The woman wore a dazzlingly white jazz hat, with a slender feather tucked slantingly into the band. The brim was pulled low, covering most of her face, revealing only her tightly pursed lips.
“We’ve met before, Ashley Jenkins.”
Her voice was low and husky as her slender fingers tapped lightly on the glossy new lacquered tabletop, one by one.
Across the table sat a loli, sitting blankly in place.
The heavy, sturdy cast-iron chair was comically oversized for her. She perched in the middle, not touching the front or back, all alone.
The loli’s innocent big eyes were wide open, her pupils dilated, as if she were having a panic attack.
The walls seemed to shift, relentlessly compressing the already cramped space, drawing the terrifying white-hatted woman closer and closer…
In one corner of the ceiling hung a surveillance camera. Its lens was a large crystalline mass smeared with eerie red, blood vessels like threadworms frozen in resin, locked in a pose focused on the massive amber pupil of the loli below, writhing and clustering.
At the camera’s tail, besides the mounting bracket, a bundle of neural conduits wrapped in plastic sheeting snaked into the wall.
The camera twitched slightly, turning toward the loli’s small face. Its pupil contracted, zooming in and focusing.
In the monitoring room, police officers in black wool uniforms crowded around a cathode-ray tube television. The silver threads and silver buttons on their collars gleamed.
“Is it necessary to put such a little girl in an interrogation chair? Scare her a bit, and she’ll cry her lungs out. And she’s facing the Tribunal’s Chief, known as the ‘Disorder Witch,’ Letisia.” Someone asked doubtfully.
“Don’t you know who she is? She’s a Jenkins. That family has lived by crime for generations, never producing a single law-abiding soul. Every drop of blood in their veins is tainted with the factors of sin and violence.”
The speaker was a little girl with a neat black bob haircut. Though young, her crisp, ruthless style bore some resemblance to the white-hatted woman.
She wasn’t wearing the silver-and-black uniform of the Union City police but the special windbreaker from the superior Tribunal organization, enveloping her small body and leaving only her head exposed, like a sunny doll.
Murmurs of astonishment rose around her.
“Whoa! A kid from the Jenkins Family!”
“Kid? Little beast!”
“Does a crime gene exist, passed down through generations, dooming them to crime?”
“That’s why she’s here—her existence proves it.”
…
The black-haired girl stared at the screen and spoke briskly:
“My teacher is the captain of the investigation team tasked with supervising and dismantling the Jenkins Family. And this little troublemaker named Ashley is the family’s youngest child.
Half a month ago, my teacher brought her back from the ‘Devil’s Den’ in the Nottingham Lake District—of course, she wasn’t a victim. She was the little mistress of the Devil’s Den, the crime family’s little princess. Don’t let her pitiful appearance fool you; she might be racked up a mountain of blood debts.
Then, she was placed in foster care at the Saint Dormer Community, a semi-open correctional center for juvenile offenders under the city hall’s social welfare department.
Hmph, we thought she’d curb her evil, savage nature, gradually accept reform, and become useful to society. But not even a week later, she was suspected of torturing a child named Onna Williams to death. The autopsy report showed—skull fracture, cerebral hemorrhage, missing teeth, multiple soft tissue contusions all over the body, gastrointestinal bleeding…”
Criminal psychology is a field built on hands-on experience with offenders. The Jenkins Family and Ashley’s case was a rare historical specimen, and as a firsthand witness to the interrogation, this was invaluable experience for Amber Abbey.
She watched intently as Ashley averted her gaze to the window—a stress-relief gesture, indicating the girl was in a state of anxiety.
With the interrogator blocking the path between the door and the suspect, this little troublemaker felt she couldn’t get past the mountain that was her teacher. The window was her only mental escape route, so she looked there—Amber analyzed carefully.
The weather was overcast, the wind howling, thick fog drifting low along the windowpane.
The gray mist framed in the window looked like a tormented soul, writhing and struggling, spreading despair and sorrow from the murky depths…
“You don’t look well. Do you need me to open the window for you?” the white-hatted woman asked softly, offering a thread of kindness.
In this cramped interrogation room, the window was the pressure valve. Opening it released tension and built rapport. Drawing the curtains applied pressure, turning the small space into a sealed cage in an instant.
“Thanks, no need.”
Ashley turned back, her gaze settling on the white-hatted woman—neither evading nor challenging.
Common stress-relief body language included nail-biting, raising arms to expand the chest for easier breathing, scratching the scalp, and so on.
But she remained perfectly still, no extraneous movements. Her mind was rock-solid; the interrogation room’s pressure wasn’t enough to faze her.
It wasn’t bravado. Ashley had endured far worse confinement—the tiniest, most terrifying kind: curled into a ball, wrapped in tough membrane filled with fluid, held by a cold-blooded maniac…
That was ten thousand times more horrifying than this room. Any claustrophobia paled in comparison.
But she had survived.
“We have everything.”
Letisia lifted her head, projecting a sharp gaze from under her hat brim.
Ashley felt a sting on her cheeks, as if her skin were being sliced.
The woman was amplifying her presence—not psychological, but a real ‘force.’
“You left traces everywhere—fingerprints, hair, skin cells… about forty or fifty spots, each crystal clear, all pointing to you. They’re shouting in unison: the killer is you. You murdered Onna Williams.” The woman interlaced her fingers, her tone certain, coming out swinging with ‘you’re definitely guilty.’
“If I did it, I wouldn’t leave so much evidence. That’d be stupid, like a clumsy maid.” Ashley pursed her lips, her expression indifferent.
“Evidence doesn’t lie. This isn’t an interrogation; it’s testing your attitude,” Letisia softened her tone, methodically building the ‘theme compilation.’ “Who are you? A compulsive liar, a little demon with the Jenkins Family’s filthy blood? Or just a timid, sensitive child whose stress response and poor family upbringing left you maladapted to human interaction? No one taught you social graces, your anxiety escalated into panic, you misread the victim’s body language signals, and out of fear and self-preservation, you did something you shouldn’t have… We want to know exactly what happened. What did you do to him? It’s time to confess everything, child. It’s time.”
As she repeated ‘it’s time,’ the woman nodded repeatedly, planting affirmative psychological suggestion.
“I didn’t kill anyone.” Ashley didn’t even twitch an eyebrow.
“Stop pretending. I know how innocents react under interrogation—yours is too ‘normal.’ That’s not normal.” Letisia shook her head.
