“You’ll forgive me for asking this…” I started. “But… you wouldn’t happen to be the same… uh, guy… that runs the pulled pork…”

“8 hour smoked pork belly and spider sandwiches.” The pig interrupted me with his perfect non-regional dialect. He was sitting on a chair, looking out at us from inside the little security guard room by the front entrance. Well, he wasn’t exactly ‘sitting’. It was more like he was sprawling his body across the seat, letting his little hoofed legs dangle over the sides. Kinda cute. He even had a little blue hat.

“Yeah, uh, those.” I narrowed my eyes. “So… why are you here?”

“I need the money. You saw how all my 8 hour smoked pork…”

“Yeah, I sure did.” Did he really need to say the whole thing every time?

“Sounds yummy,” Yaika said, seemingly to herself.

“Is… is that the Princess?” the pig whispered, his mouth hanging open.

“Yes!” Violetta smiled. “The Princess is gracing us with her presence today.” Was she? Was her presence gracing? I was never going to understand the deep love all the demons seemed to have for the royal family.

“Alright, let’s get back on track,” I sighed.

“Hmm…” the pig’s deep announcer voice hummed. “What were you here for again?”

Honestly, I had a ton of questions. Was it hard not having thumbs? Did he have piglets to feed? How did he feel about profiting off of the corpses of his brethren? Was being a pig fun?

I decided to skip those and go straight to the point. “We need to know who was here last night.”

“I already told that Flereous woman,” the pig said. He must have been talking about Lyili. “She told me that you might come here, and that you’d probably be thinking about how to sleep with her, but that I shouldn’t give you any ideas.” Yeah. Lyili for sure.

“Uhh… I don’t need any ideas.” I might have been immune to magic, but I didn’t want to take my chances with something that might literally melt me. “All I need to know is who was here.”

“Last night?” The chair the pig was lying on started to spin. He had to kind of hump his seat to get to face us again. This was cute, but made kind of less cute when I considered he had the voice of a news anchor. “What time do you mean?”

I didn’t fucking know. “Just tell us what you told the… uh… furious…”

“Flereous,” Violetta piped up.

“You get the idea.”

The pig looked upward, causing his hat to slide back. “Well… I’d say most of the Janitor players were out of here at 7:00 when practice finished. Some stay to do some practicing on their own, of course. When I did my rounds at 8, there were only three left.”

“One of them was Prowteg?” I asked.

The pig nodded. “Yes, I saw him.”

“Was he still alive?” Violetta added. Alright, we were back to the stupid questions again.

“He was. He was coming out of the locker room at the time.”

“Did he say anything to you?” I continued.

“Just hello.”

Cool. No help there. “Uhh… Who else was still here?” I suddenly realized that my main question still hadn’t been answered yet.

“McGee and Sidkik were here too,” the pig said, obviously a little annoyed at having to talk about this twice in one day. It seemed like he’d rather be talking about his 8 hour smoked whatever sandwiches than help solve a murder. Priorities. “McGee on the field, and Sidkik in the weight room.”

“How can you be sure they were the only ones?” I asked. It didn’t exactly seem difficult to sneak past someone that could barely see over the window sill in front of them.

“We have a secret camera that keeps track of when demons come and go,” the pig said.

“A camera?” I glanced around, but nothing stood out. “Where?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.” Well played. I guess it didn’t really matter anyway. What did matter was that there were two players still here that could have killed Prowteg.

“I don’t suppose there are any other cameras here in the stadium?”

“Nope. Didn’t think we needed any other ones.” I guess that would have been too much to ask for.

Alright, back at it. “Did you see the other two leave the building?”

“I sure did,” the pig said. “And the camera pick them up too. McGee left around 8:45. Sidkik just before 9:00 when we close.”

“I never knew players stayed so late!” Violetta’s eyes almost sparked as she said the words.

“Only the fanatics,” the pig said, totally unfazed by her enthusiasm. “Prowteg was here until closing pretty regularly.”

“Wait a minute.” I put my hand on the bottom part of the window frame and leaned my head into the room. Yeah, bad ass interrogation move. “Prowteg died sometime between 8 when you saw him and 9 when the stadium closed. That means he didn’t leave at closing. Didn’t you think that was strange?”

The pig narrowed his eyes. “Am I a suspect in this…?”

“Maybe. Depends on your answer.”

“Ugh, fine. Look, this could get me in trouble…” The pig glanced around as if his supervisor would pop out from somewhere. “But Prowteg’s been staying the night here pretty often recently.”

“Staying the night?” Violetta grabbed onto her horns. “Why would he do something like that?”

“Nerves, I guess. He said he was really stressed about the World Series,” the pig said. “I didn’t press for details too much, just asked him to keep this a secret between us.”

Was he that stressed out about a bocce ball game? So stressed that he spent all night practicing? Did he even sleep?

“Alright,” I sighed. “I think we’d better get out of here. Thanks for cooperating.” The pig nodded.

“Wait!” Violetta grabbed me by the arm, shaking me like a fucking ragdoll. “Aren’t you going to ask anything about McGee or Sidkik? I could tell you!”

“As excited as you are, I’d rather just hear it from them.” I yanked my arm away.

“S-So mean!”

A sickly voice came from right behind me. “Do you need me to have them called here, Ryley?”

“Oh my god!” I jumped. She had been so quiet, I completely forgot Yaika was here. It took me a moment to catch my breath. “N-No. Don’t call them here.”

”I thought you said you wanted to hear from them…” Violetta was still on the verge of crying about she couldn’t show off her Janitor knowledge.

“I do want to hear from them” I turned to walk toward the exit. “In court.”

I didn’t feel like I was much better off from where I had started, but I doubted that calling them here before the trial was going to make much of a difference. Suza wasn’t the killer, so that meant one of them was. I just… had no idea how I was going to figure out which one of them had done it.

At least I looked bad ass.