"It's - fine." His voice breaks very slightly at that; he takes in a breath to steady himself a moment later. His hatred for von Karma, the man who'd taken his dad from him, is absolute. Yet for a moment he thinks of the man's figure, strong and proud, suddenly broken by that shot to the chest - thinks of him bleeding on the floor, desperate and afraid - and he thinks of the way he'd admired him. He thinks of how, when Miles was a child, he'd seemed so tall, so uncompromising. And now...

He swallows hard.

"The weapon used won't have belonged to gunnery. I - believe it will have been a firearm which appeared in my locker several months ago."

"I brought it into that room." And abandoned it there, hands shaking, confused and nauseated and miserable, hating himself and hating his weakness and hating the impulse that had even brought him there...Foolish of him. Incredibly foolish.

He doesn't say anything of that, though. He just keeps his eyes fixed on the ground, masochism willing the other man to come to the obvious conclusion.

He stares still resolutely down at the ground. He could confess it all, of course - could tell the full tale, could lay it out from beginning to end, starting with a cowardly boy in an elevator. There's something cruel within him, though, that spurs him to be difficult. To be unkind about this.

"What would the purpose be of bringing a weapon somewhere?"

His answer is miserable, simple, and true. "For the purpose of revenge," he says, quietly, looking down at the floor. He can see that this man, too, wishes to think the best of him - wants to give him countless opportunities to wriggle out from under these questions. It's a miserable thing, a pathetic thing, that he should be allowed such freedom.

He'll not do one thing: he'll not lie. And so he doesn't lift his head, but he responds quietly to that question, and truly.

"I am not, sir."

"I fled."

And that's all he offers. That's all he can, indeed, offer, because that's all he knows. After him, someone else came in and slew his mentor. Some other person took that gun, and they -

Unless it was indeed Edgeworth himself. Unless he is mad, and...just...destroyed the memory of it, as he'd destroyed the memory of von Karma killing his father. But no matter how self-flagellating he is, he'll not voice that notion to this man.

Edgeworth looks down. After a moment, he confesses, "I don't know. It was not...very long in advance of the discovery of the body. Perhaps an hour."

He thinks. He hasn't any notion. After that confrontation, when he'd proven his nerves too unsteady to accomplish the deed he thought he could manage, he'd...charged blindly and foolishly forth, and he'd ended up in a kitchen staring down at cold tea. That's all he recalls.

Here, his answer is ready. He's been thinking about this for some time, now, but - von Karma kept to himself, for the most part; he'd remained aloof from the petty foolishness and pointlessness of the common struggles aboard this ship. Any who knew von Karma knew him through Edgeworth, and so the only ones who might have a motive -

Might be the ones loyal to Edgeworth. And he does wonder...about Sirius, perhaps, who's always been more decisive than he is - but Sirius wouldn't, not when Edgeworth had spoken to him only elliptically and cryptically...No. No, it wasn't.

"No. None."