Transcript
Five weeks ago I opened this case with that card. I called it a demand. I read it
the way this family has read it for two years — as a ransom.
It isn't one.
A ransom asks for something the other side can spend. Money. A promise. A
surrender. This asked for none of that. It asked for one object bound to each of four
people. Not the most valuable thing they owned. Something that, quote, "relates to"
them.
Last week you read a memo from the Office of Santa Claus. It says the attachment a
child forms to a thing is real. That it accumulates. That it stays in the thing after
the child moves on.
Read the card again with that in your head. It isn't asking for something to
trade. It's asking for materials. That's what you ask for when you don't want
anything back — when you want to make something.
It's a parts list.
And then there's the line everyone laughed at. "Please make sure it is ethically
sourced. I have to do my bit."
For two years that's been the joke on the card. It isn't a joke. It's a citation.
Item four of the memo: "Nothing is to be taken from a child who still wants it. All
sourcing is to be ethical."
Cookie wasn't being funny. Cookie was following the rules. His rules. Whatever
else Cookie is, it learned its manners from his paperwork.
Santa didn't pay. We've established that three different ways. So I can finally
ask the question I opened this case with, properly.
If nobody paid, why did the threat stop?
Item forty-seven says one of you "talked Cookie out of" it. I've turned that
phrase over for five weeks. You don't talk someone out of needing parts.
You bring them the parts.
Your own copies of the log and the memo should have arrived this week. I'm told
there was one more thing in each envelope — a card, with your name on it. I was sent
a copy of one. I'm told the other three match.
"One of four. Relates to" — a name. "Description" — blacked out. "Received" — a
day and a month blacked out, and a year that isn't. 2025. "Condition: Loved."
And the last line. "Ethically sourced: pending review."
Pending review. It learned that from him too.
The list was filled. Not by Santa. Sometime in 2025, one thing that relates to
each of you was delivered — by one of you, if item forty-seven means what it says.
Something of yours left the house. The kind of thing a person keeps without ever
deciding to keep it. The kind of thing that ends up
{{SLIP}}.
One of you handed over four things. Which means three of you didn't hand over
anything.
You were sourced.
The same source sent me one more document this week. I didn't ask for it. I don't
know how my source came by it.
It's a homicide file. The victim is a gingerbread. The suspect is a cat.
I've published it in full, unedited. I don't think I could summarize it fairly,
and I don't think I should try.
Here's what I can confirm. The three gingerbreads in last week's photographs all
have eyes like this. Large. Faceted. Glitter.
And the family's own appeal, Christmas 2025: "Cleaned up hairballs with minimal
complaints. Some were kind of… sparkly?"
There were four. There are three.
The same letter records that the household's response, that year, was to buy the
cat a sixty-pack of tinsel balls. The file treats this as a reward. I've gone back and
forth on it. I don't have a better reading.
In fairness to the suspect, she has not been interviewed. She was not available
for comment. She was asleep.
The file says the victim went to Florida "to bring 003 home." 003 is the fish. I
don't know where Cookie thinks home is.
I'll leave you with the card I started with.
"An item that relates to each and every one of them."
I've read that line forty times this week, and I keep catching on "each and
every." Not "your children." Not "the four of them." Each and every one. Whoever
wrote it didn't want some of you. It wanted all of you in one place.
I don't know yet what it was building.
Case continues.