Michael Duran was a good cop who had spent too much time playing bad cop. Detective Roger Menken pondered this truth as he watched the giant officer shouting at the terrified teenager for a few moments from behind the one-way mirror. Finally he had seen enough and walked the short distance down the hall to the questioning room door.

"Anything new, Officer?" he asked quietly as he stepped into the room, the opening causing both people in the room to nearly jump out of their pants.

"Not a thing, Detective. I still think he knows more than he's..." began Duran. He was a bear of a man, easily topping six and a half feet tall and he had to weigh more than three hundred pounds. The uniforms he wore had to be specially ordered, since there was no other officer in the precinct that wore anything close to his size. Dark black hair was cut into a flat top, giving a military look to his square-jawed features. When San Francisco's finest needed to scare somebody into giving information, they sent Officer Duran.

But that wasn't what was needed today and Detective Menken cut him off before he could get on a roll. "I'll determine that, Officer, and I'll take over the questioning for now. Could you do me a favor and go down and get lunch for the two of us?" He gestured at the young man seated at the only table in the room, who had finally stopped shaking like a leaf. "You hungry kid?"

"Uhhh, yeah." the youth responded in an uncertain tone. His name was Josh Felder, and he was just out of high school. Supposedly he was saving up the money to go to UCLA next fall. Faded blue jeans and an oversized black dress shirt adorned his lanky brown-haired body. A smart kid, and a hard worker by all accounts, but right now he was just plain scared. And who could blame him after the last couple of days?

Officer Duran gave a curt nod and walked out the door, letting it fall shut behind him. As soon as the door closed he began to curse softly under his breath as he stormed towards the cafeteria. A couple of secretaries watched him nervously from behind their cubicle walls, turning to each other and gossiping quietly the instant he left earshot.

Detective Menken took hold of the only unoccupied chair in the room and swung it around so he was staring at the youth over the backrest. "You drink coffee Josh?" he offered, pulling a thermos out from under his coat. Menken had been accused of dressing like Columbo on more than one occassion, and he had that perpetually rumpled look that made you think of him as harmless and scatterbrained. But he was far from that, in fact he was considered one of the most creative minds on the force when it came down to brass tacks.

Josh nodded silently and then stared at the table quietly while the Detective poured a cup for each of them. The two sat there for several moments drinking before Menken spoke again, "I know you probably don't want to hear this, but I have a few questions to ask you."

"I'm sure. That's all I've had for the last twelve hours." Josh seemed to have recovered remarkably quickly and there was a slightly bitter tone to his voice, Menken noted idly as he sipped at his cup.

"Well, I'll try to give you some new ones then." he remarked, pulling a sheaf of papers from a folder. "Let's go back a couple of days before the night in question. You've been working the four to midnight shift for the last few weeks, right?"

"Yeah. What about it?" Josh pushed a few hairs back from from his thin face and leaned back in the rickety chair, clutching his coffee mug to his chest like a lifeline.

"You remember a courier by the name of..." he flipped a couple of pages, "...Jane Hancock? This would be Tuesday night."

Josh thought for a moment and then nodded. "That late there aren't too many couriers. Fed Ex uniform, short, thin, long blonde hair in a ponytail. She signed the register, went up and came down about twenty minutes later."

"You remember it that well?"

"She was cute."

Menken grinned understandingly and let the folder fall to the table, then picked up a notepad and pencil. The folder contained an employee list for the local Fed Ex offices, and no employee fit that name or description. "I see. All right, lets try something else. Why don't you just tell me in your own words what happened that night? Tell me everything you can remember, and I'll ask questions as we go along."

"Okay," Josh responded, taking a long sip of coffee to reinforce his thoughts. His feet landed on the table with a thump and he began with a long,irritated sigh, "Right, It was about 8:30 that night. I had just come up from the parking ramp - I was doing that half of the patrol that night." Menken nodded and looked up from his scribbling to meet the young man's eyes. "That was when we got the alarm up in the Nakatomi offices."

Menken nodded and gestured for Josh to continue, "And then?"

"Well, no one was supposed to be there, natch. I'd never seen that particular one go off before, and neither had Don. We were just about to head upstairs when that superhero showed up. You know, that Gnome guy? The one on TV?"

"I know him."

Josh nodded curtly, "He was passing through the building on his way home from dinner, he'd been eating over at the Comstock Lounge, I think. Anyway, he heard the alarm and asked us if there was any trouble. We explained it best we could, which wasn't very, and he offered to help us out. Checked some magical thing on his wrist."

Menken made a note: checked his watch to see if he had enough time to help. Even superheroes have watches. Occam's razor.

The scribbling didn't deter the youth at all this time, "So the three of us went up in the elevator. Nakatomi is up on the 27th floor, so that took a couple of minutes. Oh, and we shut off the rest of the elevators, just in case."

The scribbling paused for a moment. "Just in case of what?"

Josh shrugged, "Well, we didn't know what was going on up there. So we figured it was best to take precautions. If someone was up there, we didn't want them coming down while we were on the way up. And we didn't want anyone breaking in while we were away from the security station."

Menken nodded, "Okay, go ahead." He took a quick sip of coffee and wondered just how long it was going to be until Duran got the sandwiches.

"Well, we open the doors to the offices and you can hear the rattling of a keyboard in one of the rooms, and that's where the only non-security light was coming from. So that's where we went. I opened the door and there's a young lady in a business suit in there tapping away on one of the computers."

"Was she authorized to be there?" Menken's pencil hit the pad with a thump.

Josh looked suddenly nervous, as though worried he might be blamed for something, "I... we didn't know. It didn't look like she had broken into the place, so when she began to dig around in her purse we didn't do anything. I thought she was getting a passcard out, at least that's what she said. She looked really nervous and embarassed."

Menken nodded and smiled sympathetically, "I'd have probably done the same thing. So then what?"

Josh sighed and set his mug down, one hand rising to massage his temples, "She spilled her purse, I think. There was a rattle and things went spilling all over the floor. I looked down and there was this burst of light, and I couldn't see anything for about a minute."

Menken's pencil nearly put a hole through the notepad, "That's her M.O., all right. You couldn't see anything, could you hear anything?"

Eyes closed and leaning back, Josh considered the question carefully. "Okay... there was a loud fwoomp... a crash... something like a bunch of ball bearings falling to the floor... and two different explosions. I think the fwoomp was where the smoke came from." He added the last in a rush, getting it in before the Detective could ask the question.

"Smoke?"

"Well, when I could see again, there was smoke everywhere, the kind you get from fireworks on the forth of July?"

There was a knock at the door and Officer Duran stuck his head around the edge with a decidedly grumpy expression. Brown-bagged lunches hit the table in front of both men. "Here you go, Detective. Anything else I can get for you?"

"No, thank you Officer. Why don't you listen in on the rest of this though?" A quick gesture and Duran leaned up against the wall, listening with unnerving intensity to the unfolding story. "Okay Josh, so there was smoke everywhere when you could see again?"

Josh unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite out of it. He chewed on it for a moment while he thought. "Yeah, smoke everywhere. The whole room was filled with it. I could hear someone else banging around in the room. By the time I found a door and got out I had found out it was that Gnome guy. Don had gone of chasing the lady, but he wasn't able to find her. The place was a real mess, too. She set something off by the computer and wrecked the terminal."

"Was anything else taken?' Duran interupted with a grunt, bringing a glare from Menken who was halfway through his own sandwich by this point. The subs tasted a little off today, maybe the mayonaisse had gone a little sour?

The youth set his own lunch down and sipped on his coffee, his eyes looking a little glassy and tired. "Not that I saw. I... was blinded for a while." His eyes blinked several times as he tried to concentrate through a sudden wave of fatigue. He suddenly slumped forward, the mug hitting the floor with the crash of broken pottery.

Officer Duran reached behind him, engaging the lock with a soft schnick. The proximity detector in the observation room would inform him if anyone wandered in there accidentally, and the loop of film showing the previous twenty minutes of the interview would keep anyone from recording what was about to occur in the room. He pulled the notepad from Menken's nerveless fingers as the Detective slumped over in his chair, the hypno-drug taking effect just as they had said it would. "Now then, kid, you're going to go over everything in that room from the moment you first entered until you were blinded... and we're going to examine your memory very closely to see just what might have gone missing." He smiled softly to himself as Josh began to recite in a monotone. The Council always paid well for information on Cheshire's activities, and all he needed to do was find out if that disk had been destroyed in the explosion. Early retirement was right around the corner...