Small Town
Hawkins, Indiana was a small town. A small town. There were barely 1,000 residents of the town, every person in the town pretty well knew their neighbors and their neighbor’s neighbors and probably every relative that branched off those family trees.
There weren’t a lot of secrets in Hawkins.
Jim Hopper grew up in Hawkins, left for some time, then returned to take over as the town sheriff and he personally knew two kids who weren’t the children of the men they called ‘dad’. Jim knew which families were struggling hard financially, he knew of the ones that were struggling with addictions.
In a small town, there weren’t a lot of secrets or a lot of excitement.
Jim had started his shift that morning expecting that the old bat on Pine Street calling about her missing cats would be the biggest call he received. For three years, the worst case he had land on his desk were the teenagers that would get a wild hair once in a while and tear up some roads while they drove drunk and pretended to be invincible.
Until that day.
Jim had been enjoying some fucking silence and coffee to ease the hangover pounding in his temples when the station secretary knocked on his door.
“Chief.” Flo, the station secretary, poked her head in Jim’s office with pursed lips. Flo didn’t look real impressed, but she always looked bitchy around Jim. “There’s a woman here, claims her son is missing.”
“Claims or is?” Jim asked, more interested in his coffee. If the woman claimed her kid was missing, it was a theory. Theories could be ignored until supper time when the kid would roll up and apologize for running away to fuck his girlfriend - or maybe he already had and she was knocked up. The point was - kids weren’t exactly the fucking brightest and a claim wasn’t a fact.
If the kid was missing… then Jim might still have time to finish his coffee and smoke before he had to do anything about it.
“Claims,” Flo said. She lowered her voice and looked at Jim through glasses that always looked ready to fall. “She’s demanding to see you.”
“Great.” Jim drained the rest of his mug and slammed it on his desk, internally wincing at the sharp throb that bonehead move brought him. “Send her to Powell,” he said.
“She wants to speak with you,” Flo repeated.
Everyone wanted to speak with the Police Chief when they made a report, as if Jim’s opinion was going to be any different than any other cop in the station. Hell, Powell would probably at least cruise around time to look for the kid.
“Flo…” Jim pulled a cigarette out and paused to light it before he glared at Flo. He wasn’t in the mood to be around a hysterical mother whose kid probably took off twice a week. “Do we give every damn person that walks in this place exactly what they want?”
“It’s Joyce Byers.”
Jim took a long draw off the cigarette and let the nicotine lie to him and tell him it was going to be a normal day.
“Alright, send her in.”
Joyce Byers took no time at all to rush in Jim’s office, looking fucking insane. Joyce was a good looking woman, always had been, but her hair looked like a tangled mess, her Melvard’s uniform was ripped and stained with dirty.
Hell, there was a fucking leaf in her hair.
“Hop, my son - he’s missing,” Joyce said in a rush, bypassing the niceties. “Please, you’ve got to find him.”
“Alright, calm down,” Jim said, showing Joyce how good it felt to be calm by showing it. He flicked his cigarette in the ashtray and replaced it in his mouth. “Which boy is it?”
Joyce had two of them, if Jim remembered right. An older boy, high schooler. Then another one, ten maybe.
“It’s Will, my youngest.” Joyce started pacing, real anxious and on edge. Jim would say drugs if he didn’t remember her always full of too much energy even back in school.
“Will’s not like this, he wouldn’t just disappear,” Joyce said, starting off with the cliché. “He never came home last night, he didn’t go to school this morning. This isn’t like him. I think - I think he’s hurt. God.” Joyce’s breath hitched and Jim was not prepared to deal with a meltdown. “What if he’s hurt?”
“How old is he?” Jim asked.
“He’s only twelve.”
Jim acknowledged the old pang of pain and slid the ashtray across his desk when Joyce shakily lit up.
“You guys have a fight last night?” Jim asked her. “He get grounded recently?”
“What?” Joyce’s eyes flashed through the smoke that spilled from her mouth. “No, Jim, we didn’t have a fucking fight. He is missing.”
“Joyce, the odds are that he got upset about something, maybe a fight with a friend, and he took off for a bit,” Jim told her bluntly. “If you go home, I bet he’ll be back as soon as he gets hungry.”
“Damn it, no!” Joyce slapped her hand on the desk so she could glare at him with her whole might. Real scary too, all five foot of her.
“Will is not like that,” she insisted. “He is a good boy, Jim. He’s sensitive, caring. He would never do this.”
That’s what they all said.
“How about Lonnie then?” Jim asked, thinking of Joyce’s shitbag ex-husband. “Any chance Will went to see his dad and forgot to mention it?”
“His dad?” Joyce laughed, a crazed sound. “Will wouldn’t go see Lonnie if the whole world was on fire and Muncie was the only place with water. Lonnie - he - he’s never understood Will. He used to call him queer, a fag, shit like that.”
“Is he?” Jim asked, might explain the kid’s disappearance if so.
“Is my twelve year old gay? No! God, what is wrong with you?!”
Headache, nausea; pretty standard hangover.
“Alright, give me the timeline,” Jim said. Might be easier to get the standard information, send Joyce home, check at night that the kid made it back alright. It wouldn’t hurt to scare him some, make sure Jim didn’t have a hysterical Joyce in his office again.
“I worked overnight last night, inventory night,” Joyce started - explained why she looked strung out, probably hadn’t slept yet. “Jonathan had to work the dinner shift at Benny’s, Will went to his friend’s house, Mike Wheeler.”
Jim wrote down that name.
“Jonathan said when he got home that he assumed Will decided to stay with Mike, he does that sometimes, they’re best friends. I got home this morning and Will wasn’t there. I called Karen Wheeler, she said Will didn’t stay the night.”
So the kid went to his friend’s house, then left. It made ‘fight with a friend’ sound real likely. Unless the older brother was lying…
“Karen say what time Will left?” Jim asked.
“Seven, the boys all left at seven.”
Jim wrote that down too.
“Who all was there? The other boys?” he asked.
Joyce sighed and finished off her cigarette.
“Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson,” she said. “I called their houses today too, Will had never been there. The school said he didn’t show up today either.”
“Okay,” Jim said. He wrote down the names, got Joyce’s home number and added her address too. “Why don’t you go home, try and calm down, stay by the phone. I’ll drive around, check the places kids like to hang out, alright?”
If nothing else, Jim could take a nap in a parking lot somewhere.
Joyce agreed to wait at home and told Jim that she had yanked her older boy from school to send him around town as well. It was all a little fucking dramatic, but Jim didn’t mind leaving the station when the Cat Lady on Pine did end up calling about her cats and Powell had to deal with that.
Jim had a small town to cruise and a nap calling his name.
It took no time for Jim to drive through town, keeping his eyes peeled for an abandoned bike anywhere. He drove past the soda shop, circled the buildings downtown, checked the park.
Jim stopped to find out why there was a teenager in a blue Camaro loitering at the quarry instead of attending school. The kid, the new Hargrove kid with the speeding problem, said he was suspended. Jim clocked the bruised eye and split lip, figured the kid would be his problem as soon as the high school got sick of him fighting classmates, and sent his ass home.
Then Jim radioed to the station, told Flo to page him when Joyce called to say the kid was home, and took a nap.
Not a bad morning at all really.
“Chief? Chief!”
Jim groaned when he was roused from his sleep by tones dropping on his pager in between Powell’s voice. He glared blearily at the old clock on his dash and figured the crick in his neck had something to do with the four hours he slept in the driver’s seat of his car.
Tones dropped again and Jim reached for the radio in his passenger seat and turned that shit way down.
“Someone better be fucking dead,” Jim growled in the radio. Tones were for emergencies, not because Powell didn’t like how handsy Cat Lady got with the officers.
“Think they are.” Powell’s voice was shaky on the radio, not like the man at all. “It’s Benny Hammond, Chief. Call said he’s dead in his diner.”
Yup, that would be a fucking emergency.
Jim ordered Powell to call Callahan in, all hands on deck, and then flipped his lights on to tear across town. Jim lit up on his way, hoping like hell that the Halloween pranks were starting a day early.
It wasn’t fucking funny, Jim would be willing to put in the hours for a false reporting charge when he caught the little bastard that called it in. It had to be a prank, had to be a sick joke.
Benny Hammond wasn’t dead, couldn’t be. Jim saw him just the day before, down at the station. Benny looked healthier than he ever had, happier too. Healthy and happy men did not drop dead in the diner’s they ran for fifteen years.
Jim was first on scene, managing to pull in just before Hawkins EMS. There was a maroon BMW in the lot - belonged to one of the high school kids, Jim couldn’t remember which as he jumped from his car, slamming the door shut, and jogged to the diner entrance with his hand on his service weapon.
The wailing - the specific wailing that only the heartbroken and devastated could make - hit Jim’s ears when he swung the door open.
The diner looked the same as it had since Jim was a busboy there back in his high school days. The only change that had been made was the body of Benny Hammond slumped over on a table and the three kids that were beside him.
One of the kids, the Harrington kid who Jim absently remembered owned the BMW, was wide-eyed and started rambling as soon as he saw Jim.
“He’s dead, dead dead. He’s dead, just… dead.”
The kid kept up his rambling, probably his first time around a dead body, as Jim clocked the other two kids. Jim had never met ‘em, but Benny had talked about them like they made the fucking world rotate.
“Hop?” Benny Hammond knocked on Jim’s office door and let himself in. Jim didn’t mind too much, it wasn’t like he was doing a damn thing.
“Benny, how’s it going?” Jim didn’t stand up, didn’t have to offer Benny a seat. Benny knew he was as welcome as anyone and he sat himself right down before the bastard took Jim’s lighter to get a cigarette.
“Good.” Benny blew his smoke toward the cracked window and then gave Jim the same damn grin he’d had his whole life. “Gotta favor to ask you…”
“Alright then.” Jim kicked his feet up on the desk and figured he’d probably do whatever Benny needed. Benny was a good man, never had been a troublemaker.
“Let’s hear it,” Jim told him.
“God damn it.” Jim walked around the table and didn’t need to check for a pulse, didn’t need EMS for anything more than a body removal.
Benny’s upper body was slumped over the table, an old handgun beneath his limp hand, and the blood pouring from the single head wound had already dried.
Just like the Harrington kid was rambling - Benny was dead.
Dead dead.
Jim held up a hand toward the EMTs, stopping them in their tracks. There was nothing to do about Benny, but there was a hysterical teenage girl who could use some help.
“Sirianna?” Jim ignored the body of his oldest friend to date and knelt down beside the girl whose waiting was cutting him to the core. “That’s your name, right? Sirianna?”
Jim started to reach for her, to put his hand on her back, and he would swear until day he died that he must have had a mini-stroke with the quick flash of heat that traveled from his fingertips clear to his elbow. Jim shook his arm and as quickly as the flare of pain started, it disappeared.
“Don’t touch her.”
Jim hadn’t noticed much about the boy, he’d been mostly hidden by the shadow of his sister’s raw sobs, Harrington’s stammered nerves, and the body of Benny. Jim noticed him then, noticed that the waif of a fifteen year old who he locked eyes with looked like he was ready to pull Jim’s fingers off for daring.
“Benny.” Jim groaned and rubbed his forehead, pushed back on the ache that Benny’s whole tale gave him. “How do you know they’re not scammers or drifters? These kids might roll in a new town every month, same sad story.”
They’d milk Benny for all he was worthy, taking advantage of him, then move on to the next place.
“They didn’t give me a story,” Benny said - stubborn and an ass. “They tried to rent a damn bed, Jim. I’m telling you, their parents did a real number on ‘em.”
“That doesn’t mean you can just take in a couple of runaways all hunky dory,” Jim said, trying to use ration on him. “Their parents are going to come looking for them eventually.”
Benny’s jaw locked and he crossed his arms over his chest, apparently damn ready to fight for the kids if it came to it.
“Good,” he said, snarling. “I hope they do knock on my door.”
Judging from the heat in the boy’s eyes - Jim thought he might do it too.
“You’re Harry, right?” Jim asked. The boy didn’t seem to have any sort of a good first impression of Jim, but between the girl that had to stop crying sometime and Harrington - at least he was calm.
“Can you get your sister out of here?” Jim asked when it was clear the boy wasn’t going to say a word to Jim. “I need all three of you out of here. Go wait outside.”
Powell, fucking finally, walked in and blanched at the sight of Benny’s body before he caught Jim’s eye.
“I’ll take them out, Chief,” he said. “Come on, boys. Let’s get outside.”
Jim pushed himself off the ground and thought maybe he was going to have to ask the EMT’s to sedate the girl. He’d be a liar if he said that the way she was curled up, her pale hand clutching Benny’s ankle, sobbing her fucking heart out wasn’t - well, it was damn sad, that’s what it was.
“Siri.”
Jim got a decent look at the boy when he stepped up to touch the girl’s shoulder: pale as fuck, like he hadn’t seen the sun in a while. He had big eyes, too big - fit the story Benny gave Jim, the one that had more credibility when Jim saw the boy’s wrists and thought maybe they’d snap with a hard enough wind.
Harry bent down by his sister and ducked his head by hers, whispered something Jim couldn’t hear. Jim was ready to say screw it and ask someone to sedate her, for her comfort as much as Jim’s, when the sobbing hitched and started to slow.
“Come meet ‘em sometime,” Benny said. “Maybe in a week or so, I want ‘em to settle in. You’ll like them, Jim. Sirianna - she, well,” Benny chuckled and Jim stared at him through dead eyes, recognizing the look of a father enamored in any state. “You’d love her, she’s a little spitfire. Got a heart of gold though, you should see her taking care of her brother.”
“That’s Harry, right?” Jim asked. He wouldn’t write down their names in front of Benny, but he’d remember them.
A report would roll in eventually about two runaway kids, Hawkins wasn’t exempt from the national alerts, and Jim would… well, he’d deal with that then.
“Yeah.” Benny grimaced, just for a second. “He doesn’t talk to me much, but he’s a good one too. Loves his sister, you can just tell.”
Sirianna stood up with her brother’s hand on her back and Jim had to see her grief in full force. Jim had thought, well… two strange kids show up and then the guy who took them in ends up dead, Jim had theories… but those theories didn’t fit that well of sorrow.
“Go on.” Jim could be patient, calm. That girl might have lost the first person in a long time who had loved her. That wasn’t a small thing and Jim wasn’t a monster.
Sirianna had the same green eyes as her brother, though Jim noticed the stark contrast in the tears and heartbreak - she was drowning, he was dry. It wasn’t until she started walking away, stumbling some with shaking knees but a hand on her back, that Jim could focus on the crime scene.
Because it absolutely was a fucking crime scene.
Benny had been happy, and Jim doubted that whoever put that pistol under his hand knew it. Jim ducked down to look at the gun, the barrel… it was a nice one, newer model.
Benny only owned a shotgun as far as Jim knew. He used it to hunt, once for a break-in that wound up being an old drunk who couldn’t comprehend the diner was closed, and to keep coyotes off his property.
“Chief?” Callahan walked over, bringing the EMTs with him. “Uh… don’t see this everyday,” he said. “You - you see a lot of this in the city?”
Jim pulled a notepad from his breast pocket and carefully jotted down the make of the gun while he absently answered Callahan.
“Dead bodies of my friends? Not so much,” Jim murmured. He had to shove away who Benny was so he could look at his face, inspect the single headshot there.
It was dead center. That wasn’t an impossible shot for someone to make themself, but unlikely. Suicides were emotional, committed by mentally unwell folks. They tended to have shaky hands, shoulders that heaved with cries.
They weren’t men who had taken in two kids and planned on making them a part of his family.
“I just need you to print something up,” Benny pleaded. “I told Higgins that they’re Michael’s kids, his ex-wife is real sick and will be gone before anyone gets any ideas about checking in with her.”
And Michael was conveniently dead, Jim knew that much. It was a good story… it wouldn’t take much for Jim to type up a form for Benny, some forged form of custody so he could keep the school system off his ass if they asked for it.
“You’re asking me to break the law so you can let some runaways stay with you?” Jim asked carefully, making sure Benny knew clear as day what he wanted.
“Jim… I’m asking you to break the law so I can keep these kids.” Benny looked Jim right in the eye, knew exactly what he was asking, what he wanted. “They need a family, Jim, a good one. And, well, hell, I don’t think I’d be real keen on giving ‘em up now.”
Before Benny left the station, Jim had filled out an official letter of custody for him. As far as anyone needed to be concerned, Sirianna and Harry Hammond were legally Benny’s problems.
And Benny had been over the moon - Jim always did suspect that he would have made one hell of a dad. His ex-wives didn’t agree, but if Benny was sure about the story he had, it seemed like the world had agreed.
“Suicide, right?” Callahan asked, stupidly staying six feet away from the body while he looked everywhere but. “It’s a damn shame, I heard from Beckett that those kids were pretty taken with him.”
“It sure looks like a suicide,” Jim said carefully. It did look like a suicide and if Jim weren’t in Hawkins, Indiana - if it had happened in one of the cities - he would say it also looked like a real well-planned murder.
Almost perfect. Except Jim knew that Benny had been planning for the future, planning on taking care of the kids. And there were more things, small, that didn’t add up. The gun that Jim didn’t recognize, the perfectly centered head shot. Even the location was suspicious - why would Benny sit down at a table in the middle of the diner to off himself?
“Go check the register, call Beckett and have him tell you about anything of value in here,” Jim ordered Callahan. He looked at Benny one more time, one long look where he didn’t push away who Benny was or the thousands of memories he had of him.
Benny had been Jim’s best friend growing up. They rode bikes together, went fishing together. They got older, flirted with girls together, got shot down together. Jim and Benny had been inseparable until Jim enlisted and Benny got disqualified for an underlying heart condition the Military discovered.
Benny had been at Jim’s wedding, been there at the darkest time of Jim’s life. When Jim moved back to Hawkins, back in the same crummy house he had been raised in, Benny showed up with a broom, mop, and bourbon.
“Damn it.” Jim touched Benny’s shoulder lightly before he left Callahan to collaborate with the diner chef and the EMTs to start removing the body.
Jim was going to talk to the kids, try and get some idea of what the fuck had happened there. And he wasn’t going to start with the girl who acted like her world had come to a screeching halt, he was going to start with the boy who hadn’t shed a single tear.
The kids didn’t go far, Powell had them behind the ambulance with the girl sitting on the tailgate while her brother hovered beside her like a ninety pound guard-dog. Jim took his time walking to them, took his time to really study them while he lit a cigarette.
Sirianna was curled up, her chin on her knees and her eyes silently crying. She was devastated, Jim didn’t think any kid could fake that kind of pain. There wasn’t any blood on her clothes, though Jim wondered where Benny had pulled the sweatsuits and canvas coats from.
Harry didn’t have his hand on Sirianna anymore, but it hovered there, ready to grab her. He was on edge, Jim could see it. That boy did not want to be at the diner and it would be a perfectly normal reaction to have if he looked like he cared at all that Benny was dead. Harry was wearing Benny’s coat (blood free, as far as Jim could tell) and the only sadness he had in his eyes seemed to just be for his sister.
And Harrington… well, Jim wasn’t sure what Harrington was doing there. He didn’t look great though and the spot on his shirt told Jim whose puddle of puke had been just outside the diner door.
Jim thought it had been Callahan’s really.
“Harrington, right?” Jim started with him, figuring that he might have given the twins a ride home, not suspecting what was inside the diner.
“Yes, sir?” Harrington asked, perfectly politely if too quickly, a side effect of seeing his first dead body probably.
“I want you to go with Officer Powell, give him a statement, then he’s going to call your parents and have them come pick you up,” Jim said firmly.
“I… they’re not home,” Harrington said - which was just fucking great. The kid was going to be shaking, sick, probably have nightmares.
“Right.” Nothing Jim could do about that. “Powell can drive you home, we’ll get your car to you by morning.”
“Oh - okay.” Harrington looked at Harry, a stealthy glance, then down at Sirianna. “I’ll - uh… does someone have paper? And a pen?” he asked.
Jim did and didn’t mind to give him a sheet, watched while Harrington quickly jotted down what looked like his address and number to pass to Harry.
“If you need anything,” Harrington said. Kid seemed to be a good enough one, shame that he had to see Benny like that.
Powell took Harrington over by his car and Jim smoked his cigarette while deciding how to divide the twins up for interrogations, wondered if it would even be worth it.
They looked close, might have only ever had each other. There were plenty of physical cues that the story Benny had, one about two kids who ran away from abusive parents with only $60 and each other, was the truth. But Jim knew the kind of scars that abuse could leave; kids who got smacked around by bastards who should have been sterilized didn’t always grow up wanting to save the world - sometimes they were the ones who tried to burn it down.
“You feel up to answering a few questions?” Jim asked the girl, assuming that her story would be close to her truth. The girl would give Jim her story, her brother would parrot it. Jim was a decent cop, liked to think he could read people well enough. If the boy slipped up… Jim would catch it.
“Yes.” Sirianna’s voice was hoarse, Jim wished he had some water or something to offer her. She looked at Jim and Jim could see some of the strength Benny described in the lift of her chin, the set of her jaw.
“Someone killed him,” Sirianna said right off the bat. “Benny wouldn’t - he wouldn’t have done it himself. He wouldn’t.”
Yeah, Jim agreed.
“Alright, let’s hear it then. Can you think of anyone who had a reason to do this to him?” Jim asked. “Any enemies?”
Any pissed off relatives or gang members or friends of the twins?
“I don’t think so.” Sirianna’s lower lip wobbled and Jim was grateful that she kept ahold of herself. “He’s nice, he - people like him. Benny’s nice.”
“Did you move anything when you entered the diner?” Jim asked.
“No.” Sirianna shook her head and swallowed loudly. “I - we just saw Benny. We didn’t touch anything.”
“And you two were at school all day?” Jim asked. It would be easy enough to check, just a way to test their honesty.
“Yes,” Sirianna said. Her eyebrows twitched then, just before she let out a pained moan. “They couldn’t get ahold of him,” she whispered. “The school.” Sirianna looked up at Jim with just the most pitiful expression. “Principal Higgins tried to call him, Benny never answered. What if - what if…?”
“What time was that?” Jim asked, following the theory. He wrote down the time when she said it, between eight and nine. “Any idea what Higgins wanted?” It probably wouldn’t matter, plenty of reasons for a principal to call the guardian of two students, but Jim wasn’t leaving any stone unchecked.
“I got in a fight.”
Jim lifted his eyes from his notepad to stare at the girl deadpan.
“You got in a fight?” he asked. “You mind telling me what about?”
Again, probably not important. The kids were wearing clothes that Jim wouldn’t doubt had been taken from Benny’s own closet and from the customers who had met them - there were plenty of ways Jim could see Sirianna being spurred to fight on her second day of school.
“I - someone was being rude and I lost my temper,” Sirianna said. She seemed credible enough, Jim had a hard time looking at her with her pink scrunchie and sad eyes and thinking ‘murderer’.
The brother though…
“How about you?” Jim asked him. “Were you at school all day? Never left to run home for a book?”
Or to help kill Benny.
Harry shook his head, wouldn’t even look at Jim.
“He didn’t,” Sirianna said. “We were both there. I wouldn’t - we didn’t —” she broke on a whimper and Jim figured that was all the questions he’d aim her way.
“Harry? You notice anything off when you guys entered the diner?” Outside of the obvious, that was.
Again, the kid shook his head.
“This is an official fucking report,” Jim told him, a bite of impatience. “I need some verbal answers here, kid. There’s a dead body in that diner and I need to know how it happened.”
“Harry didn’t do it!” Sirianna leapt off the tailgate of the ambulance, definitely the protective type. She grabbed for her brother’s hand and Jim didn’t miss the way that Harry hesitated just for a second before he curled his fingers around hers.
“Benny is our friend,” Sirianna said hotly. “Benny - Benny is kind and he- he helps us. He’s our friend!”
Was. Helped.
The girl didn’t kill Benny, her brain wasn’t even accepting that he was gone.
“I’m going to level with you.” Jim gave them a severe look and grit his teeth as Harry continued to look only at the side of his sister’s face.
“Two runaways show up here, ask for a place to stay. The guy who takes them in ends up dead two weeks later. You say you were both at school, and I’ll check, but I need you to be honest. If you cared about Benny even a fucking tenth of what he did you, I need to know right now if there’s any chance that someone related to you two did this.”
Because Jim could see the kids, he wasn’t blind. Benny was right, someone did a number on them. There weren’t any injuries, but they weren’t the bodies of children who were well-cared for and loved. That meant that someone in their lives was dangerous, violent.
They knew it too. Sirianna turned so she could see her brother. It was like they had a whole conversation with just their eyes - just the way that she seemed to be the one who took care of him, but he was going to be the one to decide if Jim was going to get the truth the easy way or the hard way.
“Yes.” Harry’s voice had softened, probably had something to do with the way that his sister looked like a broken heart personified in front of him. He might have been answering Jim’s question, but Jim didn’t think that was it.
He was desperate enough to pretend like Harry had confirmed a theory he would have investigated first anyway.
“Okay.” Jim sighed and really hoped that the twins weren’t personally involved, that Benny wasn’t killed because of the worst kind of betrayal.
“That’s a start,” he said. There was a wave from the door, one of the EMTs. They were probably ready to move the body and didn’t want the kids to see it.
Jim didn’t want to see it himself if he were honest.
“Why don’t the three of us go down to the station, talk some more?” Jim suggested. “I’m going to have some questions but if you’re honest then I’ll call social services and have them find you a place to sleep while this all gets sorted out.”
“Social services?” Somehow Sirianna’s face paled more when she whipped her attention back to Jim in a panic. “You can’t call them. They’ll - we - please, just let us go. We’ll answer all your questions and then we’ll leave, we won’t be a burden to anyone again.”
Sirianna was spooked, spooked real bad. Jim could guess why - any call to social services had the potential to send an alert to whichever county was missing two teens. Jim didn’t have a clue what happened to twins, except it must have been bad and the girl before him was terrified of being made to return to it.
Even Harry had finally shown some emotion, if his face shutting down completely was an emotion.
They weren’t the same, not at all. Sirianna and Harry were pale, had black hair, green eyes. They were older, somehow seemed weary of the world already. There weren’t a lot of similarities between them and Jim’s daughter, but damn if he wasn’t thinking about her hard in that moment.
“Fine,” Jim agreed, shoving his own foot in his mouth before he could stop himself. “You two answer my questions completely and honestly and I won’t have to call social services. Is that a deal?”
It was the only one they’d get and damn if Jim knew where they’d go once he was done questioning them.
“Will - if you can find who did this… you will?” Sirianna asked.
It wasn’t a question of if Jim could find them, he thought it was a question of if he was given enough information to at least try.
“Kid, when I do find who did this, they’re going to fucking fry,” Jim said. He shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t have shared his own view that it was more likely to be a murder than suicide. The girl was devastated, she couldn’t even comprehend that Benny was gone.
She must have liked what Jim said though because she didn’t even look at her brother before she nodded shortly at Jim.
“Then we have a deal,” she said.
It seemed to go unspoken that she was accepting on behalf of them both.