothing quite like keeping it all in the
family.
    I had just set my sights on identifying a
different stain a foot or so over from the first when the relative
silence of the interview room was broken by the sound of the door
swinging open. I looked up in the direction of the noise and saw a
disheveled looking man enter then push the door closed behind him.
He appeared to be somewhere around my own age, maybe a few years
older, and from the looks of him, I would have guessed he was
running on nearly the same amount of sleep as me.
    He didn’t say anything initially. Instead he
simply took the few steps over to the metal table that was
positioned in front of me and stood there silently reading
something in a manila folder. After several languid moments, he
shut the folder and tossed it onto the surface of the table.
    “Get up and face the back wall,”