You are a detective with a file, a room, and not enough questions. Nobody will search a house for you and there is no verb for looking under a bed. Everything you get, you get by asking somebody for it.
You meet everybody at the door and get a few questions each. This is where you decide who is worth a room, and it is diagnostic: you are reading people, not collecting facts.
You take some of them further — never all — and the questions are shared between whoever you choose. You can put an object from your file in front of somebody mid-sentence, and that interruption is the game's sharpest tool: a person shown the right thing at the right moment gives you something they were not going to.
Push too hard and it costs you. One kind of person shouts and walks out. One kind goes quiet and stops answering. One kind is frightened enough to confess to something they did not do, and a confession that is not true is worth nothing at all.
You name somebody and you cite what ties them to it — the objects, and what two objects mean together. A name with nothing behind it collapses at trial. The right name with the wrong citations collapses too.
Every filing is final. Most cases give you a second attempt, months later, working from a colder file: what people remembered clearly the first night they no longer remember at all.
They improvise. What they can truthfully know was written down before you sat down, and the model that speaks for them is never allowed to decide who did it, to invent evidence, or to hand you a fact its character does not have. That is the whole contract: the conversation is live and the truth is fixed.
So a suspect can lie to you, and a suspect can be wrong, and neither is the machine malfunctioning. Working out which is which is the job.
Open the file cabinet