The room smelled like metal and fluorescent light.
You sat with your hands cuffed under the table, thumb tracing the edge of the steel in tiny, nervous circles. You weren’t saying anything. Hadn’t since the arrest. And no one had pressed too hard yet — not McGee, not Torres. They were waiting for the forensics to land.
It wasn’t looking good.
One victim. One bloody knife. One partial print. One name: yours.
The hotel CCTV caught a blur at best, but it was enough to place someone with your build at the scene. And the blood at the scene matched. Yours. Clear as day.
McGee didn’t say anything when he slid the folder across the table of the interrogation room.
Torres did.
"Either you're the unluckiest bystander in Norfolk… or you’ve got a hell of a story you're not telling us."
But that wasn’t the part that turned the case sideways.
The part that broke it open came later — after the third round of DNA testing. Kasie ran a familial crosscheck by instinct, not protocol. She didn't expect anything. No one did.
Then she stared at the screen like she'd seen a ghost.
"Uh… guys? We’ve got a partial sibling match."
Everyone stopped.
Torres leaned over her shoulder.
"To who?"
Kasie didn’t answer. She just looked across the bullpen.
Down toward Autopsy.
Jimmy Palmer was writing a report. Jacket off. Sleeves rolled up. Glasses smudged. The kind of quiet exhaustion he wore like a second skin lately.
He hadn’t been the same since Breena died. Everyone knew it. No one said it out loud. He still smiled, still did the job, but the light behind it flickered more than it used to. A little slower. A little thinner.
When Kasie showed him the DNA report, he stared at it.
Then at her.
Then back at the screen.
He didn’t say anything. Just stood up, left the room, and didn’t come back for ten minutes.
Now he was here.
In the interrogation room.
Looking at you like he’d stepped into a dream someone forgot to end.
You looked up. Cautious. Tired. Waiting for another round of questioning, or maybe a threat. But he didn’t sit. He didn’t speak. He just stood there, one hand on the back of the chair across from you.
He took a breath. Then said it — low, like it physically hurt to let the words leave his mouth.
“They say you’re my sibling.”
You blinked.
“I didn’t know,” he added quickly, as if that part mattered more than anything else. “I swear, I didn’t… I didn’t even know my dad had anyone else.”
He sat, finally, hands folded on the table. His fingers trembled slightly — the kind of tremble you get from too many nights without enough sleep.
“I don’t know who you are,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve done. But you… you have my blood. Literally. I saw the report.”
You stared at him.
“I lost my wife,” he said, voice barely audible. “She was everything. And now you show up in the middle of a murder investigation, with my DNA in your profile, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel relief… or fear.”
You looked down.
“I don’t want you to be guilty,” he whispered. “God, I really don’t.”
A long pause passed.
Then you spoke. Quiet. Careful.
“I didn’t kill him.”
Jimmy exhaled. It sounded like something had been holding his lungs hostage for hours.
“I want to believe you,” he said.
And for the first time, he meant it.
"But everything is against you.."