The woman who opened the door of 4B Sycamore Lane was not the missing chemist.
She was young, twenty-one at most, with mousy brown hair tied in a messy bun and a pair of thick glasses sliding down her nose.
She clutched a thick linguistics textbook to her chest like a shield.
"Miss Vex?" Foster asked, his badge held up.
She flinched, then shook her head vigorously. "No. I'm... that's not my name."
Foster kept his expression neutral, but internally, his sense of reality tilted another degree.
"You gave a statement to one of my officers under the name Elara Vex."
She bit her lip, her gaze dropping.
"I... I needed you to listen. If I'd said my real name—Lily Moses, just a student, talking about flashes of light... you would have filed it away as the ramblings of a sleep-deprived girl with her face in books. No one would have listened."
Her voice was a desperate whisper. "But a missing person... that's serious. You'd have to take it seriously."
Foster stared at her, his mind a storm of confusion. This wasn't a clue. It was a hall of mirrors.
"You used the name of a missing woman to get our attention? Do you have any idea how serious that is? How did you even know that name?"
Lily Moses looked genuinely bewildered.
"I read it in the paper days ago. It just... stuck in my head. When I saw the light in Leo's window, I knew I had to say something important, and... the name just came out. I'm sorry. I just wanted someone to believe me."
Her explanation was pathetic, almost childish in its logic, and yet it had worked. It had brought a detective to her door.
Foster probed, his tone sharpening.
"A name 'just came out'? A name connected to an active missing person's case? That's quite a coincidence, Miss Moses."
Tears welled up behind her glasses. "I don't know! I don't know why I said it! I was scared and I panicked. I just saw the light, a bright, silent flash, and then everything went dark and quiet. It was wrong. It felt... wrong."
The frustration was a physical pressure in Foster's chest.
He had a key witness who was also a liar, a murder tied to supernatural clues, and a captain demanding a simple answer.
He took her formal statement, this time under her real name, but the encounter left him feeling unmoored.
He had no legal grounds to hold her, she was just a frightened witness who wanted to be heard, however misguided her method.