Franklin takes a deep breath and exhales even more slowly.
"There are a lot of powerful men who owe me many debts," he says after a moment. "I'm going to cash in all of my chips, as they say, and that's how I'm gonna make the case against your father go away."
When he glares into my eyes, I see a fire there that sends goose bumps down my arms.
I know that I shouldn't believe him, but I do.
When I go over to the kitchen to refresh our cups, I briefly glance over at my phone on the kitchen island.
With the screen off and the software hidden in a nondescript fitness app, it's recording and backing up every single thing that we have just said.
7
Henry
When the thunderstorms roll in, I have a hard time getting out of bed. The sheets are soft and it feels like I'm sleeping on a cloud. They're so much better than they were in that apartment near my school.
The kitchen of this three-star hotel room is small, but I'm glad to have it. I've stayed in places without one before and it was always a pain to make all of my meals in the microwave or just eat vending machine food all the time.
The podcast game isn't glamorous. Some have studios and big budgets, but not mine.
Generation Crime with Henry Asher is a shoestring operation and we record most of our interviews in hotel rooms just like this, using my laptop and a few microphones.
This is how I started out when I first got the job at Tate Media. They added a little bit to the budget allowing me to get a partner but not much else.
My partner, Liam Kazinski, is sitting across from me as I narrate the last bits of this week's episode.
This season, which we recorded over the series of a month, focuses on a teenage girl whose body was found in an irrigation ditch behind the library that she used to love to go to as a little girl. The man responsible for her death is a guy who attended a nearby high school who forced her into prostitution, made her run away from home, and eventually killed her.
Elizabeth Kenner came from an upper-middle-class family with long roots in Kentucky.
Her father and his father were both dentists and her mother was a homemaker who raised two other children.
Elizabeth was the oldest and to say that her disappearance and eventual murder came as a shock to her family would be a grave understatement.
Her father dealt with it by burying himself in his work. He died of a heart attack two years later, a year before her body was found.
With two small children to raise, Mrs. Kenner focused her attention on setting up an organization that helps parents of runaways. That's why she's here talking to me. She wants to raise awareness about how dangerous it is for teenagers to run away since many end up homeless and become victims of sexual and physical abuse.
I don't have much experience doing formal interviews, but with my work with the podcast, I've had to learn everything rapid-fire.
Mrs. Kenner answers all of my questions and after I stop recording, she thanks me and Liam for bringing attention to her daughter's case.
"A lot of people assume that she came from a bad home or somehow deserved what had happened to her," Mrs. Kenner says, "but the truth is none of them do. Teenagers run away because they think it's romantic. They want to break the rules, they want to do what they want to do, and they shouldn't pay with their lives for wanting to live a little bit on the edge."
I thank her again for coming in and speaking with me and show her to the door.
We have invited her to stay for dinner, a glamorous dinner of takeout from the Denny's across the street, but she declines.
She doesn't want to make friends with people who know her deepest and darkest pain and I understand that.
After she leaves, I ask Liam to wrap up the recording session before dinner.
We are both hungry, but I want to put this case behind us and really celebrate.
No, maybe celebrate is the wrong word.
I don't have anything to celebrate.
The reason that I'm back in Kentucky is that I'm running away from life as I know it.
But it's good to put a period at the end of the sentence and that's why I want to finish talking about this case before dinner.
"What a terrible story," Liam says into the microphone after I read from the script that I put together earlier today. "But of course it is so important that we share it so that others can learn from it."
"Yes, I totally agree with you," I say. "That's one of the reasons we do what we do here at Generation Crime with Henry Asher.”
At this point, I'm supposed to read a promo for the podcast's sponsor; an online mattress store, but I get lost in the paperwork and read the wrong script.
"Oh, shit," I say with the recording still running.
Liam shakes his head.
"I'm sorry, man.” I guess I'm hungrier than I thought.
"Let's just finish it when we get back, I'm starving," he insists.
I shake my head no, scrambling for the right ad.
At one point I had them all printed out, God knows why, but now I just scroll up through the Word document where I had organized the whole story and find it at the very beginning.
"Let me just do this part again," I insist.
We get to Denny's fifteen minutes later. A familiar waitress welcomes us in.
After a month of living here, she knows both of our names and we know all of the waitresses who work here.
This one is Maureen, she is eighteen-years-old with pimples to show for it and the casual quiet demeanor of someone who would prefer to spend her days thinking about dragons and swordplay rather than omelet grand slams and hash browns.
Maureen is a big fan of the Witcher, the latest Netflix sensation, and the three of us bond over this fact. She has never heard of a podcast until she met us and I showed her how to access the Podcast App on her iPhone.
"I never even knew what this button did," she said. "And they’re all free?"
"Yep," I confirmed. "And not all of them are about crime. A lot of them are about politics and there are lots of really good ones about various curiosities and unusual stories. If you like science-fiction and fantasy, there are a ton of podcasts about that."
"Awesome, I'll definitely check them out," she promised.
At the time, I thought that she was just being nice, but she surprised me.
I see her a few times a week and every time she introduces me to a new fantasy podcast that I've never heard of that she has already binged.
"You know, I'm going to miss seeing you every week," I tell her.
"Why is that?" she asks.
"Well, we just did our last interview and we're heading back home soon."
"Oh, no, that's too bad. Any chance that you'll be back?"
"Not likely," I say.
After she leaves to get our orders, Liam takes a sip of his soda and mentions how he wishes that Leslie was working tonight.
I laugh and shake my head.
Leslie is twenty-seven-years-old with two children and a husband who went out to get some milk one night and never came back.
She knew enough not to get her hopes up with Liam, but they've enjoyed each other's company for a few nights and from what I've heard, they have both had a good time.