"What do you mean?"

"It's very hard to get married if you're in jail for murder, or so I hear."

"I... doubt I'm going to convince anyone about an impossible murder."

"We need to convince people that someone went missing, Parker is the cause, and that that person is dead. We can smooth over the dehydration."

"It was years ago."

"Someone has been missing for years, and we have a witness who saw them die but didn't come forward because they were afraid of repercussions? It's not open and shut, but it's pretty good."

"...I don't know who died. It was some random tramp."

"I could find out who it was for you."

"...and you think the police are going to care about the death of some random tramp years ago? You have more faith in them than I do."

Yeah, actually he does.

"The thing is, people are fundamentally lazy. It's hard finding missing people if you don't have any idea where they've got to, or their family doesn't push. But witnesses make things so much easier. Some of them might not care about a random tramp, no. A lot of them care about being able to say they caught a murderer."

"So you're planning to take advantage of the police's selfishness in order to maybe prosecute Parker for murder and maybe frame him, so that your friend gets out of her bad marriage."

"I'd like to point out that we'd be getting him arrested for a murder he actually did. But I will admit, that's the gist of it."

"How do you know that?"

"You seem like a trustworthy witness. Also everything I've heard about Parker-- I'm pretty sure he can't dehydrate people, but murdering tramps for no good reason does sound rather like him."

"We know I saw some things that must have been wrong because you can't dehydrate people. You're just assuming that anything that's convenient for your case is right."

"I don't know about the dehydration. There's been some weird definitely-murders, but they've been... less like that. But you saw someone die. That matters."

"Unless I hallucinated the whole thing, which does seem more likely.

Stop pretending you're motivated by justice. There's no reason to value this one nameless tramp over any other, and there are far more killed by poverty than by Parker even if everything I saw was true, you just want to free your friend from her engagement. Probably because you want to step in yourself."

"I would like my friend not to be married to someone who keeps getting away with murder. Do you really trust your own eyes so little?"

"Yes! All kinds of things can deceive them. Try eating the wrong kind of mushroom sometime. Or opium."

Suppressed eye twitch.

"Had you been partaking in anything when you saw someone get fatally dried out?"

"No. But does that mean anything? Perhaps it was all a dream."

"...do you regularly hallucinate or have waking dreams?"

"Do you have some other explanation for why I saw the man get dehydrated? I obviously hallucinated something. We're just arguing about what."

Unfortunately he does not, and it's incredibly frustrating. "I wouldn't put it past Parker to work out how."

"To dehydrate people by whistling at them."