Five days later, the police arrested the suspect based on Shane's description and the physical characteristics from the surveillance footage. The prosecutor's office filed charges, and the court quickly set a trial date. The police contacted Shane again.
Based on their investigation, they had reason to believe the suspect had broken in to steal, been discovered by the homeowner, and then stabbed her. To ensure a swift conviction, they hoped Shane would testify in court.
Since Shane had made that manly promise, he naturally had to follow through.
So on the day of the trial, he took the witness stand and recounted everything he'd seen that night.
But the suspect and his lawyer knew that while the police had found the suspect's fingerprints at the victim's apartment, they hadn't found his hair or skin cells on the victim's body. And the knife embedded in the victim had been wiped clean of fingerprints. So they admitted only to the theft evidence and refused to confess to the murder.
The suspect's lawyer and the victim's lawyer engaged in a protracted debate.
Shane, having finished his testimony, sat in the gallery and watched the defense's entire performance of sophistry. Listening to the suspect insist on his innocence, a fire of anger rose in his chest.
Seeing the judge waver, Shane paused time.
If not you, then who killed that innocent woman? Just because the police lack a tiny bit of evidence, you think you can overturn all the other proof and claim you didn't kill her?
Furious at the suspect's refusal to confess, Shane walked up to him and, on the blank dialog box above his head, wrote out a confession beginning with "I killed..."
Then he returned to his seat in the gallery and snapped his fingers again.
From the defendant's box, the suspect suddenly announced: "I killed her. I broke in to steal, I was discovered, so I killed her."
Some in the courtroom exchanged glances; others wore expressions of "just as we thought." The suspect and his lawyer, meanwhile, looked horrified.
"What are you saying!" The lawyer couldn't understand his client's confession, and of course the suspect himself had no idea why those words had come out of his mouth.
But the victim's lawyer seized the opening, and the judge's brow relaxed as he took notes.
The suspect, confronted by his own words, instantly lost his bravado and slumped in defeat. Under pressure from all sides, he eventually confessed and detailed the crime—how he'd broken in, been caught, begged the woman to let him go, how she'd agreed out of fear, and how he'd then stabbed her when her guard was down. After killing her, in his panic he'd only thought to wipe the knife clean, abandoning it at the scene before fleeing...
This account matched the police's reconstruction exactly.
The case was resolved. The suspect received his due punishment, and Shane felt genuinely happy.
He felt a strange sense of accomplishment. If the suspect had kept insisting on his innocence, the case wouldn't have ended so quickly, and the victim's family wouldn't have received justice so soon.
Walking out of the courthouse, Shane felt great. He was replying to Sophia's messages as he descended the courthouse steps.
Just then, it occurred to him that he could turn this experience into a post for his public account.
9
After Shane published the account of his experience, it received far more shares and likes than his usual posts. People loved stories exploring others' tragedies, and they loved seeing criminals brought to justice in a satisfying conclusion.
This gave Shane a new idea.
The court posted trial announcements online, and he could attend proceedings just by applying with his ID. Plus, thanks to the murdered woman downstairs, he'd gotten to know some police officers—it wasn't hard to become friends and gather information. So he decided, riding the momentum of his viral post, to turn true crime reporting into a regular feature.
He began shuttling between police stations and courthouses, carefully documenting cases, sometimes discussing details with his police friends. Thanks to his fiction-writer's instincts, his narratives had all the structure and suspense of a novel, far more vivid and detailed than what newspapers or TV reported. His following grew and grew.
Sophia had been complaining lately that Shane was too busy, that he didn't need to push himself so hard for the public account.
Shane was in the middle of outlining a story, irritated, and snapped: "If I don't push hard, where's the traffic? Without traffic, why would advertisers fund my account? I'm doing this for us to have a good life!"
"I think... our quiet old life was fine," Sophia protested. She was upset that he never had time for her anymore.
Shane set down his papers and looked at her coldly. "What do you know?"
Several recent cases had gone viral through his posts, sparking heated public debates about crime and punishment. Shane felt he was shouldering some kind of mission.
He wasn't doing this just for money anymore—he genuinely felt his social value. He changed his public account bio to "Narrator of Justice."
And Sophia... what did a woman know? Shane thought meanly.
Sophia looked at him and shook her head helplessly.
She feared that this narrator would ultimately be consumed by his own fervent sense of justice.
Why she thought that, Sophia couldn't say. But a woman's sixth sense was nothing to scoff at.
10
Ryan Cross's case came half a year later.
During that time, Shane had been reporting on social cases—burglaries, robberies, sexual assaults, murders—all grist for his mill.
His public account's read count was perpetually 100,000+, analytics companies ranked him among the top ten public accounts, and advertisers threw enormous sums at securing placement in his posts. Shane soon bought a real home of his own, but his relationship with Sophia had grown precarious.
Since the account blew up, Shane was either at the courthouse or wining and dining with sponsors. The couple spent less time together, fewer opportunities to understand each other's thoughts, and the conflicts in their lives erupted with the unsubtle force of a melodrama—no buildup required.
"You're insane!" "Why don't you just die!" "Get out!" "I hate you!"
These phrases flashed frequently across Sophia's dialog box.
Shane gave her a cold glance and turned up the music on his computer.
His overgrown hair—untrimmed because of his recent writing marathons—concealed the Bluetooth earbuds that were now blocking out Sophia's curses with loud music.
Clown.
Because he'd caught the profanity spilling across Sophia's dialog box, Shane thought this while typing away.
Eventually, Shane's cold war successfully drove Sophia away.
She left the study, and only then did Shane remove his earbuds. He heard her packing her things, and for a moment he recalled the scene when she'd moved her boxes into his rental apartment. But nostalgia didn't move him now—mostly, he was relieved when Sophia finally slammed the door.
Not long after, his phone buzzed.
"The divorce papers are on the coffee table." Sophia's text glowed on the screen.
Below it was another message, from his new girlfriend Asha, asking when he'd take her out to dinner.
—Shane had never publicly acknowledged his marriage, claiming he needed to maintain the mystique of his public persona.
He and Asha had met at an advertiser's networking event. He'd used the same trick he'd deployed on Sophia—making the girl so bewildered by her own involuntary outbursts that she began to question her feelings. Add Shane's newfound confidence from the success of his account and the personal magnetism he'd cultivated, and a girl who was easily swayed quickly surrendered to him.
But this time, Shane couldn't be bothered to reply to Asha's message, because Ryan Cross's case was going to its third trial tomorrow.
It was an attempted rape and murder case. The police had presented ample evidence to the court, but the suspect insisted he was innocent, turning the whole proceeding into a convoluted mess.
"He clearly killed her," said the police officer handling the case, an old friend of Shane's, analyzing the details while complaining. "They keep dragging this out, wasting our resources. He should be subject to the law like anyone else. Why can't he just confess like other people?"
Shane froze for a moment, then looked down and gave a faint smile.
About 20% of the cases on his account featured suspects who went from insisting on their innocence in court to suddenly breaking down and confessing.
Shane always explained these confessions by citing the overwhelming pressure of the proceedings—but only he knew the truth: he couldn't stand the cases dragging on, so he modified their dialog boxes.
Just like Ryan Cross now, who, like those suspects, refused to confess, driving Shane to frustration as a spectator.