I didn't have to. The wound pattern wasn't consistent with a typical car accident injury, particularly not a fatal one. There's nothing inside a car that would make that sort of focused, penetrating injury except possibly the steering wheel column, which is already unlikely because it's not at the correct angle for that type of penetration, and you didn't have the frontal contusions that would necessarily have accompanied something like that.

Inside the car there would've been damage from an airbag deploying — a broken nose, facial bruising from where the bag tried to deploy and failed to prevent you from striking the column. If you'd been outside of the car as a pedestrian, the additional injuries would've been from getting knocked around by the car's force — you wouldn't have stayed in place, it would've thrown you back. You didn't suffer fractures to your pelvis, femur, or ribs — all of which should've taken comparable damage if you were struck so hard in the abdomen by something significantly bigger than you.

[It's strangely therapeutic to just...recite details and observations like this, like painting thin coats of sealant over something otherwise fragile. Doing her job is familiar. Drawing conclusions is familiar. Being a detective is familiar. And she's been compartmentalizing her feelings for the sake of detective work since she was seven years old and they told her that her mother was dying.]

I never tried to figure you out. It was enough to know that you were lying. But I've since seen a nearly identical injury on someone else and that person confirmed how it was done. So I...extrapolated.

[...Wait.]

...Oh. Did you mean — did I try to figure out how my father was murdered?