“Are you the person who reported this to the authorities?”
“That’s right.” Ardi massaged his temples.
He hadn’t slept since last night. Even now, he couldn’t sleep because he had to wrestle with the investigator’s questions. Ardi’s life hadn’t improved—in fact, it had become far worse after his second wife’s death. Kiara’s anger and Kia’s threats still seemed easier to figure out than the tangled mystery surrounding his second wife’s death.
“Please answer our questions honestly.”
“All right,” Ardi replied.
“Who were the people you saw when you arrived at the crime scene?”
“Only Saiful.” His answer was brief, but his heart was still in turmoil, plagued by doubt. The information he provided had to be accurate, while the person he had seen last night might have been nothing more than an illusion. So Ardi gave only the answer he was certain of.
“Are you sure?”
He should have answered that he wasn’t sure. Instead, he chose to nod confidently.
“What was the first thing you saw besides the body and Saiful?”
“Nothing else. Just the two of them. Saiful standing there like a statue. Kia lying on the floor. And, yeah... The scene from last night keeps playing over and over in my head.” Ardi’s voice grew heavy as he said it, and then he drew a shallow breath. “And the living room light was on. Only the living room.” Ardi repeated the words living room as though they were a phrase that needed to be underlined.
“What about the living room light being on?”
“Kia turned off all the lights whenever she left, and turned them all on when she came home. If only one room’s light was on, that meant she had just gotten home and hadn’t had time to turn on the lights in the other rooms.” This statement was exactly the same as the information Saiful had given.
“In other words, the victim had just arrived home?” the investigator asked.
“I think so. Is it possible the killer came right after Kia got home?”
“Or did the killer come with the victim?” the officer asked.
Ardi let out another sigh. In the middle of the interrogation, his mind filled with Kirana. A silhouette resembling someone—and Kirana, who was always creating bombs in the middle of peaceful moments.
“Do you suspect Saiful?”
Ardi remembered the first time he and Kia took Saiful and his wife in. Saiful was hardworking, and his wife was neat. In the early days of the man’s employment at their house, Saiful and his wife had never been very talkative, and that habit had lasted until now. Kia and Saiful’s family were on the same wavelength. None of them talked much. They spoke only when necessary, and only about work. It was easy to imagine how quiet that house was. There was nothing but the sound of footsteps, the people moving around in their rooms, and the occasional loud clatter of cleaning equipment.
From Ardi’s perspective, there had been nothing strange during their first year of employment. Then Kia got pregnant, and Ardi began noticing Saiful and his wife doing unusual things. Saiful’s wife started preparing food Kia hadn’t asked for in advance. That wouldn’t have been strange on its own; after all, pregnant women needed more nutrition than usual. But one day, Ardi caught the childless couple carrying a toy doll in the kitchen and treating it like a real human child.
Ardi slowly recounted the incident to the officer who continued typing steadily in front of him.
“What time did you enter the victim’s house?” the investigator asked again.
“Probably a little before eight. I don’t know... I wasn’t paying attention. But she had contacted me beforehand.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much. She screamed that someone was going to kill our child. And...?”
“And what else?”
“She said, ‘Please.’”
There was one word Ardi didn’t mention: Kia had said the word shoe. He wasn’t sure, and wanted to confirm it himself. If only Ardi had realized it, he had already hidden two details he should have reported.
“Saiful said you never came home later than five in the afternoon. So why did you come home later than usual last night?”